“That’s the end,” she said softly, and he did not find the remark unnecessary. They sat down somewhere and talked little, each aware of anticlimax. John was almost glad when Ordith, graceful and self-confident, came up and took her away.
Perhaps her own emotion was communicated to Ordith; perhaps he, perceiving it in her, realizing—as she did not—from what source it flowed, and trying to take advantage of it, was himself entrapped. He pursued a policy of what he described to himself as “talking big”; he played upon an imagination already excited.
“I can’t bear to leave London,” he said. “And you are actually eager to go! Life centres here. The people in this room have their fingers on the pulse of the world.”
“The politicians?”
He smiled over her shoulder. “Yes. I know it is a middle-class fashion to despise them. I can’t despise men with power and knowledge. And not the politicians only. Everybody is here—the artists who matter, the thinkers who are in touch. And at this moment, a crisis in the history of the world, I am to go away.”
He made it sound a tragedy.
He knew that to Twenty Years the present is always the opportunity of mankind—and an unpromising Twenty Years it would be if it thought otherwise. He knew, too—for his shrewdness went deeper than the surface—that Twenty Years has an understanding of many truths that Disappointment, not Philosophy, describes subsequently as illusions. But, so far as his immediate purpose was concerned, it mattered nothing whether the ideas that dominated Margaret were illusory or not. Only the fact of their domination was of importance to him, for they were to be a means to his own dominion. He spun a web of dreams that he might entangle her in it. His voice, which he could tune to the very ring of sincerity, told her how the future was to be glorious. There was to be battle against all the powers of evil—a new political outlook, new relations between state and state, and between governors and governed. That was the mission of their generation.
“We must grip the essentials,” he said. “We must permit no compromise. And, above all, we mustn’t lose ourselves in mere talk—we must act temperately, and according to a clearly-conceived plan.... And women!” he exclaimed. “What a tremendous chance! Your influence is growing every day; soon it will be direct as well as indirect. And then the best of you will not be content to manipulate the party strings at dinner-tables. You will be cutting them where they are obstructive. You will come with free hands—no stale tradition—no fear of precedent—no corruption of ideals.”
He felt proud when he had delivered himself of this. It would win him laurels, he thought, among the forward young men, with their pamphlets and loose collars, their carpet-slippers and their political ikons. And Margaret was in a mood to question little. Cynicism and doubt had small influence over her that night. Was not Mr. Ordith her father’s friend?—and, Heaven knew! he was no vague idealist. And had not Mr. Ordith a reputation for soundness and level-headedness where such a reputation was most difficult to win? She paused neither to doubt nor to believe. It was enough that his enthusiasm awakened in her a sensation of warmth and brilliance, of assurance and power. And, though she danced with him a second and a third time, and though intervals elapsed between the dances, the sensation endured, and grew in intensity, grew until—so inflammatory are wine, ideals, and the contact of dancing—Ordith, too, became aware of its heat, and flamed amazingly, so that he was cool-headed no more. The conflagration, he found, gave him greater power over her—though power of a new kind. He was too wise to speak personal endearments to her, even the lightest, but his voice assumed a lower, more intimate tone, and vibrated now with a passion that was not artificial. He spoke of the foolishness and selfishness of other women, their blindness to ideals—how he loved that word!—their fear of sacrifice, their failure to understand the real needs of the world. It was implied that she was wonderfully different from them all. How many and far-reaching were the victories within the scope of a mind inspired by her motives! Somehow he was to be her ally in these victories. “We,” he said, and “I,” but never “You,” thereby binding her to him without emphasizing her submission to the bond. The reality of triumph is in an opponent’s ignorance of his own defeat.