“The Germans have torpedoed the Lusitania,” he said. “It was without warning. More than a hundred Americans drowned—women and children ... like rats,” he finished.
The Senator was on his feet. The news had been a sudden, bewildering blow to him. “What’s that? Are you sure? Where did you get it?”
Potter threw a paper on the desk over which the Senator and the stranger crouched with manifest excitement. Not so Fabius Waite. He did not glance at the paper, nor did he seem moved. His broad, clean-shaven, patrician face showed no emotion except, perhaps, a shade of irritation at the others’ reception of the tidings. Potter said to himself that his father would sit outwardly unmoved, unruffled, not in the least disarranged mentally, if word were brought him that the dissolution of the universe had commenced. It was true. Fabius Waite would study the information and determine his course of action before he gave a sign that the most sharp-eyed might read.
“My God!” exclaimed the man whom Potter did not know.
“What’ll it mean?... What will it mean?” the Senator asked, in an awed, frightened voice.
“What can it mean but war?” Potter said.
His father merely glanced at him, not contemptuously, not rebukingly, in fact, not as if Potter were a human being at all, but as if he were some piece of the room’s furniture to which attention had been called.
“When you men are through scrambling over that paper,” he said, quietly, “I’ll look at it myself.” He did not stretch out his hand for the paper, did not seem to suggest that it be given to him, but simply stated a fact. Potter came near to smiling at the alacrity with which Senator and business man abandoned the news sheet and pressed it upon his father. The Senator was a big man in Washington and in Michigan, Potter knew. The stranger looked like a man of importance, yet Fabius Waite dominated them, made their personalities colorless by the simple fact of his presence. He merely sat there—and they were dwarfs beside him.
“The people,” said the Senator, “there’ll be no holding them back. They’ll sweep us into war—as they did with Spain.”
“I heard there were munitions shipped on the Lusitania,” said the stranger.