A lady, he was told, waited to see him. What lady was likeliest to have news so quickly of his arrival? He shrank from the thought of Greta as from something reptilian. It couldn't be Greta on this day of all days. And who else, but the being of all the world he most hungered to see? So thinking, he made his way among the hosts of horror-stricken people, one sole theme in every mouth, Lusitania! Lusitania! Some, and not one most voluble or outwardly most excited, uttered the word War with an accent that Napier wished might have been heard across the Rhine. He kept on telling himself that he knew it would be Nan he should find waiting; but he was not prepared for the Nan he found, nor for that low exclamation: "At last! At last!" nor for the shaken voice in which she disposed of his question how had she known of his arrival.
"An arrangement with the clerk," she said, to ring her up as soon—
"Then that was before!"—said Napier hungrily.
"Yes, before the awful news." A shuddering vagueness seemed to close about her like a mist. It shut out the moment's shining at his coming. He could see that blank horror at the tragedy obscured for the moment everything else in life.
Only Napier, it seemed, felt the added strain of this coming and going of excited people, the bringing in of telegrams, the dictating of others. The girl paid no more attention to the other people scattered about the great room, to their tension or their tears, than they to hers. As she turned to throw her trembling body down in a chair by the window, the look in her eyes startled Napier.
"And did you see what the papers said?" she demanded.
The terrible newspaper accounts, which he had not yet found time to read, she had by heart. Behind that veil of nervous vagueness he caught glimpses of the intensity of her realization—her participation, one might almost say—in the scenes off the Irish coast.
"Had you any special friend on board?" he asked.
"Special fr—" she repeated in that low voice. And then her note climbed quickly to what for her was the climax of the huge disaster. "They were Americans!" So she confessed that limitation which a faulty imagination sets to our humanity—a limitation she had imagined she despised. "Americans they were, and innocent. I keep thinking most of the children. There were such lots of children, Gavan, on that boat. I kept seeing them all night long. I could hear their voices growing weaker—" her own failed her for a moment. And when she found it again, it was a different voice altogether, firm and bitter. "People say to me, 'the Lusitania was warned not to sail.'"
Yes, Napier had heard that was so.