In the least pious of moods they dropped from her knees to their own and put their clasped hands across her lap. They became in a way hallowed by their attitude, and the world seemed good to her again as she looked down at the two children, beautiful as only children can be, innocent of wile, of hardship and of crime, safe at home and praying to their heavenly Father from whose presence they had so recently come.
But as she brooded over them motherly and took strength from them as mothers do, she thought of other children in other countries orphaned in swarms, starving in multitudes, waiting for food like flocks of lambs in the blizzard of the war. She thought still more vividly of children flung into the ocean. She had seen these children at her knees fighting against bitter medicines, choking on them and blurting them out at mouth and nose and almost, it seemed, at eyes. So it was very vivid to her how children thrown into the sea must have gagged with terror at the bitter medicine of death, strangled and smothered as they drowned.
She heard the prayers mumbled through, but at the hasty “Amen” she protested.
“You didn’t thank God for anything. Haven’t you anything to thank God for?”
If they had expressed any doubt, she would have told them of dozens of special mercies, but almost instantly they answered, “Oh yes!” They looked at each other, understood, 7 nodded, clapped their hands, and chuckled with pride. Then they bent their heads, gabled their finger-tips, and the boy said:
“We t’ank Dee, O Dod, for making sink dat old Lusitania.” And the girl said, “A-men!”
Marie Louise gave a start as if she had been stabbed. It was the loss of the Lusitania that had first terrified her. She had just seen it announced on the placards of newsboys in London streets, and had fled home to escape from the vision, only to hear the children thank Heaven for it! She rose so suddenly that she flung the children back from their knees to their haunches. They stared up at her in wondering fear. She stepped outside the baleful circle and went striding up and down the room, fighting herself back to self-control, telling herself that the children were not to blame, yet finding them the more repulsive for their very innocence. The purer the lips, the viler the blasphemy.
She was not able to restrain herself from denouncing them with all her ferocity. She towered over them and cried out upon them: “You wicked, wicked little beasts, how dare you put such loathsome words into a prayer! God must have gasped with horror in heaven at the shame of it. Wherever did you get so hateful an idea?”
“Wicked your own self!” the boy snapped back. “Fräulein read it in the paper about the old boat, and she walked up and down the room like what you do, and she said, ‘Ach, unser Dott––how dood you are to us, to make sink dat Lusitania!’”
He was going on to describe her ecstasy, but Marie Louise broke in: “It’s Fräulein’s work, is it? I might have known that! Oh, the fiend, the harpy!”