"Considering your early handicaps you have certainly shown some speed
in adapting yourself to conditions," Carr observed facetiously. "There
was a time when I didn't believe you could. Which shows that even wise
men err. Material factors loom bigger and bigger on your horizon, don't
they? Don't let 'em obscure everything though, Thompson. That's a
blunder plenty of smart men make. Well, we've progressed since Lone
Moose days, haven't we--the four of us that foregathered there that last
summer?"
Thompson smiled. He liked to hear Carr in a philosophic vein. And their
talk ran thence for an hour. At the end of which time Sophie came home.
She walked into the room, shook hands with Thompson, flung her coat,
hat, and furs across a chair, and drew another up to the crackling fire.
Outside, the long Northern twilight was deepening. Carr rose and
switched on a cluster of lights in frosted globes. In the mellow glow he
resumed his seat, and his glance came to rest upon his daughter with a
curious fixity, as if he subtly divined something that troubled her.
"What is it?" he asked, after a minute of unbroken silence. "You look--"
"Out of sorts?" she interrupted. "Showing up poorly as a hostess?"
Her look included Thompson with a faint, impersonal smile, and her gaze
went back to the fire. Sam Carr held his peace, toying with the
long-stemmed glass in his hand.
"I went to a Belgian Relief Fund lecture in the Granada ballroom this
afternoon," she said at last. "A Belgian woman--a refugee--spoke in
broken English. The things she told. It was horrible. I wonder if they
could be true?"
"Atrocities?" Carr questioned.
Sophie nodded.
"That's propaganda," her father declared judicially. "We're being
systematically stimulated to ardent support of the war in men and money
through the press and public speaking, through every available avenue
that clever minds can devise. We are not a martial nation, so we have to
be spurred, our emotions aroused. Of course there are atrocities. Is
there an instance in history where an invading army did not commit all
sorts of excesses on enemy soil?"
"I know," Sophie said absently. "But this woman's story--she wasn't one
of your glib platform spouters, flag-waving and calling the Germans
names. She just talked, groping now and then for the right word. And if
a tithe of what she told is true--well, she made me wish I were a man."
One small, soft hand, outstretched over the chair-arm toward the fire,
shut suddenly into a hard little fist. And for a moment Thompson felt
acutely uncomfortable, without knowing why.
Carr eyed his daughter impassively. In a few seconds she went on.
"Of course I know that in any large army there is bound to be a certain
percentage of abnormals who will be up to all sorts of deviltry whenever
they find themselves free of direct restraint," she said. "The history
of warfare shows that. But this Belgian woman's account puts a
different face on things. These unmentionable brutalities weren't
isolated cases. Her story gave me the impression of ordered barbarity,
of systematic terrorizing by the foulest means imaginable. The sort of
thing the papers have been publishing--and worse."