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In her bewilderment she took the bold step of calling at the Hotel de Ville, gave her name and nationality, and asked the advice of the municipal employé who saw her as to what course she and her mother had better pursue: leave Tervueren and seek a lodging in Brussels; or retreat as far as Ghent or Bruges or even Holland? The clerk reassured her. The Germans had certainly occupied the south-east of Belgium, but dared not push as far to the west and north as Brussels. They risked otherwise being nipped between the Belgian army of Antwerp and the British force marching on Mons.... He directed her attention to the last communiqué of the Ministry of War: "La situation n'a jamais été meilleure. Bruxelles,
These panels represent the "Triumph of Civilization over Barbarism," and are now in the Museum at Tervueren. They are curious in their symbols of fetichism, and have an attraction that one can scarcely explain.
Alluring stories like these flitted through despairing Brussels during the first two months of German occupation, though Vivie, in her solitude at Tervueren, seldom heard them. After her business at the bank she walked about the town. No one took any notice of her or annoyed her in any way.
Except in the matter of the farewell visit to the farm at Tervueren, Vivie was reluctant to ask for any such favour from von Giesselin, though she was curious to see the condition of Louvain and to ascertain whether her father still inhabited the monastic house of his order she had an idea that he was away in Germany in connection with his schemes for raising the Irish against the British Government.
She had evidently gone back to the Villa Beau-séjour while she could. It was too late for any tram in the direction of Tervueren. There were no taxis owing to the drivers being called up.
She got in, and the soldier chauffeur whirled her away to the Villa Beau-séjour, beyond Tervueren. On her return she found her mother prostrate with bad news. Their nearest neighbour, Farmer Oudekens who had driven them into Brussels the preceding day had been executed in his own orchard only an hour ago.
She woke up the next morning to the country pleasures of Villa Beau-séjour, a preposterous chateau-villa it might be, but attached to a charming Flemish farm; with cows and pigs, geese and ducks, plump poultry and white pigeons, with clumps of poplars and copses of hawthorns and wild cherry trees which joined the little domain on to the splendid forest of Tervueren.
The beech woods of Tervueren shut out any horizon of town activity; black and white cows were being driven out to pasture, a flock of geese with necks raised vertically waggled sedately along their own chosen path, a little disturbed and querulous over the arrival of a stranger; turkey hens and their half-grown poults and a swelling, strutting turkey cock, a peacock that had already lost nearly all his tail and therefore declined combat with the turkey and was, moreover, an isolated bachelor; guinea-fowls scratching and running about alternately; and plump cocks and hens of mixed breed covered most of the ground in the adjacent farm yard and the turf of an apple orchard, where the fruit was already reddening under the August sun.
Scandal had been busy with her name the unhappy reputation of her mother, the peculiar circumstances under which she had left England, the two or three months shut up at Tervueren with Colonel von Giesselin, and the very protection he now accorded her and her mother at the Hotel Impérial.
Along the Tervueren road they met numbers of peasant refugees in carts and on foot, driving cattle, geese or pigs towards the capital; urging on the tugging dogs with small carts and barrows loaded with personal effects, trade-goods, farm produce, or crying children. All of them had a distraught, haggard appearance and were constantly looking behind them.
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