"But my husband says we may be in Brussels ourselves in three weeks' time: Why not wait and come in in safety with the Belgian Army!"
Other people gathered round us, there in the dimly-lit palm court of the big Antwerp Hotel, and a lively discussion went on.
A big dark man, with a melancholy face, said wistfully, "I wish I could make up my mind to go too!"
This was Cherry Kearton, the famous naturalist and photographer. He was out at the front looking for pictures, and in his mind's eye, doubtless, he saw the pictures he would get in Brussels, pictures sneakingly and stealthily taken from windows at the risk of one's life, glorious pictures, pictures a photographer would naturally see in his mind's eye when he thought of getting into Brussels during the German occupation.
Mr. Kearton's interpreter, a little fair-haired man, however, put in a couple of sharp words that were intended to act as an antidote to the great photographer's uncertain longings.
"You'll be shot for a dead certainty, Cherry?" he said. "You get into Brussels with your photographic apparatus! Why, you might as well walk straight out to the Germans and ask them to finish you off!"
"Cherry" had his old enemy, malaria, hanging about him at that time, or I quite believe he would have risked it and come.
But as events turned out it was lucky for him he didn't! For his King and his Country have called him since then in a voice he could not resist, and he has gone to his beloved Africa again, in Colonel Driscoll's League of Frontiersmen.
When I met him out there in Antwerp, he had just returned from his famous journey across Central Africa. His thoughts were all of lions, giraffes, monkeys, rhinoceros. He would talk on and on, quite carried away. He made noises like baboons, boars, lions, monkeys. He was great fun. I was always listening to him, and gradually I would forget the War, forget I was in Antwerp, and be carried right away into the jungle watching a crowd of giraffes coming down to drink.
Indeed the vividness of Cherry's stories was such, that, when I think of Antwerp now, I hear the roar of lions, the pad pad of wild beasts, the gutteral uncouthness of monkeys—all the sounds in fact that so excellently represent Antwerp's present occupiers! But the faces of Cherry's wild beasts were kinder, humaner faces than the faces that haunt Antwerp now.