CHAPTER XXII
UNDER GERMAN OCCUPATION
In my empty hotel the profoundest melancholy reigns.
The inherent sadness of the occupied city seems to have full sway here. The palm court, with its high glassed roof, is swept with ghostly echoes, especially when the day wanes towards dusk, the great deserted dining-salon, with its polished tables and its rows of chairs is like a mausoleum for dead revellers, the writing-rooms with their desks always so pitifully tidy, the smoking-rooms, the drawing-rooms, the floor upon floor of empty, guestless bedrooms, with the beds rolled back and the blinds down; they ache with their ghastly silences and seem to languish away towards decay.
The only servant is Antoine, the bent little old faithful white-haired porter, who has passed his lifetime in the service of the house.
Madame la Patronne, in heavy mourning, with her two small boys clinging to either arm, sometimes moves across the palm court to her own little sitting-room.
And sometimes some Belgian woman friend, always in black, drops in, and she and la Patronne and the old porter all talk together, dully, guardedly, relating to each other the gossip of Brussels, and wondering always how things are going with "les petits Belges" outside in the world beyond.
In front, the great doors are locked and barred.
One tiny door, cut in the wooden gate at the side, is one's sole means of exit and entrance.
But it is almost too small for the Liège professor, and he tells me plaintively that he will be glad to move on to Liège.