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Sober little knots of people were gathering on the street corners, drifting toward the royal palace. Streamers of crepe, left over from the funeral of King Albert, appeared on all the balconies. Cafè orchestras put away their music, snapped their fiddle cases shut. Hour after hour the bells of Ste. Gudule Cathedral tolled, and the crowds waited patiently by the palace gate. From mouth to mouth stories of the dead Queen began to spread.
Astrid Sofia Louisa Thyra her name was, and she was 29. Her father, the Duke of Yastergotland, is brother of King Gustaf of Sweden; her mother is sister to Christian of Denmark and Haakon of Norway. One great aunt was Alexandra of Britain, another Dagmar, Tsarina of Russia. But no Queen ever lived more simply. All Brussels had seen Astrid time & time again wheeling her own baby carriage along the boulevards on a Sunday morning. Young Leopold as Crown Prince had gone several times to Stockholm to propose to her, traveling in a third-class coach to keep his incognito. There, after their engagement was announced, they used to sit in the public park holding hands.
The Queen of the Belgians lay in state in the black-draped "Tinkers Hall" of Laeken Palace last week with four generals as a guard of honor during the day, black-robed nuns to watch over her at night. Only her face was visible above the violet-strewn counterpane.
To the people of Belgium Premier van Zeeland last week broadcast:
"A single moment was enough for a tragic accident to sweep away everything —both the reality of the present and the promises of the future. Is there really some mysterious law that insures that everything that is the greatest, the purest, the most beautiful should last only for a short time?"
Half way round the world three days later another automobile accident brought death to another woman of importance— Anna Wilmarth Thompson Ickes, 62, wife of the Secretary of the Interior. The same enthusiasm which Secretary Ickes has for breeding dahlias, Mrs. Ickes gave to the study of the Amerindian. From Coolidge, N. Mex. where she had vacationed for the past ten years attending Indian tribal dances, Mrs. Ickes and a party of friends were last week on their way to Santa Fe to see more Indians. Near a filling station at a settlement known as Velarde the car, driven by one Frank Allen of Gallup, shot past another automobile at over 60 m.p.h., skidded in the gravel on the roadside, turned over four times. Mrs. Ickes' skull was fractured. Driver Allen later died of a fractured pelvis and the other passengers, Mrs. Genevieve Forbes Herrick, onetime feature writer for the Chicago Tribune, and Ibrahim Seyfullah, Third Secretary to the Turkish Embassy, were critically injured.