Mrs. Warren's Daughter: A Story of the Woman's Movement

by Harry Johnston

So I throw out these indications to influence the sequels they may plan to this story.

I think that Michael and Vivie were married at the British Legation in Brussels between Christmas and the New Year of 1918-1919; before that Legation was erected into an Embassy; and that the marriage officer was kind, genial Mr. Hawk when he returned to Brussels from The Hague and proceeded to get the Legation into working order. I am sure Mr. Hawk entered into the spirit of the thing and gave an informal breakfast afterwards in the Rue de Spa to which Mons. and Mme. Walcker, Mons. and Mme. Trouessart, and the Directeur of the prison of Saint-Gilles and his wife were invited. I think the head gardener of the Jardin Botanique who had charge of the Tropical houses cribbed from the collections some of the most magnificent blooms, and presented them to Vivie on the morning of her marriage; and that afterwards she laid the bouquet on her mother's newly finished tomb in the cemetery of St. Josse-ten-Noode, where, the weather being singularly mild for the time of year, the flowers lasted fresh and blooming for several days.

I am sure she and Michael then crossed the road and passed on to the building of the Tir National; entered it and stood for a moment in the verandah from which Vivie had seen Bertie Adams executed; and passed on over the tussocky grass to the graves of Bertie Adams and Edith Cavell, where they did silent homage to the dead. I believe a few days afterwards they visited the Senate where the victims of von Bissing's "Terror" had been tried, browbeaten, insulted, mocked. And the functionary who showed them over this superb national palace is certain to have included in his exposition the once splendid carpets which the German officers prior to their evacuation of the Senate—all but the legislative chamber of which was used as a barracks for rough soldiery—had sprayed and barred, streaked and splodged with printing ink. He would also have pointed out the three-hundred-year-old tapestries they had ripped from the walls and the historical portraits they had slashed, and would again have emphasized the fact that in all these senseless devastations the officers were far worse than the men.

Also I am certain that Michael and Vivie made a pilgrimage to the prison of Saint-Gilles, and stood silently in the cell where Bertie Adams and Vivie had spent those terrible days of suspense and despair between April 6 and April 8, 1917; and that when they entered that other compartment of the prison where Edith Cavell had passed her last days before her execution, they listened with sympathetic reverence to the recital by the Directeur of verses from "l'Hymne d'Édith Cavell"—as it is now called—no other than the sad old poem of human sorrow, Abide with me; and that they appreciated to the full the warmth of Belgian feeling which has turned the cell of Edith Cavell into a Chapelle Ardente in perpetuity.

I think they returned to England in January, 1919, so that Michael might get back quickly to his work of mending the maimed, now transferred to English hospitals; and so that Vivie—always a practical woman—should prove her mother's will, secure her heritage and have it in hand as a fund from which to promote all the happiness she could. I doubt whether she will give much of it to "causes" rather than cases and to politics in preference to persons. I think she was awfully disgusted when she was back in the England of to-day not to find Mrs. Fawcett Prime Ministress and First Lady of the Treasury, Annie Kenney at the Board of Trade and Christabel Pankhurst running the Ministry of Health. It was disheartening after the long struggle for the Woman's Vote and the equality of the sexes in opportunity to find the same old men-muddlers in charge of all public affairs and departments of state, and the only woman on the benches of the House of Commons a millionaire peeress never before identified with the struggle for the Woman's Cause.

However I think her disenchantment did not diminish the rapture at finding herself once more in the intimacy of Honoria Armstrong. Sir Petworth, when he ran over on leave from the Army of Occupation, thought her enormously improved, though he had the tact not to say so. He frankly made the amende honorable for his suspicions and churlishness of the past, and himself—I think—insisted on his frank and friendly children calling her "Aunt Vivie." I am equally sure that Vivie was not long in London before she appeared at dear old Praddy's studio, beautifully gowned and looking years younger than forty-three; and I shouldn't wonder but that her presence once more in his circle will give his frame a fillip so that he may cheat Death over a few more annual outbreaks of influenza. I am convinced that he has left all his money, after providing a handsome annuity for the parlour-maid, to Vivie, knowing that in her hands, far more—and far more quickly than in those that direct princely and public charities—will his funds reach the students and the poverty-stricken artists whom he wants to benefit.

I think that after spending the first five months of 1919 in London, getting No. 1 Park Crescent tidy again and fully repaired (because Michael wished to pursue more thoroughly than ever his biological researches), Vivie and Michael went off to spend their real honeymoon in the Occupied Territory of the Rhineland, in that never-to-be forgotten June, memorable for its splendid sunshine and the beauty of its flowers and foliage. I think they did this expressly (under the guise of a visit to General Armstrong), so that Vivie and Minna von Stachelberg—now Minna Schultz—might foregather at Bonn. Minna had married again, an officer of no family but of means and of fine physique whom she had nursed in Brussels. His left arm had been shattered, but the skill of the Belgian surgeons and her devoted nursing had saved it from being amputated. She had wished however to have him examined by some great exponent of curative surgery at Bonn University, and the conjunction of the celebrated Sir Michael Rossiter—who in his discussions of anatomy with the Bonn professors forgot there had ever been a war between Britain and Germany—was most opportune.

I think however that Sir Michael said this was all humbug on Minna's part, and that all she wanted—her husband, Major Schultz, looking the picture of health—was to meet once more her well-beloved Vivie. At any rate I am sure they met in the Rhineland in a propitious month when you could be out of doors all day and all night; and that Minna said some time or other how happy she was in her second marriage, and that however heartily she disliked militarism and condemned War, soldiers made the nicest husbands. I think before she and Vivie parted to go their several ways, they determined to work for the building up of an Anglo-German reconciliation, and for the advocacy in both countries of a Man-and-Woman Government.

I think, nevertheless, that Vivie being a sound business woman and possessing a strong sense of justice on the lines of an eye for an eye, will claim at least Five Thousand pounds from the German Government for the devastations and thefts at the Villa Beau-séjour; and that having got it and having disposed of her mother's jewellery and plate for £3,500, she will present the Villa Beau-séjour property and an endowment of £8,000 to the Town of Brussels, as an educational orphanage for the children of Belgian soldiers who have died in the War, where they may receive a practical education in agriculture and poultry farming.

I fancy she gave a Thousand pounds to Pasteur Walcker's Congo Mission; and transferred to Mme. Trouessart all her shares in and rights over the Hotel Édouard-Sept.