Mrs. Warren: "Not a bad idea. Do me a lot of good. I was feeling awfully down, Vivie, when you came. I wasn't altogether taken aback at your coming, dearie, 'cos Praddy had given me a kind of a hint you might turn up. But somehow, though everything goes well in business—we seldom had so busy a time as during this last Humanitarian Congress of the Powers—all the diplomats came here—mostly the old ones, the old and respectable—oh we all like respectability—yet I never 'ad such low spirits. My gals used to come in here and find me cryin' as often as not.... 'Comment, Madame,' they used to say, 'pourquoi pleurez vous? Tout va si bien! Quelle clientele, et pas chiche'—I suppose you understand French? However about this trip to the country, look on it as settled. I'll pack up now and away we go in the afternoon. And not to any of your measly Hotels or village inns. Why I've got me own country place and me own auto. Villa de Beau-séjour, a mile or so beyond the lovely beech woods of Tervueren. Ain't so far from Louvain, so's I can send you on there one day—Ah! There's some one you'd like to see in Louvain, if I mistake not! You always was one for findin' out things, and maybe I'll tell you more, now you've come back to me, than what I'd a done with you standing up so stiff and proud and me unfit to take up the hem of your skirt.... How I do ramble. Suppose it's old age comin' on" (shudders). "About this Villa de Beau-séjour ... It was once a farm house, and even now it's the farm where I get me eggs and milk and butter an' the fruit and vegetables for this hotel. He gave it to me—you know whom I mean by 'He'? ... don't do to talk too loud in a place like this.... They say he's pretty bad just now, not likely to live much longer. I was his mistress once, years ago—at least I was more a confidante than anything else. How he used to laugh at my stories! 'Que tu es une drôlesse,' he used to say. I never used to mince matters and we were none the worse for that. Bless you, he wasn't as bad as they painted him, 'long of all this fuss about the blacks. As I say, he gave me the Villa de Beau-séjour, and used to say if I behaved myself he might some day make me 'Baronne de Beau-séjour.' How'd you have liked that, eh? Sort of morganatic Queen? I lay I'd have put some good management into the runnin' of those places. Aïe! How they used to swindle 'im, and he believing himself always such a sharp man of business! When that Vaughan hussy..."
Vivie: "Very well. We'll go to Villa Beau-séjour. But don't give me too many of your reminiscences or I may leave you after all and go back to England. Whilst I'm with you, you must give up rouge and patchouli and the kind of conversation that goes with them. I'm out here trying to do my duty and duty is always unpleasant. I don't want to be a kill-joy, but don't give me more of that side of your character than you can help. It—it makes me sick, mother..."
[Mrs. Warren—or Madame Varennes—whimpers a little, but soon cheers up, rings the bell for her maid preparatory to dressing and being the business woman over her preparations for departure. She notes the address of Vivie's hotel and promises to call for her there in the auto at three o'clock. Vivie leaves her, descends the richly carpeted stairs—the lift is worked by an odiously pretty, little, plump soubrette dressed as a page boy—and goes out into the street. Several lounging men stare hard at her, but decide she is too English, too plainly dressed, and a little too old to neddle with. This last consideration is apparent to Vivie's intelligence and she muses on it with a wistful little smile, half humour, half regret. She will at her leisure write a whole description of the scene to Michael.]
Those who come after us will never realize how delightful was foreign travel before the War, before that War which installed damnable Dora in power in all the countries of Europe, especially France, Belgium, Switzerland, Italy, and Holland. They will not conceive it possible that the getting of a passport (as a mere means of rapidly establishing one's identity at bank or post-office) was a simple transaction done through a banker or a tourist agency, the enclosing of stamps and the payment of a shilling or two; that there was no question of visas entailing endless humiliation and back-breaking delays, waiting about in ante-rooms and empty apartments of squalid, desolating ugliness situate always in the most odious parts of a town. But the Foreign Offices of Europe were agreed on one topic, and this was that having got their feet back on the necks of the people, their serfs of the glebe should not, save under circumstances hateful, fatiguing, unhealthy and humiliating, travel through the lands that once were beautiful and bountiful and are so no longer.
So: Vivie, never having consciously been abroad before (though she was later to learn she had actually been born in Brussels), began to experience all the delights of travel in a foreign land. 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. There were the friendly, super-intelligent big dogs, like bastard St. Bernards or mastiffs in breed, that drew the little carts which carried the produce of the farm to the markets or to Brussels. There were cheery Flemish farm servants and buxom dairy or poultry women, their wives; none of them particularly aware that there was anything discreditable about Madame Varennes. They may have vaguely remembered she had once lived under High protection, but that, if anything, added to her prestige in their eyes. She was an English lady who for purposes of business and may be of la haute politique chose to live in Belgium. She was a kind mistress and a generous patronne. Vivie as her daughter was assured of their respect, and by her polite behaviour won their liking as well.
"You know, Viv, old girl," said Mrs. Warren one day, "if you played your cards all right, this pretty place might be yours after I'd gone. Why don't yer pick up a decent husband somewhere and drop all this foolishness about the Suffragettes? He needn't know too much about me, d'yer see? And if you looked at things sensible-like, you'd come in for a pot of money some day; and whilst I lived I'd make you a good allowance—"
"It's no use, dear mother"—involuntarily she said "dear": her heart was hungry for affection, Wales was rapidly passing out of her sphere, David's business must soon be wound up in that quarter and where else had she to go? "So long as you keep on with those Hotels I can't touch a penny. I oughtn't to have kept that thousand, only Praddy assured me it was 'clean' money."
Mrs. W.: "So it was. I won it at Monte. I don't often gamble now, I hate losing money. But we'd had a splendid season at Roquebrune and I sat down one day at the tables, a bit reckless-like. Seemed as if I couldn't lose. When I got up and left I had won Thirty thousand francs. So I says to myself: 'This shall go to my little girl: I'll send it through Praddy and he'll pay it into her bank. Then I shan't feel anxious about her.'"
"Mother! what a strange creature you are! Such a mixture of good and bad—for I suppose it is bad, I feel somehow it is bad, trafficking in women's bodies, as they put it sensationally. Towards me you have always been compact of kindness; you took every precaution to have me brought up well, out of knowledge of any impurity; and well and modernly educated. You left me quite free to marry whom I liked ... but ... but ... you stuck to this horrible career..."
"Well, Vivie. I did. But did you make any great effort to turn me from it? Besides, is it horrible? I won't promise much for Berlin and Buda-Pest or even Vienna, because I haven't been in those directions for ever so long, and the Germans are reg'lar getting out of hand, they are, working up for something. I dessay if you looked in at the Warren Hotels in those places you might find lots to say against 'em. But you couldn't say the places I supervise here and at Roquebrune are so bad? I won't stop your looking into 'em. The girls are treated right down well. Looked after if they fall sick and given every encouragement to marry well. I even call those two places—I've giv' up me Paris house this ten years—I even call them my 'marriage markets.' Ah! an' I've given in my time not a few dots to decent girls that had found a good husband dans la clientèle. Why they're no more than what you might call hotels a bit larkier than what other Hotels are. I've never in all my twenty years of Brussels management had a row with the police.... And as to all this rot about the White Slave Traffic that you seem so excited about ... well I'm not saying there's nothin' in it.... Antwerp, Hamburg, Rotterdam—you'd hear some funny stories there ... but only if you went as David Williams in your man's kit—My! what a wheeze that's bin!... And from all they tell me, that place in South America—Buenos Aires, is a reg'lar Hell. But ... God bless my soul ... there's nothin' to fuss about here. Our young ladies would take on like anything if you forced them to go away from my care. It's gettin' near the time when we close our Roquebrune establishment for the summer, an' the girls'll all be goin' back to their homes in the mountains and fattenin' up on new milk; still if you go there before the middle of May you'll see things pretty much as they are in the season; and what's more you'll see plenty of perfectly respectable people stoppin' there. Of course the prices are high. But look at the luxury! What that wicked Bax used to call 'All the Home Comforts.' He liked 'is joke. I hear he's settlin' down at home with his old Dutch. She's bin awful good to him, I must say. I couldn't stand 'im long. I don't often lose me temper but I did with him, after he got licked by Paul Dombey, and I threw an inkpot at his head and ain't seen him for a matter of thirteen or fourteen year. He sold out all his shares in the Warren Hotels when he came a cropper."