Chapter 12

VIVIE RETURNS

Honoria Armstrong, faithful in friendship and purpose as few people are (though she abated never a whit her love for her dear, fierce, blue-eyed, bristly-moustached, battle-scarred, bullying husband) prepared for Vivie's return in the autumn of 1909 by securing for her occupancy a nice little one-storeyed house in a Kensington back street; one of those houses--I doubt not, now tenanted by millionaires who don't want a large household, just a roof over their heads--that remain over from the early nineteenth century, when Kensington was emerging from a country village into villadom. The broad, quiet road, named after our late dear Queen, has nothing but these detached or semi-detached little _cottages ornés_, one-storeyed villas with a studio behind, or two-storeyed components of "terraces," for about a quarter of a mile; and just before the War, building speculators were wont to pace its pavements with a hungry gaze directed to left and right buying up in imagination all this wasted space, pulling down these pretty stucco nests, and building in their place castles of flats, high into the air. I don't suppose this district will escape much longer the destruction of its graceful flowering trees and vivid gardens, its air of an opulent village; it will match with the rest of Kensingtonia in huge, handsome buildings and be much sought after by the people who devote their lives--till they commit suicide--to illicit love and the Victory Balls at the Albert Hall. But in 1909--would that we were all back in 1909!--it was as nice a part of London as a busy, energetic, sober-living spinster, in the movement, yet liking home retirement and lilac-scented privacy--could desire to inhabit, at the absurd rental of fifty pounds a year, with comparatively low rates, and the need for only one hard-working, self-respecting Suffragette maid, with the monthly assistance of a charwoman of advanced views.

There Vivie took up her abode in November of the year indicated. Honoria lived not far away, next door but one to the Parrys in Kensington Square. She--Vivie--was aware that Colonel Armstrong did not altogether like her, couldn't "place" her, felt she wasn't "one of us," and therefore despite Honoria's many invitations to run in and out and not to mind dear old "Army" who was _always_ like that at first, just as their Chow was--she exercised considerable discretion about her frequentation of the Armstrong household, though she generally attended Honoria's Suffrage meetings, held whenever the Colonel was called away to Aldershot or Hythe.

Honoria by this time--the close of 1909--was the mother of four lovely, healthy, happy children. She would give birth to a fifth the following June (1910), and then perhaps she would stop. She often said about this time--touching wood as she did so--"could any woman be happier?" She was so happy that she believed in God, went sometimes to St. Mary Abbott's or St. Paul's, Knightsbridge--the music was so jolly--and gave largely to cheerful charities as well as to the Suffrage Cause. She would in the approach to Christmas, 1909, look round and survey her happiness: could any one have a more satisfactory husband? Of course he was a man and had silly mannish prejudices, but then without them he would not be so lovable. Her children--two boys and two girls--could you find greater darlings if you spent a week among the well-bred childern playing round the Round Pond? Such _natural_ children with really original remarks and untrained ideas; not artificial Peter Pans who wistfully didn't want to grow up; not slavish little mimics of the Children's stories in vogue, pretending to play at Red Indians--when every one knew that Red Indians nowadays dressed like all the other citizens of the United States and Canada and sat in Congress and cultivated political "pulls" or sold patent medicines; or who said "Good hunting" and other Mowgli shibboleths to mystified relations from the mid-nineteenth century country towns; nor children who teased the cat or interfered with the cook or stole jam or did anything else that was obsolete; or decried Sullivan's music in favour of Debussy's or of Scarlatini's 17th century _tiraliras_; or wore spectacles and had to have their front teeth in gold clamps. Just clear-eyed, good-tempered, good-looking, roguish and spontaneously natural and reasonably self-willed children, who adored their parents and did not openly mock at the Elishas that called on them.

Then there were Honoria's friends. I gave a sort of list of them in