Week-End-on-Sea.
_Park Lane._
Dearest Daphne,--I've been doing Easter with the Clackmannans and
helping them with an idea they're carrying out. There's a little coast
town on their Southshire property (Shrimpington it's been called up to
now), and they're turning it into a seaside place _that people can go
to_! _Isn't_ that dilly? Of course, our coasts quite _bristle_ with
seaside towns, but they're places people _can't_ go to because
_everybody_ goes there. And so the Clackmannans are going to supply a
long-felt want, as old-fashioned people say, and give us a _ville de
bains_ of our very _very_ own. Its name is to be changed from
Shrimpington to Week-End-on-Sea. It has no railway station, which, of
course, is a great merit; it's not to have any big blatant hotels or
pensions--nothing but charming bungalow-cottages; there'll be no pier,
no band, none of those banal winter-gardens and impossible pleasure
palaces that _ces autres_ delight in, and, _of course_, none of those
immensely fearful concert parties and pierrots. But we shall have a
troupe of mermen and mermaids who will do classic gambols by the marge
of the sea and play on pipes or shells or whatever it is that
sea-creatures play on. There'll be bathing parties, when the last
syllable of the last word in bathing-kit will be seen; paddling parties,
in carefully thought out _toilettes pour marcher dans l'eau_, and
shell-gathering parties. Stella Clackmannan, who has such an active
brain that everyone's quite anxious about her, is going to have tons of
really pretty shells laid along a part of the beach (above high water),
and people will go shell-gathering _en habit coquilleux_.
The only feature Week-End-on-Sea will have in common with other seaside
places is a parade. At first Stella wouldn't hear of having one; but
Norty told her there's "a deep-seated primal instinct in human nature
for sitting on benches and watching one's fellow-creatures walk up and
down, and it would not be wise to thwart this instinct." He's an
enormously clever boy, and, when it was put to her like that, Stella
gave in. So there's to be a parade on the sea front, and Ray Rymington,
whose sense of the beautiful is _absolutely_, will see after it.
There'll be none of those ghastly glass shelters, but just darling
Sheraton benches at intervals, and the paraders will be carefully
_censored_. Nobody who hasn't _something_ of a profile will be allowed
to walk up and down--and no woman who takes more than 4's in slices or
who's wearing a last year's sleeve. So you see, dearest, it will be
quite a _cachet_, both of person and style, to be seen walking on the
parade at _our_ watering-place. The Bullyon-Boundermere woman met Stella
in town the other day and said, "My dear duchess, how can we thank you
for at last giving us a really _classy_ seaside place?" "What a
wonderful word, Mrs. Boundermere!" answered Stella. "'_Classy_'! Do tell
me what it means!"
Oh, my best one! Such a simply _sumptuous_ storyette for you! Even in
_your_ remote fastnesses you must have heard of young Ivan Rowdidowsky,
the very _very_ latest thing in Russian composer-pianists. Playing the
piano with his elbows, dressed in scarlet velvet, and fuller of "inner
meanings" than anyone (even from _Russia_) ever was before, he captured
London at the beginning of the Little Season, and his vogue has been
_colossal_. He gave twelve elbow-recitals of his own compositions at
Emperor's Hall. Those fearsome interviewers fairly mobbed him, and he
told them, in the _prettiest_ broken English, that "piano playing with
the hands suited well enough the pale-blooded law-abiding people of
yesterday, but that the full-pulsing stormy emotions of to-day could
only be adequately expressed by the _elbows_!" Quite _myriads_ of people
made him write, "Your affectionate friend, Ivan Rowdidowsky," in their
autograph-books, till at last he had cramp in the hand and Sir William
Kiddem had to be called in. There were reassuring bulletins telling the
public that they needn't be alarmed about their favourite, as cramp in
the band is _rarely_ fatal and does _not_ affect the elbows, and that,
if M. Rowdidowsky stopped writing in autograph-books for a day or two,
he'd be quite his wonderful self again.
Popsy, Lady Ramsgate, has been _folle de lui_ from the first, and at
Easter she'd a big party for him down at "Popsy's Pleasaunce," her place
in Sussex, and then and there announced that she was engaged to him, and
that after her marriage she would drop the Ramsgate title and be known
by "her Ivan's beautiful Slavonic name!" People were very nice to her
about it and didn't laugh more than they could help, and all went
cheerily, Rowdidowsky in his scarlet velvet playing to them with his
elbows every evening; and then one fatal morning (as novelists say)
Popsy picked up a letter that her Ivan had dropped from his pocket. It
was addressed outside to "M. Rowdidowsky," and this is an extract from
what she read _inside_: "I was at your show at Emperor's Hall the other
day and thought I should have split my skin at the way the silly jossers
all round me were carrying on, and at the thought that it was my pal,
good old Bert Smith of Camberwell, perched up on the platform in red
velvet togs pounding away on the old piano with his elbows like a good
'un. I put my hands over my face to prevent myself from bursting out,
and the woman next to me shoved a silver bottle under my nose and
gurgled into my ear, 'You've an artist-soul! I felt just as you do when
I first heard this divine Rowdidowsky!' The silly geeser! Go it, old
son! More power to your _elbows_! And don't forget, when you've made
your pile, that your old pal, Joe, was part-author of the idea and
helped you to work it out!"
Popsy, poor old dear, is having the Gurra-Gurra treatment for nervous
collapse. Lord and Lady Ramsgate are enormously relieved at the turn
things have taken; and their boy Pegwell said to me yesterday, "I'm
jolly glad it's all off! Fancy how _decomposed_ it would have been to
have Rumtidumsky, or whatever his name was, for a step-grandfather!"
Ever thine, Blanche.
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[Illustration: _Superb Chauffeur._ "There has been an _accident_,
m'lady."]
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