BLANCHE'S LETTERS.
War Fashions.
Park Lane.
Dearest Daphne,—People are going to the theatre a good deal, but not in the old way. We wait in the queue now, and work our way up into the gallery. We leave the stalls and boxes to ces autres. "Olga" has created a simply charming queue-coat, heavy grey frieze, with plenty of pockets and a cap to match with ear-pieces. You take a parcel of sandwiches to eat while you're waiting (the dernier cri is to wrap the parcel in a spotted handkerchief), and, if you want to be immensely and utterly right, you'll walk home and buy a piece of fried fish on the way for your supper.
À propos, there's quite a good little story being told about Lady Goreazure and these topsy-turvy times. She was in the gallery at the Incandescent the other night, and, on coming down, the gallery people, finding it was pouring in torrents, crowded into the chief entrance for shelter, to the enormous disgust of the stalls and boxes, who were just coming out. A rose-coloured satin gown with ante-war bare arms and shoulders, an ermine wrap, and a paste hair-bandeau was particularly furious, and announced loudly that it was "an abominable shame to mix us up with the gallery people in this way." Lady Goreazure thought she knew the voice, and, turning, recognised in the angry pink-satin person her maid, Dawkins, who left her some months ago to go into munition work. She's a skilled hand now and simply coining money, as she told Lady G. in a hurried furtive whisper, adding, "Please don't talk to me any more. I shouldn't like my friends to see that I know anyone from the gallery."
One of the literally burning questions of the moment has been how to dispose of the little lanterns one's obliged to carry after dark now that so many people have given their motors to the country and stump it or bus it everywhere. Your Blanche has solved the difficulty and at the same time set a fashion. My evening boots (what a different meaning that phrase has from what it once had, my Daphne!) have darling little teeny-weeny lamps fixed to their toes, so that one can see exactly where one's stepping. With these boots is worn a toque with a small lamp fastened in a velvet or ribbon chou in front. The boots are for one's own guidance; the toque illuminante is to show other gropers in the darkness that one's coming. Some people add a chic little hooter, which clears the way quite nicely and is simply precious in crossing roads.
Speaking of those who've given all their motors to the State and those who haven't, a new social danger has bobbed up for the latter—the chauffeuse. She's got to be reckoned with, dearest. In threatening the single lives of people's eldest sons she's leaving even the eternal chorus-girl down the course, and in releasing one man for the Front she's quite likely to capture another who counts considerably more!
The Ramsgates thought they'd got a perfect jewel of a chauffeuse—smart, businesslike, knew town well, knew when she might exceed the speed limit and when she mightn't, thoroughly understood her car and so on. And then one day Pegwell came back from the Front on sick leave. As soon as he was well enough he went for a drive every day. Someone said to his mother, "I wonder you trust your boy out alone with that chauffeuse of yours." And Elizabeth Ramsgate laughed at the caution. "I only wish Thompson were more dangerous," she said. "There's safety in numbers, and if she were younger and prettier perhaps she'd switch Peggy's thoughts off that fearful Dolly de Colty of the Incandescent."
"I say, old girl, do let me carry something."
And so Pegwell went on with his drives, and one day they were out so long that his mother was anxious, and when at last they came back she said, "Oh, Thompson, you've been driving Lord Pegwell too far; he's not strong enough for such long drives; it was very inconsiderate of you, Thompson." And the chauffeuse tossed up her chin and cried, "Not so much 'Thompson,' please!" And Pegwell chipped in with, "This is Lady Pegwell, mother, and in future she'll drive no one but me!"
Popsy, Lady Ramsgate, is even more furious about it than his parents. "Ramsgate and Elizabeth have behaved like fools," she said to me yesterday; "they don't know their world in the least, though they've lived in it nearly half a century. What if the minx wasn't particularly young and pretty. A chauffeuse is a novelty, and when you've said that you've said everything."
Your Blanche is enormously busy just now editing a book that's going to be the sensation of the Spring crop of volumes. You're aware, of course, m'amie, that if a book's even to be looked at now it must be either Somebody's Memories of Everybody Else or Somebody's Experiences in an Enemy Country. Well, and so Stella Clackmannan and I, in the hostel we run for poor dears who've lost their situations abroad and have no friends to go to on coming back here, found among our guests a bright little Cockney who's been what she calls an up-and-down girl in the Royal Palace at Bashbang, the capital of Rowdydaria. My dearest, the things that girl has climbed over and crawled under, and the weather she's come through, in escaping from the Rowdydarians and getting back here! And the things she's seen and heard in the Palace! It will throw a flood of light on all sorts of things, and will certainly make our F.O. sit up.
With the help of a clever photographer and some imagination we've reconstructed the up-and-down girl's adventures quite nicely. There are photos of the King of Rowdydaria as head of his own army; in his uniform as Colonel of the Hun Räuberundmörder Regiment; and in the Arab burnous in which he is to lead an attack on Egypt. There's a photo of the up-and-down girl sweeping a passage and listening through a key-hole to a wonderful conversation between the King of R. and an Emperor who'd come to see him (luckily it was in English and she remembers every word): "You've got to say you did it." "But I haven't got any navy—I couldn't have done it." "I'll give you the submarine that did it—or lend it to you. There! now it's yours—for a time. You don't depend on the Neutralians for any supplies. So you can afford to tell them you did it—and be quick about it." "But you can't expect even the Neutralians to swallow that!" "Why, you fool, they'd swallow anything! That's the meaning of their phrase 'rubber-neck.'" There's a photo of the Queen of Rowdydaria coming up at this point, snatching the broom away, and beating the up-and-down girl with it, and calling her "Spying English Pig." Altogether, my dear, it's positively enthralling! Order your copy early, for people will be slaying each other for this book. Astounding Disclosures of an Up-and-down Girl in the Royal Palace at Bashbang will certainly quite quite eclipse those two other sensations, What a Buttons Overheard in the Imperial Pickelhaube Schloss and Amazing Revelations of a Tweeny in the Perhapsburg Hof.
Ever thine,
Blanche.