Balloons | Page 9

an announcement that "Mr. Woburn's many admirers will no doubt find his last book eminently to their taste. He provides a lavish supply of the features they are accustomed to look for in his work."
Poor Delancey, his stories did sell so well! And there was his flat in Grafton Street with the beautiful new taffetas curtains and the cigars that had just arrived from Havana, with his own initials on.
So from week to week he put off becoming an artist and one year (after a four-month love affair and two lacquer cabinets) he made a lecture tour in America.
"Was it a success?" I asked wearily (Delancey's success is always such a terribly foregone conclusion).
"Tremendous," he beamed. "I was careful to be a little dull because then they think they're learning something." But he was out of love, the flat was overcrowded, money continued to pour in and he knew terribly well that he was not making a contribution to contemporary literature.
He had always assured me at intervals that some day he would write his "real book" but I think it was after his tour in America that the dream became a project. He burst in to tell me about it. Delancey always begins things with a sudden noisy rush.
"Charlotte," he said, "I have made up my mind."
"It sounds very momentous," I teased. He decided years ago that I was grave, fastidious, whimsical, aloof and (I suspect) a little faded. I have long given up fighting my own battle (to be known) because I realise that Delancey never revises the passports given to old ideas. There is always, to him, something a little bit sacred about the accepted. "I can't go on with it any longer," he explained.
"Go on with what?"
"My damned stories."
"How ungrateful you are," I murmured, thinking of the lacquer cabinets, "you have a market, you can command a price. Each of your love affairs is more magnificently studded with flowers than the last----"
"Be quiet," he said. "I came to you because I knew that you would understand."
"You are trying to blackmail me."
"Do be serious," he pleaded. "I am going to give all that up. I have determined to settle down and dedicate myself entirely to my book."
"But," I expostulated, "have you thought of the yearning _Saturday Evening Post, of the deserted Strand_?"
"I have thought of everything," he said, "I shall be sacrificing 5,000 pounds a year, but what is 5,000 pounds a year?"
I thought of the taffetas curtains and the cigars, but I answered quite truthfully.
"I don't know."
"You see, Charlotte," he dropped the noble for the confidential, "I have got things to say, things that are vital to me. I couldn't put them in my other work. How could I? It would have seemed--you will think me ridiculous--a kind of prostitution."
"Yes," I said.
"But they were clamouring for expression all the time. And I have kept them down till I couldn't keep them down any longer. Of course, I know my book won't be a success--a popular success, I mean--but it won't have been written for the multitude but for the few--the people who really care, who really understand. It may be even thought," there was exultation in his voice, "dull."
"Well," I said, "I think it is very brave of you--and quite right. Truly I do."
"I think I shall take a tiny cottage in a fishing village in Devonshire," Delancey was as usual seeing things pictorially--bare white-washed walls, blue and white linen curtains and a pot of wall flowers.
A week later he came to see me again.
"When are you off to Devonshire?" I asked.
"I have decided to stay here," he answered, "there is a roar of life in London, a vibrating pulse, a muffled thunder." I began to be afraid that Delancey's book would be very bad indeed. It was, it appeared, to be a novel. "Not exactly a novel," he explained, "a large canvas with figures moving on a back-ground of world conditions." I thought of "War and Peace" and was silent. It doesn't matter being silent with Delancey because he doesn't notice it.
"I want," he said, "to picture the very earth in the agonies of labour giving birth to a new world." Later, the theme was (to my secret relief) narrowed down to England.
"I have changed my motif a little," he said. "I simply want to portray the quicksilver of after-war conditions--England in transition." At this time Delancey seemed to me the least little tiny bit depressed. The income he was sacrificing rose (in his conversation) from 5,000 to 7,000 pounds. He dined out less, avoided his club and Christie's. Also, he kept out of love. For ten years, Delancey had always been in love. Managed by him, it was a delightful state, ably presided over by head waiters and florists. It made, he once explained to