"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 me, all the difference to walking into a room.
But everything was changed now. The masterpiece was a jealous god. Jealous and, I sometimes thought, apt to be a little tiresome. It had to be referred to so very deferentially, with such carefully serious respect. Also, it cast a shadow of gravity over Delancey—Delancey who was never meant to be a high priest, but rather a young man in white flannels, with a cigarette in his mouth, punting a young girl with a red sunshade—like an illustration to one of his own stories.
Friendship is a difficult, dangerous job. It is also (though we rarely admit it) extremely exhausting. But never have my patience and endurance been more severely tested than during the year of Delancey's masterpiece. He finally decided that in the foreground, there was to be the clash of two human souls and in the background, the collision of two worlds—the old (pre-War) and the new. In fact, a partie carrée of conflicts.
"You with your love of form," he explained to me, "will appreciate the care I have given to the structure. It is," he added, "difficult to mould vast masses of material."
As the months went by I began to be horribly afraid that Delancey's novel would be very, very long indeed. And even if nobody read it through, not even a reviewer, I should have to without skipping a word or a comma.
"The sentences," Delancey told me, "are rather long. I find the semicolon very useful for cumulative effects." A vast array of words policed by semi-colons. I felt a little dizzy. Would they be able to keep order?
"Of course," he continued, "the interest is very largely psychological, but I regard the book mainly as a document—a social document. The fiction of to-day is the history of to-morrow."
This seemed conclusive. The book could not have less than 700 pages. A social document with psychological interest and a double conflict. Why, it would be short at that. And then, one day, when Delancey's book had become to me a form of eternity, he arrived, breathless with excitement.