Christmas Pudding and Pigeon Pie Read Free Page A

Ruskin. He sat on a hard and shiny bench and gave himself up to the contemplation of an elderly lady who was struggling, with but little success, to reproduce the handsome but unprepossessing features of Mrs. Rossetti. For it was copying day in the Tate. Paul wondered how she managed to keep the paint so beautifully smooth. He thought it very clever of her. Whenever he had tried to express himself on canvas, the result had invariably been a mass of dirty bumps; his own particular style of course, and, he liked to think, a not unpleasing one. Nevertheless, he was perfectly aware that even if he wished to do so he was incapable of producing that oleographic smoothness which seemed to come so easily to the elderly copyist.
    Soon, however, his thoughts left the exterior world and turned upon his own inward wretchedness. When a man is harassed beyond endurance through the two most important aspects of life; when the labour of months bears a bitterer fruit than that of failure; and when, at the very same moment, she whom he adores shows herself once and for all unworthy of adoration; then indeed is that man unhappy.
    So thought Paul; and writhing beneath the duplicated gaze of Mrs. Rossetti he considered for the hundredth time the two causes of his present depression, namely, the behaviour of his fiancée, Marcella Bracket, and the reception by the public of his first novel,
Crazy Capers
, which had been published that week. It would be difficult to say which was the more wounding. The reception accorded to his novel, indeed, appeared at first sight to have been extremely gratifying. The critics, even those of them who had been neither at Eton nor at Oxford with him, had praised it extravagantly, and with a startling unanimity; the cheque which he would eventually receive from his publisher promised to be a great deal larger than those which must so often (and so fortunately) prevent young authors from ever again putting pen to paper. The book, in fact, was an undoubted success. Nevertheless how could praise or promise of glittering gain compensate in any way to the unhappy Paul for the fact that his book, the child of his soul upon which he had expended over a year of labour, pouring forth into it all the bitterness of a bitter nature; describing earnestly, as he thought, and with passion, the subtle shades of a young man’s psychology, and rising to what seemed to him an almost unbearably tragic climax with the suicide pact of his hero and heroine, had been hailed with delight on every hand as the funniest, most roaringly farcical piece of work published for years. He who had written with one goal always before him, sincere approbation from the very few, the exquisitely cultured, was now to be held up as a clown and buffoon to jeers and senseless laughter from the mob.
    His eyes, fixed upon Lizzie’s face, filled with tears, so that her features became blurred and her hair more woolly than ever, as he recalled with a sinking heart that one critic after another had described him as the new humorist and his book as the funniest of the month. Sadly he drew from his pocket a sheaf of press cuttings. He knew them by heart already, and to look at them again was like pressing upon the tooth that aches in the hope that after all it perhaps does not ache unbearably.
    R EALLY F UNNY B OOK BY N EW W RITER
    A welcome contrast to the unrelieved gloom of Miss Lion’s
Tragedy in a Farmyard
is provided by Paul Fotheringay, whose first novel,
Crazy Capers
, is the most amusing piece of work to be published for many months. This delicious whimsy maintains a high level of humour throughout, and should certainly find its way to the bookshelves of those who enjoy a quiet chuckle.
    A MUSING F IRST N OVEL
    … I myself paid Mr. Fotheringay the very sincere tribute of laughing out loud several times over the absurd adventures of his hero, Leander Belmont.… If
Crazy Capers
bears little or no relation to the experiences of actual life, one cannot