The Cardboard Crown Read Online Free Page A

smile was his response to the atmosphere of the past, of which this was his first experience, as he had never been out of Australia.
    ‘You could bring this house into the novel, too,’ he said. ‘They lived here, didn’t they?’
    ‘Yes, but apart from everything else, I don’t know enough about them.’
    ‘You saw them when you were quite young. If you set your adult experience to work on your youthful memory, you would know what they were like. Or if you looked at those portraits long enough you could imagine it. Besides, there must be other things, photographs and letters and things, poked away in old cupboards?’
    ‘I might possibly find some in the laundry,’ I said. ‘Dominic seems to have amused himself by scattering his penates in the outhouses. Actually there is some material of the sort you mention. Yesterday I found a uniform case in the harness room. It was full of old parchments, some seventeenth century, one from the Herald’s College, and with them were my grandmother’s diaries almost complete from her marriage to her death.’
    ‘There you have the whole thing!’ exclaimed Julian.
    ‘They tell nothing exciting. I glanced at them. The entries are mostly things like “Hetty came to luncheon. Mildred wore her new dress, a rather ugly blue”. Even if there are other things I couldn’t possibly use them. I should have to leave this place which I have sweated to bring back to life, andreturn to England, or to France or Italy. And yet that is what I’ve always longed for, the literary freedom of the outcast—to be like Verlaine or somebody who did not have to worry when he sat down to write, whether he would offend Aunt Maysie, or whether it would lose him an invitation from Mrs Vane. It would be a profound satisfaction not to bother about this any more, but to write exactly what one believed to be true about the things one knew best. I suppose that is what I know about best, all the events and influences of the last eighty years which have made us what we are and which culminated in this house in Dominic’s final rack of mental anguish. It’s what I said to you just now. Everyone can write one book. This would be my one real book. I’d go on writing it till I die.’
    In spite of myself I was taken with the idea.
    ‘It would be wrong not to do it,’ said Julian.
    ‘Your idea of right and wrong is not the same as Aunt Maysie’s,’ I said, ‘although, changing the meaning of the word a little, you are more Right than she is. I am supposed to be extremely snobbish, even in Melbourne, the most snobbish place on earth. The reason is that my snobbery is of a different kind. It is not concerned with the horizontal divisions of society, but with the vertical, which is down the middle, “
per pale
” as the Heralds say on that document in the harness room. At the top on the Right is the duke, and at the top on the Left is the international financier. At the bottom on the Right is the peasant—on the Left the factory worker. On the Right between the duke and the peasant are all kinds of landowners and farmers, all artists and craftsmen, soldiers, sailors, clergymen and musicians. On the Left side arebusiness men, stockbrokers, bankers, exporters, all men whose sole reason for working is to make money, and also mechanics and aviators. We on the Right cannot make money. When we have it, it has only come to us as an accident following on our work, or from luck. There are those whose place is on the right of the
pale
but who express the ideas of the Left. They are traitors. They imagine that by breaking down the pale, giving that word a slightly double meaning, they are releasing humanity into wider fields, when in reality they are letting in the beasts of the jungle. One could enlarge on this, explaining how doctors are on the Right of the
pale
because they put their work before money, but near the Left because of their materialistic conception of life. Lawyers are on the Right because of their