The Cardboard Crown Read Online Free Page B

concern with justice, but near the Left because they serve business interests. Scientists are not concerned with money, but they are the supreme servants of the Left. In satisfying their vicious curiosity they are prepared to deny all we know of good, and even to destroy the world. This division
per pale
is also not unrelated to the political division between Right and Left, but do not imagine that the big business Tories who have wrecked Europe are on the Right. It also has some connection with the heraldic term “sinister” for the Left side of the shield. Again, if you are clumsy in spirit you are
gauche.
Even at the Last Judgment the division is
per pale
, and those at the Left Hand of God are plunged into Hell. There is also I believe a term in boxing—the dirty Left.
    ‘This is not really true, of course,’ I went on, ‘but one must talk a great deal of nonsense to arrive at a little truth. If you go mining, you must dig up a great deal of quartz to finda little gold. If you only dig as much quartz as you want gold, you will have hardly any gold at all.’
    ‘I’ve always thought the Left was right,’ said Julian. He was smiling but a little truculent.
    ‘Nonsense,’ I said. ‘You don’t believe it at all. If you did you couldn’t paint as you do. Your painting would damn you at once if the Communists had power. It’s traditional, rooted in nature, Catholic, it breathes the inescapable sorrows of the human race. It denies flatly that science can cure the soul of man. Otherwise how could I have asked you to decorate a room in this house?’
    ‘You’re trying to get away from the novel.’
    ‘Not at all. What I have been saying has to do with it. All these people you want me to write about were far on the right side of the
pale
. One must understand what that means before you can understand them. I might write this book, and let all the skeletons come tumbling out of the cupboards, but allow only you to read it. Then you would bear our curse in your heart, like that Scottish family whose eldest son never smiles after his twenty-first birthday.’
    ‘What curse?’ asked Julian.
    ‘Doesn’t it appear to you that we are cursed? I don’t know where it comes from, probably the duque de Teba.’
    ‘Who was he?’
    ‘You haven’t heard of him? Then I’d better not tell you.’
    ‘I promise not to believe you,’ said Julian smiling.
    ‘Then what’s the use of telling you? By the way, the patterns have come for the chapel. You might as well choose them now, or at any rate see what they look like at night.’
    I pulled open a drawer and took out some squares ofgold and soft red damask and brocade, and we went to that room which always filled me with such great depression that I was turning it into a chapel, in the same way that the Church of S. Maria del Popolo in Rome was built over the tomb of Nero, to scatter the devils gathered there. My mind automatically went to the chapel on the mention of the duque de Teba.
    In that room all flippancy left me, and I was subject to the heavy influences of the place, though these were not so great since Julian had done his murals. I looked first at the huge crucifixion painted by Dominic, the tortured body, the face hidden by hanging hair, the conspicuous genitals. It was not a thing that could properly be shown, except perhaps to Carthusian monks on Good Friday, and yet I could not bring myself to paint it out. Dominic must have been a kind of throwback to that Spanish forbear of whom I had not yet told Julian. With his
anima naturaliter Catholica,
but brought up in dreary low-church Anglicanism, he had painted as it were on the cross formed by his inner desire and his habit of mind, this terrible figure. Apparently he had used this room as an oratory. When I arrived there was no furniture in it beyond a hard wooden chair and a Bible. I could not use it for any other purpose with that painting on the wall. Julian also had something dark in his imagination,