Дэвид Герберт Лоуренс
Любовник леди Чаттерлей / Lady Chatterley's Lover

© Шитова Л. Ф., адаптация, сокращение, словарь, 2021

© ООО «ИД «Антология», 2021

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Chapter 1

We live in a tragic age, but we refuse to take it tragically. We are among the ruins, but we start to have new little hopes. We’ve got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.

This was more or less Constance Chatterley’s position. The war had brought the roof down over her head. And she had realized that one must live and learn[1].

She married Clifford Chatterley in 1917, when he was home for a month on leave. They had a month’s honeymoon. Then he went back to Flanders[2]: to be shipped over to England again six months later, in bits. Constance, his wife, was then twenty-three years old, and he was twenty-nine.

His hold on life was marvellous. He didn’t die, and the bits seemed to grow together again. For two years he remained in the doctor’s hands. Then he could return to life again, with the lower half of his body paralysed for ever.

This was in 1920. They returned, Clifford and Constance, to his home, Wragby Hall, the family ‘seat’. His father had died, Clifford was now a baronet, Sir Clifford, and Constance was Lady Chatterley. They came to start housekeeping and married life in the rather abandoned home of the Chatterleys on a rather inadequate income. Crippled for ever, knowing he could never have any children, Clifford came home to the Midlands[3] to keep the Chatterley name alive while he could.

He was not really downcast. He could wheel himself about in a wheeled chair, and he had a bath-chair with a small motor, so he could drive himself slowly round the garden and into the park, of which he was really proud.

He remained bright and cheerful, with his ruddy, healthy-looking face, and his pale-blue eyes. His shoulders were broad and strong. He was expensively dressed, and wore handsome neckties. Yet still in his face one saw the watchful look of a cripple.

He had so very nearly lost his life, that what remained was wonderfully precious to him. It was obvious in the brightness of his eyes, how proud he was of being alive.

Constance, his wife, was a ruddy, country-looking girl with soft brown hair and strong body. She had big, wondering eyes, and a soft voice, and seemed just to have come from her native village. It was not so at all. Her father was the once well-known R. A.[4], old Sir Malcolm Reid. Her mother had been one of the cultivated Fabians[5]. Between artists and cultured socialists, Constance and her sister Hilda had had an unconventional upbringing. They had been taken to Paris and Florence and Rome to learn art, and they had been taken also in the other direction, to the Hague[6] and Berlin, to great Socialist conventions.

The two girls therefore were at once cosmopolitan and provincial.

They had been sent to Dresden at the age of ﬁfteen, for music among other things. And they had had a good time there. They lived freely among the students, they argued with the men over philosophical, sociological and artistic matters, they were just as good as the men themselves: only better, since they were women. And they went to the forests with strong youths bearing guitars. They sang the Wandervogel[7] songs, and they were free. Free! to say what they liked. It was the talk that mattered most. Love was only a minor accompaniment.

Both Hilda and Constance had had their love-affairs by the time they were eighteen. The young men with whom they talked so passionately and sang and camped under the trees in such freedom wanted, of course, the love connexion. The girls were doubtful, but then the thing was so much talked about, it was supposed to be so important. And the men were so humble and anxious. Why couldn’t a girl be generous, and give the gift of herself?

So they had given the gift of themselves, each to the youth with whom she had the most intimate arguments.

The sex business was gloriﬁed by poets who were mostly men. Women had always known there was something better, something higher. And now they knew definitely that the beautiful freedom of a woman was much more wonderful than any sexual love. But men insisted on the sex thing like dogs.

And a woman had to yield. A man was like a child with his appetites. A woman had to yield him what he wanted, or like a child he would turn nasty and spoil what was a very pleasant connexion. But a woman could take a man without really giving herself away. She could use this sex thing to have power over him. Both sisters had had their love experience by the time the war came, and they were hurried home. Neither was ever in love with a young man.

When the girls came home for the summer holidays of 1913, when Hilda was twenty and Connie eighteen, their father could see plainly that they had had the love experience. But he was a man of experience himself, and let life take its course. As for the mother, a nervous invalid in the last few months of her life, she wanted her girls to be ‘free’, and to ‘fulﬁl themselves’. She had never been able to be altogether herself. She blamed her husband.

So the girls were ‘free’, and went back to Dresden, and their music, and the university and the young men. They loved their young men, and their young men loved them with all the passion. Connie’s young man was musical, Hilda’s was technical. But they simply lived for their young women. It was obvious in them too that love had gone through them: that is, the physical experience. It is curious what change love makes, both in the body of men and women: the woman more blooming, more rounded, and her expression triumphant; the man much quieter, more inward, the very shapes of his shoulders and his back less assertive, more hesitant.

The sisters took the sex-thrill as a sensation, and remained free. Whereas the men, in gratitude to the woman for the sex experience, let their souls go out to her. Connie’s man could be a bit sulky, and Hilda’s a bit jeering. But that is how men are! Ungrateful and never satisﬁed. When you don’t have them they hate you because you won’t; and when you do have them they hate you again, for some other reason. Or for no reason at all, except that they are naughty children, and can’t be satisﬁed whatever they get.

However, came the war, Hilda and Connie returned home again to their mother’s funeral. Before Christmas of 1914 both their German young men were dead: the sisters wept, and loved the young men passionately, but soon forgot them.

Both sisters lived in their father’s Kensington[8] house. Hilda, however, suddenly married a man ten years older than herself, a man with a fair amount of money, and a comfortable job in the government. She lived with him in a smallish house in Westminster[9].

Connie did a mild form of war-work. Her ‘friend’ was a Clifford Chatterley, a young man of twenty-two, who had hurried home from Bonn, where he was studying coal-mining. He had previously spent two years at Cambridge. Now he had become a ﬁrst lieutenant in a smart regiment.

Clifford Chatterley was more upper-class than Connie. Connie was well-to-do intelligentsia, but he was aristocracy. Not the big sort, but still it.

But Clifford, while he was better bred than Connie, and more ‘society’, was in his own way more provincial and more timid.

Therefore the peculiar assurance of a girl like Constance Reid fascinated him. She was so much more mistress of herself than he was master of himself.

In 1916, when Sir Geoffrey Chatterley died, Clifford became heir. He was terriﬁed of this. Now he was heir and responsible for Wragby. Was that not terrible? and also splendid and at the same time, perhaps, purely absurd?

Sir Geoffrey had wanted Clifford to marry and produce an heir. For willy-nilly[10] he took his baronetcy and Wragby with seriousness.

The war had brought too much death and horror. A man needed support and comfort. A man needed to have an anchor in the safe world. A man needed a wife.

Clifford married Connie and had his month’s honeymoon with her. It was the terrible year 1917, and they were intimate as two people who stand together on a sinking ship. He had been virgin when he married: and the sex part did not mean much to him. They were so close, he and she, apart from that. And Connie enjoyed this intimacy which was beyond sex, and beyond a man’s ‘satisfaction’. Clifford was not just keen on his ‘satisfaction’, as so many men seemed to be. No, the intimacy was deeper, more personal than that. And sex was merely an accident, one of the obsolete, organic processes, which was not really necessary. Though Connie did want children.

But early in 1918 Clifford was shipped home smashed, and there was no child.

Chapter 2

Connie and Clifford came home to Wragby in the autumn of 1920.

Wragby was a long low old house in brown stone, begun about the middle of the eighteenth century. It stood on a hill in a rather old park of oak trees, but alas, one could see in the near distance the chimney of Tevershall pit, with its clouds of steam and smoke, and the Tevershall village, which began almost at the park gates, and trailed in utter ugliness for a long mile: houses, rows of small, blackened, gloomy, brick houses, with slate roofs.

Connie was accustomed to Kensington or the Scotch hills: that was her England. With the stoicism of the young she took in the ugliness of the coal-and-iron Midlands at a glance, as not to be thought about. From the rather gloomy rooms at Wragby she heard the rumble at the pit, the little whistle of the colliery locomotives. Tevershall pit-bank was burning, had been burning for years, and it would cost thousands to put it out. So it had to burn. And when the wind was that way, which was often, the house was full of the stench. But even on windless days the air always smelt of something under-earth: sulphur, iron or coal. And even on the Christmas roses the soot settled, like black manna from the skies of doom.

Well, there it was: fated like the rest of things! It was rather awful, but you couldn’t kick it away. It just went on. At night she could see red spots burning in the sky. It was the furnaces. At ﬁrst they fascinated Connie; she felt she was living underground. Then she got used to them. And in the morning it rained.

Clifford pretended to like Wragby better than London. This country had a will of its own, and the people had guts. Connie wondered what else they had: certainly neither eyes nor minds. The people were as haggard, shapeless, and sad as the countryside, and as unfriendly. They spoke a slurring dialect.

There had been no welcome home for the young couple, no festivities, no deputation, not even a single ﬂower. Only a ride in a motor-car up a dark road through gloomy trees, out to the slope of the park where grey sheep were feeding, to the hill where the house spread its dark brown facade, and the housekeeper and her husband were waiting to welcome them.

There was no communication between Wragby Hall and Tevershall village. No caps were touched, no curtseys bobbed[11]. The colliers merely stared; the tradesmen lifted their caps to Connie as to an acquaintance, and nodded awkwardly to Clifford; that was all. It was not that she and Clifford were unpopular, they merely belonged to another species, different from the colliers. You stick to your side, I’ll stick to mine!

The attitude of the miners’ wives—We think ourselves as good as you, if you are Lady Chatterley! – puzzled Connie at ﬁrst extremely.

Clifford left them alone[12], and she learnt to do the same: she just went by without looking at them, and they stared as if she were a walking wax ﬁgure. When he had to deal with them, Clifford was rather haughty and contemptuous. In fact he was contemptuous of anyone not in his own class. And he was neither liked nor disliked by the people: he was just part of things, like the pit-bank and Wragby itself.

But Clifford was really extremely shy now he was lamed. He hated seeing anyone except the personal servants. For he had to sit in a wheeled chair or a sort of bath-chair. Nevertheless he was just as carefully dressed as ever, by his expensive tailors, and he wore the Bond Street neckties just as before.

Connie and he were attached to one another. He was much too hurt in himself, the great shock of his maiming. And Connie stuck to him passionately.

But she could not help feeling how little connexion he really had with people. The miners were, in a sense, his own men; but he saw them as objects rather than men. He was in some way afraid of them, he could not bear to have them look at him now he was lame.

He was remote. He was not in actual touch with anybody, save, traditionally, with Wragby. Connie felt that she herself didn’t really touch him.

Yet he was absolutely dependent on her, he needed her every moment. Big and strong as he was, he was helpless. He could wheel himself about in a wheeled chair, and he had a sort of bath-chair with a motor attachment, in which he could ride slowly round the park. But alone he was like a lost thing. He needed Connie to be there, to assure him he existed at all.

Still he was ambitious. He had taken to writing stories; curious, very personal stories about people he had known. Clever, and yet, in some mysterious way, meaningless. It was as if the whole thing took place in a vacuum.

Clifford was very sensitive about these stories. He wanted everyone to think them good, of the best. They appeared in the most modern magazines, and were praised and blamed as usual. But to Clifford the blame was torture. It was as if the whole of his being were in his stories.

Connie helped him as much as she could. At ﬁrst she was thrilled. He talked everything over with her monotonously, persistently, and she had to respond with all her might.

Of physical life they lived very little. She had to control the house. But the housekeeper had served Sir Geofrf ey for many years, and his wife who waited at table, had been in the house for forty years. Even the very housemaids were no longer young. It was awful! What could you do with such a place, but leave it alone! So she left it alone.

Connie’s father, where he paid a short visit to Wragby, said in private to his daughter: As for Clifford’s writing, it’s smart, but there’s nothing in it. It won’t last! Connie looked at him: What did he mean by nothing in it? If the critics praised it, and Clifford’s name was almost famous, and it even brought in money…what did her father mean by saying there was nothing in Clifford’s writing?

It was in her second winter at Wragby her father said to her: ‘I hope, Connie, you won’t let circumstances force you into being a demi-vierge[13].’

‘A demi-vierge!’ replied Connie vaguely. ‘Why? Why not?’

‘Unless you like it, of course!’ said her father hastily. To Clifford he said the same, when the two men were alone: ‘I’m afraid it doesn’t quite suit Connie to be a demi-vierge.’

‘A half-virgin!’ replied Clifford, translating the phrase to be sure of it.

He thought for a moment, then ﬂushed very red. He was angry and offended.

‘In what way doesn’t it suit her?’ he asked stifylf.

‘She’s getting thin… It’s not her style.’

Clifford wanted to say something later to Connie about the half-virgin state of her affairs. But he could not bring himself to do it. He was at once too intimate with her and not intimate enough. He was so very much at one with her, in his mind and hers, but bodily they were non-existent to one another, and utterly out of touch.

Connie guessed, however, that her father had said something, and that something was in Clifford’s mind.

Connie and Clifford had now been nearly two years at Wragby. Their common interests were connected only with his work. The rest was non-existence. Wragby was there, the servants… Connie went for walks in the park, and in the woods that joined the park, and enjoyed the solitude, kicking the brown leaves of autumn, and picking the primroses of spring. But it was all a dream: no touch, no contact! Only this life with Clifford and his stories which wouldn’t last.

Clifford had quite a number of friends, acquaintances really, and he invited them to Wragby. He invited all sorts of people, critics and writers, people who would help to praise his books. And they were flattered at being asked to Wragby. Connie understood it all perfectly. But why not?

She was hostess to these people, mostly men. She was hostess also to Clifford’s aristocratic relations. Being a ruddy, country-looking girl, inclined to freckles, with big blue eyes, and curling, brown hair, and a soft voice, and rather strong, female body she was considered a little old-fashioned and ‘womanly’. She was not like a boy, with a boy’s ﬂat breast and little buttocks. She was too feminine to be quite smart.

So the men, especially those no longer young, were very nice to her indeed. But, knowing how poor Clifford would feel at the slightest sign of ﬂirting on her part, she gave them no chance at all. She was quiet, had no contact with them and intended to have none. Clifford was very proud of himself.

His relatives treated her quite kindly. But again she had no contact. She let them be kindly and had no real connexion with them.

Time went on. Whatever happened, nothing happened, because she was so beautifully out of contact. She and Clifford lived in their ideas and his books. She entertained. There were always people in the house. Time went on as the clock does, half past eight instead of half past seven.

Chapter 3

Connie was aware, however, of a growing restlessness, which was taking possession of her like madness. It thrilled inside her body, somewhere, till she felt she must jump into water and swim to get away from it; a mad restlessness. It made her heart beat violently for no reason. And she was getting thinner.

It was just restlessness. She would rush off across the park, abandon Clifford, and lie in the grass. To get away from the house…she must get away from the house and everybody.

Vaguely she knew herself that she was going to pieces in some way. Vaguely she knew she was out of connexion: she had lost touch with the world. Only Clifford and his books, which did not exist…which had nothing in them! Vaguely she knew. But it was like beating her head against a stone.

Her father told her again: ‘Why don’t you get yourself a beau[14], Connie? Do you all the good in the world.’

That winter Michaelis came for a few days. He was a young Irishman who had already made a large fortune by his plays in America. He had been taken up quite enthusiastically for a time by smart society[15] in London, for he wrote smart society plays. Then gradually smart society realized that he had made them look ridiculous. He was discovered to be anti-English, which was to the class worse than the dirtiest crime. He was cut dead, and his corpse thrown into the refuse can[16].

Nevertheless Michaelis had his apartment in Mayfair[17], and walked down Bond Street perfectly dressed by the best tailors.

Clifford was inviting the young man of thirty at an unfavorable moment in that young man’s career. Yet Clifford did not hesitate. Michaelis had the ear of a few million people, probably; and would no doubt be grateful to be asked down to Wragby, when the rest of the smart world was cutting him.

Connie wondered a little over Clifford’s instinct to become known as a writer, as a first-class modern writer. Clifford discovered new channels of publicity. He had all kinds of people at Wragby.

Michaelis arrived duly, in a very neat car, with a chauffeur and a manservant. He was absolutely Bond Street! But at sight of him Clifford saw that he wasn’t exactly what his appearance intended to show. To Clifford this was ﬁnal and enough. Yet he was very polite to the man, because he wanted to sell himself to the goddess of Success also, if only she would have him.

Michaelis obviously wasn’t an Englishman, in spite of all the tailors, hatters, barbers, booters of the very best quarter of London. Poor Michaelis had been much kicked, so that he had a slightly tail-between-the-legs[18] look even now. He had pushed his way by instinct and impertinence to the stage, with his plays. He had caught the public. And he had thought the kicking days were over. Alas, they weren’t… They never would be. For he, in a sense, asked to be kicked. He pined to be where he didn’t belong…among the English upper classes. And how he hated them!

Nevertheless he travelled with his manservant and his very neat car, this Dublin mongrel.

There was something about him that Connie liked. He didn’t put on airs to himself, he had no illusions about himself. He talked to Clifford brieﬂy, practically, about all the things Clifford wanted to know. He knew he had been asked down to Wragby to be made use of, and like a business man, he let himself be asked questions, and he answered with as little feeling as possible.

‘Money!’ he said. ‘Money is a sort of instinct. It’s a sort of property of nature in a man to make money. Once you start, you make money, and you go on; up to a point, I suppose.’

‘But you’ve got to begin,’ said Clifford.

‘Oh, quite! You’ve got to get in. You can do nothing if you are kept outside. You should beat your way in. Once you’ve done that, you can’t help it.’

‘And you think it’s a writer of popular plays that you’ve got to be?’ asked Connie.

‘There, exactly!’ he said, turning to her. ‘There’s nothing in popularity. There’s nothing in the public, if it comes to that. There’s nothing really in my plays to make them popular. It’s not that. They just are like the weather…the sort that will have to be…for the time being.’

He turned his slow eyes on Connie, and she trembled a little. He seemed so old; and at the same time he was lonely like a child. An outcast, but with a desperate bravery.

‘At least it’s wonderful what you’ve done at your time of life,’ said Clifford.

‘I’m thirty…yes, I’m thirty!’ said Michaelis, sharply and suddenly, with a curious laugh; triumphant, and bitter.

‘And are you alone?’ asked Connie.

‘How do you mean? Do I live alone? I’ve got my servant. He’s a Greek, so he says. And I’m going to marry. Oh, yes, I must marry.’

‘It sounds like going to have your tonsils cut,’ laughed Connie. ‘Will it be an efof rt?’

He looked at her admiringly. ‘Well, Lady Chatterley, somehow it will! I ﬁnd… excuse me… I ﬁnd I can’t marry an Englishwoman, not even an Irishwoman…’

‘Try an American,’ said Clifford.

‘Oh, American!’ He laughed. ‘No, I’ve asked my man if he will ﬁnd me a Turk or something…something nearer to the Oriental.’

Connie really wondered at this queer, melancholy specimen of extraordinary success; it was said he had an income of ﬁfty thousand dollars from America alone. Sometimes he was handsome. Connie felt a sudden, strange sympathy for him, amounting almost to love. The outsider! And they called him a bounder! How much more bounderish and assertive Clifford looked! How much stupider!

Michaelis knew at once he had made an impression on her. He turned his eyes on her. He was estimating her, and the extent of the impression he had made. For the English he was the outsider. Yet women sometimes fell for him…Englishwomen too.

Breakfast was served in the bedrooms; Clifford never appeared before lunch, and the dining-room was a little gloomy. After coffee Michaelis, restless and ill-sitting soul, wondered what he should do. It was a ﬁne November day. He looked over the melancholy park. My God! What a place!

He sent a servant to ask, could he be of any service to Lady Chatterley: he thought of driving into Shefifeld. The answer came, would he care to go up to Lady Chatterley’s sitting-room.

Connie had a sitting-room on the third ﬂoor, the top ﬂoor of the central portion of the house. Clifford’s rooms were on the ground ﬂoor, of course. Michaelis was ﬂattered by being asked up to Lady Chatterley’s own parlour. In her room he glanced round at the ﬁne German reproductions of Renoir and Cezanne.

‘It’s very pleasant up here,’ he said, with his queer smile. ‘You are wise to get up to the top.’

‘Yes, I think so,’ she said.

Her room was the only gay, modern one in the house, the only spot in Wragby where her personality was revealed. Clifford had never seen it, and she asked very few people up.

Now she and Michaelis sat on opposite sides of the ﬁre and talked. She asked him about himself, his mother and father, his brothers… Michaelis talked frankly about himself, quite frankly, then showing pride in his success.

‘But why are you such a lonely bird?’ Connie asked him; and again he looked at her, with his searching look.

‘Some birds are that way,’ he replied. Then, with a touch of irony: ‘but, look here, what about yourself? Aren’t you by way of being a lonely bird yourself?’ Connie, a little startled, thought about it for a few moments, and then she said: ‘Only in a way! Not altogether, like you!’

‘Am I altogether a lonely bird?’ he asked, with his queer grin of a smile.

‘Why?’ she said, as she looked at him. ‘You are, aren’t you?’

She felt a terrible appeal coming to her from him that made her almost lose her balance.

‘Oh, you’re quite right!’ he said, turning his head away, and looking sideways, downwards.

He looked up at her with the full glance that saw everything, registered everything.

‘It’s awfully nice of you to think of me,’ he said laconically.

‘Why shouldn’t I think of you?’ she exclaimed.

He gave the quick laugh.

‘Oh, in that way!..May I hold your hand for a minute?’ he asked suddenly, ﬁxing his eyes on her with almost hypnotic power, and sending out an appeal that affected her directly.

She stared at him, and he went over and kneeled beside her, and took her two feet close in his two hands, and buried his face in her lap, remaining motionless. She was perfectly shocked, looking down in a sort of amazement at the back of his neck, feeling his face pressing her thighs. She could not help putting her hand, with tenderness and compassion, on the defenceless back of his neck, and he trembled.

Then he looked up at her with that awful appeal in his glowing eyes. She was utterly incapable of resisting it; she must give him anything, anything.

He was a very gentle lover, very gentle with the woman, and yet at the same time aware of every sound outside.

To her it meant nothing except that she gave herself to him. And at length he ceased to quiver any more, and lay quite still. Then, she stroked his head that lay on her breast.

When he rose, he kissed both her hands, then both her feet, and in silence went away to the end of the room, where he stood with his back to her. There was silence for some minutes. Then he turned and came to her again as she sat in her old place by the ﬁre.

‘And now, I suppose you’ll hate me!’ he said in a quiet way. She looked up at him quickly.

‘Why should I?’ she asked.

‘They mostly do,’ he said; then he caught himself up. ‘I mean…a woman is supposed to.’

‘This is the last moment when I ought to hate you,’ she said.

‘I know! It should be so! You’re frightfully good to me…’ he cried miserably.

She wondered why he should be miserable. ‘Won’t you sit down again?’ she said. He glanced at the door.

‘Sir Clifford!’ he said, ‘won’t he…won’t he be…?’

She paused a moment to consider. ‘Perhaps!’ she said. And she looked up at him. ‘I don’t want Clifford to know not even to suspect. It would hurt him so much. But I don’t think it’s wrong, do you?’

‘Wrong! Good God, no! You’re only too good to me…I can hardly bear it.’

He turned aside, and she saw that in another moment he would be sobbing.

‘But we needn’t let Clifford know, need we?’ she pleaded. ‘It would hurt him so. And if he never knows, never suspects, it hurts nobody.’

‘Me!’ he said, almost ﬁercely; ‘he’ll know nothing from me! You see if he does. Me give myself away! Ha! Ha!’ he laughed cynically, at such an idea. She watched him in wonder. He said to her: ‘May I kiss your hand and go? I’ll run into Shefifeld I think, and lunch there, if I may, and be back to tea. May I do anything for you? May I be sure you don’t hate me? – and that you won’t?’—he ended desperately.

‘No, I don’t hate you,’ she said. ‘I think you’re nice.’

‘Ah!’ he said to her, ‘I’d rather you said that to me than said you love me[19]! It means such a lot more…Till afternoon then. I’ve plenty to think about till then.’ He kissed her hands humbly and was gone.

‘I don’t think I can stand that young man,’ said Clifford at lunch.

‘Why?’ asked Connie.

‘He’s such a bounder underneath his veneer.’

‘I think people have been so unkind to him,’ said Connie.

‘Do you wonder? And do you think he wastes time doing deeds of kindness?’

‘I think he has a certain sort of generosity.’

‘Towards whom?’

‘I don’t quite know.’

‘Naturally you don’t. I’m afraid you mistake unscrupulousness for generosity.[20]’

Connie paused. Did she? It was just possible. In his way Michaelis had conquered the world, which was what Clifford wanted to do. Ways and means…? The goddess of Success was hunted by thousands of dogs. The one that got her ﬁrst was the real dog among dogs, if you go by success! So Michaelis could keep his tail up[21].

Which he didn’t. He came back towards tea-time with a large handful of violets and lilies, and the same sad expression. Connie wondered sometimes if it were a sort of mask, because it was almost too ﬁxed. Was he really such a sad dog?

Connie was in love with him, but she managed to sit with her embroidery and let the men talk, and not give herself away. As for Michaelis, he was perfect; exactly the same melancholic, attentive young fellow of the previous evening. Connie felt he must have forgotten the morning. He had not forgotten. But he knew where he was…in the same old place outside.

He didn’t take the love-making altogether personally. He knew it would not change him from an ownerless dog into a comfortable society dog. His isolation was a necessity to him; just as the mixing-in with the smart people was also a necessity.

But occasional love, as a comfort and soothing, was also a good thing, and he was not ungrateful. On the contrary, he was very grateful for a piece of natural, spontaneous kindness: almost to tears. His child’s soul was sobbing with gratitude to the woman, and burning to come to her again.

He found an opportunity to say to her, as they were lighting the candles in the hall:

‘May I come?’

‘I’ll come to you,’ she said.

‘Oh, good!’

He waited for her a long time…but she came.

He was the trembling excited sort of lover, whose crisis soon came, and was ﬁnished. There was something curiously childlike and defenceless about his naked body: as children are naked. He roused in the woman a wild sort of compassion and yearning, and a wild physical desire. The physical desire he did not satisfy in her; he was always come and ﬁnished so quickly, while she lay disappointed, lost.

But then she soon learnt to hold him, to keep him there inside her when his crisis was over. And there he was generous and curiously potent; he stayed ﬁrm inside her, while she was active… wildly, passionately active, coming to her own crisis. And as he felt her achieving her own satisfaction, he had a curious sense of pride.

‘Ah, how good!’ she whispered, and she became quite still, clinging to him. And he lay there in his own isolation, but somehow proud.

He stayed that time only the three days, and to Clifford was exactly the same as on the ﬁrst evening; to Connie also.

He wrote to Connie with the same melancholy note as ever, sometimes witty. A kind of hopeless affection he seemed to feel for her, and the remoteness remained the same.

Connie never really understood him, but, in her way, she loved him. So they went on for quite a time, writing, and meeting occasionally in London. She still wanted the physical, sexual thrill she could get with him by her own activity. And he still wanted to give it her. Which was enough to keep them connected.

She was very cheerful at Wragby. And she used all her cheerfulness and satisfaction to stimulate Clifford, so that he wrote his best at this time, and was almost happy in his strange blind way. He really reaped the fruits[22] of the sensual satisfaction she got out of Michaelis inside her. But of course he never knew it, and if he had, he wouldn’t have said thank you!

Yet when those days of her joyful cheerfulness were gone and she was depressed and irritable, how Clifford longed for them again! Perhaps if he’d known he might even have wished to get her and Michaelis together again.

Chapter 4

Connie understood the hopelessness of her affair with Mick, as people called him. Yet other men seemed to mean nothing to her. She was attached to Clifford. He wanted a good deal of her life and she gave it to him. But she wanted a good deal from the life of a man, and this Clifford did not give her; could not. There were occasional meetings with Michaelis. But, as she knew, that would come to an end. It was part of his being that he must break off any connexion, and be free, isolated, absolutely lone dog again. It was his major necessity, even though he always said: She turned me down!

Clifford was making strides into fame, and even money. People came to see him. Connie nearly always had somebody at Wragby.

There were a few regular men; men who had been at Cambridge with Clifford. There was Tommy Dukes, who had remained in the army, and was a Brigadier-General. There was Charles May, an Irishman, who wrote scientiﬁcally about stars. There was Hammond, another writer. All were about the same age as Clifford; the young intellectuals of the day. They all believed in the life of the mind. What you did apart from that was your private affair, and didn’t much matter. And it is true about most of the matters of ordinary life…how you make your money, or whether you love your wife, or if you have ‘affairs’. All these matters concern only the person concerned, and have no interest for anyone else.

‘The whole point about the sexual problem,’ said Hammond, who was a tall thin fellow with a wife and two children, but much more closely connected with a typewriter, ‘is that there is no point to it. Strictly there is no problem. We don’t want to follow a man into the w.c., so why should we want to follow him into bed with a woman? And here lies the problem. It’s all senseless: a matter of curiosity.’

‘Quite, Hammond, quite! But if someone starts making love to Julia, you begin to simmer; and if he goes on, you are soon at boiling point[23].’…Julia was Hammond’s wife.

‘Why, exactly! So I should be if he began to urinate in a corner of my drawing-room. There’s a place for all these things.’

‘You mean you wouldn’t mind if he made love to Julia in some discreet alcove?’

Charlie May was slightly satirical, for he had ﬂirted a very little with Julia, and Hammond had cut up very roughly.

‘Of course I should mind. Sex is a private thing between me and Julia; and of course I should mind anyone else trying to mix in.’

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Notes

1

век живи, век учись

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2

Фландрия – область в Западной Европе, расположенная на территории современных Бельгии, Франции и Голландии.

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3

Мидлендс – центральные графства Англии.

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4

контр-адмирал

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5

Фабианцы – сторонники постепенного реформирования капитализма в социализм.

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6

Гаага – неофициальная столица Нидерландов.

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7

«Перелётная птица» – немецкое молодёжное движение.

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8

Кенсингтон – престижный район Лондона.

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9

Вестминстер – правительственный район Лондона.

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10

волей-неволей

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11

Никто не приподнимал шляпу и не приседал в реверансе.

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12

не обращал на них внимания

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13

(фр.) полудева

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14

любовник

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15

светское общество

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16

С ним расправились, а труп выбросили на помойку.

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17

Мейфэр – богатый район Лондона.

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18

с поджатым хвостом

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19

Хорошо, что вы не сказали, что любите меня!

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20

Боюсь, ты принимаешь беспринципность за благородство.

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21

мог не унывать

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22

пожинал плоды

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23

на точке кипения

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