Kitabı oku: «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 learn¹.

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 Flanders²: 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 Midlands³ 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 Fabians⁵. 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 Hague⁶ 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 Wandervogel⁷ 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 Kensington⁸ 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 Westminster⁹.

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-nilly¹⁰ 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 bobbed¹¹. 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 alone¹², 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-vierge¹³.’

‘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.