Дэвид Лоуренс - Lady Chatterley's Lover [С англо-русским словарем]

“Still far from it, I assure you.

“Not a’ that far, I assure you. I’ve got my own sort o’ continuity, back your life! Good as yours, any day. An’ if your sister there comes ter me for a bit o’ cunt an’ tenderness, she knows what she’s after. She’s been in my bed afore: which you “aven’t, thank the Lord, with your continuity.” There was a dead pause, before he added: “ — Eh, I don’t wear me breeches arse-forrards. An’ if I get a windfall, I thank my stars. A man gets a lot of enjoyment out o’ that lass theer, which is more than anybody gets out o’ th’ likes o’ you. Which is a pity, for you might appen a’ bin a good apple, ’stead of a handsome crab. Women like you needs proper graftin”.”

He was looking at her with an odd, flickering smile, faintly sensual and appreciative.

“And men like you,” she said, “ought to be segregated: justifying their own vulgarity and selfish lust.”

“Ay, ma’am! It’s a mercy there’s a few men left like me. But you deserve what you get: to be left severely alone.”

Hilda had risen and gone to the door. He rose and took his coat from the peg.

“I can find my way quite well alone,” she said.

“I doubt you can’t,” he replied easily.

They tramped in ridiculous file down the lane again, in silence. An owl still hooted. He knew he ought to shoot it.

The car stood untouched, a little dewy. Hilda got in and started the engine. The other two waited.

“All I mean,” she said from her entrenchment, “is that I doubt if you’ll find it’s been worth it, either of you!”

“One man’s meat is another man’s poison,” he said, out of the darkness. “But it’s meat an’ drink to me.

The lights flared out.

“Don’t make me wait in the morning,”

“No, I won’t. Goodnight!”

The car rose slowly on to the highroad, then slid swiftly away, leaving the night silent.

Connie timidly took his arm, and they went down the lane. He did not speak. At length she drew him to a standstill.

“Kiss me!” she murmured.

“Nay, wait a bit! Let me simmer down,” he said.

That amused her. She still kept hold of his arm, and they went quickly down the lane, in silence. She was so glad to be with him, just now. She shivered, knowing that Hilda might have snatched her away. He was inscrutably silent.

When they were in the cottage again, she almost jumped with pleasure, that she should be free of her sister.

“But you were horrid to Hilda,” she said to him.

“She should ha’ been slapped in time.”

“But why? and she’s so nice.”

He didn’t answer, went round doing the evening chores, with a quiet, inevitable sort of motion. He was outwardly angry, but not with her. So Connie felt. And his anger gave him a peculiar handsomeness, an inwardness and glisten that thrilled her and made her limbs go molten.

Still he took no notice of her.

Till he sat down and began to unlace his boots. Then he looked up at her from under his brows, on which the anger still sat firm.

“Shan’t you go up?” he said. “There’s a candle!”

He jerked his head swiftly to indicate the candle burning on the table. She took it obediently, and he watched the full curve of her hips as she went up the first stairs.

It was a night of sensual passion, in which she was a little startled and almost unwilling: yet pierced again with piercing thrills of sensuality, different, sharper, more terrible than the thrills of tenderness, but, at the moment, more desirable. Though a little frightened, she let him have his way, and the reckless, shameless sensuality shook her to her foundations, stripped her to the very last, and made a different woman of her. It was not really love. It was not voluptuousness. It was sensuality sharp and searing as fire, burning the soul to tinder.

Burning out the shames, the deepest, oldest shames, in the most secret places. It cost her an effort to let him have his way and his will of her. She had to be a passive, consenting thing, like a slave, a physical slave. Yet the passion licked round her, consuming, and when the sensual flame of it pressed through her bowels and breast, she really thought she was dying: yet a poignant, marvellous death.

She had often wondered what Abelard meant, when he said that in their year of love he and Heloise had passed through all the stages and refinements of passion. [114] Пьер Абеляр (1079–1142) и Элоиза Фульбер (ок.1100–1164) — знаменитая романтическая пара. Философ и теолог Абеляр и его возлюбленная, а впоследствии тайная супруга, Элоиза были вынуждены из-за преследований родственников после года отношений разлучиться и уйти в монастыри, соответствующие их полу. Их переписка стала одним из известнейших образцов романтической литературы. The same thing, a thousand years ago: ten thousand years ago! The same on the Greek vases, everywhere! The refinements of passion, the extravagances of sensuality! And necessary, forever necessary, to burn out false shames and smelt out the heaviest ore of the body into purity. With the fire of sheer sensuality.

In the short summer night she learnt so much. She would have thought a woman would have died of shame. Instead of which, the shame died. Shame, which is fear: the deep organic shame, the old, old physical fear which crouches in the bodily roots of us, and can only be chased away by the sensual fire, at last it was roused up and routed by the phallic hunt of the man, and she came to the very heart of the jungle of herself. She felt, now, she had come to the real bed-rock of her nature, and was essentially shameless. She was her sensual self, naked and unashamed. She felt a triumph, almost a vainglory. So! That was how it was! That was life! That was how oneself really was! There was nothing left to disguise or be ashamed of. She shared her ultimate nakedness with a man, another being.

And what a reckless devil the man was! really like a devil! One had to be strong to bear him. But it took some getting at, the core of the physical jungle, the last and deepest recess of organic shame. The phallos alone could explore it. And how he had pressed in on her!

And how, in fear, she had hated it. But how she had really wanted it! She knew now. At the bottom of her soul, fundamentally, she had needed this phallic hunting out, she had secretly wanted it, and she had believed that she would never get it. Now suddenly there it was, and a man was sharing her last and final nakedness, she was shameless.

What liars poets and everybody were! They made one think one wanted sentiment. When what one supremely wanted was this piercing, consuming, rather awful sensuality. To find a man who dared do it, without shame or sin or final misgiving! If he had been ashamed afterwards, and made one feel ashamed, how awful! What a pity most men are so doggy, a bit shameful, like Clifford! Like Michaelis even! Both sensually a bit doggy and humiliating. The supreme pleasure of the mind! And what is that to a woman? What is it, really, to the man either! He becomes merely messy and doggy, even in his mind. It needs sheer sensuality even to purify and quicken the mind. Sheer fiery sensuality, not messiness.

Ah, God, how rare a thing a man is! They are all dogs that trot and sniff and copulate. To have found a man who was not afraid and not ashamed! She looked at him now, sleeping so like a wild animal asleep, gone, gone in the remoteness of it. She nestled down, not to be away from him.

Till his rousing waked her completely. He was sitting up in bed, looking down at her. She saw her own nakedness in his eyes, immediate knowledge of her. And the fluid, male knowledge of herself seemed to flow to her from his eyes and wrap her voluptuously. Oh, how voluptuous and lovely it was to have limbs and body half-asleep, heavy and suffused with passion.