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

And Sir Malcolm sat back and smiled again. Connie did not answer.

“I hope you had a real man at last,” he said to her after a while, sensually alert.

“I did. That’s the trouble. There aren’t many of them about,” she said.

“No, by God!” he mused. “There aren’t! Well, my dear, to look at you, he was a lucky man. Surely he wouldn’t make trouble for you?”

“Oh no! He leaves me my own mistress entirely.”

“Quite! Quite! A genuine man would.”

Sir Malcolm was pleased. Connie was his favourite daughter, he had always liked the female in her. Not so much of her mother in her as in Hilda. And he had always disliked Clifford. So he was pleased, and very tender with his daughter, as if the unborn child were his child.

He drove with her to Hartland’s hotel, and saw her installed: then went round to his club. She had refused his company for the evening.

She found a letter from Mellors.

I won’t come round to your hotel, but I’ll wait for you outside the Golden Cock in Adam Street at seven.

There he stood, tall and slender, and so different, in a formal suit of thin dark cloth. He had a natural distinction, but he had not the cut-to-pattern look of her class. Yet, she saw at once, he could go anywhere. He had a native breeding which was really much nicer than the cut-to-pattern class thing.

“Ah, there you are! How well you look!”

“Yes! But not you.”

She looked in his face anxiously. It was thin, and the cheekbones showed. But his eyes smiled at her, and she felt at home with him. There it was: suddenly, the tension of keeping up her appearances fell from her. Something flowed out of him physically, that made her feel inwardly at ease and happy, at home. With a woman’s now alert instinct for happiness, she registered it at once. “I’m happy when he’s there!” Not all the sunshine of Venice had given her this inward expansion and warmth.

“Was it horrid for you?” she asked as she sat opposite him at table. He was too thin; she saw it now. His hand lay as she knew it, with the curious loose forgottenness of a sleeping animal. She wanted so much to take it and kiss it. But she did not quite dare.

“People are always horrid,” he said.

“And did you mind very much?”

“I minded, as I always shall mind. And I knew I was a fool to mind.”

“Did you feel like a dog with a tin can tied to its tail? Clifford said you felt like that.”

He looked at her. It was cruel of her at that moment: for his pride had suffered bitterly.

“I suppose I did,” he said.

She never knew the fierce bitterness with which he resented insult.

There was a long pause.

“And did you miss me?” she asked.

“I was glad you were out of it.”

Again there was a pause.

“But did people believe about you and me?” she asked.

“No! I don’t think so for a moment.”

“Did Clifford?”

“I should say not. He put it off without thinking about it. But naturally it made him want to see the last of me.”

“I’m going to have a child.”

The expression died utterly out of his face, out of his whole body. He looked at her with darkened eyes, whose look she could not understand at all: like some dark-flamed spirit looking at her.

“Say you’re glad!” she pleaded, groping for his hand. And she saw a certain exultance spring up in him. But it was netted down by things she could not understand.

“It’s the future,” he said.

“But aren’t you glad?” she persisted.

“I have such a terrible mistrust of the future.”

“But you needn’t be troubled by any responsibility. Clifford would have it as his own, he’d be glad.”

She saw him go pale, and recoil under this. He did not answer.

“Shall I go back to Clifford and put a little baronet into Wragby?” she asked.

He looked at her, pale and very remote. The ugly little grin flickered on his face.

“You wouldn’t have to tell him who the father was?”

“Oh!” she said; “he’d take it even then, if I wanted him to.”

He thought for a time.

“Ay!” he said at last, to himself. “I suppose he would.”

There was silence. A big gulf was between them.

“But you don’t want me to go back to Clifford, do you?” she asked him.

“What do you want yourself?” he replied.

“I want to live with you,” she said simply.

In spite of himself, little flames ran over his belly as he heard her say it, and he dropped his head. Then he looked up at her again, with those haunted eyes.

“If it’s worth it to you,” he said. “I’ve got nothing.”

“You’ve got more than most men. Come, you know it,” she said.

“In one way, I know it.” He was silent for a time, thinking. Then he resumed: “They used to say I had too much of the woman in me. But it’s not that. I’m not a woman not because I don’t want to shoot birds, neither because I don’t want to make money, or get on. I could have got on in the army, easily, but I didn’t like the army. Though I could manage the men all right: they liked me and they had a bit of a holy fear of me when I got mad. No, it was stupid, dead-handed higher authority that made the army dead: absolutely fool-dead. I like men, and men like me. But I can’t stand the twaddling bossy impudence of the people who run this world. That’s why I can’t get on. I hate the impudence of money, and I hate the impudence of class. So in the world as it is, what have I to offer a woman?”

“But why offer anything? It’s not a bargain. It’s just that we love one another,” she said.

“Nay, nay! It’s more than that. Living is moving and moving on. My life won’t go down the proper gutters, it just won’t. So I’m a bit of a waste ticket by myself. And I’ve no business to take a woman into my life, unless my life does something and gets somewhere, inwardly at least, to keep us both fresh. A man must offer a woman some meaning in his life, if it’s going to be an isolated life, and if she’s a genuine woman. I can’t be just your male concubine.”

“Why not?” she said.

“Why, because I can’t. And you would soon hate it.”

“As if you couldn’t trust me,” she said.

The grin flickered on his face.

“The money is yours, the position is yours, the decisions will lie with you. I’m not just my Lady’s fucker, after all.”

“What else are you?”

“You may well ask. It no doubt is invisible. Yet I’m something to myself at least. I can see the point of my own existence, though I can quite understand nobody else’s seeing it.”

“And will your existence have less point, if you live with me?”

He paused a long time before replying:

“It might.”

She too stayed to think about it.

“And what is the point of your existence?”

“I tell you, it’s invisible. I don’t believe in the world, not in money, nor in advancement, nor in the future of our civilization. If there’s got to be a future for humanity, there’ll have to be a very big change from what now is.”

“And what will the real future have to be like?”

“God knows! I can feel something inside me, all mixed up with a lot of rage. But what it really amounts to, I don’t know.”

“Shall I tell you?” she said, looking into his face. “Shall I tell you what you have that other men don’t have, and that will make the future? Shall I tell you?”

“Tell me then,” he replied.

“It’s the courage of your own tenderness, that’s what it is: like when you put your hand on my tail and say I’ve got a pretty tail.”

The grin came flickering on his face.

“That!” he said.

Then he sat thinking.

“Ay!” he said. “You’re right. It’s that really. It’s that all the way through. I knew it with the men. I had to be in touch with them, physically, and not go back on it. I had to be bodily aware of them and a bit tender to them, even if I put em through hell. It’s a question of awareness, as Buddha said. But even he fought shy of the bodily awareness, and that natural physical tenderness, which is the best, even between men; in a proper manly way. Makes ’em really manly, not so monkeyish. Ay! it’s tenderness, really; it’s cunt-awareness. Sex is really only touch, the closest of all touch. And it’s touch we’re afraid of. We’re only half-conscious, and half alive. We’ve got to come alive and aware. Especially the English have got to get into touch with one another, a bit delicate and a bit tender. It’s our crying need.”