目　录

译者序

Chapter ❶

Chapter ❷

Chapter ❸

Chapter ❹

Chapter ❺

Chapter ❻

Chapter ❼

Chapter ❽

Chapter ❾

Chapter ❿

Chapter ⓫

Chapter ⓬

Chapter ⓭

Chapter ⓮

Chapter ⓯

Chapter ⓰

Chapter ⓱

Chapter ⓲

Chapter ⓳

第一章

第二章

第三章

第四章

第五章

第六章

第七章

第八章

第九章

第十章

第十一章

第十二章

第十三章

第十四章

第十五章

第十六章

第十七章

第十八章

第十九章

图书在版编目（CIP）数据

查泰莱夫人的情人／（英）劳伦斯（Lawrence, D. H.）著；黑马译．—南京：译林出版社，2010.2

（双声道文库）

书名原文：Lady Chatterley's Lover

ISBN 978-7-5447-1099-2

Ⅰ．查…　Ⅱ．①劳…②黑…　Ⅲ．①长篇小说—英国—现代　Ⅳ．I561.45

中国版本图书馆CIP数据核字（2009）第214748号

书　　名　查泰莱夫人的情人

作　　者　［英国］D. H. 劳伦斯

译　　者　黑　马

责任编辑　田　智

凤凰出版传媒集团

出版发行

译林出版社（南京市湖南路1号　210009）

电子信箱　yilin@yilin.com

网　　址　http://www.yilin.com

集团网址　凤凰出版传媒网http://www.ppm.cn

印　　刷　江苏省南通印刷总厂有限公司

开　　本　718×1000毫米　1/16

印　　张　35

插　　页　2

版　　次　2010年2月第1版　2010年2月第1次印刷

书　　号　ISBN 978-7-5447-1099-2

定　　价　35.00元

译林版图书若有印装错误可向出版社调换

译者序

废墟上生命的抒情诗

摆在读者面前的，是一本在英美长期遭禁的世界文学名著。直到1960年代终于被英国宣布开禁后，这本小说一度洛阳纸贵，高踞畅销书排行榜数周并常销至今。比畅销和常销更重要的是，它的开禁标志着人类的宽容在劳伦斯苦恋着的祖国终于战胜了道德虚伪和文化强权。从此，劳伦斯作为二十世纪文学大师的地位得到了确认，劳伦斯学也渐渐成为英美大学里的一门学位课程和文学研究的一门学科。时至2000年代，劳伦斯研究早已演变成一种“工业”，得其沾溉获得学位、靠研究和出版劳伦斯作品为生的大有人在。劳伦斯若在天有灵，应该感到欣慰。

在中国，这部小说问世不久，诗人邵洵美就撰文盛赞。随后几个杂志上陆续出现节译，译者中包括大文豪林语堂先生。其后出版了饶述一先生翻译的单行本，但因为是自费出版，发行量仅千册。当年的中国内忧外患，战乱频仍，估计人们都没了读小说的雅兴，这个译本就没有机会再版。光阴荏苒，五十年漫长的时间里中国读者与此书无缘。到1980年代，饶述一的译本在湖南再版，不久就被禁，长达二十年。但幸运的是，中国的学术界与出版界对劳伦斯早就有了一个全面公正的认识。

除了这部小说，劳伦斯还著有另外十一部长篇小说，五十多部中短篇小说，多部诗集、剧本、游记，大量的文学批评、哲学、心理学和历史学方面的著作和散文随笔。他还翻译出版了俄国作家托尔斯泰和陀思妥耶夫斯基及意大利作家乔万尼·维尔加的长篇小说等，仅凭这些译文就足以称他为翻译家了。这位矿工的儿子，以自己非凡的文学天赋、敏感的内心体验、坚持不懈的毅力和顽强的生命力，拖着带病之躯，在短短二十年的写作生涯中，为后人留下了卷帙浩繁的文学经典遗产，这不能不令人肃然起敬。不少研究者称其为天才和大师，是不无道理的。

大师自有大师的气度和风范，他的四大名著《儿子与情人》、《虹》、《恋爱中的女人》和这本《查泰莱夫人的情人》可说部部经典。《儿》被普遍认为是文学史上印证弗洛伊德“恋母情结”学说的“原型”之作。《虹》和《查》屡遭查禁和焚毁，惹出文学和政治风波来。作者本人虽未遭“坑”，却也在长时间内遭受监视和搜查，心灵备受煎熬，以至于对他“爱得心头发酸”的祖国终于失望而自我流放，最后病死他乡，做了异乡鬼。我们甚至无法断定他是因了文学的孽缘才遭此厄运，还是厄运专门来锻造他的文学魂。

然而，在1985年上海出版的《现代英国小说史》中，这位旷世奇才的作品仍然被指责为“黄色淫秽”并把开禁这本书作为“当前西方社会的道德风尚已经堕落到何种地步”

①

的标志。这也难怪，不用说当年，即使是目前，我们许多读者也仍然停留在那个人云亦云的阶段，甚至不少知识分子一提起劳伦斯的名字仍想当然地一言以蔽之曰“黄色作家”。这归根结底是眼光的问题，偏见往往比无知更可怕，此言极是。

于是，当我们无法要求大多数非文学专业人士去一部部死啃劳伦斯作品而后公正以待之时，我们只有对这部家喻户晓的作品作个“眼光”上的评说。艺术的眼光往往需要靠一个人较为全面的发展来培养，需要时间。或许随着时光的推移，随着文明的进程，终于有一天对这本书的争议和赏析都成了一种过时和多余。

当历史毫不留情地把我们置于一个尴尬的叙述语境中时，我们只有毫不尴尬地直面历史。

1984年笔者完成国内第一篇研究劳伦斯的硕士论文时，国内还没有劳伦斯作品的译本（只有个别短篇小说的译文），这个领域还被认为是禁地，因为他在非学术领域仍被看作是“黄色作家”的。八十年代后期劳伦斯作品开始大量出版，便有了三五成群突击抢译劳伦斯作品的壮观场面。三十年代的旧译《查泰莱夫人的情人》重印上市后，黑市竟出现高价抢购的热潮。在这种尴尬的阅读环境中解释劳伦斯的这部最有争议的小说，颇令人生出滑稽之感。

称之为废墟上生命的童话，是一种久经考量的体认——是理性认识与情感体验交织积淀的结果。我无法不这样认为。

小说伊始，即是一场浩劫之后的一片废墟。这是第一次世界大战后满目疮痍的象征，也是大战后人之精神荒原的写照。

在这样的背景下，出现了野林子和林中木屋，里面发生了一个男人和一个女人的生命故事，一个复归自然的男人给一个寻找自然的怨妇注入了崭新的生命，这怨妇亦焕发出女人之本色，唤起了这个近乎遁世的男人身心遥远的无限的温情，激发出他身上近乎消失的性爱激情。他们在远离工业文明的地方体验着自然纯朴的爱情，体验着创造的神奇，双双获得了灵与肉的再生。浪漫而美丽，不乏乌托邦色彩，这简直是一部成人的童话。

劳伦斯生前好友理查德·奥尔丁顿曾长期从事劳伦斯作品的编辑和评论工作，他说过，这本书根本算不上一本性小说，因为它其实是“关于性的说教……是一种‘精神恋爱’”

②

。中国文豪林语堂早在三十年代就指出，劳伦斯的性描写别有一番旨趣：“在于劳伦斯，性交是含蓄一种主义的。”

③

这真是一种林语堂式的“会心之顷”的顿悟。时至今日，普遍的研究认为，劳伦斯对性持一种清教徒的观点：“他之所以常常被称作清教徒，就是因为他认为性是生命和精神再生的钥匙，也因为他认为这是极为严肃的事情。”

④

1960年伦敦刑事法庭审判这本书时，文化学家霍嘉特就特别说这书“讲道德，甚至有清教之嫌”。此言令检察官困惑不解，转而问询文学家福斯特，福斯特抑扬顿挫地回答说：“我认为那个描述是准确的，尽管人们对此的第一反应是觉得自相矛盾。”

⑤

看似如此的矛盾，造就了劳伦斯这部小说之性宗教的特质。因此，霍嘉特在他那篇具有历史意义的《查》1961年版序言中称这本书是“洁净、严肃的美文”，“如果这样的书我们都试图当成淫秽书来读，那就说明我们才叫肮脏。我们不是在玷污劳伦斯，而是在玷污我们自己。”

⑥

查泰莱爵士因伤失去性能力，本值得同情，但他的内心十分麻木，对工人冷酷无情，对夫人康妮感情冷漠。他认定矿工只是工具，非用鞭子驱使不可。康妮只要能为他生个儿子继承他的事业和爵位就行。至于同谁生育，他倒不在乎，但绝对要求孩子的父亲来自上流社会，以不辱查家门楣。同他在一起，康妮虽生犹死。

正因此，当康妮遇上一身质朴但情趣脱俗的猎场看守梅勒斯时，便自然流露出了女性的软弱与柔情，备受失败婚姻折磨和工业文明戕害的梅勒斯立即情动于中，双方情色相生，一发而不可收。

梅勒斯与康妮的丈夫形成了鲜明的对照，他是一个根植于自然、富有生命力的“下等人”。他受过教育，但厌恶了他认为腐朽的文明生活，选择了自我流放，自食其力，寄情山水。

劳伦斯对现实的选择令人深思：他选择了森林为背景，选择了一个猎场看守而不是他情感上最为依恋的矿工来作故事的男主人公。猎场看守这种职业的人游离于社会，为有钱人看护森林和林中的动物供其狩猎，也要防止穷人偷猎或砍伐树木。这样的人往往过着孤独的生活。他们是有钱人的下人，是劳动者，但又与广大劳动者不同。在劳伦斯看来，这类脱离了俗尘的阶级利益、一身儒雅同时又充满阳刚气的男人最适合用来附丽他的崇高理想。而从根本上说，矿主和矿工虽然是对立的，但他们又是统一的：双方都受制于金钱、权力和机械。在劳伦斯眼里，他们都是没有健康灵魂的人。

从《恋爱中的女人》开始，劳伦斯的超阶级意识日渐凸显，在今天看来颇具后现代意义：劳伦斯从人类文明进程的悲剧角度出发，超越了现代经济学理论的认知范畴即资本是靠对劳动力的压榨达到积累的。事实上后现代理论认为，资本是靠对不可再生的自然资源的掠夺“转化”而成的，劳动力不过是自然的一部分。劳伦斯注意到劳动力脱离土地／自然后的异化特质，同时也注意到劳动力在资本转化过程中主体性的丧失，对工人来说他们经历的是双重异化。而采矿这一行业更是对不可再生的人类资源无情掠夺的最典型范例，在剥夺自然方面双方都是参与者。在与自然的异化过程中，劳资双方成了对立的统一。矿工的罢工运动不过是在工资待遇上与资本家的对立，这并没改变其异化的本质。劳伦斯超越了剥削—被剥削阶级对立的意识，揭示的是整个文明进程中资本对人／自然的物化，揭示出对立的双方都是被物化的对象这样一个真理。所以尽管劳伦斯对于自己出生并生长于斯的矿工阶级在情感上万分依恋，称矿工是这世界上唯一令他感动的人，但他在理智上却选择脱离他们。有产者的冷酷无情与无产者的萎靡无奈都是文明异化不可救药的产物。（劳伦斯的有关论述详见其散文《还乡》、《诺丁汉矿乡杂记》和《我算哪个阶级》等。）

在资本主义工业文明如日中天之时，劳伦斯凭着其对人／自然的本能关爱，凭着其天赐的艺术敏感，触及了一些颇具本质性的特质，其作品在后资本主义时代愈显功力，无怪乎他被称为预言家。他的作品也因此跨越了写实主义、现代主义和后现代主义三个阶段而成为文学的常青树，真是难能可贵之至。一个穷工人的儿子能达到这样的艺术境界，除了造化使然，后天的生活经历和精神砥砺亦是关键——生活在肮脏的工业文明与田园牧歌式的老英国的交界地带，出身于草根，备受磨难，但艺术天分促使他孜孜以求，吸取的是那个时代最优秀的文化。他的创作超越了阶级出身和阶级仇恨，探究的是超然的真理。而他这样游走在各种文化群体之间的边缘作家本身，就是后现代主义文学研究所关注的天然“差异者”，意义的“颠覆者”和“消解者”。因此，劳伦斯文学的魅力愈是到后资本主义时代愈得到彰显。

劳伦斯试图创造一个文明与自然之间的第三者，这就是梅勒斯。在此劳伦斯超越了自身阶级的局限，用道德和艺术的标准衡量人，用“健康”的标准衡量人的肉体和灵魂，选择了梅勒斯这样的人作自己小说的主人公。而森林在劳伦斯眼中则象征着人与自然本真的生命力，象征着超凡脱俗的精神的纯洁。森林中万物的生发繁衍，无不包孕着一个“性”字。劳伦斯选择了森林，选择了森林里纯粹性的交汇来张扬人的本真活力，以此表达对文明残酷性的抗争。

郁达夫在劳伦斯逝世后不久读了劳伦斯的作品，他英明地指出：劳伦斯是个积极厌世的虚无主义者。此言极是。所谓厌世，自然是面对汹汹人世表现出的超然与逃避；所谓积极，当然是在看破红尘的同时依然顽强地表现出对人类的信心。于是劳伦斯选择了梅勒斯这样孤独隐居但性力强健的男人作他的理念传达者。这样的男人与世界的结合点只有自己最为本真的性，他只与脱离了一切尘世丑陋的女人之最本真的东西接触。这就是超凡脱俗的性，与鲜花、绿树、鸟禽一起蓬勃自然地在大森林里生发。谁又能说梅勒斯不是一棵伟岸但又柔美的橡树？一个复归自然的文明男人，集强健的性力、隐忍的品质和敏感的心灵于一身，对女人和自然界的鸟兽花表现出似水柔情。中国只有郁达夫才能在劳伦斯刚刚逝世不久就作出一个这样的判断。

一个要摆脱代表死亡与坟场的丈夫的鲜活女人遇上了梅勒斯这样一个卓尔不群、回归自然的理想主义男人，在童话般的林中木屋里自然而然地相爱，演出了一幕幕激情跌宕的生命故事。小说字里行间荡漾着的生命气息，幻化成大战后废墟上人性的希望祥云，富有强烈的艺术冲击力。

这种冲击力在于它童话般的真实性。在这个文本中，劳伦斯构建了一个有血有肉的故事，用他自己的话说，“任何东西只要是在自身的时间、地点和环境中，它就是真实的。”

⑦

我想这应该是一种源于现实而超越现实的艺术真实，应当受到应有的尊重。

小说创造的是一种艺术的真实。只有基于这种认识，我们才能说《查》是一部象征小说：小说中的每一样事物都具有象征意义，直至最后整部小说本身成了一个巨大的象征。林语堂谓之“含蓄一种主义”的性交，可能指的就是小说的象征性。

了解了这一层意思，我们就把握住了这部小说形而上的内涵，而不至于停留在其表面的性描写上画地为牢，无端訾议。中国古文曰：“形而上者谓之道，形而下者谓之器。”艺术的真实往往是形而上的。从这个意义上去考察这部小说，我们完全有理由称之为“废墟上生命的抒情诗”，算一家之言，聊以代序。

同时，这部小说写作的一些历史和个人背景也是不可忽视的。任何一个作家的创作都是其独特的个性与时代背景和环境互动的结果。于劳伦斯，这样的互动就更为突出，在此略作交代。

1925年，劳伦斯还在美国和墨西哥漫游时，从十六岁开始长期困扰折磨他的气管炎和肺炎被确诊为肺结核三期。在没有抗生素的年代，这等于宣判了他的死刑。眼看大限将至，自己还在创作上徘徊，劳伦斯心急如焚，他是不甘心自己长时间写不出力作的。1920年《恋爱中的女人》出版后并未引起轰动；后来的《迷途女》被认为是为钱而写的平平之作；《亚伦之笛》、《袋鼠》和《羽蛇》虽然独具匠心，但一时也难为圈内人士认可，评论寥寥，且抨击者为多；《林中青年》是与别人的合作，乏善可陈。而他一系列的中短篇小说和游记等并非他的根本关切，长篇小说的写作，才是他的生命支柱。查出肺结核三期后，他在给澳大利亚女作家莫莉·斯金纳的信中说：“我还是想写一部长篇小说：你可以与你所创造和记录下的人物及经验生死交关，它本身就是生命，远胜过人们称之为生命的俗物……”

⑧

这一年是他创作上的“休耕年”，他开始潜心于理论探索，写出了一系列小说理论方面的随笔。他的理论探索为他的扛鼎之作找到了主题，这就是要张扬“生命”。其实劳伦斯1912年与弗里达私奔到嘎达湖畔时就已经通过直觉触及到了未来十几年后生命结束之前的一部惊世骇俗的小说的主题了，其理念在游记《意大利的薄暮》中已初见端倪，他要做的只是等待和寻觅，寻觅将这理念附丽其上的人物和故事，从而将这理念戏剧化。这一等就是十四年，等到医生宣判了他的死刑。

随后他在1925年和1926年最后两趟回故乡。看到英国中部地区煤矿工人的大罢工，看到生命在英国的萎缩与凋残，他终于失望而去，彻底与阴郁冷漠的英格兰告别。他再次回到他生命所系的意大利，明丽的意大利与阴郁的故乡两相对比，两相冲撞。在那里，他以羸弱的病体考察了意大利中部古代伊特鲁里亚文明的墓葬和完好如初的彩色壁画，伊特拉斯坎人充满血性的性格、自由浪漫的生活方式、对神灵的虔诚膜拜与对死亡的豁达，这些与基督教文明下人的物欲横流和人性的异化形成了鲜明的对比。劳伦斯深深地迷上了罗马人之前生活在这片土地上的意大利人真正的祖先伊特拉斯坎人：“苗条、优雅、文静，有着高贵的裸体、油黑的头发和狭长的脚板。”

⑨

意大利的现实和远古都感召着劳伦斯。于是，潜隐心灵深处多年的小说主题终于得到戏剧化，终于附丽于梅勒斯和康妮两个生命的阴阳交流之上。这就是《查泰莱夫人的情人》，一本生命之书，一首生命的抒情诗。

黑马

1993年1月5日

2004年7—10月改写

2009年3月修订

注　释

①
侯维瑞著《现代英国小说史》，1985年上海外语教育出版社出版。

②
见拙译《一个天才的画像，但是……》，1989年天津人民出版社出版，p.426。

③
林语堂《读劳伦斯》，载于《人间世》19期，p.34。

④
弗兰克·克默德《劳伦斯》，1986年三联书店出版，p.207。

⑤
见《霍嘉特·回顾〈查泰莱夫人的情人〉审判及其文化反思》，《悦读》杂志，2008年第9期。

⑥
理查德·霍嘉特：Introduction, Lady Chatterley's Lover, Penguin, 1961, p.v。

⑦
见拙译《劳伦斯文艺随笔》，2004年漓江版，p.230。

⑧
见2002年剑桥平装本《劳伦斯书信集》第五卷，p.293。

⑨
见2002年剑桥平装本《劳伦斯书信集》第四卷，p.87。

Chapter ❶

Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. 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.

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: to be shipped over to England again six months later, more or less 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 was pronounced a cure, and could return to life again, with the lower half of his body, from the hips down, 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 forlorn home of the Chatterleys on a rather inadequate income. Clifford had a sister, but she had departed. Otherwise there were no near relatives. The elder brother was dead in the war. Crippled for ever, knowing he could never have any children, Clifford came home to the smoky Midlands 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 attachment, so he could drive himself slowly round the garden and into the line melancholy park, of which he was really so proud, though he pretended to be flippant about it.

Having suffered so much, the capacity for suffering had to some extent left him. He remained strange and bright and cheerful, almost, one might say, chirpy, with his ruddy, healthy-looking face, and his pale-blue, challenging bright eyes. His shoulders were broad and strong, his hands were very strong. He was expensively dressed, and wore handsome neckties from Bond Street. Yet still in his face one saw the watchful look, the slight vacancy of a cripple.

He had so very nearly lost his life, that what remained was wonderfully precious to him. It was obvious in the anxious brightness of his eyes, how proud he was, after the great shock, of being alive. But he had been so much hurt that something inside him had perished, some of his feelings had gone. There was a blank of insentience.

Constance, his wife, was a ruddy, country-looking girl with soft brown hair and sturdy body, and slow movements, full of unusual energy. She had big, wondering eyes, and a soft mild 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., old Sir Malcolm Reid. Her mother had been one of the cultivated Fabians in the palmy, rather pre-Raphaelite days. Between artists and cultured socialists, Constance and her sister Hilda had had what might be called an aesthetically unconventional upbringing. They had been taken to Paris and Florence and Rome to breathe in art, and they had been taken also in the other direction, to the Hague and Berlin, to great Socialist conventions, where the speakers spoke in every civilized tongue, and no one was abashed.

The two girls, therefore, were from an early age not the least daunted by either art or ideal politics. It was their natural atmosphere. They were at once cosmopolitan and provincial, with the cosmopolitan provincialism of art that goes with pure social ideals.

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 tramped off to the forests with sturdy youths bearing guitars, twang-twang! They sang the Wandervogel songs, and they were free. Free! That was the great word. Out in the open world, out in the forests of the morning, with lusty and splendid-throated young fellows, free to do as they liked, and—above all—to say what they liked. It was the talk that mattered supremely: the impassioned interchange of talk. Love was only a minor accompaniment.

Both Hilda and Constance had had their tentative love-affairs by the time they were eighteen. The young men with whom they talked so passionately and sang so lustily 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 craving. Why couldn't a girl be queenly, and give the gift of herself?

So they had given the gift of themselves, each to the youth with whom she had the most subtle and intimate arguments. The arguments, the discussions were the great thing: the love-making and connexion were only a sort of primitive reversion and a bit of an anti-climax. One was less in love with the boy afterwards, and a little inclined to hate him, as if he had trespassed on one's privacy and inner freedom. For, of course, being a girl, one's whole dignity and meaning in life consisted in the achievement of an absolute, a perfect, a pure and noble freedom. What else did a girl's life mean? To shake off the old and sordid connexions and subjections.

And however one might sentimentalize it, this sex business was one of the most ancient, sordid connexions and subjections. Poets who glorified it were mostly men. Women had always known there was something better, something higher. And now they knew it more definitely than ever. The beautiful pure freedom of a woman was infinitely more wonderful than any sexual love. The only unfortunate thing was that men lagged so far behind women in the matter. They 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 probably turn nasty and flounce away and spoil what was a very pleasant connexion. But a woman could yield to a man without yielding her inner, free self. That the poets and talkers about sex did not seem to have taken sufficiently into account. A woman could take a man without really giving herself away. Certainly she could take him without giving herself into his power. Rather she could use this sex thing to have power over him. For she only had to hold herself back in sexual intercourse, and let him finish and expend himself without herself coming to the crisis: and then she could prolong the connexion and achieve her orgasm and her crisis while he was merely her tool.

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 unless he and she were verbally very near: that is unless they were profoundly interested, TALKING to one another. The amazing, the profound, the unbelievable thrill there was in passionately talking to some really clever young man by the hour, resuming day after day for months... this they had never realized till it happened! The paradisal promise: Thou shalt have men to talk to!—had never been uttered. It was fulfilled before they knew what a promise it was.

And if after the roused intimacy of these vivid and soul-enlightened discussions the sex thing became more or less inevitable, then let it. It marked the end of a chapter. It had a thrill of its own too: a queer vibrating thrill inside the body, a final spasm of self-assertion, like the last word, exciting, and very like the row of asterisks that can be put to show the end of a paragraph, and a break in the theme.

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.

L'amour avait passé par là, as somebody puts it. 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 herself had never been able to be altogether herself: it had been denied her. Heaven knows why, for she was a woman who had her own income and her own way. She blamed her husband. But as a matter of fact, it was some old impression of authority on her own mind or soul that she could not get rid of. It had nothing to do with Sir Malcolm, who left his nervously hostile, high-spirited wife to rule her own roost, while he went his own way.

So the girls were 'free', and went back to Dresden, and their music, and the university and the young men. They loved their respective young men, and their respective young men loved them with all the passion of mental attraction. All the wonderful things the young men thought and expressed and wrote, they thought and expressed and wrote for the young women. Connie's young man was musical, Hilda's was technical. But they simply lived for their young women. In their minds and their mental excitements, that is. Somewhere else they were a little rebuffed, though they did not know it.

It was obvious in them too that love had gone through them: that is, the physical experience. It is curious what a subtle but unmistakable transmutation it makes, both in the body of men and women: the woman more blooming, more subtly rounded, her young angularities softened, and her expression either anxious or triumphant: the man much quieter, more inward, the very shapes of his shoulders and his buttocks less assertive, more hesitant.

In the actual sex-thrill within the body, the sisters nearly succumbed to the strange male power. But quickly they recovered themselves, 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. And afterwards looked rather as if they had lost a shilling and found sixpence. 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 discontented children, and can't be satisfied whatever they get, let a woman do what she may.

However, came the war, Hilda and Connie were rushed home again after having been home already in May, to their mother's funeral. Before Christmas of 1914 both their German young men were dead: whereupon the sisters wept, and loved the young men passionately, but underneath forgot them. They didn't exist any more.

Both sisters lived in their father's, really their mother's, Kensington house, and mixed with the young Cambridge group, the group that stood for 'freedom' and flannel trousers, and flannel shirts open at the neck, and a well-bred sort of emotional anarchy, and a whispering, murmuring sort of voice, and an ultra-sensitive sort of manner. Hilda, however, suddenly married a man ten years older than herself, an elder member of the same Cambridge group, a man with a fair amount of money, and a comfortable family job in the government: he also wrote philosophical essays. She lived with him in a smallish house in Westminster, and moved in that good sort of society of people in the government who are not tip-toppers, but who are, or would be, the real intelligent power in the nation: people who know what they're talking about, or talk as if they did.

Connie did a mild form of war-work, and consorted with the flannel-trousers Cambridge intransigents, who gently mocked at everything, so far. Her 'friend' was a Clifford Chatterley, a young man of twenty-two, who had hurried home from Bonn, where he was studying the technicalities of coal-mining. He had previously spent two years at Cambridge. Now he had become a first lieutenant in a smart regiment, so he could mock at everything more becomingly in uniform.

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. His father was a baronet, and his mother had been a viscount's daughter.

But Clifford, while he was better bred than Connie, and more 'society', was in his own way more provincial and more timid. He was at his ease in the narrow 'great world', that is, landed aristocracy society, but he was shy and nervous of all that other big world which consists of the vast hordes of the middle and lower classes, and foreigners. If the truth must be told, he was just a little bit frightened of middle- and lower-class humanity, and of foreigners not of his own class. He was, in some paralysing way, conscious of his own defencelessness, though he had all the defence of privilege. Which is curious, but a phenomenon of our day.

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

Nevertheless he too was a rebel: rebelling even against his class. Or perhaps rebel is too strong a word; far too strong. He was only caught in the general, popular recoil of the young against convention and against any sort of real authority. Fathers were ridiculous: his own obstinate one supremely so. And governments were ridiculous: our own wait-and-see sort especially so. And armies were ridiculous, and old duffers of generals altogether, the red-faced Kitchener supremely. Even the war was ridiculous, though it did kill rather a lot of people.

In fact everything was a little ridiculous, or very ridiculous: certainly everything connected with authority, whether it were in the army or the government or the universities, was ridiculous to a degree. And as far as the governing class made any pretensions to govern, they were ridiculous too. Sir Geoffrey, Clifford's father, was intensely ridiculous, chopping down his trees, and weeding men out of his colliery to shove them into the war; and himself being so safe and patriotic; but, also, spending more money on his country than he'd got.

When Miss Chatterley—Emma—came down to London from the Midlands to do some nursing work, she was very witty in a quiet way about Sir Geoffrey and his determined patriotism. Herbert, the elder brother and heir, laughed outright, though it was his trees that were falling for trench props. But Clifford only smiled a little uneasily. Everything was ridiculous, quite true. But when it came too close and oneself became ridiculous too...? At least people of a different class, like Connie, were earnest about something. They believed in something.

They were rather earnest about the Tommies, and the threat of conscription, and the shortage of sugar and toffee for the children. In all these things, of course, the authorities were ridiculously at fault. But Clifford could not take it to heart. To him the authorities were ridiculous ab ovo, not because of toffee or Tommies.

And the authorities felt ridiculous, and behaved in a rather ridiculous fashion, and it was all a mad hatter's tea-party for a while. Till things developed over there, and Lloyd George came to save the situation over here. And this surpassed even ridicule, the flippant young laughed no more.

In 1916 Herbert Chatterley was killed, so Clifford became heir. He was terrified even of this. His importance as son of Sir Geoffrey, and child of Wragby, was so ingrained in him, he could never escape it. And yet he knew that this too, in the eyes of the vast seething world, was ridiculous. 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 would have none of the absurdity. He was pale and tense, withdrawn into himself, and obstinately determined to save his country and his own position, let it be Lloyd George or who it might. So cut off he was, so divorced from the England that was really England, so utterly incapable, that he even thought well of Horatio Bottomley. Sir Geoffrey stood for England and Lloyd George as his forebears had stood for England and St. George: and he never knew there was a difference. So Sir Geoffrey felled timber and stood for Lloyd George and England, England and Lloyd George.

And he wanted Clifford to marry and produce an heir. Clifford felt his father was a hopeless anachronism. But wherein was he himself any further ahead, except in a wincing sense of the ridiculousness of everything, and the paramount ridiculousness of his own position? For willy-nilly he took his baronetcy and Wragby with the last seriousness.

The gay excitement had gone out of the war... dead. 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.

The Chatterleys, two brothers and a sister, had lived curiously isolated, shut in with one another at Wragby, in spite of all their connexions. A sense of isolation intensified the family tie, a sense of the weakness of their position, a sense of defencelessness, in spite of, or because of, the title and the land. They were cut off from those industrial Midlands in which they passed their lives. And they were cut off from their own class by the brooding, obstinate, shut-up nature of Sir Geoffrey, their father, whom they ridiculed, but whom they were so sensitive about.

The three had said they would all live together always. But now Herbert was dead, and Sir Geoffrey wanted Clifford to marry. Sir Geoffrey barely mentioned it: he spoke very little. But his silent, brooding insistence that it should be so was hard for Clifford to bear up against.

But Emma said No! She was ten years older than Clifford, and she felt his marrying would be a desertion and a betrayal of what the young ones of the family had stood for.

Clifford married Connie, nevertheless, 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 exulted a little in this intimacy which was beyond sex, and beyond a man's 'satisfaction'. Clifford anyhow 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, or an adjunct, one of the curious obsolete, organic processes which persisted in its own clumsiness, but was not really necessary. Though Connie did want children: if only to fortify her against her sister-in-law Emma.

But early in 1918 Clifford was shipped home smashed, and there was no child. And Sir Geoffrey died of chagrin.

Chapter ❷

Connie and Clifford came home to Wragby in the autumn of 1920. Miss Chatterley, still disgusted at her brother's defection, had departed and was living in a little flat in London.

Wragby was a long low old house in brown stone, begun about the middle of the eighteenth century, and added on to, till it was a warren of a place without much distinction. It stood on an eminence in a rather fine 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 on the damp, hazy distance of the hill the raw straggle of Tevershall village, a village which began almost at the park gates, and trailed in utter hopeless ugliness for a long and gruesome mile: houses, rows of wretched, small, begrimed, brick houses, with black slate roofs for lids, sharp angles and wilful, blank dreariness.

Connie was accustomed to Kensington or the Scotch hills or the Sussex downs: that was her England. With the stoicism of the young she took in the utter, soulless ugliness of the coal-and-iron Midlands at a glance, and left it at what it was: unbelievable and not to be thought about. From the rather dismal rooms at Wragby she heard the rattle-rattle of the screens at the pit, the puff of the winding-engine, the clink-clink of shunting trucks, and the hoarse 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 of this sulphurous combustion of the earth's excrement. But even on windless days the air always smelt of something underearth: sulphur, iron, coal, or acid. And even on the Christmas roses the smuts settled persistently, incredible, like black manna from the skies of doom.

Well, there it was: fated like the rest of things! It was rather awful, but why kick? You couldn't kick it away. It just went on. Life, like all the rest! On the low dark ceiling of cloud at night red blotches burned and quavered, dappling and swelling and contracting, like burns that give pain. It was the furnaces. At first they fascinated Connie with a sort of horror; she felt she was living underground. Then she got used to them. And in the morning it rained.

Clifford professed to like Wragby better than London. This country had a grim 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 dreary as the countryside, and as unfriendly. Only there was something in their deep-mouthed slurring of the dialect, and the thresh-thresh of their hob-nailed pit-boots as they trailed home in gangs on the asphalt from work, that was terrible and a bit mysterious.

There had been no welcome home for the young squire, no festivities, no deputation, not even a single flower. Only a dank ride in a motorcar up a dark, damp drive, burrowing through gloomy trees, out to the slope of the park where grey damp sheep were feeding, to the knoll where the house spread its dark brown facade, and the housekeeper and her husband were hovering, like unsure tenants on the face of the earth, ready to stammer a welcome.

There was no communication between Wragby Hall and Tevershall village, none. No caps were touched, no curtseys bobbed. The colliers merely stared; the tradesmen lifted their caps to Connie as to an acquaintance, and nodded awkwardly to Clifford; that was all. Gulf impassable, and a quiet sort of resentment on either side. At first Connie suffered from the steady drizzle of resentment that came from the village. Then she hardened herself to it, and it became a sort of tonic, something to live up to. It was not that she and Clifford were unpopular, they merely belonged to another species altogether from the colliers. Gulf impassable, breach indescribable, such as is perhaps nonexistent south of the Trent. But in the Midlands and the industrial North gulf impassable, across which no communication could take place. You stick to your side, I'll stick to mine! A strange denial of the common pulse of humanity.

Yet the village sympathized with Clifford and Connie in the abstract. In the flesh it was—You leave me alone!—on either side.

The rector was a nice man of about sixty, full of his duty, and reduced, personally, almost to a nonentity by the silent—You leave me alone!—of the village. The miners' wives were nearly all Methodists. The miners were nothing. But even so much official uniform as the clergyman wore was enough to obscure entirely the fact that he was a man like any other man. No, he was Mester Ashby, a sort of automatic preaching and praying concern.

This stubborn, instinctive—We think ourselves as good as you, if you are Lady Chatterley!—puzzled and baffled Connie at first extremely. The curious, suspicious, false amiability with which the miners' wives met her overtures; the curiously offensive tinge of—Oh dear me! I am somebody now, with Lady Chatterley talking to me! But she needn't think I'm not as good as her for all that!—which she always heard twanging in the women's half-fawning voices, was impossible. There was no getting past it. It was hopelessly and offensively nonconformist.

Clifford left them alone, 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; one could no longer afford to be friendly. In fact he was altogether rather supercilious and contemptuous of anyone not in his own class. He stood his ground, without any attempt at conciliation. 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 and self-conscious now he was lamed. He hated seeing anyone except just 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 careful Bond Street neckties just as before, and from the top he looked just as smart and impressive as ever. He had never been one of the modern ladylike young men: rather bucolic even, with his ruddy face and broad shoulders. But his very quiet, hesitating voice, and his eyes, at the same time bold and frightened, assured and uncertain, revealed his nature. His manner was often offensively supercilious, and then again modest and self-effacing, almost tremulous.

Connie and he were attached to one another, in the aloof modern way. He was much too hurt in himself, the great shock of his maiming, to be easy and flippant. He was a hurt thing. And as such 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, parts of the pit rather than parts of life, crude raw phenomena rather than human beings along with him. He was in some way afraid of them, he could not bear to have them look at him now he was lame. And their queer, crude life seemed as unnatural as that of hedgehogs.

He was remotely interested; but like a man looking down a microscope, or up a telescope. He was not in touch. He was not in actual touch with anybody, save, traditionally, with Wragby, and, through the close bond of family defence, with Emma. Beyond this nothing really touched him. Connie felt that she herself didn't really, not really touch him; perhaps there was nothing to get at ultimately; just a negation of human contact.

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 puff 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, rather spiteful, and yet, in some mysterious way, meaningless. The observation was extraordinary and peculiar. But there was no touch, no actual contact. It was as if the whole thing took place in a vacuum. And since the field of life is largely an artificially-lighted stage today, the stories were curiously true to modern life, to the modern psychology, that is.

Clifford was almost morbidly sensitive about these stories. He wanted everyone to think them good, of the best, ne plus ultra. They appeared in the most modern magazines, and were praised and blamed as usual. But to Clifford the blame was torture, like knives goading him. 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, insistently, persistently, and she had to respond with all her might. It was as if her whole soul and body and sex had to rouse up and pass into these stories of his. This thrilled her and absorbed her.

Of physical life they lived very little. She had to superintend the house. But the housekeeper had served Sir Geoffrey for many years, and the dried-up, elderly, superlatively correct female you could hardly call her a parlour-maid, or even a woman... 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! All these endless rooms that nobody used, all the Midlands routine, the mechanical cleanliness and the mechanical order! Clifford had insisted on a new cook, an experienced woman who had served him in his rooms in London. For the rest the place seemed run by mechanical anarchy. Everything went on in pretty good order, strict cleanliness, and strict punctuality; even pretty strict honesty. And yet, to Connie, it was a methodical anarchy. No warmth of feeling united it organically. The house seemed as dreary as a disused street.

What could she do but leave it alone? So she left it alone. Miss Chatterley came sometimes, with her aristocratic thin face, and triumphed, finding nothing altered. She would never forgive Connie for ousting her from her union in consciousness with her brother. It was she, Emma, who should be bringing forth the stories, these books, with him; the Chatterley stories, something new in the world, that they, the Chatterleys, had put there. There was no other standard. There was no organic connexion with the thought and expression that had gone before. Only something new in the world: the Chatterley books, entirely personal.

Connie's father, when he paid a flying 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 the burly Scottish knight who had done himself well all his life, and her eyes, her big, still-wondering blue eyes became vague. Nothing in it! 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? What else could there be?

For Connie had adopted the standard of the young: what there was in the moment was everything. And moments followed one another without necessarily belonging to one another.

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.'

'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 stiffly.

'She's getting thin... angular. It's not her style. She's not the pilchard sort of little slip of a girl, she's a bonny Scotch trout.'

'Without the spots, of course!' said Clifford.

He wanted to say something later to Connie about the demi-vierge business... 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 neither could bear to drag in the corpus delicti. They were so intimate, and utterly out of touch.

Connie guessed, however, that her father had said something, and that something was in Clifford's mind. She knew that he didn't mind whether she were demi-vierge or demi-monde, so long as he didn't absolutely know, and wasn't made to see. What the eye doesn't see and the mind doesn't know, doesn't exist.

Connie and Clifford had now been nearly two years at Wragby, living their vague life of absorption in Clifford and his work. Their interests had never ceased to flow together over his work. They talked and wrestled in the throes of composition, and felt as if something were happening, really happening, really in the void.

And thus far it was a life: in the void. For the rest it was non-existence. Wragby was there, the servants... but spectral, not really existing. Connie went for walks in the park, and in the woods that joined the park, and enjoyed the solitude and the mystery, kicking the brown leaves of autumn, and picking the primroses of spring. But it was all a dream; or rather it was like the simulacrum of reality. The oak-leaves were to her like oak-leaves seen ruffling in a mirror, she herself was a figure somebody had read about, picking primroses that were only shadows or memories, or words. No substance to her or anything... no touch, no contact! Only this life with Clifford, this endless spinning of webs of yarn, of the minutiae of consciousness, these stories Sir Malcolm said there was nothing in, and they wouldn't last. Why should there be anything in them, why should they last? Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. Sufficient unto the moment is the appearance of reality.

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, and they praised. Connie understood it all perfectly. But why not? This was one of the fleeting patterns in the mirror. What was wrong with it?

She was hostess to these people... mostly men. She was hostess also to Clifford's occasional aristocratic relations. Being a soft, ruddy, country-looking girl, inclined to freckles, with big blue eyes, and curling, brown hair, and a soft voice, and rather strong, female loins she was considered a little old-fashioned and 'womanly'. She was not a 'little pilchard sort of fish', 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 what torture poor Clifford would feel at the slightest sign of flirting on her part, she gave them no encouragement at all. She was quiet and vague, she had no contact with them and intended to have none. Clifford was extraordinarily proud of himself.

His relatives treated her quite kindly. She knew that the kindliness indicated a lack of fear, and that these people had no respect for you unless you could frighten them a little. But again she had no contact. She let them be kindly and disdainful, she let them feel they had no need to draw their steel in readiness. She 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 ❸

Connie was aware, however, of a growing restlessness. Out of her disconnexion, a restlessness was taking possession of her like madness. It twitched her limbs when she didn't want to twitch them, it jerked her spine when she didn't want to jerk upright but preferred to rest comfortably. It thrilled inside her body, in her womb, 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 prone in the bracken. To get away from the house... she must get away from the house and everybody. The work was her one refuge, her sanctuary.

But it was not really a refuge, a sanctuary, because she had no connexion with it. It was only a place where she could get away from the rest. She never really touched the spirit of the wood itself... if it had any such nonsensical thing.

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 substantial and vital world. Only Clifford and his books, which did not exist... which had nothing in them! Void to void. Vaguely she knew. But it was like beating her head against a stone.

Her father warned her again: 'Why don't you get yourself a beau, 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 in London, for he wrote smart society plays. Then gradually smart society realized that it had been made ridiculous at the hands of a down-at-heel Dublin street-rat, and revulsion came. Michaelis was the last word in what was caddish and bounderish. He was discovered to be anti-English, and to the class that made this discovery this was worse than the dirtiest crime. He was cut dead, and his corpse thrown into the refuse can.

Nevertheless Michaelis had his apartment in Mayfair, and walked down Bond Street the image of a gentleman, for you cannot get even the best tailors to cut their low-down customers, when the customers pay.

Clifford was inviting the young man of thirty at an inauspicious moment in that young man's career. Yet Clifford did not hesitate. Michaelis had the ear of a few million people, probably; and, being a hopeless outsider, he would no doubt be grateful to be asked down to Wragby at this juncture, when the rest of the smart world was cutting him. Being grateful, he would no doubt do Clifford 'good' over there in America. Kudos! A man gets a lot of kudos, whatever that may be, by being talked about in the right way, especially 'over there'. Clifford was a coming man; and it was remarkable what a sound publicity instinct he had. In the end Michaelis did him most nobly in a play, and Clifford was a sort of popular hero. Till the reaction, when he found he had been made ridiculous.

Connie wondered a little over Clifford's blind, imperious instinct to become known: known, that is, to the vast amorphous world he did not himself know, and of which he was uneasily afraid; known as a writer, as a first-class modern writer. Connie was aware from successful, old, hearty, bluffing Sir Malcolm, that artists did advertise themselves, and exert themselves to put their goods over. But her father used channels ready-made, used by all the other R. A.s who sold their pictures. Whereas Clifford discovered new channels of publicity, all kinds. He had all kinds of people at Wragby, without exactly lowering himself. But, determined to build himself a monument of a reputation quickly, he used any handy rubble in the making.

Michaelis arrived duly, in a very neat car, with a chauffeur and a manservant. He was absolutely Bond Street! But at sight of him something in Clifford's county soul recoiled. He wasn't exactly... not exactly... in fact, he wasn't at all, well, what his appearance intended to imply. To Clifford this was final and enough. Yet he was very polite to the man, to the amazing success in him. The bitch-goddess, as she is called, of Success, roamed, snarling and protective, round the half-humble, half-defiant Michaelis' heels, and intimidated Clifford completely: for he wanted to prostitute himself to the bitch-goddess 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. No, no, he obviously wasn't an Englishman: the wrong sort of flattish, pale face and bearing; and the wrong sort of grievance. He had a grudge and a grievance: that was obvious to any true-born English gentleman, who would scorn to let such a thing appear blatant in his own demeanour. Poor Michaelis had been much kicked, so that he had a slightly tail-between-the-legs look even now. He had pushed his way by sheer instinct and sheerer effrontery on to the stage and to the front of it, 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 they enjoyed the various kicks they got at him! 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 sensibly, briefly, practically, about all the things Clifford wanted to know. He didn't expand or let himself go. He knew he had been asked down to Wragby to be made use of, and like an old, shrewd, almost indifferent business man, or big-business man, he let himself be asked questions, and he answered with as little waste of 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. It's nothing you do. It's no trick you play. It's a sort of permanent accident of your own nature; 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've got to beat your way in. Once you've done that, you can't help it.'

'But could you have made money except by plays?' asked Clifford.

'Oh, probably not! I may be a good writer or I may be a bad one, but a writer and a writer of plays is what I am, and I've got to be. There's no question of that.'

'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 in a sudden flash. 'There's nothing in it! 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, rather full eyes, that had been drowned in such fathomless disillusion, on Connie, and she trembled a little. He seemed so old... endlessly old, built up of layers of disillusion, going down in him generation after generation, like geological strata; and at the same time he was forlorn like a child. An outcast, in a certain sense; but with the desperate bravery of his rat-like existence.

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

'I'm thirty... yes, I'm thirty!' said Michaelis, sharply and suddenly, with a curious laugh; hollow, 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 quite incompetent. But I keep him. 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 effort?'

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 a hollow laugh. '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: sometimes as he looked sideways, downwards, and the light fell on him, he had the silent, enduring beauty of a carved ivory Negro mask, with his rather full eyes, and the strong queerly-arched brows, the immobile, compressed mouth; that momentary but revealed immobility, an immobility, a timelessness which the Buddha aims at, and which Negroes express sometimes without ever aiming at it; something old, old, and acquiescent in the race! Aeons of acquiescence in race destiny, instead of our individual resistance. And then a swimming through, like rats in a dark river. Connie felt a sudden, strange leap of sympathy for him, a leap mingled with compassion, and tinged with repulsion, amounting almost to love. The outsider! 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 full, hazel, slightly prominent eyes on her in a look of pure detachment. He was estimating her, and the extent of the impression he had made. With the English nothing could save him from being the eternal outsider, not even love. Yet women sometimes fell for him... Englishwomen too.

He knew just where he was with Clifford. They were two alien dogs which would have liked to snarl at one another, but which smiled instead, perforce. But with the woman he was not quite so sure.

Breakfast was served in the bedrooms; Clifford never appeared before lunch, and the dining-room was a little dreary. After coffee Michaelis, restless and ill-sitting soul, wondered what he should do. It was a fine November day... fine for Wragby. 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 Sheffield. 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. He followed blindly after the servant... he never noticed things, or had contact with his surroundings. In her room he did glance vaguely round at the fine German reproductions of Renoir and Cézanne.

'It's very pleasant up here,' he said, with his queer smile, as if it hurt him to smile, showing his teeth. '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 at all revealed. Clifford had never seen it, and she asked very few people up.

Now she and Michaelis sit on opposite sides of the fire and talked. She asked him about himself, his mother and father, his brothers... other people were always something of a wonder to her, and when her sympathy was awakened she was quite devoid of class feeling. Michaelis talked frankly about himself, quite frankly, without affectation, simply revealing his bitter, indifferent, stray-dog's soul, then showing a gleam of revengeful pride in his success.

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

'Some birds are that way,' he replied. Then, with a touch of familiar 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, as if he had toothache; it was so wry, and his eyes were so perfectly unchangingly melancholy, or stoical, or disillusioned or afraid.

'Why?' she said, a little breathless, 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, with that strange immobility of an old race that is hardly here in our present day. It was that that really made Connie lose her power to see him detached from herself.

He looked up at her with the full glance that saw everything, registered everything. At the same time, the infant crying in the night was crying out of his breast to her, in a way that affected her very womb.

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

'Why shouldn't I think of you?' she exclaimed, with hardly breath to utter it.

He gave the wry, quick hiss of a 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 direct in the womb.

She stared at him, dazed and transfixed, 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 dim and dazed, looking down in a sort of a mazement at the rather tender nape of his neck, feeling his face pressing her thighs. In all her burning dismay, she could not help putting her hand, with tenderness and compassion, on the defenceless nape of his neck, and he trembled, with a deep shudder.

Then he looked up at her with that awful appeal in his full, glowing eyes. She was utterly incapable of resisting it. From her breast flowed the answering, immense yearning over him; she must give him anything, anything.

He was a curious and very gentle lover, very gentle with the woman, trembling uncontrollably, and yet at the same time detached, aware, 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, quite still. Then, with dim, compassionate fingers, she stroked his head, that lay on her breast.

When he rose, he kissed both her hands, then both her feet, in their suède slippers, 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, inevitable 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 resentfully.

'I know! 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 infinitely 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 hollowly, 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 Sheffield 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 with a desperate note of cynicism.

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

'Ah!' he said to her fiercely, 'I'd rather you said that to me than said you love me! 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... just waiting to bounce us.'

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

'Do you wonder? And do you think he employs his shining hours 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.'

Connie paused. Did she? It was just possible. Yet the unscrupulousness of Michaelis had a certain fascination for her. He went whole lengths where Clifford only crept a few timid paces. In his way he had conquered the world, which was what Clifford wanted to do. Ways and means...? Were those of Michaelis more despicable than those of Clifford? Was the way the poor outsider had shoved and bounced himself forward in person, and by the back doors, any worse than Clifford's way of advertising himself into prominence? The bitch-goddess, Success, was trailed by thousands of gasping dogs with lolling tongues. The one that got her first was the real dog among dogs, if you go by success! So Michaelis could keep his tail up.

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

His sad-dog sort of extinguished self persisted all the evening, though through it Clifford felt the inner effrontery. Connie didn't feel it, perhaps because it was not directed against women; only against men, and their presumptions and assumptions. That indestructible, inward effrontery in the meagre fellow was what made men so down on Michaelis. His very presence was an affront to a man of society, cloak it as he might in an assumed good manner.

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, aloof young fellow of the previous evening, millions of degrees remote from his hosts, but laconically playing up to them to the required amount, and never coming forth to them for a moment. Connie felt he must have forgotten the morning. He had not forgotten. But he knew where he was... in the same old place outside, where the born outsiders are. He didn't take the love-making altogether personally. He knew it would not change him from an ownerless dog, whom everybody begrudges its golden collar, into a comfortable society dog.

The final fact being that at the very bottom of his soul he was an outsider, and anti-social, and he accepted the fact inwardly, no matter how Bond-Streety he was on the outside. His isolation was a necessity to him; just as the appearance of conformity and 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 burningly, poignantly grateful for a piece of natural, spontaneous kindness: almost to tears. Beneath his pale, immobile, disillusioned face, his child's soul was sobbing with gratitude to the woman, and burning to come to her again; just as his outcast soul was knowing he would keep really clear of her.

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. His defences were all in his wits and cunning, his very instincts of cunning, and when these were in abeyance he seemed doubly naked and like a child, of unfinished, tender flesh, and somehow struggling helplessly.

He roused in the woman a wild sort of compassion and yearning, and a wild, craving physical desire. The physical desire he did not satisfy in her; he has always come and finished so quickly, then shrinking down on her breast, and recovering somewhat his effrontery while she lay dazed, 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, giving to her, while she was active... wildly, passionately active, coming to her own crisis. And as he felt the frenzy of her achieving her own orgasmic satisfaction from his hard, erect passivity, he had a curious sense of pride and satisfaction.

'Ah, how good!' she whispered tremulously, 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. There was no breaking down his external man.

He wrote to Connie with the same plaintive melancholy note as ever, sometimes witty, and touched with a queer, sexless affection. A kind of hopeless affection he seemed to feel for her, and the essential remoteness remained the same. He was hopeless at the very core of him, and he wanted to be hopeless. He rather hated hope. 'Une immense espérance a traversé la terre,' he read somewhere, and his comment was: '—and it's darned-well drowned everything worth having.'

Connie never really understood him, but, in her way, she loved him. And all the time she felt the reflection of his hopelessness in her. She couldn't quite, quite love in hopelessness. And he, being hopeless, couldn't ever quite love at all.

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, his little orgasm being over. And he still wanted to give her it. Which was enough to keep them connected.

And enough to give her a subtle sort of self-assurance, something blind and a little arrogant. It was an almost mechanical confidence in her own powers, and went with a great cheerfulness.

She was terrifically cheerful at Wragby. And she used all her aroused 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 of the sensual satisfaction she got out of Michaelis' male passivity erect 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 grand joyful cheerfulness and stimulus were gone, quite 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 ❹

Connie always had a foreboding of 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 spasms of Michaelis. But, as she knew by foreboding, that would come to an end. Mick couldn't keep anything up. It was part of his very being that he must break off any connexion, and be loose, isolated, absolutely lone dog again. It was his major necessity, even though he always said: She turned me down!

The world is supposed to be full of possibilities, but they narrow down to pretty few in most personal experience. There's lots of good fish in the sea... maybe... but the vast masses seem to be mackerel or herring, and if you're not mackerel or herring yourself you are likely to find very few good fish in the sea.

Clifford was making strides into fame, and even money. People came to see him. Connie nearly always had somebody at Wragby. But if they weren't mackerel they were herring, with an occasional catfish, or congereel.

There were a few regular men, constants; men who had been at Cambridge with Clifford. There was Tommy Dukes, who had remained in the army, and was a Brigadier-General. 'The army leaves me time to think, and saves me from having to face the battle of life,' he said.

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. No one thinks of inquiring of another person at what hour he retires to the privy. It isn't interesting to anyone but the person concerned.

And so with 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, like going to the privy, 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 therein lies the problem. If we took no more notice of the one thing than the other, there'd be no problem. It's all utterly senseless and pointless; a matter of misplaced 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.'... 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.'

'As a matter of fact,' said the lean and freckled Tommy Dukes, who looked much more Irish than May, who was pale and rather fat, 'As a matter of fact, Hammond, you have a strong property instinct, and a strong will to self-assertion, and you want success. Since I've been in the army definitely, I've got out of the way of the world, and now I see how inordinately strong the craving for self-assertion and success is in men. It is enormously overdeveloped. All our individuality has run that way. And of course men like you think you'll get through better with a woman's backing. That's why you're so jealous. That's what sex is to you... a vital little dynamo between you and Julia, to bring success. If you began to be unsuccessful you'd begin to flirt, like Charlie, who isn't successful. Married people like you and Julia have labels on you, like travellers' trunks. Julia is labelled Mrs. Arnold B. Hammond... just like a trunk on the railway that belongs to somebody. And you are labelled Arnold B. Hammond, c/o Mrs. Arnold B. Hammond. Oh, you're quite right, you're quite right! The life of the mind needs a comfortable house and decent cooking. You're quite right. It even needs posterity. But it all hinges on the instinct for success. That is the pivot on which all things turn.'

Hammond looked rather piqued. He was rather proud of the integrity of his mind, and of his not being a time-server. None the less, he did want success.

'It's quite true, you can't live without cash,' said May. 'You've got to have a certain amount of it to be able to live and get along... even to be free to think you must have a certain amount of money, or your stomach stops you. But it seems to me you might leave the labels off sex. We're free to talk to anybody; so why shouldn't we be free to make love to any woman who inclines us that way?'

'There speaks the lascivious Celt,' said Clifford.

'Lascivious! Well, why not? I can't see I do a woman any more harm by sleeping with her than by dancing with her... or even talking to her about the weather. It's just an interchange of sensations instead of ideas, so why not?'

'Be as promiscuous as the rabbits!' said Hammond.

'Why not? What's wrong with rabbits? Are they any worse than a humanity full of nervous hate?'

'But we're not rabbits, even so,' said Hammond.

'Precisely! I have my mind: I have certain calculations to make in certain astronomical matters that concern me almost more than life or death. Sometimes indigestion interferes with me. Hunger would interfere with me disastrously. In the same way starved sex interferes with me. What then?'

'I should have thought sexual indigestion from surfeit would have interfered with you more seriously,' said Hammond satirically.

'Not it! I don't overeat myself and I don't over-fuck myself. One has a choice about eating too much. But you would absolutely starve me.'

'Not at all! You can marry.'

'How do you know I can? It may not suit the process of my mind. Marriage might... and would... stultify my mental processes. I'm not properly pivoted that way... and so must I be chained in a kennel like a monk? All rot and funk, my boy. I must live and do my calculations. I need women sometimes. I refuse to make a mountain of it, and I refuse anybody's moral condemnation or prohibition. I'd be ashamed to see a woman walking around with my name-label on her, address and railway station, like a wardrobe trunk.'

These two men had not forgiven each other about the Julia flirtation.

'It's an amusing idea, Charlie,' said Dukes, 'that sex is just another form of talk, where you act the words instead of saying them. I suppose it's quite true. I suppose we might exchange as many sensations and emotions with women as we do ideas about the weather, and so on. Sex might be a sort of normal physical conversation between a man and a woman. You don't talk to a woman unless you have ideas in common: that is you don't talk with any interest. And in the same way, unless you had some emotion or sympathy in common with a woman you wouldn't sleep with her. But if you had...'

'If you have the proper sort of emotion or sympathy with a woman, you ought to sleep with her,' said May. 'It's the only decent thing, to go to bed with her. Just as, when you are interested talking to someone, the only decent thing is to have the talk out. You don't prudishly put your tongue between your teeth and bite it. You just say out your say. And the same the other way.'

'No,' said Hammond. 'It's wrong. You, for example, May, you squander half your force with women. You'll never really do what you should do, with a fine mind such as yours. Too much of it goes the other way.'

'Maybe it does... and too little of you goes that way, Hammond, my boy, married or not. You can keep the purity and integrity of your mind, but it's going damned dry. Your pure mind is going as dry as fiddlesticks, from what I see of it. You're simply talking it down.'

Tommy Dukes burst into a laugh.

'Go it, you two minds!' he said. 'Look at me... I don't do any high and pure mental work, nothing but jot down a few ideas. And yet I neither marry nor run after women. I think Charlie's quite right; if he wants to run after the women, he's quite free not to run too often. But I wouldn't prohibit him from running. As for Hammond, he's got a property instinct, so naturally the straight road and the narrow gate are right for him. You'll see he'll be an English Man of Letters before he's done. A. B. C. from top to toe. Then there's me. I'm nothing. Just a squib. And what about you, Clifford? Do you think sex is a dynamo to help a man on to success in the world?'

Clifford rarely talked much at these times. He never held forth; his ideas were really not vital enough for it, he was too confused and emotional. Now he blushed and looked uncomfortable.

'Well!' he said, 'being myself hors de combat, I don't see I've anything to say on the matter.'

'Not at all,' said Dukes, 'the top of you's by no means hors de combat. You've got the life of the mind sound and intact. So let us hear your ideas.'

'Well,' stammered Clifford, 'even then I don't suppose I have much idea... I suppose marry-and-have-done-with-it would pretty well stand for what I think. Though of course between a man and woman who care for one another, it is a great thing.'

'What sort of great thing?' said Tommy.

'Oh... it perfects the intimacy,' said Clifford, uneasy as a woman in such talk.

'Well, Charlie and I believe that sex is a sort of communication like speech. Let any woman start a sex conversation with me, and it's natural for me to go to bed with her to finish it, all in due season. Unfortunately no woman makes any particular start with me, so I go to bed by myself; and am none the worse for it... I hope so, anyway, for how should I know? Anyhow I've no starry calculations to be interfered with, and no immortal works to write. I'm merely a fellow skulking in the army...

Silence fell. The four men smoked. And Connie sat there and put another stitch in her sewing... Yes, she sat there! She had to sit mum. She had to be quiet as a mouse, not to interfere with the immensely important speculations of these highly-mental gentlemen. But she had to be there. They didn't get on so well without her; their ideas didn't flow so freely. Clifford was much more edgy and nervous, he got cold feet much quicker in Connie's absence, and the talk didn't run. Tommy Dukes came off best; he was a little inspired by her presence. Hammond she didn't really like; he seemed so selfish in a mental way. And Charles May, though she liked something about him, seemed a little distasteful and messy, in spite of his stars.

How many evenings had Connie sat and listened to the manifestations of these four men! These, and one or two others. That they never seemed to get anywhere didn't trouble her deeply. She liked to hear what they had to say, especially when Tommy was there. It was fun. Instead of men kissing you, and touching you with their bodies, they revealed their minds to you. It was great fun! But what cold minds!

And also it was a little irritating. She had more respect for Michaelis, on whose name they all poured such withering contempt, as a little mongrel arriviste, and uneducated bounder of the worst sort. Mongrel and bounder or not, he jumped to his own conclusions. He didn't merely walk round them with millions of words, in the parade of the life of the mind.

Connie quite liked the life of the mind, and got a great thrill out of it. But she did think it overdid itself a little. She loved being there, amidst the tobacco smoke of those famous evenings of the cronies, as she called them privately to herself. She was infinitely amused, and proud too, that even their talking they could not do, without her silent presence. She had an immense respect for thought... and these men, at least, tried to think honestly. But somehow there was a cat, and it wouldn't jump. They all alike talked at something, though what it was, for the life of her she couldn't say. It was something that Mick didn't clear, either.

But then Mick wasn't trying to do anything, but just get through his life, and put as much across other people as they tried to put across him. He was really anti-social, which was what Clifford and his cronies had against him. Clifford and his cronies were not anti-social; they were more or less bent on saving mankind, or on instructing it, to say the least.

There was a gorgeous talk on Sunday evening, when the conversation drifted again to love.

'Blest be the tie that binds

Our hearts in kindred something-or-other—'

said Tommy Dukes. 'I'd like to know what the tie is... The tie that binds us just now is mental friction on one another. And, apart from that, there's damned little tie between us. We bust apart, and say spiteful things about one another, like all the other damned intellectuals in the world. Damned everybody, as far as that goes, for they all do it. Else we bust apart, and cover up the spiteful things we feel against one another by saying false sugaries. It's a curious thing that the mental life seems to flourish with its roots in spite, ineffable and fathomless spite. Always has been so! Look at Socrates, in Plato, and his bunch round him! The sheer spite of it all, just sheer joy in pulling somebody else to bits... Protagoras, or whoever it was! And Alcibiades, and all the other little disciple dogs joining in the fray! I must say it makes one prefer Buddha, quietly sitting under a bo-tree, or Jesus, telling his disciples little Sunday stories, peacefully, and without any mental fireworks. No, there's something wrong with the mental life, radically. It's rooted in spite and envy, envy and spite. Ye shall know the tree by its fruit.'

'I don't think we're altogether so spiteful,' protested Clifford.

'My dear Clifford, think of the way we talk each other over, all of us. I'm rather worse than anybody else, myself. Because I infinitely prefer the spontaneous spite to the concocted sugaries; now they are poison; when I begin saying what a fine fellow Clifford is, etc., then poor Clifford is to be pitied. For God's sake, all of you, say spiteful things about me, then I shall know I mean something to you. Don't say sugaries, or I'm done.'

'Oh, but I do think we honestly like one another,' said Hammond.

'I tell you we must... we say such spiteful things to one another, about one another, behind our backs! I'm the worst.'

'And I do think you confuse the mental life with the critical activity. I agree with you, Socrates gave the critical activity a grand start, but he did more than that,' said Charlie May, rather magisterially. The cronies had such a curious pomposity under their assumed modesty. It was all so ex cathedra, and it all pretended to be so humble.

Dukes refused to be drawn about Socrates.

'That's quite true, criticism and knowledge are not the same thing,' said Hammond.

'They aren't, of course,' chimed in Berry, a brown, shy young man, who had called to see Dukes, and was staying the night.

They all looked at him as if the ass had spoken.

'I wasn't talking about knowledge... I was talking about the mental life,' laughed Dukes. 'Real knowledge comes out of the whole corpus of the consciousness; out of your belly and your penis as much as out of your brain and mind. The mind can only analyse and rationalize. Set the mind and the reason to cock it over the rest, and all they can do is to criticize, and make a deadness. I say all they can do. It is vastly important. My God, the world needs criticizing today... criticizing to death. Therefore let's live the mental life, and glory in our spite, and strip the rotten old show. But, mind you, it's like this: while you live your life, you are in some way an organic whole with all life. But once you start the mental life you pluck the apple. You've severed the connexion between the apple and the tree: the organic connexion. And if you've got nothing in your life but the mental life, then you yourself are a plucked apple... you've fallen off the tree. And then it is a logical necessity to be spiteful, just as it's a natural necessity for a plucked apple to go bad.'

Clifford made big eyes: it was all stuff to him. Connie secretly laughed to herself.

'Well then, we're all plucked apples,' said Hammond, rather acidly and petulantly.

'So let's make cider of ourselves,' said Charlie.

Out of a long silence came Berry's anxious question:

'You do believe in love then, Tommy, don't you?'

'You lovely lad!' said Tommy. 'No, my cherub, nine times out of ten, no! Love's another of those half-witted performances today. Fellows with swaying waists fucking little jazz girls with small boy buttocks, like two collar studs! Do you mean that sort of love? Or the joint-property, make-a-success-of-it, My-husband-my-wife sort of love? No, my fine fellow, I don't believe in it at all!'

'But you do believe in something?'

'Me? Oh, intellectually I believe in having a good heart, a chirpy penis, a lively intelligence, and the courage to say "shit!" in front of a lady.'

'Well, you've got them all,' said Berry.

Tommy Dukes roared with laughter. 'You angel boy! If only I had! If only I had! No; my heart's as numb as a potato, my penis droops and never lifts its head up, I dare rather cut him clean off than say "shit!" in front of my mother or my aunt... they are real ladies, mind you; and I'm not really intelligent, I'm only a "mentallifer". It would be wonderful to be intelligent: then one would be alive in all the parts mentioned and unmentionable. The penis rouses his head and says: How do you do?—to any really intelligent person. Renoir said he painted his pictures with his penis... he did too, lovely pictures! I wish I did something with mine. God! when one can only talk! Another torture added to Hades! And Socrates started it.'

'There are nice women in the world,' said Connie, lifting her head up and speaking at last.

The men resented it... she should have pretended to hear nothing. They hated her admitting she had attended so closely to such talk.

'My God! "If they be not nice to me—What care I how nice they be?"

'No, it's hopeless! I just simply can't vibrate in unison with a woman. There's no woman I can really want when I'm faced with her, and I'm not going to start forcing myself to it... My God, no! I'll remain as I am, and lead the mental life. It's the only honest thing I can do. I can be quite happy talking to women; but it's all pure, hopelessly pure. Hopelessly pure! What do you say, Hildebrand, my chicken?'

'It's much less complicated if one stays pure,' said Berry.

'Yes, life is all too simple!'

Chapter ❺

On a frosty morning with a little February sun, Clifford and Connie went for a walk across the park to the wood. That is, Clifford chuffed in his motor-chair, and Connie walked beside him.

The hard air was still sulphurous, but they were both used to it. Round the near horizon went the haze, opalescent with frost and smoke, and on the top lay the small blue sky; so that it was like being inside an enclosure, always inside. Life's always a dream or a frenzy, inside an enclosure.

The sheep coughed in the rough, sere grass of the park, where frost lay bluish in the sockets of the tufts. Across the park ran a path to the wood-gate, a fine ribbon of pink. Clifford had had it newly gravelled with sifted gravel from the pit-bank. When the rock and refuse of the underworld had burned and given off its sulphur, it turned bright pink, shrimp-coloured on dry days, darker, crab-coloured on wet. Now it was pale shrimp-colour, with a bluish-white hoar of frost. It always pleased Connie, this underfoot of sifted, bright pink. It's an ill wind that brings nobody good.

Clifford steered cautiously down the slope of the knoll from the hall, and Connie kept her hand on the chair. In front lay the wood, the hazel thicket nearest, the purplish density of oaks beyond. From the wood's edge rabbits bobbed and nibbled. Rooks suddenly rose in a black train, and went trailing off over the little sky.

Connie opened the wood-gate, and Clifford puffed slowly through into the broad riding that ran up an incline between the clean-whipped thickets of the hazel. The wood was a remnant of the great forest where Robin Hood hunted, and this riding was an old, old thoroughfare coming across country. But now, of course, it was only a riding through the private wood. The road from Mansfield swerved round to the north.

In the wood everything was motionless, the old leaves on the ground keeping the frost on their underside. A jay called harshly, many little birds fluttered. But there was no game; no pheasants. They had been killed off during the war, and the wood had been left unprotected, till now Clifford had got his game-keeper again.

Clifford loved the wood; he loved the old oak-trees. He felt they were his own through generations. He wanted to protect them. He wanted this place inviolate, shut off from the world.

The chair chuffed slowly up the incline, rocking and jolting on the frozen clods. And suddenly, on the left, came a clearing where there was nothing but a ravel of dead bracken, a thin and spindly sapling leaning here and there, big sawn stumps, showing their tops and their grasping roots, lifeless. And patches of blackness where the woodmen had burned the brushwood and rubbish.

This was one of the places that Sir Geoffrey had cut during the war for trench timber. The whole knoll, which rose softly on the right of the riding, was denuded and strangely forlorn. On the crown of the knoll where the oaks had stood, now was bareness; and from there you could look out over the trees to the colliery railway, and the new works at Stacks Gate. Connie had stood and looked, it was a breach in the pure seclusion of the wood. It let in the world. But she didn't tell Clifford.

This denuded place always made Clifford curiously angry. He had been through the war, had seen what it meant. But he didn't get really angry till he saw this bare hill. He was having it replanted. But it made him hate Sir Geoffrey.

Clifford sat with a fixed face as the chair slowly mounted. When they came to the top of the rise he stopped; he would not risk the long and very jolty downslope. He sat looking at the greenish sweep of the riding downwards, a clear way through the bracken and oaks. It swerved at the bottom of the hill and disappeared; but it had such a lovely easy curve, of knights riding and ladies on palfreys.

'I consider this is really the heart of England,' said Clifford to Connie, as he sat there in the dim February sunshine.

'Do you?' she said, seating herself in her blue knitted dress, on a stump by the path.

'I do! This is the old England, the heart of it; and I intend to keep it intact.'

'Oh yes!' said Connie. But, as she said it she heard the eleven-o'clock hooters at Stacks Gate colliery. Clifford was too used to the sound to notice.

'I want this wood perfect... untouched. I want nobody to trespass in it,' said Clifford.

There was a certain pathos. The wood still had some of the mystery of wild, old England; but Sir Geoffrey's cuttings during the war had given it a blow. How still the trees were, with their crinkly, innumerable twigs against the sky, and their grey, obstinate trunks rising from the brown bracken! How safely the birds flitted among them! And once there had been deer, and archers, and monks padding along on asses. The place remembered, still remembered.

Clifford sat in the pale sun, with the light on his smooth, rather blond hair, his reddish full face inscrutable.

'I mind more, not having a son, when I come here, than any other time,' he said.

'But the wood is older than your family,' said Connie gently.

'Quite!' said Clifford. 'But we've preserved it. Except for us it would go... it would be gone already, like the rest of the forest. One must preserve some of the old England!'

'Must one?' said Connie. 'If it has to be preserved, and preserved against the new England, it's sad, I know.'

'If some of the old England isn't preserved, there'll be no England at all,' said Clifford. 'And we who have this kind of property, and the feeling for it, must preserve it.'

There was a sad pause. 'Yes, for a little while,' said Connie.

'For a little while! It's all we can do. We can only do our bit. I feel every man of my family has done his bit here, since we've had the place. One may go against convention, but one must keep up tradition.' Again there was a pause.

'What tradition?' asked Connie.

'The tradition of England! Of this!'

'Yes,' she said slowly.

'That's why having a son helps; one is only a link in a chain,' he said.

Connie was not keen on chains, but she said nothing. She was thinking of the curious impersonality of his desire for a son.

'I'm sorry we can't have a son,' she said.

He looked at her steadily, with his full, pale-blue eyes.

'It would almost be a good thing if you had a child by another man,' he said. 'If we brought it up at Wragby, it would belong to us and to the place. I don't believe very intensely in fatherhood. If we had the child to rear, it would be our own, and it would carry on. Don't you think it's worth considering?'

Connie looked up at him at last. The child, her child, was just an 'it' to him. It... it... it!

'But what about the other man?' she asked.

'Does it matter very much? Do these things really affect us very deeply?... You had that lover in Germany... what is it now? Nothing almost. It seems to me that it isn't these little acts and little connexions we make in our lives that matter so very much. They pass away, and where are they? Where... Where are the snows of yesteryear?... It's what endures through one's life that matters; my own life matters to me, in its long continuance and development. But what do the occasional connexions matter? And the occasional sexual connexions especially! If people don't exaggerate them ridiculously, they pass like the mating of birds. And so they should. What does it matter? It's the lifelong companionship that matters. It's the living together from day to day, not the sleeping together once or twice. You and I are married, no matter what happens to us. We have the habit of each other. And habit, to my thinking, is more vital than any occasional excitement. The long, slow, enduring thing... that's what we live by... not the occasional spasm of any sort. Little by little, living together, two people fall into a sort of unison, they vibrate so intricately to one another. That's the real secret of marriage, not sex; at least not the simple function of sex. You and I are interwoven in a marriage. If we stick to that we ought to be able to arrange this sex thing, as we arrange going to the dentist; since fate has given us a checkmate physically there.'

Connie sat and listened in a sort of wonder, and a sort of fear. She did not know if he was right or not. There was Michaelis, whom she loved; so she said to herself. But her love was somehow only an excursion from her marriage with Clifford; the long, slow habit of intimacy, formed through years of suffering and patience. Perhaps the human soul needs excursions, and must not be denied them. But the point of an excursion is that you come home again.

'And wouldn't you mind what man's child I had?' she asked.

'Why, Connie, I should trust your natural instinct of decency and selection. You just wouldn't let the wrong sort of fellow touch you.'

She thought of Michaelis! He was absolutely Clifford's idea of the wrong sort of fellow.

'But men and women may have different feelings about the wrong sort of fellow,' she said.

'No,' he replied. 'You care for me. I don't believe you would ever care for a man who was purely antipathetic to me. Your rhythm wouldn't let you.'

She was silent. Logic might be unanswerable because it was so absolutely wrong.

'And should you expect me to tell you?' she asked, glancing up at him almost furtively.

'Not at all, I'd better not know... But you do agree with me, don't you, that the casual sex thing is nothing, compared to the long life lived together? Don't you think one can just subordinate the sex thing to the necessities of a long life? Just use it, since that's what we're driven to? After all, do these temporary excitements matter? Isn't the whole problem of life the slow building up of an integral personality, through the years? Living an integrated life? There's no point in a disintegrated life. If lack of sex is going to disintegrate you, then go out and have a love-affair. If lack of a child is going to disintegrate you, then have a child if you possibly can. But only do these things so that you have an integrated life, that makes a long harmonious thing. And you and I can do that together... don't you think?... if we adapt ourselves to the necessities, and at the same time weave the adaptation together into a piece with our steadily-lived life. Don't you agree?'

Connie was a little overwhelmed by his words. She knew he was right theoretically. But when she actually touched her steadily-lived life with him she... hesitated. Was it actually her destiny to go on weaving herself into his life all the rest of her life? Nothing else?

Was it just that? She was to be content to weave a steady life with him, all one fabric, but perhaps brocaded with the occasional flower of an adventure. But how could she know what she would feel next year? How could one ever know? How could one say yes, for years and years? The little yes, gone on a breath! Why should one be pinned down by that butterfly word? Of course it had to flutter away and be gone, to be followed by other yes's and no's! Like the straying of butterflies.

'I think you're right, Clifford. And as far as I can see I agree with you. Only life may turn quite a new face on it all.'

'But until life turns a new face on it all, you do agree?'

'Oh yes! I think I do, really.'

She was watching a brown spaniel that had run out of a side-path, and was looking towards them with lifted nose, making a soft, fluffy bark. A man with a gun strode swiftly, softly out after the dog, facing their way as if about to attack them; then stopped instead, saluted, and was turning downhill. It was only the new game-keeper, but he had frightened Connie, he seemed to emerge with such a swift menace. That was how she had seen him, like the sudden rush of a threat out of nowhere.

He was a man in dark green velveteens and gaiters... the old style, with a red face and red moustache and distant eyes. He was going quickly downhill.

'Mellors!' called Clifford.

The man faced lightly round, and saluted with a quick little gesture, a soldier!

'Will you turn the chair round and get it started? That makes it easier,' said Clifford.

The man at once slung his gun over his shoulder, and came forward with the same curious swift, yet soft movements, as if keeping invisible. He was moderately tall and lean, and was silent. He did not look at Connie at all, only at the chair.

'Connie, this is the new game-keeper, Mellors. You haven't spoken to her ladyship yet, Mellors?'

'No, Sir!' came the ready, neutral words.

The man lifted his hat as he stood, showing his thick, almost fair hair. He stared straight into Connie's eyes, with a perfect, fearless, impersonal look, as if he wanted to see what she was like. He made her feel shy. She bent her head to him shyly, and he changed his hat to his left hand and made her a slight bow, like a gentleman; but he said nothing at all. He remained for a moment still, with his hat in his hand.

'But you've been here some time, haven't you?' Connie said to him.

'Eight months, Madam... your Ladyship!' he corrected himself calmly.

'And do you like it?'

She looked him in the eyes. His eyes narrowed a little, with irony, perhaps with impudence.

'Why, yes, thank you, your Ladyship! I was reared here...'

He gave another slight bow, turned, put his hat on, and strode to take hold of the chair. His voice on the last words had fallen into the heavy broad drag of the dialect... perhaps also in mockery, because there had been no trace of dialect before. He might almost be a gentleman. Anyhow, he was a curious, quick, separate fellow, alone, but sure of himself.

Clifford started the little engine, the man carefully turned the chair, and set it nose-forwards to the incline that curved gently to the dark hazel thicket.

'Is that all then, Sir Clifford?' asked the man.

'No, you'd better come along in case she sticks. The engine isn't really strong enough for the uphill work.' The man glanced round for his dog... a thoughtful glance. The spaniel looked at him and faintly moved its tail. A little smile, mocking or teasing her, yet gentle, came into his eyes for a moment, then faded away, and his face was expressionless. They went fairly quickly down the slope, the man with his hand on the rail of the chair, steadying it. He looked like a free soldier rather than a servant. And something about him reminded Connie of Tommy Dukes.

When they came to the hazel grove, Connie suddenly ran forward, and opened the gate into the park. As she stood holding it, the two men looked at her in passing, Clifford critically, the other man with a curious, cool wonder, impersonally wanting to see what she looked like. And she saw in his blue, impersonal eyes a look of suffering and detachment, yet a certain warmth. But why was he so aloof, apart?

Clifford stopped the chair, once through the gate, and the man came quickly, courteously, to close it.

'Why did you run to open?' asked Clifford in his quiet, calm voice, that showed he was displeased. 'Mellors would have done it.'

'I thought you would go straight ahead,' said Connie. 'And leave you to run after us?' said Clifford.

'Oh, well, I like to run sometimes!'

Mellors took the chair again, looking perfectly unheeding, yet Connie felt he noted everything. As he pushed the chair up the steepish rise of the knoll in the park, he breathed rather quickly, through parted lips. He was rather frail really. Curiously full of vitality, but a little frail and quenched. Her woman's instinct sensed it.

Connie fell back, let the chair go on. The day had greyed over; the small blue sky that had poised low on its circular rims of haze was closed in again, the lid was down, there was a raw coldness. It was going to snow. All grey, all grey! The world looked worn out.

The chair waited at the top of the pink path. Clifford looked round for Connie.

'Not tired, are you?' he said.

'Oh, no!' she said.

But she was. A strange, weary yearning, a dissatisfaction had started in her. Clifford did not notice: those were not things he was aware of. But the stranger knew. To Connie, everything in her world and life seemed worn out, and her dissatisfaction was older than the hills.

They came to the house, and around to the back, where there were no steps. Clifford managed to swing himself over on to the low, wheeled house-chair; he was very strong and agile with his arms. Then Connie lifted the burden of his dead legs after him.

The keeper, waiting at attention to be dismissed, watched everything narrowly, missing nothing. He went pale, with a sort of fear, when he saw Connie lifting the inert legs of the man in her arms, into the other chair, Clifford pivoting round as she did so. He was frightened.

'Thanks, then, for the help, Mellors,' said Clifford casually, as he began to wheel down the passage to the servants' quarters.

'Nothing else, Sir?' came the neutral voice, like one in a dream.

'Nothing, good morning!'

'Good morning, Sir.'

'Good morning! It was kind of you to push the chair up that hill... I hope it wasn't heavy for you,' said Connie, looking back at the keeper outside the door.

His eyes came to hers in an instant, as if wakened up. He was aware of her.

'Oh no, not heavy!' he said quickly. Then his voice dropped again into the broad sound of the vernacular: 'Good mornin' to your Ladyship!'

'Who is your game-keeper?' Connie asked at lunch.

'Mellors! You saw him,' said Clifford.

'Yes, but where did he come from?'

'Nowhere! He was a Tevershall boy... son of a collier, I believe.'

'And was he a collier himself?'

'Blacksmith on the pit-bank, I believe: overhead smith. But he was keeper here for two years before the war... before he joined up. My father always had a good opinion of him, so when he came back, and went to the pit for a blacksmith's job, I just took him back here as keeper. I was really very glad to get him... it's almost impossible to find a good man round here, for a gamekeeper... and it needs a man who knows the people.'

'And isn't he married?'

'He was. But his wife went off with... with various men... but finally with a collier at Stacks Gate, and I believe she's living there still.'

'So this man is alone?'

'More or less! He has a mother in the village... and a child, I believe.'

Clifford looked at Connie, with his pale, slightly prominent blue eyes, in which a certain vagueness was coming. He seemed alert in the foreground, but the background was like the Midlands atmosphere, haze, smoky mist. And the haze seemed to be creeping forward. So when he stared at Connie in his peculiar way, giving her his peculiar, precise information, she felt all the background of his mind filling up with mist, with nothingness. And it frightened her. It made him seem impersonal, almost to idiocy.

And dimly she realized one of the great laws of the human soul: that when the emotional soul receives a wounding shock, which does not kill the body, the soul seems to recover as the body recovers. But this is only appearance. It is really only the mechanism of the re-assumed habit. Slowly, slowly the wound to the soul begins to make itself felt, like a bruise, which only slowly deepens its terrible ache, till it fills all the psyche. And when we think we have recovered and forgotten, it is then that the terrible after-effects have to be encountered at their worst.

So it was with Clifford. Once he was 'well', once he was back at Wragby, and writing his stories, and feeling sure of life, in spite of all, he seemed to forget, and to have recovered all his equanimity. But now, as the years went by, slowly, slowly, Connie felt the bruise of fear and horror coming up, and spreading in him. For a time it had been so deep as to be numb, as it were non-existent. Now slowly it began to assert itself in a spread of fear, almost paralysis. Mentally he still was alert. But the paralysis, the bruise of the too-great shock, was gradually spreading in his affective self.

And as it spread in him, Connie felt it spread in her. An inward dread, an emptiness, an indifference to everything gradually spread in her soul. When Clifford was roused, he could still talk brilliantly and, as it were, command the future: as when, in the wood, he talked about her having a child, and giving an heir to Wragby. But the day after, all the brilliant words seemed like dead leaves, crumpling up and turning to powder, meaning really nothing, blown away on any gust of wind. They were not the leafy words of an effective life, young with energy and belonging to the tree. They were the hosts of fallen leaves of a life that is ineffectual.

So it seemed to her everywhere. The colliers at Tevershall were talking again of a strike, and it seemed to Connie there again it was not a manifestation of energy, it was the bruise of the war that had been in abeyance, slowly rising to the surface and creating the great ache of unrest, and stupor of discontent. The bruise was deep, deep, deep... the bruise of the false inhuman war. It would take many years for the living blood of the generations to dissolve the vast black clot of bruised blood, deep inside their souls and bodies. And it would need a new hope.

Poor Connie! As the years drew on it was the fear of nothingness in her life that affected her. Clifford's mental life and hers gradually began to feel like nothingness. Their marriage, their integrated life based on a habit of intimacy, that he talked about: there were days when it all became utterly blank and nothing. It was words, just so many words. The only reality was nothingness, and over it a hypocrisy of words.

There was Clifford's success: the bitch-goddess! It was true he was almost famous, and his books brought him in a thousand pounds. His photograph appeared everywhere. There was a bust of him in one of the galleries, and a portrait of him in two galleries. He seemed the most modern of modern voices. With his uncanny lame instinct for publicity, he had become in four or five years one of the best known of the young 'intellectuals'. Where the intellect came in, Connie did not quite see. Clifford was really clever at that slightly humorous analysis of people and motives which leaves everything in bits at the end. But it was rather like puppies tearing the sofa cushions to bits; except that it was not young and playful, but curiously old, and rather obstinately conceited. It was weird and it was nothing. This was the feeling that echoed and re-echoed at the bottom of Connie's soul: it was all flag, a wonderful display of nothingness. At the same time a display. A display! A display! A display!

Michaelis had seized upon Clifford as the central figure for a play; already he had sketched in the plot, and written the first act. For Michaelis was even better than Clifford at making a display of nothingness. It was the last bit of passion left in these men: the passion for making a display. Sexually they were passionless, even dead. And now it was not money that Michaelis was after. Clifford had never been primarily out for money, though he made it where he could, for money is the seal and stamp of success. And success was what they wanted. They wanted, both of them, to make a real display... a man's own very display of himself that should capture for a time the vast populace.

It was strange... the prostitution to the bitch-goddess. To Connie, since she was really outside of it, and since she had grown numb to the thrill of it, it was again nothingness. Even the prostitution to the bitch-goddess was nothingness, though the men prostituted themselves innumerable times. Nothingness even that.

Michaelis wrote to Clifford about the play. Of course she knew about it long ago. And Clifford was again thrilled. He was going to be displayed again this time, somebody was going to display him, and to advantage. He invited Michaelis down to Wragby with Act I.

Michaelis came: in summer, in a pale-coloured suit and white suede gloves, with mauve orchids for Connie, very lovely, and Act I was a great success. Even Connie was thrilled... thrilled to what bit of marrow she had left. And Michaelis, thrilled by his power to thrill, was really wonderful... and quite beautiful, in Connie's eyes. She saw in him that ancient motionlessness of a race that can't be disillusioned any more, an extreme, perhaps, of impurity that is pure. On the far side of his supreme prostitution to the bitch-goddess he seemed pure, pure as an African ivory mask that dreams impurity into purity, in its ivory curves and planes.

His moment of sheer thrill with the two Chatterleys, when he simply carried Connie and Clifford away, was one of the supreme moments of Michaelis' life. He had succeeded: he had carried them away. Even Clifford was temporarily in love with him... if that is the way one can put it.

So next morning Mick was more uneasy than ever; restless, devoured, with his hands restless in his trousers pockets. Connie had not visited him in the night... and he had not known where to find her. Coquetry!... at his moment of triumph.

He went up to her sitting-room in the morning. She knew he would come. And his restlessness was evident. He asked her about his play... did she think it good? He had to hear it praised: that affected him with the last thin thrill of passion beyond any sexual orgasm. And she praised it rapturously. Yet all the while, at the bottom of her soul, she knew it was nothing.

'Look here!' he said suddenly at last. 'Why don't you and I make a clean thing of it? Why don't we marry?'

'But I am married,' she said, amazed, and yet feeling nothing.

'Oh that!... He'll divorce you all right... Why don't you and I marry? I want to marry. I know it would be the best thing for me... marry and lead a regular life. I lead the deuce of a life, simply tearing myself to pieces. Look here, you and I, we're made for one another... hand and glove. Why don't we marry? Do you see any reason why we shouldn't?'

Connie looked at him amazed: and yet she felt nothing. These men, they were all alike, they left everything out. They just went off from the top of their heads as if they were squibs, and expected you to be carried heavenwards along with their own thin sticks.

'But I am married already,' she said. 'I can't leave Clifford, you know.'

'Why not? But why not?' he cried. 'He'll hardly know you've gone, after six months. He doesn't know that anybody exists, except himself. Why the man has no use for you at all, as far as I can see: he's entirely wrapped up in himself.'

Connie felt there was truth in this. But she also felt that Mick was hardly making a display of selflessness.

'Aren't all men wrapped up in themselves?' she asked.

'Oh, more or less, I allow. A man's got to be, to get through. But that's not the point. The point is, what sort of a time can a man give a woman? Can he give her a damn good time, or can't he? If he can't he's no right to the woman...' He paused and gazed at her with his full, hazel eyes, almost hypnotic. 'Now I consider,' he added, 'I can give a woman the darnedest good time she can ask for. I think I can guarantee myself.'

'And what sort of a good time?' asked Connie, gazing on him still with a sort of amazement, that looked like thrill; and underneath feeling nothing at all.

'Every sort of a good time, damn it, every sort! Dress, jewels up to a point, any nightclub you like, know anybody you want to know, live the pace... travel and be somebody wherever you go... Darn it, every sort of good time.'

He spoke it almost in a brilliancy of triumph, and Connie looked at him as if dazzled, and really feeling nothing at all. Hardly even the surface of her mind was tickled at the glowing prospects he offered her. Hardly even her most outside self responded, that at any other time would have been thrilled. She just got no feeling from it, she couldn't 'go off'. She just sat and stared and looked dazzled, and felt nothing, only somewhere she smelt the extraordinarily unpleasant smell of the bitch-goddess.

Mick sat on tenterhooks, leaning forward in his chair, glaring at her almost hysterically: and whether he was more anxious out of vanity for her to say Yes! or whether he was more panic-stricken for fear she should say Yes!—who can tell?

'I should have to think about it,' she said. 'I couldn't say now. It may seem to you Clifford doesn't count, but he does. When you think how disabled he is...'

'Oh damn it all! If a fellow's going to trade on his disabilities, I might begin to say how lonely I am, and always have been, and all the rest of the my-eye-Betty-Martin sob-stuff! Damn it all, if a fellow's got nothing but disabilities to recommend him...'

He turned aside, working his hands furiously in his trousers pockets. That evening he said to her:

'You're coming round to my room tonight, aren't you? I don't darned know where your room is.'

'All right!' she said.

He was a more excited lover that night, with his strange, small boy's frail nakedness. Connie found it impossible to come to her crisis before he had really finished his. And he roused a certain craving passion in her, with his little boy's nakedness and softness; she had to go on after he had finished, in the wild tumult and heaving of her loins, while he heroically kept himself up, and present in her, with all his will and self-offering, till she brought about her own crisis, with weird little cries.

When at last he drew away from her, he said, in a bitter, almost sneering little voice:

'You couldn't go off at the same time as a man, could you? You'd have to bring yourself off! You'd have to run the show!'

This little speech, at the moment, was one of the shocks of her life. Because that passive sort of giving himself was so obviously his only real mode of intercourse.

'What do you mean?' she said.

'You know what I mean. You keep on for hours after I've gone off... and I have to hang on with my teeth till you bring yourself off by your own exertions.'

She was stunned by this unexpected piece of brutality, at the moment when she was glowing with a sort of pleasure beyond words, and a sort of love for him. Because, after all, like so many modern men, he was finished almost before he had begun. And that forced the woman to be active.

'But you want me to go on, to get my own satisfaction?' she said.

He laughed grimly. 'I want it!' he said. 'That's good! I want to hang on with my teeth clenched, while you go for me!'

'But don't you?' she insisted.

He avoided the question. 'All the darned women are like that,' he said. 'Either they don't go off at all, as if they were dead in there... or else they wait till a chap's really done, and then they start in to bring themselves off, and a chap's got to hang on. I never had a woman yet who went off just at the same moment as I did.'

Connie only half heard this piece of novel, masculine information. She was only stunned by his feeling against her... his incomprehensible brutality. She felt so innocent.

'But you want me to have my satisfaction too, don't you?' she repeated.

'Oh, all right! I'm quite willing. But I'm darned if hanging on waiting for a woman to go off is much of a game for a man...'

This speech was one of the crucial blows of Connie's life. It killed something in her. She had not been so very keen on Michaelis; till he started it, she did not want him. It was as if she never positively wanted him. But once he had started her, it seemed only natural for her to come to her own crisis with him. Almost she had loved him for it... almost that night she loved him, and wanted to marry him.

Perhaps instinctively he knew it, and that was why he had to bring down the whole show with a smash; the house of cards. Her whole sexual feeling for him, or for any man, collapsed that night. Her life fell apart from his as completely as if he had never existed.

And she went through the days drearily. There was nothing now but this empty treadmill of what Clifford called the integrated life, the long living together of two people, who are in the habit of being in the same house with one another.

Nothingness! To accept the great nothingness of life seemed to be the one end of living. All the many busy and important little things that make up the grand sum-total of nothingness!

Chapter ❻

'Why don't men and women really like one another nowadays?' Connie asked Tommy Dukes, who was more or less her oracle.

'Oh, but they do! I don't think since the human species was invented, there has ever been a time when men and women have liked one another as much as they do today. Genuine liking! Take myself. I really like women better than men; they are braver, one can be more frank with them.'

Connie pondered this.

'Ah, yes, but you never have anything to do with them!' she said.

'I? What am I doing but talking perfectly sincerely to a woman at this moment?'

'Yes, talking...'

'And what more could I do if you were a man, than talk perfectly sincerely to you?'

'Nothing perhaps. But a woman...'

'A woman wants you to like her and talk to her, and at the same time love her and desire her; and it seems to me the two things are mutually exclusive.'

'But they shouldn't be!'

'No doubt water ought not to be so wet as it is; it overdoes it in wetness. But there it is! I like women and talk to them, and therefore I don't love them and desire them. The two things don't happen at the same time in me.'

'I think they ought to.'

'All right. The fact that things ought to be something else than what they are, is not my department.'

Connie considered this. 'It isn't true,' she said. 'Men can love women and talk to them. I don't see how they can love them without talking, and being friendly and intimate. How can they?'

'Well,' he said, 'I don't know. What's the use of my generalizing? I only know my own case. I like women, but I don't desire them. I like talking to them; but talking to them, though it makes me intimate in one direction, sets me poles apart from them as far as kissing is concerned. So there you are! But don't take me as a general example, probably I'm just a special case: one of the men who like women, but don't love women, and even hate them if they force me into a pretence of love, or an entangled appearance.'

'But doesn't it make you sad?'

'Why should it? Not a bit! I look at Charlie May, and the rest of the men who have affairs... No, I don't envy them a bit! If fate sent me a woman I wanted, well and good. Since I don't know any woman I want, and never see one... why, I presume I'm cold, and really like some women very much.'

'Do you like me?'

'Very much! And you see there's no question of kissing between us, is there?'

'None at all!' said Connie. 'But oughtn't there to be?'

'Why, in God's name? I like Clifford, but what would you say if I went and kissed him?'

'But isn't there a difference?'

'Where does it lie, as far as we're concerned? We're all intelligent human beings, and the male and female business is in abeyance. Just in abeyance. How would you like me to start acting up like a continental male at this moment, and parading the sex thing?'

'I should hate it.'

'Well then! I tell you, if I'm really a male thing at all, I never run across the female of my species. And I don't miss her, I just like women. Who's going to force me into loving or pretending to love them, working up the sex game?'

'No, I'm not. But isn't something wrong?'

'You may feel it, I don't.'

'Yes, I feel something is wrong between men and women. A woman has no glamour for a man any more.'

'Has a man for a woman?'

She pondered the other side of the question.

'Not much,' she said truthfully.

'Then let's leave it all alone, and just be decent and simple, like proper human beings with one another. Be damned to the artificial sex-compulsion! I refuse it!'

Connie knew he was right, really. Yet it left her feeling so forlorn, so forlorn and stray. Like a chip on a dreary pond, she felt. What was the point, of her or anything?

It was her youth which rebelled. These men seemed so old and cold. Everything seemed old and cold. And Michaelis let one down so; he was no good. The men didn't want one; they just didn't really want a woman, even Michaelis didn't.

And the bounders who pretended they did, and started working the sex game, they were worse than ever.

It was just dismal, and one had to put up with it. It was quite true, men had no real glamour for a woman: if you could fool yourself into thinking they had, even as she had fooled herself over Michaelis, that was the best you could do. Meanwhile you just lived on and there was nothing to it. She understood perfectly well why people had cocktail parties, and jazzed, and Charlestoned till they were ready to drop. You had to take it out some way or other, your youth, or it ate you up. But what a ghastly thing, this youth! You felt as old as Methuselah, and yet the thing fizzed somehow, and didn't let you be comfortable. A mean sort of life! And no prospect! She almost wished she had gone off with Mick, and made her life one long cocktail party, and jazz evening. Anyhow that was better than just mooning yourself into the grave.

On one of her bad days she went out alone to walk in the wood, ponderously, heeding nothing, not even noticing where she was. The report of a gun not far off startled and angered her.

Then, as she went, she heard voices, and recoiled. People! She didn't want people. But her quick ear caught another sound, and she roused; it was a child sobbing. At once she attended; someone was ill-treating a child. She strode swinging down the wet drive, her sullen resentment uppermost. She felt just prepared to make a scene.

Turning the corner, she saw two figures in the drive beyond her: the keeper, and a little girl in a purple coat and moleskin cap, crying.

'Ah, shut it up, tha false little bitch!' came the man's angry voice, and the child sobbed louder.

Constance strode nearer, with blazing eyes. The man turned and looked at her, saluting coolly, but he was pale with anger.

'What's the matter? Why is she crying?' demanded Constance, peremptory but a little breathless.

A faint smile like a sneer came on the man's face. 'Nay, yo' mun ax' er,' he replied callously, in broad vernacular.

Connie felt as if he had hit her in the face, and she changed colour. Then she gathered her defiance, and looked at him, her dark blue eyes blazing rather vaguely.

'I asked you,' she panted.

He gave a queer little bow, lifting his hat. 'You did, your Ladyship,' he said; then, with a return to the vernacular: 'but I canna tell yer.' And he became a soldier, inscrutable, only pale with annoyance.

Connie turned to the child, a ruddy, black-haired thing of nine or ten. 'What is it, dear? Tell me why you're crying!' she said, with the conventionalized sweetness suitable. More violent sobs, self-conscious. Still more sweetness on Connie's part.

'There, there, don't you cry! Tell me what they've done to you!'... an intense tenderness of tone. At the same time she felt in the pocket of her knitted jacket, and luckily found a sixpence.

'Don't you cry then!' she said, bending in front of the child. 'See what I've got for you!'

Sobs, snuffles, a fist taken from a blubbered face, and a black shrewd eye cast for a second on the sixpence. Then more sobs, but subduing. 'There, tell me what's the matter, tell me!' said Connie, putting the coin into the child's chubby hand, which closed over it.

'It's the... it's the... pussy!'

Shudders of subsiding sobs.

'What pussy, dear?'

After a silence the shy fist, clenching on sixpence, pointed into the bramble brake.

'There!'

Connie looked, and there, sure enough, was a big black cat, stretched out grimly, with a bit of blood on it.

'Oh!' she said in repulsion.

'A poacher, your Ladyship,' said the man satirically.

She glanced at him angrily. 'No wonder the child cried,' she said, 'if you shot it when she was there. No wonder she cried!'

He looked into Connie's eyes, laconic, contemptuous, not hiding his feelings. And again Connie flushed; she felt she had been making a scene, the man did not respect her.

'What is your name?' she said playfully to the child. 'Won't you tell me your name?'

Sniffs; then very affectedly in a piping voice: 'Connie Mellors!'

'Connie Mellors! Well, that's a nice name! And did you come out with your Daddy, and he shot a pussy? But it was a bad pussy!'

The child looked at her, with bold, dark eyes of scrutiny, sizing her up, and her condolence.

'I wanted to stop with my Gran,' said the little girl.

'Did you? But where is your Gran?'

The child lifted an arm, pointing down the drive. 'At th' cottidge.'

'At the cottage! And would you like to go back to her?'

Sudden, shuddering quivers of reminiscent sobs. 'Yes!'

'Come then, shall I take you? Shall I take you to your Gran? Then your Daddy can do what he has to do.' She turned to the man. 'It is your little girl, isn't it?'

He saluted, and made a slight movement of the head in affirmation.

'I suppose I can take her to the cottage?' asked Connie.

'If your Ladyship wishes.'

Again he looked into her eyes, with that calm, searching detached glance. A man very much alone, and on his own.

'Would you like to come with me to the cottage, to your Gran, dear?'

The child peeped up again. 'Yes!' she simpered.

Connie disliked her; the spoilt, false little female. Nevertheless she wiped her face and took her hand. The keeper saluted in silence.

'Good morning!' said Connie.

It was nearly a mile to the cottage, and Connie senior was well red by Connie junior by the time the game-keeper's picturesque little home was in sight. The child was already as full to the brim with tricks as a little monkey, and so self-assured.

At the cottage the door stood open, and there was a rattling heard inside. Connie lingered, the child slipped her hand, and ran indoors.

'Gran! Gran!'

'Why, are yer back a'ready!'

The grandmother had been blackleading the stove, it was Saturday morning. She came to the door in her sacking apron, a blacklead-brush in her hand, and a black smudge on her nose. She was a little, rather dry woman.

'Why, whatever?' she said, hastily wiping her arm across her face as she saw Connie standing outside.

'Good morning!' said Connie. 'She was crying, so I just brought her home.'

The grandmother looked around swiftly at the child:

'Why, wheer was yer Dad?'

The little girl clung to her grandmother's skirts and simpered.

'He was there,' said Connie, 'but he'd shot a poaching cat, and the child was upset.'

'Oh, you'd no right t'ave bothered, Lady Chat'ley, I'm sure! I'm sure it was very good of you, but you shouldn't 'ave bothered. Why, did ever you see!'—and the old woman turned to the child: 'Fancy Lady Chat'ley takin' all that trouble over yer! Why, she shouldn't 'ave bothered!'

'It was no bother, just a walk,' said Connie smiling.

'Why, I'm sure 'twas very kind of you, I must say! So she was crying! I knew there'd be something afore they got far. She's frightened of 'im, that's wheer it is. Seems 'e's almost a stranger to 'er, fair a stranger, and I don't think they're two as'd hit it off very easy. He's got funny ways.'

Connie didn't know what to say.

'Look, Gran!' simpered the child.

The old woman looked down at the sixpence in the little girl's hand.

'An' sixpence an' all! Oh, your Ladyship, you shouldn't, you shouldn't. Why, isn't Lady Chat'ley good to yer! My word, you're a lucky girl this morning!'

She pronounced the name, as all the people did: Chat'ley—'Isn't Lady Chat'ley good to you!'—Connie couldn't help looking at the old woman's nose, and the latter again vaguely wiped her face with the back of her wrist, but missed the smudge.

Connie was moving away... 'Well, thank you ever so much, Lady Chat'ley, I'm sure. Say thank you to Lady Chat'ley!'—this last to the child.

'Thank you,' piped the child.

'There's a dear!' laughed Connie, and she moved away, saying 'Good morning', heartily relieved to get away from the contact. Curious, she thought, that that thin, proud man should have that little, sharp woman for a mother!

And the old woman, as soon as Connie had gone, rushed to the bit of mirror in the scullery, and looked at her face. Seeing it, she stamped her foot with impatience. 'Of course she had to catch me in my coarse apron, and a dirty face! Nice idea she'd get of me!'

Connie went slowly home to Wragby. 'Home!'... it was a warm word to use for that great, weary warren. But then it was a word that had had its day. It was somehow cancelled. All the great words, it seemed to Connie, were cancelled for her generation: love, joy, happiness, home, mother, father, husband, all these great, dynamic words were half dead now, and dying from day to day. Home was a place you lived in, love was a thing you didn't fool yourself about, joy was a word you applied to a good Charleston, happiness was a term of hypocrisy used to bluff other people, a father was an individual who enjoyed his own existence, a husband was a man you lived with and kept going in spirits. As for sex, the last of the great words, it was just a cocktail term for an excitement that bucked you up for a while, then left you more raggy than ever. Frayed! It was as if the very material you were made of was cheap stuff, and was fraying out to nothing.

All that really remained was a stubborn stoicism: and in that there was a certain pleasure. In the very experience of the nothingness of life, phase after phase, étape after étape, there was a certain grisly satisfaction. So that's that! Always this was the last utterance: home, love, marriage, Michaelis: So that's that!—And when one died, the last words to life would be: So that's that!—

Money? Perhaps one couldn't say the same there. Money one always wanted. Money, success, the bitch-goddess, as Tommy Dukes persisted in calling it, after Henry James, that was a permanent necessity. You couldn't spend your last sou, and say finally: So that's that!—No, if you lived even another ten minutes, you wanted a few more sous for something or other. Just to keep the business mechanically going, you needed money. You had to have it. Money you have to have. You needn't really have anything else. So that's that!—

Since, of course, it's not your own fault you are alive. Once you are alive, money is a necessity, and the only absolute necessity. All the rest you can get along without, at a pinch. But not money. Emphatically, that's that!—

She thought of Michaelis, and the money she might have had with him; and even that she didn't want. She preferred the lesser amount which she helped Clifford to make by his writing. That she actually helped to make—'Clifford and I together, we make twelve hundred a year out of writing,' so she put it to herself. Make money! Make it! Out of nowhere. Wring it out of the thin air! The last feat to be humanly proud of! The rest all-my-eye-Betty-Martin.

So she plodded home to Clifford, to join forces with him again, to make another story out of nothingness: and a story meant money. Clifford seemed to care very much whether his stories were considered first-class literature or not. Strictly, she didn't care. Nothing in it! said her father. Twelve hundred pounds last year! was the retort simple and final.

If you were young, you just set your teeth, and bit on and held on, till the money began to flow from the invisible; it was a question of power. It was a question of will; a subtle, subtle, powerful emanation of will out of yourself brought back to you the mysterious nothingness of money a word on a bit of paper. It was a sort of magic, certainly it was triumph. The bitch-goddess! Well, if one had to prostitute oneself, let it be to a bitch-goddess! One could always despise her even while one prostituted oneself to her, which was good.

Clifford, of course, had still many childish taboos and fetishes. He wanted to be thought 'really good', which was all cock-a-hoopy nonsense. What was really good was what actually caught on. It was no good being really good and getting left with it. It seemed as if most of the 'really good' men just missed the bus. After all you only lived one life, and if you missed the bus, you were just left on the pavement, along with the rest of the failures.

Connie was contemplating a winter in London with Clifford, next winter. He and she had caught the bus all right, so they might as well ride on top for a bit, and show it.

The worst of it was, Clifford tended to become vague, absent, and to fall into fits of vacant depression. It was the wound to his psyche coming out. But it made Connie want to scream. Oh God, if the mechanism of the consciousness itself was going to go wrong, then what was one to do? Hang it all, one did one's bit! Was one to be let down absolutely?

Sometimes she wept bitterly, but even as she wept she was saying to herself: Silly fool, wetting hankies! As if that would get you anywhere!

Since Michaelis, she had made up her mind she wanted nothing. That seemed the simplest solution of the otherwise insoluble. She wanted nothing more than what she'd got; only she wanted to get ahead with what she'd got: Clifford, the stories, Wragby, the Lady-Chatterley business, money and fame, such as it was... she wanted to go ahead with it all. Love, sex, all that sort of stuff, just water-ices! Lick it up and forget it. If you don't hang on to it in your mind, it's nothing. Sex especially... nothing! Make up your mind to it, and you've solved the problem. Sex and a cocktail: they both lasted about as long, had the same effect, and amounted to about the same thing.

But a child, a baby! That was still one of the sensations. She would venture very gingerly on that experiment. There was the man to consider, and it was curious, there wasn't a man in the world whose children you wanted. Mick's children! Repulsive thought! As lief have a child to a rabbit! Tommy Dukes? He was very nice, but somehow you couldn't associate him with a baby, another generation. He ended in himself. And out of all the rest of Clifford's pretty wide acquaintance, there was not a man who did not rouse her contempt, when she thought of having a child by him. There were several who would have been quite possible as lover, even Mick. But to let them breed a child on you! Ugh! Humiliation and abomination.

So that was that!

Nevertheless, Connie had the child at the back of her mind. Wait! Wait! She would sift the generations of men through her sieve, and see if she couldn't find one who would do—'Go ye into the streets and byways of Jerusalem, and see if you can find a man.' It had been impossible to find a man in the Jerusalem of the prophet, though there were thousands of male humans. But a man! C'est une autre chose!

She had an idea that he would have to be a foreigner: not an Englishman, still less an Irishman. A real foreigner.

But wait! Wait! Next winter she would get Clifford to London; the following winter she would get him abroad to the South of France, Italy. Wait! She was in no hurry about the child. That was her own private affair, and the one point on which, in her own queer, female way, she was serious to the bottom of her soul. She was not going to risk any chance comer, not she! One might take a lover almost at any moment, but a man who should beget a child on one... Wait! Wait! It's a very different matter—'Go ye into the streets and byways of Jerusalem...' It was not a question of love; it was a question of a man. Why, one might even rather hate him, personally. Yet if he was the man, what would one's personal hate matter? This business concerned another part of oneself.

It had rained as usual, and the paths were too sodden for Clifford's chair, but Connie would go out. She went out alone every day now, mostly in the wood, where she was really alone. She saw nobody there.

This day, however, Clifford wanted to send a message to the keeper, and as the boy was laid up with influenza, somebody always seemed to have influenza at Wragby, Connie said she would call at the cottage.

The air was soft and dead, as if all the world were slowly dying. Grey and clammy and silent, even from the shuffling of the collieries, for the pits were working short time, and today they were stopped altogether. The end of all things!

In the wood all was utterly inert and motionless, only great drops fell from the bare boughs, with a hollow little crash. For the rest, among the old trees was depth within depth of grey, hopeless inertia, silence, nothingness.

Connie walked dimly on. From the old wood came an ancient melancholy, somehow soothing to her, better than the harsh insentience of the outer world. She liked the inwardness of the remnant of forest, the unspeaking reticence of the old trees. They seemed a very power of silence, and yet a vital presence. They, too, were waiting: obstinately, stoically waiting, and giving off a potency of silence. Perhaps they were only waiting for the end; to be cut down, cleared away, the end of the forest, for them the end of all things. But perhaps their strong and aristocratic silence, the silence of strong trees, meant something else.

As she came out of the wood on the north side, the keeper's cottage, a rather dark, brown stone cottage, with gables and a handsome chimney, looked uninhabited, it was so silent and alone. But a thread of smoke rose from the chimney, and the little railed-in garden in the front of the house was dug and kept very tidy. The door was shut.

Now she was here she felt a little shy of the man, with his curious far-seeing eyes. She did not like bringing him orders, and felt like going away again. She knocked softly, no one came. She knocked again, but still not loudly. There was no answer. She peeped through the window, and saw the dark little room, with its almost sinister privacy, not wanting to be invaded.

She stood and listened, and it seemed to her she heard sounds from the back of the cottage. Having failed to make herself heard, her mettle was roused, she would not be defeated.

So she went round the side of the house. At the back of the cottage the land rose steeply, so the backyard was sunken, and enclosed by a low stone wall. She turned the corner of the house and stopped. In the little yard two paces beyond her, the man was washing himself, utterly unaware. He was naked to the hips, his velveteen breeches slipping down over his slender loins. And his white slim back was curved over a big bowl of soapy water, in which he ducked his head, shaking his head with a queer, quick little motion, lifting his slender white arms, and pressing the soapy water from his ears, quick, subtle as a weasel playing with water, and utterly alone. Connie backed away round the corner of the house, and hurried away to the wood. In spite of herself, she had had a shock. After all, merely a man washing himself, commonplace enough, Heaven knows!

Yet in some curious way it was a visionary experience: it had hit her in the middle of the body. She saw the clumsy breeches slipping down over the pure, delicate, white loins, the bones showing a little, and the sense of aloneness, of a creature purely alone, overwhelmed her. Perfect, white, solitary nudity of a creature that lives alone, and inwardly alone. And beyond that, a certain beauty of a pure creature. Not the stuff of beauty, not even the body of beauty, but a lambency, the warm, white flame of a single life, revealing itself in contours that one might touch: a body!

Connie had received the shock of vision in her womb, and she knew it; it lay inside her. But with her mind she was inclined to ridicule. A man washing himself in a backyard! No doubt with evil-smelling yellow soap! She was rather annoyed; why should she be made to stumble on these vulgar privacies?

So she walked away from herself, but after a while she sat down on a stump. She was too confused to think. But in the coil of her confusion, she was determined to deliver her message to the fellow. She would not be balked. She must give him time to dress himself, but not time to go out. He was probably preparing to go out somewhere.

So she sauntered slowly back, listening. As she came near, the cottage looked just the same. A dog barked, and she knocked at the door, her heart beating in spite of herself.

She heard the man coming lightly downstairs. He opened the door quickly, and startled her. He looked uneasy himself, but instantly a laugh came on his face.

'Lady Chatterley!' he said. 'Will you come in?'

His manner was so perfectly easy and good, she stepped over the threshold into the rather dreary little room.

'I only called with a message from Sir Clifford,' she said in her soft, rather breathless voice.

The man was looking at her with those blue, all-seeing eyes of his, which made her turn her face aside a little. He thought her comely, almost beautiful, in her shyness, and he took command of the situation himself at once.

'Would you care to sit down?' he asked, presuming she would not. The door stood open.

'No thanks! Sir Clifford wondered if you would...' and she delivered her message, looking unconsciously into his eyes again. And now his eyes looked warm and kind, particularly to a woman, wonderfully warm, and kind, and at ease.

'Very good, your Ladyship. I will see to it at once.'

Taking an order, his whole self had changed, glazed over with a sort of hardness and distance. Connie hesitated, she ought to go. But she looked round the clean, tidy, rather dreary little sitting-room with something like dismay.

'Do you live here quite alone?' she asked.

'Quite alone, your Ladyship.'

'But your mother...?'

'She lives in her own cottage in the village.'

'With the child?' asked Connie.

'With the child!'

And his plain, rather worn face took on an indefinable look of derision. It was a face that changed all the time, baking.

'No,' he said, seeing Connie stand at a loss, 'my mother comes and cleans up for me on Saturdays; I do the rest myself.'

Again Connie looked at him. His eyes were smiling again, a little mockingly, but warm and blue, and somehow kind. She wondered at him. He was in trousers and flannel shirt and a grey tie, his hair soft and damp, his face rather pale and worn-looking. When the eyes ceased to laugh they looked as if they had suffered a great deal, still without losing their warmth. But a pallor of isolation came over him, she was not really there for him.

She wanted to say so many things, and she said nothing. Only she looked up at him again, and remarked:

'I hope I didn't disturb you?'

The faint smile of mockery narrowed his eyes.

'Only combing my hair, if you don't mind. I'm sorry I hadn't a coat on, but then I had no idea who was knocking. Nobody knocks here, and the unexpected sounds ominous.'

He went in front of her down the garden path to hold the gate. In his shirt, without the clumsy velveteen coat, she saw again how slender he was, thin, stooping a little. Yet, as she passed him, there was something young and bright in his fair hair, and his quick eyes. He would be a man about thirty-seven or eight.

She plodded on into the wood, knowing he was looking after her; he upset her so much, in spite of herself.

And he, as he went indoors, was thinking: 'She's nice, she's real! She's nicer than she knows.'

She wondered very much about him; he seemed so unlike a game-keeper, so unlike a working-man anyhow; although he had something in common with the local people. But also something very uncommon.

'The game-keeper, Mellors, is a curious kind of person,' she said to Clifford, 'he might almost be a gentleman.'

'Might he?' said Clifford. 'I hadn't noticed.'

'But isn't there something special about him?' Connie insisted.

'I think he's quite a nice fellow, but I know very little about him. He only came out of the army last year, less than a year ago. From India, I rather think. He may have picked up certain tricks out there, perhaps he was an officer's servant, and improved on his position. Some of the men were like that. But it does them no good, they have to fall back into their old places when they get home again.'

Connie gazed at Clifford contemplatively. She saw in him the peculiar tight rebuff against anyone of the lower classes who might be really climbing up, which she knew was characteristic of his breed.

'But don't you think there is something special about him?' she asked.

'Frankly, no! Nothing I had noticed.'

He looked at her curiously, uneasily, half-suspiciously. And she felt he wasn't telling her the real truth; he wasn't telling himself the real truth, that was it. He disliked any suggestion of a really exceptional human being. People must be more or less at his level, or below it.

Connie felt again the tightness, niggardliness of the men of her generation. They were so tight, so scared of life!

Chapter ❼

When Connie went up to her bedroom she did what she had not done for a long time: took off all her clothes, and looked at herself naked in the huge mirror. She did not know what she was looking for, or at, very definitely, yet she moved the lamp till it shone full on her.

And she thought, as she had thought so often, what a frail, easily hurt, rather pathetic thing a human body is, naked; somehow a little unfinished, incomplete!

She had been supposed to have rather a good figure, but now she was out of fashion: a little too female, not enough like an adolescent boy. She was not very tall, a bit Scottish and short; but she had a certain fluent, down-slipping grace that might have been beauty. Her skin was faintly tawny, her limbs had a certain stillness, her body should have had a full, down-slipping richness; but it lacked something.

Instead of ripening its firm, down-running curves, her body was flattening and going a little harsh. It was as if it had not had enough sun and warmth; it was a little greyish and sapless.

Disappointed of its real womanhood, it had not succeeded in becoming boyish, and unsubstantial, and transparent; instead it had gone opaque.

Her breasts were rather small, and dropping pear-shaped. But they were unripe, a little bitter, without meaning hanging there. And her belly had lost the fresh, round gleam it had had when she was young, in the days of her German boy, who really loved her physically. Then it was young and expectant, with a real look of its own. Now it was going slack, and a little flat, thinner, but with a slack thinness. Her thighs, too, they used to look so quick and glimpsy in their female roundness, somehow they too were going flat, slack, meaningless.

Her body was going meaningless, going dull and opaque, so much insignificant substance. It made her feel immensely depressed and hopeless. What hope was there? She was old, old at twenty-seven, with no gleam and sparkle in the flesh. Old through neglect and denial, yes, denial. Fashionable women kept their bodies bright like delicate porcelain, by external attention. There was nothing inside the porcelain; but she was not even as bright as that. The mental life! Suddenly she hated it with a rushing fury, the swindle!

She looked in the other mirror's reflection at her back, her waist, her loins. She was getting thinner, but to her it was not becoming. The crumple of her waist at the back, as she bent back to look, was a little weary; and it used to be so gay-looking. And the longish slope of her haunches and her buttocks had lost its gleam and its sense of richness. Gone! Only the German boy had loved it, and he was ten years dead, very nearly. How time went by! Ten years dead, and she was only twenty-seven. The healthy boy with his fresh, clumsy sensuality that she had then been so scornful of! Where would she find it now? It was gone out of men. They had their pathetic, two-second spasms like Michaelis; but no healthy human sensuality, that warms the blood and freshens the whole being.

Still she thought the most beautiful part of her was the long-sloping fall of the haunches from the socket of the back, and the slumberous, round stillness of the buttocks. Like hillocks of sand, the Arabs say, soft and downward-slipping with a long slope. Here the life still lingered hoping. But here too she was thinner, and going unripe, astringent.

But the front of her body made her miserable. It was already beginning to slacken, with a slack sort of thinness, almost withered, going old before it had ever really lived. She thought of the child she might somehow bear. Was she fit, anyhow?

She slipped into her nightdress, and went to bed, where she sobbed bitterly. And in her bitterness burned a cold indignation against Clifford, and his writings and his talk: against all the men of his sort who defrauded a woman even of her own body.

Unjust! Unjust! The sense of deep physical injustice burned to her very soul.

But in the morning, all the same, she was up at seven, and going downstairs to Clifford. She had to help him in all the intimate things, for he had no man, and refused a woman-servant. The housekeeper's husband, who had known him as a boy, helped him, and did any heavy lifting; but Connie did the personal things, and she did them willingly. It was a demand on her, but she had wanted to do what she could.

So she hardly ever went away from Wragby, and never for more than a day or two; when Mrs. Betts, the housekeeper, attended to Clifford. He, as was inevitable in the course of time, took all the service for granted. It was natural he should.

And yet, deep inside herself, a sense of injustice, of being defrauded, had begun to burn in Connie. The physical sense of injustice is a dangerous feeling, once it is awakened. It must have outlet, or it eats away the one in whom it is aroused. Poor Clifford, he was not to blame. His was the greater misfortune. It was all part of the general catastrophe.

And yet was he not in a way to blame? This lack of warmth, this lack of the simple, warm, physical contact, was he not to blame for that? He was never really warm, nor even kind, only thoughtful, considerate, in a well-bred, cold sort of way! But never warm as a man can be warm to a woman, as even Connie's father could be warm to her, with the warmth of a man who did himself well, and intended to, but who still could comfort a woman with a bit of his masculine glow.

But Clifford was not like that. His whole race was not like that. They were all inwardly hard and separate, and warmth to them was just bad taste. You had to get on without it, and hold your own; which was all very well if you were of the same class and race. Then you could keep yourself cold and be very estimable, and hold your own, and enjoy the satisfaction of holding it. But if you were of another class and another race it wouldn't do; there was no fun merely holding your own, and feeling you belong to the ruling class. What was the point, when even the smartest aristocrats had really nothing positive of their own to hold, and their rule was really a farce, not rule at all? What was the point? It was all cold nonsense.

A sense of rebellion smouldered in Connie. What was the good of it all? What was the good of her sacrifice, her devoting her life to Clifford? What was she serving, after all? A cold spirit of vanity, that had no warm human contacts. Even Clifford's cool and contactless assurance that he belonged to the ruling class didn't prevent his tongue lolling out of his mouth, as he panted after the bitch-goddess. After all, Michaelis was really more dignified in the matter, and far, far more successful. Really, if you looked closely at Clifford, he was a buffoon, and a buffoon is more humiliating than a bounder.

As between the two men, Michaelis really had far more use for her than Clifford had. He had even more need of her. Any good nurse can attend to crippled legs! And as for the heroic effort, Michaelis was a heroic rat, and Clifford was very much of a poodle showing off.

There were people staying in the house, among them Clifford's Aunt Eva, Lady Bennerley. She was a thin woman of sixty, with a red nose, a widow, and still something of a grande dame. She belonged to one of the best families, and had the character to carry it off. Connie liked her, she was so perfectly simple and frank, as far as she intended to be frank, and superficially kind. Inside herself she was a past-mistress in holding her own, and holding other people a little lower. She was not at all a snob: far too sure of herself. She was perfect at the social sport of coolly holding her own, and making other people defer to her.

She was kind to Connie, and tried to worm into her woman's soul with the sharp gimlet of her well-born observations.

'You're quite wonderful, in my opinion,' she said to Connie. 'You've done wonders for Clifford. I never saw any budding genius myself, and there he is, all the rage.' Aunt Eva was quite complacently proud of Clifford's success. Another feather in the family cap! She didn't care a straw about his books, but why should she?

'Oh, I don't think it's my doing,' said Connie.

'It must be! Can't be anybody else's. And it seems to me you don't get enough out of it.'

'How?'

'Look at the way you are shut up here. I said to Clifford: If that child rebels one day you'll have yourself to thank!'

'But Clifford never denies me anything,' said Connie.

'Look here, my dear child,'—and Lady Bennerley laid her thin hand on Connie's arm. 'A woman has to live her life, or live to repent not having lived it. Believe me!' And she took another sip of brandy, which maybe was her form of repentance.

'But I do live my life, don't I?'

'Not in my idea! Clifford should bring you to London, and let you go about. His sort of friends are all right for him, but what are they for you? If I were you I should think it wasn't good enough. You'll let your youth slip by, and you'll spend your old age, and your middle age too, repenting it.'

Her ladyship lapsed into contemplative silence, soothed by the brandy.

But Connie was not keen on going to London, and being steered into the smart world by Lady Bennerley. She didn't feel really smart, it wasn't interesting. And she did feel the peculiar, withering coldness under it all; like the soil of Labrador, which has gay little flowers on its surface, and a foot down is frozen.

Tommy Dukes was at Wragby, and another man, Harry Winterslow, and Jack Strangeways with his wife Olive. The talk was much more desultory than when only the cronies were there, and everybody was a bit bored, for the weather was bad, and there was only billiards, and the pianola to dance to.

Olive was reading a book about the future, when babies would be bred in bottles, and women would be 'immunized'.

'Jolly good thing too!' she said. 'Then a woman can live her own life.' Strangeways wanted children, and she didn't.

'How'd you like to be immunized?' Winterslow asked her, with an ugly smile.

'I hope I am; naturally,' she said. 'Anyhow the future's going to have more sense, and a woman needn't be dragged down by her functions.'

'Perhaps she'll float off into space altogether,' said Dukes.

'I do think sufficient civilization ought to eliminate a lot of the physical disabilities,' said Clifford. 'All the love-business for example, it might just as well go. I suppose it would if we could breed babies in bottles.'

'No!' cried Olive. 'That might leave all the more room for fun.'

'I suppose,' said Lady Bennerley, contemplatively, 'if the love-business went, something else would take its place. Morphia, perhaps. A little morphine in all the air. It would be wonderfully refreshing for everybody.'

'The government releasing ether into the air on Saturdays, for a cheerful weekend!' said Jack. 'Sounds all right, but where should we be by Wednesday?'

'So long as you can forget your body you are happy,' said Lady Bennerley. 'And the moment you begin to be aware of your body, you are wretched. So, if civilization is any good, it has to help us to forget our bodies, and then time passes happily without our knowing it.'

'Help us to get rid of our bodies altogether,' said Winterslow. 'It's quite time man began to improve on his own nature, especially the physical side of it.'

'Imagine if we floated like tobacco smoke,' said Connie.

'It won't happen,' said Dukes. 'Our old show will come flop; our civilization is going to fall. It's going down the bottomless pit, down the chasm. And believe me, the only bridge across the chasm will be the phallus!'

'Oh do! Do be impossible, General!' cried Olive.

'I believe our civilization is going to collapse,' said Aunt Eva.

'And what will come after it?' asked Clifford.

'I haven't the faintest idea, but something, I suppose,' said the elderly lady.

'Connie says people like wisps of smoke, and Olive says immunized women, and babies in bottles, and Dukes says the phallus is the bridge to what comes next. I wonder what it will really be?' said Clifford.

'Oh, don't bother! Let's get on with today,' said Olive. 'Only hurry up with the breeding bottle, and let us poor women off.'

'There might even be real men, in the next phase,' said Tommy. 'Real, intelligent, wholesome men, and wholesome nice women! Wouldn't that be a change, an enormous change from us? We're not men, and the women aren't women. We're only cerebrating make-shifts, mechanical and intellectual experiments. There may even come a civilization of genuine men and women, instead of our little lot of clever-jacks, all at the intelligence-age of seven. It would be even more amazing than men of smoke or babies in bottles.'

'Oh, when people begin to talk about real women, I give up,' said Olive.

'Certainly nothing but the spirit in us is worth having,' said Winterslow.

'Spirits!' said Jack, drinking his whisky and soda.

'Think so? Give me the resurrection of the body!' said Dukes.

'But it'll come, in time, when we've shoved the cerebral stone away a bit, the money and the rest. Then we'll get a democracy of touch, instead of a democracy of pocket.'

Something echoed inside Connie: 'Give me the democracy of touch, the resurrection of the body!' She didn't at all know what it meant, but it comforted her, as meaningless things may do.

Anyhow everything was terribly silly, and she was exasperatedly bored by it all, by Clifford, by Aunt Eva, by Olive and Jack, and Winterslow, and even by Dukes. Talk, talk, talk! What hell it was, the continual rattle of it!

Then, when all the people went, it was no better. She continued plodding on, but exasperation and irritation had got hold of her lower body, she couldn't escape. The days seemed to grind by, with curious painfulness, yet nothing happened. Only she was getting thinner; even the housekeeper noticed it, and asked her about herself. Even Tommy Dukes insisted she was not well, though she said she was all right. Only she began to be afraid of the ghastly white tombstones, that peculiar loathsome whiteness of Carrara marble, detestable as false teeth, which stuck up on the hillside, under Tevershall church, and which she saw with such grim painfulness from the park. The bristling of the hideous false teeth of tombstones on the hill affected her with a grisly kind of horror. She felt the time not far off when she would be buried there, added to the ghastly host under the tombstones and the monuments, in these filthy Midlands.

She needed help, and she knew it: so she wrote a little cri de coeur to her sister, Hilda. 'I'm not well lately, and I don't know what's the matter with me.'

Down posted Hilda from Scotland, where she had taken up her abode. She came in March, alone, driving herself in a nimble two-seater. Up the drive she came, tooting up the incline, then sweeping round the oval of grass, where the two great wild beech trees stood, on the flat in front of the house.

Connie had run out to the steps. Hilda pulled up her car, got out, and kissed her sister.

'But Connie!' she cried. 'Whatever is the matter?'

'Nothing!' said Connie, rather shamefacedly; but she knew how she had suffered in contrast to Hilda. Both sisters had the same rather golden, glowing skin, and soft brown hair, and naturally strong, warm physique. But now Connie was thin and earthy-looking, with a scraggy, yellowish neck, that stuck out of her jumper.

'But you're ill, child!' said Hilda, in the soft, rather breathless voice that both sisters had alike. Hilda was nearly, but not quite, two years older than Connie.

'No, not ill. Perhaps I'm bored,' said Connie a little pathetically.

The light of battle glowed in Hilda's face; she was a woman, soft and still as she seemed, of the old amazon sort, not made to fit with men.

'This wretched place!' she said softly, looking at poor, old, lumbering Wragby with real hate. She looked soft and warm herself, as a ripe pear, and she was an amazon of the real old breed.

She went quietly in to Clifford. He thought how handsome she looked, but also he shrank from her. His wife's family did not have his sort of manners, or his sort of etiquette. He considered them rather outsiders, but once they got inside they made him jump through the hoop.

He sat square and well-groomed in his chair, his hair sleek and blond, and his face fresh, his blue eyes pale, and a little prominent, his expression inscrutable, but well-bred. Hilda thought it sulky and stupid, and he waited. He had an air of aplomb, but Hilda didn't care what he had an air of; she was up in arms, and if he'd been Pope or Emperor it would have been just the same.

'Connie's looking awfully unwell,' she said in her soft voice, fixing him with her beautiful, glowering grey eyes. She looked so maidenly, so did Connie; but he well knew the tone of Scottish obstinacy underneath.

'She's a little thinner,' he said.

'Haven't you done anything about it?'

'Do you think it necessary?' he asked, with his suavest English stiffness, for the two things often go together.

Hilda only glowered at him without replying; repartee was not her forte, nor Connie's; so she glowered, and he was much more uncomfortable than if she had said things.

'I'll take her to a doctor,' said Hilda at length. 'Can you suggest a good one round here?'

'I'm afraid I can't.'

'Then I'll take her to London, where we have a doctor we trust.'

Though boiling with rage, Clifford said nothing.

'I suppose I may as well stay the night,' said Hilda, pulling off her gloves, and I'll drive her to town tomorrow.'

Clifford was yellow at the gills with anger, and at evening the whites of his eyes were a little yellow too. He ran to liver. But Hilda was consistently modest and maidenly.

'You must have a nurse or somebody, to look after you personally. You should really have a manservant,' said Hilda as they sat, with apparent calmness, at coffee after dinner. She spoke in her soft, seemingly gentle way, but Clifford felt she was hitting him on the head with a bludgeon.

'You think so?' he said coldly.

'I'm sure! It's necessary. Either that, or Father and I must take Connie away for some months. This can't go on.'

'What can't go on?'

'Haven't you looked at the child!' asked Hilda, gazing at him full stare. He looked rather like a huge, boiled crayfish at the moment; or so she thought.

'Connie and I will discuss it,' he said.

'I've already discussed it with her,' said Hilda.

Clifford had been long enough in the hands of nurses; he hated them, because they left him no real privacy. And a manservant!... he couldn't stand a man hanging round him. Almost better any woman. But why not Connie?

The two sisters drove off in the morning, Connie looking rather like an Easter lamb, rather small beside Hilda, who held the wheel. Sir Malcolm was away, but the Kensington house was open.

The doctor examined Connie carefully, and asked her all about her life. 'I see your photograph, and Sir Clifford's, in the illustrated papers sometimes. Almost notorieties, aren't you? That's how the quiet little girls grow up, though you're only a quiet little girl even now, in spite of the illustrated papers. No, no! There's nothing organically wrong, but it won't do! It won't do! Tell Sir Clifford he's got to bring you to town, or take you abroad, and amuse you. You've got to be amused, got to! Your vitality is much too low; no reserves, no reserves. The nerves of the heart a bit queer already: oh, yes! Nothing but nerves; I'd put you right in a month at Cannes or Biarritz. But it mustn't go on, mustn't, I tell you, or I won't be answerable for consequences. You're spending your life without renewing it. You've got to be amused, properly, healthily amused. You're spending your vitality without making any. Can't go on, you know. Depression! Avoid depression!'

Hilda set her jaw, and that meant something.

Michaelis heard they were in town, and came running with roses. 'Why, whatever's wrong?' he cried. 'You're a shadow of yourself. Why, I never saw such a change! Why ever didn't you let me know? Come to Nice with me! Come down to Sicily! Go on, come to Sicily with me. It's lovely there just now. You want sun! You want life! Why, you're wasting away! Come away with me! Come to Africa! Oh, hang Sir Clifford! Chuck him, and come along with me. I'll marry you the minute he divorces you. Come along and try a life! God's love! That place Wragby would kill anybody. Beastly place! Foul place! Kill anybody! Come away with me into the sun! It's the sun you want, of course, and a bit of normal life.'

But Connie's heart simply stood still at the thought of abandoning Clifford there and then. She couldn't do it. No... no! She just couldn't. She had to go back to Wragby.

Michaelis was disgusted. Hilda didn't like Michaelis, but she almost preferred him to Clifford. Back went the sisters to the Midlands.

Hilda talked to Clifford, who still had yellow eyeballs when they got back. He, too, in his way, was overwrought; but he had to listen to all Hilda said, to all the doctor had said, not what Michaelis had said, of course, and he sat mum through the ultimatum.

'Here is the address of a good manservant, who was with an invalid patient of the doctor's till he died last month. He is really a good man, and fairly sure to come.'

'But I'm not an invalid, and I will not have a manservant,' said Clifford, poor devil.

'And here are the addresses of two women; I saw one of them, she would do very well; a woman of about fifty, quiet, strong, kind, and in her way cultured...'

Clifford only sulked, and would not answer.

'Very well, Clifford. If we don't settle something by tomorrow, I shall telegraph to Father, and we shall take Connie away.'

'Will Connie go?' asked Clifford.

'She doesn't want to, but she knows she must. Mother died of cancer, brought on by fretting. We're not running any risks.'

So next day Clifford suggested Mrs. Bolton, Tevershall parish nurse. Apparently Mrs. Betts had thought of her. Mrs. Bolton was just retiring from her parish duties to take up private nursing jobs. Clifford had a queer dread of delivering himself into the hands of a stranger, but this Mrs. Bolton had once nursed him through scarlet fever, and he knew her.

The two sisters at once called on Mrs. Bolton, in a newish house in a row, quite select for Tevershall. They found a rather good-looking woman of forty-odd, in a nurse's uniform, with a white collar and apron, just making herself tea in a small, crowded sitting-room.

Mrs. Bolton was most attentive and polite, seemed quite nice, spoke with a bit of a broad slur, but in heavily correct English, and from having bossed the sick colliers for a good many years, had a very good opinion of herself, and a fair amount of assurance. In short, in her tiny way, one of the governing classes in the village, very much respected.

'Yes, Lady Chatterley's not looking at all well! Why, she used to be that bonny, didn't she now? But she's been failing all winter! Oh, it's hard, it is. Poor Sir Clifford! Eh, that war, it's a lot to answer for.'

And Mrs. Bolton would come to Wragby at once, if Dr. Shardlow would let her off. She had another fortnight's parish nursing to do, by rights, but they might get a substitute, you know.

Hilda posted off to Dr. Shardlow, and on the following Sunday Mrs. Bolton drove up in Leiver's cab to Wragby with two trunks. Hilda had talks with her; Mrs. Bolton was ready at any moment to talk. And she seemed so young! The way the passion would flush in her rather pale cheek. She was forty-seven.

Her husband, Ted Bolton, had been killed in the pit, twenty-two years ago, twenty-two years last Christmas, just at Christmas time, leaving her with two children, one a baby in arms. Oh, the baby was married now, Edith, to a young man in Boots Cash Chemists in Sheffield. The other one was a schoolteacher in Chesterfield; she came home weekends, when she wasn't asked out somewhere. Young folks enjoyed themselves nowadays, not like when she, Ivy Bolton, was young.

Ted Bolton was twenty-eight when he was killed in an explosion down the pit. The butty in front shouted to them all to lie down quick, there were four of them. And they all lay down in time, only Ted, and it killed him. Then at the inquiry, on the masters' side they said Ted had been frightened, and trying to run away, and not obeying orders, so it was like his fault really. So the compensation was only three hundred pounds, and they made out as if it was more of a gift than legal compensation, because it was really the man's own fault. And they wouldn't let her have the money down; she wanted to have a little shop. But they said she'd no doubt squander it, perhaps in drink! So she had to draw it thirty shillings a week. Yes, she had to go every Monday morning down to the offices, and stand there a couple of hours waiting her turn; yes, for almost four years she went every Monday. And what could she do with two little children on her hands? But Ted's mother was very good to her. When the baby could toddle she'd keep both the children for the day, while she, Ivy Bolton, went to Sheffield, and attended classes in ambulance, and then the fourth year she even took a nursing course and got qualified. She was determined to be independent and keep her children. So she was assistant at Uthwaite hospital, just a little place, for a while. But when the Company, the Tevershall Colliery Company, really Sir Geoffrey, saw that she could get on by herself, they were very good to her, gave her the parish nursing, and stood by her, she would say that for them. And she'd done it ever since, till now it was getting a bit much for her; she needed something a bit lighter, there was such a lot of traipsing around if you were a district nurse.

'Yes, the Company's been very good to me, I always say it. But I should never forget what they said about Ted, for he was as steady and fearless a chap as ever set foot on the cage, and it was as good as branding him a coward. But there, he was dead, and could say nothing to none of 'em.'

It was a queer mixture of feelings the woman showed as she talked. She liked the colliers, whom she had nursed for so long; but she felt very superior to them. She felt almost upper class; and at the same time a resentment against the ruling class smouldered in her. The masters! In a dispute between masters and men, she was always for the men. But when there was no question of contest, she was pining to be superior, to be one of the upper class. The upper classes fascinated her, appealing to her peculiar English passion for superiority. She was thrilled to come to Wragby; thrilled to talk to Lady Chatterley, my word, different from the common colliers' wives! She said so in so many words. Yet one could see a grudge against the Chatterleys peep out in her; the grudge against the masters.

'Why, yes, of course, it would wear Lady Chatterley out! It's a mercy she had a sister to come and help her. Men don't think, high and low alike, they take what a woman does for them for granted. Oh, I've told the colliers off about it many a time. But it's very hard for Sir Clifford, you know, crippled like that. They were always a haughty family, standoffish in a way, as they've a right to be. But then to be brought down like that! And it's very hard on Lady Chatterley, perhaps harder on her. What she misses! I only had Ted three years, but my word, while I had him I had a husband I could never forget. He was one in a thousand, and jolly as the day. Who'd ever have thought he'd get killed? I don't believe it to this day somehow, I've never believed it, though I washed him with my own hands. But he was never dead for me, he never was. I never took it in.'

This was a new voice in Wragby, very new for Connie to hear; it roused a new ear in her.

For the first week or so, Mrs. Bolton, however, was very quiet at Wragby, her assured, bossy manner left her, and she was nervous. With Clifford she was shy, almost frightened, and silent. He liked that, and soon recovered his self-possession, letting her do things for him without even noticing her.

'She's a useful nonentity!' he said. Connie opened her eyes in wonder, but she did not contradict him. So different are impressions on two different people!

And he soon became rather superb, somewhat lordly with the nurse. She had rather expected it, and he played up without knowing. So susceptible we are to what is expected of us! The colliers had been so like children, talking to her, and telling her what hurt them, while she bandaged them, or nursed them. They had always made her feel so grand, almost super-human in her administrations. Now Clifford made her feel small, and like a servant, and she accepted it without a word, adjusting herself to the upper classes.

She came very mute, with her long, handsome face, and downcast eyes, to administer to him. And she said very humbly: 'Shall I do this now, Sir Clifford? Shall I do that?'

'No, leave it for a time. I'll have it done later.'

'Very well, Sir Clifford.'

'Come in again in half an hour.'

'Very well, Sir Clifford.'

'And just take those old papers out, will you?'

'Very well, Sir Clifford.'

She went softly, and in half an hour she came softly again. She was bullied, but she didn't mind. She was experiencing the upper classes. She neither resented nor disliked Clifford; he was just part of a phenomenon, the phenomenon of the high-class folks, so far unknown to her, but now to be known. She felt more at home with Lady Chatterley, and after all it's the mistress of the house that matters most.

Mrs. Bolton helped Clifford to bed at night, and slept across the passage from his room, and came if he rang for her in the night. She also helped him in the morning, and soon valeted him completely, even shaving him, in her soft, tentative woman's way. She was very good and competent, and she soon knew how to have him in her power. He wasn't so very different from the colliers after all, when you lathered his chin, and softly rubbed the bristles. The standoffishness and the lack of frankness didn't bother her; she was having a new experience.

Clifford, however, inside himself, never quite forgave Connie for giving up her personal care of him to a strange hired woman. It killed, he said to himself, the real flower of the intimacy between him and her. But Connie didn't mind that. The fine flower of their intimacy was to her rather like an orchid, a bulb stuck parasitic on her tree of life, and producing, to her eyes, a rather shabby flower.

Now she had more time to herself she could softly play the piano, up in her room, and sing: 'Touch not the nettle, for the bonds of love are ill to loose.' She had not realized till lately how ill to loose they were, these bonds of love. But thank Heaven she had loosened them! She was so glad to be alone, not always to have to talk to him. When he was alone he tapped-tapped-tapped on a typewriter, to infinity. But when he was not 'working', and she was there, he talked, always talked; infinite small analysis of people and motives, and results, characters and personalities, till now she had had enough. For years she had loved it, until she had enough, and then suddenly it was too much. She was thankful to be alone.

It was as if thousands and thousands of little roots and threads of consciousness in him and her had grown together into a tangled mass, till they could crowd no more, and the plant was dying. Now quietly, subtly, she was unravelling the tangle of his consciousness and hers, breaking the threads gently, one by one, with patience and impatience to get clear. But the bonds of such love are more ill to loose even than most bonds; though Mrs. Bolton's coming had been a great help.

But he still wanted the old intimate evenings of talk with Connie: talk or reading aloud. But now she could arrange that Mrs. Bolton should come at ten to disturb them. At ten o'clock Connie could go upstairs and be alone. Clifford was in good hands with Mrs. Bolton.

Mrs. Bolton ate with Mrs. Betts in the housekeeper's room, since they were all agreeable. And it was curious how much closer the servants' quarters seemed to have come; right up to the doors of Clifford's study, when before they were so remote. For Mrs. Betts would sometimes sit in Mrs. Bolton's room, and Connie heard their lowered voices, and felt somehow the strong, other vibration of the working people almost invading the sitting-room, when she and Clifford were alone. So changed was Wragby merely by Mrs. Bolton's coming.

And Connie felt herself released, in another world, she felt she breathed differently. But still she was afraid of how many of her roots, perhaps mortal ones, were tangled with Clifford's. Yet still, she breathed freer, a new phase was going to begin in her life.

Chapter ❽

Mrs. Bolton also kept a cherishing eye on Connie, feeling she must extend to her her female and professional protection. She was always urging her ladyship to walk out, to drive to Uthwaite, to be in the air. For Connie had got into the habit of sitting still by the fire, pretending to read, or to sew feebly, and hardly going out at all.

It was a blowy day soon after Hilda had gone, that Mrs. Bolton said: 'Now why don't you go for a walk through the wood, and look at the daffs behind the keeper's cottage? They're the prettiest sight you'd see in a day's march. And you could put some in your room; wild daffs are always so cheerful-looking, aren't they?'

Connie took it in good part, even daffs for daffodils. Wild daffodils! After all, one could not stew in one's own juice. The spring came back... 'Seasons return, but not to me returns Day, or the sweet approach of Ev'n or Morn.'

And the keeper, his thin, white body, like a lonely pistil of an invisible flower! She had forgotten him in her unspeakable depression. But now something roused... 'Pale beyond porch and portal'... the thing to do was to pass the porches and the portals.

She was stronger, she could walk better, and in the wood the wind would not be so tiring as it was across the park, flattening against her. She wanted to forget, to forget the world, and all the dreadful, carrion-bodied people. 'Ye must be born again! I believe in the resurrection of the body! Except a grain of wheat fall into the earth and die, it shall by no means bring forth. When the crocus cometh forth I too will emerge and see the sun!' In the wind of March endless phrases swept through her consciousness.

Little gusts of sunshine blew, strangely bright, and lit up the celandines at the wood's edge, under the hazel-rods, they spangled out bright and yellow. And the wood was still, stiller, but yet gusty with crossing sun. The first windflowers were out, and all the wood seemed pale with the pallor of endless little anemones, sprinkling the shaken floor. 'The world has grown pale with thy breath.' But it was the breath of Persephone, this time; she was out of hell on a cold morning. Cold breaths of wind came, and overhead there was an anger of entangled wind caught among the twigs. It, too, was caught and trying to tear itself free, the wind, like Absalom. How cold the anemones looked, bobbing their naked white shoulders over crinoline skirts of green. But they stood it. A few first bleached little primroses too, by the path, and yellow buds unfolding themselves.

The roaring and swaying was overhead, only cold currents came down below. Connie was strangely excited in the wood, and the colour flew in her cheeks, and burned blue in her eyes. She walked ploddingly, picking a few primroses and the first violets, that smelled sweet and cold, sweet and cold. And she drifted on without knowing where she was.

Till she came to the clearing, at the end of the wood, and saw the green-stained stone cottage, looking almost rosy, like the flesh underneath a mushroom, its stone warmed in a burst of sun. And there was a sparkle of yellow jasmine by the door; the closed door. But no sound; no smoke from the chimney; no dog barking.

She went quietly round to the back, where the bank rose up; she had an excuse, to see the daffodils.

And they were there, the short-stemmed flowers, rustling and fluttering and shivering, so bright and alive, but with nowhere to hide their faces, as they turned them away from the wind.

They shook their bright, sunny little rags in bouts of distress. But perhaps they liked it really; perhaps they really liked the tossing.

Constance sat down with her back to a young pine-tree, that swayed against her with curious life, elastic, and powerful, rising up. The erect, alive thing, with its top in the sun! And she watched the daffodils turn golden, in a burst of sun that was warm on her hands and lap. Even she caught the faint, tarry scent of the flowers. And then, being so still and alone, she seemed to get into the current of her own proper destiny. She had been fastened by a rope, and jagging and snarring like a boat at its moorings; now she was loose and adrift.

The sunshine gave way to chill; the daffodils were in shadow, dipping silently. So they would dip through the day and the long cold night. So strong in their frailty!

She rose, a little stiff, took a few daffodils, and went down. She hated breaking the flowers, but she wanted just one or two to go with her. She would have to go back to Wragby and its walls, and now she hated it, especially its thick walls. Walls! Always walls! Yet one needed them in this wind.

When she got home Clifford asked her:

'Where did you go?'

'Right across the wood! Look, aren't the little daffodils adorable? To think they should come out of the earth!'

'Just as much out of air and sunshine,' he said.

'But modelled in the earth,' she retorted, with a prompt contradiction, that surprised her a little.

The next afternoon she went to the wood again. She followed the broad riding that swerved round and up through the larches to a spring called John's Well. It was cold on this hillside, and not a flower in the darkness of larches. But the icy little spring softly pressed upwards from its tiny well-bed of pure, reddish-white pebbles. How icy and clear it was! Brilliant! The new keeper had no doubt put in fresh pebbles. She heard the faint tinkle of water, as the tiny overflow trickled over and downhill. Even above the hissing boom of the larchwood, that spread its bristling, leafless, wolfish darkness on the downslope, she heard the tinkle as of tiny waterbells.

This place was a little sinister, cold, damp. Yet the well must have been a drinking-place for hundreds of years. Now no more. Its tiny cleared space was lush and cold and dismal.

She rose and went slowly towards home. As she went she heard a faint tapping away on the right, and stood still to listen. Was it hammering, or a woodpecker? It was surely hammering.

She walked on, listening. And then she noticed a narrow track between young firtrees, a track that seemed to lead nowhere. But she felt it had been used. She turned down it adventurously, between the thick young firs, which gave way soon to the old oak wood. She followed the track, and the hammering grew nearer, in the silence of the windy wood, for trees make a silence even in their noise of wind.

She saw a secret little clearing, and a secret little hut made of rustic poles. And she had never been here before! She realized it was the quiet place where the growing pheasants were reared; the keeper in his shirt-sleeves was kneeling, hammering. The dog trotted forward with a short, sharp bark, and the keeper lifted his face suddenly and saw her. He had a startled look in his eyes.

He straightened himself and saluted, watching her in silence, as she came forward with weakening limbs. He resented the intrusion; he cherished his solitude as his only and last freedom in life.

'I wondered what the hammering was,' she said, feeling weak and breathless, and a little afraid of him, as he looked so straight at her.

'Ah'm gettin' th' coops ready for th' young bods,' he said, in broad vernacular.

She did not know what to say, and she felt weak.

'I should like to sit down a bit,' she said.

'Come and sit 'ere i' th' 'ut,' he said, going in front of her to the hut, pushing aside some timber and stuff, and drawing out a rustic chair, made of hazel sticks.

'Am Ah t' light yer a little fire?' he asked, with the curious naiveté of the dialect.

'Oh, don't bother,' she replied.

But he looked at her hands; they were rather blue. So he quickly took some larch twigs to the little brick fire-place in the corner, and in a moment the yellow flame was running up the chimney. He made a place by the brick hearth.

'Sit 'ere then a bit, and warm yer,' he said.

She obeyed him. He had that curious kind of protective authority she obeyed at once. So she sat and warmed her hands at the blaze, and dropped logs on the fire, whilst outside he was hammering again. She did not really want to sit, poked in a corner by the fire; she would rather have watched from the door, but she was being looked after, so she had to submit.

The hut was quite cosy, panelled with unvarnished deal, having a little rustic table and stool beside her chair, and a carpenter's bench, then a big box, tools, new boards, nails; and many things hung from pegs: axe, hatchet, traps, things in sacks, his coat. It had no window, the light came in through the open door. It was a jumble, but also it was a sort of little sanctuary.

She listened to the tapping of the man's hammer; it was not so happy. He was oppressed. Here was a trespass on his privacy, and a dangerous one! A woman! He had reached the point where all he wanted on earth was to be alone. And yet he was powerless to preserve his privacy; he was a hired man, and these people were his masters.

Especially he did not want to come into contact with a woman again. He feared it; for he had a big wound from old contacts. He felt if he could not be alone, and if he could not be left alone, he would die. His recoil away from the outer world was complete; his last refuge was this wood; to hide himself there!

Connie grew warm by the fire, which she had made too big: then she grew hot. She went and sat on the stool in the doorway, watching the man at work. He seemed not to notice her, but he knew. Yet he worked on, as if absorbedly, and his brown dog sat on her tail near him, and surveyed the untrustworthy world.

Slender, quiet and quick, the man finished the coop he was making, turned it over, tried the sliding door, then set it aside. Then he rose, went for an old coop, and took it to the chopping log where he was working. Crouching, he tried the bars; some broke in his hands; he began to draw the nails. Then he turned the coop over and deliberated, and he gave absolutely no sign of awareness of the woman's presence.

So Connie watched him fixedly. And the same solitary aloneness she had seen in him naked, she now saw in him clothed: solitary, and intent, like an animal that works alone, but also brooding, like a soul that recoils away, away from all human contact. Silently, patiently, he was recoiling away from her even now. It was the stillness, and the timeless sort of patience, in a man impatient and passionate, that touched Connie's womb. She saw it in his bent head, the quick quiet hands, the crouching of his slender, sensitive loins; something patient and withdrawn. She felt his experience had been deeper and wider than her own; much deeper and wider, and perhaps more deadly. And this relieved her of herself; she felt almost irresponsible.

So she sat in the doorway of the hut in a dream, utterly unaware of time and of particular circumstances. She was so drifted away that he glanced up at her quickly, and saw the utterly still, waiting look on her face. To him it was a look of waiting. And a little thin tongue of fire suddenly flickered in his loins, at the root of his back, and he groaned in spirit. He dreaded with a repulsion almost of death, any further close human contact. He wished above all things she would go away, and leave him to his own privacy. He dreaded her will, her female will, and her modern female insistency. And above all he dreaded her cool, upper-class impudence of having her own way. For after all he was only a hired man. He hated her presence there.

Connie came to herself with sudden uneasiness. She rose. The afternoon was turning to evening, yet she could not go away. She went over to the man, who stood up at attention, his worn face stiff and blank, his eyes watching her.

'It is so nice here, so restful,' she said. 'I have never been here before.'

'No?'

'I think I shall come and sit here sometimes.'

'Yes?'

'Do you lock the hut when you're not here?'

'Yes, your Ladyship.'

'Do you think I could have a key too, so that I could sit here sometimes? Are there two keys?'

'Not as Ah know on, ther' isna.'

He had lapsed into the vernacular. Connie hesitated; he was putting up an opposition. Was it his hut, after all?

'Couldn't we get another key?' she asked in her soft voice, that underneath had the ring of a woman determined to get her way.

'Another!' he said, glancing at her with a flash of anger, touched with derision.

'Yes, a duplicate,' she said, flushing.

''Appen Sir Clifford 'ud know,' he said, putting her off.

'Yes!' she said, 'He might have another. Otherwise we could have one made from the one you have. It would only take a day or so, I suppose. You could spare your key for so long.'

'Ah canna tell yer, m' Lady! Ah know nob'dy as ma'es keys round'ere.'

Connie suddenly flushed with anger.

'Very well!' she said. 'I'll see to it.'

'All right, your Ladyship.'

Their eyes met. His had a cold, ugly look of dislike and contempt, and indifference to what would happen. Hers were hot with rebuff.

But her heart sank, she saw how utterly he disliked her, when she went against him. And she saw him in a sort of desperation.

'Good afternoon!'

'Afternoon, my Lady!' He saluted and turned abruptly away. She had wakened the sleeping dogs of old voracious anger in him, anger against the self-willed female. And he was powerless, powerless. He knew it!

And she was angry against the self-willed male. A servant too! She walked sullenly home.

She found Mrs. Bolton under the great beech tree on the knoll, looking for her.

'I just wondered if you'd be coming, my Lady,' the woman said brightly.

'Am I late?' asked Connie.

'Oh... only Sir Clifford was waiting for his tea.'

'Why didn't you make it then?'

'Oh, I don't think it's hardly my place. I don't think Sir Clifford would like it at all, my Lady.'

'I don't see why not,' said Connie.

She went indoors to Clifford's study, where the old brass kettle was simmering on the tray.

'Am I late, Clifford?' she said, putting down the few flowers and taking up the tea-caddy, as she stood before the tray in her hat and scarf. 'I'm sorry! Why didn't you let Mrs. Bolton make the tea?'

'I didn't think of it,' he said ironically. 'I don't quite see her presiding at the tea-table.'

'Oh, there's nothing sacrosanct about a silver teapot,' said Connie.

He glanced up at her curiously.

'What did you do all afternoon?' he said.

'Walked and sat in a sheltered place. Do you know there are still berries on the big holly tree?'

She took off her scarf, but not her hat, and sat down to make tea. The toast would certainly be leathery. She put the tea-cosy over the teapot, and rose to get a little glass for her violets. The poor flowers hung over, limp on their stalks.

'They'll revive again!' she said, putting them before him in their glass for him to smell.

'Sweeter than the lids of Juno's eyes,' he quoted.

'I don't see a bit of connexion with the actual violets,' she said. 'The Elizabethans are rather upholstered.'

She poured him his tea.

'Do you think there is a second key to that little hut not far from John's Well, where the pheasants are reared?' she said.

'There may be. Why?'

'I happened to find it today—and I'd never seen it before. I think it's a darling place. I could sit there sometimes, couldn't I?'

'Was Mellors there?'

'Yes! That's how I found it: his hammering. He didn't seem to like my intruding at all. In fact he was almost rude when I asked about a second key.'

'What did he say?'

'Oh, nothing: just his manner; and he said he knew nothing about keys.'

'There may be one in father's study. Betts knows them all, they're all there. I'll get him to look.'

'Oh do!' she said.

'So Mellors was almost rude?'

'Oh, nothing, really! But I don't think he wanted me to have the freedom of the castle, quite.'

'I don't suppose he did.'

'Still, I don't see why he should mind. It's not his home, after all! It's not his private abode. I don't see why I shouldn't sit there if I want to.'

'Quite!' said Clifford. 'He thinks too much of himself, that man.'

'Do you think he does?'

'Oh, decidedly! He thinks he's something exceptional. You know he had a wife he didn't get on with, so he joined up in 1915 and was sent to India, I believe. Anyhow he was blacksmith to the cavalry in Egypt for a time; always was connected with horses, a clever fellow that way. Then some Indian colonel took a fancy to him, and he was made a lieutenant. Yes, they gave him a commission. I believe he went back to India with his colonel, and up to the north-west frontier. He was ill; he has a pension. He didn't come out of the army till last year, I believe, and then, naturally, it isn't easy for a man like that to get back to his own level. He's bound to flounder. But he does his duty all right, as far as I'm concerned. Only I'm not having any of the Lieutenant Mellors touch.'

'How could they make him an officer when he speaks broad Derbyshire?'

'He doesn't... except by fits and starts. He can speak perfectly well, for him. I suppose he has an idea if he's come down to the ranks again, he'd better speak as the ranks speak.'

'Why didn't you tell me about him before?'

'Oh, I've no patience with these romances. They're the ruin of all order. It's a thousand pities they ever happened.'

Connie was inclined to agree. What was the good of discontented people who fitted in nowhere?

In the spell of fine weather Clifford, too, decided to go to the wood. The wind was cold, but not so tiresome, and the sunshine was like life itself, warm and full.

'It's amazing,' said Connie, 'how different one feels when there's a really fresh fine day. Usually one feels the very air is half dead. People are killing the very air.'

'Do you think people are doing it?' he asked.

'I do. The steam of so much boredom, and discontent and anger out of all the people, just kills the vitality in the air. I'm sure of it.'

'Perhaps some condition of the atmosphere lowers the vitality of the people?' he said.

'No, it's man that poisons the universe,' she asserted.

'Fouls his own nest,' remarked Clifford.

The chair puffed on. In the hazel copse catkins were hanging pale gold, and in sunny places the wood-anemones were wide open, as if exclaiming with the joy of life, just as good as in past days, when people could exclaim along with them. They had a faint scent of apple-blossom. Connie gathered a few for Clifford.

He took them and looked at them curiously.

'Thou still unravished bride of quietness,' he quoted. 'It seems to fit flowers so much better than Greek vases.'

'Ravished is such a horrid word!' she said. 'It's only people who ravish things.'

'Oh, I don't know... snails and things,' he said.

'Even snails only eat them, and bees don't ravish.'

She was angry with him, turning everything into words. Violets were Juno's eyelids, and windflowers were unravished brides. How she hated words, always coming between her and life: they did the ravishing, if anything did: ready-made words and phrases, sucking all the life-sap out of living things.

The walk with Clifford was not quite a success. Between him and Connie there was a tension that each pretended not to notice, but there it was. Suddenly, with all the force of her female instinct, she was shoving him off. She wanted to be clear of him, and especially of his consciousness, his words, his obsession with himself, his endless treadmill obsession with himself, and his own words.

The weather came rainy again. But after a day or two she went out in the rain, and she went to the wood. And once there, she went towards the hut. It was raining, but not so cold, and the wood felt so silent and remote, inaccessible in the dusk of rain.

She came to the clearing. No one there! The hut was locked. But she sat on the log doorstep, under the rustic porch, and snuggled into her own warmth. So she sat, looking at the rain, listening to the many noiseless noises of it, and to the strange soughings of wind in upper branches, when there seemed to be no wind. Old oak trees stood around, grey, powerful trunks, rain-blackened, round and vital, throwing off reckless limbs. The ground was fairly free of undergrowth, the anemones sprinkled, there was a bush or two, elder, or guelder-rose, and a purplish tangle of bramble: the old russet of bracken almost vanished under green anemone ruffs. Perhaps this was one of the unravished places. Unravished! The whole world was ravished.

Some things can't be ravished. You can't ravish a tin of sardines. And so many women are like that; and men. But the earth...!

The rain was abating. It was hardly making darkness among the oaks any more. Connie wanted to go; yet she sat on. But she was getting cold; yet the overwhelming inertia of her inner resentment kept her there as if paralysed.

Ravished! How ravished one could be without ever being touched. Ravished by dead words become obscene, and dead ideas become obsessions.

A wet brown dog came running and did not bark, lifting a wet feather of a tail. The man followed in a wet black oilskin jacket, like a chauffeur, and face flushed a little. She felt him recoil in his quick walk, when he saw her. She stood up in the handbreadth of dryness under the rustic porch. He saluted without speaking, coming slowly near. She began to withdraw.

'I'm just going,' she said.

'Was yer waitin' to get in?' he asked, looking at the hut, not at her.

'No, I only sat a few minutes in the shelter,' she said, with quiet dignity.

He looked at her. She looked cold.

'Sir Clifford 'adn't got no other key, then?' he asked.

'No, but it doesn't matter. I can sit perfectly dry under this porch. Good afternoon!' She hated the excess of vernacular in his speech.

He watched her closely, as she was moving away. Then he hitched up his jacket, and put his hand in his breeches pocket, taking out the key of the hut.

''Appen yer'd better'ave this key, an' Ah min fend for t' bods some other road.'

She looked at him.

'What do you mean?' she asked.

'I mean as 'appen Ah can find anuther pleece as'll du for rearin' th' pheasants. If yer want ter be 'ere, yo'll non want me messin' abaht a' th' time.'

She looked at him, getting his meaning through the fog of the dialect.

'Why don't you speak ordinary English?' she said coldly.

'Me! Ah thowt it wor' ordinary.'

She was silent for a few moments in anger.

'So if yer want t' key, yer'd better ta'e it. Or 'appen Ah'd better gi'e 't yer termorrer, an' clear all t' stuff aht fust. Would that du for yer?'

She became more angry.

'I didn't want your key,' she said. 'I don't want you to clear anything out at all. I don't in the least want to turn you out of your hut, thank you! I only wanted to be able to sit here sometimes, like today. But I can sit perfectly well under the porch, so please say no more about it.'

He looked at her again, with his wicked blue eyes.

'Why,' he began, in the broad slow dialect. 'Your Ladyship's as welcome as Christmas ter th' hut an' th' key an' iverythink as is. On'y this time o' th' year ther's bods ter set, an' Ah've got ter be potterin' abaht a good bit, seein' after 'em, an' a'. Winter time Ah ned 'ardly come nigh th' pleece. But what wi' spring, an' Sir Clifford wantin' ter start th' pheasants... An' your Ladyship'd non want me tinkerin' around an' about when she was 'ere, all the time.'

She listened with a dim kind of amazement.

'Why should I mind your being here?' she asked.

He looked at her curiously.

'T'nuisance on me!' he said briefly, but significantly. She flushed. 'Very well!' she said finally. 'I won't trouble you. But I don't think I should have minded at all sitting and seeing you look after the birds. I should have liked it. But since you think it interferes with you, I won't disturb you, don't be afraid. You are Sir Clifford's keeper, not mine.'

The phrase sounded queer, she didn't know why. But she let it pass.

'Nay, your Ladyship. It's your Ladyship's own 'ut. It's as your Ladyship likes an' pleases, every time. Yer can turn me off at a wik's notice. It wor only...'

'Only what?' she asked, baffled.

He pushed back his hat in an odd comic way.

'On'y as 'appen yo'd like the place ter yersen, when yer did come, an' not me messin' abaht.'

'But why?' she said, angry. 'Aren't you a civilized human being? Do you think I ought to be afraid of you? Why should I take any notice of you and your being here or not? Why is it important?'

He looked at her, all his face glimmering with wicked laughter.

'It's not, your Ladyship. Not in the very least,' he said.

'Well, why then?' she asked.

'Shall I get your Ladyship another key then?'

'No thank you! I don't want it.'

'Ah'll get it anyhow. We'd best 'ave two keys ter th' place.'

'And I consider you are insolent,' said Connie, with her colour up, panting a little.

'Nay, nay!' he said quickly. 'Dunna yer say that! Nay, nay! I niver meant nuthink. Ah on'y thought as if yo' come 'ere, Ah s'd 'ave ter clear out, an' it'd mean a lot of work, settin' up somewheres else. But if your Ladyship isn't going ter take no notice o' me, then... it's Sir Clifford's 'ut, an' everythink is as your Ladyship likes, everythink is as your Ladyship likes an' pleases, barrin' yer take no notice o' me, doin' th' bits of jobs as Ah've got ter do.'

Connie went away completely bewildered. She was not sure whether she had been insulted and mortally offended, or not. Perhaps the man really only meant what he said; that he thought she would expect him to keep away. As if she would dream of it! And as if he could possibly be so important, he and his stupid presence.

She went home in confusion, not knowing what she thought or felt.

Chapter ❾

Connie was surprised at her own feeling of aversion from Clifford. What is more, she felt she had always really disliked him. Not hate: there was no passion in it. But a profound physical dislike. Almost, it seemed to her, she had married him because she disliked him, in a secret, physical sort of way. But of course, she had married him really because in a mental way he attracted her and excited her. He had seemed, in some way, her master, beyond her.

Now the mental excitement had worn itself out and collapsed, and she was aware only of the physical aversion. It rose up in her from her depths: and she realized how it had been eating her life away.

She felt weak and utterly forlorn. She wished some help would come from outside. But in the whole world there was no help. Society was terrible because it was insane. Civilized society is insane. Money and so-called love are its two great manias; money a long way first. The individual asserts himself in his disconnected insanity in these two modes: money and love. Look at Michaelis! His life and activity were just insanity. His love was a sort of insanity.

And Clifford the same. All that talk! All that writing! All that wild struggling to push himself forward! It was just insanity. And it was getting worse, really maniacal.

Connie felt washed-out with fear. But at least, Clifford was shifting his grip from her on to Mrs. Bolton. He did not know it. Like many insane people, his insanity might be measured by the things he was not aware of; the great desert tracts in his consciousness.

Mrs. Bolton was admirable in many ways. But she had that queer sort of bossiness, endless assertion of her own will, which is one of the signs of insanity in modern woman. She thought she was utterly subservient and living for others. Clifford fascinated her because he always, or so often, frustrated her will, as if by a finer instinct. He had a finer, subtler will of self-assertion than herself. This was his charm for her.

Perhaps that had been his charm, too, for Connie.

'It's a lovely day, today!' Mrs. Bolton would say in her caressive, persuasive voice. 'I should think you'd enjoy a little run in your chair today, the sun's just lovely.'

'Yes? Will you give me that book—there, that yellow one. And I think I'll have those hyacinths taken out.'

'Why, they're so beautiful!' She pronounced it with the 'y' sound: be-yutiful! 'And the scent is simply gorgeous.'

'The scent is what I object to,' he said. 'It's a little funereal.'

'Do you think so!' she exclaimed in surprise, just a little offended, but impressed. And she carried the hyacinths out of the room, impressed by his higher fastidiousness.

'Shall I shave you this morning, or would you rather do it yourself?' Always the same soft, caressive, subservient, yet managing voice.

'I don't know. Do you mind waiting a while. I'll ring when I'm ready.'

'Very good, Sir Clifford!' she replied, so soft and submissive, withdrawing quietly. But every rebuff stored up new energy of will in her.

When he rang, after a time, she would appear at once. And then he would say:

'I think I'd rather you shaved me this morning.'

Her heart gave a little thrill, and she replied with extra softness:

'Very good, Sir Clifford!'

She was very deft, with a soft, lingering touch, a little slow. At first he had resented the infinitely soft touch of her fingers on his face. But now he liked it, with a growing voluptuousness. He let her shave him nearly every day: her face near his, her eyes so very concentrated, watching that she did it right. And gradually her fingertips knew his cheeks and lips, his jaw and chin and throat perfectly. He was well-fed and well-liking, his face and throat were handsome enough, and he was a gentleman.

She was handsome too, pale, her face rather long and absolutely still, her eyes bright, but revealing nothing. Gradually, with infinite softness, almost with love, she was getting him by the throat, and he was yielding to her.

She now did almost everything for him, and he felt more at home with her, less ashamed of accepting her menial offices, than with Connie. She liked handling him. She loved having his body in her charge, absolutely, to the last menial offices. She said to Connie one day: 'All men are babies, when you come to the bottom of them. Why, I've handled some of the toughest customers as ever went down Tevershall pit. But let anything ail them so that you have to do for them, and they're babies, just big babies. Oh, there's not much difference in men!'

At first Mrs. Bolton had thought there really was something different in a gentleman, a real gentleman, like Sir Clifford. So Clifford had got a good start of her. But gradually, as she came to the bottom of him, to use her own term, she found he was like the rest, a baby grown to man's proportions: but a baby with a queer temper and a fine manner and power in its control, and all sorts of odd knowledge that she had never dreamed of, with which he could still bully her.

Connie was sometimes tempted to say to him:

'For God's sake, don't sink so horribly into the hands of that woman!' But she found she didn't care for him enough to say it, in the long run.

It was still their habit to spend the evening together, till ten o'clock. Then they would talk, or read together, or go over his manuscript. But the thrill had gone out of it. She was bored by his manuscripts. But she still dutifully typed them out for him. But in time Mrs. Bolton would do even that.

For Connie had suggested to Mrs. Bolton that she should learn to use a typewriter. And Mrs. Bolton, always ready, had begun at once, and practised assiduously. So now Clifford would sometimes dictate a letter to her, and she would take it down rather slowly, but correctly. And he was very patient, spelling for her the difficult words, or the occasional phrases in French. She was so thrilled, it was almost a pleasure to instruct her.

Now Connie would sometimes plead a headache as an excuse for going up to her room after dinner.

'Perhaps Mrs. Bolton will play piquet with you,' she said to Clifford.

'Oh, I shall be perfectly all right. You go to your own room and rest, darling.'

But no sooner had she gone, than he rang for Mrs. Bolton, and asked her to take a hand at piquet or bezique, or even chess. He had taught her all these games. And Connie found it curiously objectionable to see Mrs. Bolton, flushed and tremulous like a little girl, touching her queen or her knight with uncertain fingers, then drawing away again. And Clifford, faintly smiling with a half-teasing superiority,saying to her:

'You must say j'adoube!'

She looked up at him with bright, startled eyes, then murmured shyly, obediently:

'J'adoube!'

Yes, he was educating her. And he enjoyed it, it gave him a sense of power. And she was thrilled. She was coming bit by bit into possession of all that the gentry knew, all that made them upper class: apart from the money. That thrilled her. And at the same time, she was making him want to have her there with him. It was a subtle deep flattery to him, her genuine thrill.

To Connie, Clifford seemed to be coming out in his true colours: a little vulgar, a little common, and uninspired; rather fat. Ivy Bolton's tricks and humble bossiness were also only too transparent. But Connie did wonder at the genuine thrill which the woman got out of Clifford. To say she was in love with him would be putting it wrongly. She was thrilled by her contact with a man of the upper class, this titled gentleman, this author who could write books and poems, and whose photograph appeared in the illustrated newspapers. She was thrilled to a weird passion. And his 'educating' her roused in her a passion of excitement and response much deeper than any love affair could have done. In truth, the very fact that there could be no love affair left her free to thrill to her very marrow with this other passion, the peculiar passion of knowing, knowing as he knew.

There was no mistake that the woman was in some way in love with him: whatever force we give to the word love. She looked so handsome and so young, and her grey eyes were sometimes marvellous. At the same time, there was a lurking soft satisfaction about her, even of triumph, and private satisfaction. Ugh, that private satisfaction. How Connie loathed it!

But no wonder Clifford was caught by the woman! She absolutely adored him, in her persistent fashion, and put herself absolutely at his service, for him to use as he liked. No wonder he was flattered!

Connie heard long conversations going on between the two. Or rather, it was mostly Mrs. Bolton talking. She had unloosed to him the stream of gossip about Tevershall village. It was more than gossip. It was Mrs. Gaskell and George Eliot and Miss Mitford all rolled in one, with a great deal more, that these women left out. Once started, Mrs. Bolton was better than any book, about the lives of the people. She knew them all so intimately, and had such a peculiar, flamy zest in all their affairs, it was wonderful, if just a trifle humiliating to listen to her. At first she had not ventured to 'talk Tevershall', as she called it, to Clifford. But once started, it went on. Clifford was listening for 'material', and he found it in plenty. Connie realized that his so-called genius was just this: a perspicuous talent for personal gossip, clever and apparently detached. Mrs. Bolton, of course, was very warm when she 'talked Tevershall'. Carried away, in fact. And it was marvellous, the things that happened and that she knew about. She would have run to dozens of volumes.

Connie was fascinated, listening to her. But afterwards always a little ashamed. She ought not to listen with this queer rabid curiosity. After all, one may hear the most private affairs of other people, but only in a spirit of respect for the struggling, battered thing which any human soul is, and in a spirit of fine, discriminative sympathy. For even satire is a form of sympathy. It is the way our sympathy flows and recoils that really determines our lives. And here lies the vast importance of the novel, properly handled. It can inform and lead into new places the flow of our sympathetic consciousness, and it can lead our sympathy away in recoil from things gone dead. Therefore, the novel, properly handled, can reveal the most secret places of life: for it is in the passional secret places of life, above all, that the tide of sensitive awareness needs to ebb and flow, cleansing and freshening.

But the novel, like gossip, can also excite spurious sympathies and recoils, mechanical and deadening to the psyche. The novel can glorify the most corrupt feelings, so long as they are conventionally 'pure'. Then the novel, like gossip, becomes at last vicious, and, like gossip, all the more vicious because it is always ostensibly on the side of the angels. Mrs. Bolton's gossip was always on the side of the angels. 'And he was such a bad fellow, and she was such a nice woman.' Whereas, as Connie could see even from Mrs. Bolton's gossip, the woman had been merely a mealy-mouthed sort, and the man angrily honest. But angry honesty made a 'bad man' of him, and mealy-mouthedness made a 'nice woman' of her, in the vicious, conventional channelling of sympathy by Mrs. Bolton.

For this reason, the gossip was humiliating. And for the same reason, most novels, especially popular ones, are humiliating too. The public responds now only to an appeal to its vices.

Nevertheless, one got a new vision of Tevershall village from Mrs. Bolton's talk. A terrible, seething welter of ugly life it seemed: not at all the flat drabness it looked from outside. Clifford of course knew by sight most of the people mentioned, Connie knew only one or two. But it sounded really more like a Central African jungle than an English village.

'I suppose you heard as Miss Allsopp was married last week! Would you ever! Miss Allsopp, old James' daughter, the boot-and-shoe Allsopp. You know they built a house up at Pye Croft. The old man died last year from a fall; eighty-three, he was, an' nimble as a lad. An' then he slipped on Bestwood Hill, on a slide as the lads 'ad made last winter, an' broke his thigh, and that finished him, poor old man, it did seem a shame. Well, he left all his money to Tattie: didn't leave the boys a penny. An' Tattie, I know, is five years—yes, she's fifty-three last autumn. And you know they were such Chapel people, my word! She taught Sunday School for thirty years, till her father died. And then she started carrying on with a fellow from Kinbrook, I don't know if you know him, an oldish fellow with a red nose, rather dandified, Willcock, 'as works in Harrison's woodyard. Well he's sixty-five, if he's a day, yet you'd have thought they were a pair of young turtle-doves, to see them, arm in arm, and kissing at the gate: yes, an' she sitting on his knee right in the bay window on Pye Croft Road, for anybody to see. And he's got sons over forty: only lost his wife two years ago. If old James Allsopp hasn't risen from his grave, it's because there is no rising: for he kept her that strict! Now they're married and gone to live down at Kinbrook, and they say she goes round in a dressing-gown from morning to night, a veritable sight. I'm sure it's awful, the way the old ones go on! Why they're a lot worse than the young, and a sight more disgusting. I lay it down to the pictures, myself. But you can't keep them away. I was always saying: go to a good instructive film, but do for goodness sake keep away from these melodramas and love films. Anyhow keep the children away! But there you are, grown-ups are worse than the children: and the old ones beat the band. Talk about morality! Nobody cares a thing. Folks do as they like, and much better off they are for it, I must say. But they're having to draw their horns in nowadays, now th' pits are working so bad, and they haven't got the money. And the grumbling they do, it's awful, especially the women. The men are so good and patient! What can they do, poor chaps! But the women, oh, they do carry on! They go and show off, giving contributions for a wedding present for Princess Mary, and then when they see all the grand things that's been given, they simply rave: who's she, any better than anybody else! Why doesn't Swan & Edgar give me one fur coat, instead of giving her six? I wish I'd kept my ten shillings! What's she going to give me, I should like to know? Here I can't get a new spring coat, my dad's working that bad, and she gets van-loads. It's time as poor folks had some money to spend, rich ones 'as 'ad it long enough. I want a new spring coat, I do, an' wheer am I going to get it? I say to them, be thankful you're well fed and well clothed, without all the new finery you want! And they fly back at me: "Why isn't Princess Mary thankful to go about in her old rags, then, an' have nothing! Folks like her get van-loads, an' I can't have a new spring coat. It's a damned shame. Princess! Bloomin' rot about Princess! It's munney as matters, an' cos she's got lots, they give her more! Nobody's givin' me any, an' I've as much right as anybody else. Don't talk to me about education. It's munney as matters. I want a new spring coat, I do, an' I shan't get it, cos there's no munney..." That's all they care about, clothes. They think nothing of giving seven or eight guineas for a winter coat—colliers' daughters, mind you—and two guineas for a child's summer hat. And then they go to the Primitive Chapel in their two-guinea hat, girls as would have been proud of a three-and-sixpenny one in my day. I heard that at the Primitive Methodist anniversary this year, when they have a built-up platform for the Sunday School children, like a grandstand going almost up to th' ceiling, I heard Miss Thompson, who has the first class of girls in the Sunday School, say there'd be over a thousand pounds in new Sunday clothes sitting on that platform! And times are what they are! But you can't stop them. They're mad for clothes. And boys the same. The lads spend every penny on themselves, clothes, smoking, drinking in the Miners' Welfare, jaunting off to Sheffield two or three times a week. Why, it's another world. And they fear nothing, and they respect nothing, the young don't. The older men are that patient and good, really, they let the women take everything. And this is what it leads to. The women are positive demons. But the lads aren't like their dads. They're sacrificing nothing, they aren't: they're all for self. If you tell them they ought to be putting a bit by, for a home, they say: That'll keep, that will, I'm goin' t' enjoy myself while I can. Owt else'll keep! Oh, they're rough an' selfish, if you like. Everything falls on the older men, an' it's a bad outlook all round.'

Clifford began to get a new idea of his own village. The place had always frightened him, but he had thought it more or less stable. Now—?

'Is there much rebellion among the people?' he asked.

'Oh!' said Mrs. Bolton, 'you hear a few loud-mouthed ones. But they're mostly women who've got into debt. The men take no notice. They're too decent for that. But the young ones blether sometimes. Not that they care for it really. They only want a bit of money in their pocket, to spend at the Welfare, or go gadding to Sheffield. That's all they care.'

'So you think there's no danger?'

'Oh no! Not if trade was good, there wouldn't be. But if things were bad for a long spell, the young ones might go funny. I tell you, they're a selfish, spoilt lot. But I don't see how they'd ever do anything. They aren't ever serious about anything, except showing off on motorbikes and dancing at the Palais-de-danse in Sheffield. You can't make them serious. The serious ones dress up in evening clothes and go off to the Pally to show off before a lot of girls and dance these new Charlestons and what not. I'm sure sometimes the bus'll be full of young fellows in evening suits, collier lads, off to the Pally: let alone those that have gone with their girls in motors or on motorbikes. They don't give a serious thought to a thing—save Don caster races, and the Derby: for they all of them bet on every race. And football! But even football's not what it was, not by a long chalk. It's too much like hard work, they say. No, they'd rather be off on motorbikes to Sheffield or Nottingham, Saturday afternoons.'

'But what do they do when they get there?'

'Oh, hang around—and have tea in some fine tea-place like the Mikado—and go to the Pally or the pictures or the Empire, with some girl. The girls are as free as the lads. They do just what they like.'

'And what do they do when they haven't the money for these things?'

'They seem to get it, somehow. And they begin talking nasty then. All the lads want is just money to enjoy themselves, and the girls the same, with fine clothes: and they don't care about another thing. They haven't enough seriousness to take anything really serious, and they never will have.'

Connie thought, how extremely like all the rest of the classes the lower classes sounded. Just the same thing over again, Tevershall or Mayfair or Kensington. There was only one class nowadays: moneyboys. The moneyboy and the moneygirl, the only difference was how much you'd got, and how much you wanted.

Under Mrs. Bolton's influence, Clifford began to take a new interest in the mines. He began to feel he belonged. A new sort of self-assertion came into him. After all, he was the real boss in Tevershall, he was really the pits. It was a new sense of power, something he had till now shrunk from with dread.

Tevershall pits were running thin. There were only two collieries: Tevershall itself, and New London. Tevershall had once been a famous mine, and had made famous money. But its best days were over. New London was never very rich, and in ordinary times just got along decently. But now times were bad, and it was pits like New London that got left.

'There's a lot of Tevershall men left and gone to Stacks Gate and Whiteover,' said Mrs. Bolton. 'You've not seen the new works at Stacks Gate, opened after the war, have you, Sir Clifford? Oh, you must go one day, they're something quite new: great big chemical works at the pit-head, doesn't look a bit like a colliery. They say they get more money out of the chemical by-products than out of the coal—I forget what it is. And the grand new houses for the men, fair mansions! Of course it's brought a lot of riff-raff from all over the country. But a lot of Tevershall men got on there, and doin' well, a lot better than our own men. They say Tevershall's done, finished: only a question of a few more years, and it'll have to shut down. And New London'll go first. My word, won't it be funny when there's no Tevershall pit working. It's bad enough during a strike, but my word, if it closes for good, it'll be like the end of the world. Even when I was a girl it was the best pit in the country, and a man counted himself lucky if he could get on here. Oh, there's been some money made in Tevershall. And now the men say it's a sinking ship, and it's time they all got out. Doesn't it sound awful! But of course there's a lot as'll never go till they have to. They don't like these new tangled mines, such a depth, and all machinery to work them. Some of them simply dread those iron men, as they call them, those machines for hewing the coal, where men always did it before. And they say it's wasteful as well. But what goes in waste is saved in wages, and a lot more. It seems soon there'll be no use for men on the face of the earth, it'll be all machines. But they say that's what folks said when they had to give up the old stocking frames. I can remember one or two. But my word, the more machines, the more people, that's what it looks like! They say you can't get the same chemicals out of Tevershall coal as you can out of Stacks Gate, and that's funny, they're not three miles apart. But they say so. But everybody says it's a shame something can't be started, to keep the men going a bit better, and employ the girls. All the girls traipsing off to Sheffield every day! My word, it would be something to talk about if Tevershall Collieries took a new lease of life, after everybody saying they're finished, and a sinking ship, and the men ought to leave them like rats leave a sinking ship. But folks talk so much, of course there was a boom during the war. When Sir Geoffrey made a trust of himself and got the money safe for ever, somehow. So they say! But they say even the masters and the owners don't get much out of it now. You can hardly believe it, can you! Why I always thought the pits would go on for ever and ever. Who'd have thought, when I was a girl! But New England's shut down, so is Colwick Wood: yes, it's fair haunting to go through that coppy and see Colwick Wood standing there deserted among the trees, and bushes growing up all over the pit-head, and the lines red rusty. It's like death itself, a dead colliery. Why, whatever should we do if Tevershall shuts down—? It doesn't bear thinking of. Always that throng it's been, except at strikes, and even then the fan-wheels didn't stand, except when they fetched the ponies up. I'm sure it's a funny world, you don't know where you are from year to year, you really don't.'

It was Mrs. Bolton's talk that really put a new fight into Clifford. His income, as she pointed out to him, was secure, from his father's trust, even though it was not large. The pits did not really concern him. It was the other world he wanted to capture, the world of literature and fame; the popular world, not the working world.

Now he realized the distinction between popular success and working success: the populace of pleasure and the populace of work. He, as a private individual, had been catering with his stories for the populace of pleasure. And he had caught on. But beneath the populace of pleasure lay the populace of work, grim, grimy, and rather terrible. They too had to have their providers. And it was a much grimmer business, providing for the populace of work, than for the populace of pleasure. While he was doing his stories, and 'getting on' in the world, Tevershall was going to the wall.

He realized now that the bitch-goddess of Success had two main appetites: one for flattery, adulation, stroking and tickling such as writers and artists gave her; but the other a grimmer appetite for meat and bones. And the meat and bones for the bitch-goddess were provided by the men who made money in industry.

Yes, there were two great groups of dogs wrangling for the bitch-goddess: the group of the flatterers, those who offered her amusement, stories, films, plays: and the other, much less showy, much more savage breed, those who gave her meat, the real substance of money. The well-groomed showy dogs of amusement wrangled and snarled among themselves for the favours of the bitch-goddess. But it was nothing to the silent fight-to-the-death that went on among the indispensables, the bone-bringers.

But under Mrs. Bolton's influence, Clifford was tempted to enter this other fight, to capture the bitch-goddess by brute means of industrial production. Somehow, he got his pecker up. In one way, Mrs. Bolton made a man of him, as Connie never did. Connie kept him apart, and made him sensitive and conscious of himself and his own states. Mrs. Bolton made him aware only of outside things. Inwardly he began to go soft as pulp. But outwardly he began to be effective.

He even roused himself to go to the mines once more: and when he was there, he went down in a tub, and in a tub he was hauled out into the workings. Things he had learned before the war, and seemed utterly to have been forgotten, now came back to him. He sat there, crippled, in a tub, with the underground manager showing him the seam with a powerful torch. And he said little. But his mind began to work.

He began to read again his technical works on the coal-mining industry, he studied the government reports, and he read with care the latest things on mining and the chemistry of coal and of shale which were written in German. Of course the most valuable discoveries were kept secret as far as possible. But once you started a sort of research in the field of coal-mining, a study of methods and means, a study of by-products and the chemical possibilities of coal, it was astounding the ingenuity and the almost uncanny cleverness of the modern technical mind, as if really the devil himself had lent fiend's wits to the technical scientists of industry. It was far more interesting than art, than literature, poor emotional half-witted stuff, was this technical science of industry. In this field, men were like gods, or demons, inspired to discoveries, and fighting to carry them out. In this activity, men were beyond any mental age calculable. But Clifford knew that when it did come to the emotional and human life, these self-made men were of a mental age of about thirteen, feeble boys. The discrepancy was enormous and appalling.

But let that be. Let man slide down to general idiocy in the emotional and 'human' mind, Clifford did not care. Let all that go hang. He was interested in the technicalities of modern coal-mining, and in pulling Tevershall out of the hole.

He went down to the pit day after day, he studied, he put the general manager, and the overhead manager, and the underground manager, and the engineers through a mill they had never dreamed of. Power! He felt a new sense of power flowing through him: power over all these men, over the hundreds and hundreds of colliers. He was finding out: and he was getting things into his grip.

And he seemed verily to be re-born. Now life came into him! He had been gradually dying, with Connie, in the isolated private life of the artist and the conscious being. Now let all that go. Let it sleep. He simply felt life rush into him out of the coal, out of the pit. The very stale air of the colliery was better than oxygen to him. It gave him a sense of power, power. He was doing something: and he was going to do something. He was going to win, to win: not as he had won with his stories, mere publicity, amid a whole sapping of energy and malice. But a man's victory.

At first he thought the solution lay in electricity: convert the coal into electric power. Then a new idea came. The Germans invented a new locomotive engine with a self-feeder, that did not need a fireman. And it was to be fed with a new fuel, that burnt in small quantities at a great heat, under peculiar conditions.

The idea of a new concentrated fuel that burnt with a hard slowness at a fierce heat was what first attracted Clifford. There must be some sort of external stimulus of the burning of such fuel, not merely air supply. He began to experiment, and got a clever young fellow, who had been proved brilliant in chemistry, to help him.

And he felt triumphant. He had at last got out of himself. He had fulfilled his life-long secret yearning to get out of himself. Art had not done it for him. Art had only made it worse. But now, now he had done it.

He was not aware how much Mrs. Bolton was behind him. He did not know how much he depended on her. But for all that, it was evident that when he was with her his voice dropped to an easy rhythm of intimacy, almost a trifle vulgar.

With Connie, he was a little stiff. He felt he owed her everything, and he showed her the utmost respect and consideration, so long as she gave him mere outward respect. But it was obvious he had a secret dread of her. The new Achilles in him had a heel, and in this heel the woman, the woman like Connie, his wife, could lame him fatally. He went in a certain half-subservient dread of her, and was extremely nice to her. But his voice was a little tense when he spoke to her, and he began to be silent whenever she was present.

Only when he was alone with Mrs. Bolton did he really feel a lord and a master, and his voice ran on with her almost as easily and garrulously as her own could run. And he let her shave him or sponge all his body as if he were a child, really as if he were a child.

Chapter ❿

Connie was a good deal alone now, fewer people came to Wragby. Clifford no longer wanted them. He had turned against even the cronies. He was queer. He preferred the radio, which he had installed at some expense, with a good deal of success at last. He could sometimes get Madrid or Frankfurt, even there in the uneasy Midlands.

And he would sit alone for hours listening to the loudspeaker bellowing forth. It amazed and stunned Connie. But there he would sit, with a blank entranced expression on his face, like a person losing his mind, and listen, or seem to listen, to the unspeakable thing.

Was he really listening? Or was it a sort of soporific he took, whilst something else worked on underneath in him? Connie did now know. She fled up to her room, or out of doors to the wood. A kind of terror filled her sometimes, a terror of the incipient insanity of the whole civilized species.

But now that Clifford was drifting off to this other weirdness of industrial activity, becoming almost a creature, with a hard, efficient shell of an exterior and a pulpy interior, one of the amazing crabs and lobsters of the modern, industrial and financial world, invertebrates of the crustacean order, with shells of steel, like machines, and inner bodies of soft pulp, Connie herself was really completely stranded.

She was not even free, for Clifford must have her there. He seemed to have a nervous terror that she should leave him. The curious pulpy part of him, the emotional and humanly-individual part, depended on her with terror, like a child, almost like an idiot. She must be there, there at Wragby, a Lady Chatterley, his wife. Otherwise he would be lost like an idiot on a moor.

This amazing dependence Connie realized with a sort of horror. She heard him with his pit managers, with the members of his Board, with young scientists, and she was amazed at his shrewd insight into things, his power, his uncanny material power over what is called practical men. He had become a practical man himself and an amazingly astute and powerful one, a master. Connie attributed it to Mrs. Bolton's influence upon him, just at the crisis in his life.

But this astute and practical man was almost an idiot when left alone to his own emotional life. He worshipped Connie. She was his wife, a higher being, and he worshipped her with a queer, craven idolatry, like a savage, a worship based on enormous fear, and even hate of the power of the idol, the dread idol. All he wanted was for Connie to swear, to swear not to leave him, not to give him away.

'Clifford,' she said to him—but this was after she had the key to the hut—'Would you really like me to have a child one day?'

He looked at her with a furtive apprehension in his rather prominent pale eyes.

'I shouldn't mind, if it made no difference between us,' he said.

'No difference to what?' she asked.

'To you and me; to our love for one another. If it's going to affect that, then I'm all against it. Why, I might even one day have a child of my own!'

She looked at him in amazement.

'I mean, it might come back to me one of these days.'

She still stared in amazement, and he was uncomfortable.

'So you would not like it if I had a child?' she said.

'I tell you,' he replied quickly, like a cornered dog, 'I am quite willing, provided it doesn't touch your love for me. If it would touch that, I am dead against it.'

Connie could only be silent in cold fear and contempt. Such talk was really the gabbling of an idiot. He no longer knew what he was talking about.

'Oh, it wouldn't make any difference to my feeling for you,' she said, with a certain sarcasm.

'There!' he said. 'That is the point! In that case I don't mind in the least. I mean it would be awfully nice to have a child running about the house, and feel one was building up a future for it. I should have something to strive for then, and I should know it was your child, shouldn't I, dear? And it would seem just the same as my own. Because it is you who count in these matters. You know that, don't you, dear? I don't enter, I am a cypher. You are the great I-am! as far as life goes. You know that, don't you? I mean, as far as I am concerned. I mean, but for you I am absolutely nothing. I live for your sake and your future. I am nothing to myself.'

Connie heard it all with deepening dismay and repulsion. It was one of the ghastly half-truths that poison human existence. What man in his senses would say such things to a woman! But men aren't in their senses. What man with a spark of honour would put this ghastly burden of life-responsibility upon a woman, and leave her there, in the void?

Moreover, in half an hour's time, Connie heard Clifford talking to Mrs. Bolton, in a hot, impulsive voice, revealing himself in a sort of passionless passion to the woman, as if she were half mistress, half foster-mother to him. And Mrs. Bolton was carefully dressing him in evening clothes, for there were important business guests in the house.

Connie really sometimes felt she would die at this time. She felt she was being crushed to death by weird lies, and by the amazing cruelty of idiocy. Clifford's strange business efficiency in a way over-awed her, and his declaration of private worship put her into a panic. There was nothing between them. She never even touched him nowadays, and he never touched her. He never even took her hand and held it kindly. No, and because they were so utterly out of touch, he tortured her with his declaration of idolatry. It was the cruelty of utter impotence. And she felt her reason would give way, or she would die.

She fled as much as possible to the wood. One afternoon, as she sat brooding, watching the water bubbling coldly in John's Well, the keeper had strode up to her.

'I got you a key made, my Lady!' he said, saluting, and he offered her the key.

'Thank you so much!' she said, startled.

'The hut's not very tidy, if you don't mind,' he said. 'I cleared it what I could.'

'But I didn't want you to trouble!' she said.

'Oh, it wasn't any trouble. I am setting the hens in about a week. But they won't be scared of you. I s'll have to see to them morning and night, but I shan't bother you any more than I can help.'

'But you wouldn't bother me,' she pleaded. 'I'd rather not go to the hut at all, if I am going to be in the way.'

He looked at her with his keen blue eyes. He seemed kindly, but distant. But at least he was sane, and wholesome, if even he looked thin and ill. A cough troubled him.

'You have a cough,' she said.

'Nothing—a cold! The last pneumonia left me with a cough, but it's nothing.'

He kept distant from her, and would not come any nearer.

She went fairly often to the hut, in the morning or in the afternoon, but he was never there. No doubt he avoided her on purpose. He wanted to keep his own privacy.

He had made the hut tidy, put the little table and chair near the fireplace, left a little pile of kindling and small logs, and put the tools and traps away as far as possible, effacing himself. Outside, by the clearing, he had built a low little roof of boughs and straw, a shelter for the birds, and under it stood the live coops. And, one day when she came, she found two brown hens sitting alert and fierce in the coops, sitting on pheasants' eggs, and fluffed out so proud and deep in all the heat of the pondering female blood. This almost broke Connie's heart. She, herself was so forlorn and unused, not a female at all, just a mere thing of terrors.

Then all the live coops were occupied by hens, three brown and a grey and a black. All alike, they clustered themselves down on the eggs in the soft nestling ponderosity of the female urge, the female nature, fluffing out their feathers. And with brilliant eyes they watched Connie, as she crouched before them, and they gave short sharp clucks of anger and alarm, but chiefly of female anger at being approached.

Connie found corn in the corn-bin in the hut. She offered it to the hens in her hand. They would not eat it. Only one hen pecked at her hand with a fierce little jab, so Connie was frightened. But she was pining to give them something, the brooding mothers who neither fed themselves nor drank. She brought water in a little tin, and was delighted when one of the hens drank.

Now she came every day to the hens, they were the only things in the world that warmed her heart. Clifford's protestations made her go cold from head to foot. Mrs. Bolton's voice made her go cold, and the sound of the business men who came. An occasional letter from Michaelis affected her with the same sense of chill. She felt she would surely die if it lasted much longer.

Yet it was spring, and the bluebells were coming in the wood, and the leaf-buds on the hazels were opening like the spatter of green rain. How terrible it was that it should be spring, and everything cold-hearted, cold-hearted. Only the hens, fluffed so wonderfully on the eggs, were warm with their hot, brooding female bodies! Connie felt herself living on the brink of fainting all the time.

Then, one day, a lovely sunny day with great tufts of primroses under the hazels, and many violets dotting the paths, she came in the afternoon to the coops and there was one tiny, tiny perky chicken tinily prancing round in front of a coop, and the mother hen clucking in terror. The slim little chick was greyish brown with dark markings, and it was the most alive little spark of a creature in seven kingdoms at that moment. Connie crouched to watch in a sort of ecstasy. Life, life! Pure, sparky, fearless new life! New life! So tiny and so utterly without fear! Even when it scampered a little, scrambling into the coop again, and disappeared under the hen's feathers in answer to the mother hen's wild alarm-cries, it was not really frightened, it took it as a game, the game of living. For in a moment a tiny sharp head was poking through the gold-brown feathers of the hen, and eyeing the cosmos.

Connie was fascinated. And at the same time, never had she felt so acutely the agony of her own female forlornness. It was becoming unbearable.

She had only one desire now, to go to the clearing in the wood. The rest was a kind of painful dream. But sometimes she was kept all day at Wragby, by her duties as hostess. And then she felt as if she too were going blank, just blank and insane.

One evening, guests or no guests, she escaped after tea. It was late, and she fled across the park like one who fears to be called back. The sun was setting rosy as she entered the wood, but she pressed on among the flowers. The light would last long overhead.

She arrived at the clearing flushed and semi-conscious. The keeper was there, in his shirt-sleeves, just closing up the coops for the night, so the little occupants would be safe. But still one little trio was pattering about on tiny feet, alert drab mites, under the straw shelter, refusing to be called in by the anxious mother.

'I had to come and see the chickens!' she said, panting, glancing shyly at the keeper, almost unaware of him. 'Are there any more?'

'Thirty-six so far!' he said. 'Not bad!'

He too took a curious pleasure in watching the young things come out.

Connie crouched in front of the last coop. The three chicks had run in. But still their cheeky heads came poking sharply through the yellow feathers, then withdrawing, then only one beady little head eyeing forth from the vast mother-body.

'I'd love to touch them,' she said, putting her fingers gingerly through the bars of the coop. But the mother-hen pecked at her hand fiercely, and Connie drew back startled and frightened.

'How she pecks at me! She hates me!' she said in a wondering voice. 'But I wouldn't hurt them!'

The man standing above her laughed, and crouched down beside her, knees apart, and put his hand with quiet confidence slowly into the coop. The old hen pecked at him, but not so savagely. And slowly, softly, with sure gentle fingers, he felt among the old bird's feathers and drew out a faintly-peeping chick in his closed hand.

'There!' he said, holding out his hand to her. She took the little drab thing between her hands, and there it stood, on its impossible little stalks of legs, its atom of balancing life trembling through its almost weightless feet into Connie's hands. But it lifted its handsome, clean-shaped little head boldly, and looked sharply round, and gave a little 'peep'. 'So adorable! So cheeky!' she said softly.

The keeper, squatting beside her, was also watching with an amused face the bold little bird in her hands. Suddenly he saw a tear fall on to her wrist.

And he stood up, and stood away, moving to the other coop. For suddenly he was aware of the old flame shooting and leaping up in his loins, that he had hoped was quiescent for ever. He fought against it, turning his back to her. But it leapt, and leapt downwards, circling in his knees.

He turned again to look at her. She was kneeling and holding her two hands slowly forward, blindly, so that the chicken should run in to the mother-hen again. And there was something so mute and forlorn in her, compassion flamed in his bowels for her.

Without knowing, he came quickly towards her and crouched beside her again, taking the chick from her hands, because she was afraid of the hen, and putting it back in the coop. At the back of his loins the fire suddenly darted stronger.

He glanced apprehensively at her. Her face was averted, and she was crying blindly, in all the anguish of her generation's forlornness. His heart melted suddenly, like a drop of fire, and he put out his hand and laid his lingers on her knee.

'You shouldn't cry,' he said softly.

But then she put her hands over her face and felt that really her heart was broken and nothing mattered any more.

He laid his hand on her shoulder, and softly, gently, it began to travel down the curve of her back, blindly, with a blind stroking motion, to the curve of her crouching loins. And there his hand softly, softly, stroked the curve of her flank, in the blind instinctive caress.

She had found her scrap of handkerchief and was blindly trying to dry her face.

'Shall you come to the hut?' he said, in a quiet, neutral voice.

And closing his hand softly on her upper arm, he drew her up and led her slowly to the hut, not letting go of her till she was inside. Then he cleared aside the chair and table, and took a brown, soldier's blanket from the tool chest, spreading it slowly. She glanced at his face, as she stood motionless.

His face was pale and without expression, like that of a man submitting to fate.

'You lie there,' he said softly, and he shut the door, so that it was dark, quite dark.

With a queer obedience, she lay down on the blanket. Then she felt the soft, groping, helplessly desirous hand touching her body, feeling for her face. The hand stroked her face softly, softly, with infinite soothing and assurance, and at last there was the soft touch of a kiss on her cheek.

She lay quite still, in a sort of sleep, in a sort of dream. Then she quivered as she felt his hand groping softly, yet with queer thwarted clumsiness, among her clothing. Yet the hand knew, too, how to unclothe her where it wanted. He drew down the thin silk sheath, slowly, carefully, right down and over her feet. Then with a quiver of exquisite pleasure he touched the warm soft body, and touched her navel for a moment in a kiss. And he had to come in to her at once, to enter the peace on earth of her soft, quiescent body. It was the moment of pure peace for him, the entry into the body of the woman.

She lay still, in a kind of sleep, always in a kind of sleep. The activity, the orgasm was his, all his; she could strive for herself no more. Even the tightness of his arms round her, even the intense movement of his body, and the springing of his seed in her, was a kind of sleep, from which she did not begin to rouse till he had finished and lay softly panting against her breast.

Then she wondered, just dimly wondered, why? Why was this necessary? Why had it lifted a great cloud from her and given her peace? Was it real? Was it real?

Her tormented modern-woman's brain still had no rest. Was it real? And she knew, if she gave herself to the man, it was real. But if she kept herself for herself it was nothing. She was old; millions of years old, she felt. And at last, she could bear the burden of herself no more. She was to be had for the taking. To be had for the taking.

The man lay in a mysterious stillness. What was he feeling? What was he thinking? She did not know. He was a strange man to her, she did not know him. She must only wait, for she did not dare to break his mysterious stillness. He lay there with his arms round her, his body on hers, his wet body touching hers, so close. And completely unknown. Yet not unpeaceful. His very stillness was peaceful.

She knew that, when at last he roused and drew away from her. It was like an abandonment. He drew her dress in the darkness down over her knees and stood a few moments, apparently adjusting his own clothing. Then he quietly opened the door and went out.

She saw a very brilliant little moon shining above the afterglow over the oaks. Quickly she got up and arranged herself; she was tidy. Then she went to the door of the hut.

All the lower wood was in shadow, almost darkness. Yet the sky overhead was crystal. But it shed hardly any light. He came through the lower shadow towards her, his face lifted like a pale blotch.

'Shall we go then?' he said.

'Where?'

'I'll go with you to the gate.'

He arranged things his own way. He locked the door of the hut and came after her.

'You aren't sorry, are you?' he asked, as he went at her side.

'No! No! Are you?' she said.

'For that! No!' he said. Then after a while he added: 'But there's the rest of things.'

'What rest of things?' she said.

'Sir Clifford. Other folks. All the complications.'

'Why complications?' she said, disappointed.

'It's always so. For you as well as for me. There's always complications.' He walked on steadily in the dark.

'And are you sorry?' she said.

'In a way!' he replied, looking up at the sky. 'I thought I'd done with it all. Now I've begun again.'

'Begun what?'

'Life.'

'Life!' she re-echoed, with a queer thrill.

'It's life,' he said. 'There's no keeping clear. And if you do keep clear you might almost as well die. So if I've got to be broken open again, I have.'

She did not quite see it that way, but still...

'It's just love,' she said cheerfully.

'Whatever that may be,' he replied.

They went on through the darkening wood in silence, till they were almost at the gate.

'But you don't hate me, do you?' she said wistfully.

'Nay, nay,' he replied. And suddenly he held her fast against his breast again, with the old connecting passion. 'Nay, for me it was good, it was good. Was it for you?'

'Yes, for me too,' she answered, a little untruthfully, for she had not been conscious of much.

He kissed her softly, softly, with the kisses of warmth.

'If only there weren't so many other people in the world,' he said lugubriously.

She laughed. They were at the gate to the park. He opened it for her.

'I won't come any further,' he said.

'No!' And she held out her hand, as if to shake hands. But he took it in both his.

'Shall I come again?' she asked wistfully.

'Yes! Yes!'

She left him and went across the park.

He stood back and watched her going into the dark, against the pallor of the horizon. Almost with bitterness he watched her go. She had connected him up again, when he had wanted to be alone. She had cost him that bitter privacy of a man who at last wants only to be alone.

He turned into the dark of the wood. All was still, the moon had set. But he was aware of the noises of the night, the engines at Stacks Gate, the traffic on the main road. Slowly he climbed the denuded knoll. And from the top he could see the country, bright rows of lights at Stacks Gate, smaller lights at Tevershall pit, the yellow lights of Tevershall and lights everywhere, here and there, on the dark country, with the distant blush of furnaces, faint and rosy, since the night was clear, the rosiness of the outpouring of white-hot metal. Sharp, wicked electric lights at Stacks Gate! An undefinable quick of evil in them! And all the unease, the ever-shifting dread of the industrial night in the Midlands. He could hear the winding-engines at Stacks Gate turning down the seven-o'clock miners. The pit worked three shifts.

He went down again into the darkness and seclusion of the wood. But he knew that the seclusion of the wood was illusory. The industrial noises broke the solitude, the sharp lights, though unseen, mocked it. A man could no longer be private and withdrawn. The world allows no hermits. And now he had taken the woman, and brought on himself a new cycle of pain and doom. For he knew by experience what it meant.

It was not woman's fault, nor even love's fault, nor the fault of sex. The fault lay there, out there, in those evil electric lights and diabolical rattlings of engines. There, in the world of the mechanical greedy, greedy mechanism and mechanized greed, sparkling with lights and gushing hot metal and roaring with traffic, there lay the vast evil thing, ready to destroy whatever did not conform. Soon it would destroy the wood, and the bluebells would spring no more. All vulnerable things must perish under the rolling and running of iron.

He thought with infinite tenderness of the woman. Poor forlorn thing, she was nicer than she knew, and oh, so much too nice for the tough lot she was in contact with. Poor thing, she too had some of the vulnerability of the wild hyacinths, she wasn't all tough rubber-goods and platinum, like the modern girl. And they would do her in! As sure as life, they would do her in, as they do in all naturally tender life. Tender! Somewhere she was tender, tender with a tenderness of the growing hyacinths, something that has gone out of the celluloid women of today. But he would protect her with his heart for a little while. For a little while, before the insentient iron world and the Mammon of mechanized greed did them both in, her as well as him.

He went home with his gun and his dog, to the dark cottage, lit the lamp, started the fire, and ate his supper of bread and cheese, young onions and beer. He was alone, in a silence he loved. His room was clean and tidy, but rather stark. Yet the fire was bright, the hearth white, the petroleum lamp hung bright over the table, with its white oil-cloth. He tried to read a book about India, but tonight he could not read. He sat by the fire in his shirt-sleeves, not smoking, but with a mug of beer in reach. And he thought about Connie.

To tell the truth, he was sorry for what had happened, perhaps most for her sake. He had a sense of foreboding. No sense of wrong or sin; he was troubled by no conscience in that respect. He knew that conscience was chiefly fear of society, or fear of oneself. He was not afraid of himself. But he was quite consciously afraid of society, which he knew by instinct to be a malevolent, partly-insane beast.

The woman! If she could be there with him, and there were nobody else in the world! The desire rose again, his penis began to stir like a live bird. At the same time an oppression, a dread of exposing himself and her to that outside Thing that sparkled viciously in the electric lights, weighed down his shoulders. She, poor young thing, was just a young female creature to him, but a young female creature whom he had gone into and whom he desired again.

Stretching with the curious yawn of desire, for he had been alone and apart from man or woman for four years, he rose and took his coat again, and his gun, lowered the lamp and went out into the starry night, with the dog. Driven by desire and by dread of the malevolent Thing outside, he made his round in the wood, slowly, softly. He loved the darkness and folded himself into it. It fitted the turgidity of his desire which, in spite of all, was like a riches; the stirring restlessness of his penis, the stirring fire in his loins! Oh, if only there were other men to be with, to fight that sparkling electric Thing outside there, to preserve the tenderness of life, the tenderness of women, and the natural riches of desire. If only there were men to fight side by side with! But the men were all outside there, glorying in the Thing, triumphing or being trodden down in the rush of mechanized greed or of greedy mechanism.

Constance, for her part, had hurried across the park, home, almost without thinking. As yet she had no afterthought. She would be in time for dinner.

She was annoyed to find the doors fastened, however, so that she had to ring. Mrs. Bolton opened.

'Why there you are, your Ladyship! I was beginning to wonder if you'd gone lost!' she said a little roguishly. 'Sir Clifford hasn't asked for you, though; he's got Mr. Linley in with him, talking over something. It looks as if he'd stay to dinner, doesn't it, my Lady?'

'It does rather,' said Connie.

'Shall I put dinner back a quarter of an hour? That would give you time to dress in comfort.'

'Perhaps you'd better.'

Mr. Linley was the general manager of the collieries, an elderly man from the north, with not quite enough punch to suit Clifford; not up to post-war conditions, nor post-war colliers either, with their 'ca' canny' creed. But Connie liked Mr. Linley, though she was glad to be spared the toadying of his wife.

Linley stayed to dinner, and Connie was the hostess men liked so much, so modest, yet so attentive and aware, with big, wide blue eyes and a soft repose that sufficiently hid what she was really thinking. Connie had played this woman so much, it was almost second nature to her; but still, decidedly second. Yet it was curious how everything disappeared from her consciousness while she played it.

She waited patiently till she could go upstairs and think her own thoughts. She was always waiting, it seemed to be her forte.

Once in her room, however, she felt still vague and confused. She didn't know what to think. What sort of a man was he, really? Did he really like her? Not much, she felt. Yet he was kind. There was something, a sort of warm naive kindness, curious and sudden, that almost opened her womb to him. But she felt he might be kind like that to any woman. Though even so, it was curiously soothing, comforting. And he was a passionate man, wholesome and passionate. But perhaps he wasn't quite individual enough; he might be the same with any woman as he had been with her. It really wasn't personal. She was only really a female to him.

But perhaps that was better. And after all, he was kind to the female in her, which no man had ever been. Men were very kind to the person she was, but rather cruel to the female, despising her or ignoring her altogether. Men were awfully kind to Constance Reid or to Lady Chatterley; but not to her womb they weren't kind. And he took no notice of Constance or of Lady Chatterley; he just softly stroked her loins or her breasts.

She went to the wood next day. It was a grey, still afternoon, with the dark-green dog's-mercury spreading under the hazel copse, and all the trees making a silent effort to open their buds. Today she could almost feel it in her own body, the huge heave of the sap in the massive trees, upwards, up, up to the bud-tips, there to push into little flamy oak-leaves, bronze as blood. It was like a ride running turgid upward, and spreading on the sky.

She came to the clearing, but he was not there. She had only half expected him. The pheasant chicks were running lightly abroad, light as insects, from the coops where the fellow hens clucked anxiously. Connie sat and watched them, and waited. She only waited. Even the chicks she hardly saw. She waited.

The time passed with dream-like slowness, and he did not come. She had only half expected him. He never came in the afternoon. She must go home to tea. But she had to force herself to leave.

As she went home, a fine drizzle of rain fell.

'Is it raining again?' said Clifford, seeing her shake her hat.

'Just drizzle.'

She poured tea in silence, absorbed in a sort of obstinacy. She did want to see the keeper today, to see if it were really real. If it were really real.

'Shall I read a little to you afterwards?' said Clifford.

She looked at him. Had he sensed something?

'The spring makes me feel queer—I thought I might rest a little,' she said.

'Just as you like. Not feeling really unwell, are you?'

'No! Only rather tired—with the spring. Will you have Mrs. Bolton to play something with you?'

'No! I think I'll listen in.'

She heard the curious satisfaction in his voice. She went upstairs to her bedroom. There she heard the loudspeaker begin to bellow, in an idiotically velveteen-genteel sort of voice, something about a series of street-cries, the very cream of genteel affectation imitating old criers. She pulled on her old violet-coloured mackintosh, and slipped out of the house at the side door.

The drizzle of rain was like a veil over the world, mysterious, hushed, not cold. She got very warm as she hurried across the park. She had to open her light waterproof.

The wood was silent, still and secret in the evening drizzle of rain, full of the mystery of eggs and half-open buds, half-unsheathed flowers. In the dimness of it all trees glistened naked and dark as if they had unclothed themselves, and the green things on earth seemed to hum with greenness.

There was still no one at the clearing. The chicks had nearly all gone under the mother hens, only one or two lost adventurous ones still dibbed about in the dryness under the straw roof shelter. And they were doubtful of themselves.

So! He still had not been. He was staying away on purpose. Or perhaps something was wrong. Perhaps she should go to the cottage and see.

But she was born to wait. She opened the hut with her key. It was all tidy, the corn put in the bin, the blankets folded on the shelf, the straw neat in a corner; a new bundle of straw. The hurricane lamp hung on a nail. The table and chair had been put back where she had lain.

She sat down on a stool in the doorway. How still everything was! The fine rain blew very softly, filmily, but the wind made no noise. Nothing made any sound. The trees stood like powerful beings, dim, twilit, silent and alive. How alive everything was!

Night was drawing near again; she would have to go. He was avoiding her.

But suddenly he came striding into the clearing, in his black oilskin jacket like a chauffeur, shining with wet. He glanced quickly at the hut, half-saluted, then veered aside and went on to the coops. There he crouched in silence, looking carefully at everything, then carefully shutting the hens and chicks up safe against the night.

At last he came slowly towards her. She still sat on her stool. He stood before her under the porch.

'You come then,' he said, using the intonation of the dialect.

'Yes,' she said, looking up at him. 'You're late!'

'Ay!' he replied, looking away into the wood.

She rose slowly, drawing aside her stool.

'Did you want to come in?' she asked.

He looked down at her shrewdly.

'Won't folks be thinkin' something, you comin' here every night?' he said.

'Why?' She looked up at him, at a loss. 'I said I'd come. Nobody knows.'

'They soon will, though,' he replied. 'An' what then?'

She was at a loss for an answer.

'Why should they know?' she said.

'Folks always do,' he said fatally.

Her lip quivered a little.

'Well I can't help it,' she faltered.

'Nay,' he said. 'You can help it by not comin'—if yer want to,' he added, in a lower tone.

'But I don't want to,' she murmured.

He looked away into the wood, and was silent.

'But what when folks find out?' he asked at last. 'Think about it! Think how lowered you'll feel, one of your husband's servants.'

She looked up at his averted face.

'Is it,' she stammered, 'is it that you don't want me?'

'Think!' he said. 'Think what if folks find out Sir Clifford an' a'—an' everybody talkin'—'

'Well, I can go away.'

'Where to?'

'Anywhere! I've got money of my own. My mother left me twenty thousand pounds in trust, and I know Clifford can't touch it. I can go away.'

'But'appen you don't want to go away.'

'Yes, yes! I don't care what happens to me.'

'Ay, you think that! But you'll care! You'll have to care, everybody has. You've got to remember your Ladyship is carrying on with a game-keeper. It's not as if I was a gentleman. Yes, you'd care. You'd care.'

'I shouldn't. What do I care about my ladyship! I hate it really. I feel people are jeering every time they say it. And they are, they are! Even you jeer when you say it.'

'Me!'

For the first time he looked straight at her, and into her eyes.

'I don't jeer at you,' he said.

As he looked into her eyes she saw his own eyes go dark, quite dark, the pupils dilating.

'Don't you care about a' the risk?' he asked in a husky voice. 'You should care. Don't care when it's too late!'

There was a curious warning pleading in his voice.

'But I've nothing to lose,' she said fretfully. 'If you knew what it is, you'd think I'd be glad to lose it. But are you afraid for yourself?'

'Ay!' he said briefly. 'I am. I'm afraid. I'm afraid. I'm afraid o' things.'

'What things?' she asked.

He gave a curious backward jerk of his head, indicating the outer world.

'Things! Everybody! The lot of 'em.'

Then he bent down and suddenly kissed her unhappy face.

'Nay, I don't care,' he said. 'Let's have it, an' damn the rest. But if you was to feel sorry you'd ever done it—!'

'Don't put me off,' she pleaded.

He put his fingers to her cheek and kissed her again suddenly.

'Let me come in then,' he said softly. 'An' take off your mackintosh.'

He hung up his gun, slipped out of his wet leather jacket, and reached for the blankets.

'I brought another blanket,' he said, 'so we can put one over us if you like.'

'I can't stay long,' she said. 'Dinner is half past seven.'

He looked at her swiftly, then at his watch.

'All right,' he said.

He shut the door, and lit a tiny light in the hanging hurricane lamp.

'One time we'll have a long time,' he said.

He put the blankets down carefully, one folded for her head. Then he sat down a moment on the stool, and drew her to him, holding her close with one arm, feeling for her body with his free hand. She heard the catch of his intaken breath as he found her. Under her frail petticoat she was naked.

'Eh! What it is to touch thee!' he said, as his finger caressed the delicate, warm, secret skin of her waist and hips. He put his face down and rubbed his cheek against her belly and against her thighs again and again. And again she wondered a little over the sort of rapture it was to him. She did not understand the beauty he found in her, through touch upon her living secret body, almost the ecstasy of beauty. For passion alone is awake to it. And when passion is dead, or absent, then the magnificent throb of beauty is incomprehensible and even a little despicable; warm, live beauty of contact, so much deeper than the beauty of vision. She felt the glide of his cheek on her thighs and belly and buttocks, and the close brushing of his moustache and his soft thick hair, and her knees began to quiver. Far down in her she felt a new stirring, a new nakedness emerging. And she was half afraid. Half she wished he would not caress her so. He was encompassing her somehow. Yet she was waiting, waiting.

And when he came into her, with an intensification of relief and consummation that was pure peace to him, still she was waiting. She felt herself a little left out. And she knew, partly it was her own fault. She willed herself into this separateness. Now perhaps she was condemned to it. She lay still, feeling his motion within her, his deep-sunk intentness, the sudden quiver of him at the springing of his seed, then the slow-subsiding thrust. That thrust of the buttocks, surely it was a little ridiculous. If you were a woman, and a part in all the business, surely that thrusting of the man's buttocks was supremely ridiculous. Surely the man was intensely ridiculous in this posture and this act!

But she lay still, without recoil. Even when he had finished, she did not rouse herself to get a grip on her own satisfaction, as she had done with Michaelis; she lay still, and the tears slowly filled and ran from her eyes.

He lay still, too. But he held her close and tried to cover her poor naked legs with his legs, to keep them warm. He lay on her with a close, undoubting warmth.

'Are yer cold?' he asked, in a soft, small voice, as if she were close, so close. Whereas she was left out, distant.

'No! But I must go,' she said gently.

He sighed, held her closer, then relaxed to rest again.

He had not guessed her tears. He thought she was there with him.

'I must go,' she repeated.

He lifted himself, kneeled beside her a moment, kissed the inner side of her thighs, then drew down her skirts, buttoning his own clothes unthinking, not even turning aside, in the faint, faint light from the lantern.

'Tha mun come ter th' cottage one time,' he said, looking down at her with a warm, sure, easy face.

But she lay there inert, and was gazing up at him thinking: Stranger! Stranger! She even resented him a little.

He put on his coat and looked for his hat, which had fallen, then he slung on his gun.

'Come then!' he said, looking down at her with those warm, peaceful sort of eyes.

She rose slowly. She didn't want to go. She also rather resented staying. He helped her with her thin waterproof and saw she was tidy.

Then he opened the door. The outside was quite dark. The faithful dog under the porch stood up with pleasure seeing him. The drizzle of rain drifted greyly past upon the darkness. It was quite dark.

'Ah mun ta'e th' lantern,' he said. 'The'll be nob'dy.'

He walked just before her in the narrow path, swinging the hurricane lamp low, revealing the wet grass, the black shiny tree roots like snakes, wan flowers. For the rest, all was grey rain-mist and complete darkness.

'Tha mun come to the cottage one time,' he said, 'shall ta? We might as well be hung for a sheep as for a lamb.'

It puzzled her, his queer, persistent wanting her, when there was nothing between them, when he never really spoke to her, and in spite of herself she resented the dialect. His 'tha mun come' seemed not addressed to her, but some common woman. She recognized the foxglove leaves of the riding and knew, more or less, where they were.

'It's quarter past seven,' he said, 'you'll do it.' He had changed his voice, seemed to feel her distance. As they turned the last bend in the riding towards the hazel wall and the gate, he blew out the light. 'We'll see from here,' he said, taking her gently by the arm.

But it was difficult, the earth under their feet was a mystery, but he felt his way by tread: he was used to it. At the gate he gave her his electric torch. 'It's a bit lighter in the park,' he said, 'but take it for fear you get off th' path.'

It was true, there seemed a ghost-glimmer of greyness in the open space of the park. He suddenly drew her to him and whipped his hand under her dress again, feeling her warm body with his wet, chill hand.

'I could die for the touch of a woman like thee,' he said in his throat. 'If tha would stop another minute.'

She felt the sudden force of his wanting her again.

'No, I must run,' she said, a little wildly.

'Ay,' he replied, suddenly changed, letting her go.

She turned away, and on the instant she turned back to him saying: 'Kiss me.'

He bent over her indistinguishable and kissed her on the left eye. She held her mouth and he softly kissed it, but at once drew away. He hated mouth kisses.

'I'll come tomorrow,' she said, drawing away, 'if I can,' she added.

'Ay! Not so late,' he replied out of the darkness. Already she could not see him at all.

'Goodnight,' she said.

'Goodnight, your Ladyship,' his voice.

She stopped and looked back into the wet dark. She could just see the bulk of him. 'Why did you say that?' she said.

'Nay,' he replied. 'Goodnight then, run!'

She plunged on in the dark-grey tangible night. She found the side-door open, and slipped into her room unseen. As she closed the door the gong sounded, but she would take her bath all the same—she must take her bath. 'But I won't be late any more,' she said to herself, 'it's too annoying.'

The next day she did not go to the wood. She went instead with Clifford to Uthwaite. He could occasionally go out now in the car, and had got a strong young man as chauffeur, who could help him out of the car if needed be. He particularly wanted to see his godfather, Leslie Winter, who lived at Shipley Hall, not far from Uthwaite. Winter was an elderly gentleman now, wealthy, one of the wealthy coal-owners who had had their heyday in King Edward's time. King Edward had stayed more than once at Shipley, for the shooting. It was a handsome old stucco hall, very elegantly appointed, for Winter was a bachelor and prided himself on his style; but the place was beset by collieries. Leslie Winter was attached to Clifford, but personally did not entertain a great respect for him, because of the photographs in illustrated papers and the literature. The old man was a buck of the King Edward school, who thought life was life and the scribbling fellows were something else. Towards Connie the squire was always rather gallant; he thought her an attractive demure maiden and rather wasted on Clifford, and it was a thousand pities she stood no chance of bringing forth an heir to Wragby. He himself had no heir.

Connie wondered what he would say if he knew that Clifford's game-keeper had been having intercourse with her, and saying to her 'tha mun come to th' cottage one time'. He would detest and despise her, for he had come almost to hate the shoving forward of the working classes. A man of her own class he would not mind, for Connie was gifted from nature with this appearance of demure, submissive maidenliness, and perhaps it was part of her nature. Winter called her 'dear child' and gave her a rather lovely miniature of an eighteenth-century lady, rather against her will.

But Connie was preoccupied with her affair with the keeper. After all, Mr. Winter, who was really a gentleman and a man of the world, treated her as a person and a discriminating individual; he did not lump her together with all the rest of his female womanhood in his 'thee' and 'tha'.

She did not go to the wood that day nor the next, nor the day following. She did not go so long as she felt, or imagined she felt, the man waiting for her, wanting her. But the fourth day she was terribly unsettled and uneasy. She still refused to go to the wood and open her thighs once more to the man. She thought of all the things she might do—drive to Sheffield, pay visits, and the thought of all these things was repellent. At last she decided to take a walk, not towards the wood, but in the opposite direction; she would go to Marehay, through the little iron gate in the other side of the park fence. It was a quiet grey day of spring, almost warm. She walked on unheeding, absorbed in thoughts she was not even conscious of. She was not really aware of anything outside her, till she was startled by the loud barking of the dog at Marehay Farm. Marehay Farm! Its pastures ran up to Wragby park fence, so they were neighbours, but it was some time since Connie had called.

'Bell!' she said to the big white bull-terrier. 'Bell! Have you forgotten me? Don't you know me?' She was afraid of dogs, and Bell stood back and bellowed, and she wanted to pass through the farmyard on to the warren path.

Mrs. Flint appeared. She was a woman of Constance's own age, had been a schoolteacher, but Connie suspected her of being rather a false little thing.

'Why, it's Lady Chatterley! Why!' And Mrs. Flint's eyes glowed again, and she flushed like a young girl. 'Bell, Bell. Why! Barking at Lady Chatterley! Bell! Be quiet!' She darted forward and slashed at the dog with a white cloth she held in her hand, then came forward to Connie.

'She used to know me,' said Connie, shaking hands. The Flints were Chatterley tenants.

'Of course she knows your Ladyship! She's just showing off,' said Mrs. Flint, glowing and looking up with a sort of flushed confusion, 'but it's so long since she's seen you. I do hope you are better.'

'Yes thanks, I'm all right.'

'We've hardly seen you all winter. Will you come in and look at the baby?'

'Well!' Connie hesitated. 'Just for a minute.'

Mrs. Flint flew wildly in to tidy up, and Connie came slowly after her, hesitating in the rather dark kitchen where the kettle was boiling by the fire. Back came Mrs. Flint.

'I do hope you'll excuse me,' she said. 'Will you come in here?'

They went into the living-room, where a baby was sitting on the rag hearthrug, and the table was roughly set for tea. A young servant-girl backed down the passage, shy and awkward.

The baby was a perky little thing of about a year, with red hair like its father, and cheeky pale-blue eyes. It was a girl, and not to be daunted. It sat among cushions and was surrounded with rag dolls and other toys in modern excess.

'Why, what a dear she is!' said Connie, 'And how she's grown! A big girl! A big girl!'

She had given it a shawl when it was born, and celluloid ducks for Christmas.

'There, Josephine! Who's that come to see you? Who's this, Josephine? Lady Chatterley—you know Lady Chatterley, don't you?'

The queer pert little mite gazed cheekily at Connie. Ladyships were still all the same to her.

'Come! Will you come to me?' said Connie to the baby.

The baby didn't care one way or another, so Connie picked her up and held her in her lap. How warm and lovely it was to hold a child in one's lap, and the soft little arms, the unconscious cheeky little legs.

'I was just having a rough cup of tea all by myself. Luke's gone to market, so I can have it when I like. Would you care for a cup, Lady Chatterley? I don't suppose it's what you're used to, but if you would...'

Connie would, though she didn't want to be reminded of what she was used to. There was a great relaying of the table, and the best cups brought and the best teapot.

'If only you wouldn't take any trouble,' said Connie.

But if Mrs. Flint took no trouble, where was the fun! So Connie played with the child and was amused by its little female dauntlessness, and got a deep voluptuous pleasure out of its soft young warmth. Young life! And so fearless! So fearless, because so defenceless. All the other people, so narrow with fear!

She had a cup of tea, which was rather strong, and very good bread and butter, and bottled damsons. Mrs. Flint flushed and glowed and bridled with excitement, as if Connie were some gallant knight. And they had a real female chat, and both of them enjoyed it.

'It's a poor little tea, though,' said Mrs. Flint.

'It's much nicer than at home,' said Connie truthfully.

'Oh-h!' said Mrs. Flint, not believing, of course.

But at last Connie rose.

'I must go,' she said. 'My husband has no idea where I am. He'll be wondering all kinds of things.'

'He'll never think you're here,' laughed Mrs. Flint excitedly. 'He'll be sending the crier round.'

'Goodbye, Josephine,' said Connie, kissing the baby and ruffling its red, wispy hair.

Mrs. Flint insisted on opening the locked and barred front door. Connie emerged in the farm's little front garden, shut in by a privet hedge. There were two rows of auriculas by the path, very velvety and rich.

'Lovely auriculas,' said Connie.

'Recklesses, as Luke calls them,' laughed Mrs. Flint. 'Have some.'

And eagerly she picked the velvet and primrose flowers.

'Enough! Enough!' said Connie.

They came to the little garden gate.

'Which way were you going?' asked Mrs. Flint.

'By the warren.'

'Let me see! Oh yes, the cows are in the gin close. But they're not up yet. But the gate's locked, you'll have to climb.'

'I can climb,' said Connie.

'Perhaps I can just go down the close with you.'

They went down the poor, rabbit-bitten pasture. Birds were whistling in wild evening triumph in the wood. A man was calling up the last cows, which trailed slowly over the path-worn pasture.

'They're late, milking, tonight,' said Mrs. Flint severely. 'They know Luke won't be back till after dark.'

They came to the fence, beyond which the young fir wood bristled dense. There was a little gate, but it was locked. In the grass on the inside stood a bottle, empty.

'There's the keeper's empty bottle for his milk,' explained Mrs. Flint. 'We bring it as far as here for him, and then he fetches it himself.'

'When?' said Connie.

'Oh, any time he's around. Often in the morning. Well, goodbye Lady Chatterley! And do come again. It was so lovely having you.'

Connie climbed the fence into the narrow path between the dense, bristling young firs. Mrs. Flint went running back across the pasture, in a sun-bonnet, because she was really a schoolteacher. Constance didn't like this dense new part of the wood; it seemed gruesome and choking. She hurried on with her head down, thinking of the Flints' baby. It was a dear little thing, but it would be a bit bow-legged like its father. It showed already, but perhaps it would grow out of it. How warm and fulfilling somehow to have a baby, and how Mrs. Flint had showed it off! She had something anyhow that Connie hadn't got, and apparently couldn't have. Yes, Mrs. Flint had flaunted her motherhood. And Connie had been just a bit, just a little bit jealous. She couldn't help it.

She started out of her muse, and gave a little cry of fear. A man was there.

It was the keeper. He stood in the path like Balaam's ass, barring her way.

'How's this?' he said in surprise.

'How did you come?' she panted.

'How did you? Have you been to the hut?'

'No! No! I went to Marehay.'

He looked at her curiously, searchingly, and she hung her head a little guiltily.

'And were you going to the hut now?' he asked rather sternly.

'No! I mustn't. I stayed at Marehay. No one knows where I am. I'm late. I've got to run.'

'Giving me the slip, like?' he said, with a faint ironic smile.

'No! No. Not that. Only—'

'Why, what else?' he said. And he stepped up to her and put his arms around her. She felt the front of his body terribly near to her, and alive.

'Oh, not now, not now,' she cried, trying to push him away.

'Why not? It's only six o'clock. You've got half an hour. Nay! Nay! I want you.'

He held her fast and she felt his urgency. Her old instinct was to fight for her freedom. But something else in her was strange and inert and heavy. His body was urgent against her, and she hadn't the heart any more to fight.

He looked around.

'Come—come here! Through here,' he said, looking penetratingly into the dense fir trees, that were young and not more than half-grown.

He looked back at her. She saw his eyes, tense and brilliant, fierce, not loving. But her will had left her. A strange weight was on her limbs. She was giving way. She was giving up.

He led her through the wall of prickly trees, that were difficult to come through, to a place where was a little space and a pile of dead boughs. He threw one or two dry ones down, put his coat and waistcoat over them, and she had to lie down there under the boughs of the tree, like an animal, while he waited, standing there in his shirt and breeches, watching her with haunted eyes. But still he was provident—he made her lie properly, properly. Yet he broke the band of her under-clothes, for she did not help him, only lay inert.

He too had bared the front part of his body and she felt his naked flesh against her as he came into her. For a moment he was still inside her, turgid there and quivering. Then as he began to move, in the sudden helpless orgasm, there awoke in her new strange thrills rippling inside her. Rippling, rippling, rippling, like a flapping overlapping of soft flames, soft as feathers, running to points of brilliance, exquisite, exquisite and melting her all molten inside. It was like bells rippling up and up to a culmination. She lay unconscious of the wild little cries she uttered at last. But it was over too soon, too soon, and she could no longer force her own conclusion with her own activity. This was different, different. She could do nothing. She could no longer harden and grip for her own satisfaction upon him. She could only wait, wait and moan in spirit as she felt him withdrawing, withdrawing and contracting, coming to the terrible moment when he would slip out of her and be gone. Whilst all her womb was open and soft, and softly clamouring, like a sea-anemone under the tide, clamouring for him to come in again and make a fulfilment for her. She clung to him unconscious in passion, and he never quite slipped from her, and she felt the soft bud of him within her stirring, and strange rhythms flushing up into her with a strange rhythmic growing motion, swelling and swelling till it filled all her cleaving consciousness, and then began again the unspeakable motion that was not really motion, but pure deepening whirlpools of sensation swirling deeper and deeper through all her tissue and consciousness, till she was one perfect concentric fluid of feeling, and she lay there crying in unconscious inarticulate cries. The voice out of the uttermost night, the life! The man heard it beneath him with a kind of awe, as his life sprang out into her. And as it subsided, he subsided too and lay utterly still, unknowing, while her grip on him slowly relaxed, and she lay inert. And they lay and knew nothing, not even of each other, both lost. Till at last he began to rouse and become aware of his defenceless nakedness, and she was aware that his body was loosening its clasp on her. He was coming apart; but in her breast she felt she could not bear him to leave her uncovered. He must cover her now for ever.

But he drew away at last, and kissed her and covered her over, and began to cover himself. She lay looking up to the boughs of the tree, unable as yet to move. He stood and fastened up his breeches, looking round. All was dense and silent, save for the awed dog that lay with its paws against its nose. He sat down again on the brushwood and took Connie's hand in silence.

She turned and looked at him. 'We came off together that time,' he said.

She did not answer.

'It's good when it's like that. Most folks live their lives through and they never know it,' he said, speaking rather dreamily.

She looked into his brooding face.

'Do they?' she said. 'Are you glad?'

He looked back into her eyes. 'Glad,' he said, 'Ay, but never mind.' He did not want her to talk. And he bent over her and kissed her, and she felt, so he must kiss her for ever.

At last she sat up.

'Don't people often come off together?' she asked with naive curiosity.

'A good many of them never. You can see by the raw look of them.' He spoke unwittingly, regretting he had begun.

'Have you come off like that with other women?'

He looked at her amused.

'I don't know,' he said, 'I don't know.'

And she knew he would never tell her anything he didn't want to tell her. She watched his face, and the passion for him moved in her bowels. She resisted it as far as she could, for it was the loss of herself to herself.

He put on his waistcoat and his coat, and pushed a way through to the path again.

The last level rays of the sun touched the wood. 'I won't come with you,' he said, 'better not.'

She looked at him wistfully before she turned. His dog was waiting so anxiously for him to go, and he seemed to have nothing whatever to say. Nothing left.

Connie went slowly home, realizing the depth of the other thing in her. Another self was alive in her, burning molten and soft in her womb and bowels, and with this self she adored him. She adored him till her knees were weak as she walked. In her womb and bowels she was flowing and alive now and vulnerable, and helpless in adoration of him as the most naive woman. It feels like a child, she said to herself, it feels like a child in me. And so it did, as if her womb, that had always been shut, had opened and filled with new life, almost a burden, yet lovely.

'If I had a child!' she thought to herself, 'if I had him inside me as a child!'—and her limbs turned molten at the thought, and she realized the immense difference between having a child to oneself and having a child to a man whom one's bowels yearned towards. The former seemed in a sense ordinary: but to have a child to a man whom one adored in one's bowels and one's womb, it made her feel she was very different from her old self and as if she was sinking deep, deep to the centre of all womanhood and the sleep of creation.

It was not the passion that was new to her, it was the yearning adoration. She knew she had always feared it, for it left her helpless; she feared it still, lest if she adored him too much, then she would lose herself, become effaced, and she did not want to be effaced, a slave, like a savage woman. She must not become a slave. She feared her adoration, yet she would not at once fight against it. She knew she could fight it. She had a devil of self-will in her breast that could have fought the full soft heaving adoration of her womb and crushed it. She could even now do it, or she thought so, and she could then take up her passion with her own will.

Ah yes, to be passionate like a Bacchante, like a Bacchanal fleeing through the woods, to call on Bacchos, the bright phallus that had no independent personality behind it, but was pure god-servant to the woman! The man, the individual, let him not dare intrude. He was but a temple-servant, the bearer and keeper of the bright phallus, her own.

So, in the flux of new awakening, the old hard passion flamed in her for a time, and the man dwindled to a contemptible object, the mere phallus-bearer, to be torn to pieces when his service was performed. She felt the force of the Bacchae in her limbs and her body, the woman gleaming and rapid, beating down the male; but while she felt this, her heart was heavy. She did not want it, it was known and barren, birthless; the adoration was her treasure. It was so fathomless, so soft, so deep and so unknown. No, no, she would give up her hard bright female power; she was weary of it, stiffened with it; she would sink in the new bath of life, in the depths of her womb and her bowels that sang the voiceless song of adoration. It was early yet to begin to fear the man.

'I walked over by Marehay, and I had tea with Mrs. Flint,' she said to Clifford. 'I wanted to see the baby. It's so adorable, with hair like red cobwebs. Such a dear! Mr. Flint had gone to market, so she and I and the baby had tea together. Did you wonder where I was?'

'Well, I wondered, but I guessed you had dropped in somewhere to tea,' said Clifford jealously. With a sort of second sight he sensed something new in her, something to him quite incomprehensible, but he ascribed it to the baby. He thought that all that ailed Connie was that she did not have a baby, automatically bring one forth, so to speak.

'I saw you go across the park to the iron gate, my Lady,' said Mrs. Bolton, 'so I thought perhaps you'd called at the Rectory.'

'I nearly did, then I turned towards Marehay instead.'

The eyes of the two women met: Mrs. Bolton's grey and bright and searching; Connie's blue and veiled and strangely beautiful. Mrs. Bolton was almost sure she had a lover, yet how could it be, and who could it be? Where was there a man?

'Oh, it's so good for you, if you go out and see a bit of company sometimes,' said Mrs. Bolton. 'I was saying to Sir Clifford, it would do her ladyship a world of good if she'd go out among people more.'

'Yes, I'm glad I went, and such a quaint dear cheeky baby, Clifford,' said Connie. 'It's got hair just like spider webs, and bright orange, and the oddest, cheekiest, pale-blue china eyes. Of course it's a girl, or it wouldn't be so bold, bolder than any little Sir Francis Drake.'

'You're right, my Lady—a regular little Flint. They were always a forward sandy-headed family,' said Mrs. Bolton.

'Wouldn't you like to see it, Clifford? I've asked them to tea for you to see it.'

'Who?' he asked, looking at Connie in great uneasiness.

'Mrs. Flint and the baby, next Monday.'

'You can have them to tea up in your room,' he said.

'Why, don't you want to see the baby?' she cried.

'Oh, I'll see it, but I don't want to sit through a teatime with them.'

'Oh,' said Connie, looking at him with wide veiled eyes.

She did not really see him, he was somebody else.

'You can have a nice cosy tea up in your room, my Lady, and Mrs. Flint will be more comfortable than if Sir Clifford was there,' said Mrs. Bolton.

She was sure Connie had a lover, and something in her soul exulted. But who was he? Who was he? Perhaps Mrs. Flint would provide a clue.

Connie would not take her bath this evening. The sense of his flesh touching her, his very stickiness upon her, was dear to her, and in a sense holy.

Clifford was very uneasy. He would not let her go after dinner, and she had wanted so much to be alone. She looked at him, but was curiously submissive.

'Shall we play a game, or shall I read to you, or what shall it be?' he asked uneasily.

'You read to me,' said Connie.

'What shall I read—verse or prose? Or drama?'

'Read Racine,' she said.

It had been one of his stunts in the past, to read Racine in the real French grand manner, but he was rusty now, and a little self-conscious; he really preferred the loudspeaker. But Connie was sewing, sewing a little silk frock of primrose silk, cut out of one of her dresses, for Mrs. Flint's baby. Between coming home and dinner she had cut it out, and she sat in the soft quiescent rapture of herself sewing, while the noise of the reading went on.

Inside herself she could feel the humming of passion, like the after-humming of deep bells.

Clifford said something to her about the Racine. She caught the sense after the words had gone.

'Yes! Yes!' she said, looking up at him. 'It is splendid.'

Again he was frightened at the deep blue blaze of her eyes, and of her soft stillness, sitting there. She had never been so utterly soft and still. She fascinated him helplessly, as if some perfume about her intoxicated him. So he went on helplessly with his reading, and the throaty sound of the French was like the wind in the chimneys to her. Of the Racine she heard not one syllable.

She was gone in her own soft rapture, like a forest soughing with the dim, glad moan of spring, moving into bud. She could feel in the same world with her the man, the nameless man, moving on beautiful feet, beautiful in the phallic mystery. And in herself, in all her veins, she felt him and his child. His child was in all her veins, like a twilight.

'For hands she hath none, nor eyes, nor feet, nor golden Treasure of hair...'

She was like a forest, like the dark interlacing of the oak wood, humming inaudibly with myriad unfolding buds. Meanwhile the birds of desire were asleep in the vast interlaced intricacy of her body.

But Clifford's voice went on, clapping and gurgling with unusual sounds. How extraordinary it was! How extraordinary he was, bent there over the book, queer and rapacious and civilized, with broad shoulders and no real legs! What a strange creature, with the sharp, cold inflexible will of some bird, and no warmth, no warmth at all! One of those creatures of the afterwards, that have no soul, but an extra-alert will, cold will. She shuddered a little, afraid of him. But then, the soft warm flame of life was stronger than he, and the real things were hidden from him.

The reading finished. She was startled. She looked up, and was more startled still to see Clifford watching her with pale, uncanny eyes, like hate.

'Thank you so much! You do read Racine beautifully!' she said softly.

'Almost as beautifully as you listen to him,' he said cruelly. 'What are you making?' he asked.

'I'm making a child's dress, for Mrs. Flint's baby.'

He turned away. A child! A child! That was all her obsession.

'After all,' he said in a declamatory voice, 'one gets all one wants out of Racine. Emotions that are ordered and given shape are more important than disorderly emotions.'

She watched him with wide, vague, veiled eyes. 'Yes, I'm sure they are,' she said.

'The modern world has only vulgarized emotion by letting it loose. What we need is classic control.'

'Yes,' she said slowly, thinking of him listening with vacant face to the emotional idiocy of the radio. 'People pretend to have emotions, and they really feel nothing. I suppose that is being romantic.'

'Exactly!' he said.

As a matter of fact, he was tired. This evening had tired him. He would rather have been with his technical books, or his pit manager, or listening-in to the radio.

Mrs. Bolton came in with two glasses of malted milk: for Clifford, to make him sleep, and for Connie, to fatten her again. It was a regular night-cap she had introduced.

Connie was glad to go, when she had drunk her glass, and thankful she needn't help Clifford to bed. She took his glass and put it on the tray, then took the tray, to leave it outside.

'Goodnight Clifford! Do sleep well! The Racine gets into one like a dream. Goodnight!'

She had drifted to the door. She was going without kissing him goodnight. He watched her with sharp, cold eyes. So! She did not even kiss him goodnight, after he had spent an evening reading to her. Such depths of callousness in her! Even if the kiss was but a formality, it was on such formalities that life depends. He gazed coldly and angrily at the door whence she had gone. Anger!

And again the dread of the night came on him. He was a network of nerves, and when he was not braced up to work, and so full of energy: or when he was not listening-in, and so utterly neuter: then he was haunted by anxiety and a sense of dangerous impending void. He was afraid. And Connie could keep the fear off him, if she would. But it was obvious she wouldn't, she wouldn't. She was callous, cold and callous to all that he did for her. He gave up his life for her, and she was callous to him. She only wanted her own way. 'The lady loves her will.'

Now it was a baby she was obsessed by. Just so that it should be her own, all her own, and not his!

Clifford was so healthy, considering. He looked so well and ruddy in the face, his shoulders were broad and strong, his chest deep, he had put on flesh. And yet, at the same time, he was afraid of death. A terrible hollow seemed to menace him somewhere, somehow, a void, and into this void his energy would collapse. Energyless, he felt at times he was dead, really dead.

So his rather prominent pale eyes had a queer look, furtive, and yet a little cruel, so cold: and at the same time, almost impudent. It was a very odd look, this look of impudence: as if he were triumphing over life in spite of life. 'Who knoweth the mysteries of the will—for it can triumph even against the angels—'

But his dread was the nights when he could not sleep. Then it was awful indeed, when annihilation pressed in on him on every side. Then it was ghastly, to exist without having any life: lifeless, in the night, to exist.

But now he could ring for Mrs. Bolton. And she would always come. That was a great comfort. She would come in her dressing gown, with her hair in a plait down her back, curiously girlish and dim, though the brown plait was streaked with grey. And she would make him coffee or camomile tea, and she would play chess or piquet with him. She had a woman's queer faculty of playing even chess well enough, when she was three parts asleep, well enough to make her worth beating. So, in the silent intimacy of the night, they sat, or she sat and he lay on the bed, with the reading-lamp shedding its solitary light on them, she almost gone in sleep, he almost gone in a sort of fear, and they played, played together—then they had a cup of coffee and a biscuit together, hardly speaking, in the silence of night, but being a reassurance to one another.

And this night she was wondering who Lady Chatterley's lover was. And she was thinking of her own Ted, so long dead, yet for her never quite dead. And when she thought of him, the old, old grudge against the world rose up, but especially against the masters, that they had killed him. They had not really killed him. Yet, to her, emotionally, they had. And somewhere deep in herself because of it, she was a nihilist, and really anarchic.

In her half-sleep, thoughts of her Ted and thoughts of Lady Chatterley's unknown lover commingled, and then she felt she shared with the other woman a great grudge against Sir Clifford and all he stood for. At the same time she was playing piquet with him, and they were gambling sixpences. And it was a source of satisfaction to be playing piquet with a baronet, and even losing sixpences to him.

When they played cards, they always gambled. It made him forget himself. And he usually won. Tonight too he was winning. So he would not go to sleep till the first dawn appeared. Luckily it began to appear at half past four or thereabouts.

Connie was in bed, and fast asleep all this time. But the keeper, too, could not rest. He had closed the coops and made his round of the wood, then gone home and eaten supper. But he did not go to bed. Instead he sat by the fire and thought.

He thought of his boyhood in Tevershall, and of his five or six years of married life. He thought of his wife, and always bitterly. She had seemed so brutal. But he had not seen her now since 1915, in the spring when he joined up. Yet there she was, not three miles away, and more brutal than ever. He hoped never to see her again while he lived.

He thought of his life abroad, as a soldier. India, Egypt, then India again: the blind, thoughtless life with the horses: the colonel who had loved him and whom he had loved: the several years that he had been an officer, a lieutenant with a very fair chance of being a captain. Then the death of the colonel from pneumonia, and his own narrow escape from death: his damaged health: his deep restlessness: his leaving the army and coming back to England to be a working man again.

He was temporizing with life. He had thought he would be safe, at least for a time, in this wood. There was no shooting as yet: he had to rear the pheasants. He would have no guns to serve. He would be alone, and apart from life, which was all he wanted. He had to have some sort of a background. And this was his native place. There was even his mother, though she had never meant very much to him. And he could go on in life, existing from day to day, without connexion and without hope. For he did not know what to do with himself.

He did not know what to do with himself. Since he had been an officer for some years, and had mixed among the other officers and civil servants, with their wives and families, he had lost all ambition to 'get on'. There was a toughness, a curious rubbernecked toughness and unlivingness about the middle and upper classes, as he had known them, which just left him feeling cold and different from them.

So, he had come back to his own class. To find there, what he had forgotten during his absence of years, a pettiness and a vulgarity of manner extremely distasteful. He admitted now at last, how important manner was. He admitted, also, how important it was even to pretend not to care about the halfpence and the small things of life. But among the common people there was no pretence. A penny more or less on the bacon was worse than a change in the Gospel. He could not stand it.

And again, there was the wage-squabble. Having lived among the owning classes, he knew the utter futility of expecting any solution of the wage-squabble. There was no solution, short of death. The only thing was not to care, not to care about the wages.

Yet, if you were poor and wretched you had to care. Anyhow, it was becoming the only thing they did care about. The care about money was like a great cancer, eating away the individuals of all classes. He refused to care about money.

And what then? What did life offer apart from the care of money? Nothing.

Yet he could live alone, in the wan satisfaction of being alone, and raise pheasants to be shot ultimately by fat men after breakfast. It was futility, futility to the power.

But why care, why bother? And he had not cared nor bothered till now, when this woman had come into his life. He was nearly ten years older than she. And he was a thousand years older in experience, starting from the bottom. The connexion between them was growing closer. He could see the day when it would clinch up and they would have to make a life together. 'For the bonds of love are ill to loose!'

And what then? What then? Must he start again, with nothing to start on? Must he entangle this woman? Must he have the horrible broil with her lame husband? And also some sort of horrible broil with his own brutal wife, who hated him? Misery! Lots of misery! And he was no longer young and merely buoyant. Neither was he the insouciant sort. Every bitterness and every ugliness would hurt him: and the woman!

But even if they got clear of Sir Clifford and of his own wife, even if they got clear, what were they going to do? What was he, himself going to do? What was he going to do with his life? For he must do something. He couldn't be a mere hanger-on, on her money and his own very small pension.

It was the insoluble. He could only think of going to America, to try a new air. He disbelieved in the dollar utterly. But perhaps, perhaps there was something else.

He could not rest nor even go to bed. After sitting in a stupor of bitter thoughts until midnight, he got suddenly from his chair and reached for his coat and gun.

'Come on, lass,' he said to the dog. 'We're best outside.'

It was a starry night, but moonless. He went on a slow, scrupulous, soft-stepping and stealthy round. The only thing he had to contend with was the colliers setting snares for rabbits, particularly the Stacks Gate colliers, on the Marehay side. But it was breeding season, and even colliers respected it a little. Nevertheless the stealthy beating of the round in search of poachers soothed his nerves and took his mind off his thoughts.

But when he had done his slow, cautious beating of his bounds—it was nearly a five-mile walk—he was tired. He went to the top of the knoll and looked out. There was no sound save the noise, the faint shuffling noise from Stacks Gate colliery, that never ceased working: and there were hardly any lights, save the brilliant electric rows at the works. The world lay darkly and fumily sleeping. It was half past two. But even in its sleep it was an uneasy, cruel world, stirring with the noise of a train or some great lorry on the road, and flashing with some rosy lightning flash from the furnaces. It was a world of iron and coal, the cruelty of iron and the smoke of coal, and the endless, endless greed that drove it all. Only greed, greed stirring in its sleep.

It was cold, and he was coughing. A fine cold draught blew over the knoll. He thought of the woman. Now he would have given all he had or ever might have to hold her warm in his arms, both of them wrapped in one blanket, and sleep. All hopes of eternity and all gain from the past he would have given to have her there, to be wrapped warm with him in one blanket, and sleep, only sleep. It seemed the sleep with the woman in his arms was the only necessity.

He went to the hut, and wrapped himself in the blanket and lay on the floor to sleep. But he could not, he was cold. And besides, he felt cruelly his own unfinished nature. He felt his own unfinished condition of aloneness cruelly. He wanted her, to touch her, to hold her fast against him in one moment of completeness and sleep.

He got up again and went out, towards the park gates this time: then slowly along the path towards the house. It was nearly four o'clock, still clear and cold, but no sign of dawn. He was used to the dark, he could see well.

Slowly, slowly the great house drew him, as a magnet. He wanted to be near her. It was not desire, not that. It was the cruel sense of unfinished aloneness, that needed a silent woman folded in his arms. Perhaps he could find her. Perhaps he could even call her out to him: or find some way in to her. For the need was imperious.

He slowly, silently climbed the incline to the hall. Then he came round the great trees at the top of the knoll, on to the drive, which made a grand sweep round a lozenge of grass in front of the entrance. He could already see the two magnificent beeches which stood in this big level lozenge in front of the house, detaching themselves darkly in the dark air.

There was the house, low and long and obscure, with one light burning downstairs, in Sir Clifford's room. But which room she was in, the woman who held the other end of the frail thread which drew him so mercilessly, that he did not know.

He went a little nearer, gun in hand, and stood motionless on the drive, watching the house. Perhaps even now he could find her, come at her in some way. The house was not impregnable: he was as clever as burglars are. Why not come to her?

He stood motionless, waiting, while the dawn faintly and imperceptibly paled behind him. He saw the light in the house go out. But he did not see Mrs. Bolton come to the window and draw back the old curtain of dark-blue silk, and stand herself in the dark room, looking out on the half-dark of the approaching day, looking for the longed-for dawn, waiting, waiting for Clifford to be really reassured that it was daybreak. For when he was sure of daybreak, he would sleep almost at once.

She stood blind with sleep at the window, waiting. And as she stood, she started, and almost cried out. For there was a man out there on the drive, a black figure in the twilight. She woke up greyly, and watched, but without making a sound to disturb Sir Clifford.

The daylight began to rustle into the world, and the dark figure seemed to go smaller and more defined. She made out the gun and gaiters and baggy jacket—it would be Oliver Mellors, the keeper. 'Yes, for there was the dog nosing around like a shadow, and waiting for him!'

And what did the man want? Did he want to rouse the house? What was he standing there for, transfixed, looking up at the house like a love-sick male dog outside the house where the bitch is?

Goodness! The knowledge went through Mrs. Bolton like a shot. He was Lady Chatterley's lover! He! He!

To think of it! Why, she, Ivy Bolton, had once been a tiny bit in love with him herself. When he was a lad of sixteen and she a woman of twenty-six. It was when she was studying, and he had helped her a lot with the anatomy and things she had had to learn. He'd been a clever boy, had a scholarship for Sheffield Grammar School, and learned French and things: and then after all had become an overhead blacksmith shoeing horses, because he was fond of horses, he said: but really because he was frightened to go out and face the world, only he'd never admit it.

But he'd been a nice lad, a nice lad, had helped her a lot, so clever at making things clear to you. He was quite as clever as Sir Clifford: and always one for the women. More with women than men, they said.

Till he'd gone and married that Bertha Courts, as if to spite himself. Some people do marry to spite themselves, because they're disappointed of something. And no wonder it had been a failure. —For years he was gone, all the time of the war: and a lieutenant and all: quite the gentleman, really quite the gentleman!—Then to come back to Tevershall and go as a game-keeper! Really, some people can't take their chances when they've got them! And talking broad Derbyshire again like the worst, when she, Ivy Bolton, knew he spoke like any gentleman, really.

Well, well! So her ladyship had fallen for him! Well, her ladyship wasn't the first: there was something about him. But fancy! A Tevershall lad born and bred, and she her ladyship in Wragby Hall! My word, that was a slap back at the high-and-mighty Chatterleys!

But he, the keeper, as the day grew, had realized: it's no good! It's no good trying to get rid of your own aloneness. You've got to stick to it all your life. Only at times, at times, the gap will be filled in. At times! But you have to wait for the times. Accept your own aloneness and stick to it, all your life. And then accept the times when the gap is filled in, when they come. But they've got to come. You can't force them.

With a sudden snap the bleeding desire that had drawn him after her broke. He had broken it, because it must be so. There must be a coming together on both sides. And if she wasn't coming to him, he wouldn't track her down. He mustn't. He must go away, till she came.

He turned slowly, ponderingly, accepting again the isolation. He knew it was better so. She must come to him: it was no use his trailing after her. No use!

Mrs. Bolton saw him disappear, saw his dog run after him.

'Well, well!' she said. 'He's the one man I never thought of; and the one man I might have thought of. He was nice to me when he was a lad, after I lost Ted. Well, well! Whatever would he say if he knew!'

And she glanced triumphantly at the already sleeping Clifford, as she stepped softly from the room.

Chapter ⓫

Connie was sorting out one of the Wragby lumber rooms. There were several: the house was a warren, and the family never sold anything. Sir Geoffery's father had liked pictures and Sir Geoffery's mother had liked cinquecento furniture. Sir Geoffery himself had liked old carved oak chests, vestry chests. So it went on through the generations. Clifford collected very modern pictures, at very moderate prices.

So in the lumber room there were bad Sir Edwin Landseers and pathetic William Henry Hunt birds' nests: and other Academy stuff, enough to frighten the daughter of an R. A. She determined to look through it one day, and clear it all. And the grotesque furniture interested her.

Wrapped up carefully to preserve it from damage and dry-rot was the old family cradle, of rosewood. She had to unwrap it, to look at it. It had a certain charm: she looked at it a long time.

'It's a thousand pities it won't be called for,' sighed Mrs. Bolton, who was helping. 'Though cradles like that are out of date nowadays.'

'It might be called for. I might have a child,' said Connie casually, as if saying she might have a new hat.

'You mean if anything happened to Sir Clifford!' stammered Mrs. Bolton.

'No! I mean as things are. It's only muscular paralysis with Sir Clifford—it doesn't affect him,' said Connie, lying as naturally as breathing.

Clifford had put the idea into her head. He had said: 'Of course I may have a child yet. I'm not really mutilated at all. The potency may easily come back, even if the muscles of the hips and legs are paralysed. And then the seed may be transferred.'

He really felt, when he had his periods of energy and worked so hard at the question of the mines, as if his sexual potency were returning. Connie had looked at him in terror. But she was quite quick-witted enough to use his suggestion for her own preservation. For she would have a child if she could: but not his.

Mrs. Bolton was for a moment breathless, flabbergasted. Then she didn't believe it: she saw in it a ruse. Yet doctors could do such things nowadays. They might sort of graft seed.

'Well, my Lady, I only hope and pray you may. It would be lovely for you: and for everybody. My word, a child in Wragby, what a difference it would make!'

'Wouldn't it!' said Connie.

And she chose three R. A. pictures of sixty years ago, to send to the Duchess of Shortlands for that lady's next charitable bazaar. She was called 'the bazaar duchess', and she always asked all the county to send things for her to sell. She would be delighted with three framed R. A.s. She might even call, on the strength of them. How furious Clifford was when she called!

But oh my dear! Mrs. Bolton was thinking to herself. Is it Oliver Mellors' child you're preparing us for? Oh my dear, that would be a Tevershall baby in the Wragby cradle, my word! Wouldn't shame it, neither!

Among other monstrosities in this lumber room was a largish black-japanned box, excellently and ingeniously made some sixty or seventy years ago, and fitted with every imaginable object. On top was a concentrated toilet set: brushes, bottles, mirrors, combs, boxes, even three beautiful little razors in safety sheaths, shaving-bowl and all. Underneath came a sort of escritoire outfit: blotters, pens, ink-bottles, paper, envelopes, memorandum books: and then a perfect sewing outfit, with three different sized scissors, thimbles, needles, silks and cottons, darning egg, all of the very best quality and perfectly finished. Then there was a little medicine store, with bottles labelled Laudanum, Tincture of Myrrh, Ess. Cloves and so on: but empty. Everything was perfectly new, and the whole thing, when shut up, was as big as a small, but fat weekend bag. And inside, it fitted together like a puzzle. The bottles could not possibly have spilled: there wasn't room.

The thing was wonderfully made and contrived, excellent craftsmanship of the Victorian order. But somehow it was monstrous. Some Chatterley must even have felt it, for the thing had never been used. It had a peculiar soullessness.

Yet Mrs. Bolton was thrilled.

'Look what beautiful brushes, so expensive, even the shaving brushes, three perfect ones! No! And those scissors! They're the best that money could buy. Oh, I call it lovely!'

'Do you?' said Connie. 'Then you have it.'

'Oh no, my Lady!'

'Of course! It will only lie here till Doomsday. If you won't have it, I'll send it to the Duchess as well as the pictures, and she doesn't deserve so much. Do have it!'

'Oh, your Ladyship! Why, I shall never be able to thank you.'

'You needn't try,' laughed Connie.

And Mrs. Bolton sailed down with the huge and very black box in her arms, flushing bright pink in her excitement.

Mr. Betts drove her in the trap to her house in the village, with the box. And she had to have a few friends in, to show it: the school mistress, the chemist's wife, Mrs. Weedon the undercashier's wife. They thought it marvellous. And then started the whisper of Lady Chatterley's child.

'Wonders'll never cease!' said Mrs. Weedon.

But Mrs. Bolton was convinced, if it did come, it would be Sir Clifford's child. So there!

Not long after, the rector said gently to Clifford:

'And may we really hope for an heir to Wragby? Ah, that would be the hand of God in mercy, indeed!'

'Well! We may hope,' said Clifford, with a faint irony, and at the same time, a certain conviction. He had begun to believe it really possible it might even be his child.

Then one afternoon came Leslie Winter, Squire Winter, as everybody called him: lean, immaculate, and seventy: and every inch a gentleman, as Mrs. Bolton said to Mrs. Betts. Every millimetre indeed! And with his old-fashioned, rather haw-haw! manner of speaking, he seemed more out of date than bag wigs. Time, in her flight, drops these fine old feathers.

They discussed the collieries. Clifford's idea was, that his coal, even the poor sort, could be made into hard concentrated fuel that would burn at great heat if fed with certain damp, acidulated air at a fairly strong pressure. It had long been observed that in a particularly strong, wet wind the pit-bank burned very vivid, gave off hardly any fumes, and left a fine powder of ash, instead of the slow pink gravel.

'But where will you find the proper engines for burning your fuel?' asked Winter.

'I'll make them myself. And I'll use my fuel myself. And I'll sell electric power. I'm certain I could do it.'

'If you can do it, then splendid, splendid, my dear boy. Haw! Splendid! If I can be of any help, I shall be delighted. I'm afraid I am a little out of date, and my collieries are like me. But who knows, when I'm gone, there may be men like you. Splendid! It will employ all the men again, and you won't have to sell your coal, or fail to sell it. A splendid idea, and I hope it will be a success. If I had sons of my own, no doubt they would have up-to-date ideas for Shipley: no doubt! By the way, dear boy, is there any foundation to the rumour that we may entertain hope of an heir to Wragby?'

'Is there a rumour?' asked Clifford.

'Well, my dear boy, Marshall from Fillingwood asked me, that's all I can say about a rumour. Of course I wouldn't repeat it for the world, if there were no foundation.'

'Well, Sir,' said Clifford uneasily, but with strange bright eyes. 'There is a hope. There is a hope.'

Winter came across the room and wrung Clifford's hand.

'My dear boy, my dear lad, can you believe what it means to me, to hear that! And to hear you are working in the hope of a son: and that you may again employ every man at Tevershall. Ah, my boy! To keep up the level of the race, and to have work waiting for any man who cares to work!—'

The old man was really moved.

Next day Connie was arranging tall yellow tulips in a glass vase.

'Connie,' said Clifford, 'did you know there was a rumour that you are going to supply Wragby with a son and heir?'

Connie felt dim with terror, yet she stood quite still, touching the flowers.

'No!' she said. 'Is it a joke? Or malice?'

He paused before he answered:

'Neither, I hope. I hope it may be a prophecy.'

Connie went on with her flowers.

'I had a letter from Father this morning,' She said. 'He wants to know if I am aware he has accepted Sir Alexander Cooper's invitation for me for July and August, to the Villa Esmeralda in Venice.'

'July and August?' said Clifford.

'Oh, I wouldn't stay all that time. Are you sure you wouldn't come?'

'I won't travel abroad,' said Clifford promptly.

She took her flowers to the window.

'Do you mind if I go?' she said. 'You know it was promised, for this summer.'

'For how long would you go?'

'Perhaps three weeks.'

There was silence for a time.

'Well,' said Clifford slowly, and a little gloomily. 'I suppose I could stand it for three weeks: if I were absolutely sure you'd want to come back.'

'I should want to come back,' she said, with a quiet simplicity, heavy with conviction. She was thinking of the other man.

Clifford felt her conviction, and somehow he believed her, he believed it was for him. He felt immensely relieved, joyful at once.

'In that case,' he said, 'I think it would be all right, don't you?'

'I think so,' she said.

'You'd enjoy the change?'

She looked up at him with strange blue eyes.

'I should like to see Venice again,' she said, 'and to bathe from one of the shingle islands across the lagoon. But you know I loathe the Lido! And I don't fancy I shall like Sir Alexander Cooper and Lady Cooper. But if Hilda is there, and we have a gondola of our own: yes, it will be rather lovely. I do wish you'd come.'

She said it sincerely. She would so love to make him happy, in these ways.

'Ah, but think of me, though, at the Gare du Nord: at Calais quay!'

'But why not? I see other men carried in litter-chairs, who have been wounded in the war. Besides, we'd motor all the way.'

'We should need to take two men.'

'Oh no! We'd manage with Field. There would always be another man there.'

But Clifford shook his head.

'Not this year, dear! Not this year! Next year probably I'll try.'

She went away gloomily. Next year! What would next year bring? She herself

did not really want to go to Venice: not now, now there was the other man. But she was going as a sort of discipline: and also because, if she had a child, Clifford could think she had a lover in Venice.

It was already May, and in June they were supposed to start. Always these arrangements! Always one's life arranged for one! Wheels that worked one and drove one, and over which one had no real control!

It was May, but cold and wet again. A cold wet May, good for corn and hay! Much the corn and hay matter nowadays! Connie had to go into Uthwaite, which was their little town, where the Chatterleys were still the Chatterleys. She went alone, Field driving her.

In spite of May and a new greenness, the country was dismal. It was rather chilly, and there was smoke on the rain, and a certain sense of exhaust vapour in the air. One just had to live from one's resistance. No wonder these people were ugly and tough.

The car ploughed uphill through the long squalid straggle of Tevershall, the blackened brick dwellings, the black slate roofs glistening their sharp edges, the mud black with coal-dust, the pavements wet and black. It was as if dismalness had soaked through and through everything. The utter negation of natural beauty, the utter negation of the gladness of life, the utter absence of the instinct for shapely beauty which every bird and beast has, the utter death of the human intuitive faculty was appalling. The stacks of soap in the grocers' shops, the rhubarb and lemons in the greengrocers! The awful hats in the milliners! All went by ugly, ugly, ugly, followed by the plaster-and-gilt horror of the cinema with its wet picture announcements, 'A Woman's Love!' and the new big Primitive chapel, primitive enough in its stark brick and big panes of greenish and raspberry glass in the windows. The Wesleyan chapel, higher up, was of blackened brick and stood behind iron railings and blackened shrubs. The Congregational chapel, which thought itself superior, was built of rusticated sandstone and had a steeple, but not a very high one. Just beyond were the new school buildings, expensive pink brick, and gravelled playground inside iron railings, all very imposing, and mixing the suggestion of a chapel and a prison. Standard Five girls were having a singing lesson, just finishing the la-me-do-la exercises and beginning a 'sweet children's song'. Anything more unlike song, spontaneous song, would be impossible to imagine: a strange bawling yell that followed the outlines of a tune. It was not like savages: savages have subtle rhythms. It was not like animals: animals mean something when they yell. It was like nothing on earth, and it was called singing. Connie sat and listened with her heart in her boots, as Field was filling petrol. What could possibly become of such a people, a people in whom the living intuitive faculty was dead as nails, and only queer mechanical yells and uncanny will power remained?

A coal-cart was coming downhill, clanking in the rain. Field started upwards, past the big but weary-looking drapers and clothing shops, the post-office, into the little market-place of forlorn space, where Sam Black was peering out of the door of the 'Sun', that called itself an inn, not a pub, and where the commercial travellers stayed, and was bowing to Lady Chatterley's car.

The church was away to the left, among black trees. The car slid on downhill, past the Miners' Arms. It had already passed the Wellington, the Nelson, the Three Tuns, and the Sun, now it passed the Miners' Arms, then the Mechanics' Hall, then the new and almost gaudy Miners' Welfare and so, past a few new 'villas', out into the blackened road between dark hedges and dark green fields, towards Stacks Gate.

Tevershall! That was Tevershall! Merrie England! Shakespeare's England! No, but the England of today, as Connie had realized since she had come to live in it. It was producing a new race of mankind, over-conscious in the money and social and political side, on the spontaneous, intuitive side dead, but dead. Half-corpses, all of them: but with a terrible insistent consciousness in the other half. There was something uncanny and underground about it all. It was an under-world. And quite incalculable. How shall we understand the reactions in half-corpses? When Connie saw the great lorries full of steelworkers from Sheffield, weird, distorted smallish beings like men, off for an excursion to Matlock, her bowels fainted and she thought: Ah God, what has man done to man? What have the leaders of men been doing to their fellow men? They have reduced them to less than humanness; and now there can be no fellowship any more! It is just a nightmare.

She felt again in a wave of terror the grey, gritty hopelessness of it all. With such creatures for the industrial masses, and the upper classes as she knew them, there was no hope, no hope any more. Yet she was wanting a baby, and an heir to Wragby! An heir to Wragby! She shuddered with dread.

Yet Mellors had come out of all this!—Yes, but he was as apart from it all as she was. Even in him there was no fellowship left. It was dead. The fellowship was dead. There was only apartness and hopelessness, as far as all this was concerned. And this was England, the vast bulk of England: as Connie knew, since she had motored from the centre of it.

The car was rising towards Stacks Gate. The rain was holding off, and in the air came a queer pellucid gleam of May. The country rolled away in long undulations, south towards the Peak, east towards Mansfield and Nottingham. Connie was travelling South.

As she rose on to the high country, she could see on her left, on a height above the rolling land, the shadowy, powerful bulk of Warsop Castle, dark grey, with below it the reddish plastering of miners' dwellings, newish, and below those the plumes of dark smoke and white steam from the great colliery which put so many thousand pounds per annum into the pockets of the Duke and the other shareholders. The powerful old castle was a ruin, yet it hung its bulk on the low skyline, over the black plumes and the white that waved on the damp air below.

A turn, and they ran on the high level to Stacks Gate. Stacks Gate, as seen from the highroad, was just a huge and gorgeous new hotel, the Coningsby Arms, standing red and white and gilt in barbarous isolation off the road. But if you looked, you saw on the left rows of handsome 'modern' dwellings, set down like a game of dominoes, with spaces and gardens, a queer game of dominoes that some weird 'masters' were playing on the surprised earth. And beyond these blocks of dwellings, at the back, rose all the astonishing and frightening overhead erections of a really modern mine, chemical works and long galleries, enormous, and of shapes not before known to man. The head-stock and pit-bank of the mine itself were insignificant among the huge new installations. And in front of this, the game of dominoes stood forever in a sort of surprise, waiting to be played.

This was Stacks Gate, new on the face of the earth, since the war. But as a matter of fact, though even Connie did not know it, downhill half a mile below the 'hotel' was old Stacks Gate, with a little old colliery and blackish old brick dwellings, and a chapel or two and a shop or two and a little pub or two.

But that didn't count any more. The vast plumes of smoke and vapour rose from the new works up above, and this was now Stacks Gate: no chapels, no pubs, even no shops. Only the great 'works', which are the modern Olympia with temples to all the gods; then the model dwellings: then the hotel. The hotel in actuality was nothing but a miners' pub though it looked first-classy.

Even since Connie's arrival at Wragby this new place had arisen on the face of the earth, and the model dwellings had filled with riff-raff drifting in from anywhere, to poach Clifford's rabbits among other occupations.

The car ran on along the uplands, seeing the rolling county spread out. The county! It had once been a proud and lordly county. In front, looming again and hanging on the brow of the skyline, was the huge and splendid bulk of Chadwick Hall, more window than wall, one of the most famous Elizabethan houses. Noble it stood alone above a great park, but out of date, passed over. It was still kept up, but as a show place. 'Look how our ancestors lorded it!'

That was the past. The present lay below. God alone knows where the future lies. The car was already turning, between little old blackened miners' cottages, to descend to Uthwaite. And Uthwaite, on a damp day, was sending up a whole array of smoke plumes and steam, to whatever gods there be. Uthwaite down in the valley, with all the steel threads of the railways to Sheffield drawn through it, and the coal mines and the steel works sending up smoke and glare from long tubes, and the pathetic little corkscrew spire of the church, that is going to tumble down, still pricking the fumes, always affected Connie strangely. It was an old market town, centre of the dales. One of the chief inns was the Chatterley Arms. There, in Uthwaite, Wragby was known as Wragby, as if it were a whole place, not just a house, as it was to outsiders: Wragby Hall, near Tevershall: Wragby, a 'seat'.

The miners' cottages, blackened, stood flush on the pavement, with that intimacy and smallness of colliers' dwellings over a hundred years old. They lined all the way. The road had become a street, and as you sank, you forgot instantly the open, rolling country where the castles and big houses still dominated, but like ghosts. Now you were just above the tangle of naked railway lines, and foundries and other 'works' rose about you, so big you were only aware of walls. And iron clanked with a huge reverberating clank, and huge lorries shook the earth, and whistles screamed.

Yet again, once you had got right down and into the twisted and crooked heart of the town, behind the church, you were in the world of two centuries ago, in the crooked streets where the Chatterley Arms stood, and the old pharmacy, streets which used to lead out to the wild open world of the castles and stately couchant houses.

But at the corner a policeman held up his hand as three lorries loaded with iron rolled past, shaking the poor old church. And not till the lorries were past could he salute her ladyship.

So it was. Upon the old crooked burgess streets hordes of oldish, blackened miners' dwellings crowded, lining the roads out. And immediately after these came the newer, pinker rows of rather larger houses, plastering the valley: the homes of more modern workmen. And beyond that again, in the wide rolling regions of the castles, smoke waved against steam, and patch after patch of raw reddish brick showed the newer mining settlements, sometimes in the hollows, sometimes gruesomely ugly along the skyline of the slopes. And between, in between, were the tattered remnants of the old coaching and cottage England, even the England of Robin Hood, where the miners prowled with the dismalness of suppressed sporting instincts, when they were not at work.

England, my England! But which is my England? The stately homes of England make good photographs, and create the illusion of a connexion with the Elizabethans. The handsome old halls are there, from the days of Good Queen Anne and Tom Jones. But smuts fall and blacken on the drab stucco, that has long ceased to be golden. And one by one, like the stately homes, they were abandoned. Now they are being pulled down. As for the cottages of England—there they are—great plasterings of brick dwellings on the hopeless countryside.

Now they are pulling down the stately homes, the Georgian halls are going. Fritchley, a perfect old Georgian mansion, was even now, as Connie passed in the car, being demolished. It was in perfect repair: till the war the Weatherleys had lived in style there. But now it was too big, too expensive, and the country had become too uncongenial. The gentry were departing to pleasanter places, where they could spend their money without having to see how it was made.

This is history. One England blots out another. The mines had made the halls wealthy. Now they were blotting them out, as they had already blotted out the cottages. The industrial England blots out the agricultural England. One meaning blots out another. The new England blots out the old England. And the continuity is not organic, but mechanical.

Connie, belonging to the leisured classes, had clung to the remnants of the old England. It had taken her years to realize that it was really blotted out by this terrifying new and gruesome England, and that the blotting out would go on till it was complete. Fritchley was gone, Eastwood was gone, Shipley was going: Squire Winter's beloved Shipley.

Connie called for a moment at Shipley. The park gates at the back, opened just near the level crossing of the colliery railway; the Shipley colliery itself stood just beyond the trees. The gates stood open, because through the park was a right-of-way that the colliers used. They hung around the park.

The car passed the ornamental ponds, in which the colliers threw their newspapers, and took the private drive to the house. It stood above, aside, a very pleasant stucco building from the middle of the eighteenth century. It had a beautiful alley of yew trees, that had approached an older house, and the hall stood serenely spread out, winking its Georgian panes as if cheerfully. Behind, there were really beautiful gardens.

Connie liked the interior much better than Wragby. It was much lighter, more alive, shapen and elegant. The rooms were panelled with creamy-painted panelling, the ceilings were touched with gilt, and everything was kept in exquisite order, all the appointments were perfect, regardless of expense. Even the corridors managed to be ample and lovely, softly curved and full of life.

But Leslie Winter was alone. He had adored his house. But his park was bordered by three of his own collieries. He had been a generous man in his ideas. He had almost welcomed the colliers in his park. Had the miners not made him rich! So, when he saw the gangs of unshapely men lounging by his ornamental waters—not in the private part of the park, no, he drew the line there—he would say: 'The miners are perhaps not so ornamental as deer, but they are far more profitable.' But that was in the golden—monetarily—latter half of Queen Victoria's reign. Miners were then 'good working men'.

Winter had made this speech, half apologetic, to his guest, the then Prince of Wales. And the Prince had replied, in his rather guttural English:

'You are quite right. If there were coal under Sandringham, I would open a mine on the lawns, and think it first-rate landscape gardening. Oh, I am quite willing to exchange roe-deer for colliers, at the price. Your men are good men too, I hear.'

But then, the Prince had perhaps an exaggerated idea of the beauty of money, and the blessings of industrialism.

However, the Prince had been a King, and the King had died, and now there was another King, whose chief function seemed to be to open soup-kitchens.

And the good working men were somehow hemming Shipley in. New mining villages crowded on the park, and the squire felt somehow that the population was alien. He used to feel, in a good-natured but quite grand way, lord of his own domain and of his own colliers. Now, by a subtle pervasion of the new spirit, he had somehow been pushed out. It was he who did not belong any more. There was no mistaking it. The mines, the industry, had a will of its own, and this will was against the gentleman-owner. All the colliers took part in the will, and it was hard to live up against it. It either shoved you out of the place, or out of life altogether.

Squire Winter, a soldier, had stood it out. But he no longer cared to walk in the park after dinner. He almost hid, indoors. Once he had walked, bare-headed, and in his patent-leather shoes and purple silk socks, with Connie down to the gate, talking to her in his well-bred rather haw-haw fashion. But when it came to passing the little gangs of colliers who stood and stared without either salute or anything else, Connie felt how the lean, well-bred old man winced, winced as an elegant antelope stag in a cage winces from the vulgar stare. The colliers were not personally hostile: not at all. But their spirit was cold, and shoving him out. And, deep down, there was a profound grudge. They 'worked for him'. And in their ugliness, they resented his elegant, well-groomed, well-bred existence. 'Who's he!' It was the difference that they resented.

And somewhere, in his secret English heart, being a good deal of a soldier, he believed they were right to resent the difference. He felt himself a little in the wrong, for having all the advantages. Nevertheless he represented a system, and he would not be shoved out.

Except by death. Which came on him soon after Connie's call, suddenly. And he remembered Clifford handsomely in his will.

The heirs at once gave out the order for the demolishing of Shipley. It cost too much to keep up. No one would live there. So it was broken up. The avenue of yews was cut down. The park was denuded of its timber, and divided into lots. It was near enough to Uthwaite. In the strange, bald desert of this still-one-more no man's land, new little streets of semi-detacheds were run up, very desirable! The Shipley Hall Estate!

Within a year of Connie's last call, it had happened. There stood Shipley Hall Estate, an array of red-brick semi-detached 'villas' in new streets. No one would have dreamed that the stucco hall had stood there twelve months before.

But this is a later stage of King Edward's landscape gardening, the sort that has an ornamental coal mine on the lawn.

One England blots out another. The England of the Squire Winters and the Wragby Halls was gone, dead. The blotting out was only not yet complete.

What would come after? Connie could not imagine. She could only see the new brick streets spreading into the fields, the new erections rising at the collieries, the new girls in their silk stockings, the new collier lads lounging into the Pally or the Welfare. The younger generation were utterly unconscious of the old England. There was a gap in the continuity of consciousness, almost American: but industrial really. What next?

Connie always felt there was no next. She wanted to hide her head in the sand: or, at least, in the bosom of a living man.

The world was so complicated and weird and gruesome! The common people were so many, and really so terrible. So she thought as she was going home, and saw the colliers trailing from the pits, grey-black, distorted, one shoulder higher than the other, slurring their heavy iron-shod boots. Underground grey faces, whites of eyes rolling, necks cringing from the pit roof, shoulders out of shape. Men! Men! Alas, in some ways patient and good men. In other ways, non-existent. Something that men should have was bred and killed out of them. Yet they were men. They begot children. One might bear a child to them. Terrible, terrible thought! They were good and kindly. But they were only half, Only the grey half of a human being. As yet, they were 'good'. But even that was the goodness of their halfness. Supposing the dead in them ever rose up! But no, it was too terrible to think of. Connie was absolutely afraid of the industrial masses. They seemed so weird to her. A life with utterly no beauty in it, no intuition, always 'in the pit'.

Children from such men! Oh God, oh God!

Yet Mellors had come from such a father. Not quite. Forty years had made a difference, an appalling difference in manhood. The iron and the coal had eaten deep into the bodies and souls of the men.

Incarnate ugliness, and yet alive! What would become of them all? Perhaps with the passing of the coal they would disappear again, off the face of the earth. They had appeared out of nowhere in their thousands, when the coal had called for them. Perhaps they were only weird fauna of the coal seams. Creatures of another reality, they were elementals, serving the elements of coal, as the metal workers were elementals, serving the element of iron. Men not men, but animas of coal and iron and clay. Fauna of the elements, carbon, iron, silicon: elementals. They had perhaps some of the weird, inhuman beauty of minerals, the lustre of coal, the weight and blueness and resistance of iron, the transparency of glass. Elemental creatures, weird and distorted, of the mineral world! They belonged to the coal, the iron, the clay, as fish belong to the sea and worms to dead wood. The anima of mineral disintegration!

Connie was glad to be home, to bury her head in the sand. She was glad even to babble to Clifford. For her fear of the mining and iron Midlands affected her with a queer feeling that went all over her, like influenza.

'Of course I had to have tea in Miss Bentley's shop,' she said.

'Really! Winter would have given you tea.'

'Oh yes, but I daren't disappoint Miss Bentley.'

Miss Bentley was a shallow old maid with a rather large nose and romantic disposition who served tea with a careful intensity worthy of a sacrament.

'Did she ask after me?' said Clifford.

'Of course!—May I ask your Ladyship how Sir Clifford is!—I believe she ranks you even higher than Nurse Cavell!'

'And I suppose you said I was blooming.'

'Yes! And she looked as rapt as if I had said the heavens had opened to you. I said if she ever came to Tevershall she was to come to see you.'

'Me! Whatever for! See me!'

'Why yes, Clifford. You can't be so adored without making some slight return. Saint George of Cappadocia was nothing to you, in her eyes.'

'And do you think she'll come?'

'Oh, she blushed! And looked quite beautiful for a moment, poor thing! Why don't men marry the women who would really adore them?'

'The women start adoring too late. But did she say she'd come?'

'Oh!' Connie imitated the breathless Miss Bentley, 'your Ladyship, if ever I should dare to presume!'

'Dare to presume! How absurd! But I hope to God she won't turn up. And how was her tea?'

'Oh, Lipton's and very strong. But Clifford, do you realize you are the Roman de la rose of Miss Bentley and lots like her?'

'I'm not flattered, even then.'

'They treasure up every one of your pictures in the illustrated papers, and probably pray for you every night. It's rather wonderful.'

She went upstairs to change.

That evening he said to her:

'You do think, don't you, that there is something eternal in marriage?'

She looked at him.

'But Clifford, you make eternity sound like a lid or a long, long chain that trailed after one, no matter how far one went.'

He looked at her, annoyed.

'What I mean,' he said, 'is that if you go to Venice, you won't go in the hope of some love affair that you can take au grand sérieux, will you?'

'A love affair in Venice au grand sérieux? No. I assure you! No, I'd never take a love affair in Venice more than au très petit sérieux.'

She spoke with a queer kind of contempt. He knitted his brows, looking at her.

Coming downstairs in the morning, she found the keeper's dog Flossie sitting in the corridor outside Clifford's room, and whimpering very faintly.

'Why, Flossie!' she said softly. 'What are you doing here?'

And she quietly opened Clifford's door. Clifford was sitting up in bed, with the bed-table and typewriter pushed aside, and the keeper was standing at attention at the foot of the bed. Flossie ran in. With a faint gesture of head and eyes, Mellors ordered her to the door again, and she slunk out.

'Oh, good morning, Clifford!' Connie said. 'I didn't know you were busy.' Then she looked at the keeper, saying good morning to him. He murmured his reply, looking at her as if vaguely. But she felt a whiff of passion touch her, from his mere presence.

'Did I interrupt you, Clifford? I'm sorry.'

'No, it's nothing of any importance.'

She slipped out of the room again, and up to the blue boudoir on the first floor. She sat in the window, and saw him go down the drive, with his curious, silent motion, effaced. He had a natural sort of quiet distinction, an aloof pride, and also a certain look of frailty. A hireling! One of Clifford's hirelings! 'The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.'

Was he an underling? Was he? What did he think of her?

It was a sunny day, and Connie was working in the garden, and Mrs. Bolton was helping her. For some reason, the two women had drawn together, in one of the unaccountable flows and ebbs of sympathy that exist between people. They were pegging down carnations, and putting in small plants for the summer. It was work they both liked. Connie especially felt a delight in putting the soft roots of young plants into a soft black puddle, and cradling them down. On this spring morning she felt a quiver in her womb too, as if the sunshine had touched it and made it happy.

'It is many years since you lost your husband?' she said to Mrs. Bolton as she took up another little plant and laid it in its hole.

'Twenty-three!' said Mrs. Bolton, as she carefully separated the young columbines into single plants. 'Twenty-three years since they brought him home.'

Connie's heart gave a lurch, at the terrible finality of it. 'Brought him home!'

'Why did he get killed, do you think?' she asked. 'He was happy with you?'

It was a woman's question to a woman. Mrs. Bolton put aside a strand of hair from her face, with the back of her hand.

'I don't know, my Lady! He sort of wouldn't give in to things: he wouldn't really go with the rest. And then he hated ducking his head for anything on earth. A sort of obstinacy, that gets itself killed. You see he didn't really care. I lay it down to the pit. He ought never to have been down pit. But his dad made him go down, as a lad; and then, when you're over twenty, it's not very easy to come out.'

'Did he say he hated it?'

'Oh no! Never! He never said he hated anything. He just made a funny face. He was one of those who wouldn't take care: like some of the first lads as went off so blithe to the war and got killed right away. He wasn't really dazzle-brained. But he wouldn't care. I used to say to him: "You care for nought nor nobody!" But he did! The way he sat when my first baby was born, motionless, and the sort of fatal eyes he looked at me with, when it was over! I had a bad time, but I had to comfort him. "It's all right, lad, it's all right!" I said to him. And he gave me a look, and that funny sort of smile. He never said anything. But I don't believe he had any right pleasure with me at nights after; he'd never really let himself go. I used to say to him: Oh, let thysen go, lad!—I'd talk broad to him sometimes. And he said nothing. But he wouldn't let himself go, or he couldn't. He didn't want me to have any more children. I always blamed his mother, for letting him in th' room. He'd no right t'ave been there. Men make so much more of things than they should, once they start brooding.'

'Did he mind so much?' said Connie in wonder.

'Yes, he sort of couldn't take it for natural, all that pain. And it spoilt his pleasure in his bit of married love. I said to him: If I don't care, why should you? It's my look-out!—But all he'd ever say was: It's not right!'

'Perhaps he was too sensitive,' said Connie.

'That's it! When you come to know men, that's how they are: too sensitive in the wrong place. And I believe, unbeknown to himself he hated the pit, just hated it. He looked so quiet when he was dead, as if he'd got free. He was such a nice-looking lad. It just broke my heart to see him, so still and pure looking, as if he'd wanted to die. Oh, it broke my heart, that did. But it was the pit.'

She wept a few bitter tears, and Connie wept more. It was a warm spring day, with a perfume of earth and of yellow flowers, many things rising to bud, and the garden still with the very sap of sunshine.

'It must have been terrible for you!' said Connie.

'Oh, my Lady! I never realized at first. I could only say: Oh my lad, what did you want to leave me for!—That was all my cry. But somehow I felt he'd come back.'

'But he didn't want to leave you,' said Connie.

'Oh no, my Lady! That was only my silly cry. And I kept expecting him back. Especially at nights. I kept waking up thinking: Why he's not in bed with me!—It was as if my feelings wouldn't believe he'd gone. I just felt he'd have to come back and lie against me, so I could feel him with me. That was all I wanted, to feel him there with me, warm. And it took me a thousand shocks before I knew he wouldn't come back, it took me years.'

'The touch of him,' said Connie.

'That's it, my Lady, the touch of him! I've never got over it to this day, and never shall. And if there's a heaven above, he'll be there, and will lie up against me so I can sleep.'

Connie glanced at the handsome, brooding face in fear. Another passionate one out of Tevershall! The touch of him! For the bonds of love are ill to loose!

'It's terrible, once you've got a man into your blood!' she said.

'Oh, my Lady! And that's what makes you feel so bitter. You feel folks wanted him killed. You feel the pit fair wanted to kill him. Oh, I felt, if it hadn't been for the pit, an' them as run the pit, there'd have been no leaving me. But they all want to separate a woman and a man, if they're together.'

'If they're physically together,' said Connie.

'That's right, my Lady! There's a lot of hard-hearted folks in the world. And every morning when he got up and went to th' pit, I felt it was wrong, wrong. But what else could he do? What can a man do?'

A queer hate flared in the woman.

'But can a touch last so long?' Connie asked suddenly. 'That you could feel him so long?'

'Oh my Lady, what else is there to last? Children grow away from you. But the man, well! But even that they'd like to kill in you, the very thought of the touch of him. Even your own children! Ah well! We might have drifted apart, who knows. But the feeling's something different. It's 'appen better never to care. But there, when I look at women who's never really been warmed through by a man, well, they seem to me poor dool-owls after all, no matter how they may dress up and gad. No, I'll abide by my own. I've not much respect for people.'

Chapter ⓬

Connie went to the wood directly after lunch. It was really a lovely day, the first dandelions making suns, the first daisies so white. The hazel thicket was a lacework of half-open leaves, and the last dusty perpendicular of the catkins. Yellow celandines now were in crowds, flat open, pressed back in urgency, and the yellow glitter of themselves. It was the yellow, the powerful yellow of early summer. And primroses were broad, and full of pale abandon, thick-clustered primroses no longer shy. The lush, dark green of hyacinths was a sea, with buds rising like pale corn, while in the riding the forget-me-nots were fluffing up, and columbines were unfolding their ink-purple riches, and there were bits of bluebird's eggshell under a bush. Everywhere the bud-knots and the leap of life!

The keeper was not at the hut. Everything was serene, brown chickens running lustily. Connie walked on towards the cottage, because she wanted to find him.

The cottage stood in the sun, off the wood's edge. In the little garden the double daffodils rose in tufts, near the wide-open door, and red double daisies made a border to the path. There was the bark of a dog, and Flossie came running.

The wide-open door! So he was at home. And the sunlight falling on the red-brick floor! As she went up the path, she saw him through the window, sitting at the table in his shirt-sleeves, eating. The dog wuffed softly, slowly wagging her tail.

He rose, and came to the door, wiping his mouth with a red handkerchief still chewing.

'May I come in?' she said.

'Come in!'

The sun shone into the bare room, which still smelled of a mutton chop, done in a dutch oven before the fire, because the dutch oven still stood on the fender, with the black potato-saucepan on a piece of paper beside it on the white hearth. The fire was red, rather low, the bar dropped, the kettle singing.

On the table was his plate, with potatoes and the remains of the chop; also bread in a basket, salt, and a blue mug with beer. The tablecloth was white oil-cloth. He stood in the shade.

'You are very late,' she said. 'Do go on eating!'

She sat down on a wooden chair, in the sunlight by the door.

'I had to go to Uthwaite,' he said, sitting down at the table but not eating.

'Do eat,' she said. But he did not touch the food.

'Shall y'ave something?' he asked her. 'Shall y'ave a cup of tea? T' kettle's on t' boil.' He half rose again from his chair.

'If you'll let me make it myself,' she said, rising. He seemed sad, and she felt she was bothering him.

'Well, teapot's in there,'—he pointed to a little, drab corner cupboard; 'an' cups. An' tea's on t' mantel ower yer 'ead.'

She got the black teapot, and the tin of tea from the mantelshelf. She rinsed the teapot with hot water, and stood a moment wondering where to empty it.

'Throw it out,' he said, aware of her. 'It's clean.'

She went to the door and threw the drop of water down the path. How lovely it was here, so still, so really woodland. The oaks were putting out ochre yellow leaves: in the garden the red daisies were like red plush buttons. She glanced at the big, hollow sandstone slab of the threshold, now crossed by so few feet.

'But it's lovely here,' she said. 'Such a beautiful stillness, everything alive and still.'

He was eating again, rather slowly and unwillingly, and she could feel he was discouraged. She made the tea in silence, and set the teapot on the hob, as she knew the people did. He pushed his plate aside and went to the back place; she heard a latch click, then he came back with cheese on a plate, and butter.

She set the two cups on the table; there were only two.

'Will you have a cup of tea?' she said.

'If you like. Sugar's in th' cupboard, an' there's a little cream jug. Milk's in a jug in th' pantry.'

'Shall I take your plate away?' she asked him. He looked up at her with a faint ironical smile.

'Why... if you like,' he said, slowly eating bread and cheese. She went to the back, into the penthouse scullery, where the pump was. On the left was a door, no doubt the pantry door. She unlatched it, and almost smiled at the place he called a pantry: a long narrow white-washed slip of a cupboard. But it managed to contain a little barrel of beer, as well as a few dishes and bits of food. She took a little milk from the yellow jug.

'How do you get your milk?' she asked him, when she came back to the table.

'Flints! They leave me a bottle at the warren end. You know, where I met you!'

But he was discouraged.

She poured out the tea, poising the cream jug.

'No milk,' he said; then he seemed to hear a noise, and looked keenly through the doorway.

''Appen we'd better shut,' he said.

'It seems a pity,' she replied. 'Nobody will come, will they?'

'Not unless it's one time in a thousand, but you never know.'

'And even then it's no matter,' she said. 'It's only a cup of tea.'

'Where are the spoons?'

He reached over, and pulled open the table drawer. Connie sat at the table in the sunshine of the doorway.

'Flossie!' he said to the dog, who was lying on a little mat at the stair foot. 'Go an' hark, hark!'

He lifted his finger, and his 'hark!' was very vivid. The dog trotted out to reconnoitre.

'Are you sad today?' she asked him.

He turned his blue eyes quickly, and gazed direct on her.

'Sad! No, bored! I had to go getting summonses for two poachers I caught, and, oh well, I don't like people.'

He spoke cold, good English, and there was anger in his voice.

'Do you hate being a game-keeper?' she asked.

'Being a game-keeper, no! So long as I'm left alone. But when I have to go messing around at the police station, and various other places, and waiting for a lot of fools to attend to me ... oh well, I get mad ...' and he smiled, with a certain faint humour.

'Couldn't you be really independent?' she asked.

'Me? I suppose I could, if you mean manage to exist on my pension. I could! But I've got to work, or I should die. That is, I've got to have something that keeps me occupied. And I'm not in a good enough temper to work for myself. It's got to be a sort of job for somebody else, or I should throw it up in a month, out of bad temper. So altogether I'm very well off here, especially lately...'

He laughed at her again, with mocking humour.

'But why are you in a bad temper?' she asked. 'Do you mean you are always in a bad temper?'

'Pretty well,' he said, laughing. 'I don't quite digest my bile.'

'But what bile?' she said.

'Bile!' he said. 'Don't you know what that is?' She was silent, and disappointed. He was taking no notice of her.

'I'm going away for a while next month,' she said.

'You are! Where to?'

'Venice.'

'Venice! With Sir Clifford? For how long?'

'For a month or so,' she replied. 'Clifford won't go.'

'He'll stay here?' he asked.

'Yes! He hates to travel as he is.'

'Ay, poor devil!' he said, with sympathy.

There was a pause.

'You won't forget me when I'm gone, will you?' she asked. Again he lifted his eyes and looked full at her.

'Forget?' he said. 'You know nobody forgets. It's not a question of memory.'

She wanted to say: 'What then?' but she didn't. Instead, she said in a mute kind of voice: 'I told Clifford I might have a child.'

Now he really looked at her, intense and searching.

'You did?' he said at last. 'And what did he say?'

'Oh, he wouldn't mind. He'd be glad, really, so long as it seemed to be his.' She dared not look up at him.

He was silent a long time, then he gazed again on her face.

'No mention of me, of course?' he said.

'No. No mention of you,' she said.

'No, he'd hardly swallow me as a substitute breeder. Then where are you supposed to be getting the child?'

'I might have a love affair in Venice,' she said.

'You might,' he replied slowly. 'So that's why you're going?'

'Not to have the love affair,' she said, looking up at him, pleading.

'Just the appearance of one,' he said.

There was silence. He sat staring out of the window, with a faint grin, half mockery, half bitterness, on his face. She hated his grin.

'You've not taken any precautions against having a child then?' he asked her suddenly. 'Because I haven't.'

'No,' she said faintly. 'I should hate that.'

He looked at her, then again with the peculiar subtle grin out of the window. There was a tense silence.

At last he turned his head and said satirically:

'That was why you wanted me then, to get a child?'

She hung her head.

'No. Not really,' she said.

'What then, really?' he asked rather bitingly.

She looked up at him reproachfully, saying: 'I don't know.'

He broke into a laugh.

'Then I'm damned if I do,' he said.

There was a long pause of silence, a cold silence.

'Well,' he said at last. 'It's as your Ladyship likes. If you get the baby, Sir Clifford's welcome to it. I shan't have lost anything. On the contrary, I've had a very nice experience, very nice indeed!'—and he stretched in a half-suppressed sort of yawn. 'If you've made use of me,' he said, 'it's not the first time I've been made use of; and I don't suppose it's ever been as pleasant as this time; though of course one can't feel tremendously dignified about it.'—He stretched again, curiously, his muscles quivering, and his jaw oddly set.

'But I didn't make use of you,' she said, pleading.

'At your Ladyship's service,' he replied.

'No,' she said. 'I liked your body.'

'Did you?' he replied, and he laughed. 'Well, then, we're quits, because I liked yours.'

He looked at her with queer darkened eyes.

'Would you like to go upstairs now?' he asked her, in a strangled sort of voice.

'No, not here. Not now!' she said heavily, though if he had used any power over her, she would have gone, for she had no strength against him.

He turned his face away again, and seemed to forget her.

'I want to touch you like you touch me,' she said. 'I've never really touched your body.'

He looked at her, and smiled again. 'Now?' he said.

'No! No! Not here! At the hut. Would you mind?'

'How do I touch you?' he asked.

'When you feel me.'

He looked at her, and met her heavy, anxious eyes.

'And do you like it when I feel you?' he asked, laughing at her still.

'Yes, do you?' she said.

'Oh, me!' Then he changed his tone. 'Yes,' he said. 'You know without asking.' Which was true.

She rose and picked up her hat. 'I must go,' she said.

'Will you go?' he replied politely.

She wanted him to touch her, to say something to her, but he said nothing, only waited politely.

'Thank you for the tea,' she said.

'I haven't thanked your Ladyship for doing me the honours of my teapot,' he said.

She went down the path, and he stood in the doorway, faintly grinning. Flossie came running with her tail lifted. And Connie had to plod dumbly across into the wood, knowing he was standing there watching her, with that incomprehensible grin on his face.

She walked home very much downcast and annoyed. She didn't at all like his saying he had been made use of; because, in a sense, it was true. But he oughtn't to have said it. Therefore, again, she was divided between two feelings: resentment against him, and a desire to make it up with him.

She passed a very uneasy and irritated teatime, and at once went up to her room. But when she was there it was no good; she could neither sit nor stand. She would have to do something about it. She would have to go back to the hut; if he was not there, well and good.

She slipped out of the side door, and took her way direct and a little sullen. When she came to the clearing she was terribly uneasy. But there he was again, in his shirt-sleeves, stooping, letting the hens out of the coops, among the chicks that were now growing a little gawky, but were much more trim than hen-chickens.

She went straight across to him.

'You see I've come!' she said.

'Ay, I see it!' he said, straightening his back, and looking at her with a faint amusement.

'Do you let the hens out now?' she asked.

'Yes, they've sat themselves to skin and bone,' he said. 'An' now they're not all that anxious to come out an' feed. There's no self in a sitting hen; she's all in the eggs or the chicks.'

The poor mother-hens; such blind devotion! Even to eggs not their own! Connie looked at them in compassion. A helpless silence fell between the man and the woman.

'Shall us go i' th' 'ut?' he asked.

'Do you want me?' she asked, in a sort of mistrust.

'Ay, if you want to come.'

She was silent.

'Come then!' he said.

And she went with him to the hut. It was quite dark when he had shut the door, so he made a small light in the lantern, as before.

'Have you left your underthings off?' he asked her.

'Yes!'

'Ay, well, then I'll take my things off too.'

He spread the blankets, putting one at the side for a coverlet. She took off her hat, and shook her hair. He sat down, taking off his shoes and gaiters, and undoing his cord breeches.

'Lie down then!' he said, when he stood in his shirt. She obeyed in silence, and he lay beside her, and pulled the blanket over them both.

'There!' he said.

And he lifted her dress right back, till he came even to her breasts. He kissed them softly, taking the nipples in his lips in tiny caresses.

'Eh, but tha'rt nice, tha'rt nice!' he said, suddenly rubbing his face with a snuggling movement against her warm belly.

And she put her arms round him under his shirt, but she was afraid, afraid of his thin, smooth, naked body, that seemed so powerful, afraid of the violent muscles. She shrank, afraid.

And when he said, with a sort of little sigh: 'Eh, tha'rt nice!' something in her quivered, and something in her spirit stiffened in resistance: stiffened from the terribly physical intimacy, and from the peculiar haste of his possession. And this time the sharp ecstasy of her own passion did not overcome her; she lay with her hands inert on his striving body, and do what she might, her spirit seemed to look on from the top of her head, and the butting of his haunches seemed ridiculous to her, and the sort of anxiety of his penis to come to its little evacuating crisis seemed farcical. Yes, this was love, this ridiculous bouncing of the buttocks, and the wilting of the poor, insignificant, moist little penis. This was the divine love! After all, the moderns were right when they felt contempt for the performance; for it was a performance. It was quite true, as some poets said, that the God who created man must have had a sinister sense of humour, creating him a reasonable being, yet forcing him to take this ridiculous posture, and driving him with blind craving for this ridiculous performance. Even a Maupassant found it a humiliating anticlimax. Men despised the intercourse act, and yet did it.

Cold and derisive her queer female mind stood apart, and though she lay perfectly still, her impulse was to heave her loins, and throw the man out, escape his ugly grip, and the butting over-riding of his absurd haunches. His body was a foolish, impudent, imperfect thing, a little disgusting in its unfinished clumsiness. For surely a complete evolution would eliminate this performance, this 'function'.

And yet when he had finished, soon over, and lay very very still, receding into silence, and a strange motionless distance, far, farther than the horizon of her awareness, her heart began to weep. She could feel him ebbing away, ebbing away, leaving her there like a stone on a shore. He was withdrawing, his spirit was leaving her. He knew.

And in real grief, tormented by her own double consciousness and reaction, she began to weep. He took no notice, or did not even know. The storm of weeping swelled and shook her, and shook him.

'Ay!' he said. 'It was no good that time. You wasn't there.'—So he knew! Her sobs became violent.

'But what's amiss?' he said. 'It's once in a while that way.'

'I... I can't love you,' she sobbed, suddenly feeling her heart breaking.

'Canna ter? Well, dunna fret! There's no law says as tha's got to. Ta'e it for what it is.'

He still lay with his hand on her breast. But she had drawn both her hands from him.

His words were small comfort. She sobbed aloud.

'Nay, nay!' he said. 'Ta'e the thick wi'th' thin. This wor' a bit o' thin for once.'

She wept bitterly, sobbing. 'But I want to love you, and I can't. It only seems horrid.'

He laughed a little, half bitter, half amused.

'It isna horrid,' he said, 'even if tha thinks it is. An' tha canna ma'e it horrid. Dunna fret thysen about lovin' me. Tha'lt niver force thysen to 't. There's sure to be a bad nut in a basketful. Tha mun ta'e th' rough wi'th' smooth.'

He took his hand away from her breast, not touching her. And now she was untouched she took an almost perverse satisfaction in it. She hated the dialect: the thee and the tha and the thysen. He could get up if he liked, and stand there, above her, buttoning down those absurd corduroy breeches, straight in front of her. After all, Michaelis had had the decency to turn away. This man was so assured in himself, he didn't know what a clown other people found him, a half-bred fellow.

Yet, as he was drawing away, to rise silently and leave her, she clung to him in terror.

'Don't! Don't go! Don't leave me! Don't be cross with me! Hold me! Hold me fast!' she whispered in blind frenzy, not even knowing what she said, and clinging to him with uncanny force. It was from herself she wanted to be saved, from her own inward anger and resistance. Yet how powerful was that inward resistance that possessed her!

He took her in his arms again and drew her to him, and suddenly she became small in his arms, small and nestling. It was gone, the resistance was gone, and she began to melt in a marvellous peace. And as she melted small and wonderful in his arms, she became infinitely desirable to him, all his blood-vessels seemed to scald with intense yet tender desire, for her, for her softness, for the penetrating beauty of her in his arms, passing into his blood. And softly, with that marvellous swoon-like caress of his hand in pure soft desire, softly he stroked the silky slope of her loins, down, down between her soft warm buttocks, coming nearer and nearer to the very quick of her. And she felt him like a flame of desire, yet tender, and she felt herself melting in the flame. She let herself go. She felt his penis risen against her with silent amazing force and assertion, and she let herself go to him. She yielded with a quiver that was like death, she went all open to him. And oh, if he were not tender to her now, how cruel, for she was all open to him and helpless!

She quivered again at the potent inexorable entry inside her, so strange and terrible. It might come with the thrust of a sword in her softly-opened body, and that would be death. She clung in a sudden anguish of terror. But it came with a strange slow thrust of peace, the dark thrust of peace and a ponderous, primordial tenderness, such as made the world in the beginning. And her terror subsided in her breast, her breast dared to be gone in peace, she held nothing. She dared to let go everything, all herself, and be gone in the flood.

And it seemed she was like the sea, nothing but dark waves rising and heaving, heaving with a great swell, so that slowly her whole darkness was in motion, and she was ocean rolling its dark, dumb mass. Oh, and far down inside her the deeps parted and rolled asunder, in long, far-travelling billows, and ever, at the quick of her, the depths parted and rolled asunder, from the centre of soft plunging, as the plunger went deeper and deeper, touching lower, and she was deeper and deeper and deeper disclosed, and heavier the billows of her rolled away to some shore, uncovering her, and closer and closer plunged the palpable unknown, and further and further rolled the waves of herself away from herself, leaving her, till suddenly, in a soft, shuddering convulsion, the quick of all her plasm was touched, she knew herself touched, the consummation was upon her, and she was gone. She was gone, she was not, and she was born: a woman.

Ah, too lovely, too lovely! In the ebbing she realized all the loveliness. Now all her body clung with tender love to the unknown man, and blindly to the wilting penis, as it so tenderly, frailly, unknowingly withdrew, after the fierce thrust of its potency. As it drew out and left her body, the secret, sensitive thing, she gave an unconscious cry of pure loss, and she tried to put it back. It had been so perfect! And she loved it so!

And only now she became aware of the small, bud-like reticence and tenderness of the penis, and a little cry of wonder and poignancy escaped her again, her woman's heart crying out over the tender frailty of that which had been the power.

'It was so lovely!' she moaned. 'It was so lovely!' But he said nothing, only softly kissed her, lying still above her. And she moaned with a sort of bliss, as a sacrifice, and a newborn thing.

And now in her heart the queer wonder of him was awakened. A man! The strange potency of manhood upon her! Her hands strayed over him, still a little afraid. Afraid of that strange, hostile, slightly repulsive thing that he had been to her, a man. And now she touched him, and it was the sons of god with the daughters of men. How beautiful he felt, how pure in tissue! How lovely, how lovely, strong, and yet pure and delicate, such stillness of the sensitive body! Such utter stillness of potency and delicate flesh. How beautiful! How beautiful! Her hands came timorously down his back, to the soft, smallish globes of the buttocks. Beauty! What beauty! A sudden little flame of new awareness went through her. How was it possible, this beauty here, where she had previously only been repelled? The unspeakable beauty to the touch of the warm, living buttocks! The life within life, the sheer warm, potent loveliness. And the strange weight of the balls between his legs! What a mystery! What a strange heavy weight of mystery, that could lie soft and heavy in one's hand! The roots, root of all that is lovely, the primeval root of all full beauty.

She clung to him, with a hiss of wonder that was almost awe, terror. He held her close, but he said nothing. He would never say anything. She crept nearer to him, nearer, only to be near to the sensual wonder of him. And out of his utter, incomprehensible stillness, she felt again the slow momentous, surging rise of the phallus again, the other power. And her heart melted out with a kind of awe.

And this time his being within her was all soft and iridescent, purely soft and iridescent, such as no consciousness could seize. Her whole self quivered unconscious and alive, like plasm. She could not know what it was. She could not remember what it had been. Only that it had been more lovely than anything ever could be. Only that. And afterwards she was utterly still, utterly unknowing, she was not aware for how long. And he was still with her, in an unfathomable silence along with her. And of this, they would never speak.

When awareness of the outside began to come back, she clung to his breast, murmuring: 'My love! My love!' And he held her silently. And she curled on his breast, perfect.

But his silence was fathomless. His hands held her like flowers, so still and strange. 'Where are you?' she whispered to him. 'Where are you? Speak to me! Say something to me!'

He kissed her softly, murmuring: 'Ay, my lass!'

But she did not know what he meant, she did not know where he was. In his silence he seemed lost to her.

'You love me, don't you?' she murmured.

'Ay, tha knows!' he said.

'But tell me!' she pleaded.

'Ay! Ay! 'Asn't ter felt it?' he said dimly, but softly and surely. And she clung close to him, closer. He was so much more peaceful in love than she was, and she wanted him to reassure her.

'You do love me!' she whispered, assertive. And his hands stroked her softly, as if she were a flower, without the quiver of desire, but with delicate nearness. And still there haunted her a restless necessity to get a grip on love.

'Say you'll always love me!' she pleaded.

'Ay!' he said, abstractedly. And she felt her questions driving him away from her.

'Mustn't we get up?' he said at last.

'No!' she said.

But she could feel his consciousness straying, listening to the noises outside.

'It'll be nearly dark,' he said. And she heard the pressure of circumstances in his voice. She kissed him, with a woman's grief at yielding up her hour.

He rose, and turned up the lantern, then began to pull on his clothes, quickly disappearing inside them. Then he stood there, above her, fastening his breeches and looking down at her with dark, wide eyes, his face a little flushed and his hair ruffled, curiously warm and still and beautiful in the dim light of the lantern, so beautiful, she would never tell him how beautiful. It made her want to cling fast to him, to hold him, for there was a warm, half-sleepy remoteness in his beauty that made her want to cry out and clutch him, to have him. She would never have him. So she lay on the blanket with curved, soft naked haunches, and he had no idea what she was thinking, but to him too she was beautiful, the soft, marvellous thing he could go into, beyond everything.

'I love thee that I can go into thee,' he said.

'Do you like me?' she said, her heart beating.

'It heals it all up, that I can go into thee. I love thee that tha opened to me. I love thee that I came into thee like that.'

He bent down and kissed her soft flank, rubbed his cheek against it, then covered it up.

'And will you never leave me?' she said.

'Dunna ask them things,' he said.

'But you do believe I love you?' she said.

'Tha loved me just now, wider than iver tha thout tha would. But who knows what'll 'appen, once tha starts thinkin' about it!'

'No, don't say those things!—And you don't really think that I wanted to make use of you, do you?'

'How?'

'To have a child—?'

'Now anybody can 'ave any childt i' th' world,' he said, as he sat down fastening on his leggings.

'Ah no!' she cried. 'You don't mean it?'

'Eh well!' he said, looking at her under his brows. 'This wor t' best.'

She lay still. He softly opened the door. The sky was dark blue, with crystalline, turquoise rim. He went out, to shut up the hens, speaking softly to his dog. And she lay and wondered at the wonder of life, and of being.

When he came back she was still lying there, glowing like a gipsy. He sat on the stool by her.

'Tha mun come one naight ter th' cottage, afore tha goos; sholl ter?' he asked, lifting his eyebrows as he looked at her, his hands dangling between his knees.

'Sholl ter?' she echoed, teasing.

He smiled.

'Ay, sholl ter?' he repeated.

'Ay!' she said, imitating the dialect sound.

'Yi!' he said.

'Yi!' she repeated.

'An' slaip wi' me,' he said. 'It needs that. When sholt come?'

'When sholl I?' she said.

'Nay,' he said, 'tha canna do't. When sholt come then?'

''Appen Sunday,' she said.

''Appen a' Sunday! Ay!'

He laughed at her quickly.

'Nay, tha canna,' he protested.

'Why canna I?' she said.

He laughed. Her attempts at the dialect were so ludicrous, somehow.

'Coom then, tha mun goo!' he said.

'Mun I?' she said.

'Maun Ah!' he corrected.

'Why should I say maun when you said mun,' She protested. 'You're not playing fair.'

'Arena Ah!' he said, leaning forward and softly stroking her face.

'Th'art good cunt, though, aren't ter? Best bit o' cunt left on earth. When ter likes! When tha'rt willin'!'

'What is cunt?' she said.

'An' doesn't ter know? Cunt! It's thee down theer; an' what I get when I'm i'side thee, and what tha gets when I'm i'side thee; it's a'as it is, all on't.'

'All on't,' she teased. 'Cunt! It's like fuck then.'

'Nay nay! Fuck's only what you do. Animals fuck. But cunt's a lot more than that. It's thee, dost see: an' tha'rt a lot beside an animal, aren't ter? Even ter fuck! Cunt! Eh, that's the beauty o' thee, lass!'

She got up and kissed him between the eyes, that looked at her so dark and soft and unspeakably warm, so unberably beautiful.

'Is it?' she said. 'And do you care for me?'

He kissed her without answering.

'Tha mun goo, let me dust thee,' he said.

His hand passed over the curves of her body, trimly, without desire, but with soft, intimate knowledge.

As she ran home in the twilight the world seemed a dream; the trees in the park seemed bulging and surging at anchor on a tide, and the heave of the slope to the house was alive.

Chapter ⓭

On Sunday Clifford wanted to go into the wood. It was a lovely morning, the pear blossom and plum had suddenly appeared in the world in a wonder of white here and there.

It was cruel for Clifford, while the world bloomed, to have to be helped from chair to bath-chair. But he had forgotten, and even seemed to have a certain conceit of himself in his lameness. Connie still suffered, having to lift his inert legs into place. Mrs. Bolton did it now, or Field.

She waited for him at the top of the drive, at the edge of the screen of beeches. His chair came puffing along with a sort of valetudinarian slow importance. As he joined his wife he said:

'Sir Clifford on his foaming steed!'

'Snorting, at least!' she laughed.

He stopped and looked round at the facade of the long, low old brown house.

'Wragby doesn't wink an eyelid!' he said. 'But then why should it! I ride upon the achievements of the mind of man, and that beats a horse.'

'I suppose it does. And the souls in Plato riding up to heaven in a two-horse chariot would go in a Ford car now,' she said.

'Or a Rolls-Royce: Plato was an aristocrat!'

'Quite! No more black horse to thrash and maltreat. Plato never thought we'd go one better than his black steed and his white steed, and have no steeds at all, only an engine!'

'Only an engine and gas!' said Clifford.

'I hope I can have some repairs done to the old place next year. I think I shall have about a thousand to spare for that: but work costs so much!' he added.

'Oh, good!' said Connie. 'If only there aren't more strikes!'

'What would be the use of their striking again! Merely ruin the industry, what's left of it: and surely the owls are beginning to see it!'

'Perhaps they don't mind ruining the industry,' said Connie.

'Ah, don't talk like a woman! The industry fills their bellies, even if it can't keep their pockets quite so flush,' he said, using turns of speech that oddly had a twang of Mrs. Bolton.

'But didn't you say the other day that you were a conservative anarchist,' she asked innocently.

'And did you understand what I meant?' he retorted. 'All I meant is, people can be what they like and feel what they like and do what they like, strictly privately, so long as they keep the form of life intact, and the apparatus.'

Connie walked on in silence a few paces. Then she said, obstinately:

'It sounds like saying an egg may go as addled as it likes, so long as it keeps its shell on whole. But addled eggs do break of themselves.'

'I don't think people are eggs,' he said. 'Not even angels' eggs, my dear little evangelist.'

He was in rather high feather this bright morning. The larks were trilling away over the park, the distant pit in the hollow was fuming silent steam. It was almost like old days, before the war. Connie didn't really want to argue. But then she did not really want to go to the wood with Clifford either. So she walked beside his chair in a certain obstinacy of spirit.

'No,' he said. 'There will be no more strikes, if the thing is properly managed.'

'Why not?'

'Because strikes will be made as good as impossible.'

'But will the men let you?' she asked.

'We shan't ask them. We shall do it while they aren't looking: for their own good, to save the industry.'

'For your own good too,' she said.

'Naturally! For the good of everybody. But for their good even more than mine. I can live without the pits. They can't. They'll starve if there are no pits. I've got other provision.'

They looked up the shallow valley at the mine, and beyond it, at the black-lidded houses of Tevershall crawling like some serpent up the hill. From the old brown church the bells were ringing: Sunday, Sunday, Sunday!

'But will the men let you dictate terms?' she said.

'My dear, they will have to: if one does it gently.'

'But mightn't there be a mutual understanding?'

'Absolutely: when they realize that the industry comes before the individual.'

'But must you own the industry?' she said.

'I don't. But to the extent I do own it, yes, most decidedly. The ownership of property has now become a religious question: as it has been since Jesus and St. Francis. The point is not: take all thou hast and give to the poor, but use all thou hast to encourage the industry and give work to the poor. It's the only way to feed all the mouths and clothe all the bodies. Giving away all we have to the poor spells starvation for the poor just as much as for us. And universal starvation is no high aim. Even general poverty is no lovely thing. Poverty is ugly.'

'But the disparity?'

'That is fate. Why is the star Jupiter bigger than the star Neptune? You can't start altering the make-up of things!'

'But when this envy and jealousy and discontent has once started,' she began.

'Do your best to stop it. Somebody's got to be boss of the show.'

'But who is boss of the show?' she asked.

'The men who own and run the industries.'

There was a long silence.

'It seems to me they're a bad boss,' she said.

'Then you suggest what they should do.'

'They don't take their boss-ship seriously enough,' she said.

'They take it far more seriously than you take your ladyship,' he said.

'That's thrust upon me. I don't really want it,' she blurted out. He stopped the chair and looked at her.

'Who's shirking their responsibility now!' he said. 'Who is trying to get away now from the responsibility of their own boss-ship, as you call it?'

'But I don't want any boss-ship,' she protested.

'Ah! But that is funk. You've got it: fated to it. And you should live up to it. Who has given the colliers all they have that's worth having: all their political liberty, and their education, such as it is, their sanitation, their health conditions, their books, their music, everything. Who has given it to them? Have colliers given it to colliers? No! All the Wragbys and Shipleys in England have given their part, and must go on giving. There's your responsibility.'

Connie listened, and flushed very red.

'I'd like to give something,' she said. 'But I'm not allowed. Everything is to be sold and paid for now; and all the things you mention now, Wragby and Shipley sell them to the people, at a good profit. Everything is sold. You don't give one heartbeat of real sympathy. And besides, who has taken away from the people their natural life and manhood, and given them this industrial horror? Who has done that?'

'And what must I do?' he asked, green. 'Ask them to come and pillage me?'

'Why is Tevershall so ugly, so hideous? Why are their lives so hopeless?'

'They built their own Tevershall, that's part of their display of freedom. They built themselves their pretty Tevershall, and they live their own pretty lives. I can't live their lives for them. Every beetle must live its own life.'

'But you make them work for you. They live the life of your coal-mine.'

'Not at all. Every beetle finds its own food. Not one man is forced to work for me.'

'Their lives are industrialized and hopeless, and so are ours,' she cried.

'I don't think they are. That's just a romantic figure of speech, a relic of the swooning and die-away romanticism. You don't look at all a hopeless figure standing there, Connie my dear.'

Which was true. For her dark blue eyes were flashing, her colour was hot in her cheeks, she looked full of a rebellious passion far from the dejection of hopelessness. She noticed, in the tussocky places of the grass, cottony young cowslips standing up still bleared in their down. And she wondered with rage, why it was she felt Clifford was so wrong, yet she couldn't say it to him, she could not say exactly where he was wrong.

'No wonder the men hate you,' she said.

'They don't!' he replied. 'And don't fall into errors: in your sense of the word, they are not men. They are animals you don't understand, and never could. Don't thrust your illusions on other people. The masses were always the same, and will always be the same. Nero's slaves were extremely little different from our colliers or the Ford motorcar workmen. I mean Nero's mine slaves and his field slaves. It is the masses: they are the unchangeable. An individual may emerge from the masses. But the emergence doesn't alter the mass. The masses are unalterable. It is one of the most momentous facts of social science. Panem et circenses! Only today education is one of the bad substitutes for a circus. What is wrong today is that we've made a profound hash of the circuses part of the programme, and poisoned our masses with a little education.'

When Clifford became really roused in his feelings about the common people, Connie was frightened. There was something devastatingly true in what he said. But it was a truth that killed.

Seeing her pale and silent, Clifford started the chair again, and no more was said till he halted again at the wood gate, which she opened.

'And what we need to take up now,' he said, 'are whips, not swords. The masses have been ruled since time began, and till time ends, ruled they will have to be. It is sheer hypocrisy and farce to say they can rule themselves.'

'But can you rule them?' she asked.

'I? Oh yes! Neither my mind nor my will is crippled, and I don't rule with my legs. I can do my share of ruling: absolutely, my share; and give me a son, and he will be able to rule his portion after me.'

'But he wouldn't be your own son, of your own ruling class; or perhaps not,' she stammered.

'I don't care who his father may be, so long as he is a healthy man not below normal intelligence. Give inc the child of any healthy, normally intelligent man, and I will make a perfectly competent Chatterley of him. It is not who begets us, that matters, but where fate places us. Place any child among the ruling classes, and he will grow up, to his own extent, a ruler. Put kings' and dukes' children among the masses, and they'll be little plebeians, mass products. It is the overwhelming pressure of environment.'

'Then the common people aren't a race, and the aristocrats aren't blood,' she said.

'No, my child! All that is romantic illusion. Aristocracy is a function, a part of fate. And the masses are a functioning of another part of fate. The individual hardly matters. It is a question of which function you are brought up to and adapted to. It is not the individuals that make an aristocracy: it is the functioning of the aristocratic whole. And it is the functioning of the whole mass that makes the common man what he is.'

'Then there is no common humanity between us all!'

'Just as you like. We all need to fill our bellies. But when it comes to expressive or executive functioning, I believe there is a gulf and an absolute one, between the ruling and the serving classes. The two functions are opposed. And the function determines the individual.'

Connie looked at him with dazed eyes.

'Won't you come on?' she said.

And he started his chair. He had said his say. Now he lapsed into his peculiar and rather vacant apathy, that Connie found so trying. In the wood, anyhow, she was determined not to argue.

In front of them ran the open cleft of the riding, between the hazel walls and the gay grey trees. The chair puffed slowly on, slowly surging into the forget-me-nots that rose up in the drive like milk froth, beyond the hazel shadows. Clifford steered the middle course, where feet passing had kept a channel through the flowers. But Connie, walking behind, had watched the wheels jolt over the woodruff and the bugle, and squash the little yellow cups of the creeping-jenny. Now they made a wake through the forget-me-nots.

All the flowers were there, the first bluebells in blue pools, like standing water.

'You are quite right about its being beautiful,' said Clifford. 'It is so amazing. What is quite so lovely as an English spring!'

Connie thought it sounded as if even the spring bloomed by act of Parliament. An English spring! Why not an Irish one? Or Jewish? The chair moved slowly ahead, past tufts of sturdy bluebells that stood up like wheat and over grey burdock leaves. When they came to the open place where the trees had been felled, the light flooded in rather stark. And the bluebells made sheets of bright blue colour, here and there, sheering off into lilac and purple. And between, the bracken was lifting its brown curled heads, like legions of young snakes with a new secret to whisper to Eve.

Clifford kept the chair going till he came to the brow of the hill; Connie followed slowly behind. The oak buds were opening soft and brown. Everything came tenderly out of the old hardness. Even the snaggy craggy oak trees put out the softest young leaves, spreading thin, brown little wings like young bat wings in the light. Why had men never any newness in them, any freshness to come forth with! Stale men!

Clifford stopped the chair at the top of the rise and looked down. The bluebells washed blue like flood-water over the broad riding, and lit up the downhill with a warm blueness.

'It's a very fine colour in itself,' said Clifford, 'but useless for making a painting.'

'Quite!' said Connie, completely uninterested.

'Shall I venture as far as the spring?' said Clifford.

'Will the chair get up again?' she said.

'We'll try; nothing venture, nothing win!'

And the chair began to advance slowly, joltingly down the beautiful broad riding washed over with blue encroaching hyacinths. O last of all ships, through the hyacinthian shallows! O pinnace on the last wild waters, sailing on the last voyage of our civilization! Whither, O weird wheeled ship, your slow course steering. Quiet and complacent, Clifford sat at the wheel of adventure: in his old black hat and tweed jacket, motionless and cautious. O Captain, my Captain, our splendid trip is done! Not yet though! Downhill, in the wake, came Constance in her grey dress, watching the chair jolt downwards.

They passed the narrow track to the hut. Thank heaven it was not wide enough for the chair: hardly wide enough for one person. The chair reached the bottom of the slope, and swerved round, to disappear. And Connie heard a low whistle behind her. She glanced sharply round: the keeper was striding downhill towards her, his dog keeping behind him.

'Is Sir Clifford going to the cottage?' he asked, looking into her eyes.

'No, only to the well.'

'Ah! Good! Then I can keep out of sight. But I shall see you tonight. I shall wait for you at the park gate about ten.'

He looked again direct into her eyes.

'Yes,' she faltered.

They heard the Papp! Papp! of Clifford's horn, tooting for Connie. She 'Coo-eed!' in reply. The keeper's face flickered with a little grimace, and with his hand he softly brushed her breast upwards, from underneath. She looked at him, frightened, and started running down the hill, calling Coo-ee! again to Clifford. The man above watched her, then turned, grinning faintly, back into his path.

She found Clifford slowly mounting to the spring, which was halfway up the slope of the dark larch-wood. He was there by the time she caught him up.

'She did that all right,' he said, referring to the chair.

Connie looked at the great grey leaves of burdock that grew out ghostly from the edge of the larch wood. The people call it Robin Hood's Rhubarb. How silent and gloomy it seemed by the well! Yet the water bubbled so bright, wonderful! And there were bits of eye-bright and strong blue bugle ... And there, under the bank, the yellow earth was moving. A mole! It emerged, rowing its pink hands, and waving its blind gimlet of a face, with the tiny pink nose-tip uplifted.

'It seems to see with the end of its nose,' said Connie.

'Better than with its eyes!' he said. 'Will you drink?'

'Will you?'

She took an enamel mug from a twig on a tree, and stooped to fill it for him. He drank in sips. Then she stooped again, and drank a little herself.

'So icy!' she said gasping.

'Good, isn't it! Did you wish?'

'Did you?'

'Yes, I wished. But I won't tell.'

She was aware of the rapping of a woodpecker, then of the wind, soft and eerie through the larches. She looked up. White clouds were crossing the blue.

'Clouds!' she said.

'White lambs only,' he replied.

A shadow crossed the little clearing. The mole had swum out on to the soft yellow earth.

'Unpleasant little beast, we ought to kill him,' said Clifford.

'Look! he's like a parson in a pulpit,' she said.

She gathered some sprigs of woodruff and brought them to him.

'New-mown hay!' he said. 'Doesn't it smell like the romantic ladies of the last century, who had their heads screwed on the right way after all!'

She was looking at the white clouds.

'I wonder if it will rain,' she said.

'Rain! Why! Do you want it to?'

They started on the return journey, Clifford jolting cautiously downhill. They came to the dark bottom of the hollow, turned to the right, and after a hundred yards swerved up the foot of the long slope, where bluebells stood in the light.

'Now, old girl!' said Clifford, putting the chair to it.

It was a steep and jolty climb. The chair plugged slowly, in a struggling unwilling fashion. Still, she nosed her way up unevenly, till she came to where the hyacinths were all around her, then she balked, struggled, jerked a little way out of the flowers, then stopped.

'We'd better sound the horn and see if the keeper will come,' said Connie. 'He could push her a bit. For that matter, I will push. It helps.'

'We'll let her breathe,' said Clifford. 'Do you mind putting a scotch under the wheel?'

Connie found a stone, and they waited. After a while Clifford started his motor again, then set the chair in motion. It struggled and faltered like a sick thing, with curious noises.

'Let me push!' said Connie, coming up behind.

'No! Don't push!' he said angrily. 'What's the good of the damned thing, if it has to be pushed! Put the stone under!'

There was another pause, then another start; but more ineffectual than before.

'You must let me push,' said she. 'Or sound the horn for the keeper.'

'Wait!'

She waited; and he had another try, doing more harm than good.

'Sound the horn then, if you won't let me push,' she said.

'Hell! Be quiet a moment!'

She was quiet for a moment; he made shattering efforts with the little motor.

'You'll only break the thing down altogether, Clifford,' she remonstrated; 'besides wasting your nervous energy.'

'If I could only get out and look at the damned thing!' he said, exasperated. And he sounded the horn stridently. 'Perhaps Mellors can see what's wrong.'

They waited, among the mashed flowers under a sky softly curdling with cloud. In the silence a wood-pigeon began to coo, roo-hoo hoo! Roo-hoo hoo! Clifford shut her up with a blast on the horn.

The keeper appeared directly, striding inquiringly round the corner. He saluted.

'Do you know anything about motors?' asked Clifford sharply.

'I am afraid I don't. Has she gone wrong?'

'Apparently!' snapped Clifford.

The man crouched solicitously by the wheel, and peered at the little engine.

'I'm afraid I know nothing at all about these mechanical things, Sir Clifford,' he said calmly. 'If she has enough petrol and oil—'

'Just look carefully and see if you can see anything broken,' snapped Clifford.

The man laid his gun against a tree, took off his coat, and threw it beside it. The brown dog sat guard. Then he sat down on his heels and peered under the chair, poking with his finger at the greasy little engine, and resenting the grease-marks on his clean Sunday shirt.

'Doesn't seem anything broken,' he said. And he stood up, pushing back his hat from his forehead, rubbing his brow and apparently studying.

'Have you looked at the rods underneath?' asked Clifford. 'See if they are all right!'

The man lay flat on his stomach on the floor, his neck pressed back, wriggling under the engine and poking with his finger. Connie thought what a pathetic sort of thing a man was, feeble and small-looking, when he was lying on his belly on the big earth.

'Seems all right as far as I can see,' came his muffled voice.

'I don't suppose you can do anything,' said Clifford.

'Seems as if I can't!' And he scrambled up and sat on his heels, collier fashion. 'There's certainly nothing obviously broken.'

Clifford started his engine, then put her in gear. She would not move.

'Run her a bit hard, like,' suggested the keeper.

Clifford resented the interference: but he made his engine buzz like a bluebottle. Then she coughed and snarled and seemed to go better.

'Sounds as if she'd come clear,' said Mellors.

But Clifford had already jerked her into gear. She gave a sick lurch and ebbed weakly forwards.

'If I give her a push, she'll do it,' said the keeper, going behind.

'Keep off!' snapped Clifford. 'She'll do it by herself.'

'But Clifford!' put in Connie from the bank, 'you know it's too much for her. Why are you so obstinate!'

Clifford was pale with anger. He jabbed at his levers. The chair gave a sort of scurry, reeled on a few more yards, and came to her end amid a particularly promising patch of bluebells.

'She's done!' said the keeper. 'Not power enough.'

'She's been up here before,' said Clifford coldly.

'She won't do it this time,' said the keeper.

Clifford did not reply. He began doing things with his engine, running her fast and slow as if to get some sort of tune out of her. The wood re-echoed with weird noises. Then he put her in gear with a jerk, having jerked off his brake.

'You'll rip her inside out,' murmured the keeper.

The chair charged in a sick lurch sideways at the ditch.

'Clifford!' cried Connie, rushing forward.

But the keeper had got the chair by the rail. Clifford, however, putting on all his pressure, managed to steer into the riding, and with a strange noise the chair was fighting the hill. Mellors pushed steadily behind, and up she went, as if to retrieve herself.

'You see, she's doing it!' said Clifford, victorious, glancing over his shoulder. There he saw the keeper's face.

'Are you pushing her?'

'She won't do it without.'

'Leave her alone. I asked you not.'

'She won't do it.'

'Let her try!' snarled Clifford, with all his emphasis.

The keeper stood back, then turned to fetch his coat and gun. The chair seemed to strangle immediately. She stood inert. Clifford, seated a prisoner, was white with vexation. He jerked at the levers with his hand, his feet were no good. He got queer noises out of her. In savage impatience he moved little handles and got more noises out of her. But she would not budge. No, she would not budge. He stopped the engine and sat rigid with anger.

Constance sat on the bank and looked at the wretched and trampled bluebells. 'Nothing quite so lovely as an English spring.' 'I can do my share of ruling.' 'What we need to take up now are whips, not swords.' 'The ruling classes!'

The keeper strode up with his coat and gun, Flossie cautiously at his heels. Clifford asked the man to do something or other to the engine. Connie, who understood nothing at all of the technicalities of motors, and who had had experience of breakdowns, sat patiently on the bank as if she were a cipher. The keeper lay on his stomach again. The ruling classes and the serving classes!

He got to his feet and said patiently:

'Try her again, then.'

He spoke in a quiet voice, almost as if to a child.

Clifford tried her, and Mellors stepped quickly behind and began to push. She was going, the engine doing about half the work, the man the rest.

Clifford glanced round, yellow with anger.

'Will you get off there!'

The keeper dropped his hold at once, and Clifford added: 'How shall I know what she is doing!'

The man put his gun down and began to pull on his coat. He'd done.

The chair began slowly to run backwards.

'Clifford, your brake!' cried Connie.

She, Mellors, and Clifford moved at once, Connie and the keeper jostling lightly. The chair stood. There was a moment of dead silence.

'It's obvious I'm at everybody's mercy!' said Clifford. He was yellow with anger.

No one answered. Mellors was slinging his gun over his shoulder, his face queer and expressionless, save for an abstracted look of patience. The dog Flossie, standing on guard almost between her master's legs, moved uneasily, eyeing the chair with great suspicion and dislike, and very much perplexed between the three human beings. The tableau vivant remained set among the squashed bluebells, nobody proffering a word.

'I expect she'll have to be pushed,' said Clifford at last, with an affectation of sang froid.

No answer. Mellors' abstracted face looked as if he had heard nothing. Connie glanced anxiously at him. Clifford too glanced round.

'Do you mind pushing her home, Mellors!' he said in a cool, superior tone. 'I hope I have said nothing to offend you,' he added, in a tone of dislike.

'Nothing at all, Sir Clifford! Do you want me to push that chair?'

'If you please.'

The man stepped up to it: but this time it was without effect. The brake was jammed. They poked and pulled, and the keeper took off his gun and his coat once more. And now Clifford said never a word. At last the keeper heaved the back of the chair off the ground and, with an instantaneous push of his foot, tried to loosen the wheels. He failed, the chair sank. Clifford was clutching the sides. The man gasped with the weight.

'Don't do it!' cried Connie to him.

'If you'll pull the wheel that way, so!' he said to her, showing her how.

'No! You mustn't lift it! You'll strain yourself,' she said, flushed now with anger.

But he looked into her eyes and nodded. And she had to go and take hold of the wheel, ready. He heaved and she tugged, and the chair reeled.

'For God's sake!' cried Clifford in terror.

But it was all right, and the brake was off. The keeper put a stone under the wheel, and went to sit on the bank, his heart beating and his face white with the effort, semi-conscious.

Connie looked at him, and almost cried with anger. There was a pause and a dead silence. She saw his hands trembling on his thighs.

'Have you hurt yourself?' she asked, going to him.

'No. No!' He turned away almost angrily.

There was dead silence. The back of Clifford's fair head did not move. Even the dog stood motionless. The sky had clouded over.

At last he sighed, and blew his nose on his red handkerchief.

'That pneumonia took a lot out of me,' he said.

No one answered. Connie calculated the amount of strength it must have taken to heave up that chair and the bulky Clifford: too much, far too much! If it hadn't killed him!

He rose, and again picked up his coat, slinging it through the handle of the chair.

'Are you ready, then, Sir Clifford?'

'When you are!'

He stooped and took out the scotch, then put his weight against the chair. He was paler than Connie had ever seen him: and more absent. Clifford was a heavy man: and the hill was steep. Connie stepped to the keeper's side.

'I'm going to push too!' she said.

And she began to shove with a woman's turbulent energy of anger. The chair went faster. Clifford looked round.

'Is that necessary?' he said.

'Very! Do you want to kill the man! If you'd let the motor work while it would—'

But she did not finish. She was already panting. She slackened off a little, for it was surprisingly hard work.

'Ay! Slower!' said the man at her side, with a faint smile of his eyes.

'Are you sure you've not hurt yourself?' she said fiercely.

He shook his head. She looked at his smallish, short, alive hand, browned by the weather. It was the hand that caressed her. She had never even looked at it before. It seemed so still, like him, with a curious inward stillness that made her want to clutch it, as if she could not reach it. All her soul suddenly swept towards him: he was so silent, and out of reach! And he felt his limbs revive. Shoving with his left hand, he laid his right on her round white wrist, softly enfolding her wrist, with a caress. And the flame of strength went down his back and his loins, reviving him. And she bent suddenly and kissed his hand. Meanwhile the back of Clifford's head was held sleek and motionless, just in front of them.

At the top of the hill they rested, and Connie was glad to let go. She had had fugitive dreams of friendship between these two men: one her husband, the other the father of her child. Now she saw the screaming absurdity of her dreams. The two males were as hostile as fire and water. They mutually exterminated one another. And she realized for the first time what a queer subtle thing hate is. For the first time, she had consciously and definitely hated Clifford, with vivid hate: as if he ought to be obliterated from the face of the earth. And it was strange, how free and full of life it made her feel, to hate him and to admit it fully to herself—'Now I've hated him, I shall never be able to go on living with him,' came the thought into her mind.

On the level the keeper could push the chair alone. Clifford made a little conversation with her, to show his complete composure: about Aunt Eva, who was at Dieppe, and about Sir Malcolm, who had written to ask would Connie drive with him in his small car, to Venice, or would she and Hilda go by train.

'I'd much rather go by train,' said Connie. 'I don't like long motor drives, especially when there's dust. But I shall see what Hilda wants.'

'She will want to drive her own car, and take you with her,' he said.

'Probably!—I must help up here. You've no idea how heavy this chair is.'

She went to the back of the chair, and plodded side by side with the keeper, shoving up the pink path. She did not care who saw.

'Why not let me wait, and fetch Field? He is strong enough for the job,' said Clifford.

'It's so near,' she panted.

But both she and Mellors wiped the sweat from their faces when they came to the top. It was curious, but this bit of work together had brought them much closer than they had been before.

'Thanks so much, Mellors,' said Clifford, when they were at the house door. 'I must get a different sort of motor, that's all. Won't you go to the kitchen and have a meal? It must be about time.'

'Thank you, Sir Clifford. I was going to my mother for dinner today, Sunday.'

'As you like.'

Mellors slung into his coat, looked at Connie, saluted, and was gone. Connie, furious, went upstairs.

At lunch she could not contain her feeling.

'Why are you so abominably inconsiderate, Clifford?' she said to him.

'Of whom?'

'Of the keeper! If that is what you call ruling classes, I'm sorry for you.'

'Why?'

'A man who's been ill, and isn't strong! My word, if I were the serving classes, I'd let you wait for service. I'd let you whistle.'

'I quite believe it.'

'If he'd been sitting in a chair with paralysed legs, and behaved as you behaved, what would you have done for him?'

'My dear evangelist, this confusing of persons and personalities is in bad taste.'

'And your nasty, sterile want of common sympathy is in the worst taste imaginable. Noblesse Oblige! You and your ruling class!'

'And to what should it oblige me? To have a lot of unnecessary emotions about my game-keeper? I refuse. I leave it all to my evangelist.'

'As if he weren't a man as much as you are, my word!'

'My game-keeper to boot, and I pay him two pounds a week and give him a house.'

'Pay him! What do you think you pay for, with two pounds a week and a house?'

'His services.'

'Bah! I would tell you to keep your two pounds a week and your house.'

'Probably he would like to: but can't afford the luxury!'

'You, and rule!' she said. 'You don't rule, don't flatter yourself. You have only got more than your share of the money, and make people work for you for two pounds a week, or threaten them with starvation. Rule! What do you give forth of rule? Why, you're dried up! You only bully with your money!'

'You are very elegant in your speech, Lady Chatterley!'

'I assure you, you were very elegant altogether out there in the wood. I was utterly ashamed of you. Why, my father is ten times the human being you are: you gentleman!'

He reached and rang the bell for Mrs. Bolton. But he was yellow at the gills.

She went up to her room, furious, saying to herself: 'Him and buying people! Well, he doesn't buy me, and therefore there's no need for me to stay with him. Dead fish of a gentleman, with his celluloid soul! And how they take one in, with their manners and their mock wistfulness and gentleness. They've got about as much feeling as celluloid has.'

She made her plans for the night, and determined to get Clifford off her mind. She didn't want to hate him. She didn't want to be mixed up very intimately with him in any sort of feeling. She wanted him not to know anything at all about herself: and especially, not to know anything about her feeling for the keeper. This squabble of her attitude to the servants was an old one. He found her too familiar, she found him stupidly insentient, tough and indiarubbery where other people were concerned.

She went downstairs calmly, with her old demure bearing, at dinnertime. He was still yellow at the gills: in for one of his liver bouts, when he was really very queer—He was reading a French book.

'Have you ever read Proust?' he asked her.

'I've tried, but he bores me.'

'He's really very extraordinary.'

'Possibly! But he bores me: all that sophistication! He doesn't have feelings, he only has streams of words about feelings. I'm tired of self-important mentalities.'

'Would you prefer self-important animalities?'

'Perhaps! But one might possibly get something that wasn't self-important.'

'Well, I like Proust's subtlety and his well-bred anarchy.'

'It makes you very dead, really.'

'There speaks my evangelical little wife.'

They were at it again, at it again! But she couldn't help fighting him. He seemed to sit there like a skeleton, sending out a skeleton's cold grizzly will against her. Almost she could feel the skeleton clutching her and pressing her to its cage of ribs. He too was really up in arms: and she was a little afraid of him.

She went upstairs as soon as possible, and went to bed quite early. But at half past nine she got up, and went outside to listen. There was no sound. She slipped on a dressing-gown and went downstairs. Clifford and Mrs. Bolton were playing cards, gambling. They would probably go on until midnight.

Connie returned to her room, threw her pyjamas on the tossed bed, put on a thin tennis dress and over that a woollen day dress, put on rubber tennis shoes, and then a light coat. And she was ready. If she met anybody, she was just going out for a few minutes. And in the morning, when she came in again, she would just have been for a little walk in the dew, as she fairly often did before breakfast. For the rest, the only danger was that someone should go into her room during the night. But that was most unlikely: not one chance in a hundred.

Betts had not locked up. He fastened up the house at ten o'clock, and unfastened it again at seven in the morning. She slipped out silently and unseen. There was a half-moon shining, enough to make a little light in the world, not enough to show her up in her dark-grey coat. She walked quickly across the park, not really in the thrill of the assignation, but with a certain anger and rebellion burning in her heart. It was not the right sort of heart to take to a love-meeting. But à la guerre comme à la guerre!

Chapter ⓮

When she got near the park gate, she heard the click of the latch. He was there, then, in the darkness of the wood, and had seen her!

'You are good and early,' he said out of the dark. 'Was everything all right?'

'Perfectly easy.'

He shut the gate quietly after her, and made a spot of light on the dark ground, showing the pallid flowers still standing there open in the night. They went on apart, in silence.

'Are you sure you didn't hurt yourself this morning with that chair?' she asked.

'No, no!'

'When you had that pneumonia, what did it do to you?'

'Oh nothing! It left my heart not so strong and the lungs not so elastic. But it always does that.'

'And you ought not to make violent physical efforts?'

'Not often.'

She plodded on in an angry silence.

'Did you hate Clifford?' she said at last.

'Hate him, no! I've met too many like him to upset myself hating him. I know beforehand I don't care for his sort, and I let it go at that.'

'What is his sort?'

'Nay, you know better than I do. The sort of youngish gentleman a bit like a lady, and no balls.'

'What balls?'

'Balls! A man's balls!'

She pondered this.

'But is it a question of that?' she said, a little annoyed.

'You say a man's got no brain, when he's a fool; and no heart, when he's mean; and no stomach when he's a funker. And when he's got none of that spunky wild bit of a man in him, you say he's got no balls. When he's a sort of tame.'

She pondered this.

'And is Clifford tame?' she asked.

'Tame, and nasty with it: like most such fellows, when you come up against 'em.'

'And do you think you're not tame?'

'Maybe not quite!'

At length she saw in the distance a yellow light.

She stood still.

'There is a light!' she said.

'I always leave a light in the house,' he said.

She went on again at his side, but not touching him, wondering why she was going with him at all.

He unlocked, and they went in, he bolting the door behind them. As if it were a prison, she thought! The kettle was singing by the red fire, there were cups on the table.

She sat in the wooden armchair by the fire. It was warm after the chill outside.

'I'll take off my shoes, they are wet,' she said.

She sat with her stockinged feet on the bright steel fender. He went to the pantry, bringing food: bread and butter and pressed tongue. She was warm: she took off her coat. He hung it on the door.

'Shall you have cocoa or tea or coffee to drink?' he asked.

'I don't think I want anything,' she said, looking at the table. 'But you eat.'

'Nay, I don't care about it. I'll just feed the dog.'

He tramped with a quiet inevitability over the brick floor, putting food for the dog in a brown bowl. The spaniel looked up at him anxiously.

'Ay, this is thy supper, tha nedna look as if tha wouldna get it!' he said.

He set the bowl on the stairfoot mat, and sat himself on a chair by the wall, to take off his leggings and boots. The dog, instead of eating, carne to him again, and sat looking up at him, troubled.

He slowly unbuckled his leggings. The dog edged a little nearer.

'What's amiss wi' thee then? Art upset because there's somebody else here? Tha'rt a female, tha art! Go an' eat thy supper.'

He put his hand on her head, and the bitch leaned her head sideways against him. He slowly, softly pulled the long silky ear.

'There!' he said. 'There! Go an' eat thy supper! Go!'

He tilted his chair towards the pot on the mat, and the dog meekly went, and fell to eating.

'Do you like dogs?' Connie asked him.

'No, not really. They're too tame and clinging.'

He had taken off his leggings and was unlacing his heavy boots. Connie had turned from the fire. How bare the little room was! Yet over his head on the wall hung a hideous enlarged photograph of a young married couple, apparently him and a bold-faced young woman, no doubt his wife.

'Is that you?' Connie asked him.

He twisted and looked at the enlargement above his head.

'Ay! Taken just afore we was married, when I was twenty-one.' He looked at it impassively.

'Do you like it?' Connie asked him.

'Like it? No! I never liked the thing. But she fixed it all up to have it done, like.'

He returned to pulling off his boots.

'If you don't like it, why do you keep it hanging there? Perhaps your wife would like to have it,' she said.

He looked up at her with a sudden grin.

'She carted off iverything as was worth taking from th' 'ouse,' he said. 'But she left that!'

'Then why do you keep it? For sentimental reasons?'

'Nay, I niver look at it. I hardly knowed it wor theer. It's bin theer sin' we come to this place.'

'Why don't you burn it?' she said.

He twisted round again and looked at the enlarged photograph. It was framed in a brown-and-gilt frame, hideous. It showed a clean-shaven, alert, very young-looking man in a rather high collar, and a somewhat plump, bold young woman with hair fluffed out and crimped, and wearing a dark satin blouse.

'It wouldn't be a bad idea, would it?' he said.

He had pulled off his boots, and put on a pair of slippers. He stood up on the chair, and lifted down the photograph. It left a big pale place on the greenish wallpaper.

'No use dusting it now,' he said, setting the thing against the wall.

He went to the scullery, and returned with hammer and pincers. Sitting where he had sat before, he started to tear off the back-paper from the big frame, and to pull out the sprigs that held the backboard in position, working with the immediate quiet absorption that was characteristic of him.

He soon had the nails out, then he pulled out the backboards, then the enlargement itself, in its solid white mount. He looked at the photograph with amusement.

'Shows me for what I was, a young curate, and her for what she was, a bully,' he said. 'The prig and the bully!'

'Let me look!' said Connie.

He did look indeed very clean-shaven and very clean altogether, one of the clean young men of twenty years ago. But even in the photograph his eyes were alert and dauntless. And the woman was not altogether a bully, though her jowl was heavy. There was a touch of appeal in her.

'One never should keep these things,' said Connie.

'That one shouldn't! One should never have them made!'

He broke the cardboard photograph and mount over his knee, and when it was small enough, put it on the fire.

'It'll spoil the fire though,' he said.

The glass and the backboard he carefully took upstairs.

The frame he knocked asunder with a few blows of the hammer, making the stucco fly. Then he took the pieces into the scullery.

'We'll burn that tomorrow,' he said. 'There's too much plaster-moulding on it.'

Having cleared away, he sat down.

'Did you love your wife?' she asked him.

'Love?' he said. 'Did you love Sir Clifford?'

But she was not going to be put off.

'But you cared for her?' she insisted.

'Cared?' He grinned.

'Perhaps you care for her now,' she said.

'Me!' His eyes widened. 'Ah no, I can't think of her,' he said quietly.

'Why?'

But he shook his head.

'Then why don't you get a divorce? She'll come back to you one day,' said Connie.

He looked up at her sharply.

'She wouldn't come within a mile of me. She hates me a lot worse than I hate her.'

'You'll see she'll come back to you.'

'That she never will. That's done! It would make me sick to see her.'

'You will see her. And you're not even legally separated, are you?'

'No.'

'Ah well, then she'll come back, and you'll have to take her in.'

He gazed at Connie fixedly. Then he gave the queer toss of his head.

'You might be right. I was a fool ever to come back here. But I felt stranded and had to go somewhere. A man's a poor bit of a wastrel, blown about. But you're right. I'll get a divorce and get clear. I hate those things like death, officials and courts and judges. But I've got to get through with it. I'll get a divorce.'

And she saw his jaw set. Inwardly she exulted.

'I think I will have a cup of tea now,' she said.

He rose to make it. But his face was set.

As they sat at table she asked him:

'Why did you marry her? She was commoner than yourself. Mrs. Bolton told me about her. She could never understand why you married her.'

He looked at her fixedly.

'I'll tell you,' he said. 'The first girl I had, I began with when I was sixteen. She was a schoolmaster's daughter over at Ollerton, pretty, beautiful really. I was supposed to be a clever sort of young fellow from Sheffield Grammar School, with a bit of French and German, very much up aloft. She was the romantic sort that hated commonness. She egged me on to poetry and reading: in a way, she made a man of me. I read and I thought like a house on fire, for her. And I was a clerk in Butterley offices, a thin, white-faced fellow fuming with all the things I read. And about everything I talked to her: but everything. We talked ourselves into Persepolis and Timbuctoo. We were the most literary-cultured couple in ten counties. I held forth with rapture to her, positively with rapture. I simply went up in smoke. And she adored me. The serpent in the grass was sex. She somehow didn't have any; at least, not where it's supposed to be. I got thinner and crazier. Then I said we'd got to be lovers. I talked her into it, as usual. So she let me. I was excited, and she never wanted it. She just didn't want it. She adored me, she loved me to talk to her and kiss her: in that way she had a passion for me. But the other, she just didn't want. And there are lots of women like her. And it was just the other that I did want. So there we split. I was cruel, and left her. Then I took on with another girl, a teacher, who had made a scandal by carrying on with a married man and driving him nearly out of his mind. She was a soft, white-skinned, soft sort of a woman, older than me, and played the fiddle. And she was a demon. She loved everything about love, except the sex. Clinging, caressing, creeping into you in every way: but if you forced her to the sex itself, she just ground her teeth and sent out hate. I forced her to it, and she could simply numb me with hate because of it. So I was balked again. I loathed all that. I wanted a woman who wanted me, and wanted it.

'Then came Bertha Coutts. They'd lived next door to us when I was a little lad, so I knew 'em all right. And they were common. Well, Bertha went away to some place or other in Birmingham; she said, as a lady's companion; everybody else said, as a waitress or something in a hotel. Anyhow just when I was more than fed up with that other girl, when I was twenty-one, back comes Bertha, with airs and graces and smart clothes and a sort of bloom on her: a sort of sensual bloom that you'd see sometimes on a woman, or on a trolly. Well, I was in a state of murder. I chucked up my job at Butterley because I thought I was a weed, clerking there: and I got on as overhead blacksmith at Tevershall: shoeing horses mostly. It had been my dad's job, and I'd always been with him. It was a job I liked: handling horses: and it came natural to me. So I stopped talking "fine", as they call it, talking proper English, and went back to talking broad. I still read books, at home: but I blacksmithed and had a pony-trap of my own, and was My Lord Duckfoot. My dad left me three hundred pounds when he died. So I took on with Bertha, and I was glad she was common. I wanted her to be common. I wanted to be common myself. Well, I married her, and she wasn't bad. Those other "pure" women had nearly taken all the balls out of me, but she was all right that way. She wanted me, and made no bones about it. And I was as pleased as punch. That was what I wanted: a woman who wanted me to fuck her. So I fucked her like a good un. And I think she despised me a bit, for being so pleased about it, and bringin' her her breakfast in bed sometimes. She sort of let things go, didn't get me a proper dinner when I came home from work, and if I said anything, flew out at me. And I flew back, hammer and tongs. She flung a cup at me and I took her by the scruff of the neck and squeezed the life out of her. That sort of thing! But she treated me with insolence. And she got so's she'd never have me when I wanted her: never. Always put me off, brutal as you like. And then when she'd put me right off, and I didn't want her, she'd come all lovey-dovey, and get me. And I always went. But when I had her, she'd never come off when I did. Never! She'd just wait. If I kept back for half an hour, she'd keep back longer. And when I'd come and really finished, then she'd start on her own account, and I had to stop inside her till she brought herself off, wriggling and shouting, she'd clutch with herself down there, an' then she'd come off, fair in ecstasy. And then she'd say: That was lovely! Gradually I got sick of it: and she got worse. She sort of got harder and harder to bring off, and she'd sort of tear at me down there, as if it was a beak tearing at me. By God, you think a woman's soft down there, like a fig. But I tell you the old rampers have beaks between their legs, and they tear at you with it till you're sick. Self! Self! Self! All self! Tearing and shouting! They talk about men's selfishness, but I doubt if it can ever touch a woman's blind beakishness, once she's gone that way. Like an old trull! And she couldn't help it. I told her about it, I told her how I hated it. And she'd even try. She'd try to lie still and let me work the business. She'd try. But it was no good. She got no feeling off it, from my working. She had to work the thing herself, grind her own coffee. And it came back on her like a raving necessity, she had to let herself go, and tear, tear, tear, as if she had no sensation in her except in the top of her beak, the very outside top tip, that rubbed and tore. That's how old whores used to be, so men used to say. It was a low kind of self-will in her, a raving sort of self-will: like in a woman who drinks. Well, in the end I couldn't stand it. We slept apart. She herself had started it, in her bouts when she wanted to be clear of me, when she said I bossed her. She had started having a room for herself. But the time came when I wouldn't have her coming to my room. I wouldn't.

'I hated it. And she hated me. My God, how she hated me before that child was born! I often think she conceived it out of hate. Anyhow, after the child was born I left her alone. And then came the war, and I joined up. And I didn't come back till I knew she was with that fellow at Stacks Gate.'

He broke off, pale in the face.

'And what is the man at Stacks Gate like?' asked Connie.

'A big baby sort of fellow, very low-mouthed. She bullies him, and they both drink.'

'My word, if she came back!'

'My God, yes! I should just go, disappear again.'

There was a silence. The pasteboard in the fire had turned to grey ash.

'So when you did get a woman who wanted you,' said Connie, 'you got a bit too much of a good thing.'

'Ay! Seems so! Yet even then I'd rather have her than the never-never ones: the white love of my youth, and that other poison-smelling lily, and the rest.'

'What about the rest?' said Connie.

'The rest? There is no rest. Only to my experience the mass of women are like this: most of them want a man, but don't want the sex, but they put up with it, as part of the bargain. The more old-fashioned sort just lie there like nothing and let you go ahead. They don't mind afterwards: then they like you. But the actual thing itself is nothing to them, a bit distasteful. And most men like it that way. I hate it. But the sly sort of women who are like that pretend they're not. They pretend they're passionate and have thrills. But it's all cockaloopy. They make it up. Then there's the ones that love everything, every kind of feeling and cuddling and going off, every kind except the natural one. They always make you go off when you're not in the only place you should be, when you go off. —Then there's the hard sort, that are the devil to bring off at all, and bring themselves off, like my wife. They want to be the active party. —Then there's the sort that's just dead inside: but dead: and they know it. Then there's the sort that puts you out before you really "come", and go on writhing their loins till they bring themselves off against your thighs.'

'And do you mind?' asked Connie.

'I could kill them. When I'm with such a woman, I fairly howl in my soul, wanting to kill her.'

'And what do you do?'

'Just go away as fast as I can.'

He looked pale, and his brows were sombre.

'And were you sorry when I came along?' she asked.

'I was sorry and I was glad.'

'And what are you now?'

'I'm sorry, from the outside: all the complications and the ugliness and recrimination that's bound to come, sooner or later. That's when my blood sinks, and I'm low. But when my blood comes up, I'm glad. I'm even triumphant. I was really getting bitter. I thought there was no real sex left: never a woman who'd really "come" naturally with a man.'

'And now, are you glad of me?' she asked.

'Yes! When I can forget the rest. When I can't forget the rest, I want to get under the table and die.'

'Why under the table?'

'Why?' he laughed. 'Hide, I suppose. Baby!'

'You do seem to have had awful experiences of women,' she said.

'You see, I couldn't fool myself. That's where most men manage. They take an attitude, and accept a lie. I could never fool myself. I knew what I wanted with a woman, and I could never say I'd got it when I hadn't.'

'But have you got it now?'

'Looks as if I might have.'

'Then why are you so pale and gloomy?'

'Bellyful of remembering: and perhaps afraid of myself.'

She sat in silence. It was growing late.

'And do you think it's important, a man and a woman?' she asked him.

'For me it is. For me it's the core of my life: if I have a right relation with a woman.'

'And if you didn't get it?'

'Then I'd have to do without.'

Again she pondered, before she asked:

'And do you think you've always been right with women?'

'God, no! I let my wife get to what she was: my fault a good deal. I spoilt her. And I'm very mistrustful. You'll have to expect it. It takes a lot to make me trust anybody, inwardly. So perhaps I'm a fraud too. I mistrust. And tenderness is not to be mistaken.'

She looked at him.

'You don't mistrust with your body, when your blood comes up,' she said. 'You don't mistrust then, do you?'

'No, alas! That's how I've got into all the trouble. And that's why my mind mistrusts so thoroughly.'

'Let your mind mistrust. What does it matter!'

The dog sighed with discomfort on the mat. The ash-clogged fire sank.

'We are a couple of battered warriors,' said Connie.

'Are you battered too?' he laughed. 'And here we are returning to the fray!'

'Yes! I feel really frightened.'

'Ay!'

He got up, and put her shoes to dry, and wiped his own and set them near the fire. In the morning he would grease them. He poked the ash of pasteboard as much as possible out of the fire. 'Even burnt, it's filthy,' he said. Then he brought sticks and put them on the hob for the morning. Then he went out awhile with the dog.

When he came back, Connie said:

'I want to go out too, for a minute.'

She went alone into the darkness. There were stars overhead. She could smell flowers on the night air. And she could feel her wet shoes getting wetter again. But she felt like going away, right away from him and everybody.

It was chilly. She shuddered, and returned to the house. He was sitting in front of the low fire.

'Ugh! Cold!' she shuddered.

He put the sticks on the fire, and fetched more, till they had a good crackling chimneyful of blaze. The rippling running yellow flame made them both happy, warmed their faces and their souls.

'Never mind!' she said, taking his hand as he sat silent and remote. 'One does one's best.'

'Ay!' He sighed, with a twist of a smile.

She slipped over to him, and into his arms, as he sat there before the fire.

'Forget then!' she whispered. 'Forget!'

He held her close, in the running warmth of the fire. The flame itself was like a forgetting. And her soft, warm, ripe weight! Slowly his blood turned, and began to ebb back into strength and reckless vigour again.

'And perhaps the women really wanted to be there and love you properly, only perhaps they couldn't. Perhaps it wasn't all their fault,' she said.

'I know it. Do you think I don't know what a broken-backed snake that's been trodden on I was myself!'

She clung to him suddenly. She had not wanted to start all this again. Yet some perversity had made her.

'But you're not now,' she said. 'You're not that now: a broken-backed snake that's been trodden on.'

'I don't know what I am. There's black days ahead.'

'No!' she protested, clinging to him. 'Why? Why?'

'There's black days coming for us all and for everybody,' he repeated with a prophetic gloom.

'No! You're not to say it!'

He was silent. But she could feel the black void of despair inside him. That was the death of all desire, the death of all love: this despair that was like the dark cave inside the men, in which their spirit was lost.

'And you talk so coldly about sex,' she said. 'You talk as if you had only wanted your own pleasure and satisfaction.'

She was protesting nervously against him.

'Nay!' he said. 'I wanted to have my pleasure and satisfaction of a woman, and I never got it: because I could never get my pleasure and satisfaction of her unless she got hers of me at the same time. And it never happened. It takes two.'

'But you never believed in your women. You don't even believe really in me,' she said.

'I don't know what believing in a woman means.'

'That's it, you see!'

She still was curled on his lap. But his spirit was grey and absent, he was not there for her. And everything she said drove him further.

'But what do you believe in?' she insisted.

'I don't know.'

'Nothing, like all the men I've ever known,' she said.

They were both silent. Then he roused himself and said:

'Yes, I do believe in something. I believe in being warmhearted. I believe especially in being warm-hearted in love, in fucking with a warm heart. I believe if men could fuck with warm hearts, and the women take it warm-heartedly, everything would come all right. It's all this cold-hearted fucking that is death and idiocy.'

'But you don't fuck me cold-heartedly,' she protested.

'I don't want to fuck you at all. My heart's as cold as cold potatoes just now.'

'Oh!' she said, kissing him mockingly. 'Let's have them sautées.' He laughed, and sat erect.

'It's a fact!' he said. 'Anything for a bit of warm-heartedness. But the women don't like it. Even you don't really like it. You like good, sharp, piercing coldhearted fucking, and then pretending it's all sugar. Where's your tenderness for me? You're as suspicious of me as a cat is of a dog. I tell you it takes two even to be tender and warm-hearted. You love fucking all right: but you want it to be called something grand and mysterious, just to flatter your own self-importance. Your own self-importance is more to you, fifty times more, than any man, or being together with a man.'

'But that's what I'd say of you. Your own self-importance is everything to you.'

'Ay! Very well then!' he said, moving as if he wanted to rise. 'Let's keep apart then. I'd rather die than do any more cold-hearted fucking.'

She slid away from him, and he stood up.

'And do you think I want it?' she said.

'I hope you don't,' he replied. 'But anyhow, you go to bed an' I'll sleep down here.'

She looked at him. He was pale, his brows were sullen, he was as distant in recoil as the cold pole. Men were all alike.

'I can't go home till morning,' she said.

'No! Go to bed. It's a quarter to one.'

'I certainly won't,' she said.

He went across and picked up his boots.

'Then I'll go out!' he said.

He began to put on his boots. She stared at him.

'Wait!' she faltered. 'Wait! What's come between us?'

He was bent over, lacing his boot, and did not reply. The moments passed. A

dimness came over her, like a swoon. All her consciousness died, and she stood there wide-eyed, looking at him from the unknown, knowing nothing any more.

He looked up, because of the silence, and saw her wide-eyed and lost. And as if a wind tossed him he got up and hobbled over to her, one shoe off and one shoe on, and took her in his arms, pressing her against his body, which somehow felt hurt right through. And there he held her, and there she remained.

Till his hands reached blindly down and felt for her, and felt under the clothing to where she was smooth and warm.

'Ma lass!' he murmured. 'Ma little lass! Dunna let's fight! Dunna let's niver fight! I love thee an' th' touch on thee. Dunna argue wi' me! Dunna! Dunna! Dunna! Let's be together.'

She lifted her face and looked at him.

'Don't be upset,' she said steadily. 'It's no good being upset. Do you really want to be together with me?'

She looked with wide, steady eyes into his face. He stopped, and went suddenly still, turning his face aside. All his body went perfectly still, but did not withdraw.

Then he lifted his head and looked into her eyes, with his odd, faintly mocking grin, saying: 'Ay-ay! Let's be together on oath.'

'But really?' she said, her eyes filling with tears.

'Ay really! Heart an' belly an' cock.'

He still smiled faintly down at her, with the flicker of irony in his eyes, and a touch of bitterness.

She was silently weeping, and he lay with her and went into her there on the hearthrug, and so they gained a measure of equanimity. And then they went quickly to bed, for it was growing chill, and they had tired each other out. And she nestled up to him, feeling small and enfolded, and they both went to sleep at once, fast in one sleep. And so they lay and never moved, till the sun rose over the wood and day was beginning.

Then he woke up and looked at the light. The curtains were drawn. He listened to the loud wild calling of blackbirds and thrushes in the wood. It would be a brilliant morning, about half past five, his hour for rising. He had slept so fast! It was such a new day! The woman was still curled asleep and tender. His hand moved on her, and she opened her blue wondering eyes, smiling unconsciously into his face.

'Are you awake?' she said to him.

He was looking into her eyes. He smiled, and kissed her. And suddenly she roused and sat up.

'Fancy that I am here!' she said.

She looked round the whitewashed little bedroom with its sloping ceiling and gable window where the white curtains were closed. The room was bare save for a little yellow-painted chest of drawers, and a chair: and the smallish white bed in which she lay with him.

'Fancy that we are here!' she said, looking down at him. He was lying watching her, stroking her breasts with his fingers, under the thin night dress. When he was warm and smoothed out, he looked young and handsome. His eyes could look so warm. And she was fresh and young like a flower.

'I want to take this off!' she said, gathering the thin batiste night dress and pulling it over her head. She sat there with bare shoulders and longish breasts faintly golden. He loved to make her breasts swing softly, like bells.

'You must take off your pyjamas too,' she said.

'Eh, nay!'

'Yes! Yes!' she commanded.

And he took off his old cotton pyjama-jacket, and pushed down the trousers. Save for his hands and wrists and face and neck he was white as milk, with fine slender muscular flesh. To Connie he was suddenly piercingly beautiful again, as when she had seen him that afternoon washing himself.

Gold of sunshine touched the closed white curtain. She felt it wanted to come in.

'Oh, do let's draw the curtains! The birds are singing so! Do let the sun in,' she said.

He slipped out of bed with his back to her, naked and white and thin, and went to the window, stooping a little, drawing the curtains and looking out for a moment. The back was white and fine, the small buttocks beautiful with an exquisite, delicate manliness, the back of the neck ruddy and delicate and yet strong.

There was an inward, not an outward strength in the delicate fine body.

'But you are beautiful!' she said. 'So pure and fine! Come!' She held her arms out.

He was ashamed to turn to her, because of his aroused nakedness.

He caught his shirt off the floor, and held it to him, coming to her.

'No!' she said still holding out her beautiful slim arms from her dropping breasts. 'Let me see you!'

He dropped the shirt and stood still looking towards her. The sun through the low window sent in a beam that lit up his thighs and slim belly and the erect phallus rising darkish and hot-looking from the little cloud of vivid gold-red hair. She was startled and afraid.

'How strange!' she said slowly. 'How strange he stands there! So big! And so dark and cock-sure! Is he like that?'

The man looked down the front of his slender white body, and laughed. Between the slim breasts the hair was dark, almost black. But at the root of the belly, where the phallus rose thick and arching, it was gold-red, vivid in a little cloud.

'So proud!' she murmured, uneasy. 'And so lordly! Now I know why men are so overbearing! But he's lovely, really. Like another being! A bit terrifying! But lovely really! And he comes to me!—' She caught her lower lip between her teeth, in fear and excitement.

The man looked down in silence at the tense phallus, that did not change. 'Ay!' he said at last, in a little voice. 'Ay ma lad! Tha're theer right enough. Yi, tha mun rear thy head! Theer on thy own, eh? An' ta'es no count o' nob'dy! Tha ma'es nowt o' me, John Thomas. Art boss? Of me? Eh well, tha're more cocky than me, an' tha says less. John Thomas! Dost want her? Dost want my lady Jane? Tha's dipped me in again, tha hast. Ay, an' tha comes up smilin'. —Ax 'er then! Ax lady Jane! Say: Lift up your heads, o ye gates, that the king of glory may come in. Ay, th' cheek on thee! Cunt, that's what tha'rt after. Tell lady Jane tha wants cunt. John Thomas, an' th' cunt o' lady Jane!—'

'Oh, don't tease him,' said Connie, crawling on her knees on the bed towards him and putting her arms round his white slender loins, and drawing him to her so that her hanging, swinging breasts touched the tip of the stirring, erect phallus, and caught the drop of moisture. She held the man fast.

'Lie down!' he said. 'Lie down! Let me come!'

He was in a hurry now.

And afterwards, when they had been quite still, the woman had to uncover the man again, to look at the mystery of the phallus.

'And now he's tiny, and soft like a little bud of life!' she said, taking the soft small penis in her hand. 'Isn't he somehow lovely! So on his own, so strange! And so innocent! And he comes so far into me! You must never insult him, you know. He's mine too. He's not only yours. He's mine! And so lovely and innocent!' And she held the penis soft in her hand.

He laughed.

'Blest be the tie that binds our hearts in kindred love,' he said.

'Of course!' she said. 'Even when he's soft and little I feel my heart simply tied to him. And how lovely your hair is here! Quite, quite different!'

'That's John Thomas's hair, not mine!' he said.

'John Thomas! John Thomas!' and she quickly kissed the soft penis, that was beginning to stir again.

'Ay!' said the man, stretching his body almost painfully. 'He's got his root in my soul, has that gentleman! An' sometimes I don' know what ter do wi' him. Ay, he's got a will of his own, an' it's hard to suit him. Yet I wouldn't have him killed.'

'No wonder men have always been afraid of him!' she said. 'He's rather terrible.'

The quiver was going through the man's body, as the stream of consciousness again changed its direction, turning downwards. And he was helpless, as the penis in slow soft undulations filled and surged and rose up, and grew hard, standing there hard and overweening, in its curious towering fashion. The woman, too, trembled a little as she watched.

'There! Take him then! He's thine,' said the man.

And she quivered, and her own mind melted out. Sharp soft waves of unspeakable pleasure washed over her as he entered her, and started the curious molten thrilling that spread and spread till she was carried away with the last, blind flush of extremity.

He heard the distant hooters of Stacks Gate for seven o'clock. It was Monday morning. He shivered a little, and with his face between her breasts pressed her soft breasts up over his ears, to deafen himself.

She had not even heard the hooters. She lay perfectly still, her soul washed transparent.

'You must get up, mustn't you?' he muttered.

'What time?' came her colourless voice.

'Seven o'clock blowers a bit sin'.'

'I suppose I must.'

She was resenting, as she always did, the compulsion from outside.

He sat up and looked blankly out of the window.

'You do love me, don't you?' she asked calmly.

He looked down at her.

'Tha knows what tha knows. What dost ax for!' he said, a little fretfully.

'I want you to keep me, not to let me go,' she said.

His eyes seemed full of a warm, soft darkness that could not think.

'When? Now?'

'Now in your heart. Then I want to come and live with you, always, soon.'

He sat naked on the bed, with his head dropped, unable to think.

'Don't you want it?' she asked.

'Ay!' he said.

Then with the same eyes darkened with another flame of consciousness, almost like sleep, he looked at her.

'Dunna ax me nowt now,' he said. 'Let me be. I like thee. I luv thee when tha lies theer. A woman's a lovely thing when 'er's deep ter fuck, and cunt's good. Ah luv thee, thy legs, an' th' shape on thee, an' th' womanness on thee. Ah luv th' womanness on thee. Ah luv thee wi' my ba's an' wi' my heart. But dunna ax me nowt. Dunna ma'e me say nowt. Let me stop as I am while I can. Tha can ax me iverything after. Now let me be, let me be!'

And softly, he laid his hand over her mound of Venus, on the soft brown maidenhair, and himself sat still and naked on the bed, his face motionless in physical abstraction, almost like the face of Buddha. Motionless, and in the invisible flame of another consciousness, he sat with his hand on her, and waited for the turn.

After a while, he reached for his shirt and put it on, dressed himself swiftly in silence, looked at her once as she still lay naked and faintly golden like a Gloire de Dijon rose on the bed, and was gone. She heard him downstairs opening the door.

And still she lay musing, musing. It was very hard to go: to go out of his arms. He called from the foot of the stairs: 'Half past seven!' She sighed, and got out of bed. The bare little room! Nothing in it at all but the small chest of drawers and the smallish bed. But the board floor was scrubbed clean. And in the corner by the window gable was a shelf with some books, and some from a circulating library. She looked. There were books about Bolshevist Russia, books of travel, a volume about the atom and the electron, another about the composition of the earth's core, and the causes of earthquakes: then a few novels: then three books on India. So! He was a reader after all.

The sun fell on her naked limbs through the gable window. Outside she saw the dog Flossie roaming round. The hazel-brake was misted with green, and dark-green dog's-mercury under. It was a clear clean morning with birds flying and triumphantly singing. If only she could stay! If only there weren't the other ghastly world of smoke and iron! If only he would make her a world.

She came downstairs, down the steep, narrow wooden stairs. Still she would be content with this little house, if only it were in a world of its own.

He was washed and fresh, and the fire was burning. 'Will you eat anything?' he said.

'No! Only lend me a comb.'

She followed him into the scullery, and combed her hair before the handbreadth of mirror by the back door. Then she was ready to go.

She stood in the little front garden, looking at the dewy flowers, the grey bed of pinks in bud already.

'I would like to have all the rest of the world disappear,' she said, 'and live with you here.'

'It won't disappear,' he said.

They went almost in silence through the lovely dewy wood. But they were together in a world of their own.

It was bitter to her to go on to Wragby.

'I want soon to come and live with you altogether,' she said as she left him.

He smiled, unanswering.

She got home quietly and unremarked, and went up to her room.

Chapter ⓯

There was a letter from Hilda on the breakfast tray. 'Father is going to London this week, and I shall call for you on Thursday week, June 17th. You must be ready so that we can go at once. I don't want to waste time at Wragby, it's an awful place. I shall probably stay the night at Retford with the Colemans, so I should be with you for lunch, Thursday. Then we could start at teatime, and sleep perhaps in Grantham. It is no use our spending an evening with Clifford. If he hates your going, it would be no pleasure to him.'

So! She was being pushed round on the chessboard again.

Clifford hated her going, but it was only because he didn't feel safe in her absence. Her presence, for some reason, made him feel safe, and free to do the things he was occupied with. He was a great deal at the pits, and wrestling in spirit with the almost hopeless problems of getting out his coal in the most economical fashion and then selling it when he'd got it out. He knew he ought to find some way of using it, or converting it, so that he needn't sell it, or needn't have the chagrin of failing to sell it. But if he made electric power, could he sell that or use it? And to convert into oil was as yet too costly and too elaborate. To keep industry alive there must be more industry, like a madness.

It was a madness, and it required a madman to succeed in it. Well, he was a little mad. Connie thought so. His very intensity and acumen in the affairs of the pits seemed like a manifestation of madness to her, his very inspirations were the inspirations of insanity.

He talked to her of all his serious schemes, and she listened in a kind of wonder, and let him talk. Then the flow ceased, and he turned on the loudspeaker, and became a blank, while apparently his schemes coiled on inside him like a kind of dream.

And every night now he played pontoon, that game of the Tommies, with Mrs. Bolton, gambling with sixpences. And again, in the gambling he was gone in a kind of unconsciousness, or blank intoxication, or intoxication of blankness, whatever it was. Connie could not bear to see him. But when she had gone to bed, he and Mrs. Bolton would gamble on till two and three in the morning, safely, and with strange lust. Mrs. Bolton was caught in the lust as much as Clifford: the more so, as she nearly always lost.

She told Connie one day: 'I lost twenty-three shillings to Sir Clifford last night.'

'And did he take the money from you?' asked Connie aghast.

'Why, of course, my Lady! Debt of honour!'

Connie expostulated roundly, and was angry with both of them. The upshot was, Sir Clifford raised Mrs. Bolton's wages a hundred a year, and she could gamble on that. Meanwhile, it seemed to Connie, Clifford was really going deader.

She told him at length she was leaving on the seventeenth.

'Seventeenth!' he said. 'And when will you be back?'

'By the twentieth of July at the latest.'

'Yes! The twentieth of July.'

Strangely and blankly he looked at her, with the vagueness of a child, but with the queer blank cunning of an old man.

'You won't let me down, now, will you?' he said.

'How?'

'While you're away, I mean, you're sure to come back?'

'I'm as sure as I can be of anything, that I shall come back.'

'Yes! Well! Twentieth of July!'

He looked at her so strangely.

Yet he really wanted her to go. That was so curious. He wanted her to go, positively, to have her little adventures and perhaps come home pregnant, and all that. At the same time, he was afraid of her going.

She was quivering, watching her real opportunity for leaving him altogether, waiting till the time, herself, himself, should be ripe.

She sat and talked to the keeper of her going abroad.

'And then when I come back,' she said, 'I can tell Clifford I must leave him. And you and I can go away. They never need even know it is you. We can go to another country, shall we? To Africa or Australia. Shall we?'

She was quite thrilled by her plan.

'You've never been to the Colonies, have you?' he asked her.

'No! Have you?'

'I've been in India, and South Africa, and Egypt.'

'Why shouldn't we go to South Africa?'

'We might!' he said slowly.

'Or don't you want to?' she asked.

'I don't care. I don't much care what I do.'

'Doesn't it make you happy? Why not? We shan't be poor. I have about six hundred a year, I wrote and asked. It's not much, but it's enough, isn't it?'

'It's riches to me.'

'Oh, how lovely it will be!'

'But I ought to get divorced, and so ought you, unless we're going to have complications.'

There was plenty to think about.

Another day she asked him about himself. They were in the hut, and there was a thunderstorm.

'And weren't you happy, when you were a lieutenant and an officer and a gentleman?'

'Happy? All right. I liked my Colonel.'

'Did you love him?'

'Yes! I loved him.'

'And did he love you?'

'Yes! In a way, he loved me.'

'Tell me about him.'

'What is there to tell? He had risen from the ranks. He loved the army. And he had never married. He was twenty years older than me. He was a very intelligent man: and alone in the army, as such a man is: a passionate man in his way: and a very clever officer. I lived under his spell while I was with him. I sort of let him run my life. And I never regret it.'

'And did you mind very much when he died?'

'I was as near death myself. But when I came to, I knew another part of me was finished. But then I had always known it would finish in death. All things do, as far as that goes.'

She sat and ruminated. The thunder crashed outside. It was like being in a little ark in the Flood.

'You seem to have such a lot behind you,' she said.

'Do I? It seems to me I've died once or twice already. Yet here I am, pegging on, and in for more trouble.'

She was thinking hard, yet listening to the storm.

'And weren't you happy as an officer and a gentleman, when your Colonel was dead?'

'No! They were a mingy lot.' He laughed suddenly. 'The Colonel used to say: "Lad, the English middle classes have to chew every mouthful thirty times because their guts are so narrow, a bit as big as a pea would give them a stoppage. They're the mingiest set of ladylike snipe ever invented: full of conceit of themselves, frightened even if their bootlaces aren't correct, rotten as high game, and always in the right. That's what finishes me up. Kow-tow, kow-tow, arse-licking till their tongues are tough: yet they're always in the right. Prigs on top of everything. Prigs! A generation of ladylike prigs with half a ball each—"'

Connie laughed. The rain was rushing down.

'He hated them!'

'No,' said he. 'He didn't bother. He just disliked them. There's a difference. Because, as he said, the Tommies are getting just as priggish and half-balled and narrow-gutted. It's the fate of mankind, to go that way.'

'The common people too, the working people?'

'All the lot. Their spunk is gone dead. Motorcars and cinemas and aeroplanes suck that last bit out of them. I tell you, every generation breeds a more rabbity generation, with india rubber tubing for guts and tin legs and tin faces. Tin people! It's just killing off the human thing, and worshipping the mechanical thing. Money, money, money! All the modern lot get their real kick out of killing the old human feeling out of man, making mincemeat of the old Adam and the old Eve. They're all alike. The world is all alike: kill off the human reality. What is cunt but machine-fucking!—It's all alike. Pay 'em money to cut off the world's cock. Pay money, money, money to them that will take spunk out of mankind, and leave 'em all little twiddling machines.'

He sat there in the hut, his face pulled to mocking irony. Yet even then, he had one ear set backwards, listening to the storm over the wood. It made him feel so alone.

'But won't it ever come to an end?' she said.

'Ay, it will. It'll achieve its own salvation. When the last real man is killed, and they're all tame: white, black, yellow, all colours of tame ones: then they'll all be insane. Because the root of sanity is in the balls. Then they'll all be insane, and they'll make their grand auto da fé. You know auto da fé means act of faith? Ay, well, they'll make their own grand little act of faith. They'll offer one another up.' 'You mean kill one another?'

'I do, duckie! If we go on at our present rate then in a hundred years' time there won't be ten thousand people on this island: there may not be ten. They'll have lovingly wiped each other out.' The thunder was rolling further away.

'How nice!' she said.

'Quite nice! To contemplate the extermination of the human species and the long pause that follows before some other species crops up, it calms you more than anything else. And if we go on in this way, with everybody, intellectuals, artists, government, industrialists and workers all frantically killing off the last human feeling, the last bit of their intuition, the last healthy instinct; if it goes on in algebraical progression, as it is going on: then ta-tah! to the human species! Goodbye! Darling! The serpent swallows itself and leaves a void, considerably messed up, but not hopeless. Very nice! When savage wild dogs bark in Wragby, and savage wild pit-ponies stamp on Tevershall pit-bank! Te Deum laudamus!'

Connie laughed, but not very happily.

'Then you ought to be pleased,' she said. 'You ought to be pleased that they hurry on towards the end.'

'So I am. I don't stop 'em. Because I couldn't if I would.'

'Then why are you so bitter?'

'I'm not! If my cock gives its last crow, I don't mind.'

'But if you have a child?' she said.

He dropped his head.

'Why,' he said at last. 'It seems to me a wrong and bitter thing to do, to bring a child into this world.'

'No! Don't say it! Don't say it!' she pleaded. 'I think I'm going to have one. Say you'll be pleased.' She laid her hand on his.

'I'm pleased for you to be pleased,' he said. 'But for me it seems a ghastly treachery to the unborn creature.

'Ah no!' she said, shocked. 'Then you can't ever really want me! You can't want me, if you feel that!'

Again he was silent, his face sullen. Outside there was only the threshing of the rain.

'It's not quite true!' she whispered. 'It's not quite true! There's another truth.' She felt he was bitter now partly because she was leaving him, deliberately going away to Venice. And this half pleased her.

She pulled open his clothing and uncovered his belly, and kissed his navel. Then she laid her cheek on his belly and pressed her arm round his warm, silent loins. They were alone in the flood.

'Tell me you want a child, in hope!' she murmured, pressing her face against his belly. 'Tell me you do!'

'Why!' he said at last: and she felt the curious quiver of changing consciousness and relaxation going through his body. 'Why I've thought sometimes if one but tried, here among th' colliers even! They're workin' bad now, an' not earnin' much. If a man could say to 'em: Dunna think o' nowt but th' money. When it comes ter wants, we want but little. Let's not live for money—'

She softly rubbed her cheek on his belly, and gathered his balls in her hand. The penis stirred softly, with strange life, but did not rise up. The rain beat bruisingly outside.

'Let's live for summat else. Let's not live ter make money, neither for us-selves nor for anybody else. Now we're forced to. We're forced to make a bit for us-selves, an' a fair lot for th' bosses. Let's stop it! Bit by bit, let's stop it. We needn't rant an' rave. Bit by bit, let's drop the whole industrial life an' go back. The least little bit o' money'll do. For everybody, me an' you, bosses an' masters, even th' king. The least little bit o' money'll really do. Just make up your mind to it, an' you've got out o' th' mess.' He paused, then went on:

'An' I'd tell 'em: Look! Look at Joe! He moves lovely! Look how he moves, alive and aware. He's beautiful! An' look at Jonah! He's clumsy, he's ugly, because he's niver willin' to rouse himself. I'd tell 'em: Look! Look at yourselves! One shoulder higher than t'other, legs twisted, feet all lumps! What have yer done ter yerselves, wi' the blasted work? Spoilt yerselves. No need to work that much. Take yer clothes off an' look at yourselves. Yer ought ter be alive an' beautiful, an' yer ugly an' half dead. So I'd tell 'em. An' I'd get my men to wear different clothes: 'appen close red trousers, bright red, an' little short white jackets. Why, if men had red, fine legs, that alone would change them in a month. They'd begin to be men again, to be men! An' the women could dress as they liked. Because if once the men walked with legs close bright scarlet, and buttocks nice and showing scarlet under a little white jacket: then the women 'ud begin to be women. It's because th' men aren't men, that th' women have to be. —An' in time pull down Tevershall and build a few beautiful buildings, that would hold us all. An' clean the country up again. An' not have many children, because the world is overcrowded.

'But I wouldn't preach to the men: only strip 'em an' say: Look at yourselves! That's workin' for money!—Hark at yourselves! That's working for money. You've been working for money! Look at Tevershall! It's horrible. That's because it was built while you were working for money. Look at your girls! They don't care about you, you don't care about them. It's because you've spent your time working an' caring for money. You can't talk nor move nor live, you can't properly be with a woman. You're not alive. Look at yourselves!'

There fell a complete silence. Connie was half listening, and threading in the hair at the root of his belly a few forget-me-nots that she had gathered on the way to the hut. Outside, the world had gone still, and a little icy.

'You've got four kinds of hair,' she said to him. 'On your chest it's nearly black, and your hair isn't dark on your head: but your moustache is hard and dark red, and your hair here, your love-hair, is like a little brush of bright red-gold mistletoe. It's the loveliest of all!'

He looked down and saw the milky bits of forget-me-nots in the hair on his groin.

'Ay! That's where to put forget-me-nots, in the man-hair, or the maiden-hair. But don't you care about the future?'

She looked up at him.

'Oh, I do, terribly!' she said.

'Because when I feel the human world is doomed, has doomed itself by its own mingy beastliness, then I feel the Colonies aren't far enough. The moon wouldn't be far enough, because even there you could look back and see the earth, dirty, beastly, unsavoury among all the stars: made foul by men. Then I feel I've swallowed gall, and it's eating my inside out, and nowhere's far enough away to get away. But when I get a turn, I forget it all again. Though it's a shame, what's been done to people these last hundred years: men turned into nothing but labour-insects, and all their manhood taken away, and all their real life. I'd wipe the machines off the face of the earth again, and end the industrial epoch absolutely, like a black mistake. But since I can't, an' nobody can, I'd better hold my peace, an' try an' live my own life: if I've got one to live, which I rather doubt.'

The thunder had ceased outside, but the rain which had abated, suddenly came striking down, with a last blench of lightning and mutter of departing storm. Connie was uneasy. He had talked so long now, and he was really talking to himself not to her. Despair seemed to come down on him completely, and she was feeling happy, she hated despair. She knew her leaving him, which he had only just realized inside himself, had plunged him back into this mood. And she triumphed a little.

She opened the door and looked at the straight heavy rain, like a steel curtain, and had a sudden desire to rush out into it, to rush away. She got up, and began swiftly pulling off her stockings, then her dress and underclothing, and he held his breath. Her pointed keen animal breasts tipped and stirred as she moved. She was ivory-coloured in the greenish light. She slipped on her rubber shoes again and ran out with a wild little laugh, holding up her breasts to the heavy rain and spreading her arms, and running blurred in the rain with the eurhythmic dance movements she had learned so long ago in Dresden. It was a strange pallid figure lifting and falling, bending so the rain beat and glistened on the full haunches, swaying up again and coming belly-forward through the rain, then stooping again so that only the full loins and buttocks were offered in a kind of homage towards him, repeating a wild obeisance.

He laughed wryly, and threw off his clothes. It was too much. He jumped out, naked and white, with a little shiver, into the hard slanting rain. Flossie sprang before him with a frantic little bark. Connie, her hair all wet and sticking to her head, turned her hot face and saw him. Her blue eyes blazed with excitement as she turned and ran fast, with a strange charging movement, out of the clearing and down the path, the wet boughs whipping her. She ran, and he saw nothing but the round wet head, the wet back leaning forward in flight, the rounded buttocks twinkling: a wonderful cowering female nakedness in flight.

She was nearly at the wide riding when he came up and flung his naked arm round her soft, naked-wet middle. She gave a shriek and straightened herself and the heap of her soft, chill flesh came up against his body. He pressed it all up against him, madly, the heap of soft, chilled female flesh that became quickly warm as flame, in contact. The rain streamed on them till they smoked. He gathered her lovely, heavy posteriors, one in each hand, and pressed them in towards him in a frenzy, quivering motion in the rain. Then suddenly he tipped her up and fell with her on the path, in the roaring silence of the rain, and short and sharp, he took her, short and sharp and finished, like an animal.

He got up in an instant, wiping the rain from his eyes.

'Come in,' he said, and they started running back to the hut. He ran straight and swift: he didn't like the rain. But she came slower, gathering forget-me-nots and campion and bluebells, running a few steps and watching him fleeing away from her.

When she came with her flowers, panting to the hut, he had already started a fire, and the twigs were crackling. Her sharp breasts rose and fell, her hair was plastered down with rain, her face was flushed ruddy and her body glistened and trickled. Wide-eyed and breathless, with a small wet head and full, trickling, naive haunches, she looked another creature.

He took the old sheet and rubbed her down, she standing like a child. Then he rubbed himself, having shut the door of the hut. The fire was blazing up. She ducked her head in the other end of the sheet, and rubbed her wet hair.

'We're drying ourselves together on the same towel, we shall quarrel!' he said.

She looked up for a moment, her hair all odds and ends.

'No!' she said, her eyes wide. 'It's not a towel, it's a sheet.'

And she went on busily rubbing her head, while he busily rubbed his.

Still panting with their exertions, each wrapped in an army blanket, but the front of the body open to the fire, they sat on a log side by side before the blaze, to get quiet. Connie hated the feel of the blanket against her skin. But now the sheet was all wet.

She dropped her blanket and kneeled on the clay hearth, holding her head to the fire, and shaking her hair to dry it. He watched the beautiful curving drop of her haunches. That fascinated him today. How it sloped with a rich downslope to the heavy roundness of her buttocks! And in between, folded in the secret warmth, the secret entrances!

He stroked her tail with his hand, long and subtly taking in the curves and the globe-fullness.

'Tha's got such a nice tail on thee,' he said, in the throaty caressive dialect. 'Tha's got the nicest arse of anybody. It's the nicest, nicest woman's arse as is! An' ivery bit of it is woman, woman sure as nuts. Tha'rt not one o' them button-arsed lasses as should be lads, are ter! Tha's got a real soft sloping bottom on thee, as a man loves in 'is guts. It's a bottom as could hold the world up, it is!'

All the while he spoke he exquisitely stroked the rounded tail, till it seemed as if a slippery sort of fire came from it into his hands. And his fingertips touched the two secret openings to her body, time after time, with a soft little brush of fire.

'An' if tha shits an' if tha pisses, I'm glad. I don't want a woman as couldna shit nor piss.'

Connie could not help a sudden snort of astonished laughter, but he went on unmoved.

'Tha'rt real, tha art! Tha'art real, even a bit of a bitch. Here tha shits an' here tha pisses: an' I lay my hand on 'em both an' like thee for it. I like thee for it. Tha's got a proper, woman's arse, proud of itself. It's none ashamed of itself, this isna.'

He laid his hand close and firm over her secret places, in a kind of close greeting.

'I like it,' he said. 'I like it! An' if I only lived ten minutes, an' stroked thy arse an' got to know it, I should reckon I'd lived one life, see ter! Industrial system or not! Here's one o' my lifetimes.'

She turned round and climbed into his lap, clinging to him. 'Kiss me!' she whispered.

And she knew the thought of their separation was latent in both their minds, and at last she was sad.

She sat on his thighs, her head against his breast, and her ivory-gleaming legs loosely apart, the fire glowing unequally upon them. Sitting with his head dropped, he looked at the folds of her body in the fire-glow, and at the fleece of soft brown hair that hung down to a point between her open thighs. He reached to the table behind, and took up her bunch of flowers, still so wet that drops of rain fell on to her.

'Flowers stop out of doors all weathers,' he said. 'They have no houses.'

'Not even a hut!' she murmured.

With quiet fingers he threaded a few forget-me-not flowers in the fine brown fleece of the mound of Venus.

'There!' he said. 'There's forget-me-nots in the right place!'

She looked down at the milky odd little flowers among the brown maiden-hair at the lower tip of her body.

'Doesn't it look pretty!' she said.

'Pretty as life,' he replied.

And he stuck a pink campion bud among the hair.

'There! That's me where you won't forget me! That's Moses in the bulrushes.'

'You don't mind, do you, that I'm going away?' she asked wistfully, looking up into his face.

But his face was inscrutable, under the heavy brows. He kept it quite blank.

'You do as you wish,' he said.

And he spoke in good English.

'But I won't go if you don't wish it,' she said, clinging to him.

There was silence. He leaned and put another piece of wood on the fire. The flame glowed on his silent, abstracted face. She waited, but he said nothing.

'Only I thought it would be a good way to begin a break with Clifford. I do want a child. And it would give me a chance to, to—' she resumed.

'To let them think a few lies,' he said.

'Yes, that among other things. Do you want them to think the truth?'

'I don't care what they think.'

'I do! I don't want them to handle me with their unpleasant cold minds, not while I'm still at Wragby. They can think what they like when I'm finally gone.'

He was silent.

'But Sir Clifford expects you to come back to him?'

'Oh, I must come back,' she said: and there was silence.

'And would you have a child in Wragby?' he asked.

She closed her arm round his neck.

'If you wouldn't take me away, I should have to,' she said.

'Take you where to?'

'Anywhere! Away! But right away from Wragby.'

'When?'

'Why, when I come back.'

'But what's the good of coming back, doing the thing twice, if you're once gone?' he said.

'Oh, I must come back. I've promised! I've promised so faithfully. Besides, I come back to you, really.'

'To your husband's game-keeper?'

'I don't see that matters,' she said.

'No?' He mused a while. 'And when would you think of going away again, then; finally? When exactly?'

'Oh, I don't know. I'd come back from Venice. And then we'd prepare everything.'

'How prepare?'

'Oh, I'd tell Clifford. I'd have to tell him.'

'Would you!'

He remained silent. She put her arms round his neck.

'Don't make it difficult for me,' she pleaded.

'Make what difficult?'

'For me to go to Venice and arrange things.'

A little smile, half a grin, flickered on his face.

'I don't make it difficult,' he said. 'I only want to find out just what you are after. But you don't really know yourself. You want to take time: get away and look at it. I don't blame you. I think you're wise. You may prefer to stay mistress of Wragby. I don't blame you. I've no Wragbys to offer. In fact, you know what you'll get out of me. No, no, I think you're right! I really do! And I'm not keen on coming to live on you, being kept by you. There's that too.'

She felt somehow as if he were giving her tit for tat.

'But you want me, don't you?' she asked.

'Do you want me?'

'You know I do. That's evident.'

'Quite! And when do you want me?'

'You know we can arrange it all when I come back. Now I'm out of breath with you. I must get calm and clear.'

'Quite! Get calm and clear!'

She was a little offended.

'But you trust me, don't you?' she said.

'Oh, absolutely!'

She heard the mockery in his tone.

'Tell me then,' she said flatly, 'do you think it would be better if I don't go to Venice?'

'I'm sure it's better if you do go to Venice,' he replied in the cool, slightly mocking voice.

'You know it's next Thursday?' she said.

'Yes!'

She now began to muse. At last she said:

'And we shall know better where we are when I come back, shan't we?'

'Oh, surely!'

The curious gulf of silence between them!

'I've been to the lawyer about my divorce,' he said, a little constrainedly.

She gave a slight shudder.

'Have you!' she said. 'And what did he say?'

'He said I ought to have done it before; that may be a difficulty. But since I was in the army, he thinks it will go through all right. If only it doesn't bring her down on my head!'

'Will she have to know?'

'Yes! She is served with a notice: so is the man she lives with, the corespondent.'

'Isn't it hateful, all the performances! I suppose I'd have to go through it with Clifford.'

There was a silence.

'And of course,' he said, 'I have to live an exemplary life for the next six or eight months. So if you go to Venice, there's temptation removed for a week or two, at least.'

'Am I temptation!' she said, stroking his face. 'I'm so glad I'm temptation to you! Don't let's think about it! You frighten me when you start thinking: you roll me out flat. Don't let's think about it. We can think so much when we are apart. That's the whole point! I've been thinking, I must come to you for another night before I go. I must come once more to the cottage. Shall I come on Thursday night?'

'Isn't that when your sister will be there?'

'Yes! But she said we would start at teatime. So we could start at teatime. But she could sleep somewhere else and I could sleep with you.'

'But then she'd have to know.'

'Oh, I shall tell her. I've more or less told her already. I must talk it all over with Hilda. She's a great help, so sensible.'

He was thinking of her plan.

'So you'd start off from Wragby at teatime, as if you were going to London? Which way were you going?'

'By Nottingham and Grantham.'

'And then your sister would drop you somewhere and you'd walk or drive back here? Sounds very risky, to me.'

'Does it? Well, then, Hilda could bring me back. She could sleep at Mansfield, and bring me back here in the evening, and fetch me again in the morning. It's quite easy.'

'And the people who see you?'

'I'll wear goggles and a veil.'

He pondered for some time.

'Well,' he said. 'You please yourself as usual.'

'But wouldn't it please you?'

'Oh, yes! It'd please me all right,' he said a little grimly. 'I might as well smite while the iron's hot.'

'Do you know what I thought?' she said suddenly. 'It suddenly came to me. You are the "Knight of the Burning Pestle"!'

'Ay! And you? Are you the "Lady of the Red-Hot Mortar"?'

'Yes!' she said. 'Yes! You're Sir Pestle and I'm Lady Mortar.'

'All right, then I'm knighted. John Thomas is Sir John, to your Lady Jane.'

'Yes! John Thomas is knighted! I'm my-lady-maiden-hair, and you must have flowers too. Yes!'

She threaded two pink campions in the bush of red-gold hair above his penis.

'There!' she said. 'Charming! Charming! Sir John!'

And she pushed a bit of forget-me-not in the dark hair of his breast.

'And you won't forget me there, will you?' She kissed him on the breast, and made two bits of forget-me-not lodge one over each nipple, kissing him again.

'Make a calendar of me!' he said. He laughed, and the flowers shook from his breast.

'Wait a bit!' he said.

He rose, and opened the door of the hut. Flossie, lying in the porch, got up and looked at him.

'Ay, it's me!' he said.

The rain had ceased. There was a wet, heavy, perfumed stillness. Evening was approaching.

He went out and down the little path in the opposite direction from the riding. Connie watched his thin, white figure, and it looked to her like a ghost, an apparition moving away from her.

When she could see it no more, her heart sank. She stood in the door of the hut, with a blanket round her, looking into the drenched, motionless silence.

But he was coming back, trotting strangely, and carrying flowers. She was a little afraid of him, as if he were not quite human. And when he came near, his eyes looked into hers, but she could not understand the meaning.

He had brought columbines and campions, and new-mown hay, and oak-tufts and honeysuckle in small bud. He fastened fluffy young oak-sprays round her breasts, sticking in tufts of bluebells and campion: and in her navel he poised a pink campion flower, and in her maiden-hair were forget-me-nots and woodruff.

'That's you in all your glory!' he said. 'Lady Jane, at her wedding with John Thomas.'

And he stuck flowers in the hair of his own body, and wound a bit of creeping-jenny round his penis, and stuck a single bell of a hyacinth in his navel. She watched him with amusement, his odd intentness. And she pushed a campion flower in his moustache, where it stuck, dangling under his nose.

'This is John Thomas marryin' Lady Jane,' he said. 'An' we mun let Constance an' Oliver go their ways. Maybe—'

He spread out his hand with a gesture, and then he sneezed, sneezing away the flowers from his nose and his navel. He sneezed again.

'Maybe what?' she said, waiting for him to go on.

He looked at her a little bewildered.

'Eh?' he said.

'Maybe what? Go on with what you were going to say,' she insisted.

'Ay, what was I going to say?'

He had forgotten. And it was one of the disappointments of her life, that he never finished.

A yellow ray of sun shone over the trees.

'Sun!' he said. 'And time you went. Time, my Lady, time! What's that as flies without wings, your Ladyship? Time! Time!'

He reached for his shirt.

'Say goodnight! to John Thomas,' he said, looking down at his penis. 'He's safe in the arms of creeping Jenny! Not much burning pestle about him just now.'

And he put his flannel shirt over his head.

'A man's most dangerous moment,' he said, when his head had emerged, 'is when he's getting into his shirt. Then he puts his head in a bag. That's why I prefer those American shirts, that you put on like a jacket.' She still stood watching him. He stepped into his short drawers, and buttoned them round the waist.

'Look at Jane!' he said. 'In all her blossoms! Who'll put blossoms on you next year, Jinny? Me, or somebody else? "Good-bye, my bluebell, farewell to you!" I hate that song, it's early war days.' He then sat down, and was pulling on his stockings. She still stood unmoving. He laid his hand on the slope of her buttocks. 'Pretty little Lady Jane!' he said. 'Perhaps in Venice you'll find a man who'll put jasmine in your maiden-hair, and a pomegranate flower in your navel. Poor little lady Jane!'

'Don't say those things!' she said. 'You only say them to hurt me.'

He dropped his head. Then he said, in dialect:

'Ay, maybe I do, maybe I do! Well then, I'll say nowt, an' ha' done wi't. But tha mun dress thysen, an' go back to thy stately homes of England, how beautiful they stand. Time's up! Time's up for Sir John, an' for little Lady Jane! Put thy shimmy on, Lady Chatterley! Tha might be anybody, standin' there be-out even a shimmy, an' a few rags o' flowers. There then, there then, I'll undress thee, tha bob-tailed young throstle.' And he took the leaves from her hair, kissing her damp hair, and the flowers from her breasts, and kissed her breasts, and kissed her navel, and kissed her maiden-hair, where he left the flowers threaded. 'They mun stop while they will,' he said. 'So! There tha'rt bare again, nowt but a bare-arsed lass an' a bit of a Lady Jane! Now put thy shimmy on, for tha mun go, or else Lady Chatterley's goin' to be late for dinner, an' where 'ave yer been to my pretty maid!'

She never knew how to answer him when he was in this condition of the vernacular. So she dressed herself and prepared to go a little ignominiously home to Wragby. Or so she felt it: a little ignominiously home.

He would accompany her to the broad riding. His young pheasants were all right under the shelter.

When he and she came out on to the riding, there was Mrs. Bolton faltering palely towards them.

'Oh, my Lady, we wondered if anything had happened!'

'No! Nothing has happened.'

Mrs. Bolton looked into the man's face, that was smooth and new-looking with love. She met his half-laughing, half-mocking eyes. He always laughed at mischance. But he looked at her kindly.

'Evening, Mrs. Bolton! Your Ladyship will be all right now, so I can leave you. Good-night to your Ladyship! Good-night, Mrs. Bolton!'

He saluted and turned away.

Chapter ⓰

Connie arrived home to an ordeal of cross-questioning. Clifford had been out at teatime, had come in just before the storm, and where was her ladyship? Nobody knew, only Mrs. Bolton suggested she had gone for a walk into the wood. Into the wood, in such a storm! Clifford for once let himself get into a state of nervous frenzy. He started at every flash of lightning, and blenched at every roll of thunder. He looked at the icy thunder-rain as if it were the end of the world. He got more and more worked up.

Mrs. Bolton tried to soothe him.

'She'll be sheltering in the hut, till it's over. Don't worry, her ladyship is all right.'

'I don't like her being in the wood in a storm like this! I don't like her being in the wood at all! She's been gone now more than two hours. When did she go out?'

'A little while before you came in.'

'I didn't see her in the park. God knows where she is and what has happened to her.'

'Oh, nothing's happened to her. You'll see, she'll be home directly after the rain stops. It's just the rain that's keeping her.'

But her ladyship did not come home directly the rain stopped. In fact time went by, the sun came out for his last yellow glimpse, and there still was no sign of her. The sun was set, it was growing dark, and the first dinner-gong had rung.

'It's no good!' said Clifford in a frenzy. 'I'm going to send out Field and Betts to find her.'

'Oh don't do that!' cried Mrs. Bolton. 'They'll think there's a suicide or something. Oh don't start a lot of talk going. Let me slip over to the hut and see if she's not there. I'll find her all right.'

So, after some persuasion, Clifford allowed her to go.

And so Connie had come upon her in the drive, alone and palely loitering.

'You mustn't mind me coming to look for you, my Lady! But Sir Clifford worked himself up into such a state. He made sure you were struck by lightning, or killed by a falling tree. And he was determined to send Field and Betts to the wood to find the body. So I thought I'd better come, rather than set all the servants agog.'

She spoke nervously. She could still see on Connie's face the smoothness and the half-dream of passion, and she could feel the irritation against herself.

'Quite!' said Connie. And she could say no more.

The two women plodded on through the wet world, in silence, while great drops splashed like explosions in the wood. When they came to the park, Connie strode ahead, and Mrs. Bolton panted a little. She was getting plumper.

'How foolish of Clifford to make a fuss!' said Connie at length, angrily, really speaking to herself.

'Oh, you know what men are! They like working themselves up. But he'll be all right as soon as he sees your Ladyship.'

Connie was very angry that Mrs. Bolton knew her secret: for certainly she knew it.

Suddenly Constance stood still on the path.

'It's monstrous that I should have to be followed!' she said, her eyes flashing.

'Oh! Your Ladyship, don't say that! He'd certainly have sent the two men, and they'd have come straight to the hut. I didn't know where it was, really.'

Connie flushed darker with rage, at the suggestion. Yet, while her passion was on her, she could not lie. She could not even pretend there was nothing between herself and the keeper. She looked at the other woman, who stood so sly, with her head dropped: yet somehow, in her femaleness, an ally.

'Oh well!' she said. 'If it is so, it is so. I don't mind!'

'Why, you're all right, my Lady! You've only been sheltering in the hut. It's absolutely nothing.'

They went on to the house. Connie marched in to Clifford's room, furious with him, furious with his pale, over-wrought face and prominent eyes.

'I must say, I don't think you need send the servants after me,' she burst out.

'My God!' he exploded. 'Where have you been, woman? You've been gone hours, hours, and in a storm like this! What the hell do you go to that bloody wood for? What have you been up to? It's hours even since the rain stopped, hours! Do you know what time it is? You're enough to drive anybody mad. Where have you been? What in the name of hell have you been doing?'

'And what if I don't choose to tell you?' She pulled her hat from her head and shook her hair.

He looked at her with his eyes bulging, and yellow coming into the whites. It was very bad for him to get into these rages: Mrs. Bolton had a weary time with him, for days after. Connie felt a sudden qualm.

'But really!' she said, milder. 'Anyone would think I'd been I don't know where! I just sat in the hut during all the storm, and made myself a little fire, and was happy.'

She spoke now easily. After all, why work him up any more! He looked at her suspiciously.

'And look at your hair!' he said, 'Look at yourself!'

'Yes!' she replied calmly. 'I ran out in the rain with no clothes on.'

He stared at her speechless.

'You must be mad!' he said.

'Why? To like a shower bath from the rain?'

'And how did you dry yourself?'

'On an old towel and at the fire.'

He still stared at her in a dumbfounded way.

'And supposing anybody came,' he said.

'Who would come?'

'Who? Why, anybody! And Mellors. Does he come? He must come in the evenings.'

'Yes, he came later, when it had cleared up, to feed the pheasants with corn.'

She spoke with amazing nonchalance. Mrs. Bolton, who was listening in the next room, heard in sheer admiration. To think a woman could carry it off so naturally!

'And suppose he'd come while you were running about in the rain with nothing on, like a maniac?'

'I suppose he'd have had the fright of his life, and cleared out as fast as he could.'

Clifford still stared at her transfixed. What he thought in his under-consciousness he would never know. And he was too much taken aback to form one clear thought in his upper consciousness. He just simply accepted what she said, in a sort of blank. And he admired her. He could not help admiring her. She looked so flushed and handsome and smooth: love smooth.

'At least,' he said, subsiding, 'you'll be lucky if you've got off without a severe cold.'

'Oh, I haven't got a cold,' she replied. She was thinking to herself of the other man's words: Tha's got the nicest woman's arse of anybody! She wished, she dearly wished she could tell Clifford that this had been said to her, during the famous thunderstorm. However! She bore herself rather like an offended queen, and went upstairs to change.

That evening, Clifford wanted to be nice to her. He was reading one of the latest scientific-religious books: he had a streak of a spurious sort of religion in him, and was egocentrically concerned with the future of his own ego. It was like his habit to make conversation to Connie about some book, since the conversation between them had to be made, almost chemically. They had almost chemically to concoct it in their heads.

'What do you think of this, by the way?' he said, reaching for his book. 'You'd have no need to cool your ardent body by running out in the rain, if only we have a few more aeons of evolution behind us. Ah, here it is!—"The universe shows us two aspects: on one side it is physically wasting, on the other it is spiritually ascending."'

Connie listened, expecting more. But Clifford was waiting. She looked at him in surprise.

'And if it spiritually ascends,' she said, 'what does it leave down below, in the place where its tail used to be?'

'Ah!' he said. 'Take the man for what he means. Ascending is the opposite of his wasting, I presume.'

'Spiritually blown out, so to speak!'

'No, but seriously, without joking: do you think there is anything in it?'

She looked at him again.

'Physically wasting?' she said. 'I see you getting fatter, and I'm not wasting myself. Do you think the sun is smaller than he used to be? He's not to me. And I suppose the apple Adam offered Eve wasn't really much bigger, if any, than one of our orange pippins. Do you think it was?'

'Well, hear how he goes on: "It is thus slowly passing, with a slowness inconceivable in our measures of time, to new creative conditions, amid which the physical world, as we at present know it, will be represented by a ripple barely to be distinguished from nonentity."'

She listened with a glisten of amusement. All sorts of improper things suggested themselves. But she only said:

'What silly hocus-pocus! As if his little conceited consciousness could know what was happening as slowly as all that! It only means he's a physical failure on the earth, so he wants to make the whole universe a physical failure. Priggish little impertinence!'

'Oh, but listen! Don't interrupt the great man's solemn words!—"The present type of order in the world has risen from an unimaginable part, and will find its grave in an unimaginable future. There remains the inexhaustive realm of abstract forms, and creativity with its shifting character ever determined afresh by its own creatures, and God, upon whose wisdom all forms of order depend." There, that's how he winds up!'

Connie sat listening contemptuously.

'He's spiritually blown out,' she said. 'What a lot of stuff! Unimaginables, and types of order in graves, and realms of abstract forms, and creativity with a shifty character, and God mixed up with forms of order! Why, it's idiotic!'

'I must say, it is a little vaguely conglomerate, a mixture of gases, so to speak,' said Clifford. 'Still, I think there is something in the idea that the universe is physically wasting and spiritually ascending.'

'Do you? Then let it ascend, so long as it leaves me safely and solidly physically here below.'

'Do you like your physique?' he asked.

'I love it!' And through her mind went the words: It's the nicest, nicest woman's arse as is!

'But that is really rather extraordinary, because there's no denying it's an encumbrance. But then I suppose a woman doesn't take a supreme pleasure in the life of the mind.'

'Supreme pleasure?' she said, looking up at him. 'Is that sort of idiocy the supreme pleasure of the life of the mind? No thank you! Give me the body. I believe the life of the body is a greater reality than the life of the mind: when the body is really wakened to life. But so many people, like your famous wind-machine, have only got minds tacked on to their physical corpses.'

He looked at her in wonder.

'The life of the body,' he said, 'is just the life of the animals.'

'And that's better than the life of professional corpses. But it's not true! The human body is only just coming to real life. With the Greeks it gave a lovely flicker, then Plato and Aristotle killed it, and Jesus finished it off. But now the body is coming really to life, it is really rising from the tomb. And It will be a lovely, lovely life in the lovely universe, the life of the human body.'

'My dear, you speak as if you were ushering it all in! True, you are going away on a holiday: but don't please be quite so indecently elated about it. Believe me, whatever God there is is slowly eliminating the guts and alimentary system from the human being, to evolve a higher, more spiritual being.'

'Why should I believe you, Clifford, when I feel that whatever God there is has at last wakened up in my guts, as you call them, and is rippling so happily there, like dawn. Why should I believe you, when I feel so very much the contrary?'

'Oh, exactly! And what has caused this extraordinary change in you? Running out stark naked in the rain, and playing Bacchante? Desire for sensation, or the anticipation of going to Venice?'

'Both! Do you think it is horrid of me to be so thrilled at going off?' she said.

'Rather horrid to show it so plainly.'

'Then I'll hide it.'

'Oh, don't trouble! You almost communicate a thrill to me. I almost feel that it is I who am going off.'

'Well, why don't you come?'

'We've gone over all that. And as a matter of fact, I suppose your greatest thrill comes from being able to say a temporary farewell to all this. Nothing so thrilling, for the moment, as Good-bye-to-all!—But every parting means a meeting elsewhere. And every meeting is a new bondage.'

'I'm not going to enter any new bondages.'

'Don't boast, while the gods are listening,' he said.

She pulled up short.

'No! I won't boast!' she said.

But she was thrilled, none the less, to be going off: to feel bonds snap. She couldn't help it.

Clifford, who couldn't sleep, gambled all night with Mrs. Bolton, till she was too sleepy almost to live.

And the day came round for Hilda to arrive. Connie had arranged with Mellors that if everything promised well for their night together, she would hang a green shawl out of the window. If there were frustration, a red one.

Mrs. Bolton helped Connie to pack.

'It will be so good for your Ladyship to have a change.'

'I think it will. You don't mind having Sir Clifford on your hands alone for a time, do you?'

'Oh no! I can manage him quite all right. I mean, I can do all he needs me to do. Don't you think he's better than he used to be?'

'Oh much! You do wonders with him.'

'Do I though! But men are all alike: just babies, and you have to flatter them and wheedle them and let them think they're having their own way. Don't you find it so, my Lady?'

'I'm afraid I haven't much experience.'

Connie paused in her occupation.

'Even your husband, did you have to manage him, and wheedle him like a baby?' she asked, looking at the other woman.

Mrs. Bolton paused too.

'Well!' she said. 'I had to do a good bit of coaxing, with him too. But he always knew what I was after, I must say that. But he generally gave in to me.'

'He was never the lord and master thing?'

'No! At least there'd be a look in his eyes sometimes, and then I knew I'd got to give in. But usually he gave in to me. No, he was never lord and master. But neither was I. I knew when I could go no further with him, and then I gave in: though it cost me a good bit, sometimes.'

'And what if you had held out against him?'

'Oh, I don't know, I never did. Even when he was in the wrong, if he was fixed, I gave in. You see, I never wanted to break what was between us. And if you really set your will against a man, that finishes it. If you care for a man, you have to give in to him once he's really determined; whether you're in the right or not, you have to give in. Else you break something. But I must say, Ted 'ud give in to me sometimes, when I was set on a thing, and in the wrong. So I suppose it cuts both ways.'

'And that's how you are with all your patients?' asked Connie.

'Oh, that's different. I don't care at all, in the same way. I know what's good for them, or I try to, and then I just contrive to manage them for their own good. It's not like anybody as you're really fond of. It's quite different. Once you've been really fond of a man, you can be affectionate to almost any man, if he needs you at all. But it's not the same thing. You don't really care. I doubt, once you've really cared, if you can ever really care again.'

These words frightened Connie.

'Do you think one can only care once?' she asked.

'Or never. Most women never care, never begin to. They don't know what it means. Nor men either. But when I see a woman as cares, my heart stands still for her.'

'And do you think men easily take offence?'

'Yes! If you wound them on their pride. But aren't women the same? Only our two prides are a bit different.'

Connie pondered this. She began again to have some misgiving about her going away. After all, was she not giving her man the go-by, if only for a short time? And he knew it. That's why he was so queer and sarcastic.

Still! The human existence is a good deal controlled by the machine of external circumstance. She was in the power of this machine. She couldn't extricate herself all in five minutes. She didn't even want to.

Hilda arrived in good time on Thursday morning, in a nimble two-seater car, with her suitcase strapped firmly behind. She looked as demure and maidenly as ever, but she had the same will of her own. She had the very hell of a will of her own, as her husband had found out. But the husband was now divorcing her. Yes, she even made it easy for him to do that, though she had no lover. For the time being, she was 'off' men. She was very well content to be quite her own mistress: and mistress of her two children, whom she was going to bring up 'properly', whatever that may mean.

Connie was only allowed a suitcase, also. But she had sent on a trunk to her father, who was going by train. No use taking a car to Venice. And Italy much too hot to motor in, in July. He was going comfortably by train. He had just come down from Scotland.

So, like a demure arcadian field-marshal, Hilda arranged the material part of the journey. She and Connie sat in the upstairs room, chatting.

'But Hilda!' said Connie, a little frightened. 'I want to stay near here tonight. Not here: near here!'

Hilda fixed her sister with grey, inscrutable eyes. She seemed so calm: and she was so often furious.

'Where, near here?' she asked softly.

'Well, you know I love somebody, don't you?'

'I gathered there was something.'

'Well, he lives near here, and I want to spend this last night with him. I must! I've promised.'

Connie became insistent.

Hilda bent her Minerva-like head in silence. Then she looked up.

'Do you want to tell me who he is?' she said.

'He's our game-keeper,' faltered Connie, and she flushed vividly, like a shamed child.

'Connie!' said Hilda, lifting her nose slightly with disgust: a motion she had from her mother.

'I know: but he's lovely really. He really understands tenderness,' said Connie, trying to apologize for him.

Hilda, like a ruddy, rich-coloured Athena, bowed her head and pondered. She was really violently angry. But she dared not show it, because Connie, taking after her father, would straightway become obstreperous and unmanageable.

It was true, Hilda did not like Clifford: his cool assurance that he was somebody! She thought he made use of Connie shamefully and impudently. She had hoped her sister would leave him. But, being solid Scotch middle class, she loathed any 'lowering' of oneself or the family. She looked up at last.

'You'll regret it,' she said,

'I shan't,' cried Connie, flushed red. 'He's quite the exception. I really love him. He's lovely as a lover.'

Hilda still pondered.

'You'll get over him quite soon,' she said, 'and live to be ashamed of yourself because of him.'

'I shan't! I hope I'm going to have a child of his.'

'Connie!' said Hilda, hard as a hammer stroke, and pale with anger.

'I shall if I possibly can. I should be fearfully proud if I had a child by him.'

It was no use talking to her. Hilda pondered.

'And doesn't Clifford suspect?' she said.

'Oh no! Why should he?'

'I've no doubt you've given him plenty of occasion for suspicion,' said Hilda.

'Not at all.'

'And tonight's business seems quite gratuitous folly. Where does the man live?'

'In the cottage at the other end of the wood.'

'Is he a bachelor?'

'No! His wife left him.'

'How old?'

'I don't know. Older than me.'

Hilda became more angry at every reply, angry as her mother used to be, in a kind of paroxysm. But still she hid it.

'I would give up tonight's escapade if I were you,' she advised calmly.

'I can't! I must stay with him tonight, or I can't go to Venice at all. I just can't.'

Hilda heard her father over again, and she gave way, out of mere diplomacy. And she consented to drive to Mansfield, both of them, to dinner, to bring Connie back to the lane-end after dark, and to fetch her from the lane-end the next morning, herself sleeping in Mansfield, only half an hour away, good going. But she was furious. She stored it up against her sister, this balk in her plans.

Connie flung an emerald-green shawl over her window-sill.

On the strength of her anger, Hilda warmed toward Clifford. After all, he had a mind. And if he had no sex, functionally, all the better: so much the less to quarrel about! Hilda wanted no more of that sex business, where men became nasty, selfish little horrors. Connie really had less to put up with than many women, if she did but know it.

And Clifford decided that Hilda, after all, was a decidedly intelligent woman, and would make a man a first-rate helpmate, if he were going in for politics for example. Yes, she had none of Connie's silliness, Connie was more a child: you had to make excuses for her, because she was not altogether dependable.

There was an early cup of tea in the hall, where doors were open to let in the sun. Everybody seemed to be panting a little.

'Good-bye, Connie girl! Come back to me safely.'

'Good-bye, Clifford! Yes, I shan't be long.' Connie was almost tender.

'Good-bye, Hilda! You will keep an eye on her, won't you?'

'I'll even keep two!' said Hilda. 'She shan't go very far astray.'

'It's a promise!'

'Good-bye, Mrs. Bolton! I know you'll look after Sir Clifford nobly.'

'I'll do what I can, your Ladyship.'

'And write to me if there is any news, and tell me about Sir Clifford, how he is.'

'Very good, your Ladyship, I will. And have a good time, and come back and cheer us up.'

Everybody waved. The car went off. Connie looked back and saw Clifford, sitting at the top of the steps in his house-chair. After all, he was her husband: Wragby was her home: circumstance had done it.

Mrs. Chambers held the gate and wished her ladyship a happy holiday. The car slipped out of the dark spinney that masked the park, on to the highroad where the colliers were trailing home. Hilda turned to the Crosshill Road, that was not a main road, but ran to Mansfield. Connie put on goggles. They ran beside the railway, which was in a cutting below them. Then they crossed the cutting on a bridge.

'That's the lane to the cottage!' said Connie.

Hilda glanced at it impatiently.

'It's a frightful pity we can't go straight off!' she said. We could have been in Pall Mall by nine o'clock.'

'I'm sorry for your sake,' said Connie, from behind her goggles.

They were soon at Mansfield, that once-romantic, now utterly disheartening colliery town. Hilda stopped at the hotel named in the motorcar book, and took a room. The whole thing was utterly uninteresting, and she was almost too angry to talk. However, Connie had to tell her something of the man's history.

'He! He! What name do you call him by? You only say he,' said Hilda.

'I've never called him by any name: nor he me: which is curious, when you come to think of it. Unless we say Lady Jane and John Thomas. But his name is Oliver Mellors.'

'And how would you like to be Mrs. Oliver Mellors, instead of Lady Chatterley?'

'I'd love it.'

There was nothing to be done with Connie. And anyhow, if the man had been a lieutenant in the army in India for four or five years, he must be more or less presentable. Apparently he had character. Hilda began to relent a little.

'But you'll be through with him in a while,' she said, 'and then you'll be ashamed of having been connected with him. One can't mix up with the working people.'

'But you are such a socialist! You're always on the side of the working classes.'

'I may be on their side in a political crisis, but being on their side makes me know how impossible it is to mix one's life with theirs. Not out of snobbery, but just because the whole rhythm is different.'

Hilda had lived among the real political intellectuals, so she was disastrously unanswerable.

The nondescript evening in the hotel dragged out, and at last they had a nondescript dinner. Then Connie slipped a few things into a little silk bag, and combed her hair once more.

'After all, Hilda,' she said, 'love can be wonderful: when you feel you live, and are in the very middle of creation.' It was almost like bragging on her part.

'I suppose every mosquito feels the same,' said Hilda.

'Do you think it does? How nice for it!'

The evening was wonderfully clear and long-lingering, even in the small town. It would be half-light all night. With a face like a mask, from resentment, Hilda started her car again, and the two sped back on their traces, taking the other road, through Bolsover.

Connie wore her goggles and disguising cap, and she sat in silence. Because of Hilda's opposition, she was fiercely on the side of the man, she would stand by him through thick and thin.

They had their headlights on, by the time they passed Crosshill, and the small lit-up train that chuffed past in the cutting made it seem like real night. Hilda had calculated the turn into the lane at the bridge-end. She slowed up rather suddenly and swerved off the road, the lights glaring white into the grassy, overgrown lane. Connie looked out. She saw a shadowy figure, and she opened the door.

'Here we are!' she said softly.

But Hilda had switched off the lights, and was absorbed backing, making the turn.

'Nothing on the bridge?' she asked shortly.

'You're all right,' said the man's voice.

She backed on to the bridge, reversed, let the car run forwards a few yards along the road, then backed into the lane, under a wych-elm tree, crushing the grass and bracken. Then all the lights went out. Connie stepped down. The man stood under the trees.

'Did you wait long?' Connie asked.

'Not so very,' he replied.

They both waited for Hilda to get out. But Hilda shut the door of the car and sat tight.

'This is my sister Hilda. Won't you come and speak to her? Hilda! This is Mr. Mellors.'

The keeper lifted his hat, but went no nearer.

'Do walk down to the cottage with us, Hilda,' Connie pleaded. 'It's not far.'

'What about the car?'

'People do leave them on the lanes. You have the key.'

Hilda was silent, deliberating. Then she looked backwards down the lane.

'Can I back round the bush?' she said.

'Oh yes!' said the keeper.

She backed slowly round the curve, out of sight of the road, locked the car, and got down. It was night, but luminous dark. The hedges rose high and wild, by the unused lane, and very dark seeming. There was a fresh sweet scent on the air. The keeper went ahead, then came Connie, then Hilda, and in silence. He lit up the difficult places with a flashlight torch, and they went on again, while an owl softly hooted over the oaks, and Flossie padded silently around. Nobody could speak. There was nothing to say.

At length Connie saw the yellow light of the house, and her heart beat fast. She was a little frightened. They trailed on, still in Indian file.

He unlocked the door and preceded them into the warm but bare little room. The fire burned low and red in the grate. The table was set with two plates and two glasses on a proper white tablecloth for once. Hilda shook her hair and looked round the bare, cheerless room. Then she summoned her courage and looked at the man.

He was moderately tall, and thin, and she thought him good-looking. He kept a quiet distance of his own, and seemed absolutely unwilling to speak.

'Do sit down, Hilda,' said Connie.

'Do!' he said. 'Can I make you tea or anything, or will you drink a glass of beer? It's moderately cool.'

'Beer!' said Connie.

'Beer for me, please!' said Hilda, with a mock sort of shyness. He looked at her and blinked.

He took a blue jug and tramped to the scullery. When he came back with the beer, his face had changed again.

Connie sat down by the door, and Hilda sat in his seat, with the back to the wall, against the window corner.

'That is his chair,' said Connie softly. And Hilda rose as if it had burnt her.

'Sit yer still, sit yer still! Ta'e ony cheer as yo'n a mind to, none of us is th' big bear,' he said, with complete equanimity.

And he brought Hilda a glass, and poured her beer first from the blue jug.

'As for cigarettes,' he said, 'I've got none, but 'happen you've got your own. I dunna smoke, mysen. Shall y' eat summat?' He turned direct to Connie. 'Shall t'eat a smite o' summat, if I bring it thee? Tha can usually do wi' a bite.' He spoke the vernacular with a curious calm assurance, as if he were the landlord of the inn.

'What is there?' asked Connie, flushing.

'Boiled ham, cheese, pickled wa'nuts, if yer like. Nowt much.'

'Yes,' said Connie. 'Won't you, Hilda?'

Hilda looked up at him.

'Why do you speak Yorkshire?' she said softly.

'That! That's non Yorkshire, that's Derby.'

He looked back at her with that faint, distant grin.

'Derby, then! Why do you speak Derby? You spoke natural English at first.'

'Did Ah though? An' canna Ah change if Ah'm a mind to 't? Nay, nay, let me talk Derby if it suits me. If yo'n nowt against it.'

'It sounds a little affected,' said Hilda.

'Ay,' appen so! An' up i' Tevershall yo'd sound affected.' He looked again at her, with a queer calculating distance, along his cheek-bone: as if to say: Yi, an' who are you?

He tramped away to the pantry for the food.

The sisters sat in silence. He brought another plate, and knife and fork. The he said:

'An' if it's the same to you, I s'll ta'e my coat off like I allers do.'

And he took off his coat, and hung it on the peg, then sat down to table in his shirt-sleeves: a shirt of thin, cream-coloured flannel.

''Elp yerselves!' he said. ''Elp yerselves! Dunna wait f'r axin'!'

He cut the bread, then sat motionless. Hilda felt, as Connie once used to, his power of silence and distance. She saw his smallish, sensitive, loose hand on the table. He was no simple working man, not he: he was acting! Acting!

'Still!' she said, as she took a little cheese. 'It would be more natural if you spoke to us in normal English, not in vernacular.'

He looked at her, feeling her devil of a will.

'Would it?' he said in the normal English. 'Would it? Would anything that was said between you and me be quite natural, unless you said you wished me to hell before your sister ever saw me again: and unless I said something almost as unpleasant back again? Would anything else be natural?'

'Oh yes!' said Hilda. 'Just good manners would be quite natural.'

'Second nature, so to speak!' he said: then he began to laugh. 'Nay,' he said. 'I'm weary o' manners. Let me be!'

Hilda was frankly baffled and furiously annoyed. After all, he might show that he realised he was being honoured. Instead of which, with his play-acting and lordly airs, he seemed to think it was he who was conferring the honour. Just impudence! Poor misguided Connie, in the man's clutches!

The three ate in silence. Hilda looked to see what his table manners were like. She could not help realizing that he was instinctively much more delicate and well-bred than herself. She had a certain Scottish clumsiness. And moreover, he had all the quiet self-contained assurance of the English, no loose edges. It would be very difficult to get the better of him.

But neither would he get the better of her.

'And do you really think,' she said, a little more humanly, 'it's worth the risk.'

'Is what worth what risk?'

'This escapade with my sister.'

He flickered his irritating grin.

'Yo' maun ax 'er!' Then he looked at Connie.

'Tha comes o' thine own accord, lass, doesn't ter? It's non me as forces thee?'

Connie looked at Hilda.

'I wish you wouldn't cavil, Hilda.'

'Naturally I don't want to. But someone has to think about things. You've got to have some sort of continuity in your life. You can't just go making a mess.'

There was a moment's pause.

'Eh, continuity!' he said. 'An' what by that? What continuity 'ave yer got i' your life? I thought you was gettin' divorced. What continuity's that? Continuity o' yer own stubbornness. I can see that much. An' what good's it goin' to do yer? You'll be sick o' yer continuity afore yer a fat sight older. A stubborn woman an' 'er own self-will: ay, they make a fast continuity, they do. Thank heaven, it isn't me as 'as got th' andlin' of yer!'

'What right have you to speak like that to me?' said Hilda.

'Right! What right ha' yo' ter start harnessin' other folks i' your continuity? Leave folks to their own continuities.'

'My dear man, do you think I am concerned with you?' said Hilda softly.

'Ay,' he said. 'Yo' are. For it's a force-put. Yo' more or less my sister-in-law.'

'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 need 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, Connie.'

'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 Abélard meant, when he said that in their year of love he and Heloise had passed through all the stages and refinements of passion. 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 bedrock 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 phallus 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!

'Is it time to wake up?' she said.

'Half past six.'

She had to be at the lane-end at eight. Always, always, always this compulsion on one!

'I might make the breakfast and bring it up here; should I?' he said.

'Oh yes!'

Flossie whimpered gently below. He got up and threw off his pyjamas, and rubbed himself with a towel. When the human being is full of courage and full of life, how beautiful it is! So she thought, as she watched him in silence.

'Draw the curtain, will you?'

The sun was shining already on the tender green leaves of morning, and the wood stood bluey-fresh, in the nearness. She sat up in bed, looking dreamily out through the dormer window, her naked arms pushing her naked breasts together. He was dressing himself. She was half-dreaming of life, a life together with him: just a life.

He was going, fleeing from her dangerous, crouching nakedness.

'Have I lost my nightie altogether?' she said.

He pushed his hand down in the bed, and pulled out the bit of flimsy silk.

'I knowed I felt silk at my ankles,' he said.

But the night dress was slit almost in two.

'Never mind!' she said. 'It belongs here, really. I'll leave it.'

'Ay, leave it, I can put it between my legs at night, for company. There's no name nor mark on it, is there?'

She slipped on the torn thing, and sat dreamily looking out of the window. The window was open, the air of morning drifted in, and the sound of birds. Birds flew continuously past. Then she saw Flossie roaming out. It was morning.

Downstairs she heard him making the fire, pumping water, going out at the back door. By and by came the smell of bacon, and at length he came upstairs with a huge black tray that would only just go through the door. He set the tray on the bed, and poured out the tea. Connie squatted in her torn nightdress, and fell on her food hungrily. He sat on the one chair, with his plate on his knees.

'How good it is!' she said. 'How nice to have breakfast together.'

He ate in silence, his mind on the time that was quickly passing. That made her remember.

'Oh, how I wish I could stay here with you, and Wragby were a million miles away! It's Wragby I'm going away from really. You know that, don't you?'

'Ay!'

'And you promise we will live together and have a life together, you and me! You promise me, don't you?'

'Ay! When we can.'

'Yes! And we will! We will, won't we?' she leaned over, making the tea spill, catching his wrist.

'Ay!' he said, tidying up the tea.

'We can't possibly not live together now, can we?' she said appealingly.

He looked up at her with his flickering grin.

'No!' he said. 'Only you've got to start in twenty-five minutes.'

'Have I?' she cried. Suddenly he held up a warning finger, and rose to his feet.

Flossie had given a short bark, then three loud sharp yaps of warning.

Silent, he put his plate on the tray and went downstairs. Constance heard him go down the garden path. A bicycle bell tinkled outside there.

'Morning, Mr. Mellors! Registered letter!'

'Oh, ay! Got a pencil?'

'Here y'are!'

There was a pause.

'Canada!' said the stranger's voice.

'Ay! That's a mate o' mine out there in British Columbia. Dunno what he's got to register.'

''Appen sent y'a fortune, like.'

'More like wants summat.'

Pause.

'Well! Lovely day again!'

'Ay!'

'Morning!'

'Morning!'

After a time he came upstairs again, looking a little angry.

'Postman,' he said.

'Very early!' she replied.

'Rural round; he's mostly here by seven, when he does come.'

'Did your mate send you a fortune?'

'No! Only some photographs and papers about a place out there in British Columbia.'

'Would you go there?'

'I thought perhaps we might.'

'Oh, yes! I believe it's lovely!'

But he was put out by the postman's coming.

'Them damned bikes, they're on you afore you know where you are. I hope he twigged nothing.'

'After all, what could he twig!'

'You must get up now, and get ready. I'm just goin' ter look round outside.'

She saw him go reconnoitring into the lane, with dog and gun. She went downstairs and washed, and was ready by the time he came back, with the few things in the little silk bag.

He locked up, and they set off, but through the wood, not down the lane. He was being wary.

'Don't you think one lives for times like last night?' she said to him.

'Ay! But there's the rest o' times to think on,' he replied, rather short.

They plodded on down the overgrown path, he in front, in silence.

'And we will live together and make a life together, won't we?' she pleaded.

'Ay!' he replied, striding on without looking round. 'When t' time comes! Just now you're off to Venice or somewhere.'

She followed him dumbly, with sinking heart. Oh, now she was wae to go!

At last he stopped.

'I'll just strike across here,' he said, pointing to the right.

But she flung her arms round his neck, and clung to him.

'But you'll keep the tenderness for me, won't you?' she whispered. 'I loved last night. But you'll keep the tenderness for me, won't you?'

He kissed her and held her close for a moment. Then he sighed, and kissed her again.

'I must go an' look if th' car's there.'

He strode over the low brambles and bracken, leaving a trail through the fern. For a minute or two he was gone. Then he came striding back.

'Car's not there yet,' he said. 'But there's the baker's cart on t' road.'

He seemed anxious and troubled.

'Hark!'

They heard a car softly hoot as it came nearer. It slowed up on the bridge.

She plunged with utter mournfulness in his track through the fern, and came to a huge holly hedge. He was just behind her.

'Here! Go through there!' he said, pointing to a gap. 'I shan't come out.'

She looked at him in despair. But he kissed her and made her go. She crept in sheer misery through the holly and through the wooden fence, stumbled down the little ditch and up into the lane, where Hilda was just getting out of the car in vexation.

'Why, you're there!' said Hilda. 'Where's he?'

'He's not coming.'

Connie's face was running with tears as she got into the car with her little bag. Hilda snatched up the motoring helmet with the disfiguring goggles.

'Put it on!' she said. And Connie pulled on the disguise, then the long motoring coat, and she sat down, a goggling, inhuman, unrecognizable creature. Hilda started the car with a businesslike motion. They heaved out of the lane, and were away down the road. Connie had looked round, but there was no sight of him. Away! Away! She sat in bitter tears. The parting had come so suddenly, so unexpectedly. It was like death.

'Thank goodness you'll be away from him for some time!' said Hilda, turning to avoid Crosshill village.

Chapter ⓱

'You see, Hilda,' said Connie after lunch, when they were nearing London, 'you have never known either real tenderness or real sensuality: and if you do know them, with the same person, it makes a great difference.'

'For mercy's sake don't brag about your experiences!' said Hilda. 'I've never met the man yet who was capable of intimacy with a woman, giving himself up to her. That was what I wanted. I'm not keen on their self-satisfied tenderness, and their sensuality. I'm not content to be any man's little petsy-wetsy, nor his chair à plaisir either. I wanted a complete intimacy, and I didn't get it. That's enough for me.'

Connie pondered this. Complete intimacy! She supposed that meant revealing everything concerning yourself to the other person, and his revealing everything concerning himself. But that was a bore. And all that weary self-consciousness between a man and a woman! A disease!

'I think you're too conscious of yourself all the time, with everybody,' she said to her sister.

'I hope at least I haven't a slave nature,' said Hilda.

'But perhaps you have! Perhaps you are a slave to your own idea of yourself.'

Hilda drove in silence for some time after this piece of unheard-of insolence from that chit Connie.

'At least I'm not a slave to somebody else's idea of me: and the somebody else a servant of my husband's,' she retorted at last, in crude anger.

'You see, it's not so,' said Connie calmly.

She had always let herself be dominated by her elder sister. Now, though somewhere inside herself she was weeping, she was free of the dominion of other women. Ah! That in itself was a relief, like being given another life: to be free of the strange dominion and obsession of other women. How awful they were, women!

She was glad to be with her father, whose favourite she had always been. She and Hilda stayed in a little hotel off Pall Mall, and Sir Malcolm was in his club. But he took his daughters out in the evening, and they liked going with him.

He was still handsome and robust, though just a little afraid of the new world that had sprung up around him. He had got a second wife in Scotland, younger than himself and richer. But he had as many holidays away from her as possible: just as with his first wife.

Connie sat next to him at the opera. He was moderately stout, and had stout thighs, but they were still strong and well-knit, the thighs of a healthy man who had taken his pleasure in life. His good-humoured selfishness, his dogged sort of independence, his unrepenting sensuality, it seemed to Connie she could see them all in his well-knit straight thighs. Just a man! And now becoming an old man, which is sad. Because in his strong, thick male legs there was none of the alert sensitiveness and power of tenderness which is the very essence of youth, that which never dies, once it is there.

Connie woke up to the existence of legs. They became more important to her than faces, which are no longer very real. How few people had live, alert legs! She looked at the men in the stalls. Great puddingy thighs in black pudding-cloth, or lean wooden sticks in black funeral stuff, or well-shaped young legs without any meaning whatever, either sensuality or tenderness or sensitiveness, just mere leggy ordinariness that pranced around. Not even any sensuality like her father's. They were all daunted, daunted out of existence.

But the women were not daunted. The awful mill-posts of most females! Really shocking, really enough to justify murder! Or the poor thin pegs! Or the trim neat things in silk stockings, without the slightest look of life! Awful, the millions of meaningless legs prancing meaninglessly around!

But she was not happy in London. The people seemed so spectral and blank. They had no alive happiness, no matter how brisk and good-looking they were. It was all barren. And Connie had a woman's blind craving for happiness, to be assured of happiness.

In Paris at any rate she felt a bit of sensuality still. But what a weary, tired, worn-out sensuality. Worn-out for lack of tenderness. Oh! Paris was sad. One of the saddest towns: weary of its now-mechanical sensuality, weary of the tension of money, money, money, weary even of resentment and conceit, just weary to death, and still not sufficiently Americanized or Londonized to hide the weariness under a mechanical jig-jig-jig! Ah, these manly he-men, these flaneurs, the oglers, these eaters of good dinners! How weary they were! Weary, worn-out for lack of a little tenderness, given and taken. The efficient, sometimes charming women knew a thing or two about the sensual realities: they had that pull over their jigging English sisters. But they knew even less of tenderness. Dry, with the endless dry tension of will, they too were wearing out. The human world was just getting worn out. Perhaps it would turn fiercely destructive. A sort of anarchy! Clifford and his conservative anarchy! Perhaps it wouldn't be conservative much longer. Perhaps it would develop into a very radical anarchy.

Connie found herself shrinking and afraid of the world. Sometimes she was happy for a little while in the Boulevards or in the Bois or the Luxembourg Gardens. But already Paris was full of Americans and English, strange Americans in the oddest uniforms, and the usual dreary English that are so hopeless abroad. She was glad to drive on. It was suddenly hot weather, so Hilda was going through Switzerland and over the Brenner, then through the Dolomites down to Venice. Hilda loved all the managing and the driving and being mistress of the show. Connie was quite content to keep quiet.

And the trip was really quite nice. Only Connie kept saying to herself: Why don't I really care! Why am I never really thrilled? How awful, that I don't really care about the landscape any more! But I don't. It's rather awful. I'm like Saint Bernard, who could sail down the lake of Lucerne without ever noticing that there were even mountain and green water. I just don't care for landscape any more. Why should one stare at it? Why should one? I refuse to.

No, she found nothing vital in France or Switzerland or the Tyrol or Italy. She just was carted through it all. And it was all less real than Wragby. Less real than the awful Wragby! She felt she didn't care if she never saw France or Switzerland or Italy again. They'd keep. Wragby was more real.

As for people! People were all alike, with very little difference. They all wanted to get money out of you: or, if they were travellers, they wanted to get enjoyment, perforce, like squeezing blood out of a stone. Poor mountains! Poor landscape! It all had to be squeezed and squeezed and squeezed again, to provide a thrill, to provide enjoyment. What did people mean, with their simply determined enjoying of themselves?

No! said Connie to herself. I'd rather be at Wragby, where I can go about and be still, and not stare at anything or do any performing of any sort. This tourist performance of enjoying oneself is too hopelessly humiliating: it's such a failure.

She wanted to go back to Wragby, even to Clifford, even to poor crippled Clifford. He wasn't such a fool as this swarming holidaying lot, anyhow.

But in her inner consciousness she was keeping touch with the other man. She mustn't let her connexion with him go: oh, she mustn't let it go, or she was lost, lost utterly in this world of riff-raffy expensive people and joy-hogs. Oh, the joy-hogs! Oh, 'enjoying oneself! Another modern form of sickness.

They left the car in Mestre, in a garage, and took the regular steamer over to Venice. It was a lovely summer afternoon, the shallow lagoon rippled, the full sunshine made Venice, turning its back to them across the water, look dim.

At the station quay they changed to a gondola, giving the man the address. He was a regular gondolier in a white-and-blue blouse, not very good-looking, not at all impressive.

'Yes! The Villa Esmeralda! Yes! I know it! I have been the gondolier for a gentleman there. But a fair distance out!'

He seemed a rather childish, impetuous fellow. He rowed with a certain exaggerated impetuosity, through the dark side-canals with the horrible, slimy green walls, the canals that go through the poorer quarters, where the washing hangs high up on ropes, and there is a slight, or strong, odour of sewage.

But at last he came to one of the open canals with pavement on either side, and looping bridges, that run straight, at right angles to the Grand Canal. The two women sat under the little awning, the man was perched above, behind them.

'Are the signorine staying long at the Villa Esmeralda?' he asked, rowing easy, and wiping his perspiring face with a white-and-blue handkerchief.

'Some twenty days: we are both married ladies,' said Hilda, in her curious hushed voice, that made her Italian sound so foreign.

'Ah! Twenty days!' said the man. There was a pause. After which he asked: 'Do the signore want a gondolier for the twenty days or so that they will stay at the Villa Esmeralda? Or by the day, or by the week?'

Connie and Hilda considered. In Venice, it is always preferable to have one's own gondola, as it is preferable to have one's own car on land.

'What is there at the Villa? What boats?'

'There is a motor-launch, also a gondola. But—' The but meant: they won't be your property.

'How much do you charge?'

It was about thirty shillings a day, or ten pounds a week.

'Is that the regular price?' asked Hilda.

'Less, Signora, less. The regular price—'

The sisters considered.

'Well,' said Hilda, 'come tomorrow morning, and we will arrange it. What is your name?'

His name was Giovanni, and he wanted to know at what time he should come, and then for whom should he say he was waiting. Hilda had no card. Connie gave him one of hers. He glanced at it swiftly, with his hot, southern blue eyes, then glanced again.

'Ah!' he said, lighting up. 'Milady! Milady, isn't it?'

'Milady Costanza!' said Connie.

He nodded, repeating: 'Milady Costanza!' and putting the card carefully away in his blouse.

The Villa Esmeralda was quite a long way out, on the edge of the lagoon looking towards Chioggia. It was not a very old house, and pleasant, with the terraces looking seawards, and below, quite a big garden with dark trees, walled in from the lagoon.

Their host was a heavy, rather coarse Scotchman who had made a good fortune in Italy before the war, and had been knighted for his ultrapatriotism during the war. His wife was a thin, pale, sharp kind of person with no fortune of her own, and the misfortune of having to regulate her husband's rather sordid amorous exploits. He was terribly tiresome with the servants. But having had a slight stroke during the winter, he was now more manageable.

The house was pretty full. Besides Sir Malcolm and his two daughters, there were seven more people, a Scotch couple, again with two daughters; a young Italian Contessa, a widow; a young Georgian prince, and a youngish English clergyman who had had pneumonia and was being chaplain to Sir Alexander for his health's sake. The prince was penniless, good-looking, would make an excellent chauffeur, with the necessary impudence, and basta! The Contessa was a quiet little puss with a game on somewhere. The clergyman was a raw simple fellow from a Bucks vicarage: luckily he had left his wife and two children at home. And the Guthries, the family of four, were good solid Edinburgh middle class, enjoying everything in a solid fashion, and daring everything while risking nothing.

Connie and Hilda ruled out the prince at once. The Guthries were more or less their own sort, substantial, but boring: and the girls wanted husbands. The chaplain was not a bad fellow, but too deferential. Sir Alexander, after his slight stroke, had a terrible heaviness in his joviality, but he was still thrilled at the presence of so many handsome young women. Lady Cooper was a quiet, catty person who had a thin time of it, poor thing, and who watched every other woman with a cold watchfulness that had become her second nature, and who said cold, nasty little things which showed what an utterly low opinion she had of all human nature. She was also quite venomously overbearing with the servants, Connie found: but in a quiet way. And she skilfully behaved so that Sir Alexander should think that he was lord and monarch of the whole caboosh, with his stout, would-be-genial paunch, and his utterly boring jokes, his humourosity, as Hilda called it.

Sir Malcolm was painting. Yes, he still would do a Venetian lagoonscape, now and then, in contrast to his Scottish landscapes. So in the morning he was rowed off with a huge canvas, to his 'site'. A little later, Lady Cooper would be rowed off into the heart of the city, with sketching-block and colours. She was an inveterate watercolour painter, and the house was full of rose-coloured palaces, dark canals, swaying bridges, medieval facades, and so on. A little later the Guthries, the prince, the countess, Sir Alexander, and sometimes Mr. Lind, the chaplain, would go off to the Lido, where they would bathe; coming home to a late lunch at half past one.

The house-party, as a house-party, was distinctly boring. But this did not trouble the sisters. They were out all the time. Their father took them to the exhibition, miles and miles of weary paintings. He took them to all the cronies of his in the Villa Lucchese, he sat with them on warm evenings in the piazza, having got a table at Florian's: he took them to the theatre, to the Goldoni plays. There were illuminated water-fêtes, there were dances. This was a holiday-place of all holiday-places. The Lido, with its acres of sun-pinked or pyjamaed bodies, was like a strand with an endless heap of seals coming up for mating. Too many people in the piazza, too many limbs and trunks of humanity on the Lido, too many gondolas, too many motorlaunches, too many steamers, too many pigeons, too many ices, too many cocktails, too many menservants wanting tips, too many languages rattling, too much, too much sun, too much smell of Venice, too many cargoes of strawberries, too many silk shawls, too many huge, raw-beef slices of watermelon on stalls: too much enjoyment, altogether far too much enjoyment!

Connie and Hilda went around in their sunny frocks. There were dozens of people they knew, dozens of people knew them. Michaelis turned up like a bad penny. 'Hullo! Where you staying? Come and have an ice-cream or something! Come with me somewhere in my gondola.' Even Michaelis almost sunburned: though sun-cooked is more appropriate to the look of the mass of human flesh.

It was pleasant in a way. It was almost enjoyment. But anyhow, with all the cocktails, all the lying in warmish water and sunbathing on hot sand in hot sun, jazzing with your stomach up against some fellow in the warm nights, cooling off with ices, it was a complete narcotic. And that was what they all wanted, a drug: the slow water, a drug; the sun, a drug; jazz, a drug; cigarettes, cocktails, ices, vermouth. To be drugged! Enjoyment! Enjoyment!

Hilda half liked being drugged. She liked looking at all the women, speculating about them. The women were absorbingly interested in the women. How does she look! What man has she captured? What fun is she getting out of it? The men were like great dogs in white flannel trousers, waiting to be patted, waiting to wallow, waiting to plaster some woman's stomach against their own, in jazz.

Hilda liked jazz, because she could plaster her stomach against the stomach of some so-called man, and let him control her movement from the visceral centre, here and there across the floor, and then she could break loose and ignore 'the creature'. He had been merely made use of. Poor Connie was rather unhappy. She wouldn't jazz, because she simply couldn't plaster her stomach against some 'creature's' stomach. She hated the conglomerate mass of nearly nude flesh on the Lido: there was hardly enough water to wet them all. She disliked Sir Alexander and Lady Cooper. She did not want Michaelis or anybody else trailing her.

The happiest times were when she got Hilda to go with her away across the lagoon, far across to some lonely shingle-bank, where they could bathe quite alone, the gondola remaining on the inner side of the reef.

Then Giovanni got another gondolier to help him, because it was a long way and he sweated terrifically in the sun. Giovanni was very nice: affectionate, as the Italians are, and quite passionless. The Italians are not passionate: passion has deep reserves. They are easily moved, and often affectionate, but they rarely have any abiding passion of any sort.

So Giovanni was already devoted to his ladies, as he had been devoted to cargoes of ladies in the past. He was perfectly ready to prostitute himself to them, if they wanted him: he secretly hoped they would want him. They would give him a handsome present, and it would come in very handy, as he was just going to be married. He told them about his marriage, and they were suitably interested.

He thought this trip to some lonely bank across the lagoon probably meant business: business being l'amore, love. So he got a mate to help him, for it was a long way; and after all, they were two ladies. Two ladies, two mackerels! Good arithmetic! Beautiful ladies, too! He was justly proud of them. And though it was the Signora who paid him and gave him orders, he rather hoped it would be the young milady who would select him for L'amore. She would give more money too.

The mate he brought was called Daniele. He was not a regular gondolier, so he had none of the cadger and prostitute about him. He was a sandola man, a sandola being a big boat that brings in fruit and produce from the islands.

Daniele was beautiful, tall and well-shapen, with a light round head of little, close, pale-blond curls, and a good-looking man's face, a little like a lion, and long-distance blue eyes. He was not effusive, loquacious, and bibulous like Giovanni. He was silent and he rowed with a strength and ease as if he were alone on the water. The ladies were ladies, remote from him. He did not even look at them. He looked ahead.

He was a real man, a little angry when Giovanni drank too much wine and rowed awkwardly, with effusive shoves of the great oar. He was a man as Mellors was a man, unprostituted. Connie pitied the wife of the easily-overflowing Giovanni. But Daniele's wife would be one of those sweet Venetian women of the people whom one still sees, modest and flower-like in the back of that labyrinth of a town.

Ah, how sad that man first prostitutes woman, then woman prostitutes man. Giovanni was pining to prostitute himself, dribbling like a dog, wanting to give himself to a woman. And for money!

Connie looked at Venice far off, low and rose-coloured upon the water. Built of money, blossomed of money, and dead with money. The money-deadness! Money, money, money, prostitution and deadness.

Yet Daniele was still a man capable of a man's free allegiance. He did not wear the gondolier's blouse: only the knitted blue jersey. He was a little wild, uncouth and proud. So he was hireling to the rather doggy Giovanni who was hireling again to two women. So it is! When Jesus refused the devil's money, he left the devil like a banker, master of the whole situation.

Connie would come home from the blazing light of the lagoon in a kind of stupor, to find letters from home. Clifford wrote regularly. He wrote very good letters: they might all have been printed in a book. And for this reason Connie found them not very interesting.

She lived in the stupor of the light of the lagoon, the lapping saltiness of the water, the space, the emptiness, the nothingness: but health, health, complete stupor of health. It was gratifying, and she was lulled away in it, not caring for anything. Besides, she was pregnant. She knew now. So the stupor of sunlight and lagoon salt and sea-bathing and lying on shingle and finding shells and drifting away, away in a gondola, was completed by the pregnancy inside her, another fulness of health, satisfying and stupefying.

She had been at Venice a fortnight, and she was to stay another ten days or a fortnight. The sunshine blazed over any count of time, and the fulness of physical health made forgetfulness complete. She was in a sort of stupor of well-being.

From which a letter of Clifford roused her.

'We too have had our mild local excitement. It appears the truant wife of Mellors, the keeper, turned up at the cottage and found herself unwelcome. He packed her off, and locked the door. Report has it, however, that when he returned from the wood he found the no longer fair lady firmly established in his bed, in puris naturalibu; or one should say, in impuris naturalibus. She had broken a window and got in that way. Unable to evict the somewhat manhandled Venus from his couch, he beat a retreat and retired, it is said, to his mother's house in Tevershall. Meanwhile the Venus of Stacks Gate is established in the cottage, which she claims is her home, and Apollo, apparently, is domiciled in Tevershall.

'I repeat this from hearsay, as Mellors has not come to me personally. I had this particular bit of local garbage from our garbage bird, our ibis, our scavenging turkey-buzzard, Mrs. Bolton. I would not have repeated it had she not exclaimed: her ladyship will go no more to the wood if that woman's going to be about!

'I like your picture of Sir Malcolm striding into the sea with white hair blowing and pink flesh glowing. I envy you that sun. Here it rains. But I don't envy Sir Malcolm his inveterate mortal carnality. However, it suits his age. Apparently one grows more carnal and more mortal as one grows older. Only youth has a taste of immortality—'

This news affected Connie in her state of semi-stupefied well-being with vexation amounting to exasperation. Now she had got to be bothered by that beast of a woman! Now she must start and fret! She had no letter from Mellors. They had a greed not to write at all, but now she wanted to hear from him personally. After all, he was the father of the child that was coming. Let him write!

But how hateful! Now everything was messed up. How foul those low people were! How nice it was here, in the sunshine and the indolence, compared to that dismal mess of that English Midlands! After all, a clear sky was almost the most important thing in life.

She did not mention the fact of her pregnancy, even to Hilda. She wrote to Mrs. Bolton for exact information.

Duncan Forbes, an artist friend of theirs, had arrived at the Villa Esmeralda, coming north from Rome. Now he made a third in the gondola, and he bathed with them across the lagoon, and was their escort: a quiet, almost taciturn young man, very advanced in his art.

She had a letter from Mrs. Bolton:

'You will be pleased, I am sure, my Lady, when you see Sir Clifford. He's looking quite blooming and working very hard, and very hopeful. Of course he is looking forward to seeing you among us again. It is a dull house without my Lady, and we shall all welcome her presence among us once more.

'About Mr. Mellors, I don't know how much Sir Clifford told you. It seems his wife came back all of a sudden one afternoon, and he found her sitting on the doorstep when he came in from the wood. She said she was coming back to him and wanted to live with him again, as she was his legal wife, and he wasn't going to divorce her. But he wouldn't have anything to do with her, and wouldn't let her in the house, and did not go in himself; he went back into the wood without ever opening the door.

'But when he came back after dark, he found the house broken into, so he went upstairs to see what she'd done, and he found her in bed without a rag on her. He offered her money, but she said she was his wife and he must take her back. I don't know what sort of a scene they had. His mother told me about it, she's terribly upset. Well, he told her he'd die rather than ever live with her again, so he took his things and went straight to his mother's on Tevershall hill. He stopped the night and went to the wood next day through the park, never going near the cottage. It seems he never saw his wife that day. But the day after she was at her brother Dan's at Beggarlee, swearing and carrying on, saying she was his legal wife, and that he'd been having women at the cottage, because she'd found a scent-bottle in his drawer, and gold-tipped cigarette-ends on the ash-heap, and I don't know what all. Then it seems the postman Fred Kirk says he heard somebody talking in Mr. Mellors' bedroom early one morning, and a motorcar had been in the lane.

'Mr. Mellors stayed on with his mother, and went to the wood through the park, and it seems she stayed on at the cottage. Well, there was no end of talk. So at last Mr. Mellors and Tom Phillips went to the cottage and fetched away most of the furniture and bedding, and unscrewed the handle of the pump, so she was forced to go. But instead of going back to Stacks Gate she went and lodged with that Mrs. Swain at Beggarlee, because her brother Dan's wife wouldn't have her. And she kept going to old Mrs. Mellors' house, to catch him, and she began swearing he'd got in bed with her in the cottage and she went to a lawyer to make him pay her an allowance. She's grown heavy, and more common than ever, and as strong as a bull. And she goes about saying the most awful things about him, how he has women at the cottage, and how he behaved to her when they were married, the low, beastly things he did to her, and I don't know what all. I'm sure it's awful, the mischief a woman can do, once she starts talking. And no matter how low she may be, there'll be some as will believe her, and some of the dirt will stick. I'm sure the way she makes out that Mr. Mellors was one of those low, beastly men with women, is simply shocking. And people are only too ready to believe things against anybody, especially things like that. She declares she'll never leave him alone while he lives. Though what I say is, if he was so beastly to her, why is she so anxious to go back to him? But of course she's coming near her change of life, for she's years older than he is. And these common, violent women always go partly insane when the change of life comes upon them—'

This was a nasty blow to Connie. Here she was, sure as life, coming in for her share of the lowness and dirt. She felt angry with him for not having got clear of a Bertha Coutts: nay, for ever having married her. Perhaps he had a certain hankering after lowness. Connie remembered the last night she had spent with him, and shivered. He had known all that sensuality, even with a Bertha Coutts! It was really rather disgusting. It would be well to be rid of him, clear of him altogether. He was perhaps really common, really low.

She had a revulsion against the whole affair, and almost envied the Guthrie girls their gawky inexperience and crude maidenliness. And she now dreaded the thought that anybody would know about herself and the keeper. How unspeakably humiliating! She was weary, afraid, and felt a craving for utter respectability, even for the vulgar and deadening respectability of the Guthrie girls. If Clifford knew about her affair, how unspeakably humiliating! She was afraid, terrified of society and its unclean bite. She almost wished she could get rid of the child again, and be quite clear. In short, she fell into a state of funk.

As for the scent-bottle, that was her own folly. She had not been able to refrain from perfuming his one or two handkerchiefs and his shirts in the drawer, just out of childishness, and she had left a little bottle of Coty's Wood-Violet perfume, half empty, among his things. She wanted him to remember her in the perfume. As for the cigarette-ends, they were Hilda's.

She could not help confiding a little in Duncan Forbes. She didn't say she had been the keeper's lover, she only said she liked him, and told Forbes the history of the man.

'Oh,' said Forbes, 'you'll see, they'll never rest till they've pulled the man down and done him in. If he has refused to creep up into the middle classes, when he had a chance; and if he's a man who stands up for his own sex, then they'll do him in. It's the one thing they won't let you be, straight and open in your sex. You can be as dirty as you like. In fact the more dirt you do on sex the better they like it. But if you believe in your own sex, and won't have it done dirt to: they'll down you. It's the one insane taboo left: sex as a natural and vital thing. They won't have it, and they'll kill you before they'll let you have it. You'll see, they'll hound that man down. And what's he done, after all? If he's made love to his wife all ends on, hasn't he a right to? She ought to be proud of it. But you see, even a low bitch like that turns on him, and uses the hyena instinct of the mob against sex, to pull him down. You have to snivel and feel sinful or awful about your sex, before you're allowed to have any. Oh, they'll hound the poor devil down.'

Connie had a revulsion in the opposite direction now. What had he done, after all? What had he done to herself, Connie, but give her an exquisite pleasure and a sense of freedom and life? He had released her warm, natural sexual flow. And for that they would hound him down.

No, no, it should not be. She saw the image of him, naked white with tanned face and hands, looking down and addressing his erect penis as if it were another being, the odd grin flickering on his face. And she heard his voice again: Tha's got the nicest woman's arse of anybody! And she felt his hand warmly and softly closing over her tail again, over her secret places, like a benediction. And the warmth ran through her womb, and the little flames flickered in her knees, and she said: Oh, no! I mustn't go back on it! I must not go back on him. I must stick to him and to what I had of him, through everything. I had no warm, flamy life till he gave it me. And I won't go back on it.

She did a rash thing. She sent a letter to Ivy Bolton, enclosing a note to the keeper, and asking Mrs. Bolton to give it him. And she wrote to him:

'I am very much distressed to hear of all the trouble your wife is making for you, but don't mind it, it is only a sort of hysteria. It will all blow over as suddenly as it came. But I'm awfully sorry about it, and I do hope you are not minding very much. After all, it isn't worth it. She is only a hysterical woman who wants to hurt you. I shall be home in ten days' time, and I do hope everything will be all right.'

A few days later came a letter from Clifford. He was evidently upset.

'I am delighted to hear you are prepared to leave Venice on the sixteenth. But if you are enjoying it, don't hurry home. We miss you, Wragby misses you. But it is essential that you should get your full amount of sunshine, sunshine and pyjamas, as the advertisements of the Lido say. So please do stay on a little longer, if it is cheering you up and preparing you for our sufficiently awful winter. Even today, it rains.

'I am assiduously, admirably looked after by Mrs. Bolton. She is a queer specimen. The more I live, the more I realize what strange creatures human beings are. Some of them might just as well have a hundred legs, like a centipede, or six, like a lobster. The human consistency and dignity one has been led to expect from one's fellow men seem actually nonexistent. One doubts if they exist to any startling degree even in oneself.

'The scandal of the keeper continues and gets bigger like a snowball. Mrs. Bolton keeps me informed. She reminds me of a fish which, though dumb, seems to be breathing silent gossip through its gills, while ever it lives. All goes through the sieve of her gills, and nothing surprises her. It is as if the events of other people's lives were the necessary oxygen of her own.

'She is preoccupied with the Mellors scandal, and if I will let her begin, she takes me down to the depths. Her great indignation, which even then is like the indignation of an actress playing a role, is against the wife of Mellors, whom she persists in calling Bertha Coutts. I have been to the depths of the muddy lives of the Bertha Couttses of this world, and when, released from the current of gossip, I slowly rise to the surface again, I look at the daylight in wonder that it ever should be.

'It seems to me absolutely true, that our world, which appears to us the surface of all things, is really the bottom of a deep ocean: all our trees are submarine growths, and we are weird, scaly-clad submarine fauna, feeding ourselves on offal like shrimps. Only occasionally the soul rises gasping through the fathomless fathoms under which we live, far up to the surface of the ether, where there is true air. I am convinced that the air we normally breathe is a kind of water, and men and women are a species of fish.

'But sometimes the soul does come up, shoots like a kittiwake into the light, with ecstasy, after having preyed on the submarine depths. It is our mortal destiny, I suppose, to prey upon the ghastly subaqueous life of our fellow men, in the submarine jungle of mankind. But our immortal destiny is to escape, once we have swallowed our swimmy catch, up again into the bright ether, bursting out from the surface of Old Ocean into real light. Then one realizes one's eternal nature.

'When I hear Mrs. Bolton talk, I feel myself plunging down, down, to the depths where the fish of human secrets wriggle and swim. Carnal appetite makes one seize a beakful of prey: then up, up again, out of the dense into the ethereal, from the wet into the dry. To you I can tell the whole process. But with Mrs. Bolton I only feel the downward plunge, down, horribly, among the seaweeds and the pallid monsters of the very bottom.

'I am afraid we are going to lose our game-keeper. The scandal of the truant wife, instead of dying down, has reverberated to greater and greater dimensions. He is accused of all unspeakable things and curiously enough, the woman has managed to get the bulk of the colliers' wives behind her, gruesome fish, and the village is putrescent with talk.

'I hear this Bertha Coutts besieges Mellors in his mother's house, having ransacked the cottage and the hut. She seized one day upon her own daughter, as that chip of the female block was returning from school; but the little one, instead of kissing the loving mother's hand, bit it firmly, and so received from the other hand a smack in the face which sent her reeling into the gutter: whence she was rescued by an indignant and harassed grandmother.

'The woman has blown off an amazing quantity of poison-gas. She has aired in detail all those incidents of her conjugal life which are usually buried down in the deepest grave of matrimonial silence, between married couples. Having chosen to exhume them, after ten years of burial, she has a weird array. I hear these details from Linley and the doctor: the latter being amused. Of course there is really nothing in it. Humanity has always had a strange avidity for unusual sexual postures, and if a man likes to use his wife, as Benvenuto Cellini says, 'in the Italian way', well that is a matter of taste. But I had hardly expected our game-keeper to be up to so many tricks. No doubt Bertha Coutts herself first put him up to them. In any case, it is a matter of their own personal squalor, and nothing to do with anybody else.

'However, everybody listens: as I do myself. A dozen years ago, common decency would have hushed the thing. But common decency no longer exists, and the colliers' wives are all up in arms and unabashed in voice. One would think every child in Tevershall, for the last fifty years, had been an immaculate conception, and every one of our nonconformist females was a shining Joan of Arc. That our estimable game-keeper should have about him a touch of Rabelais seems to make him more monstrous and shocking than a murderer like Crippen. Yet these people in Tevershall are a loose lot, if one is to believe all accounts.

'The trouble is, however, the execrable Bertha Coutts has not confined herself to her own experiences and sufferings. She has discovered, at the top of her voice, that her husband has been "keeping" women down at the cottage, and has made a few random shots at naming the women. This has brought a few decent names trailing through the mud, and the thing has gone quite considerably too far. An injunction has been taken out against the woman.

'I have had to interview Mellors about the business, as it was impossible to keep the woman away from the wood. He goes about as usual, with his Miller-of-the-Dee air, I care for nobody, no not I, if nobody cares for me! Nevertheless, I shrewdly suspect he feels like a dog with a tin can tied to its tail: though he makes a very good show of pretending the tin can isn't there. But I heard that in the village the women call away their children if he is passing, as if he were the Marquis de Sade in person. He goes on with a certain impudence, but I am afraid the tin can is firmly tied to his tail, and that inwardly he repeats, like Don Rodrigo in the Spanish ballad: "Ah, now it bites me where I most have sinned!"

'I asked him if he thought he would be able to attend to his duty in the wood, and he said he did not think he had neglected it. I told him it was a nuisance to have the woman trespassing: to which he replied that he had no power to arrest her. Then I hinted at the scandal and its unpleasant course. "Ay," he said. "Folks should do their own fuckin', then they wouldn't want to listen to a lot of clatfart about another man's."

'He said it with some bitterness, and no doubt it contains the real germ of truth. The mode of putting it, however, is neither delicate nor respectful. I hinted as much, and then I heard the tin can rattle again. "It's not for a man in the shape you're in, Sir Clifford, to twit me for havin' a cod atween my legs."

'These things, said indiscriminately to all and sundry, of course do not help him at all, and the rector, and Linley, and Burroughs all think it would be as well if the man left the place.

'I asked him if it was true that he entertained ladies down at the cottage, and all he said was: "Why, what's that to you, Sir Clifford?" I told him I intended to have decency observed on my estate, to which he replied: "Then you mun button the mouths o' a' th' women." When I pressed him about his manner of life at the cottage, he said: "Surely you might ma'e a scandal out o' me an' my bitch Flossie. You've missed summat there." As a matter of fact, for an example of impertinence he'd be hard to beat.

'I asked him if it would be easy for him to find another job. He said: "If you're hintin' that you'd like to shunt me out of this job, it'd be easy as wink." So he made no trouble at all about leaving at the end of next week, and apparently is willing to initiate a young fellow, Joe Chambers, into as many mysteries of the craft as possible. I told him I would give him a month's wages extra, when he left. He said he'd rather I kept my money, as I'd no occasion to ease my conscience. I asked him what he meant, and he said: "You don't owe me nothing extra, Sir Clifford, so don't pay me nothing extra. If you think you see my shirt hanging out, just tell me."

'Well, there is the end of it for the time being. The woman has gone away: we don't know where to: but she is liable to arrest if she shows her face in Tevershall. And I heard she is mortally afraid of gaol, because she merits it so well. Mellors will depart on Saturday week, and the place will soon become normal again.

'Meanwhile, my dear Connie, if you would enjoy to stay in Venice or in Switzerland till the beginning of August, I should be glad to think you were out of all this buzz of nastiness, which will have died quite away by the end of the month. 'So you see, we are deep-sea monsters, and when the lobster walks on mud, he stirs it up for everybody. We must perforce take it philosophically.'

The irritation, and the lack of any sympathy in any direction, of Clifford's letter, had a bad effect on Connie. But she understood it better when she received the following from Mellors:

'The cat is out of the bag, along with various other pussies. You have heard that my wife Bertha came back to my unloving arms, and took up her abode in the cottage: where, to speak disrespectfully, she smelled a rat, in the shape of a little bottle of Coty. Other evidence she did not find, at least for some days, when she began to howl about the burnt photograph. She noticed the glass and the backboard in the spare bedroom. Unfortunately, on the backboard somebody had scribbled little sketches, and the initials, several times repeated: C. S. R. This, however, afforded no clue until she broke into the hut, and found one of your books, an autobiography of the actress Judith, with your name, Constance Stewart Reid, on the front page. After this, for some days she went round loudly saying that my paramour was no less a person than Lady Chatterley herself. The news came at last to the rector, Mr. Burroughs, and to Sir Clifford. They then proceeded to take legal steps against my liege lady, who for her part disappeared, having always had a mortal fear of the police.

'Sir Clifford asked to see me, so I went to him. He talked around things and seemed annoyed with me. Then he asked if I knew that even her ladyship's name had been mentioned. I said I never listened to scandal, and was surprised to hear this bit from Sir Clifford himself. He said, of course it was a great insult, and I told him there was Queen Mary on a calendar in the scullery, no doubt because Her Majesty formed part of my harem. But he didn't appreciate the sarcasm. He as good as told me I was a disreputable character also walked about with my breeches' buttons undone, and I as good as told him he'd nothing to unbutton anyhow, so he gave me the sack, and I leave on Saturday week, and the place thereof shall know me no more.

'I shall go to London, and my old landlady, Mrs. Inger, 17 Coburg Square, will either give me a room or will find one for me.

'Be sure your sins will find you out, especially if you're married and her name's Bertha—'

There was not a word about herself, or to her. Connie resented this. He might have said some few words of consolation or reassurance. But she knew he was leaving her free, free to go back to Wragby and to Clifford. She resented that too. He need not be so falsely chivalrous. She wished he had said to Clifford: 'Yes, she is my lover and my mistress and I am proud of it!' But his courage wouldn't carry him so far.

So her name was coupled with his in Tevershall! It was a mess. But that would soon die down.

She was angry, with the complicated and confused anger that made her inert. She did not know what to do nor what to say, so she said and did nothing. She went on at Venice just the same, rowing out in the gondola with Duncan Forbes, bathing, letting the days slip by. Duncan, who had been rather depressingly in love with her ten years ago, was in love with her again. But she said to him: 'I only want one thing of men, and that is, that they should leave me alone.'

So Duncan left her alone: really quite pleased to be able to. All the same, he offered her a soft stream of a queer, inverted sort of love. He wanted to be with her.

'Have you ever thought,' he said to her one day, 'how very little people are connected with one another. Look at Daniele! He is handsome as a son of the sun. But see how alone he looks in his handsomeness. Yet I bet he has a wife and family, and couldn't possibly go away from them.'

'Ask him,' said Connie.

Duncan did so. Daniele said he was married, and had two children, both male, aged seven and nine. But he betrayed no emotion over the fact.

'Perhaps only people who are capable of real togetherness have that look of being alone in the universe,' said Connie. 'The others have a certain stickiness, they stick to the mass, like Giovanni.' 'And,' she thought to herself, 'like you, Duncan.'

Chapter ⓲

She had to make up her mind what to do. She would leave Venice on the Saturday that he was leaving Wragby: in six days' time. This would bring her to London on the Monday following, and she would then see him. She wrote to him to the London address, asking him to send her a letter to Hartland's hotel, and to call for her on the Monday evening at seven.

Inside herself, she was curiously and complicatedly angry, and all her responses were numb. She refused to confide even in Hilda, and Hilda, offended by her steady silence, had become rather intimate with a Dutch woman. Connie hated these rather stifling intimacies between women, intimacy into which Hilda always entered ponderously.

Sir Malcolm decided to travel with Connie, and Duncan could come on with Hilda. The old artist always did himself well: he took berths on the Orient Express, in spite of Connie's dislike of trains de luxe, the atmosphere of vulgar depravity there is aboard them nowadays. However, it would make the journey to Paris shorter.

Sir Malcolm was always uneasy going back to his wife. It was habit carried over from the first wife. But there would be a house-party for the grouse, and he wanted to be well ahead. Connie, sunburnt and handsome, sat in silence, forgetting all about the landscape.

'A little dull for you, going back to Wragby,' said her father, noticing her glumness.

'I'm not sure I shall go back to Wragby,' she said, with startling abruptness, looking into his eyes with her big blue eyes. His big blue eyes took on the frightened look of a man whose social conscience is not quite clear.

'You mean you'll stay on in Paris a while?'

'No! I mean never go back to Wragby.'

He was bothered by his own little problems, and sincerely hoped he was getting none of hers to shoulder.

'How's that, all at once?' he asked.

'I'm going to have a child.'

It was the first time she had uttered the words to any living soul, and it seemed to mark a cleavage in her life.

'How do you know?' said her father.

She smiled.

'How should I know?'

'But not Clifford's child, of course?'

'No! Another man's.'

She rather enjoyed tormenting him.

'Do I know the man?' asked Sir Malcolm.

'No! You've never seen him.'

There was a long pause.

'And what are your plans?'

'I don't know. That's the point.'

'No patching it up with Clifford?'

'I suppose Clifford would take it,' said Connie. 'He told me, after last time you talked to him, he wouldn't mind if I had a child, so long as I went about it discreetly.'

'Only sensible thing he could say, under the circumstances. Then I suppose it'll be all right.'

'In what way?' said Connie, looking into her father's eyes. They were big blue eyes rather like her own, but with a certain uneasiness in them, a look sometimes of an uneasy little boy, sometimes a look of sullen selfishness, usually good-humoured and wary.

'You can present Clifford with an heir to all the Chatterleys, and put another baronet in Wragby.'

Sir Malcolm's face smiled with a half-sensual smile.

'But I don't think I want to,' she said.

'Why not? Feeling entangled with the other man? Well! If you want the truth from me, my child, it's this. The world goes on. Wragby stands and will go on standing. The world is more or less a fixed thing and, externally, we have to adapt ourselves to it. Privately, in my private opinion, we can please ourselves. Emotions change. You may like one man this year and another next. But Wragby still stands. Stick by Wragby as far as Wragby sticks by you. Then please yourself. But you'll get very little out of making a break. You can make a break if you wish. You have an independent income, the only thing that never lets you down. But you won't get much out of it. Put a little baronet in Wragby. It's an amusing thing to do.'

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.'

She looked at him.

'Then why are you afraid of me?' she said.

He looked at her a long time before he answered.

'It's the money, really, and the position. It's the world in you.'

'But isn't there tenderness in me?' she said wistfully.

He looked down at her, with darkened, abstract eyes.

'Ay! It comes an' goes, like in me.'

'But can't you trust it between you and me?' she asked, gazing anxiously at him.

She saw his face all softening down, losing its armour.

'Maybe!' he said.

They were both silent.

'I want you to hold me in your arms,' she said. 'I want you to tell me you are glad we are having a child.'

She looked so lovely and warm and wistful, his bowels stirred towards her.

'I suppose we can go to my room,' he said. 'Though it's scandalous again.'

But she saw the forgetfulness of the world coming over him again, his face taking the soft, pure look of tender passion.

They walked by the remoter streets to Coburg Square, where he had a room at the top of the house, an attic room where he cooked for himself on a gas ring. It was small, but decent and tidy.

She took off her things, and made him do the same. She was lovely in the soft first flush of her pregnancy.

'I ought to leave you alone,' he said.

'No!' she said. 'Love me! Love me, and say you'll keep me. Say you'll keep me! Say you'll never let me go, to the world nor to anybody.'

She crept close against him, clinging fast to his thin, strong naked body, the only home she had ever known.

'Then I'll keep thee,' he said. 'If tha wants it, then I'll keep thee.'

He held her round and fast.

'And say you're glad about the child,' she repeated. 'Kiss it! Kiss my womb and say you're glad it's there.'

But that was more difficult for him.

'I've a dread of puttin' children i' th' world,' he said. 'I've such a dread o' th' future for 'em.'

'But you've put it into me. Be tender to it, and that will be its future already. Kiss it!'

He quivered, because it was true. 'Be tender to it, and that will be its future.'—At that moment he felt a sheer love for the woman. He kissed her belly and her mound of Venus, to kiss close to the womb and the foetus within the womb.

'Oh, you love me! You love me!' she said, in a little cry like one of her blind, inarticulate love cries. And he went in to her softly, feeling the stream of tenderness flowing in release from his bowels to hers, the bowels of compassion kindled between them.

And he realised as he went into her that this was the thing he had to do, to come into tender touch, without losing his pride or his dignity or his integrity as a man. After all, if she had money and means, and he had none, he should be too proud and honourable to hold back his tenderness from her on that account. 'I stand for the touch of bodily awareness between human beings,' he said to himself, 'and the touch of tenderness. And she is my mate. And it is a battle against the money, and the machine, and the insentient ideal monkeyishness of the world. And she will stand behind me there. Thank God I've got a woman! Thank God I've got a woman who is with me, and tender and aware of me. Thank God she's not a bully, nor a fool. Thank God she's a tender, aware woman.' And as his seed sprang in her, his soul sprang towards her too, in the creative act that is far more than procreative.

She was quite determined now that there should be no parting between him and her. But the ways and means were still to settle.

'Did you hate Bertha Coutts?' she asked him.

'Don't talk to me about her.'

'Yes! You must let me. Because once you liked her. And once you were as intimate with her as you are with me. So you have to tell me. Isn't it rather terrible, when you've been intimate with her, to hate her so? Why is it?'

'I don't know. She sort of kept her will ready against me, always, always: her ghastly female will: her freedom! A woman's ghastly freedom that ends in the most beastly bullying! Oh, she always kept her freedom against me, like vitriol in my face.'

'But she's not free of you even now. Does she still love you?'

'No, no! If she's not free of me, it's because she's got that mad rage, she must try to bully me.'

'But she must have loved you.'

'No! Well, in specks she did. She was drawn to me. And I think even that she hated. She loved me in moments. But she always took it back, and started bullying. Her deepest desire was to bully me, and there was no altering her. Her will was wrong, from the first.'

'But perhaps she felt you didn't really love her, and she wanted to make you.'

'My God, it was bloody making.'

'But you didn't really love her, did you? You did her that wrong.'

'How could I? I began to. I began to love her. But somehow, she always ripped me up. No, don't let's talk of it. It was a doom, that was. And she was a doomed woman. This last time, I'd have shot her like I shoot a stoat, if I'd but been allowed: a raving, doomed thing in the shape of a woman! If only I could have shot her, and ended the whole misery! It ought to be allowed. When a woman gets absolutely possessed by her own will, her own will set against everything, then it's fearful, and she should be shot at last.'

'And shouldn't men be shot at last, if they get possessed by their own will?'

'Ay!—The same! But I must get free of her, or she'll be at me again. I wanted to tell you. I must get a divorce if I possibly can. So we must be careful. We mustn't really be seen together, you and I. I never, never could stand it if she carne down on me and you.'

Connie pondered this.

'Then we can't be together?' she said.

'Not for six months or so. But I think my divorce will go through in September; then till March.'

'But the baby will probably be born at the end of February,' she said. He was silent.

'I could wish the Cliffords and Berthas all dead,' he said.

'It's not being very tender to them,' she said.

'Tender to them? Yea, even then the tenderest thing you could do for them, perhaps, would be to give them death. They can't live! They only frustrate life. Their souls are awful inside them. Death ought to be sweet to them. And I ought to be allowed to shoot them.'

'But you wouldn't do it,' she said.

'I would though! And with less qualms than I shoot a weasel. It anyhow has a prettiness and a loneliness. But they are legion. Oh, I'd shoot them.'

'Then perhaps it is just as well you daren't.'

'Well.'

Connie had now plenty to think of. It was evident he wanted absolutely to be free of Bertha Coutts. And she felt he was right. The last attack had been too grim. —This meant her living alone, till spring. Perhaps she could get divorced from Clifford. But how? If Mellors were named, then there was an end to his divorce. How loathsome! Couldn't one go right away, to the far ends of the earth, and be free from it all?

One could not. The far ends of the world are not five minutes from Charing Cross, nowadays. While the wireless is active, there are no far ends of the earth. Kings of Dahomey and Lamas of Tibet listen in to London and New York.

Patience! Patience! The world is a vast and ghastly intricacy of mechanism, and one has to be very wary, not to get mangled by it.

Connie confided in her father.

'You see, Father, he was Clifford's game-keeper: but he was an officer in the army in India. Only he is like Colonel C. E. Florence, who preferred to become a private soldier again.'

Sir Malcolm, however, had no sympathy with the unsatisfactory mysticism of the famous C. E. Florence. He saw too much advertisement behind all the humility. It looked just like the sort of conceit the knight most loathed, the conceit of self-abasement.

'Where did your game-keeper spring from?' asked Sir Malcolm irritably.

'He was a collier's son in Tevershall. But he's absolutely presentable.'

The knighted artist became more angry.

'Looks to me like a gold-digger,' he said. 'And you're a pretty easy gold-mine, apparently.'

'No, Father, it's not like that. You'd know if you saw him. He's a man. Clifford always detested him for not being humble.'

'Apparently he had a good instinct, for once.'

What Sir Malcolm could not bear was the scandal of his daughter's having an intrigue with a game-keeper. He did not mind the intrigue: he minded the scandal.

'I care nothing about the fellow. He's evidently been able to get round you all right. But, by God, think of all the talk. Think of your step-mother, how she'll take it!'

'I know,' said Connie. 'Talk is beastly: especially if you live in society. And he wants so much to get his own divorce. I thought we might perhaps say it was another man's child, and not mention Mellors' name at all.'

'Another man's! What other man's?'

'Perhaps Duncan Forbes. He has been our friend all his life. And he's a fairly well-known artist. And he's fond of me.'

'Well I'm damned! Poor Duncan! And what's he going to get out of it?'

'I don't know. But he might rather like it, even.'

'He might, might he? Well, he's a funny man if he does. Why, you've never even had an affair with him, have you?'

'No! But he doesn't really want it. He only loves me to be near him, but not to touch him.'

'My God, what a generation!'

'He would like me most of all to be a model for him to paint from. Only I never wanted to.'

'God help him! But he looks down-trodden enough for anything.'

'Still, you wouldn't mind so much the talk about him?'

'My God, Connie, all the bloody contriving!'

'I know! It's sickening! But what can I do?'

'Contriving, conniving; conniving, contriving! Makes a man think he's lived too long.'

'Come, Father, if you haven't done a good deal of contriving and conniving in your time, you may talk.'

'But it was different, I assure you.'

'It's always different.'

Hilda arrived, also furious when she heard of the new developments. And she also simply could not stand the thought of a public scandal about her sister and a game-keeper. Too, too humiliating!

'Why should we not just disappear, separately, to British Columbia, and have no scandal?' said Connie.

But that was no good. The scandal would come out just the same. And if Connie was going with the man, she'd better be able to marry him. This was Hilda's opinion. Sir Malcolm wasn't sure. The affair might still blow over.

'But will you see him, Father?'

Poor Sir Malcolm! He was by no means keen on it. And poor Mellors, he was still less keen. Yet the meeting took place: a lunch in a private room at the club, the two men alone, looking one another up and down.

Sir Malcolm drank a fair amount of whisky, Mellors also drank. And they talked all the while about India, on which the young man was well informed.

This lasted during the meal. Only when coffee was served, and the waiter had gone, Sir Malcolm lit a cigar and said, heartily:

'Well, young man, and what about my daughter?'

The grin flickered on Mellors' face.

'Well, Sir, and what about her?'

'You've got a baby in her all right.'

'I have that honour!' grinned Mellors.

'Honour, by God!' Sir Malcolm gave a little squirting laugh, and became Scotch and lewd. 'Honour! How was the going, eh? Good, my boy, what?'

'Good!'

'I'll bet it was! Ha-ha! My daughter, chip of the old block, what! I never went back on a good bit of fucking, myself. Though her mother, oh, holy saints!' He rolled his eyes to heaven. 'But you warmed her up, oh, you warmed her up, I can see that. Ha-ha! My blood in her! You set fire to her haystack all right. Ha-ha-ha! I was jolly glad of it, I can tell you. She needed it. Oh, she's a nice girl, she's a nice girl, and I knew she'd be good going, if only some damned man would set her stack on fire! Ha-ha-ha! A game-keeper, eh, my boy! Bloody good poacher, if you ask me. Ha-ha! But now, look here, speaking seriously, what are we going to do about it? Speaking seriously, you know!'

Speaking seriously, they didn't get very far. Mellors, though a little tipsy, was much the soberer of the two. He kept the conversation as intelligent as possible: which isn't saying much.

'So you're a game-keeper! Oh, you're quite right! That sort of game is worth a man's while, eh, what? The test of a woman is when you pinch her bottom. You can tell just by the feel of her bottom if she's going to come up all right. Ha-ha! I envy you, my boy. How old are you?'

'Thirty-nine.'

The knight lifted his eyebrows.

'As much as that! Well, you've another good twenty years, by the look of you. Oh, game-keeper or not, you're a good cock. I can see that with one eye shut. Not like that blasted Clifford! A lily-livered hound with never a fuck in him, never had. I like you, my boy, I'll bet you've a good cod on you; oh, you're a bantam, I can see that. You're a fighter. Game-keeper! Ha-ha, by crikey, I wouldn't trust my game to you! But look here, seriously, what are we going to do about it? The world's full of blasted old women.'

Seriously, they didn't do anything about it, except establish the old freemasonry of male sensuality between them.

'And look here, my boy, if ever I can do anything for you, you can rely on me. Game-keeper! Christ, but it's rich! I like it! Oh, I like it! Shows the girl's got spunk. What? After all, you know, she has her own income, moderate, moderate, but above starvation. And I'll leave her what I've got. By God, I will. She deserves it for showing spunk, in a world of old women. I've been struggling to get myself clear of the skirts of old women for seventy years, and haven't managed it yet. But you're the man, I can see that.'

'I'm glad you think so. They usually tell me, in a sideways fashion, that I'm the monkey.'

'Oh, they would! My dear fellow, what could you be but a monkey, to all the old women?'

They parted most genially, and Mellors laughed inwardly all the time for the rest of the day.

The following day he had lunch with Connie and Hilda, at some discreet place.

'It's a very great pity it's such an ugly situation all round,' said Hilda.

'I had a lot o' fun out of it,' said he.

'I think you might have avoided putting children into the world until you were both free to marry and have children.'

'The Lord blew a bit too soon on the spark,' said he.

'I think the Lord had nothing to do with it. Of course, Connie has enough money to keep you both, but the situation is unbearable.'

'But then you don't have to bear more than a small corner of it, do you?' said he.

'If you'd been in her own class.'

'Or if I'd been in a cage at the Zoo.'

There was silence.

'I think,' said Hilda, 'it will be best if she names quite another man as corespondent, and you stay out of it altogether.'

'But I thought I'd put my foot right in.'

'I mean in the divorce proceedings.'

He gazed at her in wonder. Connie had not dared mention the Duncan scheme to him.

'I don't follow,' he said.

'We have a friend who would probably agree to be named as co-respondent, so that your name need not appear,' said Hilda.

'You mean a man?,

'Of course!'

'But she's got no other?'

He looked in wonder at Connie.

'No, no!' she said hastily. 'Only that old friendship, quite simple, no love.'

'Then why should the fellow take the blame, if he's had nothing out of you?'

'Some men are chivalrous and don't only count what they get out of a woman,' said Hilda.

'One for me, eh? But who's the johnny?'

'A friend whom we've known since we were children in Scotland, an artist.'

'Duncan Forbes!' he said at once, for Connie had talked of him. 'And how would you shift the blame on to him?'

'They could stay together in some hotel, or she could even stay in his apartment.'

'Seems to me like a lot of fuss for nothing,' he said.

'What else do you suggest?' said Hilda. 'If your name appears, you will get no divorce from your wife, who is apparently quite an impossible person to be mixed up with.'

'All that!' he said grimly.

There was a long silence.

'We could go right away,' he said.

'There is no right away for Connie,' said Hilda. 'Clifford is too well known.'

Again the silence of pure frustration.

'The world is what it is. If you want to live together without being persecuted, you will have to marry. To marry, you both have to be divorced. So how are you both going about it?'

He was silent for a long time.

'How are you going about it for us?' he said.

'We will see if Duncan will consent to figure as co-respondent: then we must get Clifford to divorce Connie: and you must go on with your divorce, and you must both keep apart till you are free.'

'Sounds like a lunatic asylum.'

'Possibly! And the world would look on you as lunatics: or worse.'

'What is worse?'

'Criminals, I suppose.'

'Hope I can plunge in the dagger a few more times yet,' he said, grinning. Then he was silent, and angry.

'Well!' he said at last. 'I agree to anything. The world is a raving idiot, and no man can kill it, though I'll do my best. But you're right. We must rescue ourselves as best we can.'

He looked in humiliation, anger, weariness and misery at Connie.

'Ma lass!' he said. 'The world's goin' to put salt on thy tail.'

'Not if we don't let it,' she said.

She minded this conniving against the world less than he did.

Duncan, when approached, also insisted on seeing the delinquent gamekeeper, so there was a dinner, this time in his flat: the four of them. Duncan was a rather short, broad, dark-skinned, taciturn Hamlet of a fellow with straight black hair and a weird Celtic conceit of himself. His art was all tubes and valves and spirals and strange colours, ultramodern, yet with a certain power, even a certain purity of form and tone: only Mellors thought it cruel and repellent. He did not venture to say so, for Duncan was almost insane on the point of his art: it was a personal cult, a personal religion with him.

They were looking at the pictures in the studio, and Duncan kept his smallish brown eyes on the other man. He wanted to hear what the game-keeper would say. He knew already Connie's and Hilda's opinions.

'It is like a pure bit of murder,' said Mellors at last; a speech Duncan by no means expected from a game-keeper.

'And who is murdered?' asked Hilda, rather coldly and sneeringly.

'Me! It murders all the bowels of compassion in a man.'

A wave of pure hate came out of the artist. He heard the note of dislike in the other man's voice, and the note of contempt. And he himself loathed the mention of bowels of compassion. Sickly sentiment!

Mellors stood rather tall and thin, worn-looking, gazing with flickering detachment that was something like the dancing of a moth on the wing, at the pictures.

'Perhaps stupidity is murdered; sentimental stupidity,' sneered the artist.

'Do you think so? I think all these tubes and corrugated vibrations are stupid enough for anything, and pretty sentimental. They show a lot of self-pity and an awful lot of nervous self-opinion, seems to me.'

In another wave of hate the artist's face looked yellow. But with a sort of silent hauteur he turned the pictures to the wall.

'I think we may go to the dining-room,' he said.

And they trailed off, dismally.

After coffee, Duncan said:

'I don't at all mind posing as the father of Connie's child. But only on the condition that she'll come and pose as a model for me. I've wanted her for years, and she's always refused.' He uttered it with the dark finality of an inquisitor announcing an auto da fé.

'Ah!' said Mellors. 'You only do it on condition, then?'

'Quite! I only do it on that condition.' The artist tried to put the utmost contempt of the other person into his speech. He put a little too much.

'Better have me as a model at the same time,' said Mellors. 'Better do us in a group, Vulcan and Venus under the net of art. I used to be a blacksmith, before I was a game-keeper.'

'Thank you,' said the artist. 'I don't think Vulcan has a figure that interests me.'

'Not even if it was tubified and titivated up?'

There was no answer. The artist was too haughty for further words.

It was a dismal party, in which the artist henceforth steadily ignored the presence of the other man, and talked only briefly, as if the words were wrung out of the depths of his gloomy portentousness, to the women.

'You didn't like him, but he's better than that, really. He's really kind,' Connie explained as they left.

'He's a little black pup with a corrugated distemper,' said Mellors.

'No, he wasn't nice today.'

'And will you go and be a model to him?'

'Oh, I don't really mind any more. He won't touch me. And I don't mind anything, if it paves the way to a life together for you and me.'

'But he'll only shit on you on canvas.'

'I don't care. He'll only be painting his own feelings for me, and I don't mind if he does that. I wouldn't have him touch me, not for anything. But if he thinks he can do anything with his owlish arty staring, let him stare. He can make as many empty tubes and corrugations out of me as he likes. It's his funeral. He hated you for what you said: that his tubified art is sentimental and self-important. But of course it's true.'

Chapter ⓳

'Dear Clifford, I am afraid what you foresaw has happened. I am really in love with another man, and do hope you will divorce me. I am staying at present with Duncan in his flat. I told you he was at Venice with us. I'm awfully unhappy for your sake: but do try to take it quietly. You don't really need me any more, and I can't bear to come back to Wragby. I'm awfully sorry. But do try to forgive me, and divorce me and find someone better. I'm not really the right person for you, I am too impatient and selfish, I suppose. But I can't ever come back to live with you again. And I feel so frightfully sorry about it all, for your sake. But if you don't let yourself get worked up, you'll see you won't mind so frightfully. You didn't really care about me personally. So do forgive me and get rid of me.'

Clifford was not inwardly surprised to get this letter. Inwardly, he had known for a long time she was leaving him. But he had absolutely refused any outward admission of it. Therefore, outwardly, it came as the most terrible blow and shock to him. He had kept the surface of his confidence in her quite serene.

And that is how we are, By strength of will we cut off our inner intuitive knowledge from admitted consciousness. This causes a state of dread, or apprehension, which makes the blow ten times worse when it does fall.

Clifford was like a hysterical child. He gave Mrs. Bolton a terrible shock, sitting up in bed ghastly and blank.

'Why, Sir Clifford, whatever's the matter?'

No answer! She was terrified lest he had had a stroke. She hurried and felt his face, took his pulse.

'Is there a pain? Do try and tell me where it hurts you. Do tell me!'

No answer!

'Oh dear, oh dear! Then I'll telephone to Sheffield for Dr. Carrington, and Dr. Lecky may as well run round straightaway.'

She was moving to the door, when he said in a hollow tone:

'No!'

She stopped and gazed at him. His face was yellow, blank, and like the face of an idiot.

'Do you mean you'd rather I didn't fetch the doctor?'

'Yes! I don't want him,' came the sepulchral voice.

'Oh, but Sir Clifford, you're ill, and I daren't take the responsibility. I must send for the doctor, or I shall be blamed.'

A pause: then the hollow voice said:

'I'm not ill. My wife isn't coming back.' It was as if an image spoke.

'Not coming back? You mean her ladyship?' Mrs. Bolton moved a little nearer to the bed. 'Oh, don't you believe it. You can trust her ladyship to come back.'

The image in the bed did not change, but it pushed a letter over the counterpane.

'Read it!' said the sepulchral voice.

'Why, if it's a letter from her ladyship, I'm sure her ladyship wouldn't want me to read her letter to you, Sir Clifford. You can tell me what she says, if you wish.'

'Read it!' repeated the voice.

'Why, if I must, I do it to obey you, Sir Clifford,' she said.

And she read the letter.

'Well, I am surprised at her ladyship,' she said. 'She promised so faithfully she'd come back!'

The face in the bed seemed to deepen its expression of wild, but motionless distraction. Mrs. Bolton looked at it and was worried. She knew what she was up against: male hysteria. She had not nursed soldiers without learning something about that very unpleasant disease.

She was a little impatient of Sir Clifford. Any man in his senses must have known his wife was in love with somebody else, and was going to leave him. Even, she was sure, Sir Clifford was inwardly absolutely aware of it, only he wouldn't admit it to himself. If he would have admitted it, and prepared himself for it: or if he would have admitted it, and actively struggled with his wife against it: that would have been acting like a man. But no! He knew it, and all the time tried to kid himself it wasn't so. He felt the devil twisting his tail, and pretended it was the angels smiling on him. This state of falsity had now brought on that crisis of falsity and dislocation, hysteria, which is a form of insanity. 'It comes,' she thought to herself, hating him a little, 'because he always thinks of himself. He's so wrapped up in his own immortal self, that when he does get a shock he's like a mummy tangled in its own bandages. Look at him!'

But hysteria is dangerous: and she was a nurse, it was her duty to pull him out. Any attempt to rouse his manhood and his pride would only make him worse: for his manhood was dead, temporarily if not finally. He would only squirm softer and softer, like a worm, and become more dislocated.

The only thing was to release his self-pity. Like the lady in Tennyson, he must weep or he must die.

So Mrs. Bolton began to weep first. She covered her face with her hand and burst into little wild sobs. 'I would never have believed it of her ladyship, I wouldn't!' she wept, suddenly summoning up all her old grief and sense of woe, and weeping the tears of her own bitter chagrin. Once she started, her weeping was genuine enough, for she had had something to weep for.

Clifford thought of the way he had been betrayed by the woman Connie, and in a contagion of grief, tears filled his eyes and began to run down his cheeks. He was weeping for himself. Mrs. Bolton, as soon as she saw the tears running over his blank face, hastily wiped her own wet cheeks on her little handkerchief, and leaned towards him.

'Now, don't you fret, Sir Clifford!' she said, in a luxury of emotion. 'Now, don't you fret, don't, you'll only do yourself an injury!'

His body shivered suddenly in an indrawn breath of silent sobbing, and the tears ran quicker down his face. She laid her hand on his arm, and her own tears fell again. Again the shiver went through him, like a convulsion, and she laid her arm round his shoulder. 'There, there! There, there! Don't you fret, then, don't you! Don't you fret!' she moaned to him, while her own tears fell. And she drew him to her, and held her arms round his great shoulders, while he laid his face on her bosom and sobbed, shaking and hulking his huge shoulders, whilst she softly stroked his dusky-blond hair and said: 'There! There! There! There then! There then! Never you mind! Never you mind, then!'

And he put his arms round her and clung to her like a child, wetting the bib of her starched white apron, and the bosom of her pale-blue cotton dress, with his tears. He had let himself go altogether, at last.

So at length she kissed him, and rocked him on her bosom, and in her heart she said to herself: 'Oh, Sir Clifford! Oh, high and mighty Chatterleys! Is this what you've come down to!' And finally he even went to sleep, like a child. And she felt worn out, and went to her own room, where she laughed and cried at once, with a hysteria of her own. It was so ridiculous! It was so awful! Such a come-down! So shameful! And it was so upsetting as well.

After this, Clifford became like a child with Mrs. Bolton. He would hold her hand, and rest his head on her breast, and when she once lightly kissed him, he said: 'Yes! Do kiss me! Do kiss me!' And when she sponged his great blond body, he would say the same: 'Do kiss me!' And she would lightly kiss his body, anywhere, half in mockery.

And he lay with a queer, blank face like a child, with a bit of the wonderment of a child. And he would gaze on her with wide, childish eyes, in a relaxation of madonna-worship. It was sheer relaxation on his part, letting go all his manhood, and sinking back to a childish position that was really perverse. And then he would put his hand into her bosom and feel her breasts, and kiss them in exultation, the exultation of perversity of being a child when he was a man.

Mrs. Bolton was both thrilled and ashamed, she both loved and hated it. Yet she never rebuffed nor rebuked him. And they drew into a closer physical intimacy, an intimacy of perversity, when he was a child stricken with an apparent candour and an apparent wonderment, that looked almost like a religious exaltation: the perverse and literal rendering of 'except ye become again as a little child'. While she was the Magna Mater, full of power and potency, having the great blond child-man under her will and her stroke entirely.

The curious thing was that when this child-man, which Clifford was now and which he had been becoming for years, emerged into the world, it was much sharper and keener than the real man he used to be. This perverted child-man was now a real businessman; when it was a question of affairs, he was an absolute he-man, sharp as a needle, and impervious as a bit of steel. When he was out among men, seeking his own ends, and 'making good' his colliery workings, he had an almost uncanny shrewdness, hardness, and a straight sharp punch. It was as if his very passivity and prostitution to the Magna Mater gave him insight into material business affairs, and lent him a certain remarkable inhuman force. The wallowing in private emotion, the utter abasement of his manly self, seemed to lend him a second nature, cold, almost visionary, business-clever. In business he was quite inhuman.

And in this Mrs. Bolton triumphed. 'How he's getting on!' she would say to herself in pride. 'And that's my doing! My word, he'd never have got on like this with Lady Chatterley. She was not the one to put a man forward. She wanted too much for herself.'

At the same time, in some corner of her weird female soul, how she despised him and hated him! He was to her the fallen beast, the squirming monster. And while she aided and abetted him all she could, away in the remotest corner of her ancient healthy womanhood she despised him with a savage contempt that knew no bounds. The merest tramp was better than he.

His behaviour with regard to Connie was curious. He insisted on seeing her again. He insisted, moreover, on her coming to Wragby. On this point he was finally and absolutely fixed. Connie had promised to come back to Wragby, faithfully.

'But is it any use?' said Mrs. Bolton. 'Can't you let her go, and be rid of her?'

'No! She said she was coming back, and she's got to come.'

Mrs. Bolton opposed him no more. She knew what she was dealing with.

'I needn't tell you what effect your letter has had on me,' he wrote to Connie to London. 'Perhaps you can imagine it if you try, though no doubt you won't trouble to use your imagination on my behalf.

'I can only say one thing in answer: I must see you personally, here at Wragby, before I can do anything. You promised faithfully to come back to Wragby, and I hold you to the promise. I don't believe anything nor understand anything until I see you personally, here under normal circumstances. I needn't tell you that nobody here suspects anything, so your return would be quite normal. Then if you feel, after we have talked things over, that you still remain in the same mind, no doubt we can come to terms.'

Connie showed this letter to Mellors.

'He wants to begin his revenge on you,' he said, handing the letter back.

Connie was silent. She was somewhat surprised to find that she was afraid of Clifford. She was afraid to go near him. She was afraid of him as if he were evil and dangerous.

'What shall I do?' she said.

'Nothing, if you don't want to do anything.'

She replied, trying to put Clifford off. He answered:

'If you don't come back to Wragby now, I shall consider that you are coming back one day, and act accordingly. I shall just go on the same, and wait for you here, if I wait for fifty years.'

She was frightened. This was bullying of an insidious sort. She had no doubt he meant what he said. He would not divorce her, and the child would be his, unless she could find some means of establishing its illegitimacy.

After a time of worry and harassment, she decided to go to Wragby. Hilda would go with her. She wrote this to Clifford. He replied: 'I shall not welcome your sister, but I shall not deny her the door. I have no doubt she has connived at your desertion of your duties and responsibilities, so do not expect me to show pleasure in seeing her.'

They went to Wragby. Clifford was away when they arrived. Mrs. Bolton received them.

'Oh, your Ladyship, it isn't the happy homecoming we hoped for, is it!' she said.

'Isn't it?' said Connie.

So this woman knew! How much did the rest of the servants know or suspect?

She entered the house, which now she hated with every fibre in her body. The great, rambling mass of a place seemed evil to her, just a menace over her. She was no longer its mistress, she was its victim.

'I can't stay long here,' she whispered to Hilda, terrified.

And she suffered going into her own bedroom, re-entering into possession as if nothing had happened. She hated every minute inside the Wragby walls.

They did not meet Clifford till they went down to dinner. He was dressed, and with a black tie: rather reserved, and very much the superior gentleman. He behaved perfectly politely during the meal and kept a polite sort of conversation going: but it seemed all touched with insanity.

'How much do the servants know?' asked Connie, when the woman was out of the room.

'Of your intentions? Nothing whatsoever.'

'Mrs. Bolton knows.'

He changed colour.

'Mrs. Bolton is not exactly one of the servants,' he said.

'Oh, I don't mind.'

There was tension till after coffee, when Hilda said she would go up to herroom.

Clifford and Connie sat in silence when she had gone. Neither would begin to speak. Connie was so glad that he wasn't taking the pathetic line, she kept him up to as much haughtiness as possible. She just sat silent and looked down at her hands.

'I suppose you don't at all mind having gone back on your word?' he said at last.

'I can't help it,' she murmured.

'But if you can't, who can?'

'I suppose nobody.'

He looked at her with curious cold rage. He was used to her. She was as it were embedded in his will. How dared she now go back on him, and destroy the fabric of his daily existence? How dared she try to cause this derangement of his personality?

'And for what do you want to go back on everything?' he insisted.

'Love!' she said. It was best to be hackneyed.

'Love of Duncan Forbes? But you didn't think that worth having, when you met me. Do you mean to say you now love him better than anything else in life?'

'One changes,' she said.

'Possibly! Possibly you may have whims. But you still have to convince me of the importance of the change. I merely don't believe in your love of Duncan Forbes.'

'But why should you believe in it? You have only to divorce me, not to believe in my feelings.'

'And why should I divorce you?'

'Because I don't want to live here any more. And you really don't want me.'

'Pardon me! I don't change. For my part, since you are my wife, I should prefer that you should stay under my roof in dignity and quiet. Leaving aside personal feelings, and I assure you, on my part it is leaving aside a great deal, it is bitter as death to me to have this order of life broken up, here in Wragby, and the decent round of daily life smashed, just for some whim of yours.'

After a time of silence she said:

'I can't help it. I've got to go. I expect I shall have a child.'

He too was silent for a time.

'And is it for the child's sake you must go?' he asked at length.

She nodded.

'And why? Is Duncan Forbes so keen on his spawn?'

'Surely keener than you would be,' she said.

'But really? I want my wife, and I see no reason for letting her go. If she likes to bear a child under my roof, she is welcome, and the child is welcome: provided that the decency and order of life is preserved. Do you mean to tell me that Duncan Forbes has a greater hold over you? I don't believe it.'

There was a pause.

'But don't you see,' said Connie. 'I must go away from you, and I must live with the man I love.'

'No, I don't see it! I don't give tuppence for your love, nor for the man you love. I don't believe in that sort of cant.'

'But you see, I do.'

'Do you? My dear Madam, you are too intelligent, I assure you, to believe in your own love for Duncan Forbes. Believe me, even now you really care more for me. So why should I give in to such nonsense!'

She felt he was right there. And she felt she could keep silent no longer.

'Because it isn't Duncan that I do love,' she said, looking up at him. 'We only said it was Duncan, to spare your feelings.'

'To spare my feelings?'

'Yes! Because who I really love, and it'll make you hate me, is Mr. Mellors, who was our game-keeper here.'

If he could have sprung out of his chair, he would have done so. His face went yellow, and his eyes bulged with disaster as he glared at her.

Then he dropped back in the chair, gasping and looking up at the ceiling.

At length he sat up.

'Do you mean to say you're telling me the truth?' he asked, looking gruesome.

'Yes! You know I am.'

'And when did you begin with him?'

'In the spring.'

He was silent like some beast in a trap.

'And it was you, then, in the bedroom at the cottage?'

So he had really inwardly known all the time.

'Yes!'

He still leaned forward in his chair, gazing at her like a cornered beast.

'My God, you ought to be wiped off the face of the earth!'

'Why?' she ejaculated faintly.

But he seemed not to hear.

'That scum! That bumptious lout! That miserable cad! And carrying on with him all the time, while you were here and he was one of my servants! My God, my God, is there any end to the beastly lowness of women!'

He was beside himself with rage, as she knew he would be.

'And you mean to say you want to have a child to a cad like that?'

'Yes! I'm going to.'

'You're going to! You mean you're sure! How long have you been sure?'

'Since June.'

He was speechless, and the queer blank look of a child came over him again.

'You'd wonder,' he said at last, 'that such beings were ever allowed to be born.'

'What beings?' she asked.

He looked at her weirdly, without an answer. It was obvious, he couldn't even accept the fact of the existence of Mellors, in any connexion with his own life. It was sheer, unspeakable, impotent hate.

'And do you mean to say you'd marry him?—and bear his foul name?' he asked at length.

'Yes, that's what I want.'

He was again as if dumbfounded.

'Yes!' he said at last. 'That proves that what I've always thought about you is correct: you're not normal, you're not in your right senses. You're one of those half-insane, perverted women who must run after depravity, the nostalgie de la boue.'

Suddenly he had become almost wistfully moral, seeing himself the incarnation of good, and people like Mellors and Connie the incarnation of mud, of evil. He seemed to be growing vague, inside a nimbus.

'So don't you think you'd better divorce me and have done with it?' she said.

'No! You can go where you like, but I shan't divorce you,' he said idiotically.

'Why not?'

He was silent, in the silence of imbecile obstinacy.

'Would you even let the child be legally yours, and your heir?' she said.

'I care nothing about the child.'

'But if it's a boy it will be legally your son, and it will inherit your title, and have Wragby.'

'I care nothing about that,' he said.

'But you must! I shall prevent the child from being legally yours, if I can. I'd so much rather it were illegitimate, and mine: if it can't be Mellors'.'

'Do as you like about that.'

He was immovable.

'And won't you divorce me?' she said. 'You can use Duncan as a pretext! There'd be no need to bring in the real name. Duncan doesn't mind.'

'I shall never divorce you,' he said, as if a nail had been driven in.

'But why? Because I want you to?'

'Because I follow my own inclination, and I'm not inclined to.'

It was useless. She went upstairs and told Hilda the upshot.

'Better get away tomorrow,' said Hilda, 'and let him come to his senses.'

So Connie spent half the night packing her really private and personal effects. In the morning she had her trunks sent to the station, without telling Clifford. She decided to see him only to say good-bye, before lunch.

But she spoke to Mrs. Bolton.

'I must say good-bye to you, Mrs. Bolton, you know why. But I can trust you not to talk.'

'Oh, you can trust me, your Ladyship, though it's a sad blow for us here, indeed. But I hope you'll be happy with the other gentleman.'

'The other gentleman! It's Mr. Mellors, and I care for him. Sir Clifford knows. But don't say anything to anybody. And if one day you think Sir Clifford may be willing to divorce me, let me know, will you? I should like to be properly married to the man I care for.'

'I'm sure you would, my Lady. Oh, you can trust me. I'll be faithful to Sir Clifford, and I'll be faithful to you, for I can see you're both right in your own ways.'

'Thank you! And look! I want to give you this—may I?' So Connie left Wragby once more, and went on with Hilda to Scotland. Mellors went into the country and got work on a farm. The idea was, he should get his divorce, if possible, whether Connie got hers or not. And for six months he should work at farming, so that eventually he and Connie could have some small farm of their own, into which he could put his energy. For he would have to have some work, even hard work, to do, and he would have to make his own living, even if her capital started him.

So they would have to wait till spring was in, till the baby was born, till the early summer came round again.

The Grange Farm

Old Heanor, 29 September

'I got on here with a bit of contriving, because I knew Richards, the company engineer, in the army. It is a farm belonging to Butler and Smitham Colliery Company, they use it for raising hay and oats for the pit-ponies; not a private concern. But they've got cows and pigs and all the rest of it, and I get thirty shillings a week as labourer. Rowley, the farmer, puts me on to as many jobs as he can, so that I can learn as much as possible between now and next Easter. I've not heard a thing about Bertha. I've no idea why she didn't show up at the divorce, nor where she is nor what she's up to. But if I keep quiet till March I suppose I shall be free. And don't you bother about Sir Clifford. He'll want to get rid of you one of these days. If he leaves you alone, it's a lot.

'I've got lodging in a bit of an old cottage in Engine Row, very decent. The man is engine-driver at High Park, tall, with a beard, and very chapel. The woman is a birdy bit of a thing who loves anything superior. King's English and allow me! all the time. But they lost their only son in the war, and it's sort of knocked a hole in them. There's a long gawky lass of a daughter training for a schoolteacher, and I help her with her lessons sometimes, so we're quite the family. But they're very decent people, and only too kind to me. I expect I'm more coddled than you are.

'I like farming all right. It's not inspiring, but then I don't ask to be inspired. I'm used to horses, and cows, though they are very female, have a soothing effect on me. When I sit with my head in her side, milking, I feel very solaced. They have six rather fine Herefords. Oat harvest is just over and I enjoyed it, in spite of sore hands and a lot of rain. I don't take much notice of people, but get on with them all right. Most things one just ignores.

'The pits are working badly; this is a colliery district like Tevershall, only prettier. I sometimes sit in the Wellington and talk to the men. They grumble a lot, but they're not going to alter anything. As everybody says, the Notts-Derby miners have got their hearts in the right place. But the rest of their anatomy must be in the wrong place, in a world that has no use for them. I like them, but they don't cheer me much: not enough of the old fighting-cock in them. They talk a lot about nationalization, nationalization of royalties, nationalization of the whole industry. But you can't nationalize coal and leave all the other industries as they are. They talk about putting coal to new uses, like Sir Clifford is trying to do. It may work here and there, but not as a general thing. I doubt. Whatever you make you've got to sell it. The men are very apathetic. They feel the whole damned thing is doomed, and I believe it is. And they are doomed along with it. Some of the young ones spout about a Soviet, but there's not much conviction in them. There's no sort of conviction about anything, except that it's all a muddle and a hole. Even under a Soviet you've still got to sell coal: and that's the difficulty.

'We've got this great industrial population, and they've got to be fed, so the damn show has to be kept going somehow. The women talk a lot more than the men, nowadays, and they are a sight more cocksure. The men are limp, they feel a doom somewhere, and they go about as if there was nothing to be done. Anyhow, nobody knows what should be done in spite of all the talk, the young ones get mad because they've no money to spend. Their whole life depends on spending money, and now they've got none to spend. That's our civilization and our education: bring up the masses to depend entirely on spending money, and then the money gives out. The pits are working two days, two and a half days a week, and there's no sign of betterment even for the winter. It means a man bringing up a family on twenty-five and thirty shillings. The women are the maddest of all. But then they're the maddest for spending, nowadays.

'If you could only tell them that living and spending aren't the same thing! But it's no good. If only they were educated to live instead of earn and spend, they could manage very happily on twenty-five shillings. If the men wore scarlet trousers as I said, they wouldn't think so much of money: if they could dance and hop and skip, and sing and swagger and be handsome, they could do with very little cash. And amuse the women themselves, and be amused by the women. They ought to learn to be naked and handsome, and to sing in a mass and dance the old group dances, and carve the stools they sit on, and embroider their own emblems. Then they wouldn't need money. And that's the only way to solve the industrial problem: train the people to be able to live and live in handsomeness, without needing to spend. But you can't do it. They're all one-track minds nowadays. Whereas the mass of people oughtn't even to try to think, because they can't. They should be alive and frisky, and acknowledge the great god Pan. He's the only god for the masses, forever. The few can go in for higher cults if they like. But let the mass be forever pagan.

'But the colliers aren't pagan, far from it. They're a sad lot, a deadened lot of men: dead to their women, dead to life. The young ones scoot about on motorbikes with girls, and jazz when they get a chance, But they're very dead. And it needs money. Money poisons you when you've got it, and starves you when you haven't.

'I'm sure you're sick of all this. But I don't want to harp on myself, and I've nothing happening to me. I don't like to think too much about you, in my head, that only makes a mess of us both. But, of course, what I live for now is for you and me to live together. I'm frightened, really. I feel the devil in the air, and he'll try to get us. Or not the devil, Mammon: which I think, after all, is only the mass-will of people, wanting money and hating life. Anyhow, I feel great grasping white hands in the air, wanting to get hold of the throat of anybody who tries to live, to live beyond money, and squeeze the life out. There's a bad time coming. There's a bad time coming, boys, there's a bad time coming! If things go on as they are, there's nothing lying in the future but death and destruction, for these industrial masses. I feel my inside turn to water sometimes, and there you are, going to have a child by me. But never mind. All the bad times that ever have been, haven't been able to blow the crocus out: not even the love of women. So they won't be able to blow out my wanting you, nor the little glow there is between you and me. We'll be together next year. And though I'm frightened, I believe in your being with me. A man has to fend and fettle for the best, and then trust in something beyond himself. You can't insure against the future, except by really believing in the best bit of you, and in the power beyond it. So I believe in the little flame between us. For me now, it's the only thing in the world. I've got no friends, not inward friends. Only you. And now the little flame is all I care about in my life. There's the baby, but that is a side issue. It's my Pentecost, the forked flame between me and you. The old Pentecost isn't quite right. Me and God is a bit uppish, somehow. But the little forked flame between me and you: there you are! That's what I abide by, and will abide by, Cliffords and Berthas, colliery companies and governments and the money-mass of people all notwithstanding.

'That's why I don't like to start thinking about you actually. It only tortures me, and does you no good. I don't want you to be away from me. But if I start fretting it wastes something. Patience, always patience. This is my fortieth winter. And I can't help all the winters that have been. But this winter I'll stick to my little Pentecost flame, and have some peace. And I won't let the breath of people blow it out. I believe in a higher mystery, that doesn't let even the crocus be blown out. And if you're in Scotland and I'm in the Midlands, and I can't put my arms round you, and wrap my legs round you, yet I've got something of you. My soul softly flaps in the little Pentecost flame with you, like the peace of fucking. We fucked a flame into being. Even the flowers are fucked into being between the sun and the earth. But it's a delicate thing, and takes patience and the long pause.

'So I love chastity now, because it is the peace that comes of fucking. I love being chaste now. I love it as snowdrops love the snow. I love this chastity, which is the pause of peace of our fucking, between us now like a snowdrop of forked white fire. And when the real spring comes, when the drawing together comes, then we can fuck the little flame brilliant and yellow, brilliant. But not now, not yet! Now is the time to be chaste, it is so good to be chaste, like a river of cool water in my soul. I love the chastity now that it flows between us. It is like fresh water and rain. How can men want wearisomely to philander. What a misery to be like Don Juan, and impotent ever to fuck oneself into peace, and the little flame alight, impotent and unable to be chaste in the cool betweenwhiles, as by a river.

'Well, so many words, because I can't touch you. If I could sleep with my arms round you, the ink could stay in the bottle. We could be chaste together just as we can fuck together. But we have to be separate for a while, and I suppose it is really the wiser way. If only one were sure.

'Never mind, never mind, we won't get worked up. We really trust in the little flame, and in the unnamed god that shields it from being blown out. There's so much of you here with me, really, that it's a pity you aren't all here.

'Never mind about Sir Clifford. If you don't hear anything from him, never mind. He can't really do anything to you. Wait, he will want to get rid of you at last, to cast you out. And if he doesn't, we'll manage to keep clear of him. But he will. In the end he will want to spew you out as the abominable thing.

'Now I can't even leave off writing to you.

'But a great deal of us is together, and we can but abide by it, and steer our courses to meet soon. John Thomas says good-night to Lady Jane, a little droopingly, but with a hopeful heart.'

第一章

我们这个时代根本是场悲剧，所以我们也就不拿它当悲剧了。大灾大难已经发生，我们身陷废墟，开始在瓦砾中重新搭建自己的小窝儿，给自己一点小小的期盼。这可是一项艰苦的工作：没有坦途通向未来，但我们还是摸索着蹒跚前行。不管天塌下几重，我们还得活下去才是。

康斯坦丝·查泰莱的处境大致如此。大战
①

给她带来了灭顶之灾，也让她意识到，真要活到老学到老呢。

1917年克利福德·查泰莱请了一个月的假回来与她完婚，蜜月后又回了佛兰德
②

战场。可六个月后他就伤残了，运回英国时几乎支离破碎。康斯坦丝，他的妻子，时年二十三，他二十九。

他的生命力极强，不但没死，破碎的身体似乎还复原了。一连两年他都在接受治疗，两年后医生宣布他痊愈，但腰部以下半截却是永久性地瘫了。

1920年，克利福德和康斯坦丝回到了克利福德的祖宅拉格比庄园。他父亲去世了，克利福德就继承爵位成了克利福德从男爵
③

，康斯坦丝因此成了查泰莱男爵夫人。他们在这颇为凄凉的查府里开始料理家务，过上了婚后的生活，但手头有点拮据。除了有个离家在外的姐姐，克利福德就没什么近亲了。长兄已经战死，查家就靠他来支撑。但他永远地残了，明知自己不会有后嗣，还是回到这烟雾弥漫的中部老家
④

维持查家的香火，能撑多久就撑多久吧。

他并没有灰心丧气。他可以自己摇着轮椅四处活动，还有一辆带篷子的轮椅装了马达，因此他能独自驾驶着轮椅在花园里慢悠悠地兜风，还能驶入那座美丽但凄凉的邸园中去。他心里着实为这座园林感到骄傲，但表面上却故作轻描淡写状。

受尽苦难的他，看上去却不那么沧桑。他表情奇特，容光焕发，生气勃勃，甚至可以说是兴高采烈。他满面红光，浅蓝色的眼睛目光炯炯，咄咄逼人，肩膀宽阔结实，手臂刚劲有力。他的华贵衣着都在伦敦定制，漂亮的领结是从邦德街
⑤

购得。可在他脸上还是能察觉出一个残疾人警觉提防的神情，眼神里还是透着一丝儿残疾人的空虚。

他几近丧命，所以倍加珍惜自己的残生。他充满渴望的炯炯目光里透着巨大打击后生还的骄傲。可他受伤过重，身心深处的某种东西已经被彻底摧毁了。一些感觉已经灰飞烟灭，只剩下一个毫无感觉的空壳。

康斯坦丝，他的妻子，脸色红润得像个乡下姑娘。她生着柔顺的棕色头发，身体健壮，动作悠缓，精力过人。她那双大眼睛里充满好奇的目光，声音柔和，活脱儿一个乍离乡村的女子。可事实并非如此。她的父亲老马尔科姆·里德爵士曾是著名的皇家艺术学会会员，母亲则在拉斐尔前派
⑥

艺术盛行时期是修养甚高的费边社
⑦

成员。从小在艺术家和有教养的社会主义者中间耳濡目染，康斯坦丝和姐姐希尔达可以说是受着反传统的美学观念影响长大成人的。她们被家长带着去过巴黎、佛罗伦萨和罗马接受艺术熏陶，还被带去海牙和柏林参加社会主义者大会，会上发言的人们言谈文明，举止大方。

这姐妹俩从小就与艺术和思想政治之类的东西毫无隔膜，那是她们天生于斯的环境。她们既有见多识广大气的一面，又有狭隘乡土气的一面。在她们身上，大气与乡土气相得益彰的艺术观与纯洁的社会理想是并行不悖的。

十五岁时她们曾被送到德国德累斯顿去学音乐等科目。那段日子很是愉快。她们在当地学生中毫无拘束地生活，同男人们争论哲学、社会学和艺术问题，在这方面她们和男人一样优秀，而且因为她们是女子，显得比男人还强。她们与强健的年轻人结伴，背着吉他到森林中去远足，唱起人称“候鸟”的徒步旅行者之歌。她们自由自在。自由！那是个多么伟大的字眼儿。在旷野里，在晨曦中的林地间，和那些生气勃勃、歌喉动听的年轻人们在一起，随心所欲——特别是——畅所欲言。最重要的是能畅所欲言，能充满激情地交谈。而爱情不过是无足轻重的伴奏曲。

希尔达和康斯坦丝在十八岁时都已初涉爱河。那些和她们放谈、高歌、在林间自由自在徒步旅行的男孩子们自然想跟她们建立爱的关系。姐妹俩起初对此有疑虑，可是后来这些东西被谈过太多次，好像应该是不可或缺的。而且那些男子又是那么低声下气地渴求她们，女孩子们为什么不能表现得像个女王，将自己当作礼物赠予他们呢？

就这样，她们将自己当作礼物赠予了和自己讨论最透彻、最亲密无间的青年。那些争论和讨论是最举足轻重的事，而欢爱之类不过是某种原始的回归，有点扫兴。事后反倒对那男孩子不那么喜爱了，甚至还有点厌恶，似乎他侵犯了自己的隐私和内在的自由。因为一个女孩子的全部尊严和生命意义在于获得一种绝对完美、全然高贵的自由。一个女子的生命还能意味着别的什么呢？就在于摆脱那种古已有之的肮脏的交媾和支配—服从的关系。

可无论人们怎样对此动情，性这东西终归是古已有之的肮脏的交媾和支配—服从的关系。歌颂它的诗人多是男性，女人一直明白有什么东西比这更美好，更高尚。而现今她们比以往任何时候都更明白这个道理，一个女人最美丽纯洁的自由绝对比任何性爱更美好。唯一遗憾的是在这个问题上男人的认识比女人落后许多，他们在性事上固执如牛。

女人不得不让步。男人就像孩子一样贪婪，他要什么，女人就得给他什么，否则他可能会像个孩子一样气急败坏，愤然而去，从而毁掉一段美好的姻缘。不过，女人尽可以在保留内在自我自由的基础上屈从于男人，这一点并没有被诗人和说教者们充分注意。女人可以接受一个男人，同时也不放弃自我。当然，她也可以在接受一个男人的同时却并不受这个男人的支配。相反，她可以利用性这东西来支配这个男人。在欢爱过程中，她只需克制自己，听任他尽情到终了而自己并不进入高潮。然后她可以延长欢爱达到高潮，把他仅仅当成一个工具。

大战爆发，两姐妹赶回国，此时她们都已经有了爱的经验。除非和哪个青年特别谈得来，她们才恋爱。和某个聪明绝顶的小伙子热烈地放谈，一小时又一小时，一天又一天，一连数月，这样的谈话给她们带来的震撼是惊人的、强烈的、难以置信的。这种感受如果不是亲历，她们是不会懂的。“汝将有可与之交心的男子！”这来自天堂的许诺并不曾耳闻，可对于她们在不知不觉中竟然成真了。

这些生动、触动灵魂的心交会唤起亲昵的感情，如果此时欢爱不可避免，就随它去。这标志着一章的结束，而且这本身就令人激动：它唤起体内奇妙的震颤，那是自我意志最后不由自主的抽搐，就如同最后一个激动人心的字眼儿，特别像一行星号，既表示一个段落的结束，又表示一个主题的间歇。

1913年这姐妹俩回来过暑假时，希尔达二十岁，康妮
⑧

十八岁，她们的父亲一眼就看出她们有了爱的经历。

就像谁说的：“如此这般领略爱情之一二。”他自己是个老手，便顺其自然了。可她们的母亲有神经性疾病，命在旦夕，她只希望自己的女儿们能“自由”，能“如愿”。她自己这辈子从来就没有自我过，她走了背字儿，天知道这是为什么。按说她有自己的收入，也有自己的想法，怎么会如此呢？她埋怨自己的丈夫。可事实上这全是因为她无法挣脱某些束缚心灵的陈规所致，跟马尔科姆爵士无关。他放任自己充满敌意的神经病妻子当家作主，自己则另行其是。

所以姑娘们才得以“自由”，过了暑假就回德累斯顿的大学继续学音乐，回到她们的小伙子身边。她们各自有个小伙子，恩恩爱爱，心心相印。男孩子们能想能说能写出来的美妙词句，全都奉献给了这两个姑娘。康妮的小伙子是个学音乐的，希尔达的那位则是学技术的，他们简直就是为这两姑娘而活着。当然，这种激情还是精神上的，有些方面他们颇受冷落，尽管他们并不明白这一点。

他们身上也明显有经历过爱情的痕迹，也就是说有了身体上的经历。奇特的是，爱情是如此精细无误地改变了男女双方的身体：女子更娇艳了，更丰满娇嫩了，棱角磨圆了，脸上带着渴望或得意的神情；男子则沉静多了，内向多了，肩膀和臀部也收敛了许多，不那么气势汹汹的了。

身体受到欢爱的刺激时，姐妹俩几乎是屈服于那奇特的男性力量了。但很快她们就恢复了理智，把爱的刺激看作是感官刺激，从而保持了自己的独立。反倒是男人，因为感激女人给了他们欢爱，就把自己的心交给了她们。过后他们看上去倒像是丢了西瓜捡了芝麻
⑨

。康妮的小伙子会有点郁闷，希尔达的情人则会说起风凉话来。男人就是这样啊！忘恩负义，贪得无厌。你不要他们吧，他们恨你不要。一旦你要了他们，他们还会因为别的理由恨你。或者什么理由也没有，就是因为他们是贪得无厌的孩子，得寸进尺，无论女人怎样做他们也不会满足。

但战争爆发了，希尔达和康妮再次赶回家来。在这之前她们五月份曾回来过一次，是给母亲奔丧。1914年圣诞节前她们的德国情人都死了。当时姐妹俩为自己热恋的男子痛哭了一场，但过后说忘就忘了他们，心里再也没他们了。

姐妹俩都住在肯辛顿
⑩

父亲的房子里，其实那本是母亲的家。她们和剑桥的年轻人过从甚密。这是些号称捍卫“自由”的人，他们身着法兰绒裤，法兰绒衬衫领口敞着，教养良好，感情奔放，说话轻声细语，举止细腻。后来，希尔达突然嫁了人。男方长她十岁，是这个剑桥圈子里的前辈，手头宽裕，在政府里有一份舒适的差事，他家几代人都在政府里供职，业余还写点哲学随笔。希尔达和夫君住在威斯敏斯特区
⑪

的小房子里，来往的人虽算不上精英，但却都是或者说会成为国家真正的智慧栋梁：他们言之有物，至少听上去如此。

康妮干点与战争有关的活儿，交往的是那些穿法兰绒裤子、固执己见的剑桥学生们，这些人对什么都冷嘲热讽。她的“朋友”就是二十二岁的青年克利福德·查泰莱，他刚从波恩赶回来，原本在那里学习采煤技术，在这之前他在剑桥上了两年学。现在他在一个出色的军团里当上中尉了，穿上合身的军服后更是目空一切。

和康妮比，克利福德·查泰莱更属于上层社会。康妮是富裕的知识分子，而克利福德·查泰莱是贵族，虽说不是大贵族，但终归算贵族。他父亲是个准男爵，母亲则是个子爵之女。

克利福德虽说出身比康妮高贵，而且“社交面”更广，可就是没康妮大气。他在那个狭窄的“高等世界”里游刃有余，那个“高等世界”即是有地产的贵族们组成的小社会。而到了别的大世界里如大量的中下阶级和外国人当中，他就会羞涩紧张起来。说白了，他就是有点怕中下阶级的人，怕与他不属于同一个阶级的外国人。他感到无能，感到无力保护自己，尽管他的特权受到了绝对的保护。这事儿听上去费解，但在我们这个年代里就有此等怪现象。

正因此，他让康斯坦丝·里德这姑娘身上所特有的那种从容自信给迷住了。在那个混乱的外部世界里，她比他能多了。

不过他也算是个叛逆者，甚至背叛了自己的阶级。可能说叛逆言重了，过于言重了。他只不过是随大流和其他年轻人一样反陈规陋习，反任何权威而已。父辈们是荒谬的，他那个冥顽不化的老爹则荒谬到了极点。政府是荒谬的，我们国家那个踌躇观望的政府
⑫

则倍加荒谬。军队是荒谬的，那些老不死的将军们全这样，那个红脸儿基奇纳
⑬

则荒谬绝伦。甚至这场战争本身就荒谬到家了，尽管它杀死了不少人。

事实上，一切事物都有点荒谬，甚至是荒谬透顶：任何东西只要与权威有关，无论是在政府里、军队里，还是大学里，都荒谬到了一定程度。只要统治阶级自命不凡地要统治，他们就荒谬。克利福德的父亲杰弗里男爵就荒谬至极。他砍伐自家的树木，把他的工人从煤井里像拔草一样弄上来推到战场上去，可自己却躲在后方自称爱国。还有，他为国家花钱，却落得自己入不敷出。

克利福德的姐姐爱玛·查泰莱小姐从中部到伦敦去做护士，心中暗自讥笑杰弗里男爵和他坚定的爱国心。身为继承人的长兄赫伯特干脆就公然嘲笑他父亲，尽管砍下来给战壕当支架的是他的树。而克利福德则只是不自然地笑笑。一切皆荒谬，没错。可是，如果这荒谬离自己太近，当自己也变得荒谬时又会是什么情形呢？至少另一个阶级的人如康妮对有些东西还是严肃认真的，他们还是信点什么的。

他们拿军队、强制征兵、儿童糖和太妃糖短缺这些问题很当一回事。当然，在这些问题上，当局都犯了荒谬的错误。可克利福德却对此不怎么上心。他认为当局压根儿就荒谬，而不是因为太妃糖和军队的问题才荒唐。

当局感到荒唐了，可行为还是照样荒诞不经，一时间乱得天昏地暗如“疯帽匠的茶会”
⑭

。直到那边乱得不可收拾了
⑮

，劳合·乔治
⑯

才出来收拾残局。可他的做法竟荒唐得没了边儿，弄得那些信口开河的年轻人再也笑不出来了。

1916年，赫伯特·查泰莱战死，所以克利福德接替他成了继承人。这甚至也让他感到害怕。作为杰弗里男爵的儿子和祖宅拉格比府的后人，他感到责任重大，无法摆脱。但他同时也明白，在喧闹的外部世界人们看来，这也是荒谬的。现在他成了继承人，担起了拉格比府的责任，这还不够可怕吗？但这也很了不起，或者，只是纯属荒谬。

杰弗里男爵丝毫也不感到荒谬。他脸色苍白，神情紧张，憋足了劲儿固执地要拯救自己的国家，保住自己的地位，不管是劳合·乔治还是别的什么人当政。他是那么封闭，那么与真正的英格兰隔绝，那么无能为力，他甚至看好霍拉肖·博顿利
⑰

。他捍卫英格兰和劳合·乔治，就像他的祖先捍卫英格兰和圣乔治一样。他从来弄不清这个英格兰和乔治与那个英格兰和乔治有什么不同，所以才会砍伐自己的树木，捍卫劳合·乔治和英格兰，英格兰和劳合·乔治。

他还要克利福德娶妻生子。克利福德觉得父亲是个不可救药的过时人物。可他自己除了躲避荒谬的东西，逃避自己的地位给自己带来的荒谬，又比他父亲强多少呢？可最终无论自愿与否，他还是郑重其事地继承了爵位，入住拉格比府。

战争开始时的狂热劲儿消停了
⑱

，破灭了。死人太多，恐惧太甚。一个男人需要支持和安慰，需要在世界上有个安全的港湾停泊下来，需要一个妻子。

查泰莱家三姐弟很怪，虽然与外界关系不少，却在拉格比府里封闭地生活着。孤独感使他们之间更亲密。他们感到地位不稳，感到无力自卫，尽管他们有爵位和土地，或许也正因为有这些东西他们才自危。他们与生活其间的工业化的英国中部地区隔绝着，也同自己的阶级隔绝着。这是他们的父亲杰弗里男爵造成的，他生性多虑，固执己见，孤僻封闭。子女们嘲弄他，但也很理解他。

他们仨发誓要永远住在一起。可现在赫伯特死了，杰弗里男爵要求克利福德婚配。虽然杰弗里男爵嘴上很少提这事，他本来就少言寡语，可他那种沉默无声的坚持态度令克利福德难以反抗。

可爱玛坚决不同意！她年长克利福德十岁，觉得克利福德的婚事是对他们姐弟约定的抛弃和背叛。

但克利福德还是娶了康妮，同她共度蜜月。那是可怕的1917年，他们两个亲密无间，就像站在同一条船上沉浮与共。结婚时他还是个童男子，但他并不看重性这东西。除此之外，他和她十分亲密。康妮对这种超越了性和男人的“满足”的亲密颇感惊喜。克利福德就是和许多别的男人不同，他对性的“满足”并不在意。他们之间的亲昵要深刻得多，是人的亲情关系。性不过是心血来潮的事，或者说是次要的事：它是正在废退的人体器官笨拙地坚持进行的一个奇怪程序，是可有可无的。但康妮特别想生几个孩子，为的是加重自己的分量与大姑姐抗衡。

可1918年初克利福德瘫着回家来了，而康妮还没有孩子。杰弗里男爵为此抑郁而死。

注　释

①
此处指第一次世界大战。——译者注

②
佛兰德，欧洲西部一地区，包括法国北部一地和比利时的一个省份。大战期间此地交战最激烈，是欧洲战场的象征。

③
从男爵，也称准男爵，是低于男爵的一个爵位，但高于勋爵。它不属于由公、侯、伯、子、男五个爵位组成的贵族等级，男爵有资格进入上议院，但从男爵没有。1964年以后停止封授从男爵爵位，到1980年代，全英国还有一千多位从男爵。估计这个爵位以后将自行消失。习惯上男爵直呼其名，如克利福德·查泰莱称为克利福德男爵，而非查泰莱男爵。但男爵夫人则要以其夫姓相称，如康斯坦丝·查泰莱称为查泰莱夫人，而非康斯坦丝夫人。——译者注

④
此处指英国中部的诺丁汉一带，当初此地煤矿遍布，采矿技术落后，因此空气中烟雾缭绕。——译者注

⑤
邦德街，伦敦高档商店集中的商业街。——译者注

⑥
拉斐尔前派，形成于1848年的一个英国艺术流派，模仿拉斐尔之前的意大利绘画风格，强调细节和自然冲动。拉斐尔（1483—1520），意大利文艺复兴盛期的画家和建筑师，主要作品有壁画《西斯廷圣母》等。

⑦
费边社，创建于1884年的一个政治派别，主张用温和渐进的方式实现社会主义。

⑧
康斯坦丝的昵称。

⑨
原文是“丢了一先令，捡了六便士”，在英语中表示失望的意思。当时一先令等于十二便士。

⑩
伦敦的富人区。

⑪
伦敦西部的贵族居住区，区内有白金汉宫、议会大厦、首相官邸、威斯敏斯特大教堂等。

⑫
指战争初期以阿斯奎斯为首相的政府。劳伦斯在《袋鼠》中指责阿斯奎斯的自由党政府涣散无能外加患得患失。——译者注

⑬
Horatio Herbert Kitchener（1850—1916），英国陆军元帅。第一次世界大战期间曾以一幅著名的征兵招贴画而青史留名。招贴画上的口号是“你的国家需要你”，上方是他的头像和伸出的手指。1914年成为英国战争大臣。他使英国军队获得了空前的扩充。

⑭
见刘易斯·卡罗尔的童话《爱丽丝漫游仙境》第七章。

⑮
英国军队在法国和佛兰德伤亡惨重。

⑯
David Lloyd George（1863—1945），在战事紧张的1916年上台任英国首相。劳伦斯的作品里经常对他嘲讽有加，特别在《袋鼠》中，称其上台是“英国的末日”。——译者注

⑰
Horatio Bottomley（1860—1933），英国下院自由党议员，煽动家。曾靠投机买卖大量赚钱，创办了《约翰牛》周刊（1906—1929）。劳伦斯在《袋鼠》（1923）中抨击他“大兴恐怖统治”，并指出在大战的关键时刻，英国人选择了博顿利，万众一声地为《约翰牛》欢呼，其选择是“低劣的”（这个词与博顿利的发音相同）。博顿利则于1928年和1929年在该杂志上猛烈抨击《查泰莱夫人的情人》。——译者注

⑱
英国人普遍对大战的爆发毫无准备，过分低估了大战的残酷性和毁灭性，许多人甚至认为战争在当年的圣诞节前就能结束，所以佛兰德战场上的惨重伤亡彻底击溃了人们对战争的幻想。——译者注

第二章

1920年秋天，康妮和克利福德回到了拉格比府。爱玛小姐仍然对弟弟的失信怀恨在心，已经离家去了伦敦，住在一套小公寓里。

拉格比府是一座狭长低矮的褐色石头建筑，始建于十八世纪中叶，后来不断扩建，直到拥挤不堪，没了特点。它坐落在一片布满了老橡树的高丘上，看上去挺像样。可惜从这里看到的近处是特瓦萧煤矿烟囱里喷出的煤烟，远处雾气沼沼的山上是特瓦萧村杂乱无章的破房子——这村子几乎就从园林的门口开始，拖拖拉拉足有一英里长，看上去丑陋无比：满村都是一排排寒酸肮脏的小砖房，青石板顶，棱角尖锐，模样既别扭又死气沉沉。

康妮习惯了肯辛顿、苏格兰山地或苏塞克斯的丘陵草地，那是她心目中的英国。她一眼就看透了这个毫无灵魂、丑陋无比的中部煤铁世界，但凭着年轻人的毅力她忍了。这地方令人匪夷所思，不去想它就是了。在阴沉的拉格比府房间里，她听到矿井上筛煤机的咣当声，卷扬机的噗噗声，火车转轨的咯噔声和矿车嘶哑的汽笛声。特瓦萧的矿井台在燃烧
①

，烧了不知多少年了。扑灭这火得花上一大笔款子才行，所以干脆就让它烧着去。当风从那边刮过来时，经常是这么个刮法，房子里就充满了烂泥里烧出的硫磺恶臭。即使是在无风的日子里，空气里也总是弥漫着地下冒出来的杂味：硫磺，煤炭，铁或酸性物质。这煤尘甚至也永久地渗进了冬玫瑰花瓣里，令人难以置信，就像黑色的吗哪
②

从厄运的天空而降。

就这样，它和别的东西一样是命中注定如此！这状况很糟糕，可为什么要抗争呢？你抗不过它，它依然故我。生活，都一样！夜晚低沉的黑色云层里，红色的斑点在燃烧着，抖动着，扩散着，肿胀着，收缩着，就像烧伤一样疼痛。那是矿井上的高炉在喷火。最初这些高炉令康妮害怕，她感到自己就像生活在炼狱中。后来她习惯了。到了早晨，天开始下起雨来。

克利福德号称喜欢拉格比庄园胜过伦敦。这片乡村有顽强的意志，这里的人很有勇气。康妮则想知道除此之外他们还有什么，眼光与头脑肯定是没有的。这里的人无精打采，形容枯槁，就跟这周围的乡村一样意气消沉，而且待人不善。不过他们也有让人感到惧怕和神秘的东西，那就是他们那口低沉含糊的土话，还有他们下班回家成群结队走在柏油路上时打了钉子的矿靴底发出的咔咔声。

这一对年轻的乡绅还乡时并没受到欢迎——没有欢庆活动，没有代表出来迎接，甚至没人来献花。他们的汽车开上一条阴森森的树木夹道的昏暗泥巴路，开到园林的坡地上，看见一群毛色发灰、浑身湿漉漉的羊在吃草，一直开到小丘上，开到拉格比府深褐色的房前。女管家和她的丈夫在房前徘徊着准备说句欢迎词儿，那模样就像两个站在地里心中没底的佃农。

拉格比府和特瓦萧村之间没有往来，一点也没有。见了面没人脱帽，没人说句客套话。矿工们只是盯着他们看，商人们就像见到个熟人一样冲康妮抬抬帽檐儿，冲克利福德则不自然地点点头，仅此而已。他们之间隔着一道不可逾越的鸿沟，双方都暗自怀有抵触情绪。起初康妮还为村民们默默的抵触情绪感到难过，后来就变得坚强了，觉得那是一针强心剂，一种不可或缺的东西。这倒不是因为她和克利福德没人缘儿，而是因为他们是另一种人，一种与矿工截然不同的人。他们之间的鸿沟是不可逾越的，裂痕是难以言表的。这种事在特伦特河
③

以南可能是没有的。可在中部地区和工业化的北方，这种鸿沟就是不可逾越的，没有任何沟通的可能——你是你，我是我！这简直莫名其妙、违背普通人性。

不过在无形中，村里人对克利福德和康妮还是同情的。可一到具体的人与人上，双方就势不两立了——离我远点儿！

这里的教区长是个和蔼的人，六十来岁。他恪尽职守，可村民们那种默默的“离我远点”的态度却让他变得无足轻重。矿工的妻子们几乎全是卫理会的教徒
④

，矿工们则什么教都不信。即使是教袍加身让他显得与众不同，他也还是个普通人。他不过是阿什比先生，一个照本宣科的牧师，干的是祈祷的行当儿。

“就算你是查泰莱夫人，俺们跟你也是一样的人！”这种固执的本能起初让康妮感到十分困惑。她主动跟矿工妻子们打招呼，她们既提防着她，又故作友善。她还常听到那些女人侉里侉气地带着鼻音套近乎说：“天啊，跟查泰莱夫人说上话了，我也成个人物儿了呀！可她别以为我不如她！”这些都让她难以忍受。可这事不可避免，这些不信国教的人就这么冒犯人，奈何不得他们。

克利福德不搭理他们，康妮也学着这样做，干脆对他们熟视无睹。人们盯着她，像是在看一个蜡人从身边走过。不得不跟他们打交道时，克利福德就表现得十分傲慢与轻蔑，他知道自己无法对他们友好。事实上，对本阶级以外的人他根本瞧不起，他固执己见，从来不打算妥协。人们对他说不上喜欢，也说不上不喜欢。他们觉得他就是那么个东西，就像矿井口的废料堆或拉格比府那座房子。

可现在他残了，变得自惭形秽，且十分敏感。除了家中的仆人，他讨厌见任何人，因为他不得不坐在轮椅上。不过他仍然像以前一样用高级裁缝制作的昂贵衣物来装扮自己，仍旧系邦德街上买来的领结。如此一来，光看上身，他仍旧和以前一样仪表堂堂。他从来就不是那种女里女气的现代绅士，他生着红扑扑的脸膛儿和宽阔的肩膀，看上去很有点乡土气。可他那安静踌躇的声音，还有他的眼神，既果敢又胆怯，既镇定又犹豫，这些暴露了他的本性。他的举止时常傲慢压人，可有时又谦虚谨慎，几乎是怯生生的。

康妮和他相依相伴，但是像现代人那样相互保持距离。他自己内心深受伤害，残废使他一蹶不振，再也轻松活泼不起来了。他是个受了伤害的人，为此康妮一腔热情地守着他。

可她又感到他和别人的联系太少了。矿工们在某种意义上来说是他自己的人，可他拿他们只当物不当人，把他们看作是矿井的一部分而不是生命的一部分，视他们为粗鲁的东西而不是像他一样的人。在某种程度上他挺怕他们，残了以后他不能容忍他们看他的眼神。他们奇特的粗野的生活在他眼里是不自然的，如同刺猬一样。

他远远地关心着他们，就像低头看显微镜或抬头看望远镜一样。他不接触他们。实际上他跟任何人和事都没有接触，除去因为传统的关系与拉格比府或出于家庭自卫的紧密纽带关系与爱玛有接触。除此之外，没什么东西能真正触动他。康妮感到自己并没有真正触动他，从来没有彻底触及到他，或许压根儿就没有什么可触及的，他根本拒绝人与人之间的接触。

可他又绝对地依赖她，每时每刻都离不开她。他虽然魁梧健壮，可却无能为力。他可以摇着轮椅活动，还可以“噗噗噗”地开着一个装了马达的带篷轮椅在邸园里兜风。可一旦独处，他就茫然起来。他需要康妮在他左右，以证实他还活着。

不过他还是雄心勃勃。他开始写小说，写的是他以前熟人们的奇闻逸事，文笔俏皮，有点恶毒，但说不上为什么，就是无聊。他的观察角度特别，很不一般，但缺少触角，没有实质性的触觉。似乎整个故事都发生在虚无缥缈之中。不过，既然当今的生活界面基本上是一个虚幻的舞台，他的故事反倒奇特地忠实于现代生活了，也就是说是符合现代人心理的。

克利福德对自己的小说上心到了病态的程度。他希望大家都看好他的小说，将它们当成极品。他的作品发表在最摩登的杂志上，评价自然也是褒贬不一。但对克利福德来说，贬损就是在折磨他，就像刀子在捅他一样。他全副身心似乎都扑在小说上了。

康妮尽力帮助他，起初她感到兴奋。他什么都对她说，聊得很枯燥，但还是没完没了，坚持不懈，她得竭尽全力作出反应，似乎她全部的灵与肉都得兴奋起来，投入到他的小说当中去。这让她兴奋，也让她着迷。

他们并没什么俗世的生活。按理说她得监督管理这个家，可这里的管家已经为杰弗里爵士工作多年了。那个面容干枯、说话字正腔圆的老女人——你很难说她是个客厅侍女，甚至都不能说她是个女人——她负责伺候用膳，已经在这家里干了四十个年头了。甚至屋里的女佣们也都不年轻了。这太可怕了！拿这样的地方你能有什么辙，随它去吧！那些没人住的数不清的房间，那些中部地区循规蹈矩的事，那些过分的整洁和死板的秩序，爱怎样就怎样吧！克利福德坚持添了个新厨子，那是他在伦敦时就曾伺候他的老练女人。除此之外，这地方好似一个井井有条的乱摊子。一切都井然有序，一尘不染，一丝不苟，甚至诚实规矩。可在康妮看来，这里却是个井然有序的乱摊子。因为没有温暖的感情将这一切有机地凝聚起来，所以这房子就像一条废弃的街道那么凄凉。

除了顺其自然她还能怎么着？于是她就听之任之了。爱玛·查泰莱小姐有时会来一趟，看到这里什么都还保持着原样，那张贵族气的瘦脸上顿显得意。她永远也不会原谅康妮，认为是康妮把她和弟弟的默契给破坏了。应该是她爱玛和弟弟一起写出这些小说和这些书，这些查家人写的故事算得上世界上的新鲜事儿。除此之外没有别的衡量标准，它与以前的思想和表现形式没什么有机的联系，只是这世界上某些新鲜的东西：查家的这些书，完全是查家私人的东西。

康妮的父亲曾来拉格比小住，他私下里告诉女儿：“克利福德的作品挺俏皮，可是空洞无物，是不会流传下去的！”看着这个壮实的一直很成功的苏格兰爵士，康妮那双依然好奇的蓝色大眼睛变得迷离起来。空洞无物！他说空洞无物是什么意思？批评家们都褒扬克利福德的作品，他几乎是声名远播了，他的写作甚至还挣到了钱……她父亲为什么还说克利福德的作品空洞无物呢？写作写到这份上，还能怎样呢？

康妮这么想，是因为她采取的是年轻人的标准：当下好的就是对的。以后一个当下接一个当下，这些当下之间并不一定彼此相属。

她在拉格比府住到第二个冬天时，父亲对她说：

“康妮，我希望你别被迫守活寡。”

“守活寡！”康妮含糊地说，“为什么，为什么不行呢？”

“你如果喜欢这样，当然没什么不行的！”父亲急促地说。和克利福德独处时，他也说了同样的话：“我觉得康妮不适合当个活寡妇。”

“活寡妇！”克利福德很明白地将这个法文词翻译成了英文。

他想了想，脸刷地红了。他生气了，感到受了冒犯。

“怎么就不行呢？”他生硬地问。

“她越来越瘦了……干枯了。她不应该是这样的。她不是个鱼干儿似的女孩子。她本是一条健美的苏格兰鳟鱼。”

“当然，是一条没有斑点的鳟鱼
⑤

”克利福德回敬道。

他想过后对康妮说说她守活寡的状况，可就是说不出口。他跟她既亲密又不够亲密。精神上他跟她十分默契，可肉体上他们没有共鸣，谁也不想谈论肉体上出格的事。他们是精神上亲密，感触上绝缘。

但康妮感觉到她父亲对克利福德说了些什么，克利福德心里有什么想法。她知道他并不在乎她是个守活寡的女人还是个风流的女人，只要他什么都不知道或没人告诉他就可以。反正是眼不见心不烦，就和没发生一样。

康妮来拉格比府已经快两年了，日子过得恍恍惚惚，只一门心思扑在克利福德身上，照顾他，帮他写作。两人在写作这方面不谋而合，他们讨论着，争论着行文结构，凭空感到真的是有什么事情发生着。

生活就在虚幻中进行着，其他的一切都是不存在的。拉格比府在那，仆人们也在那……但像幻影，并不是真的。康妮到邸园和毗邻邸园的林子里去散步，她喜欢那种寂寥和神秘，蹚着秋天的黄叶，采摘春天的报春花儿。可这一切都像一场梦，或者说是真实的幻影。橡树叶子在她看来就像在镜子里摇曳一般，而她自己则像故事里的人，她摘的报春花不过是幻影，或者说是回忆或文字。她觉得没有什么实质的东西……没有触动，没有接触，有的只是与克利福德在一起的生活，没完没了地编织着文字的网，编织着意识的细枝末节，这就是被马尔科姆爵士说成空洞无物、流传不下去的小说。为什么非要确凿有物，非要流传下去呢？“一天的难处一天当就够了。”
⑥

同理，眼下的现实表面怎样就怎样，不要想以后。

克利福德有不少朋友，严格说是些熟人，他把他们都请来拉格比府做客。他请来的各路人都有，包括批评家和作家什么的，这些人会帮着褒奖他的书。被邀请来拉格比让他们感到受宠若惊，于是就说好话。康妮对此完全明白。可为什么不呢？这是镜子里飞快变幻着的花样儿之一，有什么错呢？

作为女主人她款待这些来客……多是些男人。她也款待偶尔来访的克利福德的贵族亲戚们。柔顺的她脸红扑扑的，皮肤属于易生雀斑的那种，像个乡下姑娘。蓝色的大眼睛，褐色的卷发，轻柔的声音，健壮丰满的腰肢，这样的长相和身材被认为有点过时，过于“女性化”。她不像男孩子一样胸脯扁平、臀部窄小，如同一条沙丁鱼。她的体态过于女性化，窈窕不起来。

所以，男人们，特别是那些已经不怎么年轻的男人，对她十分和蔼。可是她知道如果她稍有调情的表情克利福德就会受到莫大的折磨，因此她对那些男人丝毫也不赏脸。她表现得沉静漠然，跟他们没有接触，连想都不想。为此克利福德自觉万分得意。

克利福德的亲戚们对她十分友善，但她明白那种和气表明他们不怕她。她也知道对于这些人，他们不怕你就意味着他们不会尊重你。但就是跟他们，她也没什么接触。她就随他们去。她由着他们友善，忍受他们的轻慢，免得他们剑拔弩张的。她其实与他们没有实质性的接触。

时光在流逝。不管发生了什么她都置若罔闻，因为她成功地脱离了一切。她和克利福德生活在他们的构思中和他的书中。她招待大家……府里总有客人。时光随着钟表的转动向前走，到了八点半就没七点半了。

注　释

①
从井下运上来的煤土等堆在井口，煤筛走后的垃圾就留在原地，这些垃圾会自燃或阴燃数年。

②
《圣经》故事中的一种天降食物。据《圣经》记载，以色列人逃离埃及经过荒野时上帝每天早晚给他们降下食物。晚上就飞来大量鹌鹑，给他们当晚餐。清晨，露水蒸发后，野地上会出现一个个小圆物，洁白如霜，滋味如同掺蜜的薄饼。在此劳伦斯反其意而用之。——译者注

③
特伦特河，英国第三大河，发源于斯坦福德郡，流经诺丁汉郡，是中部地区最大的河流。人们一般把它看作是英国南北方的分界线。——译者注

④
教区长是英国国教的牧师，但卫理会则脱离了英国国教，所以教区里的人对他并不敬重。——译者注

⑤
鳟鱼的身上有黑色斑点。克利福德在此反驳岳父。——译者注

⑥
见《马太福音》第六章，第三十四节。原文是：“不要为明天忧虑，因为明天自有明天的忧虑；一天的难处一天当就够了。”

第三章

可是康妮还是感到自己的躁动不安与日俱增。由于与别人隔绝，她感到这种躁动令她疯狂。不想让四肢抽动时，四肢却不由自主地抽动；不想挺直腰板只想舒适地休息时，脊梁却猛然挺直。这感觉搅动着她的身体内部，在她的五脏六腑深处，直到她感到自己必须跳进水里去游泳，去摆脱它。这是一种疯狂的焦躁，令她毫无原因地心跳加快。就这样，她渐渐消瘦了下来。

就是焦躁不安。她真想穿过园林逃跑，甩掉克利福德，趴在蕨草丛中。这样便可逃离这座房子……她必须逃离这座房子，离开所有的人。树林是她唯一的避难所。

但树林并非真的是一处避难所，因为她跟树林没什么联系。它只不过是她躲避其他东西的地方而已，她从来没有接触到树林的灵魂……如果树林真有这类不可言说的东西。

她朦胧地感到自己快要崩溃了。她朦胧地感到自己与世界失去了联系：与真实的、充满生命活力的世界没有了接触。只有克利福德和他的书了，可这些书并不存在……因为它们空洞无物！空对空，她朦胧地感到了这一点，觉得是在枉费心机。

她父亲又一次嘘拂她：“为什么不给自己找个情人，康妮？要善待自己啊！”

那年冬天米凯利斯来拉格比府小住。此君是个爱尔兰青年，已经靠自己的剧本在美国挣了大钱。他曾在伦敦的摩登社会里红极一时，因为他写的就是摩登社会的戏剧。可后来那些人渐渐发现他们是被一个都柏林街头潦倒的小混混儿给涮了，就厌烦了他。米凯利斯被说成是最下流最低贱的人。这个人被发现是个与英国作对的家伙。在发现这个问题的那个阶级眼里，这是最十恶不赦的罪行了。他被砍了头，尸体扔进了垃圾箱，从此无人理睬。

可是米凯利斯照样在五月市场
①

那儿有自己的公寓，依旧像个绅士一样出没于邦德街。很明显，你无法令邦德街上即便是最优秀的裁缝拒绝给那些下流的客户做衣服，因为人家出了钱。

克利福德在这个三十岁的年轻人事业不顺的时候向他发出了邀请，这事他做得毫不犹豫。米凯利斯的听众怕是有好几百万吧。当被其他摩登人士封杀、变为一个毫无前途的圈外人时能被邀来拉格比府，他肯定会对此感激不尽。既然心存感激，他毫无疑问会帮克利福德在美国那边扬名。名望！一个人是可以靠着巧妙的吹捧获得很多名望的，无论什么名望，特别是在“那边”。克利福德正崭露头角，有着强烈的出名欲。最终米凯利斯将他写进一出话剧，给他塑造了一个高贵的形象，克利福德一时间成了人人皆知的主人公。有了反响之后，他才发现自己成了笑料。

康妮对克利福德这种盲目迫切的出名欲感到惊讶。出名，让那个难以名状的大世界知道他，知道他是个作家，一个一流的现代作家。而他自己并不了解那个世界，甚至有点不安地惧怕那个世界。康妮略通此道，从成功而直言不讳的马尔科姆爵士的言谈中她能感觉到，艺术家们的确要推销自己，努力去兜售自己的产品。可是她父亲利用的是现成的渠道，其他皇家艺术学会的人都是这样卖掉自己的绘画作品。而克利福德发现了新的出名渠道，各式各样的渠道。他能既不降低自己的身份又能把各色人等请到拉格比府来。他铁了心要迅速成名，为此不择手段。

米凯利斯如约而至，坐的是一辆雅致的汽车，有专职的司机，还带了个男仆。他绝对是一身的邦德街气派。见到他，克利福德骨子里“乡下人”的一面使他心凉了，米凯利斯名不副实，事实上，他压根儿不像他表面上那样出色。对克利福德来说，他们之间的关系就此结束了。但他还是对米凯利斯表现得十分客气，这份客气是冲其惊人的成就而来的。人们惯常说成功女神是条母狗
②

，现在这条母狗就狺狺然徘徊在米凯利斯脚边，保护着这个色厉内荏的家伙。可是克利福德却给吓着了，因为他也想将自己卖身给成功女神这条母狗，只要她接受就行。

米凯利斯绝然不是个英国人，无论伦敦最时髦街区里的裁缝、帽匠、理发师和鞋匠怎么打扮他。不是，不是，他断然不是个英国人，因为他长着一张苍白扁平的脸，举止也有失体统，还怨气冲天。他的怨恨和怨气让土生土长的英国绅士一眼就看得出，这些人才不屑于让这些东西流露在言谈举止中呢。可怜的米凯利斯遭受了太多打击，即使是现在，他看上去还是有点夹着尾巴做人的痕迹。他仅仅凭着本能，凭着厚颜无耻打开了通向舞台的路，凭着自己的戏剧走向了舞台的最前端。他吸引了观众，从而觉得遭人打击的日子过去了。唉，才没有呢……那样的日子永远不会结束。因为在某种意义上，他遭打击是自找的。他渴求跻身于自己本不归属的上流社会，可人家多么开心地享受踹他的各式脚法呀！因此他恨透了他们！

尽管如此，他还是带着他的男仆，坐着神气的轿车旅行，这个都柏林混蛋。

但他身上还是有康妮喜欢的地方。他不做作，对自己也不抱幻想。谈起克利福德想了解的东西时，他言语理智、简洁、实在。他不夸夸其谈，也不信口开河。他清楚自己被叫到拉格比府来是要被派用场的，因此，像一个老奸巨滑、冷漠无情的商人或大贾，他听任别人提问，在回答时尽量不动声色。

“金钱！”他说，“金钱是一种本能。赚钱是一个男人的本性。这不是你干出来的，也不是你想耍就能耍出来的花招。它是你本性里偶然成形的东西。一旦你开始了，你就赚钱了。赚了，就继续下去，直到觉得该歇手，我想——”

“可你总得有个开头儿啊。”克利福德说。

“哦，那当然！你得进去，如果你被挡在门外你就什么也干不成。你得打拼进去。一旦你进去了，你想不赚都难。”

“你除了写剧本，还有别的路子赚钱吗？”克利福德问。

“哦，恐怕没有！我可能是个好作家，也许是个差作家。但总归算个作家，一个剧作家，也只能是个剧作家。这毫无疑问。”

“你认为流行剧作家才是你的归宿吗？”康妮问。

“说到点子上了，很对！”说着他向她转过身，脸刷地就红了，“这没什么！流行没什么。流行，但跟大众没关系。我的戏剧里没什么流行的因素。不是那个原因。它们就是流行，就像天气……是无法被改变的东西……眼下就这样。”

他的眼睛有点外凸，目光迟钝，深陷在无底的失望渊薮中。他的目光现在转向康妮，令她微微颤抖。他看上去那么老，老得没样儿了，似乎是一层又一层的幻灭垒起来的，在他身上积累了不知多少代的幻灭，就像地质岩层一样。可与此同时他又像一个孩子，某种意义上说是个弃儿，可又有着老鼠一样求生的绝处勇猛。

“至少你干得很精彩，在你这个年纪。”克利福德若有所思道。

“我三十……是的，我三十岁！”米凯利斯突然尖声说，伴随着一声怪笑，空洞、得意，又苦涩。

“你一个人吗？”康妮问。

“看怎么说了。是说我一个人生活吗？我有仆人。一个男人不娶老婆，就得有个仆人。他是个希腊人，反正他自己说是，没什么能耐。不过我还是把他留在身边。不过我会结婚的，是的，我必须结婚。”

“怎么听着像削发那么难？”康妮笑道，“结婚费劲吗？”

他景慕地看着她说：“查泰莱夫人，有点！我发现……对不起……我发现，我不能娶英国女人，甚至连爱尔兰女人都不能娶……”

“那就试试美国人。”克利福德说。

“美国人！”他干笑道，“不，我让我的仆人给我找个土耳其人，或者类似的东方人。”

这个成就非凡的人如此怪诞，如此抑郁，这让康妮好生奇怪。据说他每年仅仅从美国那边就能获得五千美元的收入呢。有时他看上去挺英俊的，他扭头看边上或看下面时，光线落在他身上，映出他沉静稳重的美，似一个象牙雕刻的黑人面具：有点凸出的眼睛，曲线奇特的浓眉，紧闭的双唇。那一瞬间流露出的凝滞，一种对于时空的超越，那是菩萨所要达到而黑人虽不求有时却能达到的境界。一种古而又古的、一个种族默认的什么东西！对一个种族命运的永久的认命，而不是进行个体的反抗。随之这影像瞬间滑过，就如同老鼠在黑暗的河流中游过。康妮心头忽然掠过一丝对他的同情，这同情中夹杂着怜惜和憎恶，变得有点像爱情了。这个受人排挤、遭人唾弃的人！他们竟说他粗俗！与他相比，克利福德不是更粗俗，更自以为是？比他愚蠢多了！

米凯利斯马上就明白他给了康妮一个好印象，于是他那双略微鼓凸的褐色大眼睛看她时故作淡漠起来。他这是在揣度她，也是在揣度他给她的印象到底如何。与英国人在一起，他怎么也改变不了自己是个外人的处境，爱情也不能改变这一点。但女人们有时会与他坠入情网……英国女人也会这样的。

他明白他与克利福德之间是什么关系。他们是两只陌生的狗，本来会对着狂吠，结果却是相视莞尔，当然这是不得已而为之。可是同这女人怎么处，他却吃不准。

早餐是在各自的卧室里用的，克利福德直到午餐时分才与大家见面，餐厅里的气氛有点压抑。上过咖啡后，米凯利斯这个不安分的人开始琢磨着干点什么了。这是个晴好的十一月天儿……对拉格比庄园来说是个好天气。他向那阴郁的园林眺望过去：天啊，这是个什么地方啊！

他差仆人去告诉查泰莱夫人他打算开车上设菲尔德
③

去一趟，看能不能顺便为夫人做点什么。回答是方便的话请他上楼去夫人的起居室。

康妮的起居室在四楼，在这座房子中部的最高层。克利福德的房间自然都在底层。应邀去查泰莱夫人自己的客厅，米凯利斯感到受宠若惊。他跟在仆人身后恍恍惚惚上了楼。他一向不注意周遭的环境，与事物没什么接触。进了厅里，他四下扫了一眼，看到了德国仿制的雷诺阿和塞尚
④

的画作。

“这儿很惬意啊！”说着他脸上露出一个怪笑，似乎一笑就痛，龇牙咧嘴的，“选最高层算是选对了。”

“我也这样觉得。”她说。

她的房间是这座房子里唯一明快、有现代气息的房间，是拉格比府里唯一能表露她个性的地方。克利福德从来没见识过这里，康妮也很少请人上来。

康妮和米凯利斯分别坐在壁炉两端聊了起来。她问起他自己，他的母亲、父亲和兄弟等……别人总是令她有点好奇，一旦她的同情心被唤起，她就会忘了阶级差别。米凯利斯直言不讳地谈起自己，毫不做作，直率地吐露自己痛苦冷漠的丧家犬心情，然后又报复性地表现出成功后的骄矜。

“可你为什么像只孤独的小鸟儿？”康妮问他。他再次看着她，凸出的褐色眼睛在搜寻着什么。

“有些鸟儿天性如此，”他回答道，然后用熟悉的口吻反唇相讥，“可是，您自己呢？难道不也是一只孤独的鸟儿吗？”康妮闻之稍稍一惊，思量了一会儿说：“只是有一点儿而已！可不像你那么彻头彻尾！”

“我是只彻头彻尾的孤独鸟儿吗？”他习惯性地咧嘴笑道，那样子像是得了牙痛病。他的笑那么有气无力，目光那么忧郁隐忍，充满了幻灭或者说是惧怕。

“怎么？”说着她看看他，呼吸有点急促，“你就是，对不对？”

她感到他是在向她迫切地求助，这令她几乎失去平衡。

“哦，你说得很对！”说着他扭过头朝侧下方看去，那奇特的凝眸属于一个古老的种族，在当今是难以见到的。看到他与自己若即若离，康妮真的没了气力。

他抬眼看看她，那一眼将一切尽收眼底，铭刻在心。与此同时，他胸中发出了一声黑夜里婴儿的哭泣
⑤

，那哭声感动了她的五脏六腑。

“你心里有我，可真是太好了！”他简洁地说道。

“我心里为什么不能有你呢？”她感叹道，说这话时她几乎喘不过气来。

米凯利斯有气无力地轻声一笑。

“哦，是这样啊……那我能握一握您的手吗？”他突然问，眼睛凝视着她，放射出一股催眠的力量，这眼神里发出的恳求直达她身体的深处。

康妮惊呆了，晕旋了，一动不动。他上前跪在她面前，两手各攥了她的一只脚在手中，将脸埋在了她的两腿间，纹丝不动。晕旋中康妮有点惊讶地垂首看着米凯利斯那细嫩的后脖颈，感到了他的脸在挤压她的大腿。惊慌之中她的手禁不住温柔爱怜地放在他那毫不设防的后颈上，米凯利斯浑身一哆嗦，开始颤抖起来。

随之他抬头看着她，熠熠生辉的眼睛里露出那种哀感顽艳的祈求，令康妮全然无法抵抗。她感到一股巨大的渴望热流从自己的胸中流淌而出，她定要把一切的一切都给他。

他是个奇特而十分温柔的情人，对康妮温柔至极。他难以自持地颤抖着，与此同时若即若离，清醒着，对外面的任何动静都能察觉到。

对康妮来说这不算什么，不过是委身于他。最终他停止了颤抖，十二分平静地躺着。她的手指轻轻地、爱怜地抚摸起他枕在她胸口的头。

他起身时吻了她的双手和穿着羊皮拖鞋的双脚，然后默默地走到屋子的一头，背对着她。他们沉默了一会儿。然后他转过身，又走到仍旧坐在壁炉旁的她身边。

“现在我想你会恨我的！”他沉静但忍不住地说。

康妮迅速抬头看着他：“为什么呢？”

“她们大都这样儿，”他话刚出口就打住，“我是说……女人一般来说会这样的。”

“我就算恨你，也绝不是在这个时候。”她反感地说。

“我知道！我懂！你对我恩重如山……”他痛苦地叫道。

她不明白他为何要感到痛苦。“你坐下来好吗？”她说。他扫了一眼门口。

“克利福德爵士，”他说道，“他不会……不会……？”她寻思片刻说：“也许吧！”说着她抬头看看他，“我不想让克利福德知道，甚至不让他怀疑。那会伤害他的。可我并不觉得我们这样有什么错，你说呢？”

“错！上天保佑，没错！您对我太好了……令我难以承受。”

说着他转过身去，她看得出，他快哭了。

“但我们别让克利福德知道，行吗？”她恳求道，“那会伤害他的。如果他永远不知道，不怀疑，就没人受伤害了。”

“我？”他急切地说，“他不会从我这儿知道什么的。不信你等着瞧！我会出卖我自己！哈——哈——！”他干笑着，嘲弄这种想法。她不解地看着他。他又说：“我能吻你的手，然后就走吗？我想我得赶到设菲尔德去，或许能赶上在那儿吃午饭，然后回来喝下午茶。我能替您做点什么？能让我放心，告诉我你不恨我——而且，永远不恨吗？”他最后一句话的口吻透着令人绝望的玩世不恭。

“不，我才不恨你呢！”康妮说，“我觉得你挺好的。”

“啊！”他激动地说，“我更喜欢你这么说，这比说你爱我还好！这句话太意味深长了……下午见吧，这段时间我会想很多很多的。”他谦卑地吻了康妮的手，然后离开了。

“我觉得那年轻人让我无法忍受。”午餐时克利福德说。

“怎么了？”康妮问。

“他简直就是个小人，别看他金玉其表……时机一成熟他就会对我们恩将仇报。”

“我觉得人们一直过于苛待他了。”康妮说。

“这有什么奇怪的！你以为他就把宝贵的时间都用在做善事上了吗？”

“我觉得他还是挺慷慨大度的。”

“对谁呢？”

“这我不大知道。”

“你当然不知道了。恐怕你是把胡作非为错当成慷慨了。”

康妮不语。是这样吗？很可能是。但米凯利斯的胡作非为对她很有点魅力。与他比，克利福德是小巫见大巫。他以自己的方式征服了世界，克利福德也想那样。可手段和方式呢……米凯利斯的路数就比克利福德的路数要卑鄙吗？那可怜的圈外人或身体力行或借助别人开路前进，而克利福德则是靠抬高自己获取功名，米凯利斯因此就比克利福德坏吗？成功这条母狗身后尾随着成千上万条喘吁吁的甜言蜜语的公狗。先获取其芳心的是狗中豪杰——如果你用成功与否来衡量的话！这么说，米凯利斯完全可以翘尾巴了。

奇怪的是，他并没有翘尾巴。下午茶时分他回来了，捧着一大捧紫罗兰和百合，可表情依旧像只忧郁的丧家犬。有时康妮猜想那是一种面具，为的是消弭别人的对立情绪，因为那表情太一成不变了。他真是个这样沮丧的人吗？

整个晚上他都在用这种丧家犬的神态掩饰自己。尽管克利福德看透了这表面下的狂妄，但康妮却没感觉出来：可能这种掩饰不是针对女人的，而是针对男人们的跋扈和虚伪的。这个下作小人身上的那种内在的狂妄是不可改变的，这一点令男人们特别蔑视他，他的出现本身就是对有身份的男人的冒犯，不管他怎样故作优雅。

康妮是爱上他了。但是她坐在一旁用刺绣来掩饰自己，不参与男人们的谈话。米凯利斯嘛，他表现得很得体，依旧和头天晚上一样表情忧郁、神情专注、若即若离，和主人们保持着遥远的距离但又言简意赅地适度迎合他们，一刻也不靠近他们。康妮感到他肯定忘记了上午的事。其实他没有，但他明白自己的处境……他仍然在圈外的老地方，是个天生的圈外人。他并没有把上午的欢爱当成天大的事，他知道那并不能把他从一只人人嫌弃的无主的狗变成一只惬意的上流社会的宠物狗。

他内心深处是个圈外人，一个反社会的人，这是不争的事实。他自己心里也承认这一点，不管他外表如何时髦。他的离众孤僻在他看来是必需的，正如同他表面上的恭顺和滥竽上流一样。

偶有爱情作为慰藉也不错，他并非一个不懂感恩的人。相反，谁对他发自内心地好，他都感激涕零。别看他脸色苍白，一副冷漠幻灭的表情，他内心里那个孩子似的灵魂在冲这女人感恩哭泣，巴望着再次亲近她。但他那弃儿的心知道他应该与她保持清白才是。

点燃客厅的蜡烛时他伺机对她说：“我能找你去吗？”

“还是我找你吧。”她说。

“那好吧！”

他等了很久……但她还是来了。

他是那种激动起来就难以自持的情人，高潮很快就来到，一会儿便完事了。他的裸体疲软无力，看上去就像个赤裸的儿童。他的劲儿全在心智上，在他狡猾的本能里，而一旦不用斗心眼儿身心缓和下来时，他就会像个赤子，发育不全，皮肉细腻，挣扎起来很无助。

他激起了这女人狂热的怜爱和渴望，还有狂野渴求的欲望。他并没有满足她的欲望，他总是来去匆匆，过于短暂，然后就萎缩了，伏在她的胸口等待恢复，而她则神情恍惚地躺着，怅然若失。

但很快她就学会了怎么让他坚忍延宕，让他高潮之后仍能保持在她体内。这方面他表现得很大度，保持着奇特的坚挺。他坚定地守在她体内，把自己交给她支配，随她激情万分地狂野律动，直至达到自己的高潮。他虽然是被动地坚挺着，但能感觉到康妮达到高潮时的疯狂，为此他莫名其妙地感到骄傲和满足。

“啊，真是太美妙了！”康妮颤抖着呢喃，安静地贴在他身上。他躺着觉得有点孤独，但还是感到些自豪。

他那次只住了三天，表面上对克利福德还一直像头天晚上那样，对康妮也没两样，外表上他一点也没有改变。

回去后他给康妮写信，语调照旧可怜阴郁，时而俏皮，但奇怪的是毫无欢爱的流露。他爱她，但似乎并不抱什么希望，因此基本上还是敬而远之。他内心深处是没希望的，他宁愿没希望。他对希望这东西有点怨恨。他从哪儿读过这样一句法国人的话：“巨大的希望掠过地球而去。”
⑥

对此他的评论是：“它击沉了一切有价值的东西。”

康妮从来也没有理解过他，但就是爱他。她总是感觉得到他的无望对自己的影响，她是怎么也无法在无望中恋爱的，而无望的他则从来就没怎么爱得起来。

他们两人就这样处了很长一段时间，写写信，偶尔也在伦敦会会。她仍然念念不忘与他在一起时获得的那种刺激，那是他的小高潮过去后她自己律动得到的，他也想让她得到这个。仅仅这一点就足以让他们保持联系了。

也足以使她感到一点莫名的自信，某种盲目的、稍稍令她自傲的东西。那几乎是一种机械的信心，她自身的力量带来的欢乐。

在拉格比府里她显得特别快活。她把自己身上被唤醒的机敏和满足感都用来激发克利福德的想象力，使得克利福德这段时间的写作状态达到最佳，并且也感到莫名其妙的幸福。他确实收获了米凯利斯被动的坚挺给康妮带来的快感结出的果实。当然他对此一无所知，否则他决不会对康妮表示感谢的！

可一旦那快活的日子过去了，康妮就变得压抑且易怒。克利福德是多么希望再过上那样的好日子呀！如果他知道这其中的秘密，或许还会让康妮和米凯利斯再度相聚也说不定。

注　释

①
伦敦最时髦的商业区。

②
“bitch-goddess of Success”，这个词是哲学家威廉姆·詹姆斯（1842—1910）的发明，意指金钱能使人丧德。但在本书的第六章中劳伦斯却将其误认为是威廉姆之弟、作家亨利·詹姆斯（1843—1916）的创造。

③
诺丁汉郡北邻的约克郡一座工业城市，当初也是矿区。——译者注

④
雷诺阿（1841—1919），塞尚（1839—1906），法国印象派画家。

⑤
见英国诗人丁尼生的诗作《纪念》：“我算什么？／黑夜里哭泣的婴儿：／为寻找光明而哭泣：／没有语言，只有一声哭泣。”

⑥
此句出自法国作家缪塞（1810—1857）。

第四章

康妮一直觉得她和米克（人们都这么叫他）没有希望，可别的男人她又看不上。她与克利福德相依为命，他需要占有她大量的生命，她把这给了他。可她也需要一个男人大量的生命，这，克利福德没有给她，因为他不能。倒是有米凯利斯时而出现，但康妮预感到这快要结束了。米克无法守住什么，这是他的天性使然。他必须断绝任何关系，放任自由，孤家寡人，当一条孤独的狗。他非这样不可，尽管他总在说：“是女人甩了我！”

这世界似乎应该遍地是机会，但在多数人看来，机会都让少数人得了。海里有无数优质品种的鱼……或许是吧……但大量的似乎都是鲭鱼或鲱鱼，如果你自己不是鲭鱼或鲱鱼，你可能会发现海里没什么好鱼了。
①

克利福德名声大噪，还赚了不少钱。人们开始来拜访他了。康妮似乎总在招待来拉格比府的客人。不过这些人不是鲭鱼就是鲱鱼，只偶尔有一条鲇鱼或大海鳗。

来者有几个常客，他们是克利福德在剑桥读书时的同学。其中一个叫汤米·杜克斯，他一直在军中，而且当上旅长了。他说：“军队给了我时间思考，省得我为生活而战斗。”

另一个叫查尔斯·梅，是个爱尔兰人，写些研究天文的科学文章。还有一个叫哈蒙德，也是个作家。他们都和克利福德年岁相当，是时下的青年知识分子。他们都信仰精神生活。除此之外你做什么都是私人的事，无关紧要。没人想打听别人的事，如谁谁什么时候如厕。除了当事人，别人对此不感兴趣。

大部分涉及到日常生活的事都是这样……你怎么挣钱，爱不爱你妻子，或者是不是有“外遇”。这些只是当事人的事，就像何时如厕一样，不关旁人的事。

“整个性问题的核心是，”哈蒙德开口说，他是个瘦高个儿，有老婆和两个孩子，但和一个女打字员关系更亲密，“是没什么核心。严格地说，是没什么问题。我们不想尾随一个人进厕所吧，那我们干吗要跟踪他和女人上床的事呢？问题就在这里。如果我们不把后者看得比前者严重，那就没问题了。这纯粹是毫无意义，毫无要领，纯属胡乱好奇。”

“很对，哈蒙德，很对！可是如果有谁向朱莉娅求爱，你会怒不可遏。如果他得寸进尺，你就会立即爆发。”朱莉娅是哈蒙德的妻子。

“那当然！如果他在我客厅的角落里撒尿，我也会发怒的。干什么有干什么的地方。”

“你的意思是如果有人和朱莉娅在不碍事的壁龛里欢爱，你就不在乎了吗？”

查尔斯·梅这话有点嘲弄的味道，他曾经与朱莉娅调过情，被哈蒙德粗暴地制止了。

“我当然在乎。性这东西是我和朱莉娅之间的私事，要是有人想插足，我当然会在乎。”

“说白了吧，”身体瘦弱、脸上长着雀斑的汤米·杜克斯说话了，他看起来比苍白微胖的梅更像爱尔兰人，“说白了吧，哈蒙德，你有很强的占有欲，很强的自高自大心劲儿。你渴望成功。因为我进了军队，所以我彻底脱离了这个世界的轨道。可是现在我看出来了，男人们是多么强烈地想独断专行，想成功。这方面他们走得太远了，我们的个性全朝着那个方向发展了。当然，像你这样的男人认为可以靠女人的支持而过得更好，正因此你才有那么强的妒忌心。那就是性对你的意义……你和朱莉娅之间有力的小发电机，它能带来成功。一旦你开始在成功的路上走下坡路，你就会像不成功的查利那样开始调情。像你和朱莉娅这样的已婚者脸上贴着标签呢，就像旅行者的箱子一样。朱莉娅脸上的标签是‘阿诺德·B．哈蒙德太太’，就像火车上一个属于某人的箱子。你的标签是‘阿诺德·B．哈蒙德，阿诺德·B．哈蒙德太太收转’。哦，你说得很对，很对！精神生活需要舒适的房子和精致的菜肴。你说得很对。甚至还要有后代。所有这些都取决于成功的本能，那才是一切事物运转的轴心呢。”

哈蒙德看上去十分不悦。他本来为自己心智健全、不趋炎附势感到骄傲。但他的确还是渴望成功。

“不错，你离了金钱就活不了，”梅说，“你得有一笔钱供你过日子。甚至你要自由地思考，也得有一笔钱才行，否则你的肚皮就制止你思考了。不过我觉得，你可以揭下性的标签。既然我们能自由地同任何人交谈，我们为什么不能向喜欢我们的女人求爱呢？”

“好色的凯尔特人才这么说。”克利福德说。

“好色？好啊，为什么不呢？我就看不出和女人睡觉哪儿伤着她了，那和跟她跳舞……或者甚至是跟她聊天一样无害嘛。不过是把头脑换成了感官，所以说，为什么不呢？”

“那不是和兔子一样乱来了吗？”哈蒙德说。

“为什么不呢？兔子有什么错？难道它们比怀着满腔仇恨之人还坏吗？”

“即便如此，我们毕竟还不是兔子嘛。”哈蒙德说。

“说得对！我还有脑子，在天文学方面我还需要做点计算，对我来说这东西比生或死还让我操心。有时消化不良会打扰我，饥饿会灾难性地影响我。同样，饥渴的性欲也会干扰我，怎么办？”

“我倒觉得性生活无度造成的性消化不良给你的干扰更严重些。”哈蒙德讽刺道。

“没有的事儿！我不暴饮暴食，也不放纵欲望。暴饮暴食可以节制，可你也不能把我饿死呀。”

“不会的！你可以结婚呀。”

“你怎么知道我可以结？结婚可能不适合我的脑力工作。婚姻或许会……肯定会损害我的精神活动。我不适合那样被固定住……难道这样我就得当和尚啦？没有的事，小伙子。我必须活着，做我的天文计算。我有时会需要女人。但我不小题大做，我也拒绝任何道德指责或禁忌。如果哪个女人像个衣服箱子一样身上带着我的标签东跑西颠，上面写着地址和到站名，那会让我感到耻辱。”

这两个男人还为调情的事耿耿于怀。

“这看法挺逗，查利，”杜克斯说，“你认为性是另一种形式的聊天，你是在身体力行表演那些话而不是用嘴说。我想这挺有道理。我想我们既然能和女人聊天气什么的，就能跟她们进行感官和情感上的交流。性或许是男女之间正常的身体对话。跟女人，没共同看法就别谈话，那样聊着没劲。同样，如果你和女人感情不通，相互不理解，你就别跟她睡。但是如果你有——”

“如果你和哪个女人有了一定的感情或相互理解，你就应该跟她睡，”梅说，“这时候最体面的事就是跟她上床。这就如同当你有兴致和一个女人聊天时，最体面的事就是把话都说出来一样。你不会咬紧舌头不说话的，你会把该说的都说出来。跟女人上床是同一个道理。”

“不，”哈蒙德说，“不对。比如你吧，梅，你一半的精力都浪费在女人身上了。你永远也不会真正干你该干的事，尽管你有这么聪明的脑子。在那方面你浪费得太多了。”

“或许是吧……可你在那方面的付出又太少了点儿，哈蒙德小伙子。无论你结没结婚，都太少了。你尽可以保持你的精神纯洁健康，可它会干枯的。你的精神会变得和琴弓子
②

一样干枯，我看出来了。你越说越干。”

听到这里，汤米·杜克斯忍不住笑了出来。

“行了，你们两个聪明人儿！”他说，“看看我吧，我并不干什么高尚纯洁的脑力工作，只是写上几行这样那样的想法。我既不结婚，也不追女人。我觉得查利说得挺对，如果他想追女人，他可以自由决定自己追得多勤，我是不会禁止他追的。至于哈蒙德，他有占有欲，所以很自然，等待他的是直通目的地的大路和窄门
③

。你会看到他早晚会成为一个英国文豪，从头到脚全是ABC
④

。我嘛，什么都不是，只是爱唠叨。你呢，克利福德？你认为性是发电机，能推动男人获取功名利禄吗？”

一到这种时候克利福德就少言寡语了。他从来也不会滔滔不绝，因为他的理念并不强，而且过于混乱，人又容易激动。听汤米这么问，他的脸就红了，看上去很不自在。

“我嘛！”他用了个法文词说，“我都没战斗力的人了，对这个问题还有什么可说的，不说也罢。”

“没关系！”杜克斯说，“你的上身还没失去战斗力嘛，思维十分健康活跃，所以，给我们说说你的看法吧。”

“唉！”克利福德支支吾吾道，“即便如此我也没太多的看法……结婚，把该做的做了，这大概就是我的看法吧。当然，在相互关心的男人和女人之间，那事儿是件大事儿。”

“怎样的大事儿？”汤米问。

“哦……它增进亲昵。”克利福德说，说起这类事时他像女人那样忸怩。

“好吧，查利和我都认为性和语言一样是一种交流。随便哪个女人跟我开始性的对话，时机一成熟，我就自然而然地会跟她到床上去结束这场对话。可惜啊，没有女人对我有所表示，所以我得一人孤零零地上床。但我并不因此就逊色……我希望是这样，管它呢，我干吗要知道这个？我反正不需要忙什么天文计算，也不要写什么传世大作，我只是在军队里躲清净而已……”

随之一阵沉默，四个人自顾默默地吸烟，康妮端坐一旁做着针线……是的，她是坐在那儿！她不得不缄默而坐，不得不像只耗子一样安静，不能打搅这些多智慧的绅士们之间进行的意义重大的探讨。可她又不得不在场，没她，他们就无法和睦相处，他们的想法无法自由衔接。克利福德说话模棱两可，神情紧张，康妮一不在他就容易害怕，造成谈话不畅。汤米·杜克斯表现最佳，康妮在场让他有点兴奋。而哈蒙德她则不怎么喜欢，这人过于自私。查尔斯·梅呢，她倒是有点喜欢，但就是觉得他的谈话格调不高，语无伦次，尽管说起天文来还行。

不知有多少个夜晚，康妮都这样坐在厅里倾听这四个人的高论，偶尔还会有一两个其他人加入进来。他们似乎永远也谈不出个子丑寅卯来，这一点并不令康妮苦恼。她喜欢听他们说些不吐不快的话，特别是汤米在场时。那样的谈话很令人愉快。男人不是在吻你，不是在用身体接触你，而是在向你袒露心声，这真是件乐事。可他们的心声是多么冷酷啊！

有时他们的谈话也让人烦。米凯利斯，他们说起他的名字时都表示蔑视，好像他是个一门心思钻营的小杂种，是个最没教养的下流坯子。而康妮却比较敬重他。杂种也好，下流坯也好，人家很快就到了自己的目的地，而不仅仅是没完没了地说来说去，炫耀自己的智慧。

康妮挺喜欢精神层面的生活，常能从此获得快乐，但她觉得这些人智慧得有点过头了。她喜欢那一个个弥漫着烟草味的美妙夜晚，坐在这几个“密友”中间，她私下里这么称呼他们。令她感到十分有趣和骄傲的是，没有她沉默地坐在他们身边，他们就谈不下去。她对思想有着无上的尊崇，而这些男人至少是在努力诚实地思考着。但是有什么东西他们没有谈出来，他们都在回避什么，至于究竟是什么，康妮无论如何也说不清。这东西连米克也没弄清楚。

可米克并没有试图行动，他只是过他的日子，别人怎么蒙骗他，他也怎么蒙骗别人。他确实是个反社会的人，这正是克利福德和他的“密友”们跟他作对的原因。克利福德和他的“密友”们不是反社会之人，他们或多或少是致力于拯救人类的人，至少是要给人以济世良方的。

周日晚上有一场精彩的谈话，话题又转到了爱情上。

“保佑那纽带

将我们的心连成一体。”
⑤

汤米·杜克斯说，“我想知道那纽带是什么……现在将我们连在一起的纽带是心灵的摩擦，除此之外，我们之间绝没有别的什么。我们和世界上别的该死的知识分子一样分崩离析，恶语相加。在这一点上，每个人都该死，因为人人都干这个。要不然就是用虚假的甜言蜜语掩饰我们之间的恶感。真怪，精神生活的丰富是扎根于怨恨，不可理喻、深不可测的怨恨。一直是这样！看看柏拉图笔下的苏格拉底，还有他周围那帮人吧！纯粹是怨恨，恨不得将别人骂得体无完肤才痛快……无论是普罗塔哥拉还是别的谁，都这样！还有阿尔西比亚德斯等一干小喽罗们也趁火打劫！
⑥

看看他们，就会让人向往静坐在菩提树下的菩萨，或者给信徒讲点礼拜日故事的基督，他们是那么宁静，毫无精神上的刀光剑影。不对，这种精神生活根本就有点毛病，它扎根在怨恨和妒忌，妒忌和怨恨之中。要知道一棵树怎么样，看它结的果子就行了。
⑦

”

“我不认为我们就那么仇恨满腔的。”克利福德不同意。

“亲爱的克利福德，想想我们之间是怎么说话的吧，我们所有人。我就比大家都差劲，因为我就喜欢直截了当的怨恨，不喜欢巧言令色的甜言蜜语，那简直是毒药。一旦我开始夸奖克利福德是个多么好的人，可怜的克利福德就得受到怜悯了。看在上帝的份上，你们都说点我的坏话吧，那样我就会知道我在你们心里还有分量。可要是说好听的，那我就完蛋了。”

“哦，可是我确实认为我们发自内心地互相喜欢。”哈蒙德反驳说。

“我告诉你，我们必须这样……我们在背后说对方的坏话，相互辱骂。我是最差劲的一个。”

“但我认为你把精神生活和批评活动混淆了。我同意你说的，苏格拉底开创了批评活动的先河，一开始就不同凡响，可他所做的要比那多得多。”查利·梅十分郑重地说。这些“密友”，表面上谦逊，内心里却自视甚高，个个目空一切，可表面上都装得十分谦卑。

杜克斯不愿被搅到有关苏格拉底之争里面去。

“说得很对，批评和知识并不是一回事儿。”哈蒙德说。

“当然不是。”贝里附和着，这是个皮肤黝黑、表情腼腆的年轻人，他是来看杜克斯的，准备在此过夜。

大家闻之都看着他，像是听见一头驴子开口说话了似的
⑧

。

“我说的不是知识，我说的是精神生活，”杜克斯笑道，“真正的知识来自意识的整体，在这方面，你的腹腔和那东西与你的头脑和心灵一样重要。心脑只能进行分析和思辨，用头脑和理性来统领别的一切，它们唯一能做的就是批评和扼杀。我说的是唯一，它太至关紧要了。我的天，今天的世界需要批评……批到死为止。所以，咱们就在仇恨中风风光光地过我们的精神生活，把陈腐古老的矫饰都剥个精光。但是，我要提醒你们的是，当你生活时，你在某种意义上是一个有机的整体，过的是全部的生活。而一旦你开始了精神生活，你就开始摘苹果了。于是你将苹果与苹果树的联系割断了，那是一种有机的关联。如果你的生活中除了精神生活以外什么都没有，那你自己就成了一只被摘下的苹果，离开了你的树。因此，按照逻辑，你肯定会变得怨恨满腹，就如同一个被摘下的苹果自然要腐烂一样。”

克利福德听得瞠目结舌，对他来说这是一堆废话。康妮则暗自发笑。

“哦，这么说，我们都是被摘下来的苹果了。”哈蒙德略带尖酸恼怒地说道。

“那我们就把自己酿成苹果酒好了。”查利说。

“你相信爱吧，汤米，不是吗？”一阵沉默之后贝里不安地问。

“你这可爱的孩子！”汤米说，“不，我的小天使，十有八九我是不信。爱在今天是另一种愚昧的行为。那些扭摆腰肢的家伙跟那些长着小男孩屁股的艳俗女子苟合，你说的就是这种爱情？还是财产共有，博取功名，我的夫，我的妻，那类爱情？不，好老弟，我一点也不信这个！”

“可你总得信点什么吧？”

“我？哦，理智点说来，我相信人要有一副好心肠，一个生龙活虎的阳具，一个活跃的头脑和在贵妇面前敢骂‘狗屎’的勇气。”

“这些你都具备了。”贝里说。

汤米狂笑起来：“你这小天使！我要有就好了！要有就好了！你看看我，我的心像土豆一样麻木，我的阳具蔫了，永远抬不起头，我宁可把这东西一刀割了，也不愿当着我母亲或姨妈的面骂‘狗屎’……告诉你吧，她们可是真正的贵妇。而且我并不真聪明，不过是个吃脑力饭的人。聪明当然好，那样的话刚说过的那些零件儿，还有不便提及的零件，就都会活起来。对任何聪明人，阳具都会抬起头来问候。雷诺阿说过他的画就是用阳具画出来的
⑨

，他确实画出了很可爱的画儿。我希望我也能用我那物件做点什么。上帝啊，如果一个人只会谈话，那地狱里就又多了一种酷刑！谈话这玩意儿的始作俑者是苏格拉底。”

“可这世界上还是有优秀的女人的。”康妮终于抬起头开腔了。

男人们对此表示不满……她应该装作什么都没听见才是。他们不愿意承认她一直在认真听他们谈话。

“上帝啊！‘他们如果对我不善

我又何以在意他们是否是善人！’
⑩

不，这毫无希望！我就是不能跟女人和谐。一旦四目相对，没有哪个女人能让我真正渴望得到她。我也不会强迫我自己这样做……上帝！该是什么样就是什么样，我会继续过我的精神生活，这是我唯一能做的忠诚的事。和女人聊天我会很高兴的，因为我喜欢女人，但我们之间很纯洁，纯洁到绝望的地步，绝望的纯洁。你怎么说，希尔德布兰德
⑪

，我的小孩？”

“如果一个人保持纯洁的话，事情就简单多了。”贝里说。

“没错！生活是简单得不能再简单了！”

注　释

①
此句典出英文习语“There is as good fish in the sea as ever came out of it”。原意是说好机会很多，失去一个还有更多别的机会。劳伦斯在此反其意用之，并引入鲭鱼和鲱鱼作象征。鲭鱼和鲱鱼都是普通的鱼，多用来做罐头，在此意味着差的机遇或普通人。望读者明察英文里“鱼”与“机会”的关系，才不会觉得这段话前后不协调。——译者注

②
“fiddelsticks”，这个词在这里是个双关语，亦暗喻“不值钱的东西”。——译者注

③
见《马太福音》第七章，第十三至第十四节。原意说宽门引向灭亡，而窄门则通向永生。

④
当时英国有一套六十七卷的《英国文豪名录》即English Men of Letters（1878—1919），入选意味着获得了经典身份。ABC的说法则是一种幽默。因为文人在英文中是“man of letters”，“letter”又有字母一意，故说文人浑身上下都是ABC字母。

⑤
此句系十九世纪某大主教所作赞美诗第一行的改写。

⑥
见柏拉图所著以苏格拉底为主角的一系列对话之一《普罗塔哥拉》。在这部对话中出现的有希腊著名哲学家普罗塔哥拉（约公元前490—前420）和希腊将军阿尔西比亚德斯（约公元前450—前404）。

⑦
见《马太福音》第十二章，第三十三节。

⑧
见《旧约·民数记》第二十二章，巴兰的驴突然张口说话，反驳其主人。

⑨
据雷诺阿的儿子让说，雷诺阿是在双手患关节炎不能正常作画时这样说过。

⑩
此句是对George Wither（1588—1667）一句诗的套用。原句是：“如果她不对我如此／我又何以在意她有多美？”

⑪
教皇格里高利七世（约1021—1085）提倡牧师独身，他当僧侣时的本名是希尔德布兰德。

第五章

二月的一个早上，雾气蒙蒙，阳光浅淡。克利福德和康妮穿过邸园去林子里散步。克利福德驾驶着他的轮椅，康妮走在一旁。

寒冷的空气里仍然弥漫着硫磺味，不过他们倒是都习惯了。近处的地平线上灰蒙蒙一片，烟雾缭绕，头顶上是一小片蓝天，让人感到是被包围了起来，永远在围城内。生命就这样被包围着，人不是在做梦就是疯了。

羊群在杂乱的干草丛中咳嗽着，草窝里的霜微微泛着蓝光。一条小路似一条粉红色的彩带穿过园子通向树林的入口，克利福德让人从矿井台上筛了些沙砾重新铺了一遍路面。地下的石头和废料经过燃烧脱去了硫磺，就变成粉色，在干爽的天气里呈透明的虾红色，潮湿天里颜色变深，呈蟹红。现在这条路上笼罩着蓝白泛灰的霜，那红色就呈浅蟹红了。这条用筛选出的沙砾铺就的粉红色小径总是让康妮心情愉快。看来，坏东西并非一点儿用都没有。

克利福德小心地驾驶着轮椅从拉格比府所在的小山丘沿坡下行，康妮扶着轮椅。前方就是林子了，近处是榛树丛，远处是微微发紫的茂密的橡树林。林地边上野兔窜来窜去在捕食，白嘴鸭忽地飞起，排成黑压压的一队飞离这片窄小的蓝天。

康妮打开树林入口的门，克利福德缓缓地把轮椅开进去，沿坡上了一条宽阔的马道，马道两侧是修剪得整整齐齐的榛树丛。这片树林是当年罗宾汉
①

狩猎的森林余下的一部分，而这条马道则是当年横贯乡间的一条大路，但现在它自然只是私人树林中的一条马道了。从曼斯菲尔德
②

过来的路从这里拐个弯向北折去。

林子里万籁俱寂，地上的落叶下仍隐匿着一层薄霜。一只松鸦发出刺耳的叫声，吓得许多小鸟儿纷纷飞窜开去。但林子里没有狩猎活动，因为没有供狩猎用的山鸡。山鸡都在战争期间给捕杀一空，林子也一直没人看护。直到现在，克利福德才新找了一个猎场看守。

克利福德喜爱这片林子。他喜爱那些古老的橡树，感到它们一代又一代都属于他。他要保护它们，要保护这片地方不受侵害，要让它与世隔绝。

轮椅车在冻泥地上摇摇晃晃，缓慢地爬上斜坡。左手边突然出现了一片空地，满地都是乱糟糟的枯蕨丛，细弱的树苗左一棵右一棵东倒西歪，一根根被锯断的大树桩子裸露着断面，还有紧紧扎在地下的树根，毫无生气。还有一片片黑斑，那是伐木工人焚烧树枝和垃圾时留下来的。

这就是杰弗里爵士大战期间为修战壕提供木头而砍伐的地方之一。马道右手边微微隆起的山丘上树木都被砍光了，看上去出奇地悲凉。山丘最高处曾经生长着橡树，现在则是一片光秃。从那里俯瞰树林子，可以看到林子外面的矿区运输铁路以及斯戴克斯门
③

的新矿井。康妮站在那里看着眼前的景象，发现那是在宁静隐秘的森林中撕开的一道口子，让外面的世界长驱直入。但她没有把这个感觉告诉克利福德。

这片被砍秃了的地方总是令克利福德异常愤怒。他是经过大战的人，明白那意味着什么。但是直到亲眼看到这座秃山，他才真正感到愤怒。他正让人在此重新植树。可一看见它，他就痛恨杰弗里爵士。

轮椅车缓缓地向上开着，克利福德坐在车里，面无表情。来到山顶，他停住了车，他不打算冒险开上那面狭长颠簸的斜坡了。下山的马道泛着绿色，在蕨草丛和橡树林中穿过，在山下打了个弯就不见了。这马道竟有如此美妙柔和的曲线，那是骑士和贵妇们骑马踏出来的。

“我认为这才是英国的心脏
④

。”克利福德沐在二月朦胧的阳光里对康妮说。

“是吗？”康妮说，她身穿蓝色的针织外套，坐在路边的木桩上。

“是的！这是古老的英格兰，是她的心脏，我要让它完美如初。”

“哦，对！”正说着，康妮听到斯戴克斯门矿井拉响了上午十一点的汽笛声。而克利福德因为太熟悉这声音而对此毫不在意。

他继续说：“我要让这片林子完整无损……不受伤害，不让任何人私自闯进来。”

克利福德说得有点悲凉。这片林子仍然透着几分野性的老英格兰的神秘，可杰弗里爵士战争期间的砍伐让它损伤了元气。这些树木曾经是多么安详，起伏的树梢耸入云天，灰白的树干顽强地从褐色的蕨草丛中拔地而起，鸟儿在林间安全地飞来飞去。这里还曾经有野鹿出没，射手在这里狩猎，僧侣骑着毛驴款款而行。这地方有这样的记忆，还记得这些。

克利福德坐在惨淡的阳光里，光线辉映着他光滑金黄的头发，红润丰满的脸上表情细微莫测。

“我到了这里，比在任何别的地方都更感到无后的遗憾。”他说。

“可这片林子比你的家族还要古老呢。”康妮轻柔地说。

“对！”克利福德说，“但是我们使它存活了下来。要是没有我们，它早就消失了，和整座森林一起消失掉。老英格兰的某些部分必须得有人保存！”

“必须？”康妮说，“必须要保存吗？要同新的英格兰对抗吗？我觉得这很可悲。”

“如果老英格兰一点也不保留下来，就没有英格兰了，”克利福德说，“我们这些有这类财产并且对她有感情的人必须要保留她。”

说完两人都感伤地沉默了。

“是的，可以保留上一阵子。”康妮说。

“一阵子！我们能做的就是这些，我们只能尽我们的绵薄之力。我感到我家族的人都尽职尽力了，自从我们开始拥有这个地方。人可以反陈规陋习，但必须保持传统。”又是一阵沉默不语。

“什么样的传统呢？”康妮问。

“英格兰的传统！这个传统！”

“是的！”她慢慢地说。

“所以说得有个子嗣才行。一个人只是一条链子上的一环。”他说。

康妮对链条并没兴趣，不过她一言不发。她在琢磨他说到渴望儿子时表现出的那种奇特的冷漠。

“我很难过，我们无法有儿子。”她说。

他那双淡蓝色的大眼睛缓缓地打量着她说：

“如果你和另一个男人有了个孩子，那也算件好事。如果我们在拉格比把它带大，它就属于我们，属于这个地方了。我并不太在意是不是它的亲生父亲。如果我们养大这孩子，它就是我们的了，而且它会传宗接代的。你不觉得这事值得考虑吗？”

康妮终于抬起头来看着他。孩子，她的孩子，在他眼里竟然只是个“它”。它……它……它！

“可是，那另一个男人怎么办？”她问。

“那很重要吗？那些事会很影响我们吗……你在德国有过情人……现在不是挺好吗？几乎没什么嘛！对我来说，我们生活中的这些小动作和小小的关系并不那么重要。它们说过去就过去了，现在在哪儿呢？昨天的雪在什么地方？
⑤

重要的是一生中长久坚持下来的东西。我自己的生活对我来说就至关重要，因为它经过了长久的延续和发展。可那些偶然发生的关系有什么了不起的？特别是那些偶然发生的欢爱！如果人们不荒唐地去夸大它们，那不过就像鸟儿的交尾，过去就过去了。本来就应该这样，有什么大不了的？重要的是终生厮守的伴侣关系。天天生活在一起，而不是一两次苟合。你和我结合了，不论发生了什么都不会把我们分开。我们各自习惯了对方，习惯在我看来比偶尔的快感还要重要。长期、缓慢地持续下来的东西，我们就按照这种习惯生活，而不是凭着任何偶然的冲动。一点一滴，生活在一起，两个人就融为一体了，两人之间会产生说不清道不明的震颤，相互影响对方。这就是婚姻的秘密，而不是性，至少不是性的简单官能作用。你和我在婚姻中交织为一体了。如果我们恪守这个婚姻，就应该能安排这桩性事，就像安排看牙医一样，因为命运让我们身体上出了毛病。”

康妮坐在树桩上惊诧地听着这番话，听得害怕起来。她说不清克利福德是对还是错。她爱过米凯利斯，她这样对自己说。但这场恋爱不过是她与克利福德婚姻中的一次出行度假，短暂地离开在这五年的苦难和坚韧中长期缓慢形成的亲昵关系。或许人的灵魂需要多次出行度假，这种需求无法拒绝。但度假的问题是你还要回家。

“难道你不在意我生的是谁的孩子吗？”康妮问道。

“为什么呢，康妮？我应该相信你有维护体面和选择的本能，你肯定不会让哪个坏家伙碰你的。”

这时康妮想到的是米凯利斯！他绝对是克利福德认为的那种坏家伙。

“不过在坏家伙的看法上，男人和女人的感觉可能是不一样的。”她说。

“不，”他说，“你会考虑到我。我不相信你会考虑接受一个对我完全冷酷无情的男人，你的良心不会允许你这样做。”

康妮沉默了。逻辑上这是不可理喻的，因为这话绝对是不合逻辑的。

“你希望我如实告知你吗？”她问道，颇为小心地朝上瞟了他一眼。

“千万别，我最好不知道……不过你肯定同意我的话，就是与长期共同的生活相比，偶然的性事毫无价值。你难道不认为，一个人可以把性事放在比长期生活的需求次要的位置上？既然我们不得不那样，那就利用它一下也好。不过，这些短暂的快活重要吗？生命的核心难道不是在岁月的长河中逐渐培养一个完美的人格并过一种完整的生活吗？人格分裂的生活是毫无价值的。如果缺少性事会让你感到人格分裂，那就出去闹一场恋爱。如果没有孩子会让你感到分裂，那就尽你的可能生一个孩子。但是，你做这些事都是为了过一种完整的生活，它能让你长久地生活在和谐之中。你和我可以共同完整和谐地生活……你不认为是这样吗……我们调整自己去适应那些必需的东西，同时将这种调整与我们稳定的生活结为一体。你同意我的话吗？”

康妮让他说懵了。她知道他是对的，在理论上。可当她想到跟他一起度过的稳定生活，她就游移了。她命中注定就要继续把自己的一生都融进他的生命吗？难道就没有别的了吗？

难道只能这样？她要安心地与他编织一个稳定的生活，编成一件织物，不过也可能织进一朵偶然的冒险之花。可她怎么知道明年她的感觉如何？谁能知道呢？谁又能说个肯定的“是”字？那以后的一年又一年呢？那小小的“是”字如同一缕游丝！为什么要让那个蝴蝶般飘忽不定的词儿左右着？当然了，它会飘走，消失，随之而来的将是别的“是”与“不是”，就如同飞逝的蝴蝶。

“我觉得你说得对，克利福德，至少目前我同意你的话。可是生活可能会变得面目全非。”

“那么在面目全非之前你是同意的了？”

“哦，是的。我想我同意，真的！”

她看到小径上跑出来一只棕色猎犬，猎犬耸着鼻子朝他们看着，抖着茸毛，低声吠着。随之一个背枪的男人大步赶上，脚步轻轻地跟着狗闪出来，朝他们这边看着，似乎是要攻击他们。然后他停住了脚步，敬了个礼，转身向山下走去。那是新来的猎场看守，可他却把康妮吓着了。他猛地出现，简直是吓人。她就那么看见了他，似乎是从什么地方猛然出现的一种骇人的力量。

那个男人身穿深绿色的棉绒衣，打着绑腿……老式的红脸膛，红胡子，目光冷漠，快步朝山下走去。

“梅勒斯！”克利福德叫道。

那人稍微转了转头，迅速敬了个礼，那是一个军礼！

“你能把椅子转过去，再推一下吗？那我就好办了。”克利福德说。

那男人马上把枪挎在肩上，走了上来，步子仍旧快得出奇，可脚步却很轻盈，似乎是想隐藏自己不让人看见。他中等个儿，偏瘦，表情沉静。他并没有看康妮，眼睛只盯着轮椅。

“康妮，这是新来的看守梅勒斯。你还没有同夫人说过话吧，梅勒斯？”

“还没有，先生！”那人不动声色道，像是早就准备好了似的。

那人站起身时摘下帽子，露出一头近乎金色的密实头发来。他的眼睛直视着康妮的眼睛，一点也不害怕，目光冷漠，似乎是想看清她的长相。这目光令康妮羞赧，她羞涩地垂下头。他则把帽子换到左手上，冲她轻轻地鞠了一躬，那架势很像个绅士，但什么都没说。他就那么手拿着帽子一动不动地站着。

“你来这里有一段时间了吧？”康妮问他道。

“八个月了，太太……夫人！”他平静地改口。

“喜欢这儿吗？”

她盯着他的眼睛。他的眼睛眯了起来，打趣或者说是无礼地说：

“哦，是的，谢谢夫人！我在这儿土生土长……”说完他又轻轻鞠个躬，然后转过身去，戴上帽子，走过去抓住轮椅。他说最后几个字时，拖着浓重的土腔，或许是故意嘲讽的吧，因为前面的话一点土音都没有。他或许算个绅士，不管怎样他是个怪人，聪明，不合群，孤独但有自信。

克利福德发动起小小的马达，那人小心翼翼地转过轮椅，将它对着蜿蜒没入黑暗榛树丛的坡路。

“还有什么事吗，克利福德男爵？”那人问道。

“是的！你最好跟着，以防车子走不动。这发动机其实没什么劲儿，怕是上不了山。”那男人朝边上扫了一眼找他的狗，眼神里若有所思。那条猎狗看看他，轻轻地摇了摇尾巴。随之他莞尔一笑，像在嘲笑或戏弄那狗，笑容稍纵即逝，他的脸又变得毫无表情了。他们下坡走得挺快，那男人手握轮椅的扶手保持着平稳。他看上去更像个悠闲的兵，而不是一个仆人。不知怎的，他令康妮想起了汤米·杜克斯。

来到榛树丛时，康妮突然跑上前去打开通往园子的门。她扶着门，两个男人过去时都看着她：克利福德的表情是在指责他，那个男人则显得不解，漠然地看着她似乎是要看清她的模样。康妮从他那淡然的蓝眼睛里看到了一丝痛苦和超然，但也看出了一丝温暖。可是他为什么如此孤独，如此与世隔绝呢？

一过大门克利福德就停住了车，那人赶忙客气地快步过来关门。

“你干吗要跑去开门？”克利福德问，语气平静，但透着不满，“梅勒斯会开的。”

“我想你们就可以一直过去了嘛。”康妮说。

“那不就得让你在后面追我们吗？”

“没事，有时候我还愿意跑跑呢。”

梅勒斯又抓住了轮椅，看上去毫不动声色。但康妮感到他什么都看在眼里了。他推着轮椅走上比较陡峭的坡路，张开嘴巴急促地呼吸起来。他很瘦弱，真的，可奇怪的是，却挺有劲儿。但终归是有点弱，心情有点压抑。这一点她凭着女性的本能感觉出来了。

康妮退后，让车子先行。天色阴沉了下来，那块烟雾包围中低垂的一小片蓝天又合拢了，盖子盖上了，天气寒冷起来。要下雪了，周围一切都变成了灰色，灰色！整个世界看上去衰败不堪。

轮椅在粉红的马道尽头停下来等康妮。克利福德扭头问康妮：“不累吧你？”

“哦，不累！”她说。

但她累了。她感到一阵渴求，奇特而令人乏力，那源自一种不满。克利福德没看出来她这种感觉，这种事他是不会注意的，但那个生人却懂得。对康妮来说，世界上的一切和她的生命似乎都衰败了，她的不满是由来已久了。

他们来到宅子前，绕到后门，那里没有台阶。克利福德自己将就着挪到了一辆室内轮椅上。他身体很壮实，双臂也很灵活。然后康妮抬起他两条沉重的僵腿帮他挪过去。

那猎场看守静候着主人发话让他退下，把一切都看在眼里。看到康妮的胳膊抱起那男人僵死的双腿把它们抬到另一辆矮的轮椅中去，克利福德顺势转身坐好时，他脸色苍白了，露出恐惧的表情来。

“谢谢你帮忙，梅勒斯。”克利福德顺口道谢，开始转动轮椅上了走廊穿过仆人区。

“没别的事了吗，先生？”那人不动声色地问，像是在梦游。

“没了，再见。”

“再见，先生。”

“再见！谢谢你帮忙把车推上山，但愿那车对你不是太沉。”康妮回头看着门外的看守说。

他的目光马上与她的目光相遇了，他似乎从梦中醒了，开始关注她了。

“哦，不，不沉！”他马上说，随后他又操着浓重的土音说，“夫人回头见！”

“你的猎场看守是谁？”午饭时分康妮问克利福德。

“梅勒斯呀！你见过他。”克利福德说。

“是的。我问的是他从哪儿来的？”

“哪儿也不是。他就是特瓦萧村的孩子……一个矿工的儿子吧，我猜。”

“他自己也干过矿工吗？”

“是矿里的铁匠，我想，是在井口的棚里干活的铁匠。不过大战前他在这儿干过两年看守，一打仗他就参军了。我父亲一直挺喜欢他，所以他回来后去矿上当铁匠时，我就让他回到这儿接着当看守。他当看守我最放心，因为这附近很难找到个像样的人当猎场看守，再说了，当看守还得认识这里的人才行。”

“他结婚了吗？”

“结过！可老婆跑了，跟……跟过好几个男人，但最终还是跟了个矿工，在斯戴克斯门那边，我想她现在还在那儿住呢。”

“就是说这个人现在独居着？”

“差不多吧！他还有个母亲住在村里，还有个孩子，我估计。”

克利福德看着康妮，那略微鼓凸的淡蓝色眼睛变得朦胧起来。那眼睛的前方似乎很警觉，但后方却像这中部一带的空气，雾霭迷茫，而且那雾霭似乎在向前弥漫。因此，当他以自己特殊的方式凝视康妮，准确无误地回答她的问题时，康妮都会感到他的头脑背景是一片迷雾，一片空白。这令她恐惧，也让他显得不近人情，有点发痴。

朦胧之中她认识到了人类灵魂的一大规律：当感情的魂受到一记打击而受伤但肉体并没有死亡时，受伤的灵魂似乎会像肉体创伤一样得到恢复。可这只是表面现象，只是一种习惯上复原的机制在起作用。渐渐地，渐渐地，灵魂上的创伤开始让人感到创痛，就像伤疤的疼痛渐渐变得剧烈起来，直到这伤痛遍布整个心灵。当我们自以为康复了，忘记了，这个时候，那可怕的后遗症就会发作，痛到极点。

克利福德就是这样。一旦他“康复”了，回到拉格比庄园并开始写起小说来，无论以前如何，他都感到生命安全了。于是他似乎开始忘记，安之若素起来。但随着日子一年年过去，康妮渐渐感到恐惧的伤疤开始复萌并在他身体里扩散。当初因为伤痕太深，人变得麻木了，甚至觉得伤痕不存在了。现在，那伤痕开始随着恐惧的加深而渐渐扩散开来，几乎让他瘫痪。精神上他依旧活跃，但那种麻痹，那种过于沉重的打击造成的休克，现在开始渐渐地扩散到他的感情上了。

随着那麻痹在他身上扩散，康妮感到它也在自己身上扩散开来。某种内在的忧虑、空虚，对一切的冷漠渐渐扩散至她的心灵。兴奋起来时，克利福德还能滔滔不绝地聊天，还能把握未来，就像他在森林里谈论怎么让她生个孩子替他继承拉格比庄园。但是一到第二天，那些高论就像落叶一样蜷缩起来然后碎成齑粉，一点意义都没有，一阵风吹来就给吹得无影无踪了。因为那不是活生生的语言，像嫩叶一样充满活力，长在树上，而是一些落叶，生命已经枯萎的落叶。

在她眼里，到处都如此。特瓦萧的矿工们又在谈论罢工
⑥

了。可在康妮看来，这并不是活力的展示，而是隐藏在深处的战争伤疤在渐渐浮出表面，其疼痛导致不安，其麻痹导致不满。那创伤过于深重，深重，深重，那是虚伪而非人的战争造成的。溶化这些凝结在灵魂中的黑色血块，需要几代人的鲜血、很多年的时间才行，而且还要有新的期盼。

可怜的康妮！时光在流逝，她对生命空虚的恐惧令她惶惶不安。克利福德的精神生活，还有她的精神生活，渐渐开始让她感到空虚了。他们的婚姻，克利福德所说的他们那建立在亲昵习惯上的完整生活，这些，经过漫长的日子，变成全然的空虚。只有谈话和文字，太多的话和字词而没有任何实质的东西，只有字词的虚伪。

克利福德成功了，他获得了母狗女神的青睐！没错，他算成功了，最新的这本书给他带来了一千镑的收入
⑦

。他的照片随处可见。一家美术馆里陈列着他的半身塑像，两家画廊里有他的画像。他的作品成了最摩登的作品，凭着他残疾人那种不可思议的造势本能，他在四五年之内就成了年轻“文化人”中的佼佼者了。康妮没看出来克利福德到底有什么智慧，不过他确实在幽默地分析人及其动机方面很机智，他能把人分析得体无完肤。但他的做法很像小狗将沙发垫子撕碎，不过他可不像小狗一样天真活泼，而是出奇的老练，甚至傲慢到可恶的地步。这很奇怪，很空洞。这就是康妮心里挥之不去的感觉：一切都是空虚，是空虚的精彩炫耀。仅仅是炫耀，炫耀，除了炫耀还是炫耀。

米凯利斯准备拿克利福德作他一出戏的主角，已经把情节勾勒出来并写出了第一幕。在炫耀空虚方面，米凯利斯可是比克利福德还要技高一筹。这些男人就剩下这最后一点激情了：炫耀的激情。在性方面，他们激情全无，甚至死了。现在米凯利斯追求的甚至不是金钱了。克利福德最初的动机也不是为了金钱，尽管他能赚就赚，因为金钱是成功的标志，而成功就是他们的追求。他们俩都要大大地炫耀一把，炫耀自己，去哗众取宠。

这真是咄咄怪事，人可以将自己出卖给那母狗女神。康妮确实是在这个成功的圈子之外，而且对这种成功带来的激动早就麻木了，这些在她看来都是虚无。甚至将自己出卖给那母狗女神，这本身也是虚无，尽管男人们出卖自己无数次了。即便如此，也还是虚无。

米凯利斯写信告诉了克利福德他那部戏的事，康妮早就知道了。克利福德闻之大为激动。他又要得到炫耀了，只是这次是别人替他炫耀，为他扬名。于是他邀请米凯利斯带着写好的第一幕剧本来拉格比庄园做客。

米凯利斯来了，那是在夏天，他身着浅色的西服，戴着羊皮手套，给康妮带来了美丽的紫红色兰花。剧本朗读很成功，连康妮都被感动了，感动得五体投地。米凯利斯被自己的感召力感动了，确实很出色，在康妮眼中他显得十分英俊。她从米凯利斯身上看到了一个决不幻灭的种族所具有的那种与生俱来的沉静，一个纯粹的杂种的极端例子。作为一个向那母狗女神卖身的极端者，他似乎是纯粹的，纯粹如非洲象牙面具，有着象牙般的曲线和平面，将芜杂臆想为纯洁。

他把康妮和克利福德都迷住了。与查家夫妇一起兴奋是米凯利斯一生中最为得意的时刻。他成功了，他将他们迷住了。一时间甚至克利福德都爱上了米凯利斯，如果可以这么说的话。

因此第二天一早米克更加焦躁不安，焦躁不安的手插在裤袋里难以自持。他感到自己完了，因为康妮昨天夜里没有邀请他，他也不知道到哪里去找她。卖弄风情！在这胜利的一刻，需要卖弄点风情。

早上他去她的起居室。她知道他会来的，他的局促不安很明显。他向她询问对他剧本的看法，是否满意。他需要听到赞赏，那会给他带来最后一点点激情，其享受超过了生理高潮。她激动万分地赞扬了他的剧本，但在说赞扬的话时，她内心深处知道那是虚无的。母狗女神！

“听我说！”他脱口而出道，“为什么你和我不能做个决断，我们为什么不能结婚呢？”

“可我结婚了呀！”康妮惊讶地说，但心里并无感觉。

“你说的是那个婚姻呀！让他跟你离算了。你为什么不能和我结婚？我想结。我知道这是我最美好的事，结婚，过一种正常的生活。我过的是一种倒霉的日子，简直把我撕成了碎片。你看啊，你和我是天生的一对儿，如同手和手套那么合适。我们为什么不能结婚？你觉得我们有什么不结婚的理由吗？”

康妮惊诧地看着他，可心里仍毫无感觉。这些男人，都差不多，他们是不计后果的。他们简直是忘乎所以，像爆竹一样放出去就不管了，期望你把他们那小小的壳子带上天空去。

“但是我已经结婚了，”她说，“我不能离开克利福德，这你是知道的。”

“可你为什么不能？为什么不能？”米凯利斯叫道，“你离开他半年之后他也就适应了。他不知道还有别人存在，只有他自己。要我说，这个男人对你一点用也没有，他把自己彻底包裹起来，心里只有他自己。”

康妮知道他说得对，但她同时也觉得米克表现出来的也不是无私。

“难道男人们不都是心里只有他们自己吗？”她问。

“哦，多少是这样吧，我想。一个男人必须挺住，才能闯过难关，不过那不是关键。关键是他能给女人什么日子？他能给女人美妙的时光，还是不能？如果他不能，他就不适合这个女人……”他停顿了一下，凝视着她，那饱满的褐色眼睛充满了魅力，“现在我认为，我能给予一个女人她想要得到的最美妙的日子，我想我能保证自己做到。”

“但是什么样的美妙日子呢？”康妮问，她仍然惊讶地注视着他，似乎感到震惊，但心里什么感觉都没有。

“任何，什么样美妙的日子都有！最时兴的衣服和珠宝，任何你喜欢的夜总会，任何你想认识的人，花钱如流水，旅行……到哪儿都受人尊敬，那可真是享不尽的快乐！”

说这话时他几乎是神采飞扬，康妮装出一副着迷的样子看着他，心里实则毫无感觉，甚至她心灵最肤浅的层面都没怎么被他许诺的辉煌前景所撩拨动。她在别的时候会感到兴奋，可现在她最外在的自我都不会与之呼应。她简直一点感觉都没有，无法“振奋”起来。她只是坐在那注视着他，看似着迷，实则麻木，只觉得嗅到了从哪儿冒出的一股铜臭气。

米克在椅子上如坐针毡，前倾着身子，几乎是发疯地看着她。或许他是出于虚荣急于等她说行，或许是更害怕她说不行，谁知道呢。

“我应该想想，”她说，“我现在不能答复你。你似乎觉得克利福德无所谓，可他不是可有可无的，你也不想想他都残成了什么样……”

“哦，去他的吧，一个拿自己的残疾当资本的人！我还可以说我都孤独成什么样了呢。说我一直孤寂无助，说我这样那样！一个人只会拿自己的残疾博得别人同情，算什么本事，去他的吧……”

他转过身去，双手在裤袋里拼命地抓挠着。那天晚上他对她说：

“今天晚上来我房间吧，行吗？我不知道你的卧室在哪儿。”

“那好吧！”她说。

那一夜，他比往常更兴奋，他那小男孩似的瘦弱裸体激动得跟什么似的。康妮发现他都结束了可她自己还无法达到高潮，可是他那小男孩似的裸体和温存唤起了她的渴望和激情，于是她不得不在他结束后自己继续。她的腰臀疯狂地起伏着，而他则意志坚强，主动地奉献自己，让自己一直坚挺地守在她体内，直到她达到高潮，发出奇特的呻吟声。

最终从她体内退出时，他语调苦涩，甚至是嘲弄地低声说：“你就不能和男人一起达到高潮吗？你非得自己那样不可？你是要操纵整个过程！”

在那一刻这短短几句话成了她一生中少有的打击，因为那种被动奉献很明显是他真正的欢爱方式。

“你这是什么意思？”她问。

“你知道我什么意思。你在我结束后持续折腾那么久……而我就得咬紧牙关坚持不懈，直到你由着性儿自己受用了为止。”

这番始料未及的粗话令她惊讶，要知道这可正是她感到妙不可言的时候，而且是对他刚刚萌生出一丝爱意之时。说到底，像很多现代男人一样，他几乎是刚一上阵就草草收兵。这是促使女人变主动的原因。

“你想让我继续下去，得到满足，对吗？”她反问。

他有点干涩地笑道：“我想！好吧，就算我想，我想咬紧牙关任你那样折腾我！”

“难道不是吗？”她坚持说。

他对此避而不答。

“所有该死的女人都那样，”他说，“她们要么没高潮，跟死了似的，要么等男人结束了以后她们自己折腾到高潮，男人得奉陪到底。我从来还没遇上一个跟我一起达到高潮的女人呢。”

康妮对这种新奇的男性知识一知半解。她简直被他的反感情绪惊呆了，他怎么会如此粗鲁呢？她觉得自己是无辜的。

“但是你也想让我受用，是不是？”她重复这个问题。

“哦，没问题！我很愿意。可我死也不觉得这对男人来说是个好玩的游戏，怎么能让男人坚挺着等女人自己折腾到高潮呢？”

这句话是康妮有生以来的一个重大打击，它扼杀了她身体中的什么东西。本来她就不太喜欢米凯利斯，他追求她，她对他还是没有欲望，似乎她从来没有主动想得到他。可一旦他让她开头了，她觉得自己就应该也从他那得到快感。她几乎因此爱上了他……几乎，在那个夜里，她爱上了他并想嫁给他了。

或许他本能地知道这一点，所以他才要毁了这一切，因为那不过是一座纸屋。那个夜晚，她对他对任何男人在那事上都绝望了。她的生活从此与他一刀两断，就如他不曾存在过。

她无聊疲惫地度日。什么都没了，除了克利福德所谓的完整生活，即两人习惯于在一个屋檐下共同生活。

空虚！接受生命的巨大空虚似乎就是活着的唯一目的。无数忙碌和举足轻重的微小东西组成的那个巨大的空虚！

注　释

①
罗宾汉是传说中的中世纪绿林英雄，在诺丁汉北部的舍伍德森林中出没。

②
诺丁汉东北部一个小城市。——译者注

③
这个词的英文“stacks”是“烟囱群”的意思，用这个词作地名加重了眼前一片工业化现象与自然风景的对比。——译者注

④
诺丁汉所在的英国中部地区被称作“英国的心脏”。——译者注

⑤
此句取自法国诗人Francois Villon（1431—1489）所写的民谣。

⑥
指1926年5月1日开始的英国全国总罢工。劳伦斯在罢工期间返故乡探亲，深深为劳资关系的紧张感到不安，写了一篇长文《还乡》，指出那将是一场革命，似“利剑刺穿英格兰的腹部”。权威的研究认为，劳伦斯返乡看到的这场大罢工情景是导致他写作这部小说的直接诱因之一。——译者注

⑦
1920年代的一千英镑是一个小学教师年薪的十倍。当初一本不赔本的小说能为作者赢得三百镑上下的收入，加上再版，比较畅销的小说作者如麦肯齐一本书往往能挣到一千多镑。如果再改编成流行戏剧在伦敦西区上演，作者能获得很高的收入，有的高达每周六百镑。从本书的情况看，克利福德应该算比较成功的小说作者了，但还没进入最成功的作家之列。——译者注

第六章

“如今的男人和女人为什么不真正相爱了呢？”康妮问汤米·杜克斯，他有点像她的向导。

“嗨，谁说他们不爱，我可不这么看。自从有了人类，男人和女人从来没有像今天这样相爱过，真的相爱！就拿我来说吧，我确实爱女人胜过男人。女人更有勇气，跟她们我可以更开诚布公。”

康妮思忖着他的话。

“那当然，可是你从来跟她们都没什么接触！”她说。

“我吗？我现在在干吗呢？不是正和一个女人十分真诚地谈话吗？”

“是的，谈话……”

“如果你是个男人，我除了十分真诚地跟你谈话还能做什么？”

“或许不能了，可是一个女人……”

“女人希望你喜欢她、和她谈话，同时爱她、渴望她。但我觉得这两样东西是互相排斥的。”

“可它们不应该这样。”

“毫无疑问，水本不应该这么湿，水过分湿了。可水就是这样湿啊！我喜欢女人，跟她们谈话。这样一来我就不能爱她们，无法对她们有欲望。这两者在我身上不能同时发生。”

“我认为它们应该能。”

“那好吧。若定要让事情变成别样，那我就没办法了。”

康妮琢磨着他的话。“不是这样的，”她说，“男人既可以爱女人也能跟她们谈话。我不明白，为什么他们可以爱女人却不跟她们谈话并友好亲昵相待，怎么就可以呢？”

“这个嘛，”汤米说，“我不知道为什么。我干吗要推而广之呢？我只知道我自己的情况。我喜欢女人，但就是对她们没欲望。我喜欢跟她们说话。尽管谈话在某一方面让我跟她们亲近，但却不会让我想跟她们接吻。就这样！但不要把我当成一个普遍的例子，或许我只是一个特殊情况——一个喜欢女人但不爱女人的男人。如果她们迫使我假装爱她们或故作纠缠状，我还会恨她们呢。”

“那不让你觉得悲哀吗？”

“为什么呢？一点也不！看看查利·梅，还有那些有艳遇的男人们……不，我丝毫也不嫉妒他们。如果命运给我一个我想要的女人，那自然好。我认识的女人我都不想要，也从来没看见过想要的。看来我是冷淡之人，可我确实特别喜欢某些女人——”

“你喜欢我吗？”

“非常喜欢！而且你看我们之间是不会亲吻的，对吗？”

“绝对不会！”康妮说，“可是不是应该那样呢？”

“可究竟为什么呢？我喜欢克利福德，可是，如果我去亲吻他，你会作何感想？”

“可这不是两回事吗？”

“就我们而言，区别在哪里？我们都是充满智慧的人，男人和女人的事是不在考虑范围内的，根本不考虑。这个时候，如果我开始像时下的欧洲大陆男人那样把那事当成什么东西来炫耀，你会怎么想？”

“我会讨厌你这样做。”

“那就好！我跟你说白了吧，如果我真是个有男性气质的人，我永远也不会遇上和我秉性相投的女人。我不会为此耿耿于怀。我只是喜欢女人而已。谁能强迫我爱或者装作爱她们并做欢爱的游戏呢？”

“反正我不会那样做。不过，是不是有什么不对劲的地方？”

“或许那是你的感觉，我倒没觉得。”

“没错，我是感到男人和女人之间有不对劲的地方，女人对男人不再有魅力了。”

“男人对女人就有吗？”

她思忖片刻道：“不是很大。”话说得很实在。

“那就算了，从此相互之间文雅简单地相处，就如同普通人与人之间那样就行了呗。让虚假的冲动见鬼去吧，我就拒绝这东西。”

康妮知道他说的确实是对的。可这让她感到十分孤寂，孤寂迷惘，觉得自己就像一潭死水上的一片木屑。她，或者任何事情的意义何在？

她年轻的生命是要反叛的。这些男人太老了，太冷漠了。一切看上去都是老而冷漠。米凯利斯就是这么令她失望的，他毫无用处。男人不渴望女人，他们并不真正渴望女人，甚至米凯利斯也不是真心实意。

而那些恶棍则装作真心，玩起爱的游戏来，这些人最坏。

这事就这么令人沮丧，可你不得不忍耐。没错，对女人来说男人魅力不再。如果你能自欺欺人认为他们仍有魅力，甚至像康妮那样想米凯利斯，那最好不过了。与此同时你也只是继续生活下去，半点意义也没有。她完全懂得人们为什么热衷于鸡尾酒会、爵士乐和摇摆舞，闹到精疲力竭为止了。你总得发泄，以各种各样的方式，让你的青春活力得到宣泄，否则你就会被它吞噬。可这等青春又是多么可怕！你感到自己像一个千岁老人
①

，可你的青春却在鼓噪，让你无法平静。这简直是一种卑贱的生活！毫无前途！她几乎希望和米克一起逃走，让自己的生活成为一场漫长的鸡尾酒会和爵士乐晚会了，那无论如何也比虚度光阴等死强。

有一天她心情很差，就独自一人去林子里散步。她步履沉重，无意流盼，甚至不知身在何处。不远处响起枪声，吓了她一跳，随之又让她感到愤怒。

朝前走走，她听到了什么声音，吓得倒退了几步。是人！她可不想见人。但她灵敏的耳朵听到了另一种声音，为之一惊。那是个孩子在抽泣，她马上注意听起来。听得出，有人在虐待孩子。她迈开大步走下那条潮湿的车道，怒火中烧，觉得自己非跟谁大吵一场不可。

转过弯，她发现远处有两个人，一个是那猎场看守，还有一个是身穿紫色外套头戴厚布帽子的女孩，那孩子正在哭泣。

“嘿，不要哭了，你这个假模假样的小母狗！”那男人气愤地说，女孩反倒哭得更伤心了。

康斯坦丝走近他们，眼里冒着怒火。那男人转过身看看她，冷漠地行个礼，不过他也气得脸色发白了。

“怎么回事，她为什么哭啊？”康斯坦丝呼吸急促地问道。

那男人脸上露出一丝嘲弄般的微笑。

“啥呀，你得问她。”他冷淡地回答，讲的是一口浓重的土腔。

康妮觉得他这是在打她耳光，立即变了脸。她一脸的蔑视，黑色的眼睛里微微燃着怒火。

“我问的是你！”她喘着气说。

他姿势奇特地冲她鞠个躬，摘下帽子。“听到了，男爵夫人，”他说，随之他又说起土话来，“可我没法儿跟你说。”他一招一式都像个军人，只是脸色气得发白。

康妮转身看那孩子，发现她脸色红扑扑的，黑头发，九岁或十岁的样子。“怎么了，小乖乖？告诉我你为什么哭啊？”她口气里透着平常人的温厚，毫不做作。女孩哭得更凶了，看来是故意的。康妮则显得亲切了。

“好了，好了，别哭了！告诉我他们怎么你了！”口气里尽是温柔。与此同时她在编织外套的口袋里摸摸，很巧，兜里有一枚六便士硬币。

“别哭了啊！”她弯下腰道，“看！看我要给你个什么东西！”

女孩继续抽抽搭搭，吸溜着鼻子，但手却从哭肿的脸上移开了，黑黑的眼睛机灵地瞥了那钱一眼，然后又哭了几声，但哭声弱多了。“乖！告诉我这是怎么回事！告诉我呀！”说着康妮把硬币放到小孩胖嘟嘟的手里，她立即就把那钱攥紧了。

“是……是……为了猫咪！”

说着女孩又抽搭起来。

“什么猫咪呀？”

沉默片刻，女孩攥着硬币的手指指荆棘丛说：

“在那儿呢！”

康妮顺着手指的方向看过去，没错，是在那里，一只大黑猫身上带着血迹，面目狰狞地挺着。

“哎呀！”她厌恶地叫道。

“是只野猫，夫人。”那男人说，语气透着嘲讽。

她抬头愠怒地瞟了他一眼。“怪不得这孩子哭了，”她说，“如果孩子在场时你开枪打死了那猫，她能不哭吗？”

他迅速瞪了康妮一眼，那眼神透着轻蔑，他并不掩饰自己的情绪。康妮的脸又红了，她感到自己向他发了脾气，那男人并不尊重她。

“叫什么名字呀？”她欢快地问那孩子，“能告诉我你叫什么名字吗？”

孩子吸溜一下鼻子，然后十分做作地尖声说：“康妮·梅勒斯！”

“康妮·梅勒斯！呵，这名字好啊！你跟爸爸出来玩，他开枪打死了那只猫咪，对吗？可那是一只坏猫咪！”

那孩子黑黑的眼睛大胆地打量着她，揣摩着她的怜悯。

“我原来想跟奶奶在一起的。”小女孩说。

“是吗？可你奶奶在哪儿呀？”

小孩抬起胳膊，朝马道下方指指说：“村子家里。”

“在村舍里！你是想回她那儿吗？”

女孩又像刚才哭泣时那样猛地抽搭一下说：“想！”

“那就去吧！让我送你找奶奶好吗？这样你爸爸就可以干他的事了。”说着她转身问那男人，“是你的小女儿，对吗？”

他敬个礼，轻轻点头承认。

“我想我能送她回村舍去吧？”康妮问他。

“夫人想送，就劳驾了。”

他再次注视着康妮的眼睛，眼神平静地探询着，又显得漠然。这是一个十分孤寂又自主的人。

“愿意跟我去村舍找你奶奶吗，小乖？”

孩子眼睛朝上翻翻，装笑道：“愿意！”

康妮不喜欢这孩子，这小女孩是给惯坏了，学虚伪了。但她还是给她擦擦脸，拉起了她的手。那看守默默地向她行了个礼。

“再会！”康妮告辞道。

到村舍要走大约一英里的路。看到看守家那漂亮的小屋子时，康妮已经让小康妮弄得不胜其烦了。那小孩子一肚子的坏水儿，就像只小猴子，使坏使得很自然。

村舍的门开着，屋里传出咔咔的响声。康妮迟疑地停下脚步，那孩子抽出自己的手跑进屋去。

“奶奶！奶奶！”

“怎么，你都回来了？”

这是周六早晨，那祖母正用铅油涂着壁炉。她来到门口，穿着粗麻布的围裙，手里握着涂铅油的刷子，鼻子上沾着铅油。她是个又矮又干瘦的女人。

“怎么，这是怎么回事？”看见康妮站在门外，她忙抬起胳膊在脸上蹭了一下。

“早上好！”康妮打了个招呼，“她刚才在哭，所以我就把她带回来了。”

老奶奶马上转身去看着孩子问：

“怎么回事，你爹呢？”

那孩子贴在奶奶裙子上傻笑着。

“他在那儿呢！”康妮说，“他打死了一只野猫，把孩子给吓着了。”

“哎呀，瞧给您添麻烦了，查莱夫人！您太好心了。不过您不必麻烦管这事儿。怎么能让您管这事儿呢！”说着老女人转身对孩子说，“瞧你，怎么能让查莱夫人为你受累呢！真不该给人家添麻烦！”

“不麻烦，不过走一趟。”康妮笑笑说。

“真是太谢谢您了！她哭来着？我就知道，他们走不远就得出点什么事。孩子怕他爹，就这么回事儿。你发现没有，他爹就跟生人似的，着实让她认生。我就知道他们俩不那么投缘儿，他爹那人脾气怪着呢。”

这话让康妮无言以对。

“你看，奶奶！”孩子傻笑着说。

老妇人低头看到了孩子手中的那枚六便士硬币。

“哎呀，六便士呢！哦，查莱夫人，您不该给她，不该给呀！你瞧瞧，查莱夫人是不是对你好呀？真是的，你今天早上真是好福气！”

她像所有这里的人一样，把康妮的姓念成“查莱”。“查莱夫人是不是对你好呀？”康妮禁不住看那女人鼻子上的污迹。那女人又用手背胡乱抹了一把自己的脸，但没抹到那个污点。

康妮开始往外走了。“哦，太谢谢您了，查莱夫人。”说完又对孩子说，“快说谢谢呀，跟查莱夫人说！”

“谢谢！”那女孩尖声道。

“真乖！”康妮笑着离开了，边走边道再见。能离开她们让她松了口气。真是奇怪，那个骄傲的瘦男人会有这么个尖酸的妈！

那老女人等康妮一走，就跑到洗涤间里的小镜子前照自己的脸。看到脸上的脏点子，她急得直跺脚。“偏偏让她看见这身粗布围裙和脏脸了！她不定怎么看我呢！”

康妮缓缓地朝拉格比府走去。家！这个温暖的词用在那座沉闷拥挤的大宅子上是不恰当的。这个词曾经让人感到过温暖，不过康妮觉得所有那些伟大的词对她这代人来说都失去了意义：爱，欢乐，幸福，家，母亲，父亲，丈夫，所有这些生动的伟大词汇现在都半死不活并且一天天消亡下去。家是你生活的地方，爱是你无法自欺的情愫，欢乐是和一场痛快的舞会连在一起的，幸福则是一个虚伪的词，是用来蒙人的，父亲是个自得其乐的人，丈夫是你精神上与之共同生活并继续生活的人。至于性，这些伟大词汇中最伟大的一个，不过是个鸡尾酒类的词，意味着短暂的兴奋与快乐，过后更疲惫不堪。耗损！似乎你是什么廉价的材料所造就的，逐渐耗损，直至片甲不留。

真正剩下的就只有顽强的坚忍，坚忍中自有其乐趣。体验生活的空虚，一步步，一段段，自能获得惊人的满足。如此而已！最后得出的就是这句话。家，爱，婚姻，米凯利斯，都不过如此！人一死，生命最后几个字就是：如此而已！

金钱呢？可能对金钱我们就不能这么说了。一个人总是需要金钱。金钱，成功——母狗女神，就像汤米·杜克斯学着亨利·詹姆斯说的那样，是永生的必需。你不能花光了最后一个铜子儿还说：如此而已！而已不了，就算只要再活上十分钟，你也需要几个铜子儿换这个换那个。仅仅是为了让一切都机械地运转，你就需要金钱。你没它就不行。金钱是你不得不拥有的东西，别的倒是可以没有。就是这样。

当然，活着并不是你的错。可你活着就得需要金钱，这是唯一的绝对必需，其余的尚可或缺，但金钱不可或缺。这才是必需！

她想到了米凯利斯以及跟了他可能获得的金钱。但她不想要那钱，她更愿意帮着克利福德通过写作挣点小钱，她做到了。“克利福德和我一起靠写作一年能挣一千二百镑！”她给自己定下这个目标。挣钱！挣，空手而得，空穴生钱！这是人最终可以为之骄傲的功绩！其余的，都是废话。

于是她步履沉重地回家，同他合作，再无中生有地弄篇小说出来，而一个故事就意味着金钱。克利福德似乎很在意他的小说是否被认为是第一流的文学，而康妮并不很在意。她父亲说克利福德的小说空洞无物，可去年挣了一千二百镑，这就是对他简单而有力的驳斥！

如果你年轻，你只需咬紧牙关坚持干下去，直到金钱从空穴而来。那是力量的问题。那是毅力的问题，你身上散发出某种微妙但强有力的意志，它还给你莫名其妙的金钱：纸片上写着字的钱。这简直是个魔术，当然也是个胜利。母狗女神！如果一个人要卖身，那就卖给那母狗女神吧！你可以一直蔑视她，但又不断地向她出卖你自己。这太妙了！

克利福德当然还是挺天真的，既有不少禁忌也有崇拜之物。他想让人们说他“确实优秀”。那想法很愚蠢，真正优秀的是实际上流行的东西，可流行一阵子就消失的并不是好东西。似乎多数“真正优秀”的人都搭不上车。说到底人只活一回，如果误了车，就被留在了便道上，和别的失败者为伍。

康妮正考虑着在伦敦过一个冬天，和克利福德一起在那儿过。他和她算是赶上了车的人，所以他们可以高高在上乘着车子炫耀一番。

可恨的是，克利福德开始变得恍惚，心不在焉，一阵阵地发呆，变得抑郁起来。这是因为他心理上的创伤发作了。这样子简直令康妮发疯。哦，上帝啊，如果他脑子开始出毛病，那可怎么办呢！见鬼去吧，我尽力了。要失望就失望到底吧。

有时她会哭得很痛心，但即使是在痛哭的时候她也会对自己说：“傻瓜，手绢都哭湿了。哭顶什么用！”

跟米凯利斯分手后，她决心不再想什么了。那似乎就是以不变应万变的最简单的办法了。她只想守住已经有的，其余什么都不想。她所想的就是维系这些现有的：克利福德、小说、拉格比庄园、查泰莱夫人的分内事、金钱，还有名望，在这些基础上再向前进。爱、性等诸如此类的东西，不过是冻果子露，舔掉它，忘到脑后去吧。只要你不一门心思想它，它就不存在。特别是性，那是无所谓的东西。心一横，问题就迎刃而解了。性，一杯鸡尾酒，效力差不多，意思也差不多。

但是一个孩子，一个小婴儿！那还是让人动容的事。她会十分小心地对待这个实验，要考虑跟什么男人生这个孩子。奇怪的是，她不想和这世上的任何男人生孩子。米克的孩子吗？想想都恶心！那不等于欣然和兔子生孩子么。汤米·杜克斯倒是不错的一个人，可你无法把他跟孩子和下一代联系起来，他是一个在自己身上完结的人。所有克利福德那个还算不小的熟人圈子里的人，那些男人，一想到跟他们当中哪个生孩子，她就无法不感到厌恶。其中有几个可能会成为情人，甚至米克。可让他们在你身上种下个孩子，呸，那是对你的侮辱，让你厌恶。

就是这样！

尽管如此，康妮心里还记挂着孩子这事。等待！等待！她要把男人都过过筛子，看能不能找到个合适的。“上街去，去到耶路撒冷，看你是否寻得到一个男人。”
②

在预言家的耶路撒冷找到个男人是不可能的，尽管有成千上万男的。可男人和男子汉是两回事啊！

她想过那得是个外国人，不是英国人，苏格兰人不行，爱尔兰人更不行，得是个真正的外国人。

可是，等待！等待！这个冬天她会带克利福德去伦敦，下一个冬天就带他去国外，去法国南部，去意大利。等吧，她并不急着要孩子，那是她私人的事，而且是她心灵深处，以她女性独特的方式唯一要严肃对待的事。她不会随便冒险的，决不。人任何时候都可以有个情人，但一个给你孩子的男人，还是等吧，等待吧！那是另一回事。“上街去，去到耶路撒冷……”这不是爱的问题，而是个男子汉的问题。你甚至可以恨他，但如果他是你要的男子汉，那么个人的恨又算得了什么呢！这事关系到自我的另一面。

像往常一样又下雨了，外面的路太泥泞，克利福德的轮椅出不去了。但康妮要出去走走。现在她每天都会一个人出去，主要是去林子里，在那里她能真正独处，谁也看不到。

今天，克利福德要给那猎场看守送个口信，可听差患了流感卧床不起——拉格比府里似乎老有人得流感——所以康妮说她可以去村舍送信。

天气潮湿阴沉，似乎整个世界都在缓慢地死去。阴沉，潮湿，寂静，连矿上的机车声都不响了，因为井下工时缩短了，今天干脆全停工。一切的末日！

林子里万籁俱寂，除了光秃秃的树干上落下的滴水溅到地上发出空洞的噼啪声，剩下的就是幽深的老树林子，死寂一片，毫无生机，虚幻空荡。

康斯坦丝昏昏沉沉地向前走着。老林子散发着一种古老的凄凉感，竟让她感到些许慰藉，这比外面那冷酷无情的世界要好得多。她喜欢这残余的老林子，它有一种内敛的气质，那是那些老树无言的矜持。它们似乎是一股沉默的力量，沉默着，但是一个强大的存在。它们也在等待着，固执、坚忍地等待，蕴含着沉默的力量。或许，它们只是在等待末日，等着被砍伐，清除，那就是森林的末日，而对它们来说则是一切的末日。但是，或许它们那强大高贵的沉默，强大的树木的沉默，意味着别的什么。

她从北面走出林子时，看到了那猎场看守的村舍。那是一座深褐色的石头房子，尖顶上有一根漂亮的烟囱，看似无人居住，静谧孤寂。但是烟囱里冒着一缕青烟，屋前围了栅栏的小园子已经被翻过土了，园内收拾得整整齐齐。屋门关着。

现在她来到这里，感到有点羞于见那个目光奇特、敏锐的男人。她不愿意给他传达命令。她觉得自己有点想走了。她轻轻地敲敲门，没人来开。她又敲了敲，但还是没用力，声音不大，还是没人应。她透过窗子朝里窥视，看到的是黑乎乎的小屋，里面的东西看不清，影影绰绰的挺吓人，不想让人进去的样子。

她站着倾听，听到村舍后面似乎有什么声音。因为没听清，她反倒一心想知道是怎么回事。她不甘心。

于是她绕到房后面去。房后的地面高了起来，形成陡坡，所以后院是陷下去的，四周有一圈低矮的石头墙。她转过房角停住了脚步。离她几步远的小院里，那男人正在洗浴，对外面的动静一点没有察觉。他光着上身，棉绒马裤脱到臀部，露出精瘦的腰。他弓着白皙单薄的背，身下是一大盆冒着肥皂泡的水。他的头沾了水，然后动作奇怪、飞快地摇着脑袋甩水，随后抬起白皙的瘦胳膊，挤着耳朵眼里的水，那动作迅速而细腻，就像一只鼬鼠在戏水，全然自得其乐的样子。康妮向后退了一步，退到墙角后面，然后快步朝林子走去。但她不由得受到了震动。可那不过是一个男人在洗浴而已，太平常不过了，天知道这是为什么。

可奇怪的是，这场景竟是如梦如幻，它击中了她身体的中心。她看到了那厚厚的马裤耷拉在他白皙瘦弱的腰上，腰骨若隐若现。一种孤独感打动了她，让她感到他是一个完全孤独的人。一个孤独生活着的人，有着那么完美孤寂的白皙裸体，而他的内心也是孤寂的。除此之外，他还有着一个纯粹的生命的美。不是什么美的东西，甚至不是美的身体，而是某种温柔的火光，是一个生命的剪影在袒露自己时燃烧着的温暖的白火苗，这火有着可以触摸的轮廓：身体！

康妮感到这景象令她的身体深处受到了震撼。她知道这一点，因为那震撼就在她体内。但她的理智不免要嘲笑自己。一个男人在后院里洗身子！毫无疑问，他用的是气味难闻的黄肥皂！她挺反感那种肥皂味的。为什么偏偏让她遇上这种庸俗的私事！

所以她走开了。过了一会儿她坐在了一个树桩子上，脑子乱了，无法思考。但在混乱中她决定还是要把口信带给那家伙，她是不会畏缩不前的。不过她要给他时间等他穿好衣服，但时间又不能太长，以防他出去，估计他是准备要出去。

于是她缓步往回走，边走边听动静。走近了，发现那村舍还是老样子。一只狗叫起来。她敲敲门，心不由自主地乱跳起来。

她听到那人轻轻下楼的脚步声，却不曾想他那么快就开了门，快得让她吃惊。他神情有点不安，但脸上立即浮现出笑容。

“查泰莱夫人！”他说，“能请您进屋吗？”

他举止十分自在得体，她迈过门槛进到沉闷的小屋里。

“我是来给你捎个克利福德男爵的口信儿。”她轻柔但呼吸急促地说。

那男人蓝色的眼睛看着她，似乎看穿了一切，害得她稍稍转过头去躲开他的目光。他觉得她羞涩的时候挺好看，几乎算得上美丽。他立即控制了局面。

“能请您坐坐吗？”他问，估计她不会坐的。门还开着。

“不了，谢谢！克利福德男爵想让你……”她传达了口信，不由自主地又去看他的眼睛。现在他的目光热情和蔼，一种特别的对女人的热情和蔼，既轻松又自然。

“是，尊贵的夫人！我马上就办。”

接到指令，他马上就变了一个人，态度生硬不算，人也变生分了。康妮犹豫着，她本该走了。可她还是吃惊地打量起这干净整齐但有点沉闷的小起居室。

“你就一个人住这儿吗？”

“是的，一个人，夫人。”

“可你母亲她……”

“她住在村里自己的房子里。”

“跟那小孩子一起吗？”

“跟小孩子一起！”

说话间他那张模样一般、有点憔悴的脸上露出一丝难以形容的嘲讽来。这是一张总在变化着的脸，让人琢磨不透。

“不过，”他发现了康妮迷惑的神情，就说，“我母亲星期六会来帮我清扫，其余的时间里我自己干。”

康妮又看看他。他的目光里再次透出笑意，虽说还有点嘲弄，但蓝色的眼睛开始变得热情、和蔼起来。她在揣摩他。他穿着长裤和法兰绒衬衫，打着灰色领结，他的头发柔软潮湿，脸色有点苍白，看上去很是沧桑。当他眼中的笑意消失时，那眼神看上去像是吃了很多苦，但目光中仍然没有失去温暖。随之他的脸色因为孤寂而变得苍白起来，因为她并不是来看他的。

康妮有许多话要说，但没说出口，她只是又抬头看着他说：

“但愿我没有打扰你。”

他轻轻地嘲讽地一笑，笑得眼睛眯上了一半。

“我刚才只是在梳头发，不好意思。对不起，我没来得及穿外套！不过我真是不知道谁在敲门。这儿平常没人敲门，猛听到敲门声，还以为出什么事了呢。”

他在她前面上了花园小径，帮她扶着门。她发现不穿那件棉绒衣、只穿衬衫的他身材颀长，瘦弱，还有点驼背。从他身边走过，她觉得他柔软的金色头发和目光敏锐的眼睛让他显得年轻活泼。他该有三十七八岁了吧。

她步履缓慢地走进林子，知道他正在后面看着她，这让她不由自主地感到不舒服。

而他呢，回到屋里时还在想：“她很好，真的很善良。她不知道她自己有多善良。”

她对他感到十分好奇：他太不像个猎场看守了，太不像个劳动阶级的男人了，尽管他和本地人有共同之处，但他确实也有与众不同之处。

“那个叫梅勒斯的看守是个怪人，”她对克利福德说，“他几乎可以算是个绅士。”

“他是吗？”克利福德说，“我没看出来。”

“可是他不是有点特别吗？”康妮坚持说。

“我觉得他是个不错的人，但我对他不太了解。他去年才退伍，还不到一年呢。是从印度回来的吧，我猜。他可能在那儿获得了某些气质。或许他是某个长官的侍从，在那个位置上有了长进。他们当中有些人就是这样变体面的，但那对他们并不好，因为他们一回家就得恢复原样儿。”

康妮若有所思地凝视着克利福德。她看出来了，他特别排斥那些有可能真正向上攀升的下层阶级的人。她知道克利福德这类人都这样。

“但是，你不觉得他有点特别吗？”她问。

“坦白说吧，没觉得！我根本没注意到。”

他好奇地看着她，眼神不安，有点怀疑。她则觉得他没有说实话，他也没对自己说实话，就这样。他不喜欢听到说哪个人确实出众，人们应该大概是在一个水准上，最好比他低点。

康妮再次感到与她同代的男人是多么固执吝啬。他们太固执己见，太惧怕生命！

注　释

①
见《创世纪》第五章，第二十一至二十七节。

②
康妮在改编《旧约·耶利米书》第五章，第一节。原文是：“你们当在耶路撒冷的街上跑来跑去，在宽阔处寻找，看看有一人行公义求诚实没有。”

第七章

康妮上楼进了自己的卧室，她做了很久以来都没有做的事：脱去衣服，在大镜子前观看自己的裸体。她并不知道自己到底在寻找或看什么，但她还是调着灯光，直至照亮全身。

像平常一样，她想：一个赤裸的人体是多么羸弱，多么易受伤害，多么可怜啊，有点像一件没有完工的作品！

她的身材曾经算得上不错，但现在却过时了，因为它过于女性化，不像个少年郎。她个子不算高，有点像苏格兰人的那种矮身量。但她的身体有流畅优雅的线条，应该说曾经很美。她的皮肤有点泛黄，四肢很是沉稳，整个身体应该说是丰腴的，呈现出下滑的线条美。但这个身体却缺少了点什么。

她的身体那清晰下滑的曲线本该成熟起来的，但现在却变得扁平，皮肤开始有点粗糙起来。似乎是因为缺少阳光和温暖，皮肤有点发灰、苍白。

它谈不上是真正的女性身材，也不像少年郎的身体那样单薄光洁，而是暗淡无华。

她的胸部有点小，呈梨形下垂着。但这一对梨并不成熟，有点青涩，毫无风韵地垂悬着。她的小腹已经失去了年轻时的紧绷，失去了娇嫩的光泽。和德国小伙子在一起的日子里，那人确实爱着她的身体。那时她的小腹细嫩诱人，是其本来的样子。但现在它变松了，平了，也瘦了，瘦得松弛了。她的大腿也是一样，曾经极富有女性美，浑圆、灵动而有光泽，现在则平了，松了，没了风韵。

她的身体正失去风韵，变得枯燥无味，行尸走肉一般，这让她感到极端沮丧无望。还有什么希望？才二十七岁，她就老了，老了，身体没了光泽和风采。老，是因为忽视和拒斥的缘故。是的，是因为拒斥。时髦的女人们把自己的肉体保养得如同娇娆的瓷器，在外表上下足了工夫。虽然那瓷器内部是空的，可她连人家那光鲜的外表都没有。精神生活！突然间她对此生出了激愤，精神生活这个大骗局！

她看看另一面镜子里自己的后背、腰肢和臀部。她正日渐消瘦，但瘦得不好看。她转过头去看自己的腰，发现腰上添了不少疲软的皱褶，可她的腰肢当初是多么活泼可爱！倾斜的长胯，还有双臀，也已失去了光泽和丰腴。没了！只有那德国小子曾经爱抚过它们，可是他都死了快十年了！时光流逝得真快啊！可她也才二十七岁。那个健壮的小子死了十年了，那时他的肉体还是那么稚嫩，动作还是那么笨拙，她还曾经那么看不起他！可现在她上哪儿找那样的欲望去呢？男人们早就没这东西了。他们只有可怜的几秒钟颤抖，像米凯利斯那样，却没有健康的、人的欲望来温暖你的血液，更新你整个生命。

她仍然认为她最美的部位是腰线以下斜滑的长胯和浑圆慵懒的双臀。阿拉伯人爱说，那些部位像沙丘，柔软、下滑的长坡。在这个地方，生命犹存，希望犹在。但她这个部位也消瘦了，生涩了，僵硬了。

让她痛苦的是她的前身，这一面已经开始干枯松垮了，几乎是凋谢了的样子，还没有真正焕发出生机就衰老了。她想到自己可能会生孩子的事。她能做个健康的母亲吗？

她套上睡衣上床了，上床后她开始难过地哭泣起来。这痛苦点燃了她的怒火，她恨克利福德和他的写作及谈话，恨所有他这样的男人，是他们欺骗了女人，甚至欺骗了女人的身体。

不公平！不公平！肉体上巨大的不公平感令她的灵魂燃烧起来。

但到了早上，一切又都恢复了常态。她七点钟起床，下楼到克利福德屋里。所有贴身伺候的事都得她帮忙做，他没雇男仆，也不让女仆做这些。女管家的丈夫从他童年时期就跟他熟，这个人帮他做所有翻身移动的事，但贴身的私事要康妮来做。康妮也愿意做这些。这是对她的要求，她也愿意做她力所能及的事。

为此她几乎就没怎么离开过拉格比府，就是离开也不超过一两天，让管家贝茨太太代为照顾克利福德。日久天长，克利福德自然就把康妮对他的照顾看作理所应当的了。他这样想也是合乎情理的。

但在康妮内心深处，一种不平和受骗感开始翻腾。肉体的不平感，一旦觉醒就是危险的事。它必须要得到宣泄，否则它就会将这肉体的主人消耗掉。可怜的克利福德是不该受到指责的，他更不幸。所有这些都是这场大灾难的一部分。

可是，在某种意义上说，难道他就不应该受指责吗？缺少温暖，缺少简单热情的身体交流，难道他不该因此受到指责吗？他从来就不曾真正热情过，从来没有过。他善良、周到、体贴，但那是出自冷淡的、良好的教养！他从来没有一个男人对一个女人的热情，甚至还没有康妮的父亲对康妮热情，一个养尊处优的男人既要生活优裕也能够用自己男性的热情抚慰一个女人。

可是克利福德不是这样，他那一类的人都不是这样。他们都内心僵硬、孤立，热情对他们来说是低下的情调。你得没有热情地活着，要学会收敛。如此这般当然无可厚非，如果你也是那个阶级的那类人。那样的话，你就可以保持冷淡和尊严，保持内敛并且享受这样带来的满足感。可如果你是另一个阶级的另一类人，这就行不通，因为保持内敛并自以为属于统治阶级的感觉毫无乐趣可言。当最时髦的贵族实质上毫无优秀的东西可以守护时，当他们的统治实则是闹剧、形同虚设时，摆出这种架势来到底有什么意思？到底有什么意思？不过是冷淡的胡闹而已。

康妮心中生出了叛逆。这一切都有什么好？她的奉献有什么用？她把生命献给克利福德有什么用？她到底是在为什么奉献自己？一个虚荣冷漠之人，毫无热情的人与人的交流。不管克利福德这个冷漠无情的人是多么自信自己属于统治阶级，他还是不可避免地张着大嘴伸着舌头喘吁吁地追求着成功母狗女神。反倒是米凯利斯在这方面更有尊严些，而且远比他成功得多。说到底，如果你仔细看看克利福德那种追求成功的气喘吁吁模样，你会发现他是个小丑。一个小丑自然比一个恶棍更无耻。

两个男人中，米凯利斯确实比克利福德于她更有用，他甚至也更需要她，因为照顾下肢瘫痪的人，随便哪个护士都行！说到英勇的行为，米凯利斯是一只英勇的鼠辈，而克利福德则更像一只炫耀自己的鬈毛狗。

家里住着些客人，其中一个是克利福德的姨妈伊娃，她是班纳利夫人。班纳利夫人六十岁，消瘦，长着红鼻头。虽是个寡妇，但依旧有点贵妇人的派头。她出身最高贵的世家并一心要发扬贵族遗风。康妮喜欢她，因为她十分单纯直率，至少她想单纯直率时她表面上做到了。至于她的内心，她很会妄自尊大，自觉高人一等。她并非一个势利者，因为她过于自信了。在社会的角力场上，她能完美地端着架子让别人对她俯首称臣。

她对康妮很和气，同时又试图凭自己的敏锐观察进入康妮的内心世界。

“我觉得你真是了不起啊，”她对康妮说，“你在克利福德身上创造了奇迹。我还没有见过他的天才崭露头角呢，他就成功了，风靡一时。”看来伊娃姨妈为克利福德的成功感到骄傲自豪，他是这个家族头上的一根可以炫耀的羽毛！其实她根本不在意他写的书。也是，她为什么要在意呢？

“哦，我不觉得那是我的功劳。”康妮说。

“肯定是！不可能是任何别人的功劳！而且我看出来了，你并没有从中得到你应该得到的。”

“怎么说？”

“看看你如此封闭自己吧。我对克利福德说过，‘如果那孩子哪天跟你闹，那全都怪你。’”

“可是克利福德从来没亏待我什么呀。”康妮说。

“瞧你，我亲爱的孩子，”说着班纳利夫人枯瘦的手搭在康妮胳膊上，“一个女人应该享受她自己的生活，否则就会后悔的。请相信我！”说着她又呷了一口白兰地，或许那就是她表达后悔的方式。

“不过我不是正在享受自己的生活吗？”

“我可不这么看！克利福德应该带你去伦敦，让你到处转转。他那帮朋友跟他说得来，可对你有什么用？如果我是你，我应该觉得现在的生活不够好。你会在后悔中空度青春、中年以及老年。”

说着老夫人陷入了沉思，平静了下来，是白兰地让她镇静的。

但是康妮并不热心去伦敦，也不太愿意让班纳利夫人引见给伦敦的时髦圈子。因为她并不觉得自己时髦，对此也不感兴趣。她感到的是那个圈子里的人内心都特别萎缩、冷漠，就像拉布拉多
①

的土地，表层上开着美丽的小花儿，可一英尺下面却是冻土。

汤米·杜克斯也住在拉格比，还有几个人，一个是哈里·温特斯罗，还有杰克·斯特伦治威斯
②

与他的妻子奥利芙。与“密友”之间的谈话相比，这些人的谈话要显得有一搭无一搭的。每个人都感到无聊，因为天气不好，只有台球消遣，还有就是伴着自动钢琴跳跳舞。

奥利芙在读一本写未来的书，书上说到那时可以通过试管生育孩子，女人们则可以“绝育”。

“这可是件大好事！”她说，“那样女人就可以独立生活了。”

斯特伦治威斯想要孩子，但她不想要。

“你愿意绝育吗？”温特斯罗做着鬼脸问她。

“我希望我能，当然是自然地绝育，”她说，“反正未来总会更合理，女人就不会被自己的生理分工拖垮了。”

“或许女人还能飞到外空间去呢。”杜克斯说。

“我确实觉得足够的文明手段应该能消除很多身体的残疾。”克利福德说，“像做爱这等事，或许也就用不着了。我想会的，如果能用试管培育婴儿的话。”

“不会的！”奥利芙叫道，“那只会让人们有更多的机会享受快乐。”

“我想啊，”班纳利夫人思忖道，“如果没了做爱这事儿，就会有别的东西来替代它。或许是吗啡吧，空气中撒点吗啡，每个人都能觉得气定神闲。”

“政府每周六都往空气中洒点乙醚，周末会多么快活呀！”杰克说，“听上去不错。可星期三我们怎么办呀？”

“只要你忘记了自己的身体，你就幸福了，”班纳利夫人说，“一旦你意识到自己的肉体，你就痛苦了。所以，如果说文明有什么好，那就是它帮助我们忘记自己的肉体，然后时光就在我们不知不觉中快乐地流逝。”

“干脆帮助我们全然忘却我们的肉体，”温特斯罗说，“是时候了，男人们要开始改善自己的本性，特别是在肉体这方面。”

“设想我们会像香烟一样缥缈！”康妮说。

“不会的，”杜克斯说，“我们的老把戏会演砸的，我们的文明将要衰落，它正走向深渊。相信我吧，唯一横跨深渊的桥梁将是阳物！”

“哦，你，你就胡说吧你，将军！”奥利芙叫道。

“我相信我们的文明将要崩溃了。”伊娃姨妈说。

“那崩溃之后呢？”克利福德问。

“我一点也不知道。不过总会有个什么吧，我想。”老夫人说道。

“康妮说人像一缕缕香烟，奥利芙说绝育的女人和试管婴儿，而杜克斯则说阳物是通向崩溃后的桥梁。我想知道究竟会像什么样子。”克利福德说。

“嗨，操那心呢！过一天算一天，”奥利芙说，“不过还是快点做出培育婴儿的试管来，好让我们可怜的女人解脱。”

“可能下一个阶段会出现真正的男子汉，”汤米说，“真正智慧又健康的男子汉，还有健康美丽的女人！那不就是变化吗？变得跟我们大不一样了！我们算不上男子汉，女人也算不上女人。我们不过是暂时现象，是机械和精神的实验品罢了。早晚会出现一个真正的男人和真正的女人的文明，取代我们这一小撮七岁智商的聪明人。那将会比香烟和试管婴儿还要令人惊叹。”

“谁谈论真正的女人，我就不说话了。”奥利芙说。

“当然只有我们的精神值得拥有。”温特斯罗说。

“精神！”杰克边喝加苏打的威士忌边说。

“你也这么认为吗？让肉体复活吧！”杜克斯说，“会的，假以时日这一天会到来的，那时压迫我们的理性之石
③

将会被推开，抛掉金钱什么的东西，然后我们就会建设起人与人接触的民主，而不是金钱的民主。”

康妮感到自己的内心与之发生了共鸣。“让肉体复活吧！要一个人与人接触的民主！”尽管她不太懂这后半句话的意思，但它让她感到了慰藉，就像其他没意义的东西让人感到慰藉一样。

一切都是那么愚蠢，令她感到万般无奈的厌倦：克利福德、伊娃姨妈、奥利芙、杰克、温特斯罗，甚至还有杜克斯。聊，聊，聊！没完没了的都叨叨什么呀！

可这些人离开之后，她感觉还是不甚好。她继续步履沉重地散步，但愤怒和恼火已经占据了她的下身，让她欲罢不能。日子似乎是在奇特的痛苦中熬过去的，什么也没发生。只是，她又消瘦了。甚至管家都这么说，关切地询问她怎么了。甚至连汤米·杜克斯都坚持说她病了。她告诉他们说她没事，但她开始害怕特瓦萧教堂下山坡上那些矗立着的白墓碑了，它们是卡拉拉大理石
④

做的，惨白的样子令人恐惧，就像一颗颗招人厌恶的假牙。从邸园这里就能看到那些阴森森的光面的墓碑。山坡上那些耸翘着的假牙般的墓碑是如此可恶，令她毛骨悚然。她感到自己被埋在那里的日子不远了，会加入那恐怖苍白的鬼群中去，埋在这肮脏的英国中部地区的墓碑和纪念碑下。

她需要帮助，她知道。于是她写了一封短信给姐姐希尔达求助：“我最近情况不好，不知何故。”

希尔达马上从苏格兰赶了过来，她住在那里。她是在三月里独自开着一辆双座的轻便小汽车来的。她的车顺着马道开来，响着喇叭驶上斜坡，绕过长着两棵野山毛榉的椭圆草坪，来到拉格比府门前的平地上。

康妮跑到门前的台阶上去迎接，希尔达停了车出来，吻了妹妹。

“康妮，到底怎么了？”她问。

“没什么！”康妮有点不好意思地说。但她知道，和希尔达比，她是一副苦相儿。姐妹俩的肤色本来都稍稍闪着金黄的光泽，都生着褐色的软发，身体自然都是结实、热情四溢的。可现在，康妮消瘦了，面色土黄，套头衫的领口处露着瘦黄的脖颈。

“你生病了吧，孩子？”希尔达语气柔和、略带颤音地问，姐妹俩的声音都这样。希尔达差不多比康妮大两岁。

“没，没病。或许是有点烦吧。”康妮有点苦涩地说。

希尔达的脸色一变，像是要去打一场仗似的。她是个温柔的女人，但还是有点像古代的亚马逊女斗士，天生与男人不和。

“这个鬼地方！”她轻声说，环顾这陈旧不堪的拉格比府，气不打一处来。她看似温柔热情如一只熟透的梨子，但实际上是真正的亚马逊传人。

她默默地进屋来到克利福德房里。克利福德觉得她看上去很是英气逼人，但还是防着她。妻子的家人都没有他所具有的举止和礼节，因此他认为她们都是圈外人，一旦她们进入了圈子，就会令他备受折磨。

克利福德正襟危坐，衣着得体，金黄的头发油光可鉴。他脸色红润，眼睛呈淡蓝色，眼球稍稍凸出，脸上露着难以琢磨的表情，但仪态高雅。这副样子在希尔达看来有点阴郁和愚蠢。他是在拭目以待。他摆出一副镇定自若的神态，可希尔达却不在乎他是什么神态，她反正是刀枪在握，准备打仗，即使你是教皇或皇帝也不在乎。

“康妮看上去身体状况很差。”她轻柔地说，漂亮的灰色眼睛凝视着他。她看上去是那么纯洁，康妮也是这样的，但克利福德心里很明白，她内心里十分执拗，坚硬如苏格兰石头。

“她是瘦了点。”他说。

“你没有想想办法吗？”

“你觉得有必要吗？”他问，声音柔和而不失坚定，在英格兰人身上这两者经常并行不悖。

希尔达不语，只是怒视着他。她并不能言善辩，康妮也不会，所以她只能怒视。这样子比说点什么还令克利福德不舒服。

“我得带她去看医生，”希尔达终于开口说，“你知道这附近有好大夫吗？”

“我不知道。”

“那我就带她去伦敦，那儿有我们信得过的大夫。”

克利福德尽管已经火冒三丈，可还是一言不发。

“我想我得在这里过夜，”说着希尔达脱下了手套，“明天开车带她进城。”

克利福德气得脸色发黄，到晚上连眼白都开始有点发黄了，看上去像得黄疸病了。可希尔达一直表现得很谦卑，像个小女孩。

晚饭后喝咖啡时分，气氛表面上很平静，希尔达说：“你得找个护士什么的贴身看护你，真的应该雇个男护士。”她说话的语气很温柔，但这对克利福德来说却如当头一棒。

“你是这么想的吗？”他冷漠地回答。

“是的，我觉得这是必要的。要不然，父亲和我就把康妮带走几个月。反正不能再这样继续下去了。”

“什么不能继续下去了？”

“你难道没有看看康妮这孩子吗？”希尔达冲他瞪大了眼睛。此时他看上去很像一只煮过的大虾，或者说她觉得是这样。

“康妮和我会商量这事的。”他说。

“我已经跟她商量过了。”希尔达说。

克利福德让护士们看护的时间太久了，他讨厌她们，因为她们把他的隐私全了解了个透。而一个男护士！他无法忍受一个男人伺候左右，雇任何一个女人都比雇个男的要好。可为什么不能是康妮呢？

姐妹俩第二天一早就驱车上路了，在把着方向盘的姐姐身边，康妮看上去就像一只复活节时的羔羊那么渺小。马尔科姆男爵不在，但肯辛顿的家却开着门。

医生仔细地替康妮做了检查，并询问了她生活的方方面面。“我时常在画报上看到你和克利福德男爵的照片。你们几乎算声名远播了，对吗？一个文静的女孩就这么长大了。即使是现在，尽管画报上登了那些照片，你也还是个文静的小姑娘。没什么，没事儿，你的器官没什么问题。可这样不行，不行啊！告诉克利福德男爵，他得带你进城来，要么就带你去国外走走，让你有点娱乐。你需要点娱乐，一定要！你的元气太弱了，没底蕴了，没底蕴了。心脏神经已经有点异样了，是的，不是别的，就是神经的问题。我一个月内可以帮你调理好，去戛纳或比亚里茨
⑤

。无论如何不能再这样下去了，不能了，听我的，否则我无法对你的后果负责。你只是在消耗生命而没有补充元气。你得有娱乐消遣，适当的健康的消遣。你现在是消耗元气而不进行补充。你知道的，不能这样下去了。抑郁！你要避免抑郁！”

希尔达咬紧牙关，那是有什么意思的。

米凯利斯听说她们在城里，忙不迭带着玫瑰来了。“怎么了，哪儿不好了？”他叫道，“你瘦得不行。我怎么没注意到你变成这样了？你怎么不让我知道呢？来，跟我去尼斯
⑥

，去西西里！走吧，跟我去西西里，现在那儿气候正好。你需要晒太阳！你需要活力！你干吗要浪费生命？跟我走吧！去非洲！哦，绞死克利福德男爵！撇下他，跟我走。他一和你离婚我就娶你。来吧，开始生活！天知道，拉格比那个地方能害死任何人的。可恶的地方，肮脏的地方，害死人的地方。跟我走吧，去晒太阳！你需要的是阳光，当然，还有一点点正常的生活。”

可一想到抛弃克利福德，康妮的心就不忍。她做不出那样的事来。不……不，她做不出来。她得回拉格比去。

米凯利斯招人讨厌。希尔达虽然不喜欢米凯利斯，但跟克利福德比她倒宁可选米凯利斯。姐妹俩又回到了中部。

希尔达找克利福德谈话。克利福德的眼球到现在还发黄呢，其实他也是心力交瘁。但他得听希尔达说的一切，听她转述医生的话，当然不是米凯利斯的话。希尔达给了他最后通牒，他则纹丝不动地坐着。

“这是一个男护士的地址，他伺候过那个医生的病人，直到上个月那病人去世。他确实是个好人，应该会来照顾你的。”

“可我不是病人，我也不要男护士。”可怜的克利福德说。

“那好，这里有两个女护士的地址。我见过其中的一个，她会干得很好的。她五十来岁，人挺文静，身体好，善良，而且还挺有教养的——”

克利福德拒绝回答，自己怄着气。

“那好吧，克利福德。如果明天还定不下来什么，我就给父亲发电报，我们会把康妮带走的。”

“康妮会走吗？”克利福德问。

“她倒是不想，可她知道她必须走。我母亲当年得癌症，就是愁的。我们可不想让康妮再冒险。”

第二天克利福德建议雇特瓦萧教区的护士博尔顿太太来。很明显这是管家贝茨太太建议的：博尔顿太太马上就要从教区的岗位上退休了，退休后会做私人看护。克利福德对生人照顾他有一种奇怪的恐惧，可博尔顿太太曾经在他得猩红热时照顾过他，因此他们比较熟悉。

姐妹俩立即去见了博尔顿太太，她住在特瓦萧村里一排比较新的房子里，在那个村算得上是讲究的住房了。她们见到的是一个四十多岁的女人，模样不错，身穿白领配围裙的护士制服，正在拥挤窄小的起居室里沏茶。

博尔顿太太十分殷勤客气，看上去挺和气。她讲话有点口音，但是一字一顿的标准英语。多年来她照看生病的矿工，管着他们，因此自视甚高。总之，虽然是个小女子，她却是村里的统治者之一，深孚众望。

“没错，查泰莱夫人看上去气色儿确实不好！她原先是个多水灵的人儿呀，现在可差池多了！整个儿冬天她一直在走下坡路！哦，日子难啊，真难！可怜的克利福德爵爷！唉，打仗，都怨那场仗。”

博尔顿太太说只要沙德罗大夫同意她马上就能来拉格比府。按说她还得在教区里当两个星期的看护，“不过他们或许能找个人替我。”

希尔达马上就去找了沙德罗医生。星期天博尔顿太太就带着两个箱子，坐着雷沃家的出租马车来了。希尔达同她谈了话，博尔顿太太什么时候都愿意交谈。博尔顿太太看起来是那么年轻，一激动苍白的脸上居然还会泛起红晕。其实她都四十七了。

博尔顿太太的丈夫特德·博尔顿二十二年前死在矿井里，就在二十二年前的圣诞节。大过节的，留下她和两个孩子走了，其中一个还是个妈妈怀抱里的婴儿。哦，现在连那婴儿都结婚了，她叫伊迪丝，嫁给了设菲尔德城里布茨连锁药店
⑦

的一个年轻伙计。另一个女儿在附近的切斯特菲尔德当老师，周末没人请出去玩时会回来看看。现在的年轻人可会享受生活了，可不像她艾维·博尔顿年轻时那样安分。

特德·博尔顿二十八岁时死于一次井下爆炸事故。前面的工头冲大家喊话让迅速趴下，他们一伙儿共四个人，其他人都及时趴下了，没出事，只有特德没及时趴下，就给炸死了。调查矿主方面时，人们说博尔顿吓坏了，试图逃跑，就没听工头的口令。听起来像是他自己的过错，因此给他的抚恤金只有三百英镑，而矿上作出的姿态更像是给了一笔赠款而不是法律上的赔偿，因为他是死于自己的过失。不仅如此，他们也不让她一次性把钱拿到手，她本来还想用这笔钱开个小铺子呢。他们说她可能会把钱挥霍掉，没准儿拿这钱喝酒呢。于是她每周只能领三十先令
⑧

。是的，她每星期一都得去办公室排队等着领钱，一站就是几个小时。是的，她就这样每个星期去一次，几乎去了四年才把那笔钱全拿到手。拉扯着两个小孩子，她能怎么样呢？不过特德的母亲对她很不错。当婴儿还蹒跚学步时，她白天把两个孩子都看着，让艾维·博尔顿去设菲尔德上课学习救护和特护，到第四年她甚至学了护士课程并取得了护士资格。她决心自立，自己抚养孩子。于是她有一段时间在医院里当助手。等到特瓦萧煤矿公司，干脆说是杰弗里男爵看到她能自立了，便对她很好，给了她教区护士的职位并维护她的利益。她也念他们的好儿，从此就一直干那份工作。现在那份工对她来说是有点吃力了，她需要一份轻巧点的活儿做。当教区护士那会儿是过于奔波忙碌了。

“确实，公司待我很好，我总这么说，可我永远也忘不了他们是怎么说特德的。自打他一下井，他就一直是个稳健勇敢的人，公司那么说他不就是把他说成胆小鬼了吗？反正他死了，跟他们谁也没法子掰扯了！”

这女人说起话来流露出的是一种奇特的复杂感情。一方面，她喜欢矿工们，她这么些年一直在照顾他们。可她觉得自己比他们优越，她几乎觉得自己是上等人。另一方面，她对有产阶级心怀不满。矿主！一遇上矿主和工人的问题，她总是站在工人一边。可如果没有斗争时，她就自以为优越，把自己当成上等阶级的人。上等阶级令她心仪，激起她心目中英国人对优越所怀有的热情。来拉格比府令她兴奋不已。同查泰莱夫人说话也令她兴奋不已。哎哟，人家和普通矿工的老婆就是不一样么！她不停地这么说。但她明显怨恨查泰莱家的人，怨恨这些主人。

“可不嘛，查泰莱夫人非得给累坏了不可！幸亏她有个姐姐来帮她。男人就不会想到这一点，不管是上等男人还是下等男人，都一样，他们把女人为他们做事当成应当应分的。哼，我对那些矿工们不知说了多少遍了。可跟克利福德爵爷就不好这么说，人家都伤成那样了。他们家一直高不可攀，不待见别人。人家那样也对。可倒那么大的霉，这可真是的！这让查泰莱夫人多为难呀，或许呀她比谁都难呢。她太亏了！我跟特德就只做了三年夫妻，你可不知道，他是个让我永远也忘不了的丈夫。他是千里挑一的人，老是那么快活。谁能想到他会出事死了呢？到现在我也不信这是真的，从来也不信。我亲手替他擦洗身子送他走，可我就不信他死了，他没死，我就不信——”

这可是拉格比府里的一个新声音，这种说话的方式对康妮来说十分新鲜，令她感到耳目一新。

头一个星期左右博尔顿太太在拉格比府里显得很安静。对待矿工的那种自信和颐指气使全没了，她感到紧张。在克利福德身边，她还羞涩，几乎是害怕，因此言行都谨慎。克利福德喜欢她这样并且很快就恢复了镇定自若，指使她时都不拿正眼看她。

“她有用，但一钱不值！”克利福德说。康妮闻之惊奇地睁大了眼睛，但没有反驳他。两个人的印象居然如此不同！

克利福德很快就对这女护士颐指气使起来。她也有点希望他这样，所以他耍起态度来竟是毫不自知。人往往容易顺竿爬。当她给矿工们包扎或护理他们时，他们就像孩子一样跟她聊，告诉她他们的伤心事。于是她感到特别了不起，简直像超人了。现在克利福德则让她感到渺小，像个佣人，而她则二话不说就接受了这种地位，让自己适应上层阶级。

她总是默默地进屋照顾他。她的脸狭长而漂亮，但眼皮总是低垂着。她会十分谦恭地问：“克利福德爵爷，我能做这个吗？能干那个吗？”

“不用，先留着，等以后叫你干你再干。”

“好的，克利福德爵爷。”

“半个小时以后再进来吧。”

“好的，克利福德爵爷。”

“把这些废报纸拿出去，好吗？”

“好的，克利福德爵爷。”

她悄悄地走了出去，半小时以后又轻轻地敲门了。她被使唤着，但她不在意。她是在熟悉上层阶级呢，因此她既不反感也不讨厌克利福德。他不过是一种现象的一部分，是上层阶级的一员。她还不了解他们，但现在必须了解他们。她和查泰莱夫人更处得来，说到底，在这个家里，和女主人处得好坏最重要。

博尔顿太太晚上伺候克利福德入睡，她就在隔着走廊对面的屋里就寝，这样只要他夜里按铃叫她她就能随时过来。早晨她也伺候他起床。很快她什么都管了起来，甚至以女人的方式给他刮脸，刮得轻柔又细致。她干得不错，很称职，而且很快就懂得怎么控制他了。归根结底，给他的脸打上肥皂沫、轻轻地揉搓他的硬胡茬时，他跟那些矿工们没有多大不同。至于他的高傲和拿腔拿调，她倒不往心里去，这对她来说是在熟悉一种新的生活。

康妮放弃亲自照料他，雇了个陌生女人替她，这让克利福德打心眼里无法原谅她。他心里说，这一招将他们两人之间的亲昵之花彻底掐死了。但康妮对此并不在意，对她来说，那美丽的亲昵之花很像一朵兰花寄生在她的生命之树上，开出的是一朵寒碜的花。

现在她有了更多属于自己的时间了。她可以在楼上她自己的房间里轻轻地弹弹钢琴，唱唱歌：“荨麻碰不得……爱的束缚松不开。”
⑨

以前她不明白这些爱的束缚怎么就不能解开，但谢天谢地，她已经松开了这些束缚。独处让她十分快活，用不着总跟克利福德聊啊聊的了。只剩他一个人时，他就会没完没了地“噼里啪啦”地在打字机上打字。可他不“干活”而她又在身边时，他就会说，说个没完，详细地分析人们和人们的动机、结果、性格和人格什么的，现在康妮算是听够了。过去几年中，她一直喜欢听，听够了以后，突然就觉得烦了。能独处真好，谢天谢地。

似乎他和她思想中成千上万的枝蔓盘根错节交织一团，到了实在无法纠缠的地步时，这植物就只有萎死了。现在她就在悄然将他们的思想剥离开来，悄然将那些纠缠在一起的线索一根根斩断，耐心或不耐心地将它们理清。可那爱的束缚比大多数别的束缚更难解开。当然，博尔顿太太的到来帮了大忙。

但是克利福德仍然想让康妮和往常一样在晚上同他亲密地聊天：或谈话或一起朗读点什么。现在她可以安排博尔顿太太到十点就进来打搅他们，然后康妮就可以上楼去独处，把他留给博尔顿太太照料。

博尔顿太太和贝茨太太一起在管家房里用餐，她们两人很合得来。奇怪的是，现在仆人们待得离主人越来越近了，都到了克利福德书房的门边上，而以前则离得很远。有时贝茨太太会坐在博尔顿太太房里，康妮能听到她们在低声嘀咕什么。当她和克利福德各自独处时，她能感到这些干活的人的动静儿几乎要闹到客厅里了。拉格比府仅仅因为博尔顿太太的到来就改变了许多。

但康妮感到她自己是自由了，有了自己的世界。她感到自己的呼吸都与以前不一样了。但她仍然感到害怕，因为她的无数条根，或许是最致命的根仍与克利福德的根盘缠在一起。即便如此她还是呼吸得自由多了。她生命中的一个新阶段就要开始了。

注　释

①
加拿大东部的一个半岛。——译者注

②
这两个人的名字都很有意思。温特斯罗的英文意思是“缓慢的冬季”，斯特伦治威斯的英文意思是“行为怪异”。估计劳伦斯给他们取这样的名字是别有用心。——译者注

③
暗指《路加福音》第二十四章，第二节，讲耶稣下葬七日后人们发现他坟墓上的石头被搬动了，有人告诉说：耶稣复活了。

④
一种意大利大理石，雪白色，经常被用来做石雕和纪念碑。

⑤
法国南部比斯开湾著名度假区。

⑥
法国南部地中海岸戛纳附近的一个疗养胜地。

⑦
布茨药店是英国药业大王布特创办的布茨药厂开办的连锁店，遍布英国各地，是英国的支柱产业之一。——译者注

⑧
当时一镑等于二十先令，三十先令即是一镑半。——译者注

⑨
1840年间的一首歌。

第八章

博尔顿太太对康妮也挺关心，觉得自己作为一个女人和一个专业护士，必须对康妮也施加保护。她总是催促夫人出去走走，开车去伍斯威特，去呼吸新鲜空气。这是因为康妮习惯于安静地坐在壁炉前，要么心不在焉地阅读，要么有气无力地做点针线，几乎不怎么出去。

希尔达刚走就开始刮大风。博尔顿太太对康妮说：“干吗不到林子里去散散步，到那个看守的房子后面看看仙花儿？那儿的景致儿最好看了。你还可以采一些来放在你屋里。仙花儿看上去总是那么喜庆，不是吗？”

康妮听懂了她话中的好意，尽管她把水仙花给简化说成了“仙花儿”。野水仙！再怎么着也不能老这样自寻烦恼不是？春天回来了。“四季轮回，但春天并没回到我身边……”
①

还有那个猎场看守，他消瘦白皙的身体就像一朵花中半隐半现的孤独的花蕊！在难言的压抑中她把他给忘了。可现在她心里又有什么被唤醒了。“门廊与大门后面一片苍白。”
②

要做的就是穿过这门廊和大门。

她比以前壮实了，更能走了。树林子里的风不会像邸园里的风那样横扫一切，令她疲于应付。她想忘却，忘却这世界和所有那些可怕的行尸走肉！“你们必须再生！我相信肉体的复活！——一粒小麦种子掉进土里，除非死了才会发芽。——当藏红花绽放时，我也会出来见太阳！”
③

在三月的风中，她的脑子里涌现出无休无止的句子和段落。

一阵风吹过，天上洒下一片奇亮的阳光，照亮了林边榛树下的地黄连，亮晶晶、黄灿灿的。树林里一片寂静，静得不能再静了，但一有风刮过，就会透进一缕缕阳光来。第一茬银莲花已经开了，那无边的白银莲花撒满了林地，令这林子都看似苍白了些。“世界因你的呼吸而苍白。”
④

但此时是冥后珀耳塞福涅
⑤

的呼吸，她是在一个料峭的早上出了地府。寒风吹拂，头顶上愤怒的风在纠缠着的树梢间呼啸。它被树梢所缚，要挣脱自己，这风跟押沙龙
⑥

样。银莲花看上去是那么冰冷，赤裸的白肩在绿色的裙边上抖动着，但它顶住了风的摧残。小径边上第一茬报春花绽放出小小的花朵，尚有黄色的花蕾正含苞欲放。

头上方狂风呼啸，树林摇动，下面感到的也只有寒风阵阵。但康妮在林子里居然感到一种奇怪的激动，她的脸色红润起来，眼睛更加湛蓝。她缓慢地走着，不时掐几朵报春花和第一茬紫罗兰，那花儿散发着冷香，阵阵扑鼻。她就这么游荡着，不知身在何处。

直到她来到林子尽头的空地上，她看见了那座青石村舍。那房子看上去发红，就像蘑菇伞下的菇肉，村舍石头的色调在阳光下显得温暖。房门口开着一蓬黄色的茉莉花，但门关着。四下里鸦雀无声，烟囱里没冒炊烟，园子里也没有犬吠。

她悄悄地走到房子后面的斜坡下，她来这里是有借口的，那就是看水仙花。

在那里，那些短梗的花朵在风中摇曳飘舞着，是那么生气勃勃。因为它们的脸无处躲藏，所以都背风开放着。

水仙花在郁闷中抖动着它们那鲜亮明媚的小花瓣儿。不过它们或许是喜欢这样的，真的。或许它们就喜欢这么抖动。

康斯坦丝背靠着一棵小松树坐了下来，那松树摇晃着，让她感到一种奇特的生命在冲撞着自己，富有弹性和力度，在向上挺着身子。这挺直的活生生的东西，树梢沐浴在阳光中！看着水仙花在阳光下光鲜夺目，她的手和腿都感到温暖。她甚至闻到了略带柏油味的花香。她是那么孤寂，似乎陷入了自己命运的湍流中。她一直都被一根绳子束缚着，像一条被拴住的船颠簸着，但逃不出绳子的圈套。现在她解了套，开始自由漂流了。

阳光还是抵不过寒气，水仙花又被笼罩在了阴影中，默默地垂下头。它们会这样垂着头待上一天一夜。别看它们那么柔弱，其实它们很有生命力！

她站起来，身子有点僵直，掐了几朵水仙花后才离开。她不喜欢掐花，可她又特别想带上一两朵走。她得回拉格比，进到大墙里去。她开始恨拉格比府，特别恨它那厚重的大墙。墙壁！总是这些墙壁！可人需要墙，在这样起风的日子里。

进家后克利福德问她：“去哪儿了？”

“穿过了整个林子！看，这些水仙花儿多可爱呀！简直无法想象它们是从地里长出来的！”

“没空气和阳光它们也长不出来的。”克利福德说。

“反正是先在土里成形的。”她立即反驳说，出口之快令她自己都有点惊讶了。

第二天她又到林子里去了。这次她走的是一条蜿蜒而上的宽阔马道，穿过落叶松林，来到一口被称为“约翰井”的泉眼。这边山坡上挺冷，落叶松林中一朵花也没有。可是冰冷的泉水却在轻柔地向上涌着，泉眼周围铺着白里透红的鹅卵石。多么清冽的泉水！真好啊！毫无疑问这些新的鹅卵石是那个新来的猎场看守铺的。康妮能听到这涓涓细流顺山而下时发出的微弱叮咚声。山坡上的落叶松虽然无叶，但松枝翘耸，还是黑压压一片，发出阵阵嘶鸣。可松涛盖不住泉声，她还是能听到泉水的叮咚声，如同水做的铃铛一样清脆。

这地方又冷又潮，有点阴森。这口泉井一定是几百年来人们饮水的地方，不过现在人们不来这里汲水了。这小小的空地绿草茵茵，但也阴森可怕。

她站起身慢慢朝家走去。走着走着，她听到右边不远处有敲打声，就站住谛听。是锤子的声音还是啄木鸟在啄木？肯定是锤子在敲打什么。

她继续走着，听着。然后她发现冷杉幼苗之间有一条窄径，不知通向什么地方。但她感到这路一直有人在走。于是她冒险走上了这条路。开始路边是厚厚的冷杉幼苗，很快就是老橡树林了。她沿着路越往前走，那锤子的敲打声就越近。在这寂静的林子里，风声遮不住锤子的声音，因为即使有风树林里也是安静的。

她看到了一片秘密的小空地，空地上有一座用没加工的木头搭起的小木屋。她从来没来过这个地方！她意识到这个安静的地方是用来养山鸡的。那猎场看守穿着衬衣，跪在地上敲打着什么。狗见来了人就狂叫着跑过来。看守猛然抬起头，看到了她，眼睛里闪过一丝惊诧。

他直起身向她行礼，默默地看着她脚步无力地走过来。他不喜欢别人侵犯他的领地，因为他把孤独看作是自己生命中最后也是唯一的自由。

“我是想知道这敲打声是怎么回事。”她边说边喘着，显得力不从心，而且由于他的眼睛直视着她，她觉得有点害怕。

“我正给小雏鸡儿们准备笼子。”他操着浓重的地方口音说。

她听了不知该说什么，只是感到虚弱。

“我想坐会儿。”她说。

“来，屋里坐呗。”说着他在前面带她进屋，扒开一些木头什么的物件，拉出一把粗榛木做的椅子。

“要生上点儿火不？”他问，奇怪的是他讲方言时显得挺天真。

“哦，不必麻烦了！”她说。

但是他看看她的手，发现它们都冻得发青了。于是他马上找了些落叶松的枝条，放进墙角里砖砌的小壁炉里，不一会儿黄黄的火苗儿就开始升起来。然后他又在炉前腾出一块地方来。

“上这儿坐会儿，暖和暖和吧。”他说。

她顺从着，他的言谈举止里有一种奇怪的保护者的威严，令她马上就服从了。她就这么坐下，在火边烤着自己的双手，不时往火里添几根树枝，而他则在外面继续敲打着。她其实并不想固定地坐在墙角的火炉边上，她更想在门边看他干活，可既然是受到了照顾，也就只好服从了。

这小木屋里很舒服，墙壁是没有上油的松木板，她的椅子边有张粗陋的小桌子和一个凳子，还有一条木匠用的条凳和一个大箱子。屋里还摆列着工具，堆着新做的板子，散落着钉子，钩子上挂着很多东西：斧子、短柄小斧、捕兽夹子，还有装着东西的袋子和他的外衣。屋子没窗户，光线是通过敞开的门透进来的。这里杂乱无章，但也是个小小的避难所。

她倾听着那个男人用锤子敲打的声音，从锤声中听得出来他并不快活，他有些压抑，因为有人侵入了他的私人地盘，而且是个危险的人，一个女人！他已经到了一种极其需要孤独的地步，可又没有能力保住自己的孤独。他是个雇工，雇他的人都是他的主子。

他是个不想再和女人接触的人。他惧怕接触，因为过去的接触给他留下了巨大的创伤。他感到如果他不能独处，如果别人不让他独处，他会死掉。他已经彻底避开了这个世界，他最后的藏身之处就是这林子，把自己隐在林子里！

康妮让炉火烤暖和了，柴加得太多了，火烧得过旺，所以她身上都感到燥热了。于是她坐到门道里的凳子上去，看着那男人干活儿。他似乎没注意到她，但知道她在边上看着。可他还是继续干活，似乎是全神贯注。他那条棕毛狗就蹲在他旁边，监视着这可疑的周边世界。

这个身材颀长的男人沉默寡言，但干起活来动作很快，不一会儿就把鸡笼子做好了，试试下滑的门没问题，就把笼子放到了一边。然后他站起身，去拿一个旧笼子，把它放到刚才干活的木墩子上。他蹲下，试试木条行不行，有几根就在他手中折了。他又开始拔钉子。拔完了，把笼子掉过来，开始想着怎么办。他一直没有表现出自己意识到有个女人在旁边。

康妮于是盯着他看起来。她曾经看到过如此孤独的他，那次他裸着身子，而这次的孤独则是穿着衣服的。孤独，聚精会神，就像一个忙着干什么的动物那样，躲避着人与人的接触，独自思考着。即便是现在，他也在沉默耐心地躲避着她。男人本是缺乏耐心、激情澎湃的，可这个人竟是这样沉静，有着无限的耐心，这一点触动了她的内心深处。她看出来了，从他低垂的头颅、灵活但沉稳的手臂、弯曲着的瘦弱而敏感的腰肢，看出了他的耐心和内敛。她能感觉出来，这个人过去的经历一定比自己要复杂，复杂得多，或许是经历过生离死别的人。这让她松了口气，几乎觉得自己用不着为今天冒犯他而负疚。

她就这么如梦如幻地坐在小屋的门道里，全然忘却了时间和自己所处的环境。她走神走得很厉害，他抬头迅速地瞟她一眼，看到了她脸上那宁静、期待的表情。在他看来，那就是期待的表情。于是，一道微弱的火舌突然间舐起他的腰臀，就在后背的根部，他的精神为之呻吟起来。他害怕任何人与人之间进一步的接触，怕得要死。他最希望的就是她赶快离开，让他一个人独享自己的私人空间。他害怕她的那股劲儿，那种女人的劲头，还有她那现代女性的坚韧。而最重要的，他害怕她那上等人的冷静的头脑，和我行我素的傲慢态度。因为说到底他只是个雇工。他烦她待在这里。

康妮突然间清醒了过来，感到一阵不安。她站起身，意识到下午已经过去，快到黄昏时分了。可是她不能就这么走。她朝那个男人走过去。他站起身准备听她说什么，憔悴的脸上表情僵硬麻木，但他的眼睛在看着她。

“这儿太好了，真悠闲，”她说，“我以前没来过这儿。”

“是吗？”

“我想我以后还要时不时来这儿坐坐。”

“那好啊！”

“你不在时屋子锁门吗？”

“锁，夫人。”

“你觉得我也能有把钥匙吗？那样我就能时不时来坐坐了！有多余的钥匙吗？”

“说不上，估摸着是莫有。”

他不知不觉地说起土话来。康妮犹豫着不知说什么才好。他这是在跟她作对，难道这小木屋是他的不成？

“我们能再有一把钥匙吗？”她问，语气柔顺但透着一个女人不达目的决不罢休的决心。

“再有一把！”他扫了她一眼，眼神里既有愠怒也有不屑。

“是的！另一把。”说着她脸红了。

“备不住克利福德男爵知道在哪儿吧。”他以此堵她的嘴。

“对！”她说，“他或许有另一把。或者我们可以用你这把再配一把。用不上一天就行，我想。能把你的钥匙借我一下吗？”

“这我可不敢保证，夫人！据我所知，这地界儿没有配钥匙的人。”

这话让康妮突然大为光火。

“那好吧！”她说，“我来弄。”

“那就随你，夫人。”

他们的目光相遇了。他的目光冷漠而恶毒，充满厌恶和蔑视，也透着对后果满不在乎的态度。而她的眼神里则是愤怒和斥责。

但她的心却为之一沉。她看出来了，她不顺着他他就恨她。她还看出了他心中的压抑。

“再见！”

“回头见，夫人！”他行个礼，立即转身而去。这女人激起了他心中已经沉睡许久的强烈怒火，那是对任性的女人所怀的怒火。可他又无能为力，无能为力！他知道这一点！

康妮也为这个任性的男人生气，而且他还是个仆人！她一路生气一路走回了家。

在山坡上那棵大山毛榉树下她看到了博尔顿太太，她也正在找康妮呢。

“我正想你什么时候回来呢，夫人。”那女人快活地说。

“我晚了吗？”康妮问。

“哦！克利福德男爵在等着用茶点呢。”

“那你怎么不准备呢？”

“哦，我觉得我干那个不行。克利福德男爵怕是不喜欢这样吧，夫人。”

“我看不出为什么不行。”康妮说。

她进了屋，到了克利福德的书房里，看到那把旧铜壶放在茶盘里，壶里已经灌了开水。

“我回来晚了，克利福德！”说着她放下手中的花，拿起茶叶罐，连帽子和围巾都没有摘，“抱歉！你怎么不让博尔顿太太给你沏茶呢？”

“我可没想到让她干这个，”他略带讽刺地说，“我不愿意让她操持茶点。”

“哦，银茶壶并没那么神圣。”康妮说。

他闻之不解地瞟了她一眼。

“整个下午都在干什么呀？”他问。

“散步啊，还在一个棚子里坐了会儿。你知道吗，大冬青树上还有浆果呢。”

说着她摘下围巾，但没摘帽子，就坐下来沏茶了。烤面包肯定都不脆了。她给茶壶套上壶套，就起身去找个玻璃杯子来插她的紫罗兰花。可怜的花朵无精打采地垂着头。

“它们会缓过来的！”说着她把装花的玻璃杯放到他面前让他闻闻花香。

“比朱诺的眼睑还漂亮。”他引用莎士比亚的话说。

“我没觉得紫罗兰与朱诺的眼睑有什么关系，”康妮说，“那些维多利亚时代的人真是玩弄辞藻。”

她给他倒上茶，问：

“离‘约翰井’不远的那个木屋还有另一把钥匙吗？哦，就是养小雏鸡的地方。”

“或许有吧，你问这个干什么？”

“我今天碰巧发现了那个地方，以前从来没见过的。我觉得那地方好可爱呀。我可以常去那儿坐坐，对吗？”

“梅勒斯在那儿吗？”

“在呀，我就是听到他用锤子敲东西才发现那个地方的。他好像不喜欢我闯进去。事实上，我问他有没有多余钥匙时他态度挺粗鲁的。”

“他说什么来着？”

“倒没说什么，可就是那态度！他说钥匙的事他不知道。”

“可能还有一把，在父亲的书房里吧。贝茨全知道，所有的东西都放那里。我回头让他去找。”

“哦，行啊！”她说。

“梅勒斯居然敢表现粗鲁！”

“哦，没什么！我就是觉得他不想让我随便到他的地盘上去。”

“我想也是。”

“可我不懂他为什么不愿意，怎么说那也不是他的家，那不是他的私人住所。我不知道，如果我想在那儿坐坐，为什么不行。”

“就是！”克利福德说，“他太拿自己当回事了，那个人。”

“你觉得是吗？”

“哦，绝对是！他认为自己非同一般人。你知道，他曾有个老婆，但两个人合不来，所以他1915年参了军，后来被派到印度去了，没错。不知怎么回事，他有一段时间又在埃及的骑兵团干过铁匠，总是在伺弄马，在那方面他是个聪明的家伙。后来有个驻印度的上校看上了他，提拔他当了个中尉。不错，他们给了他个军衔儿。我肯定他跟他的上校回了印度，到了西北部的边境地区。后来他病了，得了一笔抚恤金。但直到去年才退伍。像这样的人，自然很难倒退到自己原来的位置上去，所以他注定要出错儿。不过他干活儿还挺尽职，至少我这么看。不过我可不许他摆什么梅勒斯中尉的架子。”

“他说一口浓重的达比郡
⑦

土话，他们怎么还让他当官呢？”

“他一般不说，只是偶尔说说。他能讲标准的英语。我想，他是有想法的。如果他回到老百姓中间了，就得说老百姓的语言。”

“你以前怎么从来没对我说起过他？”

“哦，我才没有耐心说这些传奇故事呢。传奇破坏秩序，发生这些就是天大的不幸。”

康妮挺相信他的话。那些心怀不满、到处都错位的人有什么用！

偶遇好天气，克利福德也要到林子里去转转。风很冷，但并不让人厌烦，阳光则像生命，温暖而灿烂。

“真奇怪，”康妮说，“遇上个真正的好天儿，人的感觉竟然完全变了。平常总感觉连空气都半死不活的。其实破坏空气的是人。”

“你认为是人在干这种事吗？”他问。

“我是这么想的！所有人的怨气、愁气和怒气足以扼杀空气中的生气。我相信这一点。”

“也许是空气的原因让人生气低落呢。”克利福德说。

“不是！是人毒化宇宙。”她坚持说。

“玷污了自己的巢穴。”克利福德补充道。

轮椅“突突”地向前开着。低矮的榛树上垂落着淡黄色的杨花，在阳光灿烂的地方银莲花怒放，似乎是在放声唱着生命的欢乐，就像在过去人们可以同它们一起歌唱时一样。银莲的香味很像淡淡的苹果花香。康妮摘了几朵银莲给克利福德。

克利福德接过花，好奇地看着。

“你这宁静的尚未被奸污的新娘，”克利福德引用济慈《希腊古瓮颂》里的诗句道，“这句诗用在花上比用在希腊花瓶上更合适。”

“‘奸’这个字很令人恐怖！”她说，“只有人才强奸事物。”

“哦，我不知道……蜗牛什么的都干这个。”他说。

“蜗牛也不过是啮食。蜜蜂是不会强奸的。”

康妮生克利福德的气了，什么他都用比喻描述。紫罗兰是朱诺的眼睑，银莲花又成了未被奸污的新娘。她恨透了这些字词，它们总是把她和生命阻隔开！如果说奸污，字词才是在干着奸污的勾当呢。这些现成的字词和短语把所有活生生的生命元气都吸干了。

和克利福德的散步并不愉快。他和康妮之间的气氛挺紧张，但双方都佯装不知，可紧张是存在的。蓦地，康妮凭借着强烈的女性本能，想要甩开他。她要摆脱他，特别是摆脱他的想法、他的写作和他对自我的迷恋——他对自己和自己的写作怀有无限的迷恋。

又开始下雨了。但隔了一两天，她就冒雨到林子里去了，一到林子里她就去小木屋。下着雨，但并不很冷。林子里静悄悄的，让人觉得很是遥远，在昏暗的雨中，似乎难以接近。

她来到空地上，那儿一个人也没有！小屋的门锁着。她就在粗木门廊下木桩子做成的台阶上坐下来，蜷缩着身体以求暖和点。她就那样坐着看雨，倾听寂静的林中各种声音，听树林高处奇特的飒飒风声，尽管似乎并没有风。周围是老橡树林，强壮的灰色树干被雨打湿后颜色发黑，又圆又壮，枝叶茂密。地面上少有矮树丛，银莲花星星点点，偶见一两处灌木丛或荚蒾，还有一团团略微发紫的野生黑莓。翠绿的银莲花绒毛盖住了那褐色的羊齿草，几乎令其消失殆尽。或许这才是未被奸污的地方呢。未被奸污！整个世界都被奸污了。

有些东西是无法奸污的。你无法奸污一听沙丁鱼。很多女人都像一听沙丁鱼，有的男人亦如此。可大地——！

雨渐渐住了。橡树林里不那么黑了。康妮想走，可她还是坐着不动。她感到冷了，可她内心的反感产生了巨大的惰性，让她待着不动，几乎像瘫痪了一般。

奸污！一个人居然在没有接触的情况下受到奸污！字词僵死直至污秽，观念僵死直至令人痴迷，这些都可以将人奸污。

这时跑来一只湿漉漉的棕毛狗，它没叫，只是翘着湿漉漉的尾巴。那男人尾随而来，他穿着黑色雨布外衣，样子像个出租车司机，脸色有点发红。康妮感到他看到她时有点收住了疾速的脚步。她站起身，粗木头廊檐下只有很小一条干爽的地方。他无言地行个礼，缓缓靠近。康妮开始向后退缩着。

“我这就走。”她说。

“你是等着进屋吧？”他问，不看她，只看着小屋。

“不！我只是在廊下避雨。”她沉静而庄重地说。

他看看她，她看上去身上发冷。

“克利福德男爵莫有别的钥匙呀？”他问。

“没有！不过没关系。我可以在廊下坐坐，淋不着的。再会！”

她讨厌他大讲土话。

他紧紧盯着她离去的背影。紧接着他拉起上衣，从裤袋里掏出小屋的钥匙冲她说：

“没准儿你拿着这把钥匙更好，我得琢磨别的法子养小鸡子了。”

她看看他问：

“你这是什么意思啊？”

“我是说没准儿我能找着别的什么地界儿养小鸡子。要是你想在这儿待着，就不会乐意我老在这地界儿倒腾来倒腾去地瞎忙乎。”

她看着他，大概猜中了他土话里的意思。

“你为什么不讲标准的英语呢？”她冷漠地问。

“我！我觉着我说的是标准英语。”

康妮生气了，半天不说话。

“你要是想要这把钥匙，就拿着呗。不过我最好明儿个再给你，等我先把屋里乱七八糟的家什给清喽。那样儿成不？”

她更生气了。

“我不想要你的钥匙，”她说，“我也不想让你清理任何东西。我一点也不想把你赶出你的屋子，谢谢！我只是想有时候来这里坐坐，就像今天这样。我完全可以就坐在廊檐下，所以你别再提钥匙的事了。”

他又用那双恶意的蓝眼睛看了她一眼。

“这话怎么说的，”他仍讲着浓重的方言，但语速慢了下来，“夫人来小屋我欢迎，钥匙什么的都随夫人用。就是吧，年年儿这个时候我得张罗着孵小鸡儿，得里里外外忙活着照看它们！冬天我用不着怎么到这地界儿来，就是一开春儿，克利福德男爵要打山鸡了……夫人你一来了吧，怕是不乐意看我瞎转磨……”

她听着他说话，暗自感到惊诧。

“我为什么不喜欢看见你在这里呢？”她问。

他好奇地看看她。

“碍手碍脚的呗！”他简单地说了一句，但这就够了。她听了脸刷地就红了。“那好！”她最后说，“我不会给你添麻烦。但我不觉得坐在这儿看你照顾雏鸡有什么不好，我喜欢那样。不过既然你觉得干扰你了，我就不会来了，别怕。你是克利福德男爵的猎场看守，不归我管。”

这句话说得令人费解，她也不知道怎么会这么说，但说了也就说了。

“不，夫人。这是夫人您的小屋，您想来就来，您也可以提前一个礼拜通知辞了我，只是……”

“只是什么？”她不解地问。

他把帽子往上推了推，样子有点奇怪和滑稽。

“只是，您想一个人在这里待着，您来了，我就不来瞎忙乎了。”

“为什么？”她生气地说，“你不是个文明人吗？你以为我会怕你吗？我为什么要盯着你，在乎你在不在这儿？这事重要吗？”

他看着她，脸上露出恶意的笑，说：“不重要，夫人，一点儿都不重要。”

“那又是为什么？”她问。

“要我为夫人您配另一把钥匙吗？”

“不，谢谢，我不要。”

“反正我会再弄一把的。最好有两把钥匙。”

“我觉得你挺无礼的。”说着康妮脸红了，呼吸有点急促起来。

“不，不！”他赶紧说，“可别那么说呀！不，不，我压根儿没那意思！就是寻思着你会来，我该清出去。那活儿可够受的，另起炉灶么。要是夫人不在意我，那就好。这是克利福德男爵的屋子，夫人您想怎么着就怎么着呗。怎么着都行，只要夫人喜欢，只是别在意我东忙西忙的，我得干活儿。”

康妮离开了，全然莫名其妙。她不知道自己是不是受了侮辱或者受到了巨大的冒犯。或许那男人的意思的确是说他以为她想让他避开。还以为她做梦都想这事呢！还以为他自己有多重要呢！就他那个愚蠢的样子。

她回到家，脑子挺乱，不知道自己在想什么，也不知道感觉如何。

注　释

①
见弥尔顿《失乐园》第三章。

②
此句出自斯温伯恩的诗。

③
“你们必须再生”，见《约翰福音》第三章，第七节。“我相信肉体的复活”见《使徒信经》。“一粒小麦掉进土里，除非死了才会发芽”是《约翰福音》第十二章第二十四节的释意。

④
斯温伯恩的诗，意指耶稣。

⑤
希腊神话中宙斯和得墨忒耳的女儿，采花时被冥王哈得斯掠到冥府，只能在每年春天回到地面，因此也被看作是春女神。劳伦斯经常在作品里提到她。

⑥
押沙龙是大卫王的第三子。他试图组织人反抗父王，失败后企图骑马逃走，但他的长发被树枝缠住，未能逃走，后被大卫手下人所杀。见《撒母耳记》第十三至十九章。

⑦
劳伦斯的家乡在诺丁汉郡与达比郡交界的地方，但本地人都讲达比郡方言。——译者注

第九章

康妮开始厌恶克利福德了，这让她感到惊讶。不仅如此，她感到自己一直就不喜欢他。倒也不是恨他，这里面没有感情的问题。只是从肉体上深深地厌恶他。似乎她跟他结婚就是因为不喜欢他，在肉体上不喜欢。不过，她嫁给他确实是因为他在精神上吸引了她并让她兴奋。在某种意义上，他似乎是她的主人，令她无法企及。

现在，那精神上的兴奋劲儿早已过去，支离破碎，她感觉到的就只有肉体上的厌恶了。这种厌恶是发自内心深处的，让她意识到自己一直都被这种感觉蚕食着。

她感到身体虚弱，无限孤独。她巴望着外界有谁能帮她。可整个世界没人能帮她。社会是恐怖的，因为它早就疯了。文明的社会疯了。金钱和所谓的爱情是它的两大疯癫症，其中金钱远远跑在前面。个人就在金钱与爱情中分裂着，发着疯。看看米凯利斯！他的生活和行动就是疯癫的，他的爱情就是一种疯狂，他写的戏剧也是某种疯症的表现。

克利福德也一样。什么谈话！什么写作！什么疯狂的挣扎，推动自己进取！都不过是疯狂而已。这种状况每况愈下，确实疯狂。

康妮感到自己害怕至极。不过至少克利福德放松了对她的纠缠，转而纠缠博尔顿太太了。这一点他自己意识不到，像很多疯子一样，他疯狂的程度是要靠他意识不到什么来衡量的，那是他意识中的荒漠地带。

博尔顿太太在很多方面都令人起敬。奇怪的是她很霸道，总是将自己的意志强加给别人，这是现代女性疯狂的标志。她以为自己全然是为别人效劳的，是为别人而活着的。克利福德令她着迷，因为他总是，或者说经常是不动声色地就挫败了她的意志，靠的似乎是某种细腻的本能。与她相比，他的自我意志更加细腻微妙，这就是博尔顿太太眼中克利福德的魅力之所在。

或许那也是曾经迷惑过康妮的魅力。

“今儿个天儿多好呀！”博尔顿太太会半是抚慰半是说服地劝他道，“我觉得你肯定会喜欢坐着轮椅出去逛逛的，这阳光真是爱死个人儿。”

“是吗？能递给我那本书吗……在那儿，那本黄皮的。顺便把那些风信子拿走吧。”

“怎么了，不是挺好看吗？”她特别加重说“好看”二字，“香死个人儿呢。”

“我烦的就是那股香味儿，”他说，“有点丧气，像葬礼上的味儿。”

“您怎么那么想呢！”她惊讶地大叫道，感觉受到了冒犯，但还是服从了，把那些风信子拿出屋了。她服从的是他那种高雅的挑剔劲儿。

“今儿早上胡子是让我刮呢，还是你自己来？”博尔顿太太总是用这种轻柔、抚慰、顺从但又是管人的口吻说话。

“我不知道。你能等一会儿吗？我准备好了会按铃叫你的。”

“好的，克利福德男爵！”她柔顺地回答着，悄然退了下去。但每次受到冷遇都会令她的意志更坚强。

过了一会儿，他一按铃，她就立即出现了。他说：

“我想今天还是你来给我刮吧。”

她心里一阵激动，随后特别温柔地回答道：“好的，克利福德男爵！”

她很灵巧，触摸他时手指轻柔、舒缓。起初他挺反感她的手指触摸他的脸时那种过分的温柔，但现在他喜欢了，渐渐感到受用了。他几乎每天都让她给自己刮脸。刮脸时她的脸紧挨着他的脸，目光十分专注，一丝不苟地盯着，生怕出错。渐渐地，她的指尖能准确地感觉出他的脸颊、嘴唇、颧骨、下颌和喉部。他养尊处优，容颜保养得好，他的脸和颈生得完美无缺，不愧是个绅士。

她也很标致。白净的长脸，表情沉静，眼睛明亮，但丝毫也不泄露内心的秘密。渐渐地，她凭着自己无尽的温柔，几乎算是爱，控制住了他，让他服帖了。

现在她几乎什么都为他做，他也觉得同她相处得和谐多了，让她干起脏活儿来比让康妮干更好意思些。博尔顿太太喜欢伺弄他，喜欢将他的身体掌握在自己手中，什么都管，最脏的活儿也都包了。有一天她对康妮说：“你一摸到男人们的底儿，就会发现他们都是孩子。你猜怎么着，特瓦萧矿井下最难伺候的病人我都伺候过。别管他们得的是什么毛病，你伺候上他们，他们就成了孩子，简直就是大孩子。嗨，男人们呢，没什么太大的不同！”

起初博尔顿太太还以为一个绅士，一个像克利福德男爵这样真正的绅士或许真跟别人有什么不一样，所以克利福德一开始把她给镇住了。可渐渐地，用她的话说，一旦她摸到了男人的底儿，她就发现克利福德跟别人一样，是个长成大人模样的孩子，但是个脾气古怪、举止文雅、有钱有势的孩子，是个满腹经纶的孩子，那一肚子莫名其妙的知识她做梦也弄不懂，因此他还是能压制住她。

有时康妮忍不住想说：

“看在上帝的份上，别让那个女人给钳制住！”但她又发现自己还没到对他那么牵挂的地步，因此也就不说了。

他们仍然按照老习惯，两个人一起待到晚上十点才分手。他们在一起聊天、读书或研读他的手稿。可以前做这事时的兴奋感早已烟消云散，她烦了他的手稿，但仍然尽职地为他打出稿子来。不过，就这很快也成了博尔顿太太的事。

康妮建议博尔顿太太学着用打字机打字。早就有这念头的博尔顿太太说干就干，练得十分努力。所以现在克利福德有时会给她口授一封信什么的，她会记录下来，速度有点慢，但字打得准确无误。遇上难字或偶尔的法文短语什么的，克利福德会十分耐心地拼出来。博尔顿太太打起字来兴奋异常，因此教她打字几乎是件快活的事。

现在康妮有时会以头疼为托词一吃完晚饭就上楼去。

“或许博尔顿太太能陪你玩双人皮克牌。”她对克利福德说。

“哦，我挺好。你回房间休息吧，亲爱的。”

可是她一走他就按铃叫博尔顿太太来玩皮克牌、伯齐克牌甚至下棋。他教会了她玩所有这些游戏。看到博尔顿太太像个小姑娘那样红着脸哆里哆嗦、游移不定地摸摸象、摸摸马又抽回手的样子，康妮就特别反感。而克利福德却微笑着，带着调笑的口吻居高临下地对她说：

“你必须说j'adoube
①

！”

她抬起眼皮，明亮的眼睛惊悚地看看他，然后顺从地喃喃道：

“J'adoube！”

没错，他是在教育她呢。他乐为人师，因为这让他感到一种权威。而博尔顿太太也高兴，因为她逐渐地掌握了绅士阶层之所以成为绅士的那些东西，除了金钱之外。这令她兴奋不已。与此同时她也使他离不开她了。她这种发自内心的激动让他微微感到是对他的一种至高的奉承。

而在康妮看来，克利福德似乎是露出自己的真面目了：有点俗，有点平庸，毫无生气，身材也有点臃肿了。艾维·博尔顿的手腕和绵里藏针是过于昭著了点，可康妮确实为她从克利福德那里获得的兴奋感到惊讶。说她爱上了他倒还不至于。她的激动来自于同这个男人的接触，一个上等人，一个有爵位的人，一个会写书作诗的人，人家的照片都登在画报上了呢。她是因着某种奇特的激情而激动。他给她的“教育”激起了她的激情和反应，其结果是任何爱情都无法比拟的。事实上，正因为不可能有爱情这一说，她才能伴着他的另一种激情纵情地激动，那就是求知的激情，尽可能地求知。

不错，这女人在以某种方式爱着克利福德，无论我们怎么解释“爱情”这个词的意思，那都应该算是爱。她看上去是那么标致，那么年轻，灰色的眼睛有时看上去是那么精神。还有，她时不时会显出满足的样子来，甚至是得胜的样子，康妮讨厌的就是这个。偷着得意，私底下满足！

怪不得克利福德让这女人俘虏了呢！她对他绝对仰慕，从不动摇，俯首帖耳地为他效劳，任他使唤。也难怪他感到被阿谀奉承着！

康妮听到这两人在长谈，其实大部分时间里是博尔顿太太在说。她没完没了地说着特瓦萧村的流言蜚语。她的话比蜚短流长还更甚，那是熔盖斯凯尔夫人、乔治·艾略特和米特福德小姐
②

于一炉，外加这些女人挂一漏万的那些东西。一聊起人们的家长里短来，博尔顿太太简直胜过任何一本书。她对村里的人都了如指掌，而且对他们的事特别热衷。听她道来，真是精彩，虽然有点掉价儿。起初她并没有像她说的那样对克利福德“唠唠特瓦萧村”，可一旦开了头儿就收不住了。克利福德倾听着，是为自己写作找“素材”，还真听出不少料来。康妮意识到，他的“天分”就在于此：他能天才地利用那些蜚短流长，听的时候可以不动声色。博尔顿太太一旦“唠唠特瓦萧村”自然就特别热心，干脆就收不住。她知道的这里发生的那些事儿真是有意思，让她聊起来，能写成十来本书呢。

康妮听她说这些事也听得入迷，但过后总觉得有点掉价儿。她觉得自己不应该这么带着猎奇的心态去听。一个人不妨听听别人最隐私的事，但应该是对人家的挣扎和倒霉抱以尊重的态度，因为人人都如此，而且应该对此怀有细微、明察的同情心，甚至讽刺也算是一种同情。对我们的生活起决定作用的是我们的同情心释放或收敛的方式。对了，小说的重要性也在于此，如果处理得当的话。它能影响我们的同情心并将它引入新的天地，它也能引导我们的同情心从死亡处收敛回来。因此，如果处理得当，小说可以披露生命中最为隐秘的地带：因为正是在生命之激情的隐秘地带，敏锐的感觉潮汐在涨落、洗涤和刷新着。

但是小说和流言一样，也能激起虚假的同情，制造虚假的收敛，对人的心理造成机械致命的影响。小说能将最腐朽的感情化为神奇，只要这些感情是符合传统意义的“纯粹感情”。在这种情况下，小说就像流言，最终变得恶劣，而且像流言一样，因为总是昭著地站在天使一边而变得更恶劣。博尔顿太太的流言就总是站在天使一边的。“他是个特坏的家伙，可她是个挺好的女人，”她会这么说别人。可康妮甚至从博尔顿太太的闲言碎语中都能听得出，她说的那个好女人不过是个说话讨人喜欢的女人，而那个坏男人则是个脾气不好的老实人。但在经过博尔顿太太正儿八经地一番搬弄是非、错施同情之后，脾气不好的老实人就成了“坏家伙”，甜言蜜语则让她成了个“好女人”。

这样一来，闲言碎语是对人的侮辱。同样，大多数小说，特别是流行小说，也是侮辱人的东西。公众现在只喜欢迎合他们阴暗心理的东西。

无论如何，博尔顿太太的话还是能让人对特瓦萧村有新的认识。这里的生活丑陋、混乱得吓人，并不像表面看上去那样只是单调乏味而已。克利福德自然见过博尔顿太太提到的那些人，康妮则只认识其中一两个。但听上去这里更像一处非洲中部的丛林而非一座英国乡村。

“我猜你听说奥尔索普小姐上礼拜结婚的事了吧！你怎么也想不到吧！奥尔索普小姐，就是老鞋匠詹姆斯·奥尔索普的闺女。你知道的，他们在派伊克罗夫特那边盖了房子。可那老头儿去年摔了一跤，死了。都八十三的人了，腿脚儿还像个小伙子呢。去年冬天小青年儿们在贝斯特伍德山上修了条滑道滑冰，他也去滑，就摔断了大腿，结果就那么死了。可怜的老头儿，真怪可惜了儿的。猜怎么着，他把钱都留给了女儿塔蒂，没给儿子们留下一分钱。我知道，塔蒂大我五岁，去年秋天都五十三了。哎哟，天知道，他们可是些特信教
③

的人啊。塔蒂在主日学校里教了三十年的课，一直教到她爸爸去世。打那以后她就开始跟金布鲁克的一个家伙勾搭上了。不知你认不认得，那是个挺老的家伙，长着红鼻子，打扮得像个花花公子儿，叫威尔科克，在哈里森家的堆木厂工作，估摸着有六十五了。可你看他们挎着胳膊，在大门口亲嘴儿的样子，还当他们是一对儿小鸳鸯呢。没错儿，在派伊克罗夫特路边的房子里，她坐在他腿上，就在外飘窗的窗台儿上，是故意让人看的。那男人的儿子都四十大几了，他老婆死了才两年的工夫儿，他就干这个。老詹姆斯·奥尔索普没从坟里出来管他们，那是因为他不愿意出来，他觉得自己生前把女儿管得太厉害了，现在放她一马！现在两个人结了婚，住到金布鲁克去了。听那儿的人说呀，塔蒂从早到晚都穿着睡袍晃悠，真是活显眼呀。我就看不惯这个，老年人怎么会这个德性！他们简直比年轻的还差劲，那德性儿更让人恶心。我觉得这都是电影给闹的，可你又不能不让人们看电影啊。所以我总是说，看点儿让人学好的电影，看在老天爷的份儿上，别看那些瞎编乱造的情节剧和爱情片儿。无论如何也不能让孩子们看那个。可你瞧瞧，大人反倒比孩子还差劲，老的学坏更快。还说什么道德呢！去他的道德吧。人们想怎么着就怎么着，活得比原先滋润，这我得承认。可现如今他们得收敛点儿了，矿上的生产不怎么行，人们拿不到钱。他们怨气冲天的样子可怕极了，特别是女人，闹得更厉害。男人们反倒还挺通情达理，挺有耐心的！他们能怎么着，可怜的伙计们！可女人们，哦，她们可不管那一套。闹！她们里里外外地张罗，为玛丽公主的嫁妆
④

凑份子。可后来看到人家得到的是那么豪华的东西，她们简直要闹翻天了，‘她算老几，比我们强不到哪儿去！凭什么斯旺—埃德加百货店
⑤

一件毛皮大衣不给我，却一下子给了她六件儿！我就不该出那十先令
⑥

！她能给我什么，我倒想知道知道。我今年春天连件新外套儿还没有呢，我爹干半天活儿也挣不着钱，可她却一车一车的收礼物。不能再这么下去了，我受不了了。该让穷人有点钱花了，富人们有钱的日子太长了呀。我就是想要件春天穿的外套儿，没别的。可我上哪儿弄去呀？’我就劝她们，‘别不知足，你们能吃饱穿暖就行了，没那些个好衣裳也能凑合着过不是！’她们就回嘴说，‘凭什么玛丽公主不穿着破衣服知足呢？让她什么都没有试试看！像她那样的人就可以成车成车地收礼，我却连件春天的外套都没有，这太不公平了。公主！什么他妈的烂公主啊！不就是有钱嘛。她越有钱，人们给她的反倒越多！没人给我一分钱，可我跟大家一样也是人啊。少跟我说我没受教育，没钱还受什么教育呀。我想要一件春天穿的外套儿，就这，可我穿不上，就是因为我没钱——’她们就关心那个，穿的。她们花上七八个畿尼
⑦

买件冬天的外衣，或者花两个畿尼给孩子买一顶夏天的帽子，眼都不带眨的。别忘了，她们可是矿工的女儿啊。她们就戴着两畿尼的帽子上原始卫理会
⑧

教堂做礼拜去，而我年轻的时候女孩子有顶三个半先令的帽子就美得跟什么似的了。我听说，今年的原始卫理会办周年庆祝会，专门给主日学校的孩子们搭了个台子，又高又大，高到房顶上去了。我听第一个在主日学校办女生班的汤普森小姐说，给上台的孩子做主日新衣服就花了上千镑呢！她们就是会赶时髦呀！谁也挡不住她们，她们在穿上真是发疯了。男孩子们也这样儿，他们把钱都花在自个儿身上，穿戴、抽烟、在矿工俱乐部里喝酒、每礼拜上设菲尔德城里玩两三次。哼，这世道变了。他们什么心都不用操，什么人都不放在眼里，这些年轻人就这德性。上年岁的男人们多么好脾气儿，多么好心眼儿呀，他们什么都交给他们的女人管，结果就是这样儿，女人成了自高自大的魔鬼。小伙子们可不像他们的爹，他们可是一点儿亏都不吃，才不吃亏呢，他们整个儿就是为自己活着。要是你跟他们说省着点儿花，成个家，他们会说，‘顾不上那个，再说吧。趁着能享受先享受，别的先搁一边儿去吧！’哎，他们真是没心没肺，自私自利，你说是不是？什么都让老爹去扛着，真让人看不下去。”

通过博尔顿太太的话，克利福德对自己的村子有了新的认识。

“这儿有想闹事儿的人吗？”他问。

“哦！”博尔顿太太说，“有几个大嗓门儿嚷嚷的人。但都是背了一屁股债的女人。男人们才不理会那个呢，他们都是本分人儿。可是年轻人有时会胡说倒是真的，但他们也是有口无心。他们只是想多挣俩儿小钱儿去俱乐部花，或者去设菲尔德找刺激，他们关心的也就是这些东西。”

“就是说你觉得没什么危险？”

“哦，没有的事儿！只要矿上生意好，就没事。可情况要是老这么不好，年轻人就要出事。你就信我的话吧，他们可是一群自私自利、被宠坏了的家伙。不过我不信他们敢怎么着。他们对什么都不那么认真，就知道骑着摩托耍威风，上设菲尔德的舞厅跳舞。谁也没法子让他们认真起来。认真点的人会穿上晚礼服上舞厅在姑娘们面前显摆、跳新式舞什么的。我相信，不定什么时候，公共汽车上会挤满了穿晚礼服的年轻人，都是矿工的孩子，去舞厅，更不用说那些开着摩托车带着姑娘的人了。这些人根本不会严肃地合计点什么，满脑子都是唐克斯特和艾普森的赛马会，因为他们每场赛马都下赌。还有足球儿呢！现在连足球赛也比不得从前了，差远了。他们说踢足球简直是干苦活儿，他们才不踢那个呢，他们更乐意星期六下午骑着摩托车去设菲尔德或诺丁汉。”

“他们上那儿去干什么呀？”

“哦，闲逛，上‘米卡多’之类的高级馆子吃茶点，去舞厅跳舞，去看电影，或者去‘帝国’
⑨

，当然是带着女孩子啦。女孩子们和那些小子们一样随便，想怎么着就怎么着。”

“可是如果他们没钱怎么办呢？”

“他们好像是有地方弄钱，不清楚。要是没钱，他们就开始胡说八道了，可我就不信他们会谋反。这些小子脑子里只想着花钱享受，女孩子们也一样，想的只不过是衣裳，除了这个什么也不当回事。他们根本没那么严肃，从来不拿任何事当真，永远也不会的。”

康妮觉得，这些下层阶级的人听上去和别的阶级的人简直没两样。特瓦萧和伦敦的五月市场或者肯辛顿那样时髦高尚的地方何其相似乃尔。眼下只有一个阶级了，那就是拜金阶级，男女都拜金，人们之间唯一的区别就是钱的多少和欲望的强弱。

受博尔顿太太的影响，克利福德开始对矿井产生了新的兴趣。他开始感到自己属于这里了。他有了新的自我主张。归根结底，他是特瓦萧真正的主子，矿井就是他。他有了一种新的权力感，而在这之前他却因为惧怕而逃避这权力。

特瓦萧煤井里的煤越采越少了。这里只有两处采煤场，一处是特瓦萧，还有一处叫新伦敦。特瓦萧曾经是有名的富矿，赚了大钱，可它的黄金时代过去了。新伦敦从来就不那么景气，一般情况下业绩平平。现在整个情况都不好，像新伦敦这样的采煤场就得关门了。

“不少特瓦萧的男人离开这里去了斯戴克斯门和怀特奥沃，”博尔顿太太说，“你还没看见过战后在斯戴克斯门开张的新煤场吧，克利福德男爵？哦，你哪天得抽时间去看看，崭新崭新的，井台上建起了大化工厂，看上去都不像采煤场了。他们说靠化工副产品赚的钱比靠卖煤赚的还多呢，我忘了是什么化工产品了。给工人们住的新房子简直像宫殿一样！好多特瓦萧的人在那儿发了，比咱们这儿的人混得强多了。他们说特瓦萧完了，也就几年的事了，早晚得关门，新伦敦矿肯定得先关。哎呀，要是特瓦萧的矿井都关了门那可惨了。闹起罢工来情况是惨透了。不过你听我的，要是彻底关了张，那就是世界末日了。我还是姑娘时，这儿可是全国最好的矿啊，谁能上这儿干活儿都觉得有福。特瓦萧是赚过钱的呀。可这会子人们却说它是一条往下沉的船，得赶紧逃走。这都是什么事儿啊！当然还是有不少人撑着，能不走就不走。他们不喜欢那些玩新花样儿的煤矿，那么深的井，全让机器干活儿。有些人怕那些铁人，他们管机器叫铁人。让机器挖煤，可以前那一直是人干的活儿呀。他们还说那纯粹是浪费。但这浪费的洞全让减的工资给填上了，还用不完。地面儿上人看样子很快也没用了，全是机器了。他们说，当初人们废了旧织袜机时就这么说过，我还记得一点儿呢。可我就觉得，机器越多，人也越多，看上去就是这样啊！人们又说啊，特瓦萧的煤里弄不出斯戴克斯煤里的化学东西。这可真是有意思，两个矿隔着还不到三英里呢。反正他们说是这么回事儿。大伙儿都说，不能发明点什么让大家日子好起来，不能把女孩子招进矿里做工，这挺丢人现眼的。姑娘们天天上设菲尔德去闲逛！哎呀，现在人人都说它完了，是条沉船，大家像老鼠一样逃走。这时特瓦萧要是能重新振作起来，那可就成了人人夸的美事儿了。人们的闲话多了去了。大战的时候，矿上兴旺过一阵子，杰弗里男爵不知怎么把财产托管了，那样他的钱就一辈子保险了。大家都这么说呢！可现在人们说，连矿主和业主都挣不到什么钱了。你简直无法相信这个，是不是？不是么，我还是个姑娘家时，一直觉得咱们矿能一直这么过下去，怎么会想到现在会到这步田地！新英格兰矿关张了，科尔威克伍德矿也关了。穿过那片矮树林儿，看到科尔威克伍德矿停产了，在森林里荒废着，真是可怕呀，灌木长了老高，都没过出井台了，运煤铁路的铁轨都锈了。看到这个，哎呀，就跟看见鬼一样！就是死了呀，矿井死了呀。要是特瓦萧矿关了门，我们可怎么办呀，我都不忍心想这个。除了罢工的时候，矿上一直都忙，就是罢工，换风的轮子也没停过，只有往井上运拉煤的马时，轮子才停转呢。我觉得这是个说不清道不明的世界，过了今年没明年，真的。”

博尔顿太太的一席话的确激起了克利福德新的斗志。他的收入，正如她所说的，是铁定的，因为是来自他父亲的信托财产，尽管那笔钱数目不是很大。矿井并不让他烦心，他想抓住的是另一个世界，是文学和名望的世界，是流行时尚的世界，而不是劳动者的世界。

现在他意识到了成名与工作上成功的区别了。一方面是娱乐大众，另一方面是劳动者群体。作为个体，他一直为娱乐大众炮制故事而努力并且走红了。可娱乐大众表象的下面是劳动者，可恶、肮脏，而且特别可怕。这些人也得有人供养他们，这与娱乐他们相比可是件让人更加厌恶的差事。他忙着摆弄他的小说并以此在世界上“出人头地”时，特瓦萧正走向末日。

他现在明白了，成功这条母狗女神主要有两个胃口：一个需要赞美、谄媚、抚慰和挑逗，作家和艺术家能满足她这个胃口；另一个则更可怕，她要吃肉啃骨头，开工厂挣钱的人才能满足这个胃口。

于是就有了两拨儿狗在那母狗女神面前争宠：一拨儿是谄媚者，他们为她提供娱乐、故事、电影和戏剧；另一拨儿虽不那么炫耀，却是更野蛮的一类，他们给她肉吃，那可是实实在在的金钱。那些衣着光鲜、哗众取宠的狗们在这母狗女神面前相互撕咬着。可这样的狗咬狗跟另一拨狗之间的争斗比就算不了什么了，那些不可或缺的肉骨头提供者之间无声进行的可是生死搏斗啊。

博尔顿太太的话引诱着克利福德去加入另一拨争斗，用野蛮的工业生产去捕获那母狗女神的芳心。反正他开始摩拳擦掌了。某种意义上说，是博尔顿太太让他成了个男子汉，康妮则没这本事。康妮让他脱离社会，使他对自己和自己的境况有敏感清醒的认识。而博尔顿太太则让他只关注外界的事情，内心则变得软弱无助。他开始变得外向，要干点什么了。

他甚至打起精神再次到矿上去，到那儿以后他就坐上吊桶下井了，下井后他坐上矿车到巷道里去视察。大战前他学过但似乎又都忘记的东西现在都记起来了。他瘫坐在矿车里，井下的监工打着强光对他解释煤层的问题。他沉默寡言，但脑子却开始转了起来。

他开始捡起过去学过的采矿方面的技术书来读了。他还读了政府有关的报告，仔细研读了采煤、煤炭化学和页岩方面的德文书籍。当然最有价值的资料人家是尽可能保密的。可是一旦开始了采煤方面的某种研究，研究其方法和手段、其副产品以及从煤炭中提炼化学成分的可能性，你就会惊奇地发现现代技术方面的人是多么聪明，聪明得几乎难以置信，似乎魔鬼把自己的智慧都借给工业界的技术人员了。工业技术科学比艺术和文学要有趣得多，他们捣鼓那些可怜的感情玩意儿多蠢笨呀。在技术科学领域，人就像神或魔鬼，受了灵感的启发去发现并且奋力把发现付诸实践。在这项活动中，人超越了任何可计算的精神年龄。可是克利福德知道，一旦回到感情和人的生命中，一些人的精神年龄也就才十三岁的样子，是脆弱的小孩子呢。这两者之间的差距真令人觳觫。

可随它去吧。让人在感情和“人”的精神上统统滑向愚蠢吧，克利福德才不在乎这个呢。让那一切都见鬼去吧，他关心的是现代采煤的技术，是怎么把特瓦萧从深渊中解救出来。

他一天又一天地下到井里，他研究，他把总经理、井上经理和井下经理还有那些工程师等一干人马好好考问了一番，这是他们做梦也想不到的。力量！他感到自己身上涌起一股新的力量来，统治所有这些人的力量，统治成百上千的矿工的力量。他在发现，也在把这里的一切都掌握在自己手中。

他确实感到自己获得了新生。现在生命又回到了他身上！在封闭的艺术和精神生活中，他和康妮在渐渐地死去。现在，让那种生活见鬼吧！让它休眠吧！他感到生命涌进了他的体内，来自煤炭，来自矿井。煤矿上弥漫的陈腐空气对他来说比氧气还好闻，因为它让他感到一种力量，力量。他是在干着什么，他将要干一番事业了。他要赢，要赢，不是像写小说那样在嫉妒与恶意中斡旋赢得知名度，而是要赢得人生。

最初他想到的方法是发电，将煤转换成电力，就在井台上建电厂，卖电。然后又有了新主意。德国人发明了一种新式机车，可以自行补充燃料，不需要锅炉工。机车所用的是一种新燃料，在特殊条件下很少量就可以产生巨大的热能。

首先吸引克利福德的就是这种浓缩燃料，燃烧速度慢，但释放的热能巨大。这种燃料只靠空气无法燃烧，必须靠某种外部的促燃剂才行。于是他开始了实验，还找了一个在化学上颇有建树的聪明小伙子给他做帮手。

他感到成功了，因为他终于走出了自我，他实现了有生以来的秘密愿望，那就是走出自我。艺术没让他走出自我，非但没有，反而更糟。但现在，他做到了。

他并没意识到博尔顿太太对他有多大的帮助，不知道自己是如何依赖着她。虽然他没这种意识，但一跟她在一起，他的声音就明显降低，变得柔和亲昵，几乎有点俗气。

和康妮在一起，他就有点僵硬，感到自己什么都欠她的，因此对她表现出最大的尊敬和关爱，只要她表面上还尊敬他。但他明白，自己暗地里惧怕她。他长着阿喀琉斯的脚跟
⑩

，康妮这样的女人完全可以让他受到致命的打击。所以他因为惧内而显得低声下气，对她特别和气。同康妮说话不免有点紧张，她一出现他就沉默。

只有和博尔顿太太单独在一起时，他才真正觉得自己是主人。他也像她一样絮叨，两个人聊得很投机。他还让她给自己刮脸，偶尔用海绵给自己擦身，样子就像个小孩，真像个孩子一样。

注　释

①
法语，意思是调整棋子，并不走棋。

②
这三人均是十九世纪的英国女作家。盖斯凯尔夫人以描写产业革命时期的长篇小说《南方与北方》著名。劳伦斯在此处提到她，是因为她还写过一本村民生活的小说《克兰福德》（1853）。乔治·爱略特以一系列英国中部地区乡村生活的小说著名，其中描写村民的小说有《亚当·比德》（1859）和《织工马南》（1861）。玛丽·罗素·米特福德出版过一部五卷集的乡村生活特写《我们村》。

③
这里指的是脱离了英国国教的那些教派，有卫理会、公理会和浸礼会等。

④
1922年2月，英王乔治五世的女儿玛丽公主（1897—1965）出嫁。

⑤
伦敦著名的百货店。

⑥
当年一英镑等于二十先令，一先令等于十二便士。劳伦斯在诺丁汉当职员时周薪仅十三先令，矿工的平均工资也就是每周二十多个先令，最好的时候能到达四十先令。足见十先令是一笔可观的钱。——译者注

⑦
畿尼是旧英国金币，一个畿尼等于一英镑一先令。由此可见这些矿工家的女人在买衣饰上出手大方。——译者注

⑧
1811年从美以美会分离出来的一个教派，成员多来自劳动阶层。

⑨
“米卡多”是诺丁汉的一家著名饭店。“帝国”指诺丁汉城里的帝国剧院和附属的娱乐场所。

⑩
希腊神话中阿喀琉斯出生后，其母握其踵在冥河中浸过，这样他的身体即可刀枪不入，但忘记将其踵也浸水，此踵便成了阿喀琉斯的“软肋”，他最终被帕里斯击中此处而死。成语“阿喀琉斯之踵”由此得来，意为某人的致命弱点。

第十章

康妮现在很孤独，因为来拉格比府的人越来越少了。克利福德不再需要他们了。他甚至连他那几个“密友”都不理睬了，他变得古怪，宁可听收音机。他花了一大笔钱置办了一套收音机，最终安装好了，在信号不强的中部地区有时也能收到马德里或法兰克福的广播。

他能在收音机前一坐好几个钟头，听那喇叭吼叫。那样子令康妮惊诧不已，也吓得够呛。可他照样端坐着，一脸空虚迷狂的表情，就像一个丢了魂的人，听着，似乎在听着那些难以言说的广播。

他真是在听吗？或许是拿广播当催眠曲，心里在想事儿？康妮不知道是怎么回事。于是她要么逃回自己的房间里去，要么就出门到林子里去。有时她心里充满了恐惧，惧怕这整个文明世界患上的早期疯癫症。

现在克利福德正朝着工业活动的古怪方向游离而去。他突然就变了，变成了一个外表坚强、高效但内心却软弱的人，成了现代工业和金融界里一只奇特的螃蟹或龙虾，属于无脊椎的甲壳类动物，钢铁的外壳如同机器，内心却是稀烂的一摊。康妮对他感到一筹莫展。

她还是没有自由，因为克利福德非得要她守在身边不可。他似乎神经紧张，害怕她离开他。他那奇怪软弱的一面即感情和作为人的一面因为恐惧而依赖她，像个孩子，甚至说像个痴子。她必须待在拉格比府，当查泰莱夫人，当他的妻子，否则他就会迷茫，如迷失在荒原上的痴呆儿。

他太依赖她了，意识到这一点康妮不禁感到恐惧起来。她听他对他矿上的经理、董事会成员和手下的年轻技术人员说话，对他的精明见解感到惊讶，惊异于他的力量，他对所谓实际事物的那种不可思议的驾驭能力。他已经变成一个实干家了，而且是一个精明强干的人，一个主子。康妮认为这是受了博尔顿太太影响的结果，恰恰是在他生命遇上危机的当口上，他变了。

如此精明强干的实干家在独自面对自己感情生活的时候却几乎成了一个痴呆儿。他崇拜康妮，她是他的妻子，是个比他高级的人，因此他崇拜她，以一个弱者的崇敬之心，就像一个野蛮人看一个文明人一样。那是一种因为怕甚至恨而生出的崇拜，对可怕的偶像力量既怕又恨。他唯一需要的就是让康妮发誓，发誓不离开他，不抛弃他。

后来她拿到了一把林中小屋的钥匙。有一天她问道：“克利福德！你真希望我怀上孩子吗？”

他那有点鼓凸的眼睛里目光暗淡，怯生生地看看她，说：“我倒没什么，只要不影响咱们两个人的关系就行。”

“影响我们什么呢？”她问。

“你和我，我们之间的爱情呀！如果影响到爱，我就反对。或许什么时候我还能有我自己的孩子呢！”

她惊诧地看着他。

“我是说，不定哪天我能好呢。”

她仍然惊讶地盯着他，看得他都不好意思了。

“就是说你不喜欢我有孩子了？”

“我跟你说吧，”他急切地回答，像一只被逼急的狗，“我愿意，但条件是这事不影响你对我的爱情。如果会影响，那我死也不同意。”

康妮对此只能沉默，既怕他，又蔑视他。这简直是个痴子的胡说八道。他已经不知所云了。

“哦，那不会影响我对你的感情。”她略带嘲弄地说。

“这就对了！”他说，“这是关键！那样的话，我就一点儿都不在意了。我的意思是说，家里有个孩子跑来跑去该多么好，让人觉得这家有希望。我就会有可以为之奋斗的东西，而且如果是你的孩子就好，对吗，亲爱的？我会视如己出。那都是因为你的缘故。这你明白吧，亲爱的？我无所谓的，无足轻重，从生命的角度说，你才是伟大的‘自有永有者’
①

。你明白，是不是？我是说，这是我的想法，我只为你着想，我自己是无足轻重的。我是为你活着的，为你的未来活着。我对我自己都算不得什么了——”

康妮听了这话简直惊呆了，也厌恶至极。这是最可怕的假话，是对人类存在的荼毒。但凡理智尚存的男人怎么能对女人说这种话呢？除非是没有理智的男人才这样。但凡有一分廉耻的男人怎么会把生命的全部责任这样巨大的负担全推给一个女人并将她遗弃在虚无中呢？

更为可气的是，半小时之后康妮就听到克利福德热情洋溢地同博尔顿太太聊上了。他对博尔顿太太表现出若有若无的热情，似乎她是他的半个情妇加半个养母。一边聊，博尔顿太太一边精心地为他穿上晚礼服，因为家里要来生意上的重要客人了。

遇上这种情况，康妮有时真想去死。她感到自己要被莫名其妙的谎言和惊人的愚昧残酷给碾死了。克利福德在生意上奇特的干练令她有点惧怕，而他私下里对她表现出的崇拜又让她恐慌。他们之间不存在什么。现在她甚至都不触摸他了，他也不触摸她。他甚至从来也不友爱地握她的手。没有！因为他们彻底没有接触，他冲她说的那些崇拜的表白就成了对她的折磨。这是彻底阳痿造成的残酷之举，让她感到要么失去理智，要么一死了之。

于是，她得空儿就逃避到林子里去。一个午后，她正在“约翰井”旁看清冽的泉水喷涌，边看边想事儿，那猎场看守迈着大步走了过来。

“我给你配了把钥匙，夫人！”说着他敬个礼，把钥匙递了过来。

康妮一惊，忙道谢。

“小屋儿不太整洁，请多包涵，”他说，“我尽力打扫了。”

“我可没想给你添麻烦啊！”康妮说。

“哦，一点儿都不麻烦。下周我就该安排母鸡抱窝儿了，不过它们看见你不会害怕的。我一早一晚都得来照看照看它们，不过会尽量不打扰您的。”

“你才不会打扰我呢，”她说，“如果我妨碍你了，我还是不去小屋的好。”

他敏锐的蓝眼睛看看她，和气但若即若离。但至少他是理智的，理智而且健康，即便看上去瘦弱，似乎还生着病。他正害着咳嗽。

“你正咳嗽着呢！”她说。

“没什么，就是着凉了！上次得了肺炎，就落下了咳嗽毛病，不过没什么大不了的。”

他跟她保持着距离，不肯再靠近了。

她开始去小屋去得勤了，有时早上去，有时午后去，但每回都碰不上他。毫无疑问，他是故意躲着她呢。他是要保护自己的独立空间。

他把小屋收拾得挺整洁，把小桌子和小椅子摆在壁炉边上，预备好了一堆引火用的柴禾和劈好的小木头，把工具和捕兽夹子尽可能放得远一些，为的是把自己的痕迹隐藏起来。在屋外的空地上，他用树枝和茅草为母鸡搭起了一个小矮棚子，里面放着五只鸡笼子。一天康妮来时发现两只褐色的母鸡正警觉地卧在笼子里，凶相毕露。它们正在孵蛋，骄傲地抖开羽毛，沉溺在自己母性的热血涌动中。这场景几乎令康妮心碎。她自己是那么孤寂，那么形同虚设，根本算不上是个女性，不过是个害怕的物件儿。

后来全部五只笼子都有了母鸡，三只褐色的，一只灰的，一只黑的，都紧紧地护着身下的鸡蛋，羽毛扑棱开，母性的欲望、天然的母性让它们沉溺在抱窝的柔情蜜意中。可是康妮一旦在它们面前蹲下来，它们就会怒目而视，发出愤怒的警号，主要是出自母性的自卫本能。

康妮在屋子里盛谷物的桶里找到些谷粒，放在手掌上拿给母鸡们吃。它们才不吃呢，只有一只母鸡在她手上猛地喯了一口，吓了康妮一跳。她真是想喂它们点吃的，可那些抱窝的母亲们不吃也不喝。她又用小罐头盒给它们弄来水，其中一只居然喝了，这让她十分高兴。

现在她每天都来看望这些母鸡，感到这世界上能温暖她心田的只有这些母鸡了。克利福德的反对让她从头凉到了脚。博尔顿太太，还有家里来的那些商人说话的声音也让她心里发凉。米凯利斯偶尔会来封信，但读他的信也让她感到心里发凉。她感到如果这情形继续下去，她肯定会死的。

但春天到了，林子里风铃花开了，榛树发芽了，绽开了，看上去恰似碧绿的雨滴。可怕呀，都是春天了，一切还那么让人心凉，透心凉。只有这些母鸡，那么美滋滋地扑棱开羽毛卧在鸡蛋上。它们的身体是温热的，孵崽时那温热的母亲身体！这情景让康妮感到自己随时都会昏过去。

随后一个明媚的艳阳天儿，榛树下报春花怒放，小径上紫罗兰斑斑点点。她午后来了，发现一只小雏鸡儿在鸡笼前淘气地蹦跳着，鸡妈妈则恐惧地“咯咯”叫着。那娇小的雏鸡浑身灰褐色，长着黑斑点儿。一时间康妮觉得它是全英国最可爱的小东西了，逗引着她蹲下去，忘情地看起来。生命！生命！纯粹、充满活力、无所畏惧的新生命！新生命！那么娇小，可又那么无所畏惧！即使是听到鸡妈妈发出大声的警号、慌忙钻进笼子里并藏在鸡妈妈的翅膀下，它也没有给吓着，它只是把这当成了一场游戏，当成过家家。不一会儿，鸡妈妈黄褐色的羽毛下就钻出一只尖尖的小脑袋来观察这大千世界了。

康妮让这小雏鸡给迷住了。与此同时，她感到了一种从未有过的强烈痛苦，那是来自她自身母性的忧伤，这令她难以忍受。

现在她只有一个欲望，那就是到林间空地上去，其余的都成了一场痛苦的梦。但有时她被迫整天待在拉格比府里，尽她主妇的责任。待在家中让她觉得心中空落落的，空虚得要发疯。

一个黄昏时分，她顾不上家里有没有客人，用过茶点后就溜了出来。天色已晚，她小跑着穿过邸园，那样子就像生怕让人给叫回去似的。到了林子里时，夕阳西斜，西天上一片玫瑰色，可她还是在花丛中加快步伐赶着路，天光还能持续很久的。

她来到林中空地时已经面红耳赤、昏昏沉沉的了。那猎场看守还没走，穿着衬衫，正忙着关笼子门，以便小鸡们安全过夜。但还是有三只小鸡在草棚子下踮着小爪子跑来跑去，这几个机警的黄褐色小东西，任它们的妈妈怎么焦急地招呼也不回笼里去。

“我得过来看看这些小雏鸡！”她一边喘着说，一边害羞地瞟了那看守一眼，好像没意识到他的存在，“又孵出新的来了吗？”

“到现在都三十六只了！”他说，“真不错！”

他同样也怀着一种奇妙的愉快心情看着新生命降临。

康妮在最后一个笼子前面蹲下。那三只小鸡已经跑回笼了。它们那顽皮的小脑袋还在从黄色的羽毛中探出来又缩回去，最后只有一个圆圆的小脑袋从鸡妈妈那宽大的身体下面钻出来观望着。

“我真想摸摸它们呀！”说着她手指小心翼翼地从笼子栏杆的缝里伸进去，没想到那母鸡狠狠地在她手上喯了一口，吓得她赶紧缩回了手。

“它居然啄了我一口！它是恨我！”她惊讶地说，“可我是不会伤害它们的呀！”

那男人笑了，在她身边蹲下，双膝分开着，然后十分自信地把手缓缓地伸进笼子里去。那老母鸡喯了他一口，但并不狠。他轻柔、缓慢但准确地用手指在母鸡的羽毛中摸索着，掏出一只小雏鸡，那小鸡还在他手里东张西望呢。

“给！”他把手向她伸过来。她接过那黄褐色的小东西，握在手中。那小雏鸡站在她手掌上，两条小腿细若火柴杆儿，那几乎毫无重量的小脚在康妮的手心里战栗着，让她感到小鸡在靠着微弱的生命力保持身体的平衡。但它仍然大胆地抬起轮廓清晰的漂亮头颅，机警地四下观望着，并发出细弱的喳喳声来。“真可爱！真勇敢！”她轻柔地说。

那蹲在一旁的猎场看守也颇有兴致地看着她手中的小鸡。突然，他发现一滴泪滴在她手腕上。

他站起身，挪动脚步到另一个鸡笼那边去。这是因为他突然感到那股久远的火苗在自己的腰腹
②

间窜动，升腾，而他一直以为这团火永远熄灭了。他在与这火焰作斗争，因此将自己的背对着她。可那团火流窜着，燃烧着，一直烧到身下，绕膝而燃。

他再次转身看她，看到她跪在地上，缓缓地盲目地将手伸出去，让雏鸡跑回到鸡妈妈身边去。她是那么沉默，那么凄楚，那模样令他顿生同情，让他感到五内如焚。

不知不觉中他很快靠近了她，又在她身边蹲下，从她手中拿走小鸡，将它放回笼子里去。他知道她怕那母鸡。这时他感到腰腹间那团火突然烧得更旺了。

他面带惧色地瞟她一眼，她的脸扭向一边，自顾哭泣，哭出了她一辈子的痛苦和凄楚，一时间把他的心都哭化了，化成了一星火花。他伸出手去，手指搭在她膝盖上。

“你不该哭！”他轻柔地说。

她用手捂住自己的脸，感到心都要碎了，径自不管不顾地哭泣着。

他把手放在她肩上，开始温柔地顺着后背轻轻地捋下去，不知不觉地抚慰着她，一直滑到她弯曲的腰窝。他的手停在那里，无限温柔地抚摸着她的侧腰，凭的是不知不觉中的本能。

她摸到了自己的小手帕，胡乱在脸上擦着，想把泪水擦干。

“到小屋里去吧。”他不动声色地说。

说着他的手轻柔地抓住她的上臂把她拉起来，引着她缓缓地朝小屋走去，直到进了屋，手才松开。随后他把椅子和桌子推到一边，从工具箱里取出一条棕色的军毯，慢慢地铺开。她瞥了一眼他的脸，仍站着不动。

他脸色苍白，没有表情，就像一个认命的人那样。

“你躺下吧！”他轻声道，说着关上了门，随之屋里一片漆黑。

她莫名其妙地服从了，躺在了毯子上。紧接着她感到他充满欲望的手轻柔地摸索着、抚摸着她的身体，寻找她的脸。他的手万分温柔地抚摸着她的脸庞，带给她无限的温存和安慰，最终他轻轻地吻起她的脸颊来。

她安静地躺着，半梦半醒。随之，她浑身一颤，因为她感到他的手在她的衣服里轻柔但又十分笨拙地摸索着。但他的手自然知道该如何脱掉她的衣服。他缓缓地、小心翼翼地拉下她身上单薄的丝绸紧身衣，一直脱到脚面上。然后他开始抚摸她温热柔软的身子，还亲了她的肚脐，这给她带来了难言的美妙欣愉，令她为之颤抖。他要立即进入，进入到她身体里那柔软安然的宁静之乡。进入女人身体的那一刻，他感到的是纯粹的安宁。

她静静地躺着，像睡着一般，一直像睡着一般。动作，高潮，都是他的，她再也动弹不得。甚至他的双臂搂紧了她，甚至他身体剧烈起伏、将自己的生命射进她身体里时，她都似乎是在睡着的状态。直到他结束了，伏在她胸口微微地喘息时，她才醒来。

醒来后她开始感到惊讶，感到莫名其妙：为什么，为什么要这样？为什么这样一来她心头的乌云散了，她感到了宁静？这是真的吗？是真的吗？

可是她那备受煎熬的现代妇女的心还是无法平静下来。这是真的吗？她知道，如果她把自己给了这个男人，这就是真的。可如果她固守着自我，那这就跟没有发生一样。她老了，她感到自己有千百万年那么老，老到自己不能承受自己。谁把她掠走就让谁拥有她吧，掠走，拥有吧。

那男人在神秘的寂静中伏在她身上，他有怎样的感觉、想法？她并不知道。对她来说他还是个陌生人，她并不了解他。她也只能等待，因为她不敢打破他那神秘的寂静。他伏在她身上，双臂拥抱着她，他汗湿的身体贴着她的身子，两个身体亲密无间。他们之间是全然陌生的，但没有什么不安，他是那么安宁与沉静。

最终他醒了，从她身子里退了出来，她感觉到了，觉得那就像是抛弃了她似的。黑暗中他拉过她的衣服盖上了她的腿，在她身边站了一会儿，显然是在整理自己的衣衫。然后他轻轻地开了门，出去了。

她瞥见橡树梢头的夕照上有一轮小小的皓月，她马上起身，把自己的衣衫整理好，然后朝小屋的门走去。

低矮的林子上笼罩着阴影，天几乎黑了。但头顶上方的天空还是亮堂的，虽然不再洒下光线。他从矮林子的阴影中向她走来，抬起的脸像一个苍白的斑点。

“咱们这就走吧？”他说。

“去哪儿？”

“我陪你到园门口。”

他按自己的方式安排了事情。他锁上小屋的门，尾随她而来。

“你不后悔吧？”说着他走到她身边来。

“不！不！你呢？”她问。

“为那个吗？不！”他说，随后又补充道，“可别的就不好说了。”

“什么别的？”她问。

“克利福德男爵。还有别人！所有的麻烦事。”

“怎么麻烦了？”她问，为此感到失望。

“总是这样，对你对我都一样，总归是有麻烦的。”他在黑暗中不慌不忙地走着。

“你后悔吗？”她问。

“有点！”他望着天空回答道，“我原来以为我断了这种念想儿呢，谁知道我又开始了。”

“开始什么？”

“生命。”

“生命！”她重复着，感到奇特的激动。

“是生命，”他说，“无法逃避。如果逃避，还不如去死呢。所以，要是我非得再次身败名裂不可，我豁出去了。”

她倒不那么看，但还是……

“不过是爱情罢了。”她欢快地说。

“无论是什么！”他回答道。

他们在夜幕降临的林子里默默地走着，直到快到园门口。

“你不恨我吧？”她有些惆怅地问。

“不，不！”说着他突然将她紧紧地抱在怀里，那拥抱充满交融的激情，“不，我觉得很好，你呢？”

“我也一样。”她随口说，有点言不由衷，因为她没什么感觉。

他温柔热情地吻了她。

“如果这个世界上没那么多别人就好了！”他不无忧伤地说。

她笑了。他们来到了园门口，他为她推开门说：

“我就不远送了。”

“不用！”说着她伸出手去像是要握手，但他双手握住了她的手。

“我能再来吗？”她期盼道。

“来呀，来呀！”

她离开他，独自穿过邸园回去了。

他站在后面，目送她朝黑暗中走去，前方的地平线上一片苍白。望着她远去的背影，他感到心里发苦。在他想孤独的时候，是她又让他有了交融。她让他牺牲了一个铁了心要遗世独立的男人那苦涩的孤独。

他转身走进黑暗的林子中，四下里一片寂静，月亮静止在天际。但他能感到夜的喧嚣，那是斯戴克斯门矿井上隆隆的机器声，是大路上来往车辆的嘈杂声。缓缓地，他爬上了那座光秃秃的山顶。从山顶上，他能俯瞰整个乡村：斯戴克斯门矿上一排排通明的灯火，特瓦萧矿上微小的灯光，还有特瓦萧村里昏暗的灯光。黑暗的乡间，遍地灯火，远处的高炉火光微微呈现出玫瑰色，晴朗的夜空下，那白热的金属烧出一片玫瑰红来。斯戴克斯门那耀眼恶毒的电灯光！那灯火中定有一个无形的活生生的恶魔！中部工业区之夜，到处孕育着不安，让人不断地生出恐惧！他能听到斯戴克斯门矿上的卷扬机在往井下运送晚七点上下井的矿工。矿井上实行的是三班制。

他再次走入森林中，那里黑暗但远离尘嚣。但他知道林子里的遁世是虚幻的。工业的噪音打破了林子的宁静，刺眼的灯光，尽管这里看不到，是在嘲弄林子的寂静。一个男人再也无法遗世独立了。这个世界不允许有隐士的存在。现在他有了这个女人，就是给自己套上了痛苦与毁灭的枷锁。凭着他的经验，他知道这意味着什么。

这并不是女人的过错，甚至也不是爱情的过错，也不是欢爱的过错。过错在那边，在那些邪恶的电光中，在那些恶魔般喧嚣的机器里。在那里，在那个物欲横流的世界里，贪婪的机械化和机械化的贪婪正喷发着电光，喷吐着灼热的金属。机车在轰鸣，是在那里存在着巨大的罪恶，随时准备毁灭任何异己。很快森林就会被毁灭掉，风铃花将不再绽放。所有脆弱的东西非得在滚滚的铁流下灭亡不可。

他柔情万般地思念着那女人。可怜孤单的人儿，她不知道自己有多好。还有，哦，她身边那些粗俗之物怎么配得上她呢！可怜的人儿啊，她也像野生的风信子一样脆弱，可不像现代的小女子们那样如同橡皮和铂金一样皮实刚强。那些东西可是要把她拖垮的！肯定是这样，它们要拖垮她，就像它们要拖垮世间所有娇嫩的东西一样。娇嫩！她内心什么地方是娇嫩的，就像生长中的风信子那样娇嫩。这种娇嫩是当今女人们所无法拥有的，她们都是化学合成的假象牙做的。他下决心要保护她，保护上哪怕短短的一段时间，反正那冷酷无情的钢铁世界和机械化贪婪的财神早晚会把他们双双毁灭的。

他背着枪，领着狗回家了，回到那黑糊糊的村舍。点上灯，生上火，开始吃晚饭，吃的是面包夹奶酪，就着小葱头，喝着啤酒。他独自一人生活，喜欢这种安宁。他的房间很整洁，但有点寒酸。不过火是热的，壁炉台面是洁白的，铺着白油布的桌子上方悬挂着的油灯里的灯光是明亮的。他拿起一本写印度的书想读，可今晚他读不下去。他穿着衬衫坐在炉火前，没吸烟，只有一缸子啤酒相伴，一心只想着康妮。

实话说吧，他感到悔不当初，或许这主要是替她悔。他有一种预感。他不觉得这是是非问题，他并没有良心上的困扰。他知道所谓良心主要是对社会的惧怕，或是对自己的惧怕。他并不惧怕自己，但他十分明白自己惧怕社会，凭本能他知道社会是个恶毒的、半疯的野兽。

那女人！如果她能同他在一起，这世界上再也没有第三个人那该多好！想着想着他欲念又起，那东西便像一只活生生的小鸟一样躁动起来。与此同时，他感到一种压抑，害怕他和她被暴露给那个闪烁着恶毒的电光的外界，他感到心情沉重。她，可怜的小女子，在他眼里不过是个年轻的女人。不同的是，他进入了这个年轻女人的体内，而且还对她怀着欲望。

在那奇特的欲望的驱使下他伸了个懒腰。在过去的四年里他一直独身，与男人和女人都割断了联系。他站起身来，拿起外衣，拎上枪，捻小了灯捻儿，带着狗走入了星光灿烂的夜色中。在欲望的驱使下，怀着对恶毒的外界的恐惧，他开始巡视林子，走得很慢，脚步很轻。他爱这黑暗，将自己藏匿在这黑暗中。这黑暗的夜很像眼下他高涨的欲望，无论如何，这种欲望是一种财富：那躁动不安的物件儿，腰腹间燃着的火苗！哦，如果有别的男人同他一起与那闪烁的电光世界作斗争，那该多好。那样就能将生命的温存、女人的温存和欲望这天然的财富抢救并保存下来。如果有其他男人并肩战斗就好了！可那些男人都在那个外界里混得志得意满，在机械化的贪欲或贪欲的机械化中沉浮着。

这边，康斯坦丝正疾步穿过邸园朝家里走去，她脑子里一片空白，对刚刚发生的事还来不及反思，她要赶回去正点用晚餐。

发现门锁着，她有点烦，因为这样的话她就得按门铃叫门。开门的是博尔顿太太。

“哎呀，是您呀，夫人！我正想你没准儿走丢了呢！”她有点逗趣地说，“克利福德男爵倒是还没问起您呢，他正接待林利先生，谈事儿呢。看来林利先生是要在这儿用晚餐，您说是不是，夫人？”

“像是吧。”康妮说。

“要不要晚一刻钟开饭？你得有时间不慌不忙地换衣裳呀。”

“最好这样。”

林利先生是矿上的总经理，比克利福德年长，是打北边过来的。他这人不够有活力，令克利福德不是很满意。他跟不上战后的形势，也对付不了战后的矿工们，他们使出的绝招就是磨洋工。不过康妮喜欢林利先生，但不喜欢他那个谄媚的太太，今天她没来，这让康妮心里高兴。

林利留下来吃晚饭了。康妮是男人特别喜欢的女主人，她是那么谦和，对客人又那么殷勤细心，一双大大的蓝眼睛和娴静的神态足以掩饰她的内心。康妮扮演这样的女人的技艺算是炉火纯青了，几乎成了她的第二天性，当然绝对是“第二”天性。但奇怪的是，当她扮演这样的角色时，她能忘我地投入。

她耐心地等待着，直到能上楼独自想点自己的事。她总是在等待，似乎她就这命。

回到自己的房间里，她仍然感到困惑不解，不知道该作何感想。那个人到底是什么样的人呢？他真的喜欢她吗？她感到并不怎么喜欢。但他心肠好。他身上有什么东西，某种温暖、天真的善良，来得奇特，来得突然，几乎令她的身体为他绽开。不过她觉得他可能对任何女人都那么善良。尽管如此，她还是感到奇特的慰藉。他是个有激情的男人，健康而热情。不过他或许不很挑剔，他可能像待她一样对待任何女人，他不太在乎是谁，她在他心目中仅仅是个女人。

也许那样更好。无论如何，他对作为女人的她是善待的，以前还没有哪个男人这样对待她呢。男人们对她这个人很友善，但对作为女人的她则有点残酷，要么看不起她，要么全然忽视她。对作为康斯坦丝·里德或查泰莱夫人的她，男人们简直是彬彬有礼，但对作为女人的她则不然。而这个男人却不理会她是康斯坦丝还是查泰莱夫人，只顾抚摸她的腰臀和她的胸。

第二天她又去了林子里。这是个阴沉寂静的午后，榛树丛下，墨绿的多年生山靛枝蔓遍地，所有的树木都在沉静中努力发芽。今天她几乎能够感同身受，觉得自己就像那些高大的树木，元气充足的体液在内部向上、向上涌，直涌到嫩芽的顶尖上，冲绽开小小的火苗样的橡树叶，那叶子呈现出如血的古铜色来。这就如同一股潮汐，喷涌而上，直冲天空。

她来到那片小空地儿，可他不在。她并没有太想他来。那些小雏鸡们在轻快地满地乱跑着，就像一些小昆虫一样，笼子里的黄毛鸡妈妈们则在不安地咕咕叫着。康妮一边坐下看着它们跑，一边等待着。她只是等待着，因此连小鸡她也没怎么注意。她在等待。

时间过得梦一样缓慢，可他没有出现。她并没太期待他能来，因为他下午从不来这里。她必须回家用茶点了，可要走却要下一番决心强迫自己才行。

回家的路上下起了细雨。

“又下雨了吗？”见她抖落着帽子，克利福德问她。

“毛毛雨而已。”

她沉默地倒茶，还一门心思地想着自己的事。今天她确实想见到那个猎场看守，想知道那一切是不是真的，是不是真是真的！

“喝了茶以后要不要我念点什么给你听？”克利福德说。

她看看他，不知道他是否嗅出了什么。

“春天让人犯懒，我想先歇会儿。”她说。

“随你。不舒服，是吗？”

“不！就是有点累，春天人都乏。让博尔顿太太跟你玩点什么游戏行吗？”

“不了，我还是听听收音机吧。”

从他的声音里她听得出他感到特别满足。于是她就上楼到自己房间里去了。从那儿她听到楼下的扬声器在高叫，发出某种傻乎乎的矫揉造作之音，像是一连串街头的叫卖声，是典型的老式叫卖声的模仿，拿腔拿调的很做作。于是她穿上紫色的旧雨衣，从旁门溜了出去。

细雨霏霏，如同拉起了一道帷幕，雨中的世界显得神秘、寂静，但并不冷。她匆匆穿过邸园，跑得身上都热了，不得不解开那薄薄的防水雨布。

细雨潇潇，让这夜色下的林子显得更为幽静、神秘了。遍地的蛋和卵，半开半闭的叶芽和花蕾让这个世界显得神秘莫测。黑暗中，赤裸漆黑的树身隐隐闪烁着微光，它们似乎是在夜里脱去了自己的衣服，而地面上绿色的植物似乎也燃着绿光。

空地上还是没有人。雏鸡们几乎都藏到鸡妈妈身下去了，只有一两只冒险的小鸡还在草棚子下干爽的地方啄食。

原来如此！他还是没来过，他是有意躲着呢。也许是出了什么事，也许她能去村舍里看看。

但她命中注定是要等待的。于是她用自己的钥匙开了小屋的门。屋里到处都收拾得整整齐齐，谷粒都收进桶里了，毯子叠得好好的放在架子上了，柴草都整齐地码放在角落里，那是一捆新草。风灯悬挂在钉子上，桌子和椅子都放回了原处，她曾经在那里躺过。

她在门道里的一张凳子上坐下来。一切都是那么宁静！霏霏细雨似薄雾轻飘，随风潜入夜色中，但那风却悄无声息。万籁俱寂，树木挺立着，似强大的人，半明半暗，沉静但生机勃勃。一切都充满着生机！

夜色浓了，她得回去了。看来他是在躲她。

就在这时他突然大步流星地来到空地上。他穿着油布夹克，像个汽车司机，夹克淋了雨，湿得发亮。他匆忙瞟了一眼小屋，向她简单行个礼，就转身到鸡笼那边去了。他默默地蹲下，仔细地查看一遍，然后把笼门都关好，让母鸡和小鸡安全过夜。

做完这些事他才缓缓地朝她走来，她还坐在凳子上。他来到廊檐下，站到她面前。

“来啦。”他操着土腔儿说。

“是啊！”她说，抬头看看他道，“你来晚了！”

“唉！”他叹着气扭脸去看林子。

她缓缓地站起身，把凳子挪到一边。

“想进来吗？”她问。

他低下头，目光敏锐地看着她问：

“你每天儿晚上来这儿，人们不会说闲话吧？”

“怎么会呢？”她迷惑不解地仰脸看着他道，“我说过我要来。别人都不知道。”

“很快他们就会知道，”他说，“那时怎么办呢？”

她不知如何作答。

“他们怎么会知道呢？”她问。

“还不是早晚的事。”他无可奈何地说。

她的嘴唇微颤起来。

“那我也没办法。”她支吾着。

“别！”他说，“你不来就没事了，”随后他马上低声补充半句，“如果你想不来。”

“可我不想不来。”她喃喃道。

他扭脸看看林子，沉默不语。

“可要是人们发现了怎么办？”他终于说，“你再想想吧。你会觉得掉价，和你丈夫的仆人！”

她仰脸看着他的侧面说：“是不是……”她有点口吃起来，“是不是你不想要我呀？”

“你想想！”他说，“想想吧，要是人们发现了，克利福德男爵，还有，还有所有的人会怎么说——”

“说去吧，我可以离开这里。”

“去哪儿呢？”

“任何地方！我有我自己的钱，我母亲给我留下了两万镑，是托管的钱，克利福德不能动这笔钱，所以我想走就能走。”

“也许你不想走呢。”

“那又怎么样！出什么事我也不在乎。”

“哦，你现在是这么想，可你会在乎的！你得在乎，每个人都这样。你要记住自己的身份。一个贵妇人和一个猎场看守厮混！这跟我是个绅士可不一样。没错，你得在乎，你得好好想想！”

“没那个必要！我干吗要在意自己的贵夫人身份？我恨这个称谓还恨不过来呢。每次人们这么称呼我时我都感到他们是在取笑我。他们就是在取笑我，真的，甚至你这么称呼我时也是在取笑我。”

“我！”

他第一次直视着她，盯着她的眼睛。

“我没取笑你。”他说。

他凝视她的眼睛时，康妮发现他的眼神暗淡下来了，暗淡无光，瞳孔都放大了。

“你不怕冒险吗？”他声音沙哑地问，“你应该当心，否则就太晚了！”

他的话音里既有警告又有恳求，很不一般。

“我没什么可失去的！”她烦躁地说，“如果你知道我失去的是什么，你就会明白我乐意失去那东西。不过你是不是为自己担心啊？”

“唉！”他支吾道，“是的！我是担心。我担心。我怕事。”

“什么事？”她问。

他的头奇怪地向后扭扭，意思是指外面的世界。

“所有的事！所有的人！他们那些人。”

说着他低下头猛然吻起她表情难过的脸，边吻边说：

“不，我不在乎！咱们来吧，去他的别人吧。不过如果你要是为做了这事后悔的话——”

“你别不要我！”她请求着。

他的手指摩挲着她的脸颊，又猛然吻了她。

“先让我进去，”他轻柔地说，“把你的雨衣脱了吧。”

他挂上自己的枪，褪下潮湿的皮夹克，伸手去拿毯子。

“我又拿了一条毯子来，”他说，“这样咱们就有的盖了。”

“我不能待太久，”她说，“七点半得回去吃晚饭。”

他扫了她一眼，然后又看看自己的手表说：

“来得及！”

他关上门，点亮了悬着的风灯，火苗很弱。

“赶哪天咱们再多待会儿。”他说。

他仔细地把一条毯子铺在地上，另一条卷起来当枕头。随后他坐在凳子上，把她拉过来，一手紧紧地搂着她，另一只手在她身上摸索着。当他发现她薄薄的衣服下身体赤裸着时，他的呼吸骤然哽了一下，她听到了。

“哦！抚摸你可真是美妙啊！”说着他的手指在她腰腹间细腻温暖而又神秘的皮肤上爱抚着。他垂下头去，脸颊在她的小腹和大腿上来来回回滑蹭着。这次，她还是有点不太明白这给他带来的是怎样一种狂喜。她不懂，他通过触摸她活生生的身体找到的是怎样的美，何以为这美而欣喜万分。只有激情才能懂得这美。激情如果死了或心不在焉，那这美的奇妙律动就得不到理解，甚至还会被看成是卑贱的。可触摸这活生生的温暖的美比观察这美得到的感受要深刻得多。她感到他的脸颊在她的大腿、小腹和臀部滑动着，他的胡须和柔软浓密的头发在刷着她的身子，这一番爱抚令她的双膝不禁颤抖起来。在她身体的纵深处，她感到了一种全新的鼓噪，一个新的裸体在浮现。这反倒让她有点害怕，她有点希望他不要这样爱抚她。可他几乎是席卷了她。但她还是在等待，等待着什么。

当他欣然进入她时，那里一片安宁，她还在等待着。她感到自己有点被遗忘了。她知道，这部分归咎于自己，她是有意制造隔阂的。或许现在她是命中注定要在这种状态中了。她安静地躺着，感受着他在自己身体里的动作，感到他是那么沉迷专注，感到了他突如其来的颤抖，随后他的节奏渐缓下来。他臀部的冲动看上去委实有点荒唐！如果你是个女人而且与这等事情无关，那男人臀部的冲动简直算得上荒谬至极。不错，男人做这种事的姿势确实是荒唐到了极点！

但她仍然安静地躺着，没有退却。甚至当他停了下来，她也没有像跟米凯利斯那样让自己激动起来去自行达到满足。她静静地躺着，泪水渐渐涌了上来，最终夺眶而出。

他安静地伏在她身上，紧紧地搂着她，想用自己的腿盖住她裸露着的可怜的腿，以此来温暖她。他伏在她身上，紧紧拥抱她来温暖着她。

“你冷吗？”他低声温柔地问她，似乎她很近，就紧贴着他。而她却觉得离他很远，被遗忘了。

“不冷！不过我得走了。”她悄声道。

他叹口气，将她紧紧地搂了一会儿，才放开手歇息。

他没想到她会流泪，还以为她跟他一样受用呢。

“我必须走了。”她重复道。

他抬起身，在她身边跪着待了片刻，垂首吻了她的大腿根，在暗淡的风灯灯光里为她放下裙子，也给自己系上扣子，做这些时他心无旁骛，连身体都没有转过去。

“哪天你得上村子里的家来。”他低头看着她，目光温暖，表情自信而随意。

可她一动不动地躺着，眼睛向上凝视着他。陌生人！陌生人！她甚至有点反感他了。

他穿上自己的外套，找着掉地上的帽子，然后把枪背上肩。

“回头来呀！”他热情而平静地看着她说。

她缓缓地站起来。她并不想走，也不愿意留。他帮她穿上薄薄的雨衣，给她打整好。

他为她打开门，外面天色已经很黑了。见到他，房檐下那只忠诚的狗开心地站了起来。蒙蒙细雨下得灰茫茫一片，天色很晚了。

“我得拎上灯！”他说，“路上没别人！”

他们上了小径，他走在她前面一点，将风灯靠下摆动着，照亮了水湿的草、黑亮的蛇身般的树根和苍白的花朵。灯光照不到的地方雨雾蒙蒙，漆黑一片。

“哪天你得上村子里的家来，”上了宽敞的马道并肩而行时他说，“来不？咱们干脆豁出去了。”

她感到困惑不解，他对她如此穷追不舍，好生令她奇怪，其实他们之间没什么，他还没跟她切切实实地说过点什么呢。还有，不知怎么她就是烦他那口土话，什么“上家来”，听着不像是在跟她说话，倒像是在跟哪个平常的女人说话。她认出了马道上的毛地黄叶子，便大概知道这是到哪儿了。

“七点一刻了，”他说，“你还能赶上晚饭。”感到她的冷漠，他忙改了口音。转过马道最后一个弯，朝榛树篱墙和园门走去时，他熄灭了风灯。“咱们这就再见吧。”说着他拉住她的手臂。

别时不易。他们脚下的土地神秘莫测，但他能摸索着前进，因为他已经习惯了这样。在园门口，他把自己的手电筒给了她。“园子里倒是稍微亮些，”他说，“不过还是把这个带上吧，免得失足走到路下头去。”

他的话不错，空旷的园子里的确似乎闪着苍白的鬼影。他猛然一把将她拉过来，手又在她裙子里摩挲着，沾着水的凉手抚摸着她温热的身子。

“能摸摸你这样的女人，我就算死了也瞑目了，”他哑着嗓子说，“求你再多待一阵子。”

她感到他突然想要她了。

“不！我必须赶回去。”她有点焦急地说。

“唉！”他猛然松手，放了她。

她转身而去，但马上又向他转回来说：“吻我！”

黑暗中他弯下腰来，吻了她的左眼。她努起嘴巴，他蜻蜓点水般吻了一下就移开了自己的嘴。他不喜欢亲嘴。

“明天我再来，”说着她离开了，“只要我能来。”她又补充半句。

“哎！可别太晚呀。”他在黑暗中回答道。这时她已经看不见他了。

“晚安！”

“晚安，夫人！”黑暗里传来他的声音。

她停住脚步，转身看着湿漉漉的黑夜，只能看到他的身影。“干吗叫我这个？”她问。

“不那么叫了！”他说，“晚安！赶紧走吧！”

她一头扎进那漆黑如磐的夜色中。发现边门开着，便悄然溜进自己的房间。刚关上门，晚饭的锣声便响了。但她依然要冲个澡，必须要冲个澡。“不过以后不能再晚了，”她自言自语道，“这样真烦人。”

第二天她没有去林子里，而是同克利福德一起去了伍斯威特。他现在偶尔会坐汽车出门。他雇了一个身强力壮的小伙子为他开车，需要时这司机能帮他从车里挪下来。他特别想见他的教父莱斯利·温特。温特住在离伍斯威特不远的希普利府。温特现在是个老绅士了，很富有，他曾经是爱德华国王
③

时代最富有的矿主之一，那个时候他们正逢鼎盛。爱德华国王曾几次来希普利狩猎，就住在他的府邸里。这座老房子的墙壁抹着拉毛灰泥，家具典雅。温特是个单身汉，情调高雅。可惜这座大房子坐落在矿区，周围都是煤矿。莱斯利·温特喜欢克利福德，但看不惯克利福德的照片老出现在画报上，还摆弄文学，所以就不很敬重他了。这老头儿跟爱德华国王一样是个纨绔子弟，认为生活就是生活，胡编乱造写故事的人则非我族类。对康妮，这位乡绅总是很殷勤，认为她是个娴静的少女，跟了克利福德算是白费了，万分可惜的是，她没有机会给拉格比府留下子嗣。不过他自己也没有子嗣。

康妮不知道，如果温特知道克利福德的猎场看守与她有了关系，他会作何评论。那人还要她去他村里的家中私会呢！他会反感她，蔑视她，他对劳动阶级的人攀高枝的做法几乎充满仇恨。他倒是不会反对她与同一个阶级的男人私通。因为康妮天生丽质，一派娴静柔顺如少女，当然也许她本性就如此。温特称她为“亲爱的小孩”，还送她一幅十八世纪贵夫人的袖珍肖像画，尽管她不愿意要。

康妮是沉迷于同猎场看守的私情中了。但温特先生是个真正的绅士，是个精通世故的人，很看重她，把她看作一个不同一般的人，不把她与一般的女人混为一谈，他跟她说话总是以“您”相称。

那天她没有到林子里去，第二天和第三天都没去。只要她觉得或幻想中觉得那男人在等她、渴望着她，她就不去。可到了第四天，她就开始焦躁不安起来。她仍然拒绝到林子里去，再次为那男人奉献自己。她在想自己能做的一切事，如驾车去设菲尔德、访亲探友什么的。可一想到这些事她就感到厌恶。于是最终她做了个决定，去散步，但不是到林子那边，而是朝着相反的方向走。她要去马里黑，走邸园篱墙另一面上的小铁门。

这是个静谧阴沉的春日，天气算得上暖和。她埋头走着，胡思乱想着，至于想的是什么她自己都没意识到。她茫然地走着，直到马里黑农场上的狗冲她狂吠，她才清醒过来。这里的牧场一直伸延到拉格比邸园的篱墙边上，这么说他们还是邻居呢。过了好一会儿康妮才喊：

“贝尔！”她是在跟那只大白犬打招呼，“贝尔，你把我忘了吗？不认识我了吗？”她天生怕狗。贝尔边朝后退边发出咆哮声。可她想穿过农场的院子到通往小猎场的那条小路上去。

这时弗林特太太出来了。她和康斯坦丝年纪相当，当过学校教师，举止很优雅，但康妮怀疑她是个虚伪之人。

“哎哟，是查泰莱夫人！哎哟！”说着她眼睛一亮，脸红得像个小姑娘，“贝尔！贝尔！怎么能冲查泰莱夫人叫呢！贝尔，安静！”说着她跑过来用手中捏着的一块白毛巾轰开那狗，然后朝康妮迎上来。

“它原先认识我的。”说着康妮同弗林特太太握起手来。弗林特家是查泰莱家的佃户。

“它肯定认识夫人您！它只不过是耍耍威风，”弗林特太太红着脸有点不知所措地说，“不过它是有些时候没见着您了。您好多了吧？”

“是的，谢谢，我挺好的。”

“这一冬我们都没怎么见着您呢。进来看看我们家小娃娃吧？”

“哦！”康妮迟疑着，“那就看看吧。”

弗林特太太慌忙进去收拾一下，康妮则慢慢地跟在后头进去。她在阴暗的厨房里止了步，炉子上水壶里烧着开水。这时弗林特太太过来了。

“您千万别在意，”她说，“这边请吧。”

她们进了起居室，屋里有个婴儿正坐在碎布缝制的炉前地毯上，桌子上随意地摆着茶具，一个年轻的女仆见她们进来就羞羞答答地退回屋去了。

那孩子大概一岁的样子，是个傲慢的小东西，红头发像父亲，淡蓝色的眼睛看人一点也不认生。还是个女孩儿呢，但是个不吃亏的女孩。孩子坐在垫子上，身边是碎布做的布娃娃，还有不少玩具，那样子很有点现代人的奢侈。

“哦，这孩子可真是个小乖乖呀！”康妮说，“都长这么大了呀！是个大姑娘了，大姑娘了！”

这孩子出生时康妮送了她一条披巾，圣诞节时又送了几只人工象牙做的小鸭子。

“约瑟芬你瞧谁来看你了！看这是谁，约瑟芬！是查泰莱夫人呀！你认识查泰莱夫人，是不是？”

那奇特活泼的小东西大胆地凝视着康妮。什么夫人不夫人的，对这孩子来说谁都一样。

“来！上我这儿来好吗？”康妮逗着孩子。

那孩子并不理会她，所以康妮就把她抱起来，放在自己腿上。把一个孩子抱在自己腿上，多么温暖、多么可爱呀！那柔软的小胳膊儿，还有那胡乱踢腾的小腿儿。

“我刚才是自己凑合着吃的茶点。卢克去市场了，所以我可以随便想什么时候吃就什么时候吃。您喝杯茶吗，查泰莱夫人？我家的茶点您肯定不习惯，不过如果您不介意的话就——”

康妮并不介意，但她不乐意别人提醒她她习惯喝什么茶。随之桌子上的摆设被撤了重新布置，换上了精致的茶杯和茶壶。

“这太麻烦你了！”康妮说。

可如果不让弗林特太太忙乎一番，又有什么乐趣呢？于是康妮逗起孩子来，让这孩子身上那女性的顽强劲儿逗得直开心，从她那年幼柔软的身体中获得了一种强烈的快感。真年轻！真大胆！她那么大胆是因为她用不着护着自己！而人长大了，就因为恐惧而变得狭隘！

她喝了一杯茶，茶是太浓了点，但抹了黄油的面包却很好吃，还吃了罐头李子。弗林特太太脸色通红，情绪激动，好像康妮是个豪爽的骑士。她们说了些真正的女人之间的悄悄话，聊得很开心。

“不好意思啊，这顿茶点寒酸了些。”弗林特太太说。

“比我家里的好吃多了。”康妮诚恳地说。

“哎呀！瞧您说的！”弗林特叫着，她当然不信了。

康妮站起身来，说：“我得走了！我丈夫都不知道我在哪儿呢，他会胡思乱想的。”

“他怎么也想不到您会在这儿！”弗林特太太兴奋地笑道，“他会差人到处找您。”

“再见，约瑟芬！”说着康妮吻了那婴儿，还挠挠她那一小缕红头发。

弗林特太太坚持让康妮走前门
④

，为此她要开锁、拉门闩。康妮进到弗林特家前门的小花园里，花园围着水蜡树篱。小径旁种着两排熊耳朵花，看上去柔软又富贵。

“可爱的熊耳朵！”康妮说。

“卢克管它们叫怒放花儿！”弗林特太太笑道，“采一些吧！”

说着她就迫不及待地摘了一些柔软的熊耳朵花和报春花给康妮。

“够了，够了！”康妮忙说。

她们到了花园的小门旁。

“朝哪边走啊？”弗林特太太问。

“小猎场那边。”

“让我想想啊。哦，对了，母牛都在围栏里，还没进圈里去呢，围栏的门锁着，您得翻过去。”

“我能爬上去的。”康妮说。

“或许我能陪你上围栏那儿去。”

她俩走在被兔子啃噬得乱七八糟的草场上。林子里鸟儿在唱着晚间的颂歌，一个男人在召唤最后一批母牛回圈，那些母牛在四处是小径的草场上蹒跚前行。

“他们今天晚上挤奶要晚了，”弗林特太太严厉地说，“他们知道卢克要很晚才回来。”

她们来到篱墙根下，篱墙那边是密密匝匝的冷杉幼苗林。篱墙上有个小门，但上着锁。门里的草丛里有一个瓶子，是空的。

“那是猎场看守的空瓶子，等着装牛奶，”弗林特太太解释说，“我们把瓶子带到这里来，他自己取走。”

“什么时候取？”康妮问。

“哦，他随便什么时候过来都行，一般是在早上。好啦，查泰莱夫人，再会吧！一定再来呀。今天你来这儿，真好。”

康妮越过篱墙走上了茂密的冷杉夹道的小路。弗林特太太小跑着穿过草场到小山那边去，她还戴着遮阳帽，不愧是个当过老师的人。康妮不喜欢这片密实的新生林子，它让人觉得可怕、窒息。她自顾低头赶路，心里想的是弗林特家的婴儿，那真是个小宝贝儿，但那孩子将来肯定会是个罗圈儿腿，像她父亲，现在就初露端倪了，不过也许能长直了也不一定。多么温暖，多么美呀，有个孩子。瞧弗林特太太那个显摆劲儿吧，就是显摆她有的康妮没有而且肯定不会有的。没错，弗林特太太就是在炫耀她的母仪，这让康妮感到那么一丁点儿嫉妒，可这是无奈的事。

她猛地一激灵，从沉思中醒来，吓得叫出声来，前面出现了个男人。

定睛看她发现是那看守，像头巴兰的驴子站在前头，挡着她的路。

“这是怎么回事？”他吃惊道。

“你怎么来了？”她喘息着问。

“你呢？去小屋了吗？”

“没，没有！我去马里黑了。”

他好奇不解地看着她，她则有点负疚地垂下了头。

“现在去小屋吗？”他的声音有点严厉。

“不，我不能去！我在马里黑待了很长时间，没人知道我在哪儿。我得赶回去，要不就晚了——”

“躲着我，是吧？”说着他脸上闪过轻微嘲弄的一笑。

“不是！不是！不是那个意思！只是——”

“还有什么别的意思！”说着他向前朝她走过来，张开双臂把她抱在怀里。她感到他的前身紧贴着她，充满了活力。

“哦，现在不行！现在不行！”她叫着，试图将他推开。

“干吗不？刚六点。你半点钟以后走还来得及。好了，好了！我要你。”

他紧紧地搂着她，她感到他迫不及待了。她固有的本能是要为自己的自由而争斗，可是她身体里有什么奇怪的东西让她动弹不得。他的身体急迫地贴紧她，她再也没有心思去抗争了。

他四下里张望了一下，说：

“来，来，上这儿来！穿过这儿！”他敏锐的目光穿透了那密实的冷杉幼林。

他回头看看她，她发现他目光犀利、严厉、毫无爱意。但此时她已经管不住自己，四肢感到奇特的沉重。她屈服了，顺从了。

他拉着她穿过刺人的树丛，艰难地过去后到了一块空地上，地上有一堆树枝。他扔了一两根干树枝在地上，把自己的外衣和马甲铺在上面。她得躺下去，躺在树下，像一头动物那样。他身上只剩下衬衣和马裤，站在一旁凝视着她。他想得很周到，照料着她，让她躺舒服了。可他还是扯断了她内衣的带子，因为她自顾慵懒地躺着，不帮他。

他也解开衣服，裸露出自己的前身。他进入时，她感到他赤裸的皮肉贴到了她身上。他停了片刻，在那里膨胀着，颤抖着。突然他开始难以自持，直到高潮。这激起了她体内一股新奇激动的涟漪，那涟漪荡漾着，荡漾着，恰似温柔的火苗，轻若鸿毛，直到美妙的顶尖，完美，完美至极，将她灼热的身体彻底融化。这感觉就像铃铛，铃声如涟漪荡漾着，荡漾着。最终，她不知不觉发出狂野的叫喊声来。只是这一切结束得太快了，太早了！现在她再也无法强制自己自行行动了。这次与以往不同，不同，她什么也不能做了。她再也不能打起精神利用他去获得自己的快感了。她只能等待，等待。她感到他在退出，退出，收缩，在可怕的最后一刻就要离去了，离她而去，她的心为此发出了呻吟，因为她还在绽放着，轻柔地，轻柔作响，像海浪下的海葵，呼唤着他再次进来让她彻底受用。她不知不觉中依旧激动地紧贴着他，他并没有离去。她感到他那柔软的物件在自己体内耸动起来，以一种奇特的节奏冲进来，膨胀着，直至将她整个意识的空白填满。随之，他又开始了那难以言表的抽动，那简直不是抽动，而是纯粹深入的旋动，如旋涡愈旋愈深，穿透了她整个的身体与意识，直至她变成一条感觉的流水。她不自觉地叫喊着，那是漆黑夜色中发出的叫声，是生命的呼喊。当那男人的生命泉水在她体内喷涌时，他听到了身下的叫声，几乎为这声音所惊慑。随着她的叫声渐弱，他也平静了下来，懵懵地，一动不动，而她紧抓住他的手也渐渐放松了下来，一动不动了。他们横陈于斯，失去了意识，甚至意识不到对方，全然丢了自己。最终是他先醒过来，发现自己精赤着。她也开始意识到他的身体松弛了下来，渐渐离开了她。但她心里不忍让他离开后自己毫无遮盖，他现在必须庇护她，永远。

但他最终还是离开了她，吻了她，给她套上衣服，也开始给自己穿衣服。她躺着，透过头顶上的树枝看天，还是动弹不得。他站起来，系着马裤，朝四下里观望着。四周林木茂盛，万籁俱寂，只有那条狗有点受惊，趴在地上，把鼻子埋在两爪之间。他又在树枝上坐下来，默默地牵了康妮的手。

她转过身看着他。“这回咱们俩是一块儿达到高潮的。”他说。

她没说话。

“那样儿才好。好多人活了一辈子都没有过这个呢。”他如梦如幻地说着。

她凝视着他沉思中的脸。

“是吗？”她说，“你开心吗？”

他凝视着她的眼睛说：“开心呀！”但他不想让她说话，就阻止道：“嗨，别说了吧！”他弯下腰来吻她，她觉得他应该一直这么吻下去。

她总算坐了起来，天真好奇地问：“难道不能经常一起达到高潮吗？”

“不少人从来都没有过呢，看看人们那不明不白的表情就知道他们怎么回事了。”他不想说话，后悔自己又说话了。

“你和别的女人也能这样同步吗？”

他看看她，感到好笑。

“不知道，”他说，“我不知道。”

她知道，他不想告诉她的就永远也不会告诉她。她看着他的脸，体内的激情又开始荡漾。但她尽量抑制着自己，因为那意味着自我迷失。

他穿上背心和外衣，拨开树丛走上小路。

最后一抹夕阳落在林梢上。“我就不跟你去了，”他说，“最好不去。”

她恋恋不舍地看了他一眼才转身离开。他的狗正焦急地等他走，而他似乎也没什么可说的了，该说的都说了。

康妮缓缓地朝家走去，意识到自己内心深处有了更深刻的什么东西。她体内生出了另一个自己，就在自己五脏六腑中燃烧着，融化着，温柔而敏感。因为有了这个自我，她仰慕他，爱慕他，爱到让她走起路来膝头发软。她的五脏六腑都荡漾着激情，都变得生机勃勃。因为像个天真无邪的女人那样爱慕他，她现在都变得娇弱无力了。“这感觉就像变成了一个孩子！”她对自己说，“就像体内有了个孩子。”的确如此。似乎她那一直关闭着的子宫一下子绽开了，充满了新的生命，那生命几乎是个负担，但感觉很美。

“如果我怀上了孩子！”她想，“怀上个孩子，就等于让他待在我身体里了！”想到这里她的四肢都酥软了。她明白，为自己怀孩子和为一个自己全副身心渴求的男人怀孩子，这两者之间有天壤之别。前者在某种意义上说就是普普通通那么回事。可是为一个让自己爱得心肝寸断、子宫绽放的男人怀孩子！这让她感到脱胎换骨了，感到自己似乎在下沉，下沉，沉到了女性的最中心，沉到了创世之前的昏睡中。

对她来说，激情这东西并不新鲜，新鲜的是对他的渴望与爱慕。她知道她一直害怕这个，因为有了这种感情她就无法自已了。现在她依然害怕这个。如果她太爱慕他，她就会失去自我，自我湮灭，她还不想自我湮灭呢。一个奴隶，就像一个原始的女人，她绝不想成为一个奴隶。她害怕自己对他的爱慕之情，但又不愿意立即与此抗争。她知道她会与此抗争的。她心中有一个自我意志的魔鬼，它能战胜自己五脏六腑里生出的那种彻底的温柔而深情的爱慕，能将之击得粉碎。现在她也能这样，或者说她想她能。她能让理性驾驭自己的激情。

好吧，就像崇拜酒神巴克斯的女人
⑤

那样疯狂地疾步穿过森林，去找巴克斯。那聪明的阳物，他没有独立的性格，纯粹是上帝派来伺候女人的仆人！这个男人，不得妄为，他不过是个神庙的仆人，是那聪明阳物的携带者和守护者
⑥

，而那阳物是属于女人的。

于是，在新的觉醒过程中，那历久弥新的热情在她体内燃烧了一阵。一时间男人变得渺小可怜，不过是阳物的携带者，当他履行完自己的义务时他要粉身碎骨。她感到自己的四肢和全身充满着那些女酒神的力量：女人神采奕奕，飞速疾驶，将男人打败。生出这种感觉却让她心情沉重起来。她并不想要这种感觉，这感觉来自既有的知识，是苍白的，没有生命力。而那种爱慕才是她的珍宝，那么深不可测，那么温柔，那深情又是那么神秘。不行，她一定要放弃她那坚强、耀眼的女性力量，她对此厌倦了，麻木了。她要浸淫到新的生命中去沐浴，沉到自己五脏六腑的最深处，在那里，爱慕的歌在无声地哼唱着。现在还不是惧怕男人的时候。

“我到马里黑去散步了，还和弗林特太太一起吃了茶点，”她对克利福德说，“我想看看那孩子，真是太可爱了，头发就像红蜘蛛网，真是个乖乖！弗林特先生到市场上去了，所以就我们和孩子一起用的茶点。你好奇我上哪儿去了吗？”

“是的。不过我猜你是在哪儿吃茶点了。”克利福德嫉妒地说。但过后再想想，他感到她变了，她身上有什么东西让他很是无法理解。但他把这归结为她看见那孩子的缘故，他以为康妮身体不适都是因为没孩子造成的。一般来说，这事自然就会让人往这方面想。

“我看到您穿过园子到铁门那边去了，夫人，”博尔顿太太说，“我还以为您去教区长那儿了呢。”

“我差点儿就去了，可中途我拐弯去了马里黑。”

两个女人的目光相遇了：博尔顿太太明亮的灰眼睛在探询着，康妮的蓝眼睛里目光迷离，但显得出奇美丽。博尔顿太太几乎能肯定康妮有情人了。可这怎么可能？能是谁呢？这里哪有这样的男人？

“哦，你能时不时出去看看朋友，这对你有好处，”博尔顿太太说，“我还对克利福德男爵说来着，出去多跟人们接触接触对夫人大有好处。”

“是啊，我挺愿意出去的。那孩子真让人喜欢，又乖又勇敢，克利福德！”康妮说，“它的头发就像蜘蛛网，是发亮的橙色呢！还长着最奇特好看的淡蓝色小眼珠，像细瓷儿一样。当然是个女孩，不然怎么那么勇敢呢，比任何一个小弗朗西斯·德雷克男爵
⑦

都勇敢。”

“您说得对，夫人，弗林特家的都那样儿！他们家的人都头发密实，胆儿也大。”博尔顿太太说。

“你想见那孩子吗，克利福德？我请她们来喝茶了，为的是让你看看那孩子。”

“谁呀？”他问道，十分不安地看着康妮。

“弗林特太太和孩子呀，下周一来。”

“你可以让她们到楼上你的房间里喝茶。”他说。

“怎么，难道你不想见那孩子吗？”她问。

“哦，我会见它的，可我不愿意和她们坐在一起度过整个下午茶的时间。”

“嗨！”康妮迷惑地睁大眼睛看着他。

她并没有真正看他，他不是她想看的人。

“您可以在您楼上的房间里舒舒服服地喝茶，如果克利福德男爵不在场的话，弗林特太太会更随意些。”博尔顿太太说。

她相信康妮有了情人，为此她心里狂喜。可那会是谁呢？是谁？或许弗林特太太能提供线索。

今天晚上康妮不打算洗澡。他的皮肉贴过她，在她身上留下的胶着感对她来说是宝贵的，在某种意义上说是神圣的。

克利福德感到心里不踏实，他一定要她晚饭以后再离开，而她却十分想独处！她看着他，但显得出奇的顺从。

“咱们玩个游戏好不好？或者我给你读点什么？或者做点别的什么？”他局促地问。

“你读点什么吧。”康妮说。

“读什么？诗歌还是散文，或者剧本？”

“读拉辛
⑧

吧。”她说。

过去，庄重地以法国气派读拉辛是他的一绝。可现在他不行了，他也有自知之明。他其实更想听收音机。康妮在缝东西，在给弗林特太太的小孩缝一件淡黄色的绸衣，那绸子是从她自己的一件衣服上裁下来的，回家后吃晚饭前她就裁下了这块布料。她就这样一边听着克利福德朗读，一边安静地缝着，很是自我陶醉。

在内心深处，她能感到激情在嗡嗡作响，就像一座高大的钟响过后的回声。

克利福德对她讲了一通拉辛的作品，直到他说完她才弄清他的意思。

“是的，是的！”她抬头看着他说，“确实很了不起。”

她那双深邃的蓝眼睛和她坐在那儿柔和而沉静的神态又让他感到害怕了。她从来没有这样柔顺沉静过。她让他着迷，似乎是她身上的香味让他沉迷。于是他没完没了地朗读着，那法语的喉音在康妮听来像是烟囱里的风声。至于拉辛的作品，她一个音节也没听进去。

她正沉溺在微微的狂喜中，就像树林在春天里喃喃低吟着发芽。她能感到和自己的男人，那个无名的男人，在同一个世界里，阳物的神秘世界里，步态优雅地漫游。而她自己，她全身心都能感到他和他的孩子，他和他的孩子就在自己身体里。他的孩子在她的血管里，如同曙光一般。

“手没有，眼没有，脚也没有，金色

珍宝般的头发，也没有……”
⑨

她就像一片树林，像盘根错节的橡树林，无数的树芽在哼唱着绽放，与此同时欲望的鸟儿则在她身体那盘根错节的密林里休眠。

可是克利福德的声音还在继续着，那嘈嘈切切的声音听着很是奇特。这东西怎么这么怪！他这人怎么这么怪，低着头看着书，一个充满激情的文明人，肩膀宽阔但却没有腿！一个多么奇怪的人，有着尖刻、冷漠和固执的性格，却毫无热心！毫无热情！他是未来的一种动物，没有灵魂，但有特别警醒的意志，冷漠的意志。想到这儿，她害怕地打了个寒战，但她身上柔和温暖的生命之火比克利福德要强烈得多，他身上毫无真实的东西。

朗读结束了。她吃了一惊。抬起头，更吃惊了，因为克利福德正用那苍白、费解的眼神看着她，那很像仇恨的目光。

“太感谢你了！你读拉辛读得实在很美！”她温柔地说道。

“和你倾听的模样一样美。”他恶狠狠地说。

“你做什么呢？”他问。

“做件小孩的衣服，给弗林特太太的孩子。”

他转过身去。孩子！孩子！她脑子里都是孩子。

“说到底，”他像宣布什么似的说，“从拉辛的作品里你能得到你想要的一切。有序有规矩的感情比无序的感情更重要。”

她睁大眼睛看着他，目光迷离朦胧。

“是的，我相信是这样的。”她说。

“现代世界放纵感情，只能让感情变庸俗。我们需要的是对感情加以古典的约束。”

“是的！”她缓缓地说，心里则想象着他面无表情地听收音机里有关感情的废话的样子，“人们佯装有感情，其实他们什么也没感觉到。我想那就叫浪漫吧。”

“没错！”他说。

其实他累了。这个晚上令他感到疲惫。他其实更乐意读读他的技术书籍，或跟他的矿井经理在一起，或听听收音机什么的。

博尔顿太太端着两杯麦芽奶进来，一杯给克利福德，促进睡眠，另一杯给康妮，为的是让她胖起来。这是她介绍的睡前饮料，经常要喝。

康妮喝了她那一杯就可以走了，为此她感到高兴。谢天谢地，她不用帮克利福德上床。她接过克利福德的杯子放在了盘子里，然后把盘子端了出去。

“克利福德，晚安！好好睡呀。拉辛会帮人做梦。晚安！”

她向门边飘然而去，没吻他就走了。他目光尖锐冷漠地看着她。她居然这样！他花了整个晚上给她朗读，她竟不吻他道声晚安。她怎么这么冷漠！即便只是走走形式亲吻一下，那也是生活必需的形式啊。他冷漠、愤怒地盯着她离去后的门口。愤怒！

他又开始怕黑了。他的神经形成了一个网络，当他没有紧张工作但又精力充沛时，或者说当他没有全神贯注听收音机、无所事事时，他就会感到焦虑，感到危险，感到被空虚笼罩。他怕，而康妮能驱逐他的恐惧，只要她愿意。可现在很明显，她不愿意，就是不愿意。她冷漠、冷酷，对他为她所做的一切都漠然。他为她放弃了生活，可她却对他冷漠相待。她只想自己。“贵妇爱任性。”
⑩

现在她又对孩子着迷了。她想的是她自己的孩子，完全是她自己的，而不是他的。

就克利福德的情况而言，他算是十分健康了。他脸色红润，神采奕奕，肩膀宽大健壮，胸肌发达，最近又胖了些。可他却很怕死。似乎有一种可怕的空虚在威胁着他，就是一片空虚，他的元气就在这空虚中消耗殆尽。有时没了元气，他感到自己就死了，真死了。

他那有点凸出的淡灰色眼睛里眼神古怪，既怯生，又有点残酷，太冷漠了，几乎是肆无忌惮。这种肆无忌惮的表情十分冷酷，似乎他没有生命却战胜了生命。“谁知道意志的神秘呢——它甚至能战胜天使——”
⑪

但他怕的是无法入睡的夜晚。那样的夜晚实在是糟糕，虚无感从四面八方向他袭来。过一种没有生命的日子，那是可怕的：在夜晚，没有生命，但还要活着。

但是现在他可以按铃招呼博尔顿太太来。她总是一叫就来，这对他是个巨大的安慰。她进来时身穿睡袍，头发编成发辫披在肩上，有点怪模怪样的，乍看上去像个女孩，可那棕色的发辫中却夹杂着白发。她会为他泡上咖啡或甘菊茶，陪他下下棋或玩玩两人打的皮克牌。她有一种女人的特别本事，能在半梦半醒状态中下一手好棋，输得虽败犹荣。于是，在夜间沉默的亲昵气氛中，他们或者都坐着，或者她坐着，他躺在床上，伴着桌灯孤独的灯光，下棋玩牌，她几乎昏睡着，他则在恐惧中没了魂。游戏结束后他们就着饼干喝杯咖啡，几乎无言，在寂静的夜里，彼此都感到有个依靠。

而今夜，她在猜想谁是查泰莱夫人的情人，她也想到了自己的男人特德。他都死了那么久了，可对她来说他还跟没死似的。一想到特德，她对这个世界憋了这些年的火就往上窜，这火是特别冲矿主们发的，是他们害了他。虽然不能说真是他们杀了他，但对她的感情来说，就是他们杀了他。在她内心深处，就因为这，她成了个虚无主义者，还是个彻头彻尾的无政府主义者。

半睡半醒中，对她家特德的思念和对查泰莱夫人那秘密情人的猜想交织在一起。她感到她与另一个女人有了共同的深仇大恨，那就是恨克利福德和他所捍卫的一切。可与此同时她居然在和他玩双人皮克牌，还下了六便士的赌注。可与一个准男爵玩皮克牌让她感到很欣慰，就是输了那六便士她也心甘情愿。

一玩纸牌，他们就赌，这样他才玩得忘我。一般情况下是克利福德赢钱。今天晚上他又快赢了，所以他非要打到黎明时分再去睡。还好，四点半左右就曙光初照了。

康妮上床后一直睡得很香。但那猎场看守却不能休息。他把鸡笼都关了，围着林子巡逻了一圈，这才回家吃晚饭。但晚饭后他也没有上床休息，而是坐在炉火前沉思。

他在想自己在特瓦萧度过的童年和他五六年的婚姻生活。一想到他妻子，他就难过。她十分凶悍。不过1915年春天他参军以后就再没见过她。但她就在那里，在不到三英里远的地方，甚至比原先还要凶悍。他希望自己在有生之年再也不要见到她。

他想起自己在国外当兵的日子。印度，埃及，然后又回印度，和军马在一起度过的日子，没有目标，根本不用动脑子。还有那个爱他、他也爱的上校。想到自己当官的几年，当了中尉，很有可能当上尉。可上校得肺炎死了，他也差点死了，从此健康受到了损害。他特别不安分，后来离开了军队，回到英国，又成了个卖力气的。

他是在敷衍生活。他一直以为在这林子里至少能过上一段安全的日子。狩猎活动还没开始，他得先把狩猎用的山鸡养大。他情愿不背着枪替人家服务。他宁可独处，远离生活，他唯一需要的就是这样的生活。但他又需要有个什么依靠。这里是他的老家，甚至他的母亲还在这里生活，尽管她跟他从来都不近乎。他可以过一天是一天，没什么牵挂，也没什么盼头儿，因为他不知道自己该怎么办。

他不知道该怎么办。当了几年军官，与其他军官和文职人员共事，与他们的妻小交往，让他失去了“腾达”的野心。中上层阶级的人很有韧性，就如同胶皮一样柔韧，但毫无生气。他了解他们之后感到心寒，知道自己跟他们不是一类人。

于是他回到了自己的阶级中来。在那里他找回了自己离开后这些年忘记的那些东西，本阶级的人行为举止的卑贱庸俗。现在他承认了行为举止的重要性。他也承认，对几个小钱或生活琐事至少应该做到佯装不在意，这很重要。可普通百姓可没有佯装这一说，对他们来说咸肉的价钱贵一分贱一分比修改《圣经》还重要。这让他无法忍受。

还有工资上的争吵。在有产阶级中生活过的他懂得，工资上的争吵是无望解决的。没有解决方案，除了死。唯一要做的就是不要在乎，不要在意工资的多少。

可是如果你一贫如洗又是个倒霉蛋儿，你就得在意。不管怎样，工资成了他们唯一关心的事。对金钱的关注就像一个巨大的毒瘤，把所有阶级的人都消耗殆尽。于是他拒绝关心金钱。

那还有什么？除了关心金钱，生活还能给人们什么？没了。

好在他可以独处，勉强能自得其乐。他的工作就是养山鸡，最终提供给那些脑满肠肥的人早餐后猎杀用。无聊，虚无到极点了。

可干吗要为这担忧，为这发愁？他一直都无忧无虑，直到这个女人进入了他的生活。他比她年长近十岁。可论经验，他是底层出身，要比她年长一千岁。但他们之间的距离在缩短。他能看到这道鸿沟弥合的那一天，他们能生活在一起。“爱情的束缚松不开！”

然后呢？然后呢？他必须从头开始，从无开始吗？他必须缠住这女人吗？他必须要与她的残疾丈夫发生可怕的争执吗？还要与他凶悍的妻子发生可怕的口角？她恨他。痛苦啊！太多的痛苦！再说他已经不再年轻，不再青春勃发。他也不是那种漫不经心的人。任何一点痛苦和丑陋都会伤害他，也伤害那女人！

可是，即使他们摆脱了克利福德男爵和他自己的妻子，摆脱了他们，接下来要做什么呢？他自己准备做什么？他准备过什么样的生活？他总得做什么吧。他不能游手好闲，靠康妮的钱和他自己的一点养老金过活。

这问题无法解决。他只能打算去美国，去换换新的空气。他完全不信任美元，不过，或许那里还有别的什么。

他无法平静，无法上床睡觉。他坐在那里昏昏沉沉地痛苦思索到午夜，突然从椅子上一跃而起，拿起外套和枪。

“走，姑娘，”他冲他的狗说，“咱们最好出去。”

外面星汉灿烂，但没有月亮。他慢慢地巡视，一丝不苟，脚步很轻，甚至有点蹑手蹑脚的。他唯一需要担心的是矿工们埋下捕兽夹子捕野兔，特别是马里黑那边斯戴克斯门的矿工们。不过现在是动物的繁殖期，即使是矿工们也会发善心，不会下夹子的。不过，这趟蹑手蹑脚的巡逻，搜寻一通偷猎人，让他安静了下来，脑子里不再乱想了。

结束了一轮缓慢细心的巡视——这一圈下来就是差不多五英里，他累了。他来到山丘的顶端放眼望去。四下里一片寂静，只有斯戴克斯门矿井那边有微弱的杂音。那边从来也不停工，四周几乎没有灯光，只有工地上一排排的电灯光。世界在黑暗中昏睡着，此时已经是半夜两点半了。可即使在睡眠中，这也是个不安的、残酷的世界，火车或是大货车在路上发出喧嚣，一座座熔炉燃着玫瑰红色的火光。这是个铁与煤的世界，铁和煤烟的残酷无情和那难以满足的贪欲推动着这一切。只有贪欲，贪欲在睡梦中依旧鼓噪着。

夜凉了，他开始咳嗽。一阵寒风吹过山顶，让他想起那女人。现在他真想把那女人搂在怀里暖着她，两个人裹在一张毯子里一起入眠，为这个他愿意放弃他所有的，甚至他可能有的一切。未来的全部希望和过去获得的一切他都愿意放弃，就为了跟她裹在一张毯子里，暖暖和和地一起睡，就为了睡在一起。似乎让那女人睡在自己的臂弯里是他唯一的祈求。

他去了小木屋，自己裹上毯子躺在地上准备睡去。可是他睡不着，他感到冷。还有，他残酷地感到了自己的本能欲望没有得到满足。他残酷地感到了自己形单影只的缺憾。他想要她，想抚摸她，想紧紧地把她搂在怀里，在瞬间成为一体，然后再睡去。

他又起来走了出去，这次是朝着花园的门走去，然后缓缓地沿着小路朝拉格比府走去。快凌晨四点了，天晴着，但很冷，还没有黎明的迹象。他很适应黑夜，可以看得清路。

慢慢地，慢慢地，那大房子吸引着他，就像一块磁铁。他想靠近她。这不是欲望，不是那东西。是孤独让他残酷地感到自己不完整，要完整就需要一个沉默的女人蜷缩在自己怀抱里。或许他能找到她。或许他甚至能把她叫出来，或找到进屋的途径。他非找到她不可。

他默默地轻手轻脚地爬上通往大房子的斜坡，然后来到坡顶上那几棵大树下，上了车道，车道绕过一个菱形的草坪就到了大屋的门口。他已经看得清屋前这块平展展的菱形大草坪上两棵高大漂亮的山毛榉了，这两棵大树在夜色中影影绰绰的。

大屋就在眼前，低矮、狭长，形状模糊，只有楼下的一个房间亮着灯。那是克利福德男爵的房间，他知道。可她在哪个房间里呢，那根游丝的另一端，无情地拽着他的女人？他不知道。

他靠近了些，手里握着枪，纹丝不动地站在车道上，盯着大房子看。或许现在他还能找到她，想法子跟她在一起。这房子并非针插不进，他可是和盗贼一样聪明啊。为什么不找到她呢？

他纹丝不动地站着，等待着，他身后微熹渐显。他看见大屋里的灯光熄灭了。但他看不到的是，博尔顿太太熄灯后走到窗前拉开墨绿色的旧窗帘，站在黑屋里看外面黎明降临前的半明半暗的天色，盼望着黎明到来，等着，等克利福德确实感到黎明到来了。一旦他确信黎明到了，他就会马上入睡。

在半昏睡状态下她盲目地站着等克利福德睡去。可她为眼前的东西吃了一惊，差点喊出声来。她看见外面的车道上站着一个男人，那是曙光中的一个黑影。她醒了一半，继续观察着，但不露一点声色，免得吵醒克利福德。

晨光开始渗透进这个世界了，那黑影似乎开始变小，模样开始清晰。她认出了那枪、长筒胶靴和松松垮垮的夹克衫，那竟是奥利弗·梅勒斯，那猎场看守。“没错，那就是他的狗，像个影子一样嗅着，等他呢！”

这男人想干什么？是想吵醒大屋里的人吗？他站在那里干什么呢？直愣愣的，抬头看着这房子，像条相思的公狗站在母狗的窝外面那样！

天啊！博尔顿太太冷不丁儿明白了。他就是查泰莱夫人的情人！他！就是他！

这是什么事呀！她，艾维·博尔顿曾经有点爱上过他。那时他是十六岁的小伙子，而她都是二十六岁的少妇了。那时她正上学，他帮她学解剖学和别的一些必修课程。他是个聪明的孩子，得了奖学金去设菲尔德文法学校读书，学了法语和别的一些课程。可后来却到矿上在井口当铁匠，给马打铁掌。他喜欢马，他自己这么说的。他说得不错，因为他害怕出去面对这个世界，只是他从来也不承认自己害怕罢了。

可他是个好小伙子，可好了，帮了她不少忙，给你解释起问题来那个聪明劲儿，讲得清清楚楚。他的聪明劲儿跟克利福德差不多，而且特有女人缘儿。人们说，他跟女人关系比跟男人还要好。

后来他走了，跟那个叫伯莎·库茨的人结缡，好像就是要羞辱自己似的。有些人结婚就是为了羞辱自己，因为他们对什么东西都失望了。怪不得他们的婚姻完了呢。一连好几年，他离开了，整个战争期间，混了个上尉什么的，很是个绅士了，真的，简直就是个绅士！可后来就回了特瓦萧，干上了猎场看守！不错，有些人就是有机会也不会用！他又说起那口音浓重的达比郡土话，像个最下等的人。可艾维·博尔顿知道，他能像任何绅士一样说话，没错。

好啊，好啊！男爵夫人看上他了！其实，男爵夫人不是第一个爱上他的女人。他有迷人之处。可是这该有多奇妙啊，一个土生土长的特瓦萧孩子和拉格比府的男爵夫人好上了！那肯定是对位高权重的查泰莱家的一记耳光！

随着天大亮起来，那猎场看守意识到这样不行！想摆脱自己的孤独是不行的。他得坚持下去，一生都如此。只是偶尔，那空虚会被填充。偶尔！可是这偶尔是可遇不可求的。对你的孤独就认了吧，孤独一生。但是，如果空虚被填充的时刻到来，也要顺其自然。这样的时刻总会到来的，但你不能强求它到来。

猛然间，那促使他对她穷追不舍的欲望“咔嚓”一声断裂了。是他将这欲望斩断的，因为必须这样。到一起必须是双方的事。如果她不来找他，他也不会对她穷追不舍了。他不能这样。他得走，等她来。

他若有所思地缓缓转开去，再次接受了孤独。他知道，最好是这样。她必须来找他。他这样尾随是没用的。没用！

博尔顿太太眼看着他的身影消失了，他的狗紧随其后。

“好啊，好！”她自言自语道，“我怎么也想不到是他，根本不可能想到。他还是个大孩子时，对我可好了，那会儿特德刚死。好啊，好！如果克利福德知道了，看他说什么！”

想到此，她一边解气地看看已经入睡的克利福德，一边蹑手蹑脚地退出房去。

注　释

①
犹太人认为上帝这个词是神圣的，不能直接念出来，所以用“I-AM-THAT-I-AM”替代。中文《圣经》将其翻译为“自有永有者”，姑且借用。见《旧约·出埃及记》第三章，第十四节。——译者注

②
腰腹（loins）这个词经常在劳伦斯的小说中出现，源于《圣经》，如《约伯记》中就称其为力量与勇气的所在，是蕴藏生殖力的中心。在《创世纪》中则有国王等出自腰腹间的说法。英文俗语“to be a child of one's loins”即指自己的亲生子女。这个词作复数时亦有耻骨区和生殖器的意思。因此劳伦斯使用这个词的频率很高，但意思往往不一，有时确指腰臀部。但译成“腰腹”时则暗指生殖器部位，须根据上下文明察。——译者注

③
爱德华国王，1901—1910年间的英国国王，以生活放荡与沉溺享乐著称。

④
英国人一般情况下是走后花园的门通过厨房进出屋的，一般客人只是在兼餐厅的厨房逗留，只有贵客来访才走前门进客厅。——译者注

⑤
酒神巴克斯有一群女崇拜者，传说在宗教狂热的驱使下，她们醉酒后可以撕碎野兽和男人。

⑥
传说酒神祭拜阳物。

⑦
弗朗西斯·德雷克（1540—1596），英国做环球旅行的人。

⑧
拉辛（1639—1699），法国新古典主义剧作家。

⑨
斯温伯恩：《朝觐者》（1871）。

⑩
出自传统的歌谣《四爱歌》（The Four Loves）：“雄鹿爱密林／野兔爱山冈／骑士爱利剑／贵妇爱任性。”

⑪
见爱伦·坡（1809—1849）的《丽姬娅》中的铭文。

第十一章

康妮正在收拾家里的一个杂物间。家里有好几个这样的杂物间。这个家简直就是个仓库，从来没有卖过任何旧东西。杰弗里男爵的父亲爱好收藏油画，母亲则喜欢收藏十六世纪的意大利家具。杰弗里男爵自己喜欢收藏橡木雕花老箱子和教堂的圣衣柜。这些收藏就这样一代又一代地积累了下来。克利福德收藏的是特别现代的油画，但出价却很低。

因此，杂物间里有埃德温·兰西尔
①

爵士的劣质作品，也有威廉·亨利·亨特
②

画的惨兮兮的鸟巢，还有一些学院派的作品，这些东西足以将一个皇家艺术学会会员的女儿吓倒。她打定主意要把这些东西整理一遍后彻底清理掉，不过她对那些奇形怪状的家具倒是挺感兴趣。

那件家传的旧青龙木摇篮被悉心地包裹着，为的是防止磨损和干裂。她得拆开包装才能看到它的真相。这东西自有其迷人之处，她看了很久。

“真是可惜了儿的，这东西用不上，”帮忙拆包装的博尔顿太太叹息道，“不过这样的摇篮现在不时兴了。”

“说不定就用得上呢，我或许会有孩子的。”康妮不经意地说，就像说她要有一顶新帽子似的。

“您是说，如果克利福德男爵万一好了？”博尔顿太太结结巴巴地说。

“不！我是说他没问题。克利福德爵士只是肌肉萎缩，这并不影响生育。”康妮神态自若地撒着谎。

是克利福德向她灌输这种理念的，他说：“我当然有可能生个孩子，我并不是被肢解了，我的生育能力很容易就能恢复。就算是臀部和腿的肌肉都萎缩了也无伤大局，影响不了种子的传递。”

他精力充沛地忙于矿务时，真的感到自己的性力开始恢复了。康妮看到他这副样子不禁感到害怕。但她很聪明，利用他的建议为自己打掩护。如果她能，她一定要一个孩子，但那不是克利福德的孩子。

听她这样说，博尔顿太太惊得一时语塞。她才不信呢，她看出了这话里的诡计。不过现在的医生倒是能干这类事，他们会人工移植精种。

“好啊，夫人。我盼着呢，替您祈祷着呢。有个孩子，对您，对大家都是再好不过的事了。说实在的，如果拉格比府添了丁儿，就跟以前大不一样了！”

“可不是嘛！”康妮说。

她挑了三幅皇家艺术学会会员六十年前的绘画，打算送给肖特兰兹公爵夫人下次的慈善义卖会用。公爵夫人被称为“义卖公爵夫人”，因为她总是向全郡士绅征求义卖品供她举办义卖会。三幅镶了镜框的皇家艺术学会会员的画会让她满意的，她或许还会为这几幅画登门致谢呢。她一来，克利福德就怒不可遏！

天啊！博尔顿太太自忖。你怀的就是奥利弗·梅勒斯的孩子吗？我的乖，那就是特瓦萧的孩子进了拉格比的摇篮了呀，嘿！那也不会辱没拉格比的门楣！

这杂物间里还有一件怪物，是一个大黑漆盒子，做工精细，独具匠心，是六七十年前的东西，里面装满了各种物件儿。最上面是一套梳妆用品，有刷子、瓶子、镜子、梳子、小盒子，甚至还有三片套在保险套中的精美小剃刀、刀柄等一应刮脸用品。下面是一套写字台用品，有吸墨水纸、钢笔、墨水瓶、纸、信封和记事簿。再下面则是一全套缝纫工具：三把大小不同的剪刀、顶针、针、丝线、棉线、球形织补架什么的，全都做工精细，质地优良。此外还有个药品柜，瓶子上标着名种药名，如“鸦片酊”、“松香水”、“丁香油”等，但瓶子都是空的。每件东西都还是崭新的。这盒子一旦关上，就像一个内容丰富的周末度假用品袋。盒子里面的东西排列紧凑，如同迷宫。小瓶子里的液体决无可能溢出，因为盒子里的东西紧密地挤在一起，根本没有空当儿。

这东西设计精细，做工考究，体现了维多利亚时期最精美的技艺。但它确实有点又大又怪，查家一定也有人觉得别扭，因为这盒子从来没用过，因此看上去很是没有灵气。

博尔顿太太被这盒子镇住了。

“看看这漂亮的刷子，多值钱，连刮脸用的刷子都那么好看！看看那些牙刷吧，个个儿精致！嚯，瞧这些剪刀！钱能买到的东西里这可是最好的。真是太美了！”

“真的吗？”康妮说，“那这些就归你了。”

“哦，这怎么好意思呢，夫人！”

“拿去吧！搁在这儿一辈子也没用。你不要的话，我就把它和那些画儿一起送给公爵夫人。她才不值得我送这么些东西呢，你就拿着吧！”

“哎哟，夫人，我可该怎么谢您呢——”

“谢什么呀。”康妮笑道。

于是博尔顿太太腋下夹着那个大黑盒子迈着方步儿下楼了，激动得满脸放红光。

贝茨先生赶着双轮轻便马车送她和那个大盒子回村里的家。她得请上几个朋友来家里，给她们展示那个盒子，有学校女教师、药铺的老板娘和出纳助理的女人威登太太。她们都觉得这东西妙不可言，随后就议论起查泰莱夫人的孩子。

“奇怪的事层出不穷啊！”威登太太说。

可博尔顿太太却坚信，如果查泰莱夫人生孩子，那必是克利福德男爵的孩子，决无问题！

不久后教区长来拉格比府造访，他温文尔雅地对克利福德说：

“拉格比真有希望有个子嗣了？那真是上苍有眼啊！”

“对呀！希望总是有的。”克利福德有点自嘲但又相当自信地说，他开始相信自己或许真的能有孩子。

一天下午乡绅莱斯利·温特来了，人们都叫他温特老爷。清瘦雅洁的古稀老人，“从头到脚都是个十足的绅士，”博尔顿太太这样对贝茨太太说。确实是不差毫分！他言谈老派，胜过戴假发的十八世纪绅士。飞逝的时光已经把这类精致的老古董甩在了身后。

他们讨论起矿上的问题。克利福德的意思是，他矿上的煤，即使是质量差的那种，也可以制成坚硬的浓缩燃料，这种燃料在含酸的潮湿空气中若施以适度的强压能发出巨大的热量。因为人们多年来就观察到，在某种强湿的空气中，矿井台上的煤烧得很透，几乎不冒烟，燃烧后留下的是精细的煤粉，而不是粉红的粗沙砾。

“可你上哪儿找那种合适的机器烧你的燃料呢？”温特问道。

“我自己生产，而且是烧我自己的燃料，然后我会卖电。我相信我能干这个。”

“如果你能做到，那可太好了，太好了，我的好孩子。嗯，好啊！如果我能帮上你，我会很高兴这么做的。不过我怕是有点跟不上潮流了，我的矿井也跟我一样。不过也难说，等我撒手离开了，可能会出现你这样的人。好！那我的矿就能再次雇佣上原来所有的人。那样就没有卖不卖煤的问题了。好主意，我希望这能成真。要是我有自己的儿子，他们会为希普利矿想出时髦的招数来，肯定会的！对了，小伙子，有人道听途说，说拉格比府有希望有继承人了，此话当真？”

“有这种谣传吗？”克利福德问。

“哦，我的好孩子，是菲林伍德的马歇尔这么向我打听的，我就是这么听到风声的。当然，如果没有依据，我是不会跟外界重复这些话的。”

“嗯，温特先生，”克利福德局促地支吾着，但眼睛却放出奇亮的光来，“是有点希望，有点希望。”

温特闻之一步上前，握住克利福德的手。

“我的好孩子，好孩子呀，你知道这消息对我意味着什么吗？有希望得子，工作起来就大不一样了。你或许能再次让特瓦萧的每个人都有工作。哦，我的孩子！保持住竞争的势头，给每个想工作的人都准备一份工作！”

这老人确实是激动了。

第二天，康妮正在玻璃花瓶里插高大的黄郁金香时，克利福德问她：

“康妮，你知道有个谣言吗，说你要为拉格比府生个继承人了？”

康妮感到恐惧，眼前发黑，但仍然静立着摆弄着花。

“没有的事！”她说，“是开玩笑的还是恶意中伤？”

他迟疑一下说：“希望都不是。我希望是个预言。”

康妮一边继续整理她的花一边说：“今天早上我接到了父亲的信，他说他替我接受了亚历山大·库珀男爵的邀请，七月和八月份去威尼斯的埃斯梅拉达别墅度假。”

“七月和八月？”克利福德问。

“哦，我不会待那么久。你肯定不去吗？”

“我才不去国外旅行。”克利福德脱口说。

康妮把花放到窗台上，问：“我去你介意吗？不过你知道，去那里度夏天，这是答应了人家的事。”

“那你要去多久呢？”

“大概三个星期吧。”

一时间两人都沉默了。

“好吧！”克利福德缓慢又有点阴郁地说，“我想我能坚持三个星期，只要你让我相信你想回来。”

“我应该想回来。”康妮很是质朴地说，心里确信一定会回来的。她心里想的是另一个男人。

克利福德感到她的话是真的，而且挺相信她。他相信她这样是为他好，于是感到极大的安慰。

“那就好，”他说，“你说呢？”

“我也是这么想的。”她说。

“换换环境你挺开心的吧？”

她抬头看看他，蓝眼睛里露出奇特的神色。

“我想再去看看威尼斯，”她说，“再去环礁湖那边的鹅卵石岛上去沐浴。你知道的，我讨厌威尼斯的海滨浴场！我也不喜欢亚历山大·库珀男爵和他太太。不过，如果希尔达在那里，我们自己会有一条船，嗯，那就太好了。我真希望你也能去。”

她这话说得诚恳，她很想用这种方式让他开开心。

“嗨，你就想想我坐火车从伦敦到巴黎北站的样子吧，还有在加莱轮渡码头上的样子。多尴尬呀！”

“那有什么！我见过战争中的伤员让人用轮椅抬着走。再说，咱们不一样，咱们一直开着汽车过去。”

“那我们得带上两个男仆。”

“哦，不用！带上菲尔德就行了，那边总会有个仆人的。”

但克利福德还是摇着头说：“今年不行！今年不行！或许明年我可以试试。”

康妮郁闷地走了。明年！明年能怎么样？她自己并不真想去威尼斯，不是现在，因为她现在有另一个男人了。但她得去，似乎是服从纪律。她要去还有个原因，那就是如果她怀上了孩子，克利福德就会认为是她在威尼斯有了个情人。

已经是五月了，六月份他们就该动身了。总是这些安排！一个人的生活总是被安排好了！像轮子带着你转，逼着你转，可你对此无能为力！

时值五月，可天又转凉了，开始下雨。潮冷的五月有利于谷物和干草的生长！现如今，谷物和干草最要紧！康妮得去趟伍斯威特，那是他们附近的小城。在那座小城里，查泰莱家仍然是至高无上的家族。她是单独去的，菲尔德给她开车。

尽管是五月，到处一片新绿，可乡村却是一片晦暗。天很冷，雨中飘着烟雾，空气中弥漫着一股衰竭的味道。人必须抗争才能生活，难怪这些人看上去那么丑陋粗鲁。

汽车艰难地爬上山坡，在特瓦萧那狭长肮脏的街区里穿过。黑糊糊的砖房散落在山坡上，房顶是黑石板铺就，尖尖的房檐黑得发亮，路上的泥里掺杂着煤灰，也黑糊糊的，便道也是黑糊糊、潮乎乎的。这地方的一切看上去似乎都让凄凉晦暗浸透了。这情景将自然美彻底泯灭，把生命的快乐彻底消灭，连鸟兽皆有的外表美的本能在这里都消失殆尽，人类直觉功能的死亡在这里真是触目惊心。杂货店里堆着一堆一堆的肥皂，蔬菜店里堆着大黄和柠檬，女帽店里挂着难看的帽子，一个店接一个店，丑陋，丑陋，还是丑陋。接下来是那个模样吓死人的电影院，外墙装饰着石膏和镀金，一幅伤感的广告画上写着片名《一个女人的爱情》。还有那个新建的原始卫理会礼拜堂，样子确实挺原始的，外墙是裸露的砖，窗格里的玻璃红绿相间。较高的地势处是美以美会的礼拜堂，由发黑的红砖砌成，外面架着铁栅栏，栏杆外的灌木上浮着一层黑煤灰。公理会礼拜堂自视清高，是由粗红砂岩石砌成的，还竖着一个尖顶，但并不高。边上是新建的学校，是用昂贵的粉红色砖砌成，有砂石铺成的操场，外面围着铁栅栏。这些看上去十分堂皇，但让人觉得既像教堂又像监狱。五年级的女孩子们正在上音乐课，刚练完“拉咪哆拉”，开始唱一首“甜美的儿童歌曲”。但那根本不像歌曲，不像自然的歌儿，简直无法想象，就是顺着曲子扯着嗓子发出奇怪的吼叫。这声音不似野蛮人，因为野蛮人还是有其微妙的音乐节奏的。也不像兽语，当动物吼叫时它们的叫声是有意思在里边的。这些女孩发出的声音与地球上的任何声音都不同，那被称为唱歌。菲尔德在给汽车加油，康妮在听这歌声，听得心里绝望。这样的人还有什么救？他们内心里活生生的直觉器官已经死了，变得如同指甲，只会机械地发出叫声，只有莫名其妙的意志还残存着。

一辆运煤车在雨中咣咣当当地驶下山坡。菲尔德开始朝坡上行驶，一路经过那间大但看着乏味的布店和成衣铺，经过邮局，来到那个凄凉的小集市上。萨姆·布莱克从“太阳”客栈的门里朝外看着，向查泰莱夫人的汽车鞠了个躬。这个地方自称是客栈而不是酒馆，因为常有商人在这里住宿。

教堂就在客栈左边不远处，四周是黑糊糊的树丛。汽车朝坡下滑行，经过“矿工酒馆”。前面已经经过了几家酒馆和客栈：“威灵登”、“纳尔逊”、“三桶”和“太阳”。现在车开过了“矿工酒馆”，然后是机械馆，然后是新建的那座华而不实的矿工福利大楼，一路上还过了几座新建的“别墅”，这才出了城来到通往斯戴克斯门矿的大路上，大路的一边是黑糊糊的篱笆，另一边是煤灰覆盖着的绿色田野。

特瓦萧！那就是特瓦萧！快活的英格兰！莎士比亚的英格兰！不，那是今日的英格兰，康妮从一住到这里来就意识到了这一点。今日的英格兰正培育出一类新人，他们在金钱、社会和政治方面过于用心，而他们的自然本能和直觉却死了。半死不活的人，大家都是，可另一半却活得执着，令人恐惧的执着。这真是匪夷所思，难以言表。这是个莫测的地下世界。我们怎么能理解那半具尸体的反应呢？康妮看到从设菲尔德开来的卡车上装满了钢铁工人，这些矮小的怪模怪样的男人们是去马特洛克风景区游玩的。此情此景让康妮心肝俱颤，她想：上帝啊，人对人都做了些什么？人中豪杰对他们的同胞们都做了些什么？他们把别人糟蹋得没了人样，他们之间不再有友爱了！这简直是噩梦。

一阵恐惧袭上心头，她再次感到一种挥之不去的幻灭。如此众多的工业人群，还有她认识的那些上流阶级，这些人是没希望的，再也没什么希望了。但她想要生个孩子，一个拉格比府的继承人！拉格比的继承人！想到此，她怕得浑身发抖。

可是梅勒斯就出身于此。不过像她一样，他与这一切都没什么关系。甚至在他内心里也没什么友爱可言，早就死了，友爱早就死了。与这一切有关的只有隔阂与幻灭。而这就是英国，英国的主体，康妮懂得英国，因为她正乘车行驶在英国的中心。

汽车向坡上的斯戴克斯门开去。雨停了，天空露出少有的五月的明媚来。乡村绵延逶迤，南面是达比郡的丘陵地带，东部通向曼斯菲尔德和诺丁汉。康妮的车在朝南行驶。

她的车上了高地，她看到左边开阔的田野里一个高冈上矗立着的沃索普城堡，那灰暗的巨大城堡看上去影影绰绰的。城堡下方散落着淡红色的矿工住宅，是新盖的。再下方则弥漫着从巨大的煤矿里冒出的黑烟和白蒸气。这个矿每年都把千百万的金钱添进公爵和其他股东的腰包。那雄伟的老城堡只是一座废墟了，但它还是巍峨矗立在天际线上，俯视着下面潮湿的空气中弥漫着的黑烟和白蒸气。

拐个弯，车子上了更高的地带，向斯戴克斯门驶去。斯戴克斯门，从大路上看过去简直就是一座庞大华丽的新饭店。红砖白窗，金碧辉煌的“科宁斯比酒店”孤零零地坐落在路边的荒野中。不过，如果你细看，会发现左手边有一排排好看的“摩登”住宅，排列得像多米诺骨牌一样，房与房之间留出空地和花园，这是某些荒诞不经的“主子”在地球上玩的一种奇特的多米诺骨牌游戏。而在这些住宅条块后面，则矗立着现代煤矿骇人的高大建筑，那些化学工厂和长廊，其形状之庞大，模样之古怪，是前所未有的。在这些新的设备中，原先的矿井架和井台都显得渺小了。而这些建筑前面的住宅，则摆列着一副永久的多米诺骨牌，等待着人们去玩出惊喜来。

这就是斯戴克斯门，战后在地球上出现的新景象。其实连康妮都不知道的是，在山下离“酒店”半英里的地方就是老斯戴克斯门。那里有一座小型的老矿井，散落着黑糊糊的旧红砖住房，还有一两座礼拜堂，一两家店铺和一两家小酒肆。

可这些东西无足轻重了。上面那些新工厂里冒出的浓烟和蒸气才是现在的斯戴克斯门，没有礼拜堂，没有酒馆，甚至没有商店。只有那巨大的工厂，那是现代的奥林匹亚，里面有供奉所有神的神庙。还有那些模范住宅和那家饭店。其实那饭店不过只是一家矿工酒馆而已，尽管外表看上去很讲究。

这个新地方在康妮来拉格比的时候才在地球上崛起，那些模范住宅里住着些来路不明的流氓无赖，他们所从事的行当之一就是偷猎克利福德狩猎用的野兔。

汽车在高地上行驶着，康妮望着车窗外一望无际的田野。这个郡！它曾经是个令人骄傲、贵族气十足的地方。前方天际线上巍峨耸立的是庞大的查德威克府邸，墙壁上布满了窗户，是伊丽莎白时期最负盛名的府邸建筑之一。这座高贵的府邸孤零零地俯瞰着一座宽大的邸园，它已经陈旧、过时了，之所以还保存着，仅仅是因为把它当作一个文物展览，告诉人们：“看，我们的祖先是多么威风凛凛！”

那就是过去。现今在那大府邸下方。天知道未来在何方。汽车又转了个弯，在又旧又小的黑糊糊的矿工住宅间下行朝伍斯威特方向驶去。伍斯威特，在潮湿的天气里，遍地冒着一柱一柱的烟雾，像是为什么神仙烧着香。谷地里的伍斯威特，通往设菲尔德的铁路穿行其间，煤矿和钢铁厂高大的烟囱在吐着烟火，教堂顶上那可怜的小塔尖快要倒塌了，但依旧在烟雾中挺立着。就是这么一个地方，却一直影响着康妮，委实令她匪夷所思。这是一座商业小镇，是这片山谷的中心，其中最重要的客栈叫“查泰莱酒店”。在伍斯威特，拉格比府被称作拉格比，对外人来说那似乎是个地名而不是一座府邸的雅号。特瓦萧附近的拉格比府。拉格比，一座“大宅子”。

黑糊糊的矿工住宅区紧贴着人行道，看上去和一百年前建的矿工住宅一样密集窄小。这些房子一路铺展开，房子之间的小路就变成了马路，走进这些街道中，你马上就会忘记那开阔无垠的田野，那里仍然高耸着城堡和大府邸，尽管像鬼影一般。现在你正好俯视着那交错的铁路线，四周矗立着铸造厂和其它工厂，这些工厂是那么高大，让你感到四周只有那些高墙。钢铁铸件在发出巨大的轰鸣声，大货车隆隆驶过，汽笛声声鸣响。

可一旦你走进那弯弯曲曲的镇中心街道里，来到教堂后面，你就来到了两个世纪前的世界了。“查泰莱酒店”和老药店就在这弯弯曲曲的街上，这些街道曾经通向由城堡和庄严的府邸组成的开阔世界。

街角上的一个警察抬起胳膊来指挥三辆装着钢铁的货车隆隆驶过，那可怜的老教堂被震得直颤。等货车开过去了，那警察才顾得上向男爵夫人行礼。

这小镇就是这个样子。古老的曲折的街道两旁挤满了黑糊糊的矿工住宅。紧挨着这些老屋建起了较新较大的粉红色房子，布满了谷地，这些是比较现代的工人住宅。更远处，在城堡所在的广阔地带，烟雾弥漫着，一片一片的新红砖房是新的矿工住宅，有的在洼地里，有的在坡顶上，模样丑陋无比。这些新住宅之间，还残存着马车和村舍组成的老英国，甚至是罗宾汉时期的英国。矿工们工休的时候会在那里活动，以释放自己被压抑的好动本能。

英格兰，我的英格兰！可哪个才是我的英格兰呢？英国大地上那些豪宅能拍出美好的照片来，让人恍惚觉得与伊丽莎白时期的人有什么关联。那些漂亮的老府邸从好女王安妮和汤姆·琼斯时代
③

就矗立于斯。但是煤灰落在灰褐色的拉毛泥灰墙上，把墙染得越来越黑，原来的金黄色早就消失殆尽。于是，同那些豪宅一样，这些老府邸也一个接一个地被荒废了。现在则正一个接一个地被拆除着。至于那些英国的村舍，它们还在，那些红砖房像膏药似的贴在希望渺茫的田野上。

人们正在拆除那些豪宅，乔治时期的府邸正在消失。那座名为弗里奇雷的完美的乔治风格大宅子则正在拆除中，康妮坐在车里经过此地，眼看着它被拆除。大战之前它整修得很好，韦瑟雷家在里面过着讲究的生活。可现在，它显得太大，花费太高，还有乡间也变得过于不适于居住。于是乡绅们就离开这里去了更惬意的地方，从而可以只花钱而不必看到钱是怎么挣到手的了。

这就是历史。一个英国抹去另一个英国。煤矿曾经使这些府邸兴盛，现在则把它们消除，就像它们消除了那些村舍一样。工业的英国取代了农业的英国，一种意义消灭了另一种意义。新英国替代了旧英国。但它们之间的传承不是有机的，而是机械的。

康妮属于有闲阶层，因此她依恋老英国的遗风。这么多年过去，她才意识到老英国被这个可怕的、骇人的新英国消灭了，这个过程还会继续下去，直到老英国被彻底消灭为止。弗里奇雷销声匿迹了，伊斯特伍德没了，希普利正在消失，那可是温特老爷心爱的希普利呀。

康妮在希普利庄园逗留了一会儿。邸园后门就开在煤矿铁路的道口旁，希普利矿就在树林那边。邸园的门敞开着，因为一条公用的路就从园中穿过，矿工们就走这条路，穿过园子时他们会在园子里逛逛。

汽车经过那个人工水池，发现矿工们竟把报纸扔进了池子里。车上了私家车道，开到了温特家门口。这座十八世纪中叶的房子矗立在高处的路边上，拉毛泥灰墙面，很是赏心悦目。房子边上有一条美丽的紫杉树夹道的小路，通往一座更古老的房子。大宅子默然铺展开来，满墙的乔治式窗格，一格格的玻璃在闪光，似乎是在快乐地眨着眼睛。房后则是一座美丽至极的花园。

比起拉格比来，康妮觉得这里的内部装饰要好得多。它更亮堂，更有生气，更讲究并且更高雅。墙壁包了奶油色的镶板，天花板涂了金色，每样东西都摆放得井井有条，家具用品精美绝伦，当然是不惜重金的。甚至连走廊都造得宽敞漂亮，略带曲折，营造出活泼的氛围。

可是莱斯利·温特却是孤独的。他热爱自己的宅子，可他的邸园却和自己的三座煤矿连着。他这人很慷慨大方，几乎是欢迎矿工们到他的邸园中来。让他阔起来的不就是矿工么？所以，当他看到一群群衣衫不整的矿工们在他的水池子旁逗留——当然不是在他的私人园子里，他的私人花园与这边是界限分明的——他会说：“矿工们在园子里或许不像鹿一样给园子增辉，但他们比鹿带来的好处要多得多呢。”

但那是在维多利亚女王
④

统治的后半段，矿工们能挣大钱的黄金时代。那个时候矿工们都是“好工人”。

温特曾经略带歉意地对他的客人威尔士亲王这么说。亲王用他那带着浓重喉音的英语说：

“你说得对。如果桑德灵厄姆下面有煤，我就会在草坪上开个矿，那将是一流的园艺。哦，我很愿意不惜代价把狍子换成矿工。我听说你的矿工都是好人呢。”

亲王脑子里或许对金钱带来的美德和工业带来的好处有不切实际的概念。

后来这亲王就当了国王
⑤

，他死后又上来一个新国王
⑥

，这个新国王的主要任务似乎就是给穷人开免费粥厂。

那些“好工人”们却包围了希普利。新的村落在邸园里形成了，这位乡绅老爷感到与这些人格格不入了。他曾经善良慷慨地认为自己是自己领地的主子，是他的矿工们的主子。而现在，在新的观念的影响下，他有点被排挤出来了。是他自己找不到归属了。这没错。这些矿，还有这里的工业自有其意志，这种意志与其绅士所有者是背道而驰的。所有的矿工都是这种意志的一部分，它是难以抗拒的。它要么将你赶出这个地方，要么干脆将你的生活全部毁灭。

当过兵的温特老爷挺住了，但他晚饭后再也不愿意到邸园中去散步了，他几乎是躲在屋里不出门。一次他陪康妮散步，没戴帽子，穿着漆皮鞋和紫色的丝袜，他操一口贵族腔和康妮聊着天走到了园门口。经过一群矿工时，矿工们盯着他看，并不向他行礼，也没有任何别的举动。众目睽睽之下，康妮感到那教养良好的消瘦老人在退缩，就像一头高贵的羚羊被关在笼子里，在粗俗的目光下退缩着。矿工们的敌视并不是冲他个人来的，绝不是。但他们的神情是冷漠的，是在驱赶他。在他们内心深处充满了怨恨。他们是“为他干活”的。他们以自己的丑陋抵制他的高雅、斯文和教养。“他算老几？”他们嫌温特各色。

作为一个在行伍里混过多年的英国人，他内心深处懂得这些人对他的与众不同表示反感是对的。他自己也觉得占有这么多好处有点不大对。可他代表的是一个制度，他绝不愿意被排挤出局。

除非是死才能将他驱赶。康妮造访他后不久，他猝然故去。他在遗嘱里给克利福德留下了一笔可观的财产。

他的继承人立即下令拆除希普利庄园，因为维持这个大庄园花费太高。谁都不想住在这里。这座庄园就这么分崩离析了。那条紫杉树林荫道两边的树全砍了，邸园的树木也砍光了，分割成了一块块的小园子给人们耕种。这里离伍斯威特相当近。于是，在这块新的无主荒地上，盖起了一座座双户联体房，进而形成了一条条的街道，这类房子还供不应求呢！于是这里成了希普利庄园住宅区！

康妮造访一年以后，这里就变了样。希普利庄园住宅区起来了，那是新街道上的一排排红砖双户联体“别墅”。人们做梦都不会想到，十二个月前，这里曾经矗立着一座拉毛泥灰墙面的大府邸。

不过这已经是爱德华国王后期的园林风景了：花园草坪上开了一座装饰性的煤矿。

一个英国将另一个英国消灭了。那个温特老爷和拉格比府的英国消失了，死了。只是老英国被消灭得还不那么彻底而已。

那以后会怎么样呢？康妮想象不出来。她能看到的就是布满新砖房的街道向田野里伸延，新的建筑在矿区拔地而起，新派女子穿上了长筒丝袜，新派矿工青年到舞厅和俱乐部里去闲晃。新的一代人心里根本没有老英国，他们是思想的断层，几乎像美国人一样，绝对是工业化的一代。下一步会怎么样呢？

康妮一直觉得没有下一步。她只想把头扎进沙堆中去，或者至少是扎进某个有活力的男人怀中。

这世界太复杂，太古怪，太可憎！普通人太多，真的太可怕。她在回家的路上这么想着，正好看到矿工们从井下陆续上来，一个个蓬头垢面，没了人形，一肩高一肩低，穿着打了铁掌的沉重靴子踢踢踏踏地走着。他们在井下弄得一脸黢黑，只有眼白在翻动着。因为巷道顶低矮他们整天要低着头，从井下上来后依旧缩着脖子，肩膀也早就走了形。男人！男人！天啊，可以说他们是有耐心的好人，也可以说他们压根不存在。男人应该有的东西在他们身上被消灭了，可他们是男人，他们传宗接代。不定谁会为他们生孩子。想想这事该有多么可怕！他们是些好人，善良的人。可他们只是半个人，半个阴暗的人。尽管如此，他们还是“好人”。但那也是好人的一半，猜想一下他们那死了的一半什么时候会还阳吧！不，那是个可怕的想法。康妮绝对害怕这些工业化的乌合之众，他们在她眼里是怪物，因为他们的生命毫无美感，他们没有直觉，总是“在井下”。

这样的男人的孩子！上帝啊！上帝！

梅勒斯的父亲就是这样的男人，当然并非如出一辙。四十年使人性变了，变得令人瞠目结舌。铁和煤深深地浸透了男人们的肉体和灵魂。

丑陋的肉体，但是活着！他们会怎么样呢？或许随着煤资源的消失，他们也会从地球上消失。煤矿的出现，把成千上万的他们从天知道什么地方吸引过来。或许他们就是煤层里奇怪的动物吧，是另一种现实的动物。他们是些元素，为碳元素服务，就像金属制造工人也是金属元素、为铁元素服务一样。人非人，而是些有精神的煤、铁和泥土。碳动物、铁动物、硅动物，是元素。他们或许有矿物质奇特的非人之美，有煤的光泽，有铁的重量、蓝色和抵抗力，有玻璃的透明度。元素的动物，奇特、变形，属于矿物质的世界！他们属于煤、铁、泥土，就像鱼属于大海、虫子属于枯木一样。他们是矿物质蜕变而成的灵魂！

康妮很高兴回家了，可以把头埋在沙堆里躲起来了。她甚至很高兴能跟克利福德念叨念叨，因为她太怕煤和铁的英国中部，这种害怕影响着她，让她浑身上下产生了一种奇怪的感受，就像得了流感一样。

“我当然要在本特利小姐的店里喝茶了。”她说。

“真的吗？温特其实也会请你喝茶的。”

“嗯，是的！可我不敢让本特利小姐失望。”本特利小姐是个脸色蜡黄的老姑娘，鼻子挺大，但生性浪漫，她招待人用茶点时细心、认真，简直和举办圣典差不多。

“她问起我没有？”克利福德问道。

“当然了。她说：‘请问夫人，克利福德男爵可好？’我相信她把你看得比卡维尔护士
⑦

地位都高。”

“我估计你对她说我现在很发达。”

“是的！她高兴极了，好像我说你飞黄腾达了一样。我说如果她什么时候来特瓦萧，让她一定来看你。”

“我？为什么要看我呀？”

“要看，克利福德。你不能让人家空崇拜，一点回报的表示都没有哇。在她眼里，卡帕多细亚的圣乔治
⑧

都无法与你媲美。”

“你认为她会来吗？”

“哦，她羞红了脸，那一刻看上去很美，可怜的人儿！为什么男人不娶那些真正崇拜他们的人呢？”

“等她们崇拜为时已晚了。她说了她要来吗？”

“哦！”康妮模仿着本特利小姐呼吸急促的样子说，“夫人，我怎么敢这么想呢！”

“不敢想？太荒唐了！不过我求上帝别让她出现。她的茶点好吃吗？”

“哦，是立顿茶，很浓！说真的，克利福德，你不觉得在本特利小姐这类人眼里你就是一部《玫瑰传奇》
⑨

么？”

“再怎么说我也不会当真的。”

“他们把画报上你的每张照片都珍藏着，或许每天晚上还为你祈祷呢。这挺好的呀。”

说完她上楼去换衣服了。

那天晚上他对她说：

“你真的认为婚姻有某种永久的含义，是不是？”

她看看他，说：

“克利福德，你把永久说得像个盖子，能盖住一切，或者像条长长的链子，一环接一环，不管走多远，都会接下去。”

他不高兴地看着她，说：

“我的意思是，如果你去威尼斯，你不会是想去认认真真地谈一场恋爱吧？”

“在威尼斯谈一场认真的恋爱？不会的，你就放心吧！不会，我在威尼斯连最不认真的恋爱都不会谈的。”

她说话的语气里透着说不出的轻蔑，令他皱起眉头来。

翌日早上下楼来时，她发现那猎场看守的狗弗洛西正蹲在克利福德房间外的走廊上，在轻声咕噜着。

“弗洛西！”她轻声道，“你在这儿干什么呢？”

她轻轻地推开克利福德房间的门，看见他正坐在床上，床桌和打字机都推到了一边，那猎场看守正在他床脚边伺候着。弗洛西顺势进了屋。但梅勒斯只轻轻地摇摇头使个眼色，就让那狗退到门口，然后悄悄地退了出去。

“早上好，克利福德！”康妮问候道，“不知道你们正忙着呢。”随后她看看梅勒斯并问他早上好。他低声回答着，似看非看地瞟了她一眼。可仅仅看到他就让她感到一股激情涌了上来。

“对不起，克利福德，但愿我没打扰你。”

“没有，我们没忙什么。”

她悄然退出屋去，回到楼上她自己那间墙壁涂成蓝色的化妆间去。她坐在窗台上，看着他走上车道，十分安静地消失了。这个人天生文静清高，看上去有点瘦弱。一个雇工！克利福德的一个下人！“亲爱的布鲁特斯，我们错并不是错在我们的星座，而是错在自身，错在我们低人一等。”
⑩

他低人一等吗？是吗？那他又怎么看她呢？

这是个艳阳天儿，康妮在整理花园，博尔顿太太给她当帮手。出于某种原因，这两个女人关系变亲密了，这是人与人之间说不清道不明的某种同情心所致。她们一起把康乃馨拴在木杆上，腾出地方来种上些夏天的花草。这个活儿她们俩都喜欢做。康妮特别喜欢把柔软的幼苗根插进松软的黑土坑儿里，再添上土。在这个春日的早晨，她感到自己的子宫也在颤动，似乎阳光照到了那里，让它感到快乐。

“你男人没了好多年了吧？”她一边拿起一株苗往土坑里插着，一边问博尔顿太太。

“都二十三年了！”博尔顿太太边说着，边细心地把一束耧斗菜苗分成单根，“从他们把他抬回家到现在，都二十三年了呀！”

听到她这么断然的一句，康妮感到心头一颤。“抬回家！”

“他是怎么死的，你知道吗？”她问，“他跟你在一起快乐吗？”

这是一个女人问另一个女人的问题。博尔顿太太用手背撩开垂到脸上的一缕头发，说：“我说不上，我的夫人！他有点倔，骨子里不合群儿。他痛恨为什么事低头。就是倔害了他。你不知道啊，他真是个无所谓的人。我觉得是矿井闹的。他压根儿就不该下井挖煤。可当他还小时，他爹就逼他下井去。等到了二十多岁，想出来就难了。”

“他说过他痛恨下井吗？”

“哦，才没有呢！他才不说呢！他从来也没说过他痛恨什么。他就会做个鬼脸儿。他就是那种大大咧咧的人，就像大战一开始欢蹦乱跳上战场的那些孩子，一上战场就送了命。他倒不是没心眼儿，就是满不在乎。我曾经对他说过：‘你什么都不当回事，也不在乎谁！’可其实他在乎！我生第一个孩子的时候，他就那么一动不动地坐在我旁边。孩子生完了，他看着我的眼神儿是凄惨的！我生得很费劲，可我还得给他宽心，说：‘没什么，没什么！’他看着我，奇怪地笑了。他从来没说过什么，可我相信，从那以后，他没有一夜真快活过，因为他从来没有放开过。我对他说过：‘爷们儿，你放开你自个儿！’有的时候我还得跟他说大粗话儿呢。他什么也不说，可就是放不开，也说不定是不能吧。他再也不想让我要孩子了。我总是怪罪他母亲，是她非让他待在我房间里看我生孩子的。他就不该在那儿。男人啊，一动脑筋，就把问题给弄大了。”

“他很在意吗？”康妮问。

“是，他就是不能平心静气地看我受那份罪。就那，害得他找不到两口子在一块儿的乐趣了。我跟他说：‘我都不在乎，你在乎什么？那是我的事！’可他就只说一句话：‘这不公平！’”

“也许他是过于敏感了。”康妮说。

“没错！你一旦认识了男人，就会发现，他们太敏感，可敏感的不是地方儿。我相信，连他自己都不知道，他恨矿井，恨透了。他死了以后，那模样儿多平静啊，好像是解脱了似的。他可是个俊小伙子，看他那么安静，那么干净，像是自己愿意死似的，我的心都碎了呀。哦，心真的碎了。就怨那矿井——”

说着她擦去几滴伤心的泪水，而康妮比她掉的眼泪还多。那是个温暖的春日，园子里散发着泥土的芳香，黄色的花朵也芬芳一片，各种花都长出花骨朵来了，花园静静地沐浴在阳光里。

“那肯定让你不好过！”康妮说。

“哦，我的夫人啊！一开始我没觉得。我只会说：‘哦，我的小伙子，你干吗要离开我呢？’我就会那么哭叫。我其实还觉得他能回来……”

“可他不想离开你。”康妮说。

“哦，不，我的夫人！那只是我哭的时候犯傻说的话。我一直盼着他回来呢，特别是在夜里。我大睁着眼想啊，他怎么没跟我一起在床上呢！我觉得他好像没离开我似的。我只想感到他跟我在一起，热热乎乎地在一起。不知道经过多少回惊吓，我才明白他回不来了，过了好多年我才明白这个。”

“他不会贴着你了。”康妮说。

“是啊，我的夫人！他不会贴着我了！我至今都忘不了，永远也不会忘。如果说有一个天堂，他就会在那儿，他会贴着我躺着，那样我才睡得着。”

康妮瞟了一眼那张沉思中健美的脸庞，感到害怕。这是特瓦萧村又一个充满激情的人！让他贴着！爱的束缚松不开啊！

“一旦你让哪个男人进入你的骨血中，那是可怕的事！”她说，“哦，我的夫人！那会让你感到特别苦。你会感到人们都想让他死。你感到那矿井想害死他。哦，我就觉得呀，要是没有这矿井，没有那些管矿井的人们，他就不会离开我。可他们看到一个男人和一个女人在一起，就要把他们分开……”

“只要他们的肉体在一起。”康妮说。

“说得对，我的夫人！这世界上有很多铁石心肠的人。每天早上他起来去下井，我就觉得不对劲儿，不对劲儿。可他又能做什么别的呢？一个男人能干什么？”

说着那女人火冒三丈。

“可是，那种肌肤之亲能持久吗？”康妮突然问，“能让你这么久都感到他贴着你？”

“哦，我的夫人，还有什么别的能长久呢？孩子长大了就离开你了，可你的男人——算了！可就连这人们也要从你心里抹去，不让你想他的身体怎么贴着你。就连这也不让你想！连你的孩子都这样！唉，算了！我们或许会分开，这都是说不准的事儿。可感觉就不一样了。或许从来就不在乎最好。我看到有的女人从来没让男人焐过，我呀，就觉得她们像可怜虫，不管她们打扮得多好看，日子过得多美。不行，我有自己的活法儿，才不羡慕别人呢——”

注　释

①
埃德温·兰西尔（1802—1873），通俗动物画画家。

②
威廉·亨利·亨特（1790—1864），以静物和鸟巢画著名。

③
安妮女王（1665—1714），1702—1714间在位。汤姆·琼斯，见亨利·菲尔丁的同名小说（1749）。

④
维多利亚（1819—1901），1837—1901间在位。

⑤
指爱德华亲王（1841—1910），1901—1910间的爱德华七世国王。他于1863年买下桑德灵厄姆作为皇室驻地。

⑥
指乔治五世国王（1865—1936），爱德华之子，1910—1936间在位。

⑦
伊迪丝·卡维尔（1865—1915），英国护士，曾帮助协约国的士兵逃出比利时纳粹占领区到荷兰边界，1915年被德军处死。

⑧
康妮再次将亚历山大主教与英国的守护神圣乔治混为一谈了。

⑨
十二世纪法国最早的爱情寓言。

⑩
见《裘利斯·恺撒》第一场，第二幕。

第十二章

午饭后康妮就上林子里去了。那真是个好天气，初开的蒲公英形似小太阳，初开的雏菊白生生的。榛树丛叶子半开半闭，枝子上还挂着残存的染尘柳絮，看上去像一个花边。黄色的白屈菜一簇簇地盛开着，花瓣平展地舒展开，花边急切地翻开着，看过去金灿点点。初夏时节，遍地黄蕊，黄得绚烂。报春花开满枝头，不少已经开败褪色，那一撮一撮儿的花簇辉煌不再。风信子墨绿似海，花蕾昂着头如同嫩玉米头。马道上的勿忘我随风摇曳，耧斗菜紫蓝色的褶叶正在绽放，灌木下散落着一些蓝知更鸟的碎蛋壳。到处都是花蕾，处处生机勃勃！

那猎场看守不在小屋里。四下里静悄悄的，褐色的小鸡活蹦乱跳地跑来跑去。康妮转身朝村舍走去，她要找到他。

村舍沐浴在阳光里，就在林子边上。小花园里，大开的门边重瓣野水仙蹿得老高，红色重瓣雏菊在小径旁盛开。伴着吠声，弗洛西出现在门道里。

门大开着，这就是说他在家！阳光洒在红砖地上，她顺着小径走进去，透过窗户看见了他，他穿着衬衫，正坐在桌边吃东西。那狗轻声叫着，缓缓地摇着尾巴。

他站起身朝门口走来，一边嚼着一边用红手帕擦着嘴。

“我能进去吗？”她问。

“进来吧！”

阳光照进空荡荡的小屋，屋里仍然弥漫着烤羊排的味道，看得出来是用一种荷兰式烤锅在炉火前烤制的，那口烤锅还架在火炉围栏上，旁边是白壁炉，台面上铺了一张纸，一个煎土豆的黑平底锅放在纸上。炉火正红，但火苗不高，炉门关着，炉子上水壶“嘎啦嘎啦”响着。

餐桌上他的盘子里盛着土豆和剩下的烤羊排，桌上还摆着面包篓、盐和蓝色的啤酒杯。桌布是白油布做的。他站在阴影中。

“你的午饭太晚了，”她说，“接着吃呀。”

说着她在门口阳光下的一把木椅子上落了坐。

“我得去趟伍斯威特。”说着他坐在桌旁，但没吃。

“吃啊！”她说。但他没有动盘子里的食物。

“你要吃点什么吗？”他问她道，“你喝杯茶不？水开了。”说着他欠身往起站。

“你让我自己沏茶好吗？”说着她站了起来。

他看上去情绪低落，而她则觉得给他添了麻烦。

“哦，茶壶在这里，”说着他指指那黄褐色的角柜，“还有杯子！茶叶在你头上的壁炉台上。”

她找到了黑茶壶，又从炉架上取下茶叶筒，用热水涮了茶壶，但一时间呆立着，不知道把水倒哪里。

“泼出去，”他注意到她这样，就说，“水是干净的。”

她走到门边，把壶里的水洒在了小径上。这地方多可爱，那么宁静，是真正的林地。橡树长出了黄褐色的新叶子，花园里红色的雏菊就像一颗颗绒扣子。她瞟了一眼门口那块布满孔洞的大砂岩做成的门槛，看得出很少有人在这里出入。

“这里真是可爱！”她说，“多安静，一切都充满生气，可又那么宁静。”

他又开始吃了，吃得很慢，不很情愿，她能感觉出他不高兴。她默默地沏好茶，把茶壶摆在炉边的铁架上，她知道这里的人都这么放茶壶。他推开盘子，起身到后屋去了。康妮听到门闩响了一声，随后他端着盛有奶酪和黄油的盘子进来了。

康妮把两个杯子都摆在桌上，一共就两个杯子。“喝杯茶吗？”康妮问。

“你想喝那就喝吧。糖在碗柜里，还有一小罐奶油，牛奶罐在食品间里。”

“要我拿走你的盘子吗？”她问他。他抬头看看她，脸上露出一丝打趣的笑来。

“哦……好吧。”他说，仍然慢慢地吃着面包和奶酪。康妮到后屋去，来到洗涤间，压水机就在那里。左手边有一扇门，无疑就是食品间的门了。她拉开门闩，见到他称之为食品间的屋子，不禁笑了：那是一排刷了白灰的壁橱，又窄又长，不过总算还能装下一个小啤酒桶、几只盘子和一点食物。她从一个黄罐子里倒了点牛奶出来。

“你从哪儿弄牛奶？”她回到桌子旁问他。

“从弗林特家！他们把牛奶放在养殖场边上让我去取。你知道的，我就是取牛奶时碰上你的。”

说这话时他的表情是失望的。康妮倒好茶，又端起奶罐来。

“我不要加奶。”他说。这时他听到外面有什么声音，立即敏锐地朝门口看去。

“咱们最好关上门。”他说。

“关它干什么？”她说，“又没人来，不是吗？”

“万一要有呢，谁知道呢。”

“那也没关系，”她说，“不过是喝杯茶罢了。”

“茶匙在哪儿？”

他伸过胳膊，打开了桌下的抽屉。康妮就坐在门口有阳光的地方。

“弗洛西！”他招呼那只趴在楼梯下席子上的狗，“去听听动静儿！”

他举着手指说这话的声调十分生动，那狗立即小跑着去侦察了。

“今天不开心吗？”康妮问道。

他蓝色的眼睛马上转过来直视着她，说：

“不开心？不，是烦！我得去取两张传票，传我抓住的那两个偷猎的人，还得，唉，算了吧，我不喜欢与人打交道——”

他冷静地说着标准的英文，话里透着愤怒。“你是不喜欢当猎场看守吗？”康妮问。

“当看守？不，我只是想一个人独处。可我得到警察局去，跟什么杂七杂八的人周旋，等着那些笨蛋处理我的事，那简直让我发疯……”说着他微微一笑，显得无可奈何。

“你能真正独立吗？”

“我吗？我想我能，如果你指的是靠我的退休金勉强过日子。我能！可我得干活儿，否则我就会死。就是说我手上得有点什么事忙乎着。但我脾气不好，不能纯粹为我自己工作。我得给别人做点事，要是给自己干，干不了一个月，脾气一上来我就干不下去了。所以我在这里算是挺富有的了，特别是最近……”

说着他笑了，那是在打趣她。

“可你为什么脾气不好呢？”她问，“你是说你的脾气总是不好吗？”

“差不多吧，”说着他笑了，“我不太会控制自己的坏脾气。”

“可是什么样的坏脾气呢？”她问。

“坏脾气！”他说，“你难道不知道那是什么吗？”她沉默了，感到失望，因为他并没有拿她当回事。

“下个月我要离开一段时间。”她说。

“是吗？去哪儿？”

“威尼斯。”

“威尼斯！和克利福德男爵一起吗？去多久？”

“一个来月吧，”她回答道，“克利福德不去。”

“他待在这儿吗？”他问。

“是的！他那种人就是不喜欢旅行。”

“哦，可怜的家伙！”他挺同情地说。两人一时沉默。

“我走了，你不会忘了我吧？”她问他。他闻之再次睁大眼睛凝视着她。

“忘？”他说，“你知道，没有人会忘。这不是记忆的问题。”

她想说“那又怎么样”，可没说出口，而是声音似有似无地说：“我告诉克利福德我或许会怀上个孩子。”

这话让他对她刮目相看，他紧张地在她脸上搜寻着什么。

“是吗？”他终于说，“那他怎么说？”

“哦，他无所谓。只要孩子似乎像他的，他反倒高兴呢。”说这话时她不敢抬头看他。

他沉默了很久，然后盯着她的脸问：

“他肯定没提到我了？”

“没有，没提到你。”她说。

“不会，他不会容忍我替他做这个的。那你打算在哪儿有孩子呢？”

“我可以在威尼斯闹场恋爱呀。”她说。

“你是可以，”他缓缓地说，“你走就是为这个喽？”

“但不是为了爱情。”她抬头看着他为自己辩护。

“只是做个样子而已。”他说。

他们又不说话了。他坐着，眼睛盯着窗外，半是嘲弄、半是痛苦地微笑着。康妮痛恨这种表情。

“你没采取什么避孕措施吧？”他突然问，“我没预防。”

“我没有，”她轻描淡写地说，“我讨厌那么做。”

他看看她，然后带着那种微妙的笑容看着窗外。沉默的气氛变得紧张起来。

最终还是他转过身冲她讥讽道：“你就是为这个才要我的，为了怀上孩子？”

她低下头，说：“不是，真的不是。”

“那真的是什么？”他很尖刻地问。

她抬头看着他怨恨地说：“我不知道。”

他忍不住笑道：“那我就更不知道了。”

又是一阵沉默，气氛很冷。

最后他终于开口说：“好了，随夫人的便吧。如果你有了孩子，就给克利福德男爵吧。我没有损失什么。相反，我获得了一段美好的经历，十分美好，真的！”说着他有点压抑地伸了个懒腰。“就算你利用了我，”他说，“这也不是我第一次被利用了，何况这次我被利用得很愉快，虽然这事总让人觉得不是那么体面。”说着他又奇怪地伸了个懒腰，身子有点颤抖，牙关奇怪地紧咬着。

“可是我没有利用你。”她申辩说。

“我是给夫人用的。”他回答道。

“不对，”她说，“我喜欢你的身体。”

“是吗？”说着他笑了，“那好，这样我们就扯平了，因为我也喜欢你。”

说着，他看她的眼神变得特别暗淡。

“你现在想上楼去吗？”他问，声音压抑。

“不，不在这儿。现在不！”她声音沉重地说。但是如果他强迫她的话，她会顺从，因为她没有力气反抗他。

他再次转过脸去，似乎把她忘了。“我想摸你，就像你摸我那样，”她说，“我还从来没有真正摸过你的身子呢。”

他看着她，又笑了。“现在吗？”

“不！不！不在这儿！去小屋，你不介意吧？”

“我是怎么摸你的？”他问。

“你抚摸我。”

他看着她，与她那沉重而焦渴的目光相遇了。

“我抚摸你时，你喜欢吗？”他又在笑她。

“喜欢，你呢？”

“我嘛！”他的语调随之变了，说，“喜欢，你知道的，还用问吗？”他说的是真话。

她站起身，拿起了帽子。“我得走了。”她说。

“这就走吗？”他很礼貌地问。

她想让他触摸她，对她说点什么，可他什么都没说，只是礼貌地等待着。

“谢谢你的茶。”她说。

“我还没有感谢夫人亲手沏茶呢，那是我的荣幸。”他说。

康妮走上了小径，他还站在门道里冲她微笑着，弗洛西翘着尾巴跑了过来。康妮不得不步履沉重地默默走进林子里，但她知道他站在后面看着她，脸上挂着那种难以琢磨的微笑。

她一路走回家，情绪低落，心烦意乱。她一点也不喜欢他所谓的被利用的话，因为在某种意义上说，他说得有道理，但他不该那么说出来。于是，她的心让两种感觉撕扯着，一种是反感他，一种是要与他修好。

她好不容易熬过了不安和烦躁的下午茶时分，立即就上楼到自己的房间里去了。可回了房，感觉还是不对劲，坐也不是，站也不是。她非得解决这个问题不可。她得回到林中小屋里去。如果他不在也无所谓。

她从边门溜了出去，直接上了路，心情有点阴郁。到了林中空地时，她感到十分不安起来。还好，他又在那。他穿着衬衣，正猫着腰放母鸡们出笼。那些小雏鸡们现在长得笨笨拉拉的，但还是比老母鸡们看着整洁。

她照直向他走过去。“你瞧，我来了！”她说。

“欸，好呀！”说着他直起腰来，有点调侃地看着她。

“把母鸡放出来吗？”

“是啊，它们只顾一动不动地抱窝儿，都瘦得皮包骨头了，”他说，“现在它们一点都不急着出来吃食儿。抱窝儿的母鸡是无私的，一心只想着蛋和小鸡儿。”

这些可怜的母鸡们，如此盲目的献身！那些蛋并不是自己的，可它们还是照样忠心耿耿！康妮同情地看着它们。此时此刻，这对男女都沉默了。

“进屋去吗？”他问。

“你要我吗？”她有点不信任地问。

“要，只要你愿意来。”

她不语。

“来吧！”他说。

于是她就随他进了屋。他关上门，屋里黑了下来，于是他像以前一样点上灯，但灯光很弱。

“你没穿内衣吧？”他问。

“没有！”

“好，那我也脱了我的。”

他铺开毯子，把一张毯子放一边准备盖身上。她摘下帽子，摇摇头把头发散开。他坐下，脱鞋，松绑腿，解开马裤。

“躺下吧！”他只穿着衬衫对她说。她默默地顺从了，他顺势躺在她身边，拉起毯子盖在他们俩身上。

“来吧！”

说着他撩起她的外衣，一直拉到胸口。他温柔地吻着她的胸，把它们含在唇间轻轻地吮着。

“啊，你真好，你真好啊！”他边吮边说。突然，他的脸又滑到她温暖的小腹上不住地蹭着。

康妮的双臂在他的衬衫下环抱着他。但她怕，怕他那消瘦光滑的裸体，那裸体太强大了，怕他那强劲的肌肉。她退缩着，害怕了。

当他稍带叹息地说“啊，你真好”时，她身体内有什么东西颤抖起来，随之她精神上有什么东西变得僵硬去抵抗他。僵硬是那可怕的肉体亲昵和他急迫地想占有她造成的。这一次，她强烈的激情没能让她失态，她两只手毫无感觉地放在他起伏的身体上，无论怎样，她的精神似乎都在高处看着这一切。他臀部的起伏冲撞在她看来似乎是可笑的，而他那急于宣泄一下的样子显得挺滑稽。是的，这就叫爱，就是臀部滑稽的舞动，和舞动之后那可怜、渺小而湿润的小东西的萎缩。这就是神圣的爱了！看来，现代人的看法是对的，他们就是蔑视这种表演，因为这确实是表演。不错，就像有些诗人说的那样，创造了人类的上帝一定有一种险恶的幽默感，他给了人理性，可又逼着他摆出这个滑稽的姿势，还操纵他盲目地渴望进行这种屈辱的表演。甚至像莫泊桑那样的人都觉得这动作屈辱扫兴。人蔑视欢爱行为，可又要为之。

冷漠，嘲讽，她那奇特的女性头脑与之拉开了距离。尽管她十分安静地躺着，她的本能让她挺起腰腹，将那男人甩出去，逃离他那丑陋的钳制，摆脱他那冲撞着的怪诞臀部。他的肉体是愚蠢、莽撞的，是不完美的东西，那种半成品似的拙笨样有点令人厌恶。可以肯定的是，完整的进化会淘汰这种表演，淘汰这种“功能”。

他结束了，很快，静止不动，沉默着，那是一种毫无动静的特殊距离，让她无法感知他，于是她的心开始哭泣。她能感到他如退潮一样渐渐远去，丢下她，把她像一块石头一样抛弃在岸上。他在退却，他的精神在离她而去。他知道这个。

她实在难过，在自己一心二用的折磨下，她开始哭了起来。他丝毫没在意，甚至都不知道她哭了。哭声渐渐大起来，震动了她自己，也震动了他。

“唉！”他说，“这回不好。你心思不在这儿。”

原来他知道啊！于是她哭得更厉害了。

“可这是怎么回事啊？”他说，“偶尔是会这样的。”

“我……我无法爱你！”她抽泣着，突然感到心都碎了。

“没法儿！行了，别发愁！没有哪个王法非叫你爱我不可，该什么样儿就什么样儿吧。”

他的手仍然放在她胸上，但她的双手都离开了他的身子。

他的话丝毫没有让她感到安慰，她抽搭得更厉害了。

“别，别！”他说，“有时好，有时孬。这回是有点不好。”

她痛苦地哭泣着说：“我是想爱你，可就是不行，只觉得可怕。”

他笑笑。那笑，半是苦涩，半是调侃。

“没什么可怕的，”他说，“就算你那么觉得，你别一惊一乍的就行。也别为不爱我发愁，千万别难为自个儿。一篮子核桃里总有个把坏的，好的坏的都得要。”

他把手从她胸上拿开，安静地躺着，不再碰她。这反倒让她觉得满足，这感觉几乎是有点变态。她讨厌他那口土话，连个“你”字都说走了调
①

。他想起身，就站了起来，高高地站在她边上，系上他那带绳襻的马裤，就在她面前做这些。说起来米凯利斯还知道要面子，系裤子时还会转过身去，可这个男人却是那么自信，他不知道别人是把他当小丑看的，认为他是半个粗人。

可当他离开她、默默地起身要走时，她害怕地抱住了他。

“别！别走！别离开我！别生我的气！抱着我，抱紧我！”她迷狂地呢喃着，根本不知所云，不知从哪儿来的那么大力气抱住了他。她是要拯救自己，从内心的愤懑和抵抗中救出自己。那股内在的抵抗力是那样强有力地控制着她！

他再次将她揽进怀中，紧紧地拥着她，她突然在他怀里变得娇小，变得小鸟依人起来。没了，那反抗不再有了，她开始在美妙的安宁中化了。她如此娇小美好地化在他怀里，激起了他无限的欲望，他所有的血管似乎都因强烈但温柔的情欲而灼烫起来。他渴望她，渴望她的温柔，被她在他怀抱中的美艳折服，这欲望荡漾在他的血液里。温柔地，他充满柔情和欲望的手抚摸着她，令她销魂。温柔地，他抚摸着她绸缎般光滑的腰臀。他的手向下，向下滑动，在她温热的股沟间下滑着，越来越移近她最敏感的触点。她感到他就像一团欲望之火，但那是温柔的火，而自己就在这团火焰中化了。于是她放任了自己。她感到他那东西在沉默中以惊人的力量耸将起来，要她，她就去迎合他。她顺从了，那一刻她颤抖着感到自己要死了，对他毫无保留。啊，如果此时他不温柔地待她，他就太残酷了，因为她完全开放着，任他支配。

他强劲地进入了她体内，令她感到奇异而恐惧，浑身再次颤抖起来。他或许要像一把利剑刺入她温柔绽开的身子，那非要了她的命不可。突如其来的恐惧让她贴紧了他。但那东西只是十分悠缓地顶入，在黑暗中它是那么平和、沉稳、温柔，就似创世之初那样。于是她心里的恐惧消退了，敢于自由放任了，毫无顾虑了。她敢于让自己全然放任，在那洪水中纵情。

她感觉自己像大海，只有黑暗的海浪在起伏，波涛汹涌。渐渐地她整个儿的黑暗之海都涌动起来，她就是一片黑暗沉默的海洋，浪涛滚滚。啊，身体的渊薮里，海水分开，翻滚而去，那成排的巨浪翻卷向远方，不停地从她最生动的渊薮处分开，翻卷开去，那是温柔的入水中心处。那跳水人不断地向深处进发，越来越深地触动她，于是她的身体便一层层地深入绽放开来，她那海涛越来越沉重地翻卷向岸边，将她裸露出来。那陌生人探求得愈是深入，她的波浪愈是远离她而去，遗弃她，直至，蓦地，她轻柔地痉挛一下，她生命之最生动处受到了触动。她知道她被触动了，她的感觉达到了完美的极点，她飘然而去。她飘然而去，化了，她出生了，一个女人。

啊，简直美妙至极！难以言说！退潮之时，她意识到了这美的全部。现在，她整个身体都温柔地紧贴着那个陌生的男人，不顾一切地依恋着那正在萎缩回去的物件儿，因为它是那么温柔、脆弱，经过猛烈强健的抽动后在不知不觉中退缩着。那神秘敏感的物件抽出去了，离开她的身子时，她不自觉地发出一声失落的叹息，她试图把它放回去，因为它一直是那么完美，教她爱得不行！

只到现在，她才意识到那东西如小巧的花蕊，沉默而温柔。她又不自觉地轻轻发出惊讶和深情的叫声，她那颗女人心为那物件如此柔弱而惊叫，因为它刚才是那么强大。

“好可爱！”她低吟着，“这物件确实可爱！”可他不语，只是轻轻地吻她，依旧伏在她身上。她则发出幸福的呻吟，既像一件祭品，又像一个新生儿。

现在她心里开始意识到他奇特的美。

一个男人！一个男子汉的力量压在她身上！她的双手在他身上茫然摩挲着，仍然感到些儿害怕。她曾觉得他的身子陌生、充满敌意，让她有点反感，一个男人。可现在她触摸他，他们是上帝的儿子与人的女儿。他多美呀，他的皮肉多么纯洁！多可爱，多壮实，可又那么纯洁细腻，这敏感的身子是多么沉静！这壮实而细腻的肉体竟是那么沉静。多么美！多么美！她的手怯生生地顺着他的脊梁滑下去，滑到他柔软精巧的臀上。美，多么美！刹那间一股新感觉的火苗窜遍她全身。眼前这美的躯体，她以前怎么会反感呢？触摸他温热活泼的臀，那种美感是多么难以言表！生命中还有生命，那纯粹、温热、强壮的美。还有，他两腿之间那沉甸甸的家伙儿，多么神秘！这奇特、沉甸甸的神秘物件握在手里竟然很柔软！这是根，是一切美的根，是所有完美的最原始的根源。

她紧搂住他，嘴里发出惊叹，几乎也是恐惧。他紧紧抱住她，但一言不发。他绝不说什么。她贴紧他，贴紧他，只想靠近他那肉欲的奇妙之处。他全然安宁，安宁得不可思议，可她还是感到他那东西缓慢、强有力地再次勃发，那是另一种力量，于是她的心融化在了敬畏中。

这一回，他进到她体内，一派温柔，带来一片虹光，那纯美的温柔和光焰令任何意识都无法捕捉。她浑身颤抖着，没了魂，但又生机勃勃，就如同生命的原液。她无法懂得那是什么，无法记住曾经的过程，只觉得它胜过任何美好的东西，只有这种感觉。结束之后，她全然安宁下来，浑然无知，不知时光过去了多久。他仍然和她在一起，同在一个静谧的渊薮中。这次第，无以言传。

开始清醒过来时，她依偎在他胸膛上，嘴里喃喃道：“我的爱！我的爱！”他沉默地抱住她，她就势蜷缩在他胸脯上，两人实在和谐。

但他的沉静是深不可测的。他搂着她像怀抱着一朵花，安静而陌生。“你想什么呢？”她向他耳语道，“你想什么呢？说话呀，对我说点什么吧！”

他温柔地亲了她，喃言道：“啊，我的伴儿！”

可她不懂他的意思，不知道他在何方。他那么沉静，似乎让她摸不着。

“你爱我，不是吗？”她喃喃道。

“欸，这你知道的呀！”他说。

“你亲口说嘛！”她恳求着。

“欸，欸！你没感觉出来吗？”他含糊其辞地说，但语调温柔，语气坚定。她贴他贴得更紧了。爱着的他比她还要安详，但她想要确认他爱她。

“你就是爱我嘛！”她小声坚持说。他的手温柔地摩挲着她，似乎她是一朵花，没了欲望的颤抖，但手法很细腻。即便如此，她还是心神不定，咬定爱不放松。

“说你永远爱我！”她恳求道。

“欸！”他心不在焉地说。这让她觉得自己的问题把他从她身边推开了。

“咱们该起来了吧？”他终于说。

“不！”她说。

但她能感到他的心思有所旁骛，他在倾听外面的动静。

“怕是天黑了吧！”他说。康妮从他的话音里听出了尘世的压力，于是她吻了他，那是一个女人不得不放弃她的好时光的幽怨之吻。

他起身，调高了火捻儿，然后开始穿衣服，很快就让自己消失在衣服里了。然后他高高地站在她身边，手系着马裤，乌黑的大眼睛却在看着她。他脸色有点红扑扑的，头发蓬乱，在微弱的油灯下显得特别温暖、安详、英俊。他是那么英俊，她绝不会告诉他他到底有多英俊。他这样子让她想紧紧拥抱他，因为这俊美中有一种温暖、慵懒的距离感，这副神态令她恨不得喊着抓住他，占有他。她是不会占有他的，所以她蜷着赤裸的腰臀卧在毯子上，这副样子令他不懂她在想什么，只是觉得她美，是个胜过一切的温柔美妙的尤物，他能进到这尤物身体里去。

“我爱你，因为我能进到你身子里去。”他说。

“你是爱我吗？”说着她心跳加快了。

“我能进到你身子里去，这比什么都好。我爱你，因为你全对我开放着。我爱你，因为我能那么进到你身子里去。”

他弯下腰亲了她柔软的腰肢，用自己的脸在她腰上蹭蹭，然后拿毯子给她盖上。

“你永远不会离开我吧？”她说。

“你可别问这个。”他说。

“你肯定我是爱你的吧？”她问。

“你这会儿爱我，以前你连想都没想过你会这么爱我，谁知道你过后儿想想会怎么样呢？”

“别，别这么说！你不是真觉得我想利用你，是吗？”

“怎么个利用法？”

“生个孩子——”

“这世界上谁都能生孩子。”说着他坐下系绑腿。

“哦，不！”她叫道，“你不是真这么想的！”

“哦，好了！”他看着她说，“刚才那样就足够了。”

她仍然安静地躺着。他轻轻地开了门，外面天空一片深蓝，天边是晶莹的青绿。他出去关上母鸡的笼子，轻声对狗说了些什么。而她则躺在屋里，感叹生活和生命是多么美妙。

他回来时她还躺着，像个吉普赛人那样容光焕发。他在她身边的凳子上坐下说：“走前那天晚上你得上村里的家来，行不？”说着他扬起眉毛看着她，两手在两腿之间垂着。

“行不？”她学着舌逗他。

他笑笑，“欸，行不？”他重复道。

“欸！”她模仿着土音说。

“对呀！”他说。

“对呀！”她重复着。

“来跟我睡，”他说，“那东西要那个。啥时候来？”

“啥？”她说。

“不对，”他说，“你学得不对。就说你啥时候来吧。”

“估摸着是礼拜天。”她说。

“估摸着是礼拜天！对呀！”

“对呀！”她也说。

他笑笑，不满地说：

“你学得不像。”

“咋不像呢？”

他笑了。她学讲土话有点令人发笑。

“好了，你得走了！”他说。

“我得吗？”她说。

“我得走吗！”他纠正她。

“为什么不能说‘我得吗’而非要说‘我得走吗’？”她反驳道。

他伏下身，温柔地摩挲着她的脸，说：“你是个好雌儿
②

，对不？是世界上剩下的最好的雌儿，只要在你喜欢、你乐意的时候！”

“什么是雌儿？”她问。

“你不知道吗？雌儿，就在身子下头。我进去得着什么，还有，我进去你得着什么就是。就是那么回事，整个儿！”

“整个儿！”她打趣道，“雌儿！就是交合吧。”

“不，不！交合指的是你干什么。动物才交合，可雌儿就比那要有意思得多。那是你，还不明白吗？你跟动物大不一样，不是吗？尽管你也交合！雌儿！啊，那是你的美呀，伴儿。”

她起身在他两眼之间亲着，因为他看她的眼是那么乌黑，眼神那么温柔，温暖得不行，美得不行。

“是吗？”她说，“你在乎我吗？”

他只是亲她，但不回答。

“你得走了，让我给你掸掸。”

说着他的手顺着她身子的曲线摩挲而过，手很稳实，没有欲望，但温柔、亲昵。

她在暮色中跑回家去，一路上觉得这世界如梦如幻。园子里的树木似乎是停泊在潮水上随波逐澜，通向拉格比府的山坡在起伏跌宕，如同生命在喘息。

①
方言中的“you”常被说成“thee”、“tha”等。

②
英文是俗语“cunt”。

第十三章

星期天，克利福德要到林子里去转转。这是个可爱的早上，梨花和李花忽然竞放，奇异的白花满世界开遍。

当这世界欣欣向荣的时候，克利福德却得让人从一个轮椅抬到另一个轮椅，这对他来说是够残酷的。但他忘了这一点，他甚至为自己的残疾感到些儿骄傲。康妮一帮他搬动僵硬的腿就感到受罪，所以现在是博尔顿太太或菲尔德干这事了。

她在车道坡顶上的一排山毛榉旁等他。他的轮椅“突突”地开着，因为小心，开得慢，但架势很是威严。见到妻子时，他说：“克利福德男爵骑着冒气泡的骏马呢！”

“至少鼻子在喷气！”她笑道。

他停下来，回头看那座狭长低矮的褐色老房子。

“拉格比岿然不动！”他说，“凭什么呀！我是骑在人的智慧创造的成就上，比骑马强多了。”

“是啊。柏拉图灵魂升天时坐的是双轮马车，如果是现在，就得坐福特轿车了。”康妮说。

“或者是劳斯莱斯。柏拉图可是个贵族！”

“没错！再也用不着抽打虐待什么黑骏马了。柏拉图怎么也想不到咱们坐的这东西比他的黑马和白马
①

跑得都快，我们骑的不是马，只是一个马达而已！”

“不只一个马达，还有汽油！”克利福德说，“我希望明年能把老屋修缮一下。为此我得花上一千镑，可是矿上花费太大了！”

“哦，好啊！”康妮说，“只要不再闹罢工就行！”

“他们再闹一回罢工有什么用？只会破坏企业，结果怎么样，那些自欺欺人的家伙该看出来了吧！”

“也许他们不在乎企业垮了呢。”康妮说。

“妇人之见！企业至少填饱了他们的肚皮，即使不能让他们的腰包鼓起来。”他说这话时用的是博尔顿太太那种奇特的土语。

“可是前几天你不是说你是个保守的无政府主义者吗？”康妮天真地问。

“你明白我的意思了吗？”他反驳道，“我的意思只是说，人想当什么样的人就可以当，有什么感受随他的便，想干什么就干什么，但条件是他们得使自己的生活形态完整，还有生命器官完整。”

康妮默默地走了几步，然后固执地说：

“听起来像是说鸡蛋可以随意变质，只要蛋壳完整就行。但是变质的鸡蛋会自行破碎的。”

“人不是鸡蛋，”他说，“连天使的蛋都不是，我的小福音传道士。”

这个明媚的早上他情绪极佳。一溜云雀掠过园子，远处静悄悄的低谷里矿井上烟雾缭绕。这情景几乎像是大战前的日子。康妮并不想争论，但她实在也不想和克利福德一起去林子里，所以她才在他的轮椅边上悻悻地走路。

“不会的，”他说，“不会再闹罢工了，只要事情处理得当就行。”

“怎么不会？”

“因为事情已经运作好了，不可能再发生罢工。”

“可那些人会依你吗？”

“我们用不着问他们。我们要在他们不注意的时候把事情办了。我是为他们好，为了拯救企业。”

“也是为你自己好。”她说。

“那当然！大家都好，但更多的是为他们好。没有矿井我可以生存，可他们就不行。没了矿井他们就得饿肚子，而我有别的活路。”

他们眺望着浅谷中的矿场和远处特瓦萧村像蛇一样沿山坡而上的黑顶住房。那座褐色的老教堂里传出钟声：礼拜天，礼拜天，礼拜天！

“可那些人会服从你提出的条件吗？”她问。

“亲爱的，他们不从也得从，只要把事情办得巧妙。”

“会达成共识吗？”

“肯定会的，只要他们认识到企业重于个人就行。”

“你非得拥有这企业不可吗？”她问。

“那倒不是。可我掌握它到了这个程度，就已经算拥有了，绝对是。财产的所有权现在成了一个宗教问题了，从基督和圣芳济开始一直如此。关键在于，不是将你的全部所有给予穷人
②

，而是应当利用你的所有促进产业，从而给穷人活儿干，这是让所有人果腹遮体的唯一办法。把我们的所有赠予穷人，这对穷人和我们来说都意味着饥饿。全世界的饥饿可不是什么好事，甚至一般的贫困也不是好事。贫穷是丑陋的。”

“那贫富不均呢？”

“那是命。为什么木星比海王星大？你无法改变造化！”

“可一旦人们开始嫉妒和不满——”

“尽力去消除。总得有人当龙头。”

“那谁是呢？”她问。

“产业的所有者和经营者呀！”

两人半晌不语。

“可我觉得他们是些坏的龙头。”

“那你说他们该怎么办才算不坏？”

“他们没有很认真地对待他们的领导地位。”她说。

“他们很认真，比你对待你男爵夫人的地位要认真多了。”他说。

“那是强加给我的，我并不真想要那个地位。”她脱口而出。

他停下轮椅看着她，问道：“现在是谁在逃避责任？是谁在这个时候试图摆脱他们的领导地位，正如你说的那样？”

“可我根本不想要什么领导地位。”她抗辩道。

“好啊！可那是逃避。你获得了这个地位，命中注定要当这个男爵夫人，你就得名副其实才行。是谁给了矿工们那些好东西？他们享有政治自由，享受教育，有卫生条件和健康的环境，有书读，有音乐听，所有这一切都是谁给的？是矿工自己给的吗？不是！是英国的拉格比和希普利这样的企业在做出自己的贡献，而且要继续奉献下去。那就是你的责任。”

康妮听着，脸涨得通红。

“我也想奉献点什么，”她说，“可谁允许我呀？什么都是为了买和卖。你说的那些东西，拉格比和希普利是卖给人们的，是赚了钱的。什么都是卖出的，你并不给予别人真正的发自内心的同情。再说了，是谁剥夺了人们自然的生活和人性，而给了他们这种工业的恐怖？这是谁干的？”

“那你让我怎么办？”他脸都气得铁青，“请他们来掠夺我吗？”

“特瓦萧怎么这么丑陋，这么可恨？人们的生活怎么这么无望？”

“特瓦萧是他们自己建的，那就部分地展示了他们的自由了。他们建起了自己漂亮的特瓦萧，日子过得不错。我又不能替他们过他们的日子，每只甲壳虫都必须过自己的生活。”

“可是你迫使他们为你干活的，他们过的是你矿上的生活呀。”

“不是那么回事。甲壳虫是自己找食吃的，这里没有一个人是被迫为我干活的。”

“他们的生活被工业化了，没有希望，我们的也一样。”康妮喊道。

“我不这么认为。你那只是个浪漫的修辞手法罢了，让人听了犯晕的浪漫主义废话。你站在那儿，一点也不像个无望的人儿，康妮，我亲爱的。”

他说得对。因为此时她那深蓝的眼睛里目光明亮，脸颊正红扑扑的，她看上去充满反叛的激情，毫无失望的沮丧。她注意到，杂草丛生的地方，毛茸茸的嫩立金花微绽，花瓣形状尚不明显。她气鼓鼓的，心里纳闷：为什么她感到克利福德大错特错，可就是无法跟他讲清楚？她就是说不上来他到底哪儿不对。

“怪不得这里的人们都恨你呢。”她说。

“才不呢！”他反驳道，“别弄错了，按你对人这个词的理解，他们不是人。他们是你无法理解的动物，你永远也弄不懂他们。不要把你的幻想附丽在别人身上。群氓们从来都是一样的，将来还是如此。尼禄
③

的奴隶和我们的矿工之间的区别是微乎其微的，还有福特公司的汽车工人也是一样。他们是尼禄井下和地上干活的奴隶。群氓们是不会改变的。某个人或许会从群氓中脱颖而出，但他的脱颖而出并不能改变这些群氓，群氓是改变不了的。这是社会科学要研究的重大课题之一。吃喝玩乐呗！
④

可是今天的教育代替了马戏，这是个错误，错就错在我们把马戏场搞得一团糟，却用一点点教育毒害了群众。”

一旦克利福德真的一时兴起大谈普通大众，康妮就觉得害怕。他的话里有某种毁灭性的真理，但那是一种要命的真理。

看到康妮脸色苍白、沉默不语，克利福德又发动了轮椅的马达。一直到他把轮椅停在园子的门口，他们都没再说什么。康妮为他打开门。

“我们现在需要拿起的，”他说，“是鞭子，而不是剑戟。有史以来群氓们就是被统治的，直到人类的末日为止，他们一直要被统治。说他们能自治，那简直是虚伪，是笑话。”

“可你能统治他们吗？”康妮问。

“我？哦，能！我的头脑和意志并没有伤残，我统治靠的不是我的腿。我可以为统治尽我的一份责任，绝对尽我的一份责任。给我一个儿子，他会在我之后统治他该统治的那一部分。”

“可他不会是你的儿子，不属于你们统治阶级，或许不会——”康妮口吃起来。

“我不在乎他的父亲是谁，只要他是个健康的人，智力不低于一般水准。给我一个身体健康、智力正常的男人的孩子，我就能把他培养成一个能力十足的查家人。问题不在于孩子的出身，而在于他命中注定的位置怎样。把任何一个孩子放在统治阶级里，他都会成长为一个相当的统治者。把公子王孙们抛到群氓中去，他们就会成为一介庶民，成为群氓中的一个。关键是环境的巨大压力造就人。”

“那就是说，普通老百姓不是一个种族，贵族也不是血统的了？”她说。

“是的，我的孩子！那都是浪漫的幻想。贵族是一种职责，是命运的一部分。群氓们则是另一部分命运在运行。个人没什么了不起的。问题是你被培养去行使哪一部分职责，适应哪一种职责。并非是个人造就了贵族，贵族是一个行使责任的整体。同样，是整个群氓的作用使庶民成为庶民的。”

“那就是说，人们之间没有共通的人性了！”

“随你怎么说吧。我们都要填饱肚子。可提到表述功能和决策功能，我相信，统治阶级和被统治阶级之间是有一条鸿沟的，绝对有。他们的功能是相对立的。不同的功能决定了个人之间的不同。”

康妮看他的眼神变得惊恐起来。

“你不继续走吗？”她问。

他发动了轮椅。他说出了自己的主张，现在陷入了他特有的空虚冷漠之中，这一点让康妮很受不了，但她下决心在这林子里不跟他争什么。

他们前方是那条马道，夹道的是榛子树墙和生机勃勃的灰白叶树。轮椅“突突”地缓慢前行，渐渐开进了榛子树影下马道上如奶沫一样的野生勿忘我花丛中。克利福德驾驶着轮椅在马道中间行驶，那是过往行人的脚步在花丛中踏出的一条路。但走在后面的康妮却注视着车轮在车叶草和筋骨草上摇摇晃晃驶过，碾烂了黄色的小喇叭花。他们就这样在勿忘我花丛中留下了一溜痕迹。

那片地方盛开着各色花朵，绿水池里初绽的风铃草，恰似悬着的水潭。

“你说得对，这林子里就是美，”克利福德说，“简直美得惊人，还有什么能比英国的春天更美呢？”

康妮觉得这话听起来像是在说，就连春天的花也是由议会作出决议让它开它才开的。英国的春天！为什么不是爱尔兰的春天，或者犹太人的春天？轮椅缓缓地向前开着，从壮实得如同麦苗一样的风铃草和灰色的牛蒡草上压过去。他们来到那片树木被砍伐光了的空地上，阳光毫无遮拦地照射着这片空地。风铃草在阳光下蓝得发亮，这里一片蓝，那里一片蓝，那蓝色已经开始向淡紫和深紫转变了。一片片的风铃草之间，蕨草挺立着草叶曲卷着的棕色头颅，像是密密麻麻的幼蛇在对夏娃耳语着什么新的秘密。

克利福德把轮椅一直开到山顶上，康妮则缓缓地跟在后面。橡树发芽儿了，褐色的嫩芽很是柔软，冬天里僵硬了的万物化作一派柔和景象。就连那疙疙瘩瘩的橡树身上也酿出了柔软的嫩叶儿，在阳光下伸展出褐色的小羽翼，就像蝙蝠的翅膀一样。为什么人就没有新的东西、鲜嫩的东西酿出来？腐水一样的人啊！

克利福德把轮椅停在山顶上向下看去。蓝色的风铃花儿像潮水一样把宽阔的马道洗得一路幽蓝，下面的小山也是一片温暖的蓝色。

“这颜色本身很好看，”克利福德说，“可是不能用来绘画。”

“没错！”康妮心不在焉地说。

“我能不能冒险到泉眼那儿去？”

“这椅子还能再往上开吗？”她问。

“我试试！不冒险，就没收获！”

轮椅开始缓缓地向前行驶，颠簸着朝山下而去，宽阔的车道两边开满了蓝色的风信子，煞是美丽。哦，最后一条船驶过开满风信子的浅滩！哦，最后一片苍凉水域上的舢板，进行着我们文明的最后一班航程！哦，舵轮古怪的船儿，你缓慢地驶向何方？
⑤

克利福德神态平静又自得地坐在冒险的轮椅上，头戴老式帽子，身穿花呢外套，纹丝不动，谨小慎微。哦，船长，我的船长，我们辉煌的航程已走完！
⑥

可还没呢！在下山的路上，身着灰衣的康斯坦丝紧跟在他后面，注视着轮椅颠簸着下山。

他们路过通向林中小屋的那条小径。谢天谢地这路太窄，轮椅无法通过，几乎连一个人都难以通过。轮椅到了斜坡下面，掉了一个头就消失了。这时康妮听到身后响起轻微的口哨声，她机警地四下里张望一下，发现那猎场看守正大步从上面下来，他的狗紧随其后。

“克利福德男爵要去村舍吗？”他盯着她的眼睛问。

“不，只到井边去。”

“啊，那好！那我就不用露面了。不过今儿晚上我得会会你，我就在园门口等你吧，十点左右。”

说着他眼神直勾勾地盯着她看。

“嗯。”她迟疑着。

这时他们听到克利福德在“嘟——嘟——”地按喇叭叫康妮，她则“呜——呜——”地回答他。那看守闻之做个小鬼脸儿，手轻柔地从下到上捋着她的胸。康妮惊恐地看着他，迈开脚步朝山下跑去，嘴里冲克利福德发出“呜——呜——”声。山上的男人看着她，然后转过身，微微笑了一下，回到小路上去。

康妮发现克利福德正缓缓地朝上面的泉眼开去，那口泉眼在长满墨绿色落叶松的半山腰上。她赶上他时他已经到了。

“这还行。”他指的是轮椅。

康妮看着落叶松林边上宽大的灰色牛蒡叶子，觉得像鬼影一般。人们称之为“罗宾汉大黄”。这东西长在井边，模样那么安静阴郁！可是泉水涌着，那么清凉，那么美好！井边还生着小米草和肥大的蓝色喇叭花。井台下的黄土在翕动。是一只鼹鼠！它露面了，粉红的爪子扒拉着，晃着钻子一样的小脸儿，粉色小细鼻子朝上翘着。

“它好像是用鼻子尖看世界。”康妮说。

“比眼睛看得更清楚！”克利福德说，“喝水吗？”

“你呢？”

她从树枝上取下一只搪瓷杯子，弯下腰去舀水。他抿了几口。随后她弯下腰去，自己也喝了几口。

“真是冰凉！”她吸着气说。

“好喝，不是吗？你许愿了吗？”

“你呢？”

“许了，不过不告诉你。”

她听到啄木鸟锛木头的声音，然后听到了风轻柔但怪异地从阔叶松林中掠过。她抬头看去，片片白云正在蓝天上飘浮着。

“云彩！”她说。

“不过是些白羊。”他说。

一片阴影笼罩住了这片空地。那只鼹鼠已经蹿到了柔软的黄土上去。

“这讨人嫌的小动物，我们该杀死它。”克利福德说。

“可你看，它看上去像个圣坛上的牧师呢。”康妮说。

她采了几枝香车叶草递给他。

“新割下来的草！”他说，“这香味像不像发自上个世纪的浪漫贵妇？她们可是一个比一个精明。”

她不理会他的话，自顾看天上的云彩。

“怕是要下雨了。”她说。

“下雨？何以见得？你希望下雨吗？”

他们开始往家走了。克利福德小心翼翼地开着轮椅车在路上颠簸着前行。他们来到幽暗的谷底，向右转，前行一百码左右，然后转弯在那面狭长的山坡上爬行，灿烂的阳光下山坡上盛开着蓝风铃花儿。

“走啊，老伴儿！”说着克利福德把轮椅开上了坡。

这坡又陡又颠。轮椅在泥土中挣扎着前行，速度缓慢，像是有点不情愿，但还是摇摇晃晃地向上走着。来到一片风信子盛开的地方时，车子举步不前，颤颤巍巍地挣扎着开出了花丛就戛然停住了。

“咱们还是按喇叭，看那个看守会不会来帮忙，”康妮说，“他能推一把。我也可以推。推推能管用。”

“让车子喘喘气吧，”克利福德说，“在车子下面垫块东西好吗？”

康妮找到一块石头。他们等了一会儿，克利福德又发动了机器，车子终于动了，但颤抖着像个病人，还发出奇怪的杂音来。

“让我推吧！”康妮从后面上来说。

“你别！别推！”克利福德恼火地说，“要是靠推才行，我还要这没用的马达干什么？把那块石头垫轮子下面！”

车子停顿了一下，又发动一遍，但还不如刚才动得欢。

“还是让我推吧，”她说，“要不就按喇叭叫看守来吧。”

“等等！”

她等了等。他又试了一次，但越弄越糟。

“你要是不让我推，就按喇叭吧。”康妮说。

“行了，你安静会儿吧！”

康妮半晌没说话，这功夫他又疯狂地发动着那小马达。

“你非把这东西给毁了不可，克利福德，”她劝道，“再说你也是白费劲。”

“我下不去呀，否则就能看看这该死的东西是怎么回事了！”他边恼火地说着边按响了喇叭，声音很刺耳，“或许梅勒斯明白是怎么回事。”

他们在碾碎的花丛中等待着，天空中的云彩在缓缓聚集着。沉静中，一只斑尾林鸽开始咕咕叫起来。克利福德立即按响了喇叭，吓得鸽子不再叫唤。

那看守说话间就出现了，带着疑问的神情大步走来，在角落里行个礼。

“马达的事你明白吗？”克利福德尖刻地问。

“我怕是不懂。出毛病了吗？”

“明摆着的！”克利福德厉声道。

那人小心地在车轮旁蹲下，探视着小马达。

“我对这类机械的东西一无所知，克利福德男爵，”他平静地说，“如果汽油和机油不少，那——”

“你就仔细看看什么地方断了没有。”克利福德不耐烦地说。

那人把枪靠着树放下，脱下外衣扔到枪边上。棕毛狗蹲在一旁守候着。随后他蹲下，从车轮下朝里看，手指头触摸着油腻的小马达，油溅到了他干净的礼拜日衬衫上，令他不快。

“看不出哪儿断了。”他说。他站起身来，把帽子往脑后推了推，手搓着眉毛，很明显是想弄个究竟。

“你看了下面的轴没有？”克利福德问，“看看它们是不是都没事！”

那男人整个身体伏在地上，仰着头，在马达下扭动着，手指还摸索着。此情此景让康妮感慨，一个男人趴在大地上看上去是个多么可怜的物件儿，脆弱而渺小。

“看上去没事儿。”他说，话音发闷。

“我就没指望你怎么样。”克利福德说。

“看来我是不行！”他爬起来就势蹲着，这是矿工的姿势，“不过肯定没什么明显的断裂。”

克利福德又发动了马达，然后挂上了挡，可车子就是不动。

“加大油门，这样——”那看守建议道。

克利福德不喜欢别人打扰，不过他还是弄得马达像蓝色大苍蝇一样嗡嗡作响。随后车子喘着，吼着，情况似乎好转了。

“听上去行了。”梅勒斯说。

可是克利福德已经猛然挂上了挡，车子病殃殃地摇晃了一下，随后向前蠕动起来。

“我要是推一把，就走起来了。”那看守在后面说。

“走开！”克利福德喝住他，“它自己能走。”

“可是克利福德，”康妮在一边插嘴道，“你明明知道车子不行，为什么还那么固执呢？”

克利福德气得脸都白了。他用力扒拉着控制杆，轮椅拱了一下，摇晃着前进了几步，就在一片十分茂盛的风铃花丛中停了下来。

“它完了！”看守说，“马力不足。”

“以前上去过。”克利福德冷冷地说。

“可这回它不行了。”看守说。

克利福德没说话，开始折腾马达，忽快忽慢，似乎是要让它演奏出曲子来。林子里发出奇怪的回声。然后他猛然挂挡，把控制杆弄脱了位。

“你非把它弄散架不可。”那看守小声嘀咕着。

说话间那轮椅就发疯般地朝路边的沟里冲过去。

“克利福德！”康妮叫着冲上来。

那看守一把拉住轮椅扶手，可是克利福德却竭尽全力要将轮椅开上车道。那轮椅发出奇怪的响声，挣扎着。梅勒斯在后面稳稳地推着轮椅，轮椅上去了，像是重新振作起来似的。

“你看它行了！”克利福德得意地说，可一转头看到了看守在身后。

“是你在推吗？”

“不推不行。”

“让它自己走，我让你不要推。”

“可它自己走不动。”

“让它试试呀！”克利福德一字一顿地吼道。

那看守退回去，转身去取外衣和枪。那轮椅似乎立即就瘫痪在原地，一动不动。克利福德坐在轮椅里像个犯人，气得脸都白了。他用手猛推控制杆，因为他的脚动弹不得，弄得轮椅发出奇怪的声音。他疯狂烦躁地把小手柄扒拉来扒拉去，弄出了更多杂音，可轮椅纹丝不动，就是不动。于是他停了发动机，气哼哼地僵坐着。

康斯坦丝坐在路边的土坎上，看着那些被碾坏的风铃花，耳边响着克利福德刚才的话。“还有什么能比英国的春天更美呢？”“为统治尽我的一份责任。”“我们现在需要拿起的是鞭子，而不是剑戟。”“统治阶级！”

那看守拿了外衣和枪大步赶上来，弗洛西小心地跟在后面。克利福德让那人摆弄摆弄发动机。康妮对发动机技术上的事一窍不通，但她经历过发动机的瘫痪，便耐心地坐在土坎上，似乎与这一切无关。那看守又一次趴在地上了。这就是统治阶级和被统治阶级！

他站起来耐心地说：

“再试试吧。”

他说话的语气很平和，几乎像在哄孩子。

克利福德试着发动马达，梅勒斯马上走到后面去开始推。轮椅动了，几乎是一半靠机器，一半靠人推。

克利福德四下里张望着，脸气得发黄。

“你松手！”

那看守立即松了手，克利福德又说：“我怎么知道这东西怎么回事！”

那人把枪放下，开始穿他的外套了，他的事完了。

那轮椅开始缓缓地向后滑动。

“克利福德，刹车呀！”康妮喊道。

康妮、梅勒斯和克利福德立即行动了起来，康妮和看守轻轻地撞上了。轮椅停住了，随后是一阵死静。

“看来谁都在控制我！”克利福德说，脸气得蜡黄。

没人搭理他。梅勒斯把枪挎上肩，神色怪异，但脸上却没表情，只有茫然的耐心模样。弗洛西充满警觉，在主人两腿之间不安地晃动着，看着轮椅露出怀疑和厌恶的表情，在三个人之间显得困惑不解。这三人在碾得稀烂的蓝风铃花丛里静止不动，谁都不语，如同一幅活人画像。

“我想这车需要推。”克利福德终于说话了，但还故作镇静。

没人回答。梅勒斯一脸的茫然，似乎他什么都没听见。康妮焦虑地瞟他一眼，克利福德则四下里张望着。

“把车推回去行吗，梅勒斯？”他冷漠、傲慢地说，“但愿我没说什么伤害你的话。”他不情愿地补了一句。

“没有的事，克利福德男爵！是要我推轮椅吗？”

“那就劳你驾了。”

那人上去推车，但这回却推不动了，刹车被草绞住了。他们连推带拉，那看守再次放下枪，脱了外衣。现在克利福德一言不发了。最终，那看守顶起椅背把轮椅抬离了地面，同时一脚踹在车轮上想让轮子松开，但是不行，轮椅又陷了下去。克利福德紧抓住轮椅的两边，那看守让这重量压得气喘吁吁。

“别弄了！”康妮对那人说。

“你能那样拉一下轮子吗？”他冲她示范着。

“别！你别抬它，别扭伤自己。”她说着，脸气得通红。

但他凝视着她的眼睛点了点头，她还是得过去抓住轮子做好准备。他顶，她拉，于是轮椅晃动起来。

“天啊！”克利福德惊恐地叫起来。

但这下好了，刹车松开了。看守把一块石头垫在轮子下面，坐到土坎上去歇息，这一通折腾，让他心跳加快、脸色苍白、有点发晕。康妮看着他，生气地几乎要叫出声来。一时间大家都沉默不语。她看到他的手在大腿上颤抖着。

“伤着自己了吗？”说着她走过去。

“没，没有！”他有点生气地转过身去。

一阵死寂。克利福德金黄的头发纹丝不动，甚至那条狗也站着一动不动。天上乌云密布。

还是他先叹口气，用红手帕擤擤鼻子，说：

“肺炎让我大伤了元气。”

没人应声。康妮在掐算着要费多大力气才能抬起那个轮椅和大块头的克利福德：太沉了，简直是太沉了！那人肯定力气非凡，真的。这活儿居然没有累垮他。

他站起身，捡起外套，把衣服搭在轮椅把手上。

“准备好了吗，克利福德男爵？”

“就等你了！”

他弯下腰，搬开挡车轮的石块，然后全力顶住轮椅。这时康妮发现他的脸色比以往任何时候都更苍白，神情更茫然。克利福德沉着呢，山坡又陡。于是康妮过去站到看守身边，说：

“我也推！”

她开始使出一个女人愤怒时的蛮劲儿推起来，轮椅因此走得快多了。克利福德回头问：

“有那个必要吗？”

“太有了！你想累死这个人吗？要是马达还行，就发动——”

但没说完她已经开始喘了，不得不松懈一点，这活儿出人意料地艰辛。

“好，慢些儿！”她旁边的男人说，目光中露出一丝儿笑意来。

“你肯定刚才没伤着自己吗？”她气愤地问。

他摇摇头。她看着他那双短小但有生气的手，晒得黝黑。就是这双手抚摸过她，可她以前竟没有看过这双手。那手似乎很沉稳，就像他这个人一样，有一种内在的沉稳，让她想去抓它，好像她够不到它似的。她整个灵魂突然间倒向了他，他是那么沉默，那么可望而不可及！而此时他感到自己的四肢在苏醒。于是他用左手推着车，右手放到康妮那浑圆的白生生的手腕上，轻轻地握住她的手腕，抚摸起来。随之，一股火力顺他的脊梁而下，直到腰腹间，令他活力倍增。康妮一边喘着一边突然伏下身吻了他的手。而此时克利福德头发光滑的后脑勺正一动不动地挺在他们眼皮子底下。

到了山顶，他们停下来休息，康妮也乐得放松一下。她曾经暗自希望这两个男人会成为朋友，一个是她的丈夫，另一个是她孩子的父亲。可现在她明白这幻想荒唐至极，这两个男人简直是水火不相容，他们互相排斥。这让她第一次明白，仇恨是很奇怪微妙的事情。她现在是第一次有意识地绝对地恨克利福德了，恨到了极点，似乎觉得他应该被从地球上清除出去。恨他并且自己全然承认这份仇恨，这让她感到十分放松，充满了活力，这真奇怪。“既然我恨他，那就决不跟他一起生活了。”她于是有了这样的想法。

到了平地上，看守可以独自推车了。克利福德和康妮拉起话来，想以此表示自己的镇定。他谈起住在迪耶普的伊娃姨妈，谈起马尔科姆爵士，他来信问康妮是愿意和他一起开小轿车去威尼斯还是和希尔达一起坐火车去。

“我更愿意坐火车去，”康妮说，“我不喜欢长途开车，特别是遇上尘土飞扬的路段。不过我要等希尔达的意见。”

“她肯定要驾自己的车，还要带上你。”克利福德说。

“很有可能！我得帮把手了，你不知道这轮椅有多沉。”

她走到轮椅后面去，和那看守并肩跋涉在粉红色的砂岩路上。她才不在乎别人看到呢。

“要不等等菲尔德来？他力气大，让他推车。”克利福德说。

“马上就到了。”康妮喘着气说。

话虽这么说，但到家后她和梅勒斯都擦起脸上的汗来。这有点奇怪，但这次并肩推车让他们两人比以前亲密多了。

“多谢了，梅勒斯，”到家门口时克利福德说，“我得换台马达，问题就全解决了。到厨房去吃饭吧？肯定到吃饭的时间了。”

“谢谢，克利福德男爵。我今天得去我母亲那里吃饭，今天是礼拜天。”

“随你便吧。”

梅勒斯穿上外套，看看康妮，敬个礼就走了。康妮气哼哼地上楼去了。

吃午饭时她忍无可忍了，冲克利福德说：“克利福德，你怎么那么不体谅人呢？”

“体谅谁？”

“那看守！如果你认为这就是统治阶级的行为，我真替你难过。”

“为什么？”

“他是个得过病的人，并不强壮！爱信不信，如果我是伺候你的人，就会让你等着，吹哨子叫人来。”

“我相信你会这样。”

“如果换了他双腿瘫痪坐在轮椅里，行为也像你一样，你会怎么对待他？”

“我亲爱的福音传道士，如此混淆人与人、人格与人格太庸俗了。”

“可你缺少基本的同情心，那么恶心，才最庸俗。位高者须尽义务！你，还有你的统治阶级！”

“我该尽什么义务？对我的猎场看守动感情吗？没那个必要，我不会，还是让我的福音传道士去做这样的事吧。”

“我听出来了，你的意思是他不是和你一样的人！”

“他不过是我的猎场看守。再说了，我每周付给他两镑，还给他一栋房子住。”

“付他钱！你以为你一周两镑和一栋房子买来的是什么？”

“他的服务啊。”

“哼！要我说你还是收起你的每周两镑和房子吧。”

“他或许也想这么说，可他没那本事！”

“你，统治！”她说，“你并不是在统治，还是少夸你自己吧。你不过是获得了不该获得的金钱，用一周两镑的价钱迫使别人替你干活儿，否则就用饿死来威胁他们。统治！你凭什么统治呀？你干枯了！你不过是靠你的金钱欺压别人！”

“你果然言谈高雅，查泰莱男爵夫人！”

“还是让我来告诉你吧，刚才在林子里你才高雅呢，我简直为你脸红。我父亲可是比你仁义十倍，你这个绅士！”

他伸手去揿铃叫博尔顿太太来。这时他脸都黄了。

她怒气冲冲地上楼去到自己的房间，心里说：“让他买别人去吧！反正他没有买我，我也就没必要跟他在一起了。一个干枯的绅士，灵魂是假象牙做的！他们就是靠他们的外在风度和虚假的绅士气质欺骗别人的。可他们和假象牙一样没有感情。”

她做好了今晚的打算，决意要忘了克利福德。她并不想恨他。她不想在感情上跟他有什么纠葛。她想让他对自己一无所知，特别是毫不了解她对那猎场看守的感情。为她对下人的态度发生争吵是由来已久的事了，他对她的态度太熟悉了，而她则觉得他过于麻木、强横，一到别人的问题上就不通情理。

她平静地下楼来，在餐桌上依旧摆出一副不驯的架势。他仍然脸色发黄，是肝病又犯了，看上去模样古怪，他在读一本法文书。

“可读过普鲁斯特？”他问她。

“我试图读过，可他让我厌烦。”

“他的确是出类拔萃。”

“或许是吧！可他令我厌烦，太繁复琐碎了！他没有感情，只有关于感情的连篇累牍。那种妄自尊大的心性令我厌倦。”

“那就是说你喜欢妄自尊大的兽性
⑦

喽？”

“或许是吧！可兽性里或许还有那么点不是妄自尊大的东西呢。”

“算了，反正我是喜欢普鲁斯特作品里的微妙和教养良好的桀骜不驯。”

“就是这个让你变得死气沉沉，真的。”

“我的小夫人又像个传道士一样说话了。”

他们总在翻来覆去地争吵！可她就是忍不住要跟他斗。他坐在那儿就像一具骷髅，用骷髅的冰冷意志与她作对。她几乎能感到这骷髅在抓住她，要把她强压进那一条条肋骨组成的笼子里去。他也的确是武装到牙齿的，因此她还是有点怕他。

她伺机离开了克利福德，很早就上床了。可九点半她就起来了，到屋外去听动静。什么声音也没有。她穿上一件睡袍就下了楼。克利福德和博尔顿太太在赌牌，他们或许会一直玩到午夜时分。

她回到自己房间里，把睡袍甩在纷乱的床上，换上一件薄薄的睡衣，外面罩上一件毛线衣，穿上她的胶底网球鞋，再套上一件轻便的外套，就准备就绪了。如果谁看到她，她就说出去走走。早晨回来时，就说出去踏露了，她经常在早餐前出去散步。除此之外，唯一的危险是有人会在夜里进她的卧室。不过一般不会有人来，也就是万一的事。

贝茨还没有锁门。他往往在晚上十点锁宅门，早晨七点开门。于是她悄悄溜了出去，没人发现。天上亮着半个月亮，光线足够辨认道路，但看不清穿深灰衣服的她的身影。她快步穿过邸园，没有因为幽会而感到兴奋，而是心头燃烧着怒火和反抗之火。这种心情并不适于爱情幽会，只是苦中作乐而已！

注　释

①
在《斐多篇》第九章里柏拉图将人的灵魂比作马车夫，赶着一黑一白两匹长翅膀的马，一个代表恶，一个代表善。

②
见《路加福音》第十八章，第二十二节，基督告诫富人：“变卖你的所有，分给穷人，你在天国就会有财富。”圣芳济（1182—1226），意大利僧侣，创建芳济会，他放弃了财富和家庭，过贫穷的生活。

③
尼禄，罗马皇帝，暴君。

④
克利福德用拉丁文说这句话。

⑤
参见Robert Bridge（1844—1930）的《过客》中类似的诗句。

⑥
参见惠特曼《船长》。——译者注

⑦
克利福德是在玩弄辞藻。康妮讲的心性是“mentalities”，克利福德讲的兽性是“animalities”，后缀都一样，但前者的词头“men”是“人”，所以克利福德用“兽”来与此对仗。——译者注

第十四章

还没到园门口，就听到门闩响了。原来他守在那儿，在黑暗中看到了她！

“这么早就来啦，你真好，”他在黑暗中说，“还顺利吧？”

“太顺了。”

他在她身后轻轻地关上了园门，打着手电筒为她照路。微弱的灯光照在黑暗的车道上，借着灯光能看到那些白花在夜间还绽放着。他们分开走着，沉默不语。

“你肯定上午推轮椅时没伤着自己吗？”她问。

“没有的事儿。”

“患了肺炎有什么后遗症吗？”

“哦，没什么！就是心力不够足，肺活量不够大。得了肺炎的人大都这样儿。”

“就是说你不应该使猛劲儿了？”

“不能经常那么卖力气。”

她沉默着，气哼哼地走着路。

“你恨克利福德吗？”她终于说。

“恨他，才不呢！他那样的人我见多了，我才不自己找气生呢。我事先就明白不能跟他这种人较劲，所以就随他去了。”

“他那种人是什么人？”

“嗨，你比我清楚啊。就是那种年轻的绅士，有点女气，没蛋子儿。”

“什么蛋子？”

“蛋子儿，男人的蛋子儿！”

她在琢磨这个词。

“是那个原因吗？”她有点恼怒地问。

“你说一个男人傻时，就说他没脑子。说他毒时，就说他没心肝。说他
时，就说他没胆量。要说他没有男人的野性勇气，就说他没蛋子儿，也就是说他驯服了。”

她思忖片刻问：“克利福德也驯服了吗？”

“驯服了，而且令人厌恶，你一反抗他，他就那样，像大多数他那类人一样。”

“你以为你就没被驯服吗？”

“或许还没那么严重！”

这时她发现远处有暗黄的灯光，便停住了脚步。

“有灯光。”她说。

“我出来后屋里没熄灯。”他说。

她又走在他身边了，但没挨上他，说不上为什么要跟他一起走。

他开了锁，他们进了屋，他随后插上门。她觉得这像监狱似的！炉子上的水壶“嘎啦嘎啦”地响着，桌子上摆着杯子。

她在炉火边的木头扶手椅上坐下，从寒冷的外面进来这里，她感到十分温暖。

“我得脱了我的鞋，都湿了。”她说。

她坐在椅子里，穿着长筒袜的脚跷在亮晶晶的炉前铁栅栏上烤火。他到食品间去取来吃的，有面包、黄油和牛舌干。她热得脱了外套，他接过去挂在门上。

“你是要喝可可、茶，还是咖啡？”他问道。

“我什么也不要，”她看着桌子说，“不过你吃你的呀。”

“算了，我倒不想吃什么。我该喂狗了。”

他不声不响地在砖墁地上踱着步，把狗食放进一只棕色的碗里。那长毛狗朝上看看他，显得神情焦虑。

“来，这是你的晚饭，不要那副鬼样子！”他说。

他把碗放在楼梯口的垫子上，自己坐在墙根下的椅子上开始松护腿，脱靴子。那狗不吃东西，又来到他身边，蹲下抬头看着他，露出迷惑不解的眼神。

梅勒斯慢慢揭开护腿，那狗就向前凑凑。

“你怎么了呀？是因为屋里有个生人不习惯吧？真是个姑娘，姑娘！去吃你的晚饭。”

他的手放在狗的头上，那狗就势把头靠在他身上，他则慢慢地揪起它柔滑的长耳朵。

“去吧！”他说，“去吃你的饭，去呀！”

说着他抬起下颌朝毯子上的碗示意一下，那狗就老老实实地过去，蹲下吃起来。

“你喜欢狗吗？”康妮问。

“不，不太喜欢。狗太驯服，太缠人。”

他脱了护腿，又开始脱沉重的靴子。康妮转过身背对着火炉看着房子，觉得它太空旷了！可在他头顶上方的墙上却挂着一幅放大的年轻夫妇的照片，很明显，照片上是他和一个面相蛮横的年轻女人，毫无疑问是他老婆。康妮讨厌这照片。

“那是你吗？”康妮问。

他转过身去看头顶上方那张放大的照片。

“对呀！就在结婚前照的，那会儿我二十一岁。”他毫无表情地看着那照片说。

“喜欢这照片吗？”

“喜欢？不！从来就没喜欢过这玩意儿。是她张罗着照的，就那么把事儿办了，就像——”

说着他又接着脱靴子。

“既然不喜欢，为什么还要让它挂在那儿？或许你妻子想要带走它呢。”

他看看她，突然咧嘴笑了，说：

“她把值钱的东西都装上马车拉走了，就留下了这东西没拿。”

“那你为什么留着它，是因为伤感吗？”

“不，我从来都不看它，几乎都意识不到它挂在那儿，我们一来到这座房子时就挂上去了——”

“那你为什么不烧了它？”她问。

他又转过头去看看那大照片。照片镶在一个涂了金粉的棕色框里，模样颇为不雅。照片上的梅勒斯，胡须刮得干干净净，目光敏锐，还是个稚嫩的小青年儿，穿着一件高领衫。他身边那个刚毅的年轻女人身材有点臃肿，卷发蓬松，身穿一件宽松的缎面外套。

“这主意听上去不错，对吗？”他说。

他脱了靴子，换上拖鞋，站到椅子上，摘下了那幅照片，淡绿色的墙纸上露出一大块浅色印子来。

“没必要掸上面的土了。”说着他把相框靠在墙上。

随后他到洗涤间去拿来锤子和钳子。他坐回原地，开始撕掉相框背面的纸，拔去固定背面衬板的秋皮钉儿。他干起活来总是立即投入，专心致志。

他很快就把钉子都拔了出来，取出背面的衬板，然后又取出贴在硬白纸板上的放大照片。他发噱地看着那照片说：

“我那时就这样，像个小牧师，她也是这样，像个悍妇。一个学究儿，一个悍妇！”

“给我看看！”康妮说。

他看上去真是面容整洁，整个儿干干净净的一个人，是二十年前那种脸面修得干干净净的小伙子。但即使是在照片上，他的目光也是机警不驯的。而那女人也并非那么蛮横，尽管她下颚很重，但容貌还算有动人之处的。

“这种东西可留不得，”康妮说，“就不该留！压根不该照！”

他在膝盖上把照片撕开，弄碎后把碎片扔进火里。

“弄不好会把火给闷灭了。”他说。

然后他小心地收拾起玻璃和衬板，把它们拿上楼。那镜框让他几锤子就砸碎了，弄得石膏粉末乱溅。砸完了，他把垃圾收拾起来端进了洗涤间。

“明天再烧那些东西，”他说，“上面有太多的石膏。”

扫干净了地面，他坐了下来。

“你爱过你妻子吗？”她问。

“爱？”他问，“你爱过克利福德男爵吗？”

但康妮不理会他的话，坚持问他：

“可是你关心她？”

“关心？”他笑笑。

“也许你现在都关心她呢。”她说。

“我？”他睁大了眼睛，“哦，不，一想到她我就无法忍受。”他沉静地说。

“为什么？”

他只是摇摇头，不作答。

“那你为什么不离婚呢？否则她总有一天会回来找你。”康妮说。

他目光敏锐地看看她，说：

“她不会跟我同在一英里以内的。她恨我比我恨她还厉害呢。”

“她会回来找你的，不信拉倒。”

“她绝不会的。我们之间早完了！看见她我就恶心。”

“可你还会看见她的。你们的分居是没有法律依据的，对吗？”

“是的。”

“那不得了，她会回来，你得接受她。”

他凝视着康妮，然后奇怪地使劲儿摇头，道：

“你说得也许对。我回这地方来就够愚蠢的。可我那时正没出路，总得找个地方。一个男人四处漂泊，简直就像个败家子儿。不过你说得对，我得离婚，离了就算了了。我恨透了那些当官的、法庭和法官什么的，可我得硬着头皮对付他们。我是得离婚。”

她发现他咬紧了牙关，心里不禁暗自得意。“我想喝杯淡茶。”她说。他站起身去沏茶，但脸还阴沉着。他们在桌边坐下，她问他：

“你为什么要娶她？她不如你，博尔顿太太跟我讲起过她，博尔顿太太就说她怎么也不明白你怎么会娶她。”

他盯着她，说：

“我跟你说了吧，我是在十六岁时交往了第一个女孩子。她是个校长的女儿，学校在奥勒顿那边。那女孩子长得俊俏，是真漂亮。而我也算得上设菲尔德中学毕业的聪明孩子了，会点儿法文和德文，十分清高。她是个浪漫的姑娘，痛恨平庸。是她鼓励我学诗读书的，可以说是她让我成熟了。我玩命地读啊读，苦思冥想，都是为了她。那时我在巴特莱事务所当职员，苍白瘦弱，读那些东西令我七窍生烟。我跟她无所不谈，什么都说。我们谈波斯波利斯
①

，还谈廷巴克图
②

。我们算是周围十里八乡最有文学修养的一对儿了。我狂热地大谈特谈，真的算是狂热，简直是忘我。而她则崇拜我。可坏事的就是性。她就是一点感觉也没有，至少是感觉错位了。我为此消瘦了，疯狂了。我终于对她说咱们非当情人不可了。像往常一样，我说服了她，她顺从了。我挺兴奋，可她从来就不想要这个，就是不想。她崇拜我，喜欢我跟她聊天，亲她，如果说她爱我，仅仅如此。可别的，她根本就不想。不少女人都像她那样。可我偏偏想的是那个‘别的’。于是我们分手了。我挺残酷，离开了她。然后我又和另一个女孩子好上了，她是个教师，曾跟一个有妇之夫闹出丑闻，几乎把那人逼疯。她温柔，皮肤白皙，属于柔弱型的那类女人，比我岁数大，会拉小提琴。她可真是个魔鬼。对爱情，她什么都喜欢，就是不喜欢性。她对你缠绵、爱抚、讨好，可如果你强迫她做那事，她就咬牙切齿，仇视你。我强迫她做，为这事她恨透了我。于是我又失望了。我讨厌了那一切。我想找一个既要我又要‘那个’的女人。

“下一个女人是伯莎·库茨。小时候她们家就住我家隔壁，我对她们家很了解，是个普通人家儿。后来伯莎去了伯明翰的什么地方，据她自己说是去陪伴一个贵夫人，可别人都说她是在一家旅馆当招待。反正就在那个时候，我正烦了那个女孩子。我二十一岁时，伯莎回来了，神气活现，举止优雅，衣着入时，浑身魅力四射，那是一种身体的魅力，有时你从女人身上能看出来，有时妓女身上也有这种魅力。我正处在半疯状态中，一气之下就辞了巴特莱事务所的活儿，因为我觉得在那儿当职员形同草芥。就这样我回到了特瓦萧，在矿井口的马厩里干上了铁匠，主要是给马打铁掌儿。我父亲就是干这个的，我一直跟着他干。我喜欢这活儿，跟马打交道，所以很自然就干上了这一行。从此我言谈就不像人们说的那样‘斯文’了，就是不说标准的英语，而是回到了土话上去。我还读书，但是在家里读。靠打铁，我自己挣了一辆双轮马车，神气活现起来。我爹死后给我留下了三百镑。我就这么跟伯莎好上了，我很高兴她是个普通人儿，我就是要她是个普通人，我自己也要当个普通人儿。我娶了她，她不错。别的‘纯洁’女人让我没了蛋子儿，可她在那方面就挺好的。她要我，一点都不忸怩，这让我很得意。那正是我想要的，一个让我疼的女人。我和她一起特来劲。我觉得她为此有点看不起我，因为我太满足了，有时还伺候她在床上吃早饭。她是个混日子的人，我下了班回来她连像样的晚饭都不做，要是我说句什么，她就冲我发火。我也还击她，唇枪舌剑。她冲我扔茶杯，我就按住她的脖子，掐得她喘不过气来。这叫什么事呀！可是她对我傲慢无理起来，后来干脆我一要她她就不干，再也不了。她总是粗野地拒绝我，要多粗野有多粗野。她把我轰开了，我不想要她了吧，她又会情意绵绵地来缠我，引我上钩。我总是顺着她。可一干起来，她从来也不和我一起达到高潮，从来不！她故意拖着。如果我拖半个钟点，她就拖得更长。可等我达到高潮，彻底结束了，她就开始自己动作，我得待在她里面，等她又扭又叫地宣泄自己，到满意为止。她会在下面收紧，收紧，再收紧，然后自己达到高潮，她会异常兴奋，还说：‘太妙了！’渐渐地，我厌倦了这个，她却越发恶劣起来。她越来越不容易达到高潮，所以就在下面撕扯我，像鸟儿的尖嘴一样撕扯我。天啊，你别以为那是一个女人像朵无花果一样柔软地躺在你身下。告诉你吧，那些老疯子两腿之间都有尖嘴，她们撕扯你，直到你厌恶为止。自己！自己！自己！只有自己！撕扯！呼号！自己！自己！人们总说男人在性事上是自私的，可我怀疑男人的自私怎么也比不过女人这种盲目的撕扯。一旦她变成这样，那模样就像一个老妓女！她无法控制自己。我对她说过，说我恨透了她这样。她甚至试过，试着安静地躺着让我做。她想试着那样，可不行。我做，她就没有感觉，她一定得自己做，磨她自己的咖啡。这一来，她又得开始那一套了。她非得放纵自己，撕扯，撕扯，撕扯，似乎她除了尖嘴，别处就没了感觉，也只是在最尖端的地方，摩擦和撕扯才有感觉。人们都说老妓女们都是这样的。这是一种低级的自我意志，疯狂的自我意志，就像酗酒一样。算了，我终于无法忍受了，我们分开睡了。是她先这么做的，她发起火来，说我压制她，就跟我两清了。她开始单住一间屋。后来我干脆就拒绝她进我的屋。我不干了！

“我讨厌这个。她也讨厌我。天啊，孩子出生前，她简直恨死我了！我常想这孩子是在恨中得的。孩子出生后，我就不理她了。后来战争爆发了，我参了军。回来后才知道她跟了斯戴克斯门那家伙。”

他不说了，脸色煞白。

“斯戴克斯门那个人是个什么样的人？”康妮问。

“一个大男孩，谈吐十分粗俗，她欺负他，两人都喝酒。”

“要是她回来可怎么办呢？”

“上帝！那我就走，再次消失呗。”

他们又沉默了，火中的纸板已经化成了灰烬。

“所以，当你得到了一个爱你的女人，”康妮说，“不久你就觉得腻了。”

“对！似乎是这样！但我宁愿要这个女人，也不要那些总说‘不’的女人，一个是年轻时苍白的女人，一个是有毒的百合，还有其他别的什么女人。”

“其他的女人怎么了？”

“其他？没有其他。凭我的经验，大多数女人往往都这样：她们要一个男人，但不要性，可她们又忍耐着，因为那是交易的一部分。更老派的女人干脆就毫无感知地躺着，任凭你一往直前。过后她们也不介意，照样喜欢你。可这东西本身对她们来说无所谓，还有点无聊。而且大多数男人也喜欢这样。可我讨厌这个。狡猾点的女人则表面上装作自己不是那样的人。她们假装有激情，假装受用，其实是自欺欺人罢了，她们在装假。还有什么都爱的那种人，喜爱抚摸、拥抱、宣泄，什么都喜欢，就是不喜欢自然的那一种。她们总是让你在不该享受的地方享受。还有就是最麻烦的那一类人，伴着她们简直是伴魔鬼，她们就像我老婆那样自己宣泄。她们想成为主动的一方。再有一类人，她们体内简直就像死了的，她们自己都知道这一点。另一类人则是在你还没高潮时就把你挤出来，然后自己扭动腰臀，贴着你的腿宣泄——”

“你厌恶她们，是吗？”康妮问。

“我恨不得杀了她们。如果和这样的女人在一起，我的灵魂会嚎叫，想杀了她。”

“你采取行动了吗？”

“赶紧走开。”

他看上去脸色苍白，眉头紧锁。

“我来了，你后悔吗？”她问。

“后悔，但我高兴。”

“现在呢？”

“一想到外界的事，我就悔不当初。早晚会招来麻烦，闹出丑闻，让人们辱骂。一想到这个，我就心寒、丧气。可我也有热血沸腾的时候，那个时候我开心，甚至扬扬得意。我是越来越失望了。我觉得这世上压根就没剩下什么真正的性了，没有女人能和男人一起自然地达到高潮。”

“那现在你有了我，高兴吗？”

“当然！有你我就能忘记一切别的。无法忘记时，我恨不得钻到桌子底下死了算了。”

“为什么要钻到桌子下面？”

“为什么？”他笑了，“藏起来呗，像个孩子。”

“你似乎确实和女人处得很差。”她说。

“你看，我骗不了自己。大多数男人都自欺欺人。他们抱定一种观念，然后就对谎言听之任之。我就不能骗自己。我知道我想和女人一起做什么，没有得到我绝不会说得到了。”

“那你现在得到了吗？”

“看上去我或许能。”

“那你还那么苍白阴郁。”

“满脑子都是过去的事儿，还有，或许是害怕自己吧。”

她默默地坐着，夜深了。

“你真的认为这很重要吗，一个男人和一个女人？”她问他。

“反正我觉得是。在我，和一个女人处得好，那是我生活里的主心骨儿。”

“要是处不好呢？”

“那我就自己活呗。”

她又思忖片刻才问：“你觉得你一直都做得对吗，对女人？”

“天啊，不！我老婆变成那样，都怨我，我过错大了去了。是我惯的她。而且，我是个特别多疑的人。你等着瞧吧。让我从心里相信某个人可不容易。所以，或许我也是个骗子。我多疑。而温柔是无法装出来的。”

她看着他。

“当你热血沸腾的时候，你并不怀疑你的肉体，”她说，“你没怀疑，对吗？”

“不！正因此，我才惹了这么多麻烦。也正因此，我的心才疑神疑鬼的。”

“让你的心疑去吧，那有什么关系？”

那狗在垫子上发出不舒服的叹息声。炉子里的火让灰盖着，火苗弱了下去。

“咱们是一对儿被打垮的士兵。”康妮说。

“你也被打垮了吗？”梅勒斯笑道，“我们这就再次上战场！”

“好啊！不过我真害怕呀。”

“嗨！”

他站起来，把康妮的鞋拿到火边上去烘干，也擦了擦自己的鞋，然后放在火边上。明天一早他会给鞋上油。他把火里的灰都扒拉开，一边扒拉一边说：“这东西烧了它它还是那么肮脏。”然后他拿来些树枝子放在炉边的铁架上准备明天早上烧，之后就带上狗出去遛遛。

他回来时，康妮说：“我也想出去走会儿。”

她独自走进外面的黑暗中。天上星光点点，她能嗅到夜空中的花香，还感到潮湿的鞋更潮了。但她感到自己是在离开，离开他，也离开所有的人。

天气很冷，她打个寒颤，回到了屋里。这时他正在微弱的炉火前坐着。

“嘘，好冷！”她战栗着说。

他给火加了树枝，又找来更多的树枝添上，直到炉子里的火“噼啪噼啪”地烧得旺起来。那腾腾的黄色火焰温暖了他们的脸，也温暖了他们的心，令他们快活起来。

“别在意！”说着她拉过他的手，他默默地与她保持距离坐着，“尽力而为吧。”

“唉！”他叹口气，苦笑一下。

她朝他蹭过去，投入了他的怀抱，他就坐在炉火前。

“忘记吧！”她呢喃着，“忘记！”

他搂紧了她，双双沐浴在火光中。那火光本身就在忘却着什么。她是那么柔顺、温暖、成熟！抱着这个女人的身体，他的血流变了，开始汹涌起来，为他增添了力量和大无畏的勇气。

“或许，那些女人真是想好好地爱你，或许她们是不会吧。也许那不都是她们的过错。”她说。

“我懂。你以为我不知道让人折腾够了、成了一条断了脊梁骨的蛇是什么滋味吗？”

听了这话，她立即贴近他。她并不想再次说起这些，可某种变态心理偏偏让她这么说了。

“可你现在不是那个样子呀，”她说，“你不是一条任人折腾、断了脊梁骨的蛇！”

“我不知道我是什么，反正我知道倒霉的日子在等着我呢。”

“不会！”说着她贴紧他，“为什么？为什么？”

“倒霉的日子就要到来，我们大家每个人都要倒霉。”他重复着，发出阴郁的预言。

“别，别这样说！”

他沉默了，但康妮能感到他内心深处失望的黑暗空间，那里所有的欲望都死了，所有的爱都死了。这种失望对于男人们来说就像心中有一孔黑暗的洞穴，他们的灵魂失落了。

“你居然能那么冷静地谈论性，”她说，“听起来你只想自己的愉悦和满足。”

她说这番反驳他的话时内心不免有些紧张。

“不是！”他说，“我是想得到女人的快感和满足，可我从来没有得到过，因为如果她不能得到我的快感和满足，我就永远也得不到她的，双方应该是同时的。可这从来就没有过，这需要双方感觉都好才行。”

“可你从来没有相信过你的女人，你从来没有真正相信过我。”她说。

“我不知道相信一个女人意味着什么。”

“你看，我说什么来着！”

她依旧蜷缩在他的膝上。可他精神状态不佳，心不在焉，心思不在她身上，而她说的每句话都让他更加恍惚。

“可你都相信些什么呢？”她追问道。

“我不知道。”

“什么都不信，我认识的男人都这样。”她说。

他们双方都沉默了。随后他又打起精神说：

“不，我其实还是相信点什么的。我相信温暖的心。我特别相信恋爱时心要热，做那事时心要热。我相信，如果男人能怀着一颗热心去主动，女人也满腔热情地接受，一切问题就迎刃而解了。冷漠的欢爱导致死亡和愚昧。”

“你不是冷漠地对我吧？”她问。

“我根本就不想对你怎样。现在我的心跟冰冷的土豆似的。”

“行了！”她说着嗔怪地亲亲他，“那就把你那凉土豆似的心热炒一下吧。”

他笑了，挺直了腰，说：“这是真的！什么都需要温暖。可那几个女人并不喜欢这样，甚至你也不怎么喜欢这样。你喜欢的欢爱是要受用，要有劲儿，要有穿透力，但要冷漠，然后你假装这样很甜美。你对我的柔情在哪儿？你怀疑我，就像猫怀疑狗。我告诉你吧，要温柔，要热心，这是双方的事。你喜欢欢爱，这不错，可你却把它当成件什么了不起的神秘事儿，就是想通过这个显得自己不得了。对你来说，你自己的自尊自大比什么都重要，比任何男人，或者说比跟男人在一起，都重要五十倍。”

“可那正是我要说你的话，你的自尊自大才是比天还大的。”

“行！那好！”他激动地差点站起来，“那就分开试试。我就是死也不玩那种冷漠的欢爱把戏了。

康妮立即从他怀里滑出来，他也站了起来。

“你以为是我要这个的吗？”

“我倒巴不得你不想呢，”他说，“再说吧，你去床上睡，我就睡楼下了。”

她看看他，发现他脸色苍白、眉头紧锁。他离她那么远，就像寒冷的北极。男人皆如此。

“我要等到早晨才能回家。”康妮说。

“别说了！去睡吧。现在是差一刻一点。”

“我才不呢。”她说。

他立即走过去拿起自己的靴子，说：“那我就出去！”

说着他就在她注视下开始穿靴子。

“等等！”她迟疑地说，“等等！我们之间这是怎么了？”

他弯着腰系鞋带，没有回答。过了片刻，她觉得眼前发黑，感到晕旋，整个儿失去了意识，自顾大睁着两眼站在那里莫名其妙地看着他，毫无知觉了。

这沉默令他抬起头来朝她看去，发现她大睁着眼睛、神情迷茫。似乎是被一阵风吹起，他一脚穿着鞋一脚没穿，跛着朝她走过去，一把把她抱在怀中，紧紧地把她搂向自己的身体，这一抱似乎把自己压痛了。他就这么搂着她，她就待在他怀中不动。

随后他的手盲目地向下摸着，寻找着，摸到了她衣服下面光滑温暖的地方。

“我的小姑娘！”他喃喃着，“我的小姑娘，咱别斗气了！啥时候也不斗气儿了。啊！我爱你，爱摸你。别说话！别跟我斗嘴！别！别！咱们在一块儿吧。”

她抬起头看着他，平静地说：“别烦恼，烦恼没用。你真想跟我在一起吗？”

她睁大了眼睛凝视着他的脸。他住了手，突然定住，把脸扭向一边。他全身都定住了，但没有退缩。

随之他抬起头，看着她的眼睛，脸上露出奇怪苍白的笑容来，然后情绪低落地说：“好！让我们在一起！发誓在一起。”

“是真的？”她问道，眼睛里充满了泪水。“欸，是真的！心窝子、肚肠子，还有那东西。”

他仍然低头冲她微笑着，眼睛里露着一丝嘲弄来。

她在默默地流泪。他伴她在炉前地毯上躺下，进到了她的身子里，这样总算安宁了些儿。随后他们马上就上床去了，因为屋里开始冷了下来，他们俩也疲倦了。她蜷缩到他怀里，让他搂着感到自己很是娇小。两人马上就入睡了，睡得很香，跟一个人似的。他们纹丝不动地一觉睡到日上林梢，天大亮。

他睁开眼看见亮光了。窗帘拉着。他听到外面林子里画眉鸟儿叫成了一片。今天早晨一准儿阳光明媚。现在大概五点半的光景，他每天都这个时候起床。今天他睡得太沉了！新的一天多美呀！这女人仍然蜷着身子在睡，模样娇柔可人。他的手在她身上抚摸着，她睁开蓝色好奇的眼睛，目光迷离地望着他的脸。

“你醒了？”她问。

他凝视着她的眼睛，笑笑，亲亲她。康妮一惊，突然坐了起来。

“我居然在这儿！”她说。

她环顾一下这刷得白净的小卧室、坡顶和挂着窗帘的三角窗。屋里几乎空空荡荡，只有一个刷了黄漆的小抽屉柜、一把椅子，还有就是她和他同眠的这张小小白床。

“我们居然在这里！”她低头看着他说。他躺着，看着她，手指在她单薄的睡衣下摩挲着她的胸。他温暖地平躺着时看上去既年轻又英俊，目光十分热切，而她看上去也娇嫩鲜活，如同一朵鲜花。

“我想脱了你这个！”说着他一把攥住她身上轻薄的睡衣，掀过头顶脱了下来。她光着身子坐着，胸部微微发出金黄的色泽。他喜欢摆弄她的乳房，让它们像铃铛一样轻轻摇摆。

“你也得脱了你的睡衣睡裤。”她说道。

“哦，不行！”

“行！行！”她命令道。

他脱下了他的旧棉布上衣，又开始褪下睡裤。脱掉衣裤的他，除了手、手腕、脸和脖子，浑身皮肤洁白、肌肉精细。在康妮看来，他突然又美得耀眼，就像那个下午她看见他洗澡时那样。

一抹金色的阳光照在紧闭的白窗帘上，她觉得那阳光是想进来。

“哦，拉开窗帘吧！鸟儿在叫呢，让阳光进来吧。”她说。

他溜下床去，背对着她，裸着白瘦的身子朝窗户走去，看上去有点驼背。他拉开窗帘，朝外看了一会儿。他的脊背白皙，窄小的臀精致漂亮，显出精细的男子气，黑红的后颈精细但刚强。这副细巧的身架外表不强壮，但却蕴含着内在的力量。

“你真美！”她说，“纯洁、漂亮！来呀！”说着她张开了双臂。

他不好意思转过身，因为他的裸体正兴奋着。他从地板上捡起上衣，遮着自己朝她走来。

“不嘛！”她说，仍然张着两条美丽的纤臂、垂着乳房等待着他，“让我看看你！”

他松开衬衣，静立着朝她看过来。阳光透过低矮的窗户照进一缕光线，映着他的大腿和纤瘦的小腹，那东西坚挺着，暗淡而热切，在一小撮黄中透红亮的闪闪的毛丛中耸立着。这景象让她又惊又怕。

“好奇怪啊！”她缓缓地说，“它怎么挺在那儿？那么大，那么黑，那么自信！不是吗？”

男人垂首看看自己精瘦白皙的前身，笑笑。他纤小的胸肌之间胸毛暗淡，几乎发黑。可小腹下方，粗壮的物件儿躬身挺起的地方，那片毛发金黄中透红，微微发亮。

“它怎么那么骄傲！”她不安地喃喃着，“那么威风！现在我算知道男人们为什么那么专横了！不过这东西挺可爱，真的，就像另一条生命！有点吓人，但确实可爱！它找我来了——”她咬着下唇，既怕又兴奋。

男人低头默默地看着那紧张的东西，它还是那模样。“啊！”他终于小声说，“我的孩子，你在那儿挺好的。对呀，你得抬起头来！你挺自在，谁都不在乎！你一点儿也不在乎我，约翰·托马斯
③

。你是主人，我的主人吗？好啊，你比我还横，可什么也不说。约翰·托马斯，想她吗？想要我的简夫人吗？你又让我陷进去了，你呀。嘿，你抬头笑了。那就问问她，问问简夫人，说：‘打开你闸门，光荣的君王要进来。’嘿，你个没羞的东西！雌儿，你想要的就是那物件儿。告诉简夫人你想要雌儿。约翰·托马斯要简夫人的雌儿！”

“好了，你别逗它了！”说着康妮挪动两膝向他蹭过去，张开双臂搂住他白皙纤瘦的小腹，把他拉向自己。她搂紧了男人。

“躺下！”他说，“躺下！让我进去！”说着他开始犯急。

他们平静下来之后，女人要男人翻过身来，她要看看那东西有多神秘。

“这会儿它小了，软了，像有生命的蓓蕾！”说着她把那柔软的小东西握在手中，“它是不是很可爱？那么独立，那么奇特，还那么天真无邪！它能进到我很深的地方！你可千万不能亏待它，知道吗，它也是我的，并不是你一个人的，它是我的，可爱、天真！”说着她的手温柔地将它捧起。

他笑了，说：

“保佑这根纽带吧，它把我们的心连在一起，结了亲。”

“当然！”她说，“即使它小了，软了，我仍然觉得我的心让它牵着。你这里的毛发真可爱！很特别，很特别！”

“那是约翰·托马斯的毛发，不是我的！”他说。

“约翰·托马斯！约翰·托马斯！”说着她亲了那柔软的东西，它又开始热烈起来。

“啊！”男人说着有点痛苦地伸展一下他的身子，“它的根扎在我的魂里，这个绅士！有时我不知道拿它怎么办，唉，它有自己的主意，很难对付，可我决不会失去它。”

“怪不得男人们都怕它！”她说，“它是挺可怕的。”

男人的身体一阵发颤，意识的流动改变了方向，转向下面。那东西缓慢地耸动着，膨胀着，冲动着，挺起，变硬，傲慢地坚挺着，模样古怪地昂然耸立，男人管不住它。女人看着它，不禁颤抖起来。

“你看它！拿去吧，它是你的。”男人说。

她颤抖着，脑子一片空白。他进来了，一波时缓时急的浪头席卷了她，让她感到难言的欣愉。她的骨肉化了，那种奇特的出神入化的感觉一阵阵袭来，直到她被最后一股铺天盖地的浪头淹没卷走。

这时他听到了远处斯戴克斯门那边报告七点的汽笛声。这是星期一早上了。他轻轻地颤动一下，把脸埋到她胸上，堵上自己的耳朵，拒绝听那汽笛声。

她甚至都没听到那汽笛声。她十分安静地躺着，心被洗得清净透明。

“你得起来了，好不好？”他喃喃道。

“几点了？”她懒洋洋地问。

“刚才汽笛报的是七点钟。”

“看来我得起了。”

她向来反感外界的强迫。

他坐起来，茫然地看着窗外。

“你真的爱我，是吗？”她平静地问。他低头看着她，有点烦恼地说：

“你知道还问什么？”

“我想让你守住我，别让我离开。”她说。

他幽暗的目光里充满了暖意和温情，那是不假思索地流露出来的。

“什么时候？现在吗？”

“现在让你的心守住我，然后我会来和你同住，永远，很快。”

他赤裸着身子坐在床上，低着头，理不清思绪。

“你不想这样吗？”她问。

“想啊！”他说。

说着他的眼睛里燃起了另一团火焰，目光迷离地看着她，几乎要睡过去的样子。

“现在你什么也别问我，”他说，“让我由着性子吧。我爱你，你躺着的时候我爱你。能往深里爱的女人，雌儿好，就可爱。我爱你，爱你的腿，爱你的身材，爱你的女人味儿。我就爱你的女人味儿。我爱你，我那东西跟心都爱你。可是你别问我什么，别让我说什么。我是什么样儿就让我是什么样儿。以后你问我什么都行，现在就让我这样儿，让我这样儿！”

轻轻地，他将手放在她的私处，放在那片柔软的褐色毛发上，他自己仍然赤裸着身子安静地坐在床上，脸上神情淡定，如同一尊佛像。他纹丝不动，身处在一团看不见的意识的火焰中，他的手放在她身上，等待着什么。

良久，他伸手拿起衬衣穿上，默默地迅速穿戴整齐，看了她一眼就走开了。而她则仍然玉体横陈，身子微微泛着金光，整个人就像床上盛开的一朵粉白的蔷薇花。她听到他在楼下打开了门。

但她依旧躺着想事儿。离开是件难事，她难以离开他的怀抱了。这时他在楼梯下叫着：“七点半了！”她叹口气，下了床。这空荡荡的小屋！家徒四壁，除了那小抽屉柜和这张小床。不过木地板刷洗得干干净净。在山墙窗户旁的角落里立着一个书架，架子上摆着一些书，有些还是从循环图书馆
④

里借来的。她翻看了一下，有关于布尔什维克俄国的，有旅游方面的，有原子与电子方面的，还有本是讲地核结构和地震原理的，还有几本小说，还有三本讲印度的书。原来如此！他还是个读书人呢。

阳光透过窗户照耀在她赤裸的四肢上。她看到弗洛西在外面转悠着。褐色的蕨草丛泛绿了，下面爬满了深绿的长年生山靛草。这是个晴朗纯净的早晨，鸟儿四处飞窜，引吭高歌着。她真想在此待下去！如果没有那个烟雾和钢铁组成的丑陋世界该多好！如果梅勒斯能为她创造一个世界该多好。

她朝楼下走去，那又陡又窄的楼梯是木头做的。但她不嫌这个，如果这是个自成一体的世界，她会对这个小屋儿感到满足的。

梅勒斯已经洗漱过，精神焕发，把火也生着了。

“吃点什么吗？”他问。

“不了！把梳子给我用用。”

她跟着他进了洗涤间，在后门上那块巴掌大的小镜子前梳理了一下就准备离开了。

她站在前花园里观看沾满露水的花朵，灰绿的石竹花已经含苞待放。

“我想让世界上别的东西都消失，”她说，“只和你住在这里。”

“不会消失的。”他说。

他们几乎是沉默着走过露水盈盈的可爱林地。这时他们是一起在自己的世界里。

继续回拉格比让她感到痛苦。分手的时候她说：“我希望尽快来和你一起住。”

他笑笑，不语。

她悄无声息地进了家，上楼进了自己的房间，没人看见她。

注　释

①
古波斯国首都，于公元前330年被亚历山大大帝毁灭。

②
撒哈拉沙漠附近的非洲古城。

③
劳伦斯曾在一封信中说：“您或许听说过，约翰·托马斯是阳具的一种俗称。”

④
循环图书馆，商业性图书馆，借书须付费。

第十五章

早餐时分，托盘里放着一封希尔达来的信，信上说：“本周父亲要去伦敦，我将在六月十七日星期四那天去接你。你一定要准备好，我一到咱们就走。我不想在拉格比浪费时间，那是个可怕的地方。我可能在雷特福德的科尔曼家过一夜，星期四我们一起吃午饭，下午茶时分出发，或许可以在格兰瑟姆过夜
①

。和克利福德度过一个晚上毫无意义。如果他不愿意让你走，那一晚会让他扫兴。”

这样一来，她又让人给推上了棋盘。

克利福德特别不愿意让她走，原因仅仅是她不在他就感到“不安全”。她在的话，他就感到安全，感到能放开了做他关心的事。说不上为什么，就是如此。他经常下井，绞尽脑汁解决那些几乎无望解决的问题，如怎样以最省钱的手段采煤，怎样一采出来就把煤卖掉。他知道必须找到什么办法利用自己的煤，或者把煤转换成别的什么，那样的话他就不用卖煤，免得卖不出去倒霉。可是，如果他把煤变成了电力，他能把电卖出去吗？电能做什么用呢？要把煤转换成油则成本太高，工艺也过于复杂。要让企业生存，就得有更多的企业，就得发疯。

这确实是发疯，而且只有疯子才能成功。没错，他就有点发疯了。康妮是这么看他的，在她眼里，他在矿井问题上的那份苦心孤诣和才干，似乎就是在宣布他疯了，他的灵感本身就是疯癫的灵感。

他对康妮聊他全部的重大企划，她则听得目瞪口呆，随他怎么说。他说着说着会突然打住自己没完没了的话，把收音机开得大大的，呆呆地听。很明显，他的那些计划像梦一样在他心中消失了。

现在，他每天晚上都和博尔顿太太玩士兵们玩的“二十一点”牌，赌注是每局六便士。一赌起来他就丢了魂儿，沉迷其间不能自拔。康妮不忍看他这个样子。可等她上床后，他和博尔顿太太还会继续赌，一直赌到凌晨两三点钟，不慌不忙，充满了奇特的欲望。博尔顿太太和克利福德一样嗜赌，甚至越输越沉迷。

有一次她对康妮说：“昨晚儿我输给克利福德男爵二十三先令。”

“他要了你的钱吗？”康妮惊讶地问。

“当然了，夫人！我感到荣幸呢。”

康妮劝诫了他们一番，冲他们两个都发了火。结果是克利福德男爵把博尔顿太太的年薪加到了一百镑，从此她就有钱赌了。但康妮觉得克利福德真是一天不如一天了。

后来她终于告诉他她要在十七号走。

“十七号？”他说，“那你什么时候回来？”

“最晚七月二十号。”

“好，那就七月二十号！”

他神情古怪、茫然地瞥了她一眼，那表情像孩子一样茫然，又像老人一样不露声色地狡黠。

“这次你不会让我失望吧，对吗？”他问。

“这话什么意思？”

“当你不在的时候。我是说，你肯定会回来的。”

“我绝对相信我会回来。”

“那就说定了！七月二十号！”

他看着她，眼神很怪。

但他真的是希望她去。这就怪了。从好的方面说，他想让她去冒点险，或许回来时能怀上孩子，就是这样。但同时他又害怕，怕她走，不为什么，就是怕。

眼看着彻底离开他的机会来了，她为此心颤，等待着，到时她和他都会变得平心静气。

她和那猎场看守坐在一起谈她出国的事，说：

“等我回来以后，我就能告诉克利福德说我必须离开他。咱们俩可以一起离开。他们甚至用不着知道跟我走的男人是你。我们可以去另一个国家，行吗？去非洲或澳洲，行吗？”

她很为自己的计划感到激动。

“你从来没去过那些殖民地，对吗？”

“没有，你呢？”

“我不是去过印度吗？还去过南非和埃及。”

“我们干吗不去南非？”

“可以啊！”他缓缓地说。

“难道你不想去吗？”

“我无所谓。做什么我都不太在意。”

“那样你不感到幸福吗？为什么？我们不会穷困的。我一年大约会有六百镑，我写信问过了。这点钱不算多，但够花了，对不对？”

“这够富有的了，对我来说。”

“哦，那日子该多美好呀！”

“可我得离婚，你也一样，否则我们就会遇上麻烦。”

要考虑的事太多了。

另一天，他们在林中小屋里，外面正雷雨交加，她问起他的经历来。

“当初你幸福吗，你当中尉，军官，是个绅士的时候？”

“幸福？还行，我喜欢我的上校。”

“你爱他吗？”

“是的！我爱他。”

“他爱你吗？”

“是的！他应该爱我。”

“跟我说说他吧。”

“有什么好说的呢？他是从最底层升上来的，他爱军队，从来没结过婚。他比我大二十岁，是个特别有智慧的人，这种人在军队里是孤独的。其实他是个挺热情的人，一个聪明的长官。跟他在一起时，我让他迷住了，生活上差不多全听他的，但我从来不为此后悔。”

“他死了，你很难过吗？”

“我自己也差点死了。等我醒过来，我明白，我的一半生命死了。不过我倒是一直明白，早晚是要死的，世间万物都如此，什么不会死呢？”

她坐着回味他的话，屋外雷声轰鸣，让人觉得身处在大洪水中的小小方舟里。

“你似乎经历了很多事。”她说。

“是吗？我觉得我已经死过一两回了似的。可我还活着，顽强地活着，遭遇更多的烦恼。”

她在冥思苦索，但也在倾听暴风雨。

“你的上校死后，你当官做绅士还觉得幸福吗？”

“不！那些人都是些小肚鸡肠的家伙。”他突然笑道，“上校常说，孩子呀，英国的中产阶级一口东西要嚼三十遍，因为他们肚肠太窄，连一颗豆子下去都能噎着他们。他们是一群迄今为止最小肚鸡肠最女里女气的人，自以为是，连鞋带系不对都害怕，腐烂透了，就像腐臭的肉，可他们总自以为是。我可不是这号人的对手。磕头，磕头，舔屁股，直到把舌头都舔硬了。可他们永远正确。自命不凡、精巧细腻，就这么一些人！一代女里女气的精细人儿，每个人只长着半个蛋子儿。”

康妮听得直发笑。屋外大雨滂沱。

“他恨他们！”

“不，”他说，“他才不费那工夫呢。他只是不喜欢他们。恨和不喜欢是不一样的。他说，当兵的人们正变得道貌岸然、小肚鸡肠，只剩下半个蛋子儿了。这是人类的命运。”

“普通人呢，劳动人民也如此吗？”

“全大同小异。人们的精虫死了，汽车、电影院和飞机把他们最后一滴精虫都吸干了。告诉你吧，一代比一代胆怯，肚肠是橡胶管做的，腿和脸都是铁皮做的。铁皮人！扼杀人性、崇尚机械。金钱，金钱，金钱！这些现代人都扼杀古老的人性感情，从中找乐儿，把老亚当和老夏娃都绞成了肉馅儿。他们都这样。这个世界上人们都一样，都在扼杀真实的人。雌儿是什么，还不是让机器来受用的！都一样。给人们钱让他们去割世界的命根子。给人们钱，钱，让他们去把人类的精虫抽干净，让他们成为打转的小机器吧。”

他坐在小屋里，耷拉着脸在冷嘲热讽。可即便在这样的时候，他的一只耳朵还在听着身后林子里的暴雨声，那暴风雨令他感到十分孤独。

“就这样没个完吗？”她说。

“欸，会的。它自己总有解决办法的。等到最后一个真正的人都被扼杀了，大家全驯服了，白人、黑人、黄种人，所有肤色的人都驯服了，他们就都疯了。因为理智的根扎在蛋子儿里。那时候，他们都疯了，他们会举行宏伟的宗教判决仪式。你知道这个词，意思是自我牺牲仪式。好吧，他们会举行宏大的牺牲仪式，他们会相互献上自己作为祭品。”

“你是说互相残杀吗？”

“是的，宝贝儿！如果我们照现在这样走下去，一百年后，这座岛上就只剩下不到一万人了，甚至连十个都不到，人们会带着爱心相互消灭。”此时雷声渐渐远去了。

“真好！”她说。

“好极了！想想人类的灭绝，想想人类灭绝后到另一个物种出现之间那段长长的空隙吧，那比什么都能让你心静。如果我们大家都这样走下去，知识分子、艺术家、政府、实业家和工人们，都疯狂地残杀人类最后的感情，最后一丁点儿直觉，最后一点健康的本能，如果这情形像现在这样一步一步走下去，那人类这个物种就算给枪毙了！再见了，宝贝！蛇吞下自己
②

，剩下一个纷乱的空间，不过这并非没有希望。很好！当野狗在拉格比狂吠，矿上的野驴在特瓦萧矿井台上践踏！Te Deum laudamus！
③

”

康妮笑了，但并不开心。

“那你肯定就开心，”她说，“他们急匆匆地奔向末日，肯定让你感到高兴。”

“没错，是这样的。我才不拦着他们呢！即使我想拦也拦不住啊。”

“那你为什么还这么痛苦？”

“我才不呢！即使我的雄鸡
④

是最后一次昂首打鸣儿，我也不在乎。”

“可如果我们有个孩子呢？”她说。

他听后垂下了头。半晌，终于又说话了：

“为什么，我觉得把一个孩子带到这个世界上来是个错误，也是个痛苦。”

“不！别这么说呀！”她恳求道，“我觉得我要有个孩子了。那样你会高兴的。”说着她把手放在了他的手上。

“我高兴是为了让你高兴，”他说，“可我觉得，这对那个没出生的小家伙来说是一种可怕的背叛。”

“哦，不！”她感到震惊，“那你就不是真正要我！如果你有这种感觉，你就不会要我！”

他又沉默了，脸色阴沉起来。屋外的雨在狂下着。

“不是那么回事！”她喃喃道，“这不是真的，真相不是这样的。”她觉得他现在痛苦，部分是因为她要离开他，故意离开他去威尼斯，这反倒让她放下心来。

她解开他的衣服，露出他的小腹来，在他的肚脐上亲了一下。然后她把脸贴在他的小腹上，张开双臂搂住那温暖安静的腰臀。他们独自漂泊在洪水上。

“对我说你想要个孩子！”她喃喃着，脸贴紧他的小腹，“告诉我你想！”

“为什么？”他终于开口了，这时她感到他全身奇怪地颤抖了一下，松弛了下来，“我有时候想啊，如果有谁试试，仅仅到矿工中去试试呢！他们现在的活儿不好干，挣的也不多。这时如果有人对他们说：‘别光想钱。要说需要，我们需要的只是一点点，咱们不能为钱活着——’”

康妮的脸轻轻地在他小腹上蹭着，手则握住了他的蛋子儿。他那物件儿微微耸动，显示出奇特的活力，但并没有举起。外面的雨在哗哗下着。

“我们为别的什么活着好不好？活着不是为了挣钱，不是为我们自己，也不是为别的什么人。可我们现在却不得不这样。我们被迫为自己挣点小钱儿，为老板挣更多。停止这一切吧！一步一步地慢慢停下来。用不着大喊大叫的，慢慢来，摆脱整个儿工业生活，回到过去。有一点钱就行，每个人都这样，我、你、老板们和大亨们，甚至国王。一点钱我真的就可以了，只要下决心，你就能跳出这烂泥坑来。”

稍息一下他接着说，“我会告诉他们，‘看啊！看看张三！他的动作真可爱！看他的举动，活泼又机敏。他多英俊啊！再看看李四！他又笨又丑，因为他从来也不激动。我会告诉人们，看啊，看看你们自己！一肩高，一肩低，腿都打弯了，脚都变形了！那该死的工作把你们都变成什么样了！毁了自己，毁了自己的生命。千万别干活干到把自己毁了，用不着干那么多。脱了衣服看看自己吧，你们本来应该是生机勃勃的，应该是美的，可你们却变得这么丑，这么半死不活的。’我会这么对他们说的。我会让他们穿上各式各样的衣服，可能是紧身的红裤子，鲜红色的，和白的短上衣。为什么？如果男人修长的腿穿上红裤子，仅仅是这个穿法，就会在一个月内改变他们自己。他们会重新成为男人，成为男人！女人可以随心所欲地打扮自己。因为只要男人们的腿包在鲜红的紧身裤里，雪白的短上衣下露出红裤子包着的漂亮屁股，女人就会重新成为女人的。是因为男人不是男人，女人才不是女人的。还有，等机会一到，就把特瓦萧拆掉，建几座又大又漂亮的建筑，能让我们都住进去。再把乡村清扫得干干净净。还有，不要那么多孩子，因为世界已经太拥挤了。

“我不会对人们说教，只去脱掉他们的衣服，说，‘看看你们自己！就是为钱干活干成这样的！回头看看自己吧，就是为钱干活来着。你们一直在为钱干活！看看特瓦萧吧，样子多可怕。那是因为修建它的时候你们在为钱干活呢。看看你们的女人们，她们并不在乎你们，你们也不在意她们。因为你们把时间都花在为钱干活，花在想着挣钱上。你们不会说话，不会动，也不会生活，你们无法和女人和谐地在一起。你们根本就不是活着。看看你们自己吧！’”

说罢，他们彻底沉默了。康妮一边听一边在他小腹最下边的毛丛中点缀上几朵勿忘我花朵，那是她在来小屋的路上采撷的。这时屋外安静了，天气有点冷了。

“你身上长着四样毛发，”她对他说，“胸口上的发黑，可头发却并不黑，胡茬是暗红色的，而这儿的毛发，这些爱情的毛发却像一蓬金黄发红的槲寄生
⑤

花丛，这些毛里数它最可爱！”

他朝下看看，发现腹沟上的毛丛里点缀起了白生生的勿忘我小花朵。

“啊！就该把勿忘我放在那儿，男人女人都该如此。可是，你就不关心未来吗？”

她抬头看看他，说：

“怎么不？关心得很呢。”

“当我感到人类的世界注定要毁灭，被自己的卑鄙龌龊毁灭，我就会感到殖民地并不太远，月亮也不够远。即使到了月亮上，你还是能回头看到地球，肮脏、龌龊，是所有星球中最恶心的地方，是让人类给弄得如此恶臭的。于是我感到我吞下了虫子，这虫子把我咬得翻肠倒肚，让我想逃都没地方逃。可当我换个想法，就能忘却一切。虽然我知道，这一百年来普通人受到的待遇是可耻的，他们简直就成了干活的虫子，他们的人性都没了，他们真正的生命都没了。我也想把机器从这个地球上一扫而光，彻底结束这个工业时代，这是个黑色的错误，可我办不到，没人能办到。所以我只能自寻逍遥，苟且偷生。不过我怀疑，我们是否还有生活可以苟且地过。”

屋外的雷声停了，可刚才缓和了的雨却突然倾盆而下，夹杂着最后一道闪电和远去的风暴声。康妮感到不安起来，因为他说了这么长时间，其实是在跟自己叨唠，而不是在跟她说话。他似乎是彻底失望了，可她却感到高兴，因为她讨厌失望。她知道他是刚刚意识到她要离开了，是这弄得他心情不好的。为此她反而感到小小得意。

她打开门，看着外面大雨滂沱，雨幕如钢似铁，一时冲动，就想冲进雨中去，逃离这里。她站起身来，迅速脱下长筒袜，然后脱下外衣和内衣。他看着她，大气不敢喘。她一动，她那尖尖的如同动物的胸部就微微颤动。在发绿的灯光下她的身体呈现出象牙色来。她穿上胶鞋，狂笑着跑了出去，冲着大雨挺起胸，张开双臂，身影在雨中变模糊了。她在雨中跳起了很早以前在德累斯顿学会的律动舞蹈。雨中她奇特的身影朦胧灰暗，时起时落，挺直或弯腰，雨水打在她整个臀部，晶莹的水珠飞溅。随之她挺起身子，前身迎着雨前进，然后再次弯下腰去，这样她把整个儿的腰腹和臀部都对着他，似乎是在向他行一个野性的礼。

他苦笑一下，甩掉自己的衣服，这衣服太束缚人了。他光着白皙的身子跳出门去，微微颤抖着冲进滂沱大雨中。弗洛西狂吠一声跳到他前面。康妮的头发全湿乎乎地贴在头上，她扭过热辣辣的脸，看到了他，蓝眼睛立即燃起兴奋的火焰，转过身去飞跑，像是冲锋一般，冲出林中空地，朝小径上跑去。一路上水淋淋的树枝在打着她的身体。她在跑着，他看不清她，只看到湿漉漉的头，只看到湿漉漉的后背在前倾着飞跑，浑圆的臀部在闪光，那是逃跑中颤抖着的美妇人的裸体。

她眼看着就要跑到宽路上了，这时他追了上来，赤裸的双臂抱住了她柔软赤裸的湿漉漉的腰腹。她发出一声尖叫，挺直了身子，于是她柔软冰凉的肉体就倒入了他的怀抱。他搂紧了她，疯狂地搂紧了这柔软冰凉的女人的肉体。一经拥抱，这肉体就迅速变热，变成了一团火焰。雨水顺着他们的身体哗哗流下来，浇得他们浑身直冒热气。他一手握住半边沉甸甸的可爱的臀，攥紧了，疯狂地将它们往自己身上拽过来。他在雨中颤抖着，纹丝不动了片刻，随后突然将她抬起，和她一起扑在小径上。在默默的滂沱大雨中，他要了她，动作迅速而猛烈，简直像牲口一样。

事毕他站起来，抹掉眼上的雨水，说：

“回屋去吧。”他们就开始向小屋跑去。他迅速地直接跑回屋，他不喜欢在雨地里待着。但她却没那么快，因为她一路上还要采些勿忘我、剪秋箩和风铃草。她跑了几步就慢下来，看着他飞快地从自己身边跑远了。

她气喘吁吁地拿着花跑回小屋，这时他已经生起了火，树枝在噼噼啪啪响着。她尖尖的胸部上下颤动着，湿头发打着绺，脸色红扑扑的，身上的水珠在闪光，在流淌。她眼睛睁得大大的，喘息着，小小的头颅湿漉漉的，饱满而稚嫩的臀部在滴水，她这副样子看上去简直像另一个人了。

他抓过那张旧床单，从上到下为她擦着身子，她则像个孩子一样站在那里让他擦着。然后他关上门擦干自己的身体。火旺起来了。她把头埋在床单的另一头擦自己的湿头发。

“咱们俩用一条毛巾，还不得争吵起来呀！”他说。

她抬头看看他，她的头发仍然蓬乱着。

“不对！”她睁大眼睛道，“这不是毛巾，是床单。”接着他们两人各自忙着擦自己的头发。

他们还没有缓过劲来，仍然喘息着。他们并肩坐在一根木头上，各自披了一条军毯，敞着前身烤火，渐渐安静了下来。康妮讨厌军毯蹭皮肤的感觉，可也只好披着，因为床单全湿着。

她抖掉毯子，跪在壁炉前的地上，把头冲着炉火摇晃着，想这样把头发烤干。他在一旁看着她臀部美丽的曲线，今天就是这令他着迷的。这条曲线顺着一个华美的斜面滑下，直到她那沉重浑圆的臀上！而那两臀之间隐匿于神秘的温热之处的，是那些神秘门户！

他的手摩挲着她的臀，缓慢仔细地抚摸那曲线和那浑圆之处。

“你这臀儿怎么这么美呀，”他说起了那口低沉的土话，声音里充满了爱怜，“你这屁股比谁的都好看，这可是世上女人里顶好看顶好看的屁股了！一丝一毫都透着女人味儿，绝对的女人味儿。你可不是那些小屁股的女子，她们跟小伙子似的！你长着一对真正的女人屁股，软溜溜、往下沉，男人打心眼儿里爱这个。这样的屁股能撑住世界呢。”

他说话的当口儿手一直在抚摸着那浑圆的臀，直到那里面似乎滑出一团火来直达他手上。这时他的指尖触到了她身上那两个神秘的门户，像柔软的小火苗在上面一遍又一遍燎过。

“如果你拉点屎尿点尿，我才高兴。我不想要一个不拉屎不尿尿的女人。”这话惊得康妮忍不住笑起来，但他毫不为之所动地继续说，“这是真话，你是真女人！你真是，甚至有点淫荡。你这个地方拉屎，这个地方尿尿，我的手都摸着它们，有这个我才爱你，因为这个爱你。你长着标致的女人屁股，为这屁股该骄傲才是，用不着害羞。”

他的手紧压在她那两处神秘之地，似乎是在亲切地问候它们。

“我喜欢这个，”他说，“我喜欢这个！哪怕我只活十分钟，我摩挲了你的屁股，明白了它是怎么回事，那就跟活了一辈子一样，你懂我的话不？管它什么工业不工业的！我的一生都在这儿呢。”

她转过身，爬到他腿上，依偎着他，喃喃道：“亲我！”

她知道两个人脑子里都在想着分别，因此她哀伤起来。

她坐在他的大腿上，头靠着他的胸膛，象牙般光洁的腿松弛地分开着，火光斑驳地照着他们。他低着头看到火光辉映下她身体的曲线，也看到她光滑柔软的褐色头发垂到了分开的大腿上。这时他伸手到身后的桌子上，拿过她采来的那把花，那花还湿着，雨水滴到了她身上。

“花儿什么天气里都在屋外，”他说，“它们没房子住。”

“连个小棚子都没有！”她喃喃道。

他的手指悄然把几朵勿忘我串起摆在她私处漂亮的褐色毛丛里。

“就在那里！”他说，“勿忘我就该摆在那儿！”

她低头看看下身褐色毛发中洁白奇特的小花儿，说：“多漂亮啊！”

“像生命一样美。”他说。

说着他又把一朵含苞待放的粉红色剪秋箩放上去，说：

“好啊！那就是我，你不会忘了我的！那是纸莎草丛中的摩西
⑥

。”

“你心里不别扭吧，我要走了？”她凝视着他的脸，惆怅地问。

他皱着眉，表情难以琢磨。他不露声色。

“你想怎样就怎样吧。”

他讲的是标准的英语。

“可如果你不希望我走，我就不走了。”她偎依着他说。

沉默中他探身向前往火里加了根木头，火光映红了他沉默、茫然的脸。她在等，可他不语。

“我只是觉得这是与克利福德开始决裂的一个办法。我确实想要个孩子，这会给我一个机会让——让——”她欲说还休。

“让他们相信几句谎言。”他说。

“是的，那是目的之一。你想让他们知道事实吗？”

“我不在乎他们怎么想。”

“可我在乎！我不想让他们那讨厌、冷酷的心摆布我，至少当我还在拉格比的时候不行。等我彻底离开了，他们爱怎么想就怎么想去吧。”

他不语。

“不过克利福德男爵还是希望你回到他身边吧？”

“我肯定要回来的。”她说。

又是一阵沉默。

“在拉格比府生孩子吗？”他追问。

她双臂抱住他的脖子，说：

“如果你不带我走，我就得在那里生了。”

“带你去哪儿呢？”

“哪儿都行啊！走就行，离开拉格比。”

“什么时候？”

“当然是我回来以后了。”

“可为什么要回来，折腾两次呢？走了就走了。”他说。

“哦，我必须回来。我是答应了的！我是打了保票的！再说，我是回来找你的，真的。”

“来找你丈夫的猎场看守？”

“我不觉得这是个问题。”她说。

“不是吗？”他思忖片刻，“那你打算什么时候再走，彻底走？具体在什么时候？”

“哦，我不知道。我会从威尼斯回来，然后我们细做准备。”

“怎么个准备法？”

“哦，我得告诉克利福德。我怎么也得告诉他。”

“是吗？”

他沉默了，她的胳膊搂他搂得更紧了。

“别为难我嘛。”她恳求道。

“怎么为难了？”

“我要去威尼斯，才能安排这些事。”

他脸上露出一丝苦笑，道：

“我不为难你。我只是想知道你到底想怎么样。你并不真正了解你自己。你想拖一拖，离开后考虑。我并不埋怨你，我觉得你这样做是明智的。你可以选择继续当拉格比府的女主人，我不埋怨你。我可没有拉格比府那样的宅第献给你。其实你知道你能从我这儿得到什么。不，不，我觉得你是对的！我确实是这么想的！我并不打算靠你生活，让你养着。这也是我要告诉你的。”

她觉得他这是在跟她对着干。

“可你要我，对吗？”她说。

“你要我吗？”

“你知道我要你，那不是明摆着的吗？”

“没错！可是，你什么时候要我呢？”

“等我回来，我们可以安排这一切，这你知道。现在我跟你在一起，正是忘乎所以的时候，我必须要冷静下来，清醒过来。”

“没错，冷静、清醒去吧！”

她有点恼怒了，说：

“你相信我，不是吗？”

“哦，那当然了！”

她听出了他话里的嘲弄，便直言道：“告诉我，你以为我不去威尼斯会更好，对吗？”

“我肯定你最好去威尼斯。”他冷静、略带嘲讽地说。

“你知道我是下周四动身吧？”她问。

“知道！”

她思量片刻，最后说：

“等我回来，咱们就知道该怎么办了，对吧？”

“哦，当然！”

他们之间隔着一道奇特的沉默天堑！

“我去找律师谈我离婚的事了。”他有点吞吞吐吐地说。

她闻之浑身轻轻一颤。

“是吗？”她说，“律师怎么说？”

“他说我早就该离，现在离会不容易。不过既然是我在军队里服役时她跟了别人，律师觉得这事就好办了，只要别让她跟我闹就行！”

“这事得让她知道吧？”

“对。要给她发一张传票，还有那个和她同居的男人也会收到传票，他也算被告。”

“多恶心呀，这些过场！看来我跟克利福德也得走这些过场。”

又是一阵沉默。

过了一会儿他说：“当然了，我得在以后的半年到八个月期间过一种清白的生活。所以如果你去威尼斯，至少一两周内没有诱惑了。”

“我是个诱惑！”她摩挲着他的脸说，“我真高兴能成为你的诱惑！别想这事了吧！你一开始思考就让我害怕，简直把我压垮了。别想了吧，我们分开以后可以想很多。关键是，我一直在想，我走之前一定要跟你再过上一夜，我一定要再次去你的村舍里。星期四晚上去行吗？”

“那不是你姐姐来的那天吗？”

“是啊！不过她说我们会在下午茶时分动身。我们下午茶的时候就可以离开拉格比了。她在别处过夜，我跟你过夜。”

“那她就知道了。”

“哦，我会告诉她的。我已经跟她讲过一点儿了。这回我一定要跟她详细说说，她对我最有帮助了，很通情达理的。”

他在考虑她的计划。

“就是说你们在下午茶的时候离开拉格比，假装去伦敦，是吗？走哪条路？”

“经过诺丁汉和格兰瑟姆。”

“你姐会让你在什么地方下车？你走回来，或开车回来，是吗？听起来有点冒险呢。”

“是吗？那好，那好，让希尔达送我回来。她可以在曼斯菲尔德过夜，晚上把我送到这里来，第二天一早再来接我，这很容易办得到。”

“别人看见你怎么办呢？”

“我会戴风镜和面纱。”

他思忖片刻说：

“好，像以前一样，你高兴就行。”

“你不高兴吗？”

“哦，高兴，我当然高兴！”他有点阴沉地说，“我也得趁热打铁呀。”

“你知道我刚才想什么来着？”她突然说，“我是突然想起来的。你是‘滚烫的铁杵骑士’
⑦

。”

“欸！那你呢？你是‘火辣辣的研钵夫人’吗？”

“是啊！”她说，“是啊！你是铁杵男爵，我是研钵夫人。”

“好吧，我就算被封了爵位了。约翰·托马斯从此成了约翰男爵，与简夫人成了一对儿。”

“是啊，约翰·托马斯晋爵了！我是简夫人！你也得戴上花儿，戴上！”

说着她把两朵粉红的剪秋箩花挂在他那东西上方的金黄色毛丛中。

“好看！”她说，“漂亮！漂亮！约翰男爵！”

然后她又在他胸口的黑色胸毛中塞进几朵勿忘我。

“你那地方不会忘了我，对吗？”她吻了他的胸口，又在胸两边各挂了一朵勿忘我，又亲了他。

“你把我打扮成花里胡哨的月份牌了！”说着他笑起来，笑得花从胸口上掉了下来。

“等等！”他说。

他站起身，打开门。趴在走廊上的弗洛西立即站起身来看着他。

“嗨，是我！”他说。

雨住了。外面潮湿、阴沉，宁静中散发着花香。天色晚了。

他走出去，走上与马道相反的那条小径。康妮凝视着他那消瘦的白皙身体影影绰绰地从她身边走开了，在她眼里那形同幻影。看不见他了，她的心为之一沉。她站在门道里，裹着毯子，看着湿漉漉的宁静的外面。

可他回来了，一路小跑着，手里拿着花儿。她有点怕他，觉得他不那么像个人。他靠近她，眼睛盯着她的眼睛，但她不懂他的眼神。

他采来了耧斗菜、剪秋箩、新割下的草、橡树枝和长满小骨朵的忍冬。他把新酿出的橡树枝盘在她头上，用忍冬的枝条缠住她的胸，插上风铃花和剪秋箩，在她的肚脐眼里也插了一朵粉红色的剪秋箩，在她私处的毛发上则挂满了勿忘我和香车叶草。

“这是你最艳丽的时候了！”他说，“简夫人和约翰·托马斯正举行婚礼呢。”

说着他在自己身上的毛丛里挂上花朵，在那东西上绑了一根圆叶珍珠菜，又在肚脐眼里插上一朵风信子。看他如此专心致志，她很是开心，不禁把一朵剪秋箩插在他的唇须上，那花儿粘住了，在他鼻子下晃着。

“约翰·托马斯娶简夫人，”他说，“我们一定要让康丝坦丝和奥利弗如愿。或许——”说到这里他伸开双臂做了个什么动作，就打了一个喷嚏，这个喷嚏把他鼻子下和肚脐眼里的花都震掉了。然后他又打了一个喷嚏。

“或许什么？”她在等他说下去。

他有点惊诧地看看她：

“啊？”

“或许什么？接着说你想说的呀。”她坚持道。

“嗨，我想说什么来着？”

他忘了。他这种半截话总是让她失望。

一抹金黄的夕阳照在树梢上。

“阳光！”他说，“你该回去了。时间，我的夫人。时间！人们常说的那个没有翅膀但能飞翔的是什么，夫人？时间！时间！”

说着他伸手去拿他的衬衣。

“对约翰·托马斯说晚安吧，”他低头看看那东西，“它让圆叶珍珠菜环绕着，挺安全呢！现在它倒不是烫人的铁杵。”

他把薄法兰绒衬衫套上了头。

他从衬衫里钻出来时说：“一个男人最危险的时候，就是他往衬衫里钻的时候。他把头套进口袋里了。所以我喜欢美式的衬衫，就像穿外衣一样。”她仍然站着不动，看着他。他又穿上内裤，系上扣子。

“看看简！”他说，“浑身都开花了！明年谁来给你的身体戴花呢，简？我，还是别人？‘再见，我的风铃花／对你说再见——’
⑧

我讨厌那首歌，那是大战刚开始时的一首歌。”他坐下，穿上袜子。而她仍然纹丝不动地站着。他的手搭在她倾斜的臀上，说：“多娇小的简夫人啊！或许在威尼斯你会遇上个男人，在你的私处插上茉莉花，在你的肚脐眼里插石榴花。可怜的简夫人！”

“别说这个！”她说，“你就是想伤我的心。”

他听了低下头去，开始用土话说：“欸，八成儿我是那个意思，八成儿是！好了，我啥也不说了，再也不说了。可你得穿上衣裳了，该回你那个全英国最高大的家里去了，那房子多好看呀。时候不早了，约翰男爵和小简夫人的时间到了！穿上你的小褂儿，查泰莱夫人！连个小褂都不穿，只挂着几朵花儿，你不成了随便哪个女人了？来，来，让我给你这秃尾巴画眉鸟儿摘了这些花吧——”他把她头发里的树叶摘了，亲亲她潮湿的头发和胸口上的花朵，又吻了她的胸、肚脐和结着花朵的私处。“它们该离开了，”他说，“行了！你又光了，只是个光屁股的小姑娘，最多是个简夫人！穿上你的小褂儿，你非走不可了，否则查泰莱夫人就误了点儿了，人家就会审问她，‘你去哪儿了，我漂亮的女仆？’”

他一说起土话来她就不知道该怎么回答他，所以她穿好衣服，准备耻辱地回拉格比的家。或者说她感到那个家是有点叫人感到耻辱的地方。

他要陪她走到宽宽的马道旁。他那些刚出窝的山鸡都关进了笼子里。

当他们出来上了马道时，正遇上博尔顿太太踉跄地朝这边走来，脸色苍白。

“哦，我的夫人啊，我们还以为你出什么事了呢！”

“没有！没出什么事。”

博尔顿太太盯着那男人的脸，他面色光洁，气色焕然一新，一脸的柔情蜜意。她看到他半笑半讽的眼神。他总是笑傲不幸，但他看她的眼神是和蔼的。

“晚上好，博尔顿太太！你家夫人挺好的，现在我可以放心地走了。夫人，晚安！博尔顿太太，晚安！”

说完他敬个礼，转身走了。

注　释

①
雷特福德和格兰瑟姆是旧时从爱丁堡到伦敦公路上的两个停靠点。

②
蛇将尾巴叼在口中的意象象征着永恒。

③
拉丁文：我们赞美上帝！

④
雄鸡（cock）在英文里还有阳具的意思。——译者注

⑤
这种寄生植物生着青灰密实的小叶子，叶子间开满淡黄的小花，结白色的果实，人们用这种植物来装饰圣诞树。西方人有在槲寄生花丛下接吻的传统。——译者注

⑥
见《旧约·出埃及记》第二章，第三节。

⑦
参见十七世纪初的同名喜剧Knight of the Burning Pestle。

⑧
1904年间流行的一首进行曲。

第十六章

康妮回家后遭到了一通盘问。下午茶时分克利福德出门了，但是赶在暴风雨之前回来的，这段时间夫人去哪里了？谁都不知道，只有博尔顿太太想起来说夫人到林子里去散步了。到林子里去，下着这么大的暴雨！克利福德一时间紧张慌乱起来，一个闪、一声雷都让他一惊一乍的。他看着外面那冰冷的雷雨，似乎觉得那就是世界的末日，于是情绪越来越激动。

博尔顿太太试图安慰他，说：“她会在小屋里躲雨，等雨过了就回来了。别着急，夫人没事的。”

“下这样的雷雨，我可不愿意让她到林子里去！我根本就不愿意让她到林子里去！她都去了两个多小时了。她是什么时候走的？”

“你回来前不一会儿。”

“我在园子里没看到她呀。天知道她在哪儿，出了什么事。”

“嗨，不会出什么事的。不信你就瞧着，雨一停她就回来了。还不是这雨闹得她回不来？”

可直到雨停了，夫人也没回来。再后来，太阳只剩最后一抹黄，可还是见不到她的影子。直到夕阳西下，天色黑了下来，晚餐的第一声锣敲响，克利福德狂怒道：

“这样不行！我要打发菲尔德和贝茨去找她。”

“哦，不用！”博尔顿太太说，“人们还以为谁自杀了呢，千万别让人们说闲话！还是让我溜出去，到小屋那儿去看她在不在。我会找到她的。”

经过一通劝告，克利福德同意让她去了。

康妮就是这样在马道上碰上博尔顿太太的，她正一个人脸色苍白地逡巡呢。

“您可别怪我出来找您，我的夫人！你没看见克利福德男爵都气成什么样了！他以为你让电击着了，或者让刮倒的树给砸死了呢。他非要打发菲尔德和贝茨来林子里收尸呢。所以我想还是我来的好，省得他折腾所有的仆人。”

她紧张地说着。她仍然能在康妮的脸上看到激情带给她的光泽和半梦幻的神情，也能感觉得出康妮对自己的恼火。

“不错！”康妮说，除此之外再也没别的话可说了。

这两个女人默默地在湿漉漉的世界里缓慢地走着，林子里大颗的水珠滴落着，水滴声恰似爆炸声。走到邸园，康妮大步向前，博尔顿太太在后面追得有点气喘吁吁，她开始发福了。

“克利福德这么大惊小怪的，真是犯傻！”康妮终于气恼地说，不过她其实是自说自话。

“哦，你知道男人都是什么德性！他们爱自找气生。不过他一看见夫人您就会没事了。”

博尔顿太太知道了她的秘密，这让康妮很恼火。没错，她肯定知道了。

突然，康丝坦丝在小径上停住了脚步，说：“让人跟着，太可怕了！”说着她眼睛放出怒光来。

“哦，夫人您可别这么说呀！他本来是要派那两个男人出来的，他们会直接去小屋。我还不知道小屋在哪儿呢，真不知道。”

听到这句暗示，康妮的脸都气青了。可当她的热情还挂在脸上时，她无法撒谎，她甚至不能装作和那看守之间什么都没有发生。她看看这另一个女人，她是那么狡黠地垂着头，可作为一个女人，她算是她的同盟吧。

“算了！”她说，“既然如此，我也无所谓！”

“您挺好的，我的夫人！你只是在小屋里避雨来着，这没什么呀。”

说着她们朝家走去。康妮大步走进克利福德的房间，看到他那张苍白变形的脸和鼓凸的眼睛，大为光火，发作道：

“告诉你，你没有必要派下人跟踪我！”

“我的天！”他也光火地说，“你上哪儿去了，你这个女人？你走了好几个钟头了，好几个小时，在这样大的雨里！你上那该死的林子里到底干什么去了？有何贵干？雨停了也有几个小时了，好几个小时啊！你知道现在什么时候了吗？你简直让人发疯！你去哪儿了？你到底干什么该死的事去了？”

“如果我不告诉你呢？”说着她把帽子一把扯下来，摇晃着头发说。

他看着她，眼球都鼓了出来，眼白开始泛黄。他一发火就出毛病，以后的几天里博尔顿太太的日子就不好过了。想到这里，她立即觉得不安起来。

“不过说真的，”她口气缓和了下来，“谁都会以为我在一个我自己都不认识的地方。其实下大雨时我就在小屋里坐了坐，生上了火烤着，挺好的。”她现在语调轻快了起来。说到底，干吗要给他火上浇油呢？可他还是怀疑地看着她，说：

“看看你自己的头发！看看你自己——”

“对了！”她平静地说，“我跑出屋去，身上没穿衣服。”

他看着她，瞠目结舌。

“你一定疯了！”

“那怎么了？不就是在雨里冲个澡嘛。”

“你怎么擦干自己的？”

“用一块旧毛巾，在火炉前。”

他仍然目瞪口呆地看着她。

“要是有人来了可怎么好呢。”他说。

“谁会来呀？”

“谁？谁都可能。梅勒斯，他没去吗？他晚上一定会去的。”

“对，他后来去了，天晴了以后，去给山鸡喂谷子。”

她神态惊人的镇静，在隔壁听他们说话的博尔顿太太佩服得不行。一个妇道人家，竟然能这么轻而易举地就搪过去了！

“假如你一丝不挂、像个疯子一样在雨里奔跑的时候他来了怎么办？”

“我想他会吓得魂不附体，落荒而逃。”

克利福德仍然呆若木鸡地看着她。他潜意识中在想什么，他自己也弄不清楚。而他又惊诧不已，理智上也无法理出个头绪来。于是他只能糊里糊涂地随她怎么说了。但他不由得羡慕起她来，她看上去脸色那么红润，那么漂亮，那么光滑，那是爱的光泽。

“不管怎么说，”他口气缓和下来道，“不得一场重感冒就算你幸运。”

“哦，我没感冒呀，”她说。她现在心里想的是另一个男人的话：你有世界上女人最好看的屁股！她希望，特别希望能告诉克利福德，在那场滂沱大雨中有人对她说过这样的话。算了！她摆出一副受伤害的女王的样子，上楼换衣服去了。

那天晚上克利福德想对她示好。他正在读一本最新的科学与宗教方面的书。他有那么点半真半假的宗教信仰，一心只关心他自己的前途如何。他惯于拿一本书做引子开始同康妮的谈话，反正他们之间是要谈话的，几乎像进行化学配方一样，脑子里要调配谈话的成分。

“顺便问问，你觉得这本书怎么样？”说着他伸手去拿那本书，“如果我们以前多进化几代，你就用不着跑出去让雨水冷却你炽热的肉体了。哦，在这里！‘宇宙向我们展示两个方面：一方面它在物质上耗损着，另一方面它在精神上上升着。’
①

”

康妮倾听着，希望听到更多，但克利福德却在等待。她惊讶地看着他，说：

“如果说它在精神上上升着，那它遗留在它根部的是什么呢？”

“嗨！”他说，“他没别的意思。上升就是耗损相反的意思，我想。”

“也就是说，在精神上空了？”

“不是。严肃地说，不开玩笑，你认为这话有道理吗？”

她又看看他，说：

“肉体上耗损吗？可我看你却胖起来了嘛，我自己也没有耗损。你认为太阳比以前变小了吗？我觉得没有。而且我认为，亚当给夏娃吃的那个苹果，如果是真的话，并不见得比我们家的红苹果大。你认为呢？”

“还是听作者怎么说吧，‘它就这样缓慢地走过，其缓慢是无法用我们的时间刻度来衡量的，走向新的创造条件，我们所知的物质世界在它里面表现为一波涟漪，与虚无几乎别无轩轾。’”

她听着他的话，脸上露出发噱的神情，心头涌上一连串想说但又说不出口的话，她只是说：

“多么愚昧的瞎话！似乎那小小的傲慢的理智能知道发生得那么慢的事情！这话只能说明他是地球上一个肉体的废物，所以他想让整个宇宙成为一个物质上的废物。真是个自以为是的人！”

“不过，你听着！别打搅这个伟人的庄重文字！‘今日世界的秩序来自于某种无法想象的过去，而且会在某个难以想象的未来找到自己的坟墓。保留下来的是消耗不尽的抽象形式王国，是其自身的生灵所不断更新的创造力，还有上帝，所有形式的秩序都依赖其智慧。’你看，他是这样做的结论。”

康妮不屑地听着他念这段话。

“这个人的精神算是空了，”她说，“都是些什么玩意儿呀！难以想象，坟墓中的各式秩序、抽象形式王国、不断更新的创造力，还有与秩序形式混作一团的上帝，怎么这么愚蠢！”

“我得说，这话是有点含混不清，也就是所谓空话连篇吧，”克利福德说，“可我还是觉得他说的那个宇宙在物质上耗损但精神上上升是有道理的。”

“是吗？那就让它上升吧，但是要让我这身体安全地、踏实地留在地上。”

“你喜欢你的身体吗？”他问。

“我爱它！”说这话时她脑子里响起的是那句话：这是世界上最好看的女人屁股！

“这倒奇怪了，因为肉身无疑是个累赘。我觉得女人是无法在精神生活中找到至高无上的乐趣的。”

“至高无上的乐趣？”说着她抬头看看他，“难道那种愚蠢的观念就是至高无上的精神生活的乐趣吗？不，谢谢你了，给我肉体。我相信，当肉体真正觉醒时，肉体的生命比精神的生命要真实得多。可是不少人，就像你那人人皆知的风力机，他们的精神不过是依附在死尸上罢了。”

他不解地看着她。

“肉体的生命，”他说，“不过是动物的生命。”

“那比职业死尸的生命要好。可这不是真的！人的肉体才刚刚获得真正的生命呢！古希腊人的肉体刚刚发出一星可爱的火花，柏拉图和亚里士多德就把这火花给熄灭了，基督干脆就把它彻底消灭了。但现在肉体真正复苏了，真正从坟墓里站了起来，它会在可爱的宇宙中成为再可爱不过的生命，那就是人的肉体。”

“亲爱的，听你这话的意思，好像是你在引导着人的肉体！不错，你要去度假了。不过请不要忘乎所以。相信我，不管上帝是什么样，这个上帝都是在渐渐地把内脏和消化系统从人的体内剔除出去，从而演化出一个更高级、更精神化的人类。”

“我为什么要相信你，克利福德？此时此刻我感到，无论有个什么样的上帝，这个上帝都终于在我体内你称为内脏的东西里面觉醒了，就像黎明，并在那里幸福地激荡着涟漪。当我跟你感觉正好相反的时候，我为什么要相信你？”

“哦，说得对！那么是什么引起了你身体里如此非凡的变化呢？是因为浑身赤裸着跑出去淋雨，装疯卖傻才变成这样，还是想追求刺激，或者是因为要去威尼斯，迫不及待了？”

“这些原因都有！你以为我为了走而激动可怕吗？”她问。

“露骨地表现就可怕。”

“那我就掩饰起来好了。”

“哦，不必麻烦！你已经差不多把这种激动表现给我了，我几乎感到是我要走。”

“那你为什么不一起去呢？”

“我们已经谈过那个问题了。其实我想你最大的激动就在于能暂时离开这一切，没有什么比对一切说再见的那一刻更令人激动了！可每个分别都意味着在别处和别人相见，而每一个相见都意味着一种新的束缚。”

“我是不会自找新的束缚的。”

“别说大话，神在听着呢。”他说。

她立即说：“不！我才不说大话呢。”

但她还是感到激动，因为能离开了，能感到原来的束缚被斩断了。她禁不住要激动。

克利福德睡不着，就和博尔顿太太赌了一宿，直到她困得坚持不住才罢手。

希尔达这天要到了。康妮和梅勒斯商定，如果他们一起过夜没有问题，她就在她窗外挂一条绿披巾，否则就挂红的。

博尔顿太太帮着康妮准备行装时说：

“换换环境对夫人您来说大有好处哇。”

“我也觉得。你要一个人照顾克利福德男爵一段时间，还行吧？”

“哦，没事！我对付他一点问题也没有。我是说，他需要我做什么我都行。您不觉得他比原先好多了吗？”

“哦，确实是！你在他身上创造奇迹了。”

“可不是嘛！不过男人都一样，跟小孩儿似的。你得奉承、哄着他们，让他们觉得是随心所欲。你没发现这个道道儿吗，夫人？”

“我怕是没什么经验。”顿了一下，康妮问她，“甚至对你的丈夫，你也得应付他，哄骗他，像对个孩子似的？”说着她抬头看博尔顿太太。

博尔顿太太思忖片刻才说：

“嗨！对他我也得好一通儿连哄带骗呢。不过说实话，他倒是一直明白我想要什么，所以一般情况下总是让着我。”

“他从来不横行霸道吗？”

“不！他眼神儿里有时会露出来那种霸气，我一看就明白我该让着他了。不过平常老是他让着我。不过他倒是从来不耍大爷脾气。我也不那样儿。我一瞅着不行了，就退让，尽管有时候那么做挺憋屈的。”

“那你要是跟他顶撞呢？”

“那我可不知道，因为我从来不那样。即便是他错了，可他要是死心眼儿，我就让。你看出来了吧，我是绝不想跟他弄僵了。要是你非跟男人较劲，那就完了。要是你拿他当回事儿，在他死较劲的时候你就得让着他，不管你对不对，你都得服软儿。弄不好你就把什么弄折了。不过我倒是得承认，有时我错了还认死理儿时，特德也会让着我。我估摸着，两人就得这样才行。”

“你对你的病人都这样吗？”康妮问。

“哦，那不一样。其实我也不在乎。我知道怎么做对他们有好处，或者说我尽量去了解。我想法子替他们着想。这可不像是对待你爱的人那样，完全不一样。一旦你真爱上哪个男人，几乎任何男人需要时，你都会热心的。可这是两回事，你不是真爱他的。我猜呀，如果你真正爱过谁，你就不太可能再爱别人了。”

这番话把康妮吓着了，忙问：

“你认为一个人只能爱一次吗？”

“要么爱一回，要么永远也不爱。大多数女人从来就没爱过，就没开始爱过。她们不知道这是什么意思。男人也是一样。可我一看到哪个女人爱上了，就替她揪心。”

“那你觉得男人容易生气吗？”

“容易！如果你伤了他们的自尊心。不过女人不也是这样吗？只是我们的自尊心不那么一样。”

康妮反思着她的话，不禁开始为自己的出行担心起来。无论如何，即使是一段很短的时间，她不也是在逃避自己的男人吗？他明白这一点，所以表现得怪异，而且说风凉话。

唉！人生在世，老得受外部环境这架机器的控制。她就让这架机器给控制着，连五分钟都逃脱不开，她甚至都不想逃脱了。

希尔达在星期四一大早就来了。她开着一辆双座的小轿车，行李箱用皮带结结实实地缚在车尾。她还是老样子，看上去像个娴静的少女，但她可是个有主意的人。她的主意大了去了，她丈夫发现了这一点。不过她丈夫现在正跟她闹离婚。

是的，虽然她没有搞情人，还是给她丈夫行方便让他顺利地离这个婚。眼下这段时间里，她跟男人们“断”了。她十分安心地当自己的主人，还有当她两个孩子的家长。她要把孩子拉扯“成人”，不管这个字眼意味着什么。

康妮也只能带一个衣箱，不过她已经运了一个大箱子到父亲那里去。父亲将乘火车去，开汽车去威尼斯不上算，七月里在意大利开汽车太热了，他要舒舒服服地坐火车去。他是刚刚从苏格兰到的伦敦。

希尔达安排起旅行的具体事来俨然一个战地元帅。安排完了她和康妮坐在楼上的房间里聊起天来。

“希尔达，我忘告诉你了！”康妮略作惊乍地说，“今晚我要在附近过夜。不是这里，而是这附近！”

希尔达盯着妹妹，灰色的眼睛里露出不可思议的眼神来。这时她看上去是那么平静——她经常发火。

“附近什么地方？”她轻柔地问。

“呃，你知道我爱着某个人，对吧？”

“我猜是有什么情况嘛。”

“对，他住在附近，我想和他过这最后一晚。我必须得这样！我许过愿的。”康妮坚持说。

希尔达默默地低下她战神一般的头思忖片刻，然后抬起头问：

“你想告诉我他是谁吗？”

“他是我们的猎场看守。”康妮吞吞吐吐地说，脸刷地红了，像个害羞的孩子。

“康妮！”说着希尔达略带厌恶地耸起鼻子来，这个动作像她母亲。

“我知道。但他值得爱，真的。他，他，他确实懂得疼人。”康妮试图替他说情。

希尔达脸色红润得像雅典娜，她低头思忖着。她的确十分生气，但不敢表现出来，因为康妮像父亲，会立即大吵大闹，一发而不可收拾。

希尔达不喜欢克利福德，这是真的，因为他一副冷漠的自信样，自以为了不起！她认为克利福德无耻放肆地利用了康妮，因此她希望妹妹下决心离开他。但作为稳定的苏格兰中产阶级，她厌恶任何“降低”自己或家庭身份的做法。

最后，她终于抬起头来说：“你会后悔的。”

“我绝不会，”康妮叫着，脸一下子就红了，“他是个很例外的人。我真的爱他。作为情人，他很可爱。”

希尔达仍然思索着。

“你很快就会忘了他，”她说，“并且会因为他而感到耻辱。”

“我不会！我盼望着能生一个他的孩子呢。”

“康妮！”希尔达掷地有声地叫着，脸气得发白。

“只要我能，我就要给他生个孩子。如果能有一个他的孩子，我会万分骄傲。”

希尔达知道自己是无法说服康妮的。

“克利福德不犯狐疑吗？”

“哦，才不呢！他干吗要狐疑？”

“我一点都不怀疑，你已经给了他足够的机会让他起疑心。”希尔达说。

“绝不会。”

“今晚上的这事似乎十分愚蠢。那男人住哪儿？”

“在林子另一边的村舍里。”

“他单身吗？”

“不！他老婆离开了他。”

“多大年纪？”

“不知道。反正比我大。”

康妮的每一句回答都让希尔达越发愤慨，很像她们的母亲在世时那样狂怒。但她还是压着火气。

“如果我是你，我就放弃今晚的胡闹。”她平静地劝告康妮。

“我不能！今天晚上我一定要跟他一起过，否则我就不想去威尼斯了。我就是不能。”

希尔达从这话里听出了父亲的声音，于是让步了，但这让步纯属策略性的。她同意开车去曼斯菲尔德，两人在那儿吃饭，天黑之后开车送康妮回来，送到路边，明天一早再来路边接她，她自己则独自在曼斯菲尔德过夜，顺利的话，不过半小时车程。

但她很生气，因为妹妹打乱了她的计划，她为此憋了一肚子火。

康妮如约在窗台上系了一条翠绿色的披巾。

盛怒之下，希尔达对克利福德有了好感。

不管怎么说，这人还是有脑子的。如果说他没了那方面的功能，那更好，省得吵架了！希尔达现在是再也不需要那玩意儿了，男人们都让它搞得下作自私，有点可怕。同大多数女人比，康妮的确没那么多烦恼，不知道她明白不明白。

而克利福德则认为希尔达毕竟是个果断智慧的女人，如果哪个男人要从政，她会是个最好的内助。是的，她绝没有康妮的笨拙。康妮更像个孩子，你得让着她，因为她根本就不可靠。

客厅里提前备好了茶点，门开着让阳光照射进来。每个人都似乎有点气喘吁吁。

“再见，康妮姑娘！来去平安。”

“再见，克利福德！是的，我不会去太久的。”康妮几乎要温情脉脉起来。

“再见，希尔达！你会看着她的，对吧？”

“我会加倍看住她！”希尔达说，“她不会太出格的。”

“说定了！”

“再见，博尔顿太太！我知道，你会全心全意看护克利福德男爵的。”

“我会尽心尽力的，夫人。”

“有什么事给我写信，把克利福德男爵的情况告诉我。”

“好的，夫人，我会的。祝您愉快，回来给我们解闷儿呀。”

大家都挥手告别。车子开走了，康妮在车里回头望去，看见克利福德在最高的台阶上，坐在他的室内轮椅中。他怎么也是她的丈夫，拉格比也是她的家，这是既成事实。

尚贝尔太太为她们开了大门并祝男爵夫人假日愉快。汽车悄然驶出了幽暗树丛遍布的邸园，上了大路，路上走着下班回家的矿工们。希尔达把车开上了克罗斯希尔街，那不是主干道，然后继续朝曼斯菲尔德开去。康妮戴上了风镜。她们沿着路堑里的铁路行驶，随后上桥越过路堑。

“那就是通往村舍的小路！”康妮说。

希尔达不耐烦地瞟了那条路一眼。

“太可惜了，我们不能一直开下去！”她说，“否则我们九点就能到帕莫尔
②

了。”

“不好意思，给你添麻烦了。”康妮戴着风镜说。

她们很快就到了曼斯菲尔德。这地方早先是个浪漫的去处，现在却成了一座让人烦心的煤城。希尔达把车开到汽车指南上标识的一家旅馆，开了一个房间。整个过程了无生趣，她气得话都不想说，可康妮还是得告诉她那个男人的事。

“他！他！你叫他什么名字？你只说他！”希尔达说。

“我从来没叫过他的名字，他也没叫过我。这事想起来有点怪。我们倒是说过简夫人和约翰·托马斯。不过他的名字是奥利弗·梅勒斯。”

“你愿意是奥利弗·梅勒斯太太，而不是查泰莱夫人？”

“我愿意。”

真是拿康妮没办法。不过，如果这个男人在印度当过四五年上尉的话，他应该多少还像样，看来他是有个性的。希尔达心里开始有点松动。

“可是你不久后就会跟他断了，”她说，“然后你会因为同他发生关系而羞愧。千万不能跟劳动阶层的人混在一起。”

“可你却号称是社会主义者！你不总是站在劳动阶级一边吗？”

“出了政治危机时我可以站在他们一边，可正是因为我站在他们的一边，我才知道把自己的生活与他们搅在一起是不可能的。这不是出于势利，仅仅是因为同他们不合拍。”

希尔达一直生活在真正的政界知识分子中，因此她的话令人难以反驳。

旅馆里的傍晚枯燥无聊，她们吃了一顿无聊的晚餐。随后，康妮收拾了几样东西塞进绸缎包里，并再次梳理她的头发。

“无论如何，希尔达，”她说，“爱可以是美好的，叫你感到自己鲜活，身处造化的中心。”这话听着有点像夸夸其谈。

“我猜每只蚊子都有这样的感觉。”

“你认为是这样的吗？那它该多棒啊！”

这个黄昏天空出奇地明朗，出奇地漫长，甚至在这个暗淡的小镇。今天整个夜里天空都会是半透明的。希尔达因为反感而阴沉着脸，像罩了个面具似的，她又发动了车，两个人回去，不过这次走的是另一条路，通过博尔索弗。

康妮戴着风镜和伪装用的帽子安静地坐着。因为希尔达的反对，她现在更加与那男人一条心了，她决心不顾一切跟着他。

经过克罗斯希尔小镇时，她们打开了车头灯。路堑下亮着灯的小火车“噗噗”驶过，让人觉得到了夜里似的。希尔达在桥头就算好了怎么拐到小路上。她突然一个减速，离开大路，车灯白花花地照亮了那杂草丛生的小路。康妮朝车窗外看去，看到一个人的身影，就打开了车门，轻声说：

“到了！”

希尔达熄了车灯，正专心倒车和掉头。

“桥上没什么吧？”她简短地问了一句。“没事，倒吧。”男人的声音。她把车往桥的方向倒着，转个弯，沿着大路朝前开了几码，然后又倒着开进小路，在一棵榆树下停住，车轮碾碎了蕨草和杂草。随后她熄灭了所有的灯。康妮走下车，那男人就站在榆树下。

“等半天了吧？”康妮问。

“没多大工夫。”他回答。

他们都等着希尔达从车里出来，可希尔达关上了车门，坐着纹丝不动。

“那是我姐姐希尔达，你过来跟她说句话吗？希尔达！这位是梅勒斯先生。”

那猎场看守抬抬帽子，但没有移动脚步。

“跟我们一起步行上村舍里去吧，希尔达，”康妮恳求道，“离这儿不远。”

“那，车怎么办？”

“人们常把车停放在小路上。你锁上车，拿好车钥匙。”

希尔达不语，还迟疑着。然后她朝后看看那小路，问：“我能在那片灌木丛那儿掉个头吗？”

“行啊！”那看守说。

她围着灌木丛缓缓倒车，倒到从大路上看不见的地方，把车锁上后出来了。这时天彻底黑了，但天空是澄澈的。荒废的小路旁，篱笆墙很高，上面的树篱疯长着，看上去黑乎乎一片。空气中弥漫着一股甜丝丝的清香。看守走在前面，后面跟着康妮，最后是希尔达，都一言不发。他用手电照着难走的路段，过去后继续朝前走。走着走着，一只猫头鹰在橡树上轻声叫起来，弗洛西在周围打着转。谁也不说话，因为没话可说。

走了一程，康妮总算看到了房子里亮着的黄色灯光，心跳立即加快了，她有点害怕。他们仍然排成一路纵队向前走着。

他开了门，把她们请进了那个温暖但空旷的小屋。壁炉里燃着红红的文火，餐桌上摆好了两只盘子和两个杯子，第一次铺上了洁白的桌布。希尔达晃晃头发，四下里打量着这空旷沉闷的房间，鼓起勇气去看那男人。

他中等个儿，身材瘦削，她觉得他模样挺好看。他沉默地与别人保持着距离，似乎十分不愿意说话。

“坐吧，希尔达。”康妮说。

“请！”他说，“我给你们沏茶呢还是弄点别的什么？要么喝杯啤酒吧，不过就是有点凉。”

“啤酒吧！”康妮说。

“我也要啤酒，谢谢！”希尔达故作羞涩地说。他看看她，眨了眨眼。

他拿起一只蓝色的壶，脚步沉重地到厨房里去，拿了啤酒回来时，脸上的表情又变了。

康妮在门边上坐下来，希尔达则坐在了他的位子上，背靠着墙，面对着窗边的角落。

“那是他的位子，”康妮轻声地说。希尔达闻之立即站了起来，似乎那椅子烫着她了。

“甭动，坐着！爱坐哪个椅子就坐哪个，我们这儿可没有谁是大熊。”他十分平淡地说。

他给希尔达拿来一只玻璃杯，从蓝壶里第一个给她倒啤酒。

“香烟我这里没有，”他说，“你要是带着就抽自己的，我自个儿不抽烟。要吃点什么吗？”他转头问康妮，“我给你拿点什么吃的不？你平常总要吃点啥。”他说起土话来是那么平静自信，好像他是这小客栈的店主似的。

“有什么吃的？”康妮红着脸问。

“煮火腿、奶酪、腌核桃，就这几样儿，不多。”

“行啊，”康妮说，“你呢，希尔达？”

希尔达抬头看看他，轻声问：“你为什么说约克郡话？”

“那，那不是约克话，是达比话。”说着他向她淡然一笑。

“原来是达比话呀！你为什么要说达比话呢？你一开始说的是挺自然的英语。”

“真的么？我想换着口音说不成吗？算了，还是让我说达比话吧，那更适合我。你不腻烦吧？”

“听着有点做作。”希尔达说。

“没准儿是吧！可是在特瓦萧，你的腔调儿倒显得做作呢。”他又看看她，露出揣度的眼神，似乎是在说：“嘿，你何许人也？”

然后他到食品间去取食物。

两姐妹默默地坐着。他取来另一只盘子，还有刀叉，说：

“你们不觉得热吗？我可要把外套脱了，我平常就这样。”

他脱了外套，挂在衣钩上，然后只穿着衬衣坐下，那是一件奶黄色的法兰绒薄衬衣。

“随便些！”他说，“随便！别等别人请！”他切了面包，然后纹丝不动地坐着。希尔达像康妮当初那样，感到了他沉静和冷漠中的力量。她看到他那只小而敏感的手随意地搭在桌子上，看得出他不是一个简单的劳动者，才不是呢，他是在表演！表演！

“不过呀！”她取了一小片奶酪说，“如果你对我们说规范的英语而不是土话，那样更自然些。”

他看看她，感到了她身上有一股魔鬼般的意志。

“是吗？”他改说正规的英语了，“会吗？我们之间说的哪些话算得上自然？恐怕只有你说你希望我下地狱，让你妹妹永远不再见我，然后我再说些不怎么愉快的话反击你。除此之外还有哪些话算得上自然？”

“哦，对了！”希尔达说，“良好的举止本身就很自然。”

“那是所谓的第二天性！”说着他笑了起来，“可别！我厌倦了礼节，还是让我顺其自然吧！”

希尔达明显感到困惑了，她反感到了要发怒的程度。说到底，他应该表示自己感到荣幸才是。他不仅不有所表示，还装腔作势，自视甚高，倒好像是他给别人面子似的。简直是无礼！可怜的康妮，糊里糊涂地让这个人控制住了！

三个人默默地吃着。希尔达注意观察他在餐桌上的举止，不禁感到，这个人本能地举止细腻，比她自己教养都要好，她有点苏格兰人的笨拙。还有，他具备了英格兰人所具有的恬静、内敛和自信这些全部的品性，无可挑剔，想把他比下去可难。

但他别想占她的上风。

“你确实认为，”希尔达颇有人情味地说，“值得冒这险吗？”

“什么值得冒什么险？”

“和我妹妹的这种越轨行为？”

“你去问她吧！”说着他看看康妮，“那是你自己乐意，对不，小妹？不是我强迫你的吧？”

康妮看看希尔达说：“我希望你不要挑毛病，希尔达。”

“本来我是不想这样的，可人总是要考虑问题的，人的生活中总该有一种连续性，不能把事情弄得一团糟吧。”

一时间大家都不说话了。

“哦，连续性！”梅勒斯说，“那是什么意思？你的生活中有什么连续性呢？我听说你在离婚，那还有什么连续性可言？要说有连续性，是你的固执有连续性。我能懂的就这些。可那对你有什么好处呢？你会在变老之前就厌倦了你的连续性。一个固执的女人，加上她的任性，嘿，那足以让她具备连续性，没错。谢天谢地，我和你的事没关系。”

“你凭什么这么对我说话？”希尔达说。

“凭什么？你凭什么要把别人拴在你的连续性上？让别人管自己连续不连续的事去吧。”

“我的男子汉，你以为我关心你吗？”希尔达轻声道。

“还别说，”他说，“你关心。因为这是没办法的事，你怎么着也算是我的妻姐。”

“离那还早着呢，我实话跟你说。”

“用不了那么久，我也跟你说实话。我有我自己的连续性，跟你有得一比！跟你没什么两样。如果你的妹妹找我是为了得到一点欢爱和温柔，那说明她知道自己要什么。她已经上了我的床。而你没有，感谢上苍，因为你有你的连续性。”一阵死一样的沉寂后，他又说，“欸，我还没有傻到把裤子穿反了的地步。如果天上掉馅饼，我会感谢我的命。一个男人能从那个姑娘那里得到很多快乐，这是从你这类人那里得不到的。这是件遗憾事儿，因为你本来可以是一只好苹果，而不是一只中看不中用的酸苹果。你这样的女人需要适当地嫁接一下。”

说话间他冲她露出一丝怪笑，带着些许欲望，同时又是在表示对她的欣赏。

“像你这样的男人，”她说，“就该隔离起来，算是对你们粗俗和私欲的惩罚。”

“嘿，夫人！万幸的是世界上还剩下了几个我这样的男人。你才是理应受到惩罚呢，落到孤家寡人的田地。”

希尔达听到这话立即站起身走到了门口，梅勒斯也站起来从衣钩上拿下自己的外套。

“我可以孤家寡人地找到自己的路。”她说。

“我怀疑你不能。”他顺口说。

他们又默默地走在小路上，这次没了队形。猫头鹰依旧在叫着，他真想给它一枪。

车子仍停在那里，毫发未损，只是沾上了露水。希尔达进去，开始发动车子，另外两人在等着。

“我总的意思是，”她在车里说，“我怀疑你们将来会觉得这样做不值得，你们谁也不会觉得值。”

“一个人的佳肴或许是另一个人的毒药，”他在黑暗中说，“可对我来说这既是佳肴又是美酒。”

灯亮起来了。

“明天早上别让我等，康妮。”

“不会的。晚安，希尔达！”

车子缓缓地开上了大路，然后迅速开走了，四下里又恢复了宁静。

康妮小心翼翼地挽起梅勒斯的手臂，两人走上了小路。他不语，她还是拉住他，喃喃道：“吻我！”

“别，等等！让我消消气儿。”他说。

这话把她逗乐了。她仍然挽着他的手臂，两个人默默地快步走在小路上。她跟他在一起是那么高兴。一想到希尔达差点把他们拆散了，她不由得打个寒战。而他则不可思议地沉静着。

进了村舍后，康妮快活地几乎跳了起来，她总算是摆脱了姐姐。

“不过你对希尔达也太不客气了。”她对他说。

“她这人欠抽嘴巴。”

“她怎么了？挺好的呀。”

他没有回答，在屋里忙着做家务，一举一动都很沉稳。他表面上很恼火，但不是冲她，康妮这样觉得。他愤怒，但愤怒的原因是他爱她。这种生气的样子让他显得愈发英俊，某种内在的光泽令她的肢体酥软。但他仍然没注意她。

直到他坐下开始解鞋带，抬头看她时，眉宇间依旧锁着愤怒。

“你上楼吗？”他问，“这儿有蜡烛！”说着他点点头示意她去拿桌子上燃着的蜡烛。她顺从地拿了蜡烛上楼，他则盯着她上楼梯，烛光映出了她臀部完美的曲线。

这是一个激情四射的夜晚，她有点吃惊，几乎有点不情愿。可她再次被欲望的强烈快感穿透了，这与温柔的快感不同，尖锐、恐惧，但在那一刻让她求之不得。尽管有点惊骇，她还是由他去，那鲁莽无耻的欲望彻底震撼了她，将她剥得一丝不挂，使她脱胎换骨，成了另一个女人。那说不上是爱了，也不是情欲。那是身体的欲望，如同火焰一样烧灼着她，直到将她的灵魂烧成灰烬。

烧去羞耻感，那根深蒂固的最古老的羞耻感，在那最为隐秘的地方。任他行其道，顺从他的意志，她要付出很多。她得被动屈就，如同一个奴隶，一个欲望的奴隶才行。可是激情之火在舐着她的身体，吞噬着她，当那欲望的火焰穿过她的心胸和五脏六腑时，她真觉得自己要死了，那是一种刻骨铭心的美妙之死。

她曾经对阿伯拉尔的话百思不得其解，他说他和海洛伊丝
③

相爱的岁月里，他们两个经历了激情的所有燃点，体验了激情的所有微妙之处。同样的东西，几千甚至几万年前就有了！在古希腊的花瓶上，到处都绘着这些东西！激情的微妙之处，欲望的圣筵！要紧的是，永远都要紧的是，把虚假的羞耻感烧个干净，把身体里最沉重的杂质熔化，净化，用纯粹的欲望之火。

在这个短暂的夏夜里，她懂得了许多。原以为女人会因着羞耻而死，可对她来说却是羞耻死了。羞耻就是恐惧，体内深处器官的羞耻，古老而又古老的身体上的恐惧蜷缩在我们的根部，只有欲望之火才能把它烧净。最终，它在男人阳物的猎捕下被惊醒，被击溃。女人也随之来到自己的森林中央，感到是来到了自身天性的根底上，根本没了羞耻感。她就是她欲望的自我，赤裸着，毫无羞耻感。她感到自己胜利了，几乎算获得了一种荣耀。原来如此！这才是生命！人就该是这个样子！没有什么可掩盖、可羞耻的。她与一个男人，另一个生命，分享了她最终的赤裸。

而这个男人又是多么莽撞的魔鬼！真像个魔鬼！要忍受他，你非得坚强不可。可要到达那身体丛林的中心并非易事，因为那是器官之羞耻感最后也是最深的隐身之处。阳物本身可以独自进行这样的探索，它是那样不由分说地挤压而入！

她在恐惧中恨透了它！可这之后她真正地想要它了！现在她明白了，在她的灵魂深处，根本上是需要这东西的猎捕，她暗自渴望它，相信自己永远不会得到它。现在它突然出现，一个男人在分享她最终的赤裸，她变得毫无羞耻感了。

诗人们在内的所有人都是骗子！他们让你觉得你需要情感，可人真正需要的是这种钻心、耗神，甚至是恐怖的身体的欲望。找到一个敢为的男人，无羞耻、无罪恶感、无丝毫畏惧地为之！如果他事后感到羞愧，也让你感到羞愧，那才是可怕的事！可惜啊，优秀而充满欲望的男人是那么为数寥寥！可叹啊，大多数男人是那么鸡零狗碎、心怀羞耻，像克利福德那样，甚至像米凯利斯那样！他们两个人在欲望上都有点像狗，而且自惭形秽。他们讲究精神上的快乐至高无上！可那对一个女人来说意味着什么呢？对男人来说又意味着什么？他甚至在精神上也变得杂乱无章、鸡零狗碎。精神要得到净化和推动，也需要纯粹的欲望才行。纯粹如火的欲望，而不是乱作一团。

哦，上帝，一个男子汉是个多么稀有的物件！男人们大多像狗一样窜来窜去，追腥逐臭，苟且交合。寻找一个男子汉，无畏也无羞的男子汉！现在她看着他，就像一个野性的动物那样睡着，睡得深沉。她蜷缩着躺下，但不离开他。

直到他的动静搅醒了她。他正坐在床上低头看着她，康妮在这眼神里看得出自己裸着身子，那是他对她最直接的反应。那目光流动着，男性眼里的她似乎从他的眼里流向她，令她浑身情欲四射。哦，四肢和身体半眠着，充满着激情，沉甸甸的，多么撩人心旌，多么美呀！

“是该起来了么？”她问。

“六点半了。”

她得在八点钟的时候到小路口那去。人总是、总是这么被动！

“我可以去做早餐，端上来吃，好吗？”

“好啊！”

弗洛西在下面低声咕噜着。他起来，脱掉睡衣，用毛巾擦了擦身子。人勇敢无畏、生机勃勃的时候是多么美！她默默地看着他，心里这么想着。

“拉开窗帘好吗？”

清晨的阳光已经照耀在嫩绿的树叶上了，不远处的林子一派郁郁葱葱。她坐在床上，透过顶窗做梦般地朝外望着，赤裸的双臂将赤裸的双胸拢到一起。这时他正在穿衣服，她则在半梦半醒中憧憬着生活，与他在一起的生活，那才是生活呢。

他要离开，逃避她弯着腰的裸体，那是个危险的裸体。

“我把睡衣都弄没了吗？”她说。

他的手在床上摸索一通，拉出一件薄薄的绸衣来。

“我觉得我脚腕上有绸子的东西来着。”他说。

那睡衣几乎被扯成了两半。

“没关系的，”她说，“是放这儿穿的，真的。我把它留在这里。”

“欸，留在这儿，那我晚上睡觉时就把它夹在腿中间做伴儿。没牌子，没商标吗？”

说着她穿上那件破睡衣，依旧梦幻般地看着窗外。窗子开着，清晨的空气飘了进来，鸟儿的鸣啭也传了进来，小鸟在窗前不停地飞来飞去。然后她看到弗洛西溜达出去了。是早晨了。

她听到他在楼下生火，泵水，还出了后门，随后渐渐飘来煎咸肉的香味。最后他上楼来了，端着一个黑色的大托盘，那托盘大得足有门那么宽。他把托盘放在床上，为她倒上茶。康妮身穿破睡衣，蹲在床上，埋头吃起来。他则坐在椅子上，把盘子放膝盖上吃。

“真好吃啊！”她说，“一块儿吃早餐多好呀。”

他默默地吃着，心里想的是飞速而逝的时光。这让她想起什么来，便对他说：“我多么希望跟你待在这里，把拉格比甩在百万英里以外去吧！其实我这次走，是要离开拉格比。你明白，对吗？”

“欸！”

“你许下了愿说咱们将来一起住，一起过日子，你和我！你对我许了愿，是不是？”

“欸！只要我们能。”

“是的！咱们会那样的，会的，不是吗？”说着她向他倾过身子抓他的手腕，结果茶都溢了出来。

“欸！”他答应着，顺手擦去溢出来的茶。

“咱们现在不住到一起就受不了，对吧？”她恳求道。

他抬头看看她，脸上闪过一丝笑意。

“是的！”他说，“可是你得在二十五分钟内离开了。”

“是吗？”她叫了起来。突然他伸出手指头警示她，然后站了起来。

弗洛西先是短促地叫了一声，然后狂吠三声发出警告。

沉寂。他把自己的盘子放在托盘里，转身下了楼。康斯坦丝听到他走上了花园小径，门外有人按自行车铃。

“早上好，梅勒斯先生！挂号信！”

“哦，好！有铅笔吗？”

“给！”

停顿片刻，那陌生人说：“加拿大！”

“欸！是我一个哥们儿写来的，他在不列颠哥伦比亚，不懂他干吗要挂号。”

“没准儿是给你寄钱什么的。”

“倒像是向我要什么东西的。”

停顿片刻后那人说：“好啊！又是个好天儿啊！”

“欸！”

“再见！”

“再见！”

过了一会儿他上楼来了，看上去带点怒容。

“是邮递员。”他说。

“真早啊！”她说。

“是乡下这一班，他每次来大多都是在七点钟。”

“你的朋友给你寄钱来了？”

“没有！只是些照片和资料，是不列颠哥伦比亚的一个地方。”

“你要去那儿吗？”

“我想咱们或许可以去那儿。”

“好啊！我相信那儿肯定很美！”但那邮差的到来扫了他的兴。

“这些该死的自行车，一不留神就到你跟前来了。但愿他没看见什么。”

“他能看见什么？”

“你得起来，收拾停当了。我出去看看。”

她看着他走上小路去侦察，带着狗，背着枪。她下楼来，梳洗一番，等他回来时她都准备停当了，几样随身带的东西都收拾进了那个小绸缎包里。

他锁上门，两个人就出发了，不过是穿过林子，而不是走小路。他还是挺小心的。

“你觉得人一辈子里能有几次昨天夜里那样的活法？”

“是啊！可还有其它的日子要想想怎么过。”他简单地回了一句。

他们在草木丛生的小径上步履沉重地走着，他在前面，一言不发。

“咱们一定要住在一起，共同生活，好吗？”她恳求着。

“欸！”他回答着，自顾朝前大步走着，“什么时候呢？现在你要去威尼斯的什么地方了。”

她木然地跟随着他，心沉着。现在她是难舍难离！

他停住了脚步。

“我就到这儿吧。”他指指右手边。

她张开双臂抱住他的脖子，紧紧地贴着他。

“你得为我留着你的温柔，好吗？”她喃喃道，“我爱昨天那一夜。可你得为我留着你的温柔，啊？”

他亲了她，紧紧地抱了她一会儿，然后叹口气，又吻了她。

“我得去看看车在不在那儿。”

他蹚着低矮的荆棘和羊齿草走过去，在草地上踩出一道印子来。他去了一两分钟的光景，就迈着大步回来了。

“车还没来呢，”他说，“可是路上停着面包房的马车。”

他似乎为此感到焦虑烦恼。

“嘀！”

他们听到汽车驶近时轻微的鸣笛声，车正缓缓地开上桥。

康妮怀着一腔悲伤，跑上了梅勒斯刚刚在草地上踏出的路，一直跑到一道高大的冬青树篱跟前，他则跟在她身后。

“那儿！从那儿穿过去！”他指指树篱当中的一道缝隙说，“我就不出去了。”

她失望地看看他。他吻吻她，催她快过去。她痛苦地爬过冬青树篱和木栅栏，跳进一条浅沟里，然后上了小路，希尔达正一脸烦恼地从车里走出来。

“你怎么在那儿？他呢？”

“他没来。”

康妮拿着小包进到车里，已经是泪流满面。希尔达抓起摩托车帽和风镜递给她，说：“戴上！”

康妮伪装好，然后又穿上一件骑摩托车时穿的长外套，这才坐了下来，看上去就是一个没了人样的动物，谁也认不出她了。希尔达很是公事公办地发动了车子，汽车开出小路，上了大路。康妮朝后看看，但没发现他的身影。走吧，走吧！她流着苦涩的泪水坐在车中。分别是这么匆忙，这样意想不到，就像生离死别一样。

“谢天谢地，你要离开他一段时间了！”说着希尔达拐上了另一条路，躲开了克罗斯希尔村。

注　释

①
出自《宗教的形成》，作者是Alfred North Whitehead。

②
伦敦西区的一条街道。

③
这是一对著名的情人。阿伯拉尔（1079—1142）是一位牧师和神学家，海洛伊丝（1098—1164）与他发生爱情后做了修女。

第十七章

“你知道吗，希尔达，”她们快到伦敦时，吃过午餐后康妮说，“你从来没有得到过真正的温存，也没有感受到真正的欲望。如果你真得到过——从同一个人那里，那就大不一样了。”

“你饶了我吧，别显摆你的经验了！”希尔达说，“我还从来也没有遇上过一个与女人相亲相爱、能为女人奉献自己的男人。我想的就是这个。我倒不贪图他们的温存和欲望，那是他们为了自己的满足才做出来的。我并不满足于当男人的小乖乖，也不愿意他想什么时候要我就什么时候要我。我要的是亲密无间，可我没得到这个。我是受够了。”

康妮掂量着这番话。亲密无间！她猜想这意思就是说要向别人坦白你的一切，那人也要向你坦白他的一切。可那多烦人呀。那种男女之间相处时的自我意识，那是一种病！

“我觉得你一直都太在意自己怎么样，不管跟谁在一起。”她说。

“我想我没有天生的奴性吧。”希尔达说。

“也许你有呢，或许你是你自我观念的奴隶。”

这个冒失的康妮，居然说出这样闻所未闻的无礼话来，希尔达听后一言不发，只顾沉默地开车。

可她还是气不过，沉默一会儿后开始反驳，说：“至少我不会为迎合别人对我的看法去当人家的奴隶。再说了，那个人还是我丈夫的下人。”

“可你知道，事实不是这样的。”康妮平静地说。

她总是被姐姐压一头。这个时候，尽管她内心里在哭泣，但她摆脱了其他女人的管束。哦，这本身就让她松了口气，如同被赋予了另一条命：摆脱别的女人陌生的管束和迷恋。那些女人是多么可恶啊！

跟父亲相见甚欢，她一直最受父亲的宠爱。她和希尔达住在帕莫尔街上的一座小旅舍里，马尔科姆男爵则住在他的俱乐部里。晚上他带女儿们出去逛逛，她们喜欢跟他一起上街。

他仍然相貌英俊、体格结实，但对周围耸立起的新世界有点怕。他续了弦，这第二个妻子是苏格兰人，比他年轻，也比他富有。可他尽可能地外出度假，就像与前妻相处时那样。

在剧院里，康妮挨着他坐。他已经有点发福了，大腿变粗了，但还很强壮结实，那是一个会享受生活的健康男子的大腿。他快乐无私，独善其身，放纵肉欲而无悔，康妮从他那双挺拔结实的大腿上能看出这一切。真是个男子汉啊！可悲的是，他老了，在他那粗壮的男人大腿上再也看不到灵活敏感，看不到柔情，这些是青春的本质，是一旦长在那儿就不会失去的东西。

康妮让腿给唤醒了。在她看来，腿比脸重要，脸已经变得不再那么真实了。有两条生机勃勃、机敏灵活的腿的人太少了！她看看剧院正厅前排座位上的男人们。那些裹在黑笼屉布里的肥嘟嘟的大腿，或者形同木头棍的瘦腿，还有那些形状好看但毫无生气的年轻人的腿，四周伸着的这些腿没有欲望，没有柔情，也没有敏感，只是些平庸的腿而已，甚至还比不上她父亲的腿有欲望。这些腿都被吓得退缩了，没了生气。

但女人们并没有被吓住。看看大多数女人顸实的腿，着实惊人，杀人都够了！或者看看那些可怜的瘦腿，还有套在丝袜中的细长雅致但毫无生气的小腿儿！糟糕，这千百万条毫无意义的腿在四处毫无意义地伸展着！

康妮在伦敦并不快活。这儿的人似鬼影，空虚无聊。他们并不是真的幸福，不管他们显得有多活泼，模样有多标致。康妮自有一个女人对幸福的盲目渴求，要得到幸福的承诺，因此在她心目中整个伦敦都是荒芜的。

还好，在巴黎她仍能感到点肉欲。可那是怎样疲惫不堪的肉欲啊，因为缺少柔情，这种肉欲在苟延残喘。哦，巴黎真忧郁，是最忧郁的城市之一：厌倦了机械的肉欲，厌倦了挣钱的紧张，甚至对反感和傲慢都厌倦了，简直是厌倦到死了。它还不够美国化或伦敦化，掩饰不了机械跳动下的厌倦！啊，那些雄赳赳的男人，那些流浪街头的人们，那些抛媚眼的人们，那些花天酒地的人们！多么无聊啊，他们！他们厌倦、疲惫，因为他们毫无柔情，既不给予，也得不到。那些精明强干但有时也不失迷人的女人们懂得一星半点肉欲的真实性，在这方面她们比机械的英国姐妹们要强，可她们对柔情懂得更少。她们干枯，因意志上无休止的紧张而干枯，她们也疲惫不堪了。人类世界正在衰竭下去，或许它会变得具有纯粹的破坏性。一种无政府状态！克利福德和他的保守无政府主义！也许它保守不了几天了，或许会发展成某种激进的无政府主义也未可知。

康妮觉得自己在萎缩，开始害怕这个世界了。偶尔她也会开心一阵子，在大街上，在博伊斯森林或卢森堡公园里。可巴黎已经充斥着美国人和英国人了，这是些身穿古怪制服的美国人和常见的那种在国外没什么盼头儿、枯燥无聊的英国人。

车子继续向前开，这让她开心，因为天气突然热了起来。希尔达是在开车穿越瑞士，穿过布伦纳山口，经过多洛米蒂山朝威尼斯而去。希尔达喜欢张罗，喜欢开车，喜欢当女主人。而康妮则乐于保持娴静。

这趟旅行确实很惬意。不过康妮一直在对自己说：“我为什么不那么在乎呢？为什么我就没有真正兴奋起来？我居然对风景都视而不见，这简直是太可怕了！可我就是不能，这真可怕。我像圣伯纳德一样，渡过了卢塞恩湖，却没注意到青山绿水。我就是对风景不再感兴趣了。干吗要盯着风景看呢？干吗要看？我拒绝看那个。”

是的，她在法国、瑞士、蒂罗尔或意大利都看不到生机，她不过是坐车穿过那些地方而已，那些地方都比拉格比更不真实，比那个糟糕的拉格比还不真实！这让她觉得如果再也看不到法国、瑞士或意大利也没什么，因为它们让拉格比显得更真实了。

至于人们！哪儿的人们都一样，几乎无甚差别。他们都想从你这里得到金钱：如果他们旅行，他们都想得到快乐，必然要这样，就像从石头里挤血一样。可怜的山峦！可怜的风景！都得被压榨、压榨、压榨，都得给人们提供兴奋，提供享乐。如此决意要享乐，这样的人还能意味着什么呢？

不！康妮对自己说：“我宁可待在拉格比，在那儿我还可以四处溜达溜达，想安静待着就安静待着，用不着盯着什么看，或表演什么。这种找乐儿的旅行表演简直是可耻到无可救药的地步了，这种表演实在是一败涂地。”

她想回拉格比了，甚至回到克利福德身边去。那个瘫了的克利福德，比起这些熙熙攘攘度假的人们，至少还不算那么愚蠢。

但她内心深处却是和另一个男人相通的，她绝不要失去他，哦，绝不，否则她就会迷失，彻底迷失在这个骄奢淫逸的渣滓和寻欢作乐的小人组成的世界里。哼，这些贪欢的小人们，“自得其乐”！这是病态的现代版。

她们把汽车停在梅斯特雷
①

的一个车库里，从那里坐航班汽船去威尼斯。那是个明媚的夏日午后，浅浅的泻湖里泛着涟漪，在水一方的威尼斯在灿烂的阳光下身影暗淡。

在码头上她们换了一条平底船，把要去的地址给了船夫。那船夫长年在这里划船，他身穿蓝白相间的宽大罩衫，模样不怎么好看，一点也不引人注目。

“好！埃斯梅拉达别墅！好！我知道那地方。我给那儿的一位先生当过船工。离这儿可是有好一段路呢！”

这人看上去是个孩子气的莽撞家伙。他过分焦躁地划着船，穿过暗淡的运河支流，两岸的墙壁上长满了吓人的黏糊糊的绿苔。这种穿过穷人区的小河，河面上拉着绳子，上头晒着洗过的衣物，时而飘过或轻或重的臭水沟味儿。

最后她们总算来到了一条敞亮的运河上，岸边有了便道，河面上有拱桥。这条河河道笔直，与大运河成直角相交。两个女人坐在小船篷下，船工则站在她们身后船尾的高处划着船。

“小姐们要在埃斯梅拉达别墅住上一些时候吗？”船工问。他一边轻快地划着船，一边用蓝白相间的手帕擦着脸上的汗。

“住二十几天吧。不过我们可都是已婚的太太了。”希尔达声音特别沙哑，令她的意大利语听着十分怪异。

“嘿！二十天！”那人说，停顿片刻他又问，“太太们这二十来天里住在埃斯梅拉达别墅，要雇条船不？按天或者按星期租都行。”

康妮和希尔达思量着。在威尼斯，总得有条自己的船才好，就如同在陆上要有辆自己的汽车一样。

“别墅里有什么船？”

“有一条摩托艇，还有一条平底船。不过——”这个“不过”的意思是：那不是你能自由支配的船。

“你怎么收费？”

大概是一天三十先令，或者一周十镑。

“平常都这么收吗？”希尔达问。

“便宜，太太，比平常便宜。平常的价钱是——”

姐妹俩想了想，希尔达说：

“好吧，明天你来，早上来，咱们安排一下。你叫什么？”

他的名字叫乔瓦尼，他说想知道具体在什么时间来，来后应该说找谁。希尔达没名片，康妮给了他一张自己的名片。他迅速地扫了一眼，那南欧人的蓝眼睛里目光火热，然后又看了一眼，眼睛一亮，道：

“啊，原来是尊贵的夫人，是吧？”

“尊贵的科斯坦扎夫人！”康妮说。

他一边点着头，重复着“科斯坦扎夫人”，一边把名片悉心地揣进外衣里。

埃斯梅拉达别墅离威尼斯很远，坐落在基奥贾
②

附近的湖边上。房子历史并不悠久，但是惬意，平台面对着大海，下方是一座大花园，浓荫密布，围墙建在湖边。

这座房的主人是个大块头、有点粗俗的苏格兰人，战前在意大利赚了一大笔钱，战争中因为表现得十分爱国，所以被封了爵。他的妻子是瘦弱苍白、言语尖刻的那种人，自己没有财产可管理，但不幸的是却要管着丈夫，约束他那些肮脏的拈花惹草行为。他是个难伺候的人，把仆人们折腾得够呛。不过自打上个冬天轻微地中了一次风之后，他现在好伺候多了。

别墅里住满了人。除了马尔科姆爵士和他两个女儿，还住了另外七个人：一对苏格兰夫妇，也带着两个女儿；一位年轻的意大利伯爵夫人，是个寡妇；一位年轻的格鲁吉亚王子；还有一位还算年轻的英国牧师，他患过肺炎，在亚历山大男爵的小教堂里当主事，顺便养病。那格鲁吉亚王子一文不名，但模样英俊，外加厚颜无耻，当私家车司机还不错。还有——算了，不说他了！那伯爵夫人是只文静的小猫，有自己的小算盘。那牧师是个头脑简单、没什么经验的巴克斯教会的人，把妻子和两个孩子留在了家里，还算幸运。格思里一家是殷实的爱丁堡中产阶级，实实在在地享受一切，只要没什么风险，什么都敢做。

康妮和希尔达立即就决定不搭理那个王子。格思里一家大概和她们同类，挺实在，但了无情趣，两个女儿正待字闺中等着嫁人。那牧师倒是个不错的人，就是过于谦恭了点。亚历山大男爵患了轻微的中风后，快乐起来也显得十分笨拙，可这里聚集了这么多漂亮女人还是让他兴奋不已。他妻子库珀夫人是个娴静如猫的人，总也快活不起来。这可怜的人儿看每个女人的眼神都是那么警觉，这几乎成了她的第二天性。她还时不时地说上几句冷淡刻薄的话，以表示自己对人性抱着全然蔑视的态度。对下人她也是颐指气使、态度恶劣，不过就是表现得不那么张扬罢了，这一点康妮看出来了。她巧言令色，让亚历山大男爵觉得他自己是这个地方的主子，希尔达则说他脑满肠肥、故作幽默，开的都是无聊的玩笑。

马尔科姆爵士在画画。不错，他仍然时不时地想画一张威尼斯湖景，这样的景色与他的苏格兰风景形成了鲜明的对比。所以一大早他就带着一块大画布划船出去，到他的“点儿”上去。过一会儿，库珀夫人也会坐船去市中心，随身带着画簿和颜料。她是个执着的水彩画家，于是家里就挂满了玫瑰色的宫殿、光影暗淡的运河、高耸的拱桥、中世纪的建筑物等等。再晚一些时候，格思里一家、那王子、那位伯爵夫人、亚历山大男爵，有时候还包括林德先生，就是那位牧师，会到利多岛的浴场去，在那儿洗海水浴，然后在午后一点半的时候回来吃午饭。

为住宿的客人举办的聚会无聊透顶。但她们姐妹两人倒无所谓，因为她们总是在外面活动。她们的父亲带她们去看画展，好几英里长的绘画把人看得心烦。他还带她们到卢凯塞别墅去看他的老朋友，炎热的晚上他和她们一起去热闹的广场，在附近的弗洛里安咖啡馆喝咖啡，还带她们去剧院看哥尔多尼
③

的戏。水上游乐场灯火辉煌，人们在轻歌曼舞。这里是所有度假胜地中的度假胜地。利多岛上充斥着晒红了的或穿着睡衣裤的肉体，看上去就像一海滩浮出水面来交配的海豹。广场上人头攒动，利多岛上人类的肢体拥挤不堪。太多的游船，太多的摩托艇，太多的汽船，太多的鸽子，太多的冷食，太多的鸡尾酒，太多讨小费的仆人，太多的语言在聒噪，太多太多太多的阳光，太浓重的威尼斯味道，一船又一船的草莓，太多的丝绸披肩，摊位上太多的切成大片牛排似的西瓜，总之，太多的享乐，享乐得没边儿了！

康妮和希尔达穿着夏装到处逛。她们认识不少人，也有不少人认识她们。米凯利斯突然出现了，很不合适宜。“嘿！你们住哪儿呀？来，吃点冷食什么的吧！来坐我的游船上哪儿转转吧。”甚至连米凯利斯都晒红了，不过说烤红了更符合这堆人肉的颜色。

从某一方面说，这样挺惬意的，几乎算得上享乐了。可就是让人觉得，喝鸡尾酒、泡在温水里、在烫人的沙滩上晒滚烫的太阳、在炎热的晚上跟别人肚皮贴肚皮跳爵士舞、用冷食来冷却自己，这种日子简直是一服麻醉剂。那正是人们想要的麻醉剂，缓慢的水流是麻醉剂，阳光是麻醉剂，爵士乐是麻醉剂，香烟、鸡尾酒、冷食、苦艾酒，都是麻醉剂。麻醉自己！享乐！享乐！

希尔达有点喜欢被麻醉的感觉。她喜欢观察所有的女人，揣摩她们。女人对女人总是很在意的。她长相如何？捕获了什么样的男人？她从中得到了什么乐趣？而男人们则像穿白法兰绒裤子的大狗，等着人来拍打爱抚，等着打滚撒欢儿，等着跳爵士舞时蹭女人的肚皮。

希尔达喜欢爵士舞，因为跳起舞来她可以用自己的肚皮蹭某些所谓男人的肚皮，让他带动自己从舞场中央向四周游移，然后她想什么时候停就什么时候停，可以不再理会“那东西”。那男人纯粹是被利用一把。可怜的康妮就挺不开心的。她不跳爵士舞，因为她无法让自己的肚皮贴到某个“家伙”的肚皮上。她痛恨利多岛上那几乎是裸体群聚的场面，似乎那里的水都不足以把这些肉体沾湿。她不喜欢亚历山大男爵和库珀夫人，也不喜欢米凯利斯或别的什么人的追逐。

最开心的时候是她和希尔达一起穿过泻湖，远远地去某个僻静的鹅卵石海滩，在那儿她们可以让游船泊在礁石后面，安静地沐浴。

乔瓦尼又找了一个船工来帮忙，因为路太远了，他让太阳晒得大汗淋漓。乔瓦尼是个好人，像一般的意大利人男人一样热情，但没什么激情。意大利人没有激情，因为激情需要很深的底蕴。他们很容易感动，时常表现出热情来，但他们很少有任何持久的激情。

乔瓦尼就是这样的人。他对两位夫人尽心尽力，就像他过去对无数贵夫人尽心尽力一样。他绝对十分乐意卖身给她们，只要她们想要他。他暗自巴望着她们要他呢，那样的话她们就会施舍给他大笔的钱财。这样的钱来得十分容易，他要结婚，正需要钱呢。他对女人们说起了他的婚事，她们挺爱听的。

他觉得过湖去某个僻静的地方或许就意味着有买卖做了，这买卖就是爱。所以他才找了个伙伴帮他——因为路太远，再怎么说人家也是两位贵夫人呢。两个贵妇，两条鱼！多上算啊！而且还是两位美丽的贵妇！他简直为此感到得意。虽说是那个大的夫人给钱使唤他，但他心里还是希望那个年轻点的太太选他欢爱。她出的价也会更高。

他带来的伙伴叫达尼埃莱。他不是固定的船夫，所以身上没有一点贩夫和男妓的痕迹。他是大运输船上的伙计，从各座岛上往威尼斯贩运水果和杂货。

达尼埃莱高大英俊，身材很好，圆圆的头上生着小而密实的淡黄色卷发，脸庞颇具男性魅力，有点像狮子，蓝色的眼睛里目光深邃。他不像乔瓦尼那样热情健谈，也不嗜酒，只是安静地划船，显得轻松而有力，似乎是一个人在海上。太太们毕竟是贵妇，跟他没什么可谈的，他甚至都不看她们，眼睛只往前看。

他是个真正的男人，乔瓦尼一喝多了酒胡乱划桨他就有点生气。他像梅勒斯一样是个男子汉，不会屈身逢迎。康妮不禁可怜起那个过于谄媚的乔瓦尼的妻子来。而达尼埃莱的妻子肯定是人们常见的那种甜美的威尼斯女人，住在迷宫一样的偏僻小街上，既贤淑又像花儿一样好看。

唉，多么可悲呀！先是男人让女人卖身，然后又是女人从男人那里买春。乔瓦尼像条狗一样垂涎三尺，巴望着卖身，把自己卖给哪个女人，就是为了挣钱！

康妮眺望着远处的威尼斯，只见那座低矮的水城笼罩在一片玫瑰色中。那是用钱堆起来的城，靠着钱辉煌绚烂，也必将与钱一同死去。金钱就是死亡！金钱，金钱，金钱，卖淫，死亡。

可达尼埃莱还算是个男子汉，能尽职尽忠。他没有穿游艇船夫们穿的那种宽松外套，只着一件针织的蓝色上衣。他有点野性、粗犷、自傲。也正因此，他成了那个谄媚的乔瓦尼的雇工，而乔瓦尼则是两个女人的雇工。世道就是这样！基督拒绝了魔鬼的金钱
④

，却让魔鬼当了银行家，掌管了一切。

沉醉地从灯火辉煌的泻湖回到住地，康妮发现几封家里的来信在等着她。克利福德定期给她来信，文笔之优美，足以印成书出版了。但也正因此，康妮觉得那些信了无情趣。

她整日生活在泻湖的光影中，周围的水是咸的，四周空旷虚幻，这种生活令她沉醉。可健康，健康，在沉醉中活得健康。这日子挺惬意，她沉溺其中，乐而忘忧。还有，她怀孕了，现在她知道了。于是，日光、咸湖水、海水浴、鹅卵石滩、拾贝壳、坐着游船漂流，这些带给她的沉醉最终和体内的身孕一起让她彻底迷醉了，怀孕本身就是另一种美满的健康，令她惬意而沉醉。

她在威尼斯住了两周了，还要再住上十天半月。阳光抹去了时间，肉体健康的美妙让她忘却了一切，她幸福得要昏头了。

是克利福德的一封信让她清醒了过来：

“我们这里也有点小小的热闹事儿。据说看林子的梅勒斯那个离家出走的老婆回村舍来了，但受到了冷遇。他将她轰了出去，然后锁了门。可听说他从林子里回来时，发现那个风韵不再的女人大模大样地躺在他床上，一丝不挂，或者不如说是淫荡
⑤

。她从窗户爬了进去。据说他怎么打她也无法把这个爱神维纳斯从他床上赶走，于是就偃旗息鼓，撤到特瓦萧他母亲家去了。从此斯戴克斯门的维纳斯就在村舍里安营扎寨，并号称那是她的家，而太阳神阿波罗就在特瓦萧落户了。

“我这是重复传言，因为梅勒斯并没有亲自来对我说过。我这些本地废话都是从博尔顿太太那儿听来的，她可是只废话鸟。要不是她叫喊说‘要是那个女人在林子里出没，咱们家夫人可不要再去那儿了！’我就不会重复这些话。

“我喜欢你寄来的马尔科姆奔向大海的照片，他白发飘飘，粉红的皮肉闪烁着光泽。我嫉妒你享受那样的阳光，这里在下雨呢。可我不嫉妒马尔科姆那致命的根深蒂固的肉欲。不过，这倒符合他这个年纪的人的性格。很明显，随着年龄的增长，一个人的肉欲会变强，但也越接近死亡。只有青春才懂得什么是不死——”

这则消息令沉迷于养尊处优的康妮烦恼，甚至愤怒。她现在得受那个禽兽女人的骚扰，她开始懊恼了！她没有梅勒斯的来信，因为他们两个约好不相互通信的。可是现在她想听他亲自告诉她什么。无论如何他是将要出生的孩子的父亲，让他写信来！

一切都乱了套，这是多么可恶的事！那些下作的人是多么肮脏啊！跟英国中部地区的晦暗与混乱相比，这里是多么美妙，可以在阳光下如此慵懒。说到底，晴朗的天空几乎是生活中最重要的东西了。

她没有提她怀孕的事，甚至也没对希尔达说。她给博尔顿太太写了封信打听确切的消息。

她们的一位叫邓肯·福伯斯的艺术家朋友从罗马北上，也来到了埃斯梅拉达别墅。现在游船上有三个游客了，邓肯同她们一起在湖这边沐浴，成了她们的卫士。他是个沉默寡言的男人，在艺术上很前卫。

康妮接到了博尔顿太太的来信，信上说：

“我的夫人，我肯定你见到克利福德男爵会高兴。他看上去特别容光焕发，正努力地工作，很有希望。当然，他也盼着你回到我们中间来呢。这房子里缺了我们的夫人就显得沉闷，所以我们都盼着夫人回来呢。

“关于梅勒斯先生，我不知道克利福德男爵同你讲了多少。好像他妻子是在哪天下午突然回来的，他从林子里回来时发现她正坐在门口的台阶上。她说她回到他身边来了，还想跟他在一起生活，因为她是他的合法妻子，他不能休了她。她这么说，是因为梅勒斯先生正想法子离婚。他跟她之间不会怎么着，他连屋都不让她进，他自己也不进屋，他转身进了林子，再也没有开过门。

“可晚上他回家时，发现有人闯进了屋。他上楼去查看她都干了些什么，却发现她一丝不挂地在床上躺着呢。他要给她钱打发她走，可她说她是他老婆，他必须让她回家来不可。我不知道他们怎么打闹来着。这是他妈告诉我的，她简直为这事烦死了。梅勒斯对她说他就是死也不再跟她一起生活了，就这么着，他拿了自己的东西，直接就奔他妈在特瓦萧山上的家去了。过了一夜后，他是通过邸园到林子里去的，再也没有挨近过那村舍一步。看来那一整天他都没见他老婆一面。可过了一天她去了贝格里她哥哥帕恩家大吵大闹，说她是梅勒斯的合法妻子，可他居然在家里勾搭别的女人，因为她发现抽屉里有香水瓶，炉灰堆上还有金黄边儿的烟头儿。我就听说了这些。还有，好像邮差弗雷德·柯克说他一大早就听到梅勒斯的卧室里有人说话，路上还有汽车。

“梅勒斯先生一直住在他妈家里，去林子里都是从邸园过去。看来那女人是一直住在家里的。反正闲话一直没断过。后来梅勒斯和汤姆·菲利普斯到村舍里去搬走了大部分家具和铺盖，拆了压水机的把儿，这么着就逼走了那女人。可她没回斯戴克斯门，而是去了贝格里，住在斯温太太家里，因为她哥哥帕恩的老婆不收留她。她经常不断地去老梅勒斯太太家里去堵梅勒斯，发誓说他跟她在村舍里同居了，还去找了律师，想让梅勒斯付给她生活费。她比从前胖了，更不怎么样了，可却像头牛一样强壮。她到处散布梅勒斯的坏话，说他怎么怎么在家里养别的女人，他们结婚后他怎么对她不好，对她像禽兽一般什么的，也不知道是什么意思。我肯定，女人一四处叨唠，什么恶心的话都说得出来。不管她怎么粗俗，总会有人信她的话，让你怎么也洗不清恶名。我敢说，她说梅勒斯对女人像下贱的禽兽这话简直让人震惊。而人们往往对这种污蔑人的话宁可信其有，决不信其无，特别是那种事儿。她发誓说自己只要活一天，就让他不得安生。可我就说了，要是他待她如禽兽，她为什么还急着回到他身边呢？不过话说回来了，她是个快到更年期的人了，她比他大好几岁呢。那些普通人家的刁婆子们，一到更年期的时候总是半疯半魔的——”

这封信给了康妮一大打击，令她堵心。她在这儿如此生机勃勃的，却要成为那下贱肮脏的事情的一部分。她生梅勒斯的气了，气的是他居然没有摆脱那个伯莎·库茨。不，她气的是他居然跟她结过婚。或许他当初的确是有点低俗。康妮想起来之前和他度过的最后一夜，不禁颤抖起来。他甚至跟一个叫伯莎·库茨的一起体验所有那些肉欲，这真叫人恶心。看来最好还是甩了他算了，彻底甩了他。或许他真是个俗人，真是个低贱的人呢。

这桩事让她厌烦透了，为此她甚至羡慕起格思里家的女儿们，她们是那么不谙世故，那么天真无邪。她现在就怕什么人知道她跟那猎场看守的事。这事要是说出去多么丢人啊！她不安、害怕，感到特别需要别人的尊敬，甚至那俗气无比的格思里家女儿的尊敬都行。如果克利福德知道了她的风流韵事，那将是一种多么难言的耻辱呀！她怕，让社会和污秽的流言吓破了胆。她几乎希望能摆脱那个孩子。简言之，她吓得魂不附体了。

至于那瓶香水，那是她的过错。她忍不住要往他抽屉里的一两块手帕和衬衫上洒香水，只是淘气而已。她把半瓶野紫罗兰香水留在了那儿，是想让他闻到香水就想起她，而那些烟头则是希尔达留下的。

她忍不住向邓肯·福伯斯说了自己的秘密，不过她没有说自己是那看守的情人，只说她喜欢他，并对福伯斯讲了他的身世。

“哦，”福伯斯说，“你等着瞧吧，那些人不把那个人整垮了是决不善罢甘休的。他有机会但拒绝跻身中产阶级，他非要在性事上特立独行不可，那他们就非毁了他不可。他们最不能容忍的就是你对性这东西坦白公开，他们觉得那比什么都脏。其实，你越是玷污性，他们才越高兴呢。可如果你在性观念上执着，让他们无法玷污，他们就要毁灭你。人们有一个疯狂的禁忌，那就是不允许把性看成是自然的生命。他们不这么认为，也不让你这么认为，否则就要杀了你。你就等着瞧吧，他们非把那个人毁了不可。他到底干了些什么呢？说他跟他老婆行房时做得过分了，难道他没这个权利吗？他老婆应该为此感到骄傲才是。可你瞧，就连这么一条下贱的母狗都会反咬一口，利用俗众对性的仇视来毁灭他。对性这东西，你得先鬼鬼祟祟、羞羞答答一番并感到可怕，然后才会被允许去做。哦，他们非把那可怜的家伙毁了不可——”

康妮现在想法变了。他到底做错了什么呢？他对康妮所做的给她带来的是美妙的欣愉，是一种解放的感觉。他给了她生命，让她热情、自然的欲望的潮水奔腾了起来。就因为这个，人们才要毁灭他。

不，不，不应该这样。她眼前浮现出他的模样来：赤条条白皙的身子，脸和手臂晒得黑红，低着头冲自己那东西说着话，似乎那是另一个生命，脸上还闪烁着奇特的笑容。她又听到了他的声音：你有女人里最好看的屁股！她还感到他的手热情温柔地攥着她的臀，抚摸着她的私处，像是在祈福。想着想着，一股热流从她子宫里淌过，她的膝间窜起小小的火苗，她对自己说：“哦，不，我决不能放弃这个！我决不能放弃他。我必须依恋他，守住好不容易从他那里得到的一切。是他给了我热量和燃烧的生命，在那之前我没有这些东西，所以我决不放弃。”

然后她做了件冒失的事。她给艾维·博尔顿发了一封信，里面夹了一张字条给那看守，请博尔顿太太交给他。她写道：

“我听说了你妻子给你惹的麻烦，为此很是难过。不过你不必在意，那不过是一种歇斯底里罢了，会过去的。不过我为此十分难过，我确实希望你不要太着急上火，为她根本不值得。她不过是个歇斯底里的女人，想伤害你。我将在十来天后回去，希望一切都好。”

几天后克利福德的一封信到了，很明显他不高兴了。

“听说你准备在十六号离开威尼斯，我很高兴。不过如果你在那里过得快活，就别急着回来。我们都想你，拉格比的人都想你。不过你应该享受足够的阳光，正像利多岛的广告上说的那样：身着睡衣沐浴阳光。所以，为了开心，也为了准备度过我们这边吓人的冬天，还是多住些日子吧。今天还下雨呢。

“博尔顿太太不辞辛苦，把我照顾得十分周到。她真是个怪人。我是越活越觉得人是多么奇怪的物件儿。有些人干脆像蜈蚣一样长着一百条腿，或者像龙虾长着六条腿。人们期望别人言行一致、富有尊严，可这些品质其实根本就不存在，甚至在自己身上有没有都值得怀疑。

“那猎场看守的丑闻不仅没结束，而且愈演愈烈，像雪球一样越滚越大。博尔顿太太一直在告诉我新的情况。她让我觉得她像条鱼，尽管不会说话，两鳃却在静静地通过呼吸传着闲话，只要她活着就会这样，什么都要从她的鳃里过滤一遍。对她来说没什么大惊小怪的，似乎别人的事是她呼吸必需的氧气。

“她对梅勒斯的丑闻很上心，只要我问问，她就会细说个不停，她最恨的是梅勒斯的老婆，她只叫她的名字伯莎·库茨，那愤愤然的样子倒像是个演员在演戏一般。我了解这世界上那些伯莎·库茨们肮脏的生活，从那肮脏的泥水里走出来，渐渐浮出水面，看看外面的阳光，我会惊诧，怎么会有这样的人和事。

“我觉得我们这世界的表面其实是海底，这感觉绝对正确。所有的树都是海底的植物，而我们是长满鳞的奇特的海底生物，吃的是小虾米之类的废物。我们的灵魂只是偶尔气喘吁吁地浮出我们生活其间的无底深渊，来到以太
⑥

的表面，那里有真正的空气。我相信我们平时呼吸的空气是一种水，男人和女人是一种鱼。

“不过有时在海底捕食后，灵魂确实会上升，像海鸥一样狂喜地蹿入光明中。我想我们的品行命中注定是要让我们在人类的海底生活中捕食水下的同族生命。但我们不朽的命运则是出逃，一旦我们吞噬了水中的猎物，就会再次浮到光明的以太中，从旧的海洋表面跃入真正的光明中。那时人就能认识到自己永恒的本性。

“听博尔顿太太说话时，我就感到自己在向深渊中扎下去，扎下去。在那里人类的隐秘之鱼扭动着，游走着。肉欲让人叼住一口猎物的肉，然后开始上升，再上升，从浓密处上升到以太里，从湿处上升到干燥地带。对你我可以说出这整个过程。可跟博尔顿太太在一起，我只感到在向下扎，向下恐怖地扎下去，扎进海藻中，扎进满是苍白鬼魂的海底。

“恐怕我们是要失去那个猎场看守了。他那个离家的老婆造成的丑闻不仅没有消弭，反倒闹得满城风雨、不可收拾。他被指责做了一系列难以言说的错事。奇怪的是，那女人怎么有本事争取到大多数矿工老婆们的支持，真是条可怕的鱼，整个村子一片流言蜚语。

“我听说伯莎·库茨把村舍和林子里的小屋洗劫一通后又把梅勒斯堵在了他母亲家里。有一回她还在放学路上抓住了自己的女儿，女儿长得很像她妈。可那女儿不但没有亲她妈的手，反而咬了一口，于是她妈在她脸上抽了一巴掌，打得她趔趄着掉进了路边的水沟里。是她奶奶气急败坏地把她救上来的。

“那女人还放了大量的毒气，详细地到处广播他们夫妻生活中的事，那些事本来应该严严实实捂到死也不能说的。捂了十年后，她决定把这些事亮出来，真是千奇百怪哟。我是从林利和医生那里听说这些事的，医生对这些挺有兴趣。当然，说起来真的也算不得什么。人类总是对超常的欢爱姿势有着特别的爱好，如果一个男人跟老婆行房时采用的是本韦努托·切利尼
⑦

所说的‘意大利姿势’，那不过是人家的嗜好而已。问题是，我怎么也想不到我们的猎场看守竟然会玩如此多的花样儿。毫无疑问，是伯莎·库茨自己先怂恿他的。无论如何，那是他们自己不洁，不关其他人的事。

“可大家都听到了，比如我就听到了。如果是在十几年前，一般的廉耻心就足以让他们不好意思这样。可现如今人们都寡廉鲜耻了，矿工的老婆们都闹将起来，出言毫不羞耻。看来过去五十年间特瓦萧的每个孩子都是圣胎，每个不信国教的女人都是一个光辉的圣女贞德。而我们那可敬的猎场看守居然会有点伟大的拉伯雷的做派，这似乎让人们觉得他比杀人犯克里平
⑧

还恐怖骇人。不过全面地看，特瓦萧的人们也是淫荡的一群。

“麻烦的是，那穷凶极恶的伯莎·库茨并不只是诉说她自己的事和痛苦。她大声地叫嚷说她发现她丈夫在村舍里跟女人‘通奸’，而且随口就说了几个女人的名字出来，这让几个体面女人的名字沾上了污点。这事有点越闹越大了，弄得人们不得不对她下了禁令。

“我得同梅勒斯谈谈这件事，因为谁也无法阻拦那女人到林子里来。他还像往常那样晃悠着，摆出一副‘谁不拿我当人，我也不拿谁当人’的架势。可凭我的眼睛，一眼就看得出他感到自己像条尾巴上拴了个罐头盒的狗一样不自在，尽管他装作尾巴上没那罐子。我还听说，他从村里经过，女人们就把孩子往回叫，好像他是萨德侯爵再世
⑨

。他的神态很无礼，但我想那铁皮罐子是牢牢地拴在他尾巴上了，他像西班牙歌谣里的堂罗德里戈那样，心里不断地重复：‘我罪孽深重的地方在受着啃噬！’
⑩

“我问他还能否完成林子里的活计，他说他不认为他忽略了自己的工作。我对他说那女人私闯进林子来是件麻烦事，他说他没有权力逮捕她。我暗示他那丑闻令人不快，他说：‘嗨，人们都应该忙自己的房事，那样就没工夫传别人的闲话了。’

“他的话里透着苦涩，也确实有道理。可他说话的方式既不文雅也不令人尊敬。我给了他足够的暗示，但我听到那铁皮罐子又开始响了起来。他说：‘以您这样的状况，克利福德男爵，不该嘲笑我裆里那东西。’

“这种话他对谁都这么说，没个分寸，这对他没什么好处。牧师、林利和布罗斯都认为应该让这个人趁早离开这里。

“我问他人们说他在村舍里与女人有染是否属实，他只说：‘那跟您有什么关系，克利福德男爵？’我告诉他在我的领地上我要求人们行为体面，他则回答说：‘那你就得封上那些女人的嘴。’我追问他在村舍里的所作所为时，他说：‘你当然可以编排我和我的狗弗洛西的丑闻，有些东西是你错过的。’这人如此少调失教，真是少见。

“我问他找个别的工作是否容易，他说：‘如果你是说要辞了我，那倒是再容易不过了。’就这样，他对下周末离开毫无异议，而且还愿意主动把这份工作的经验传授给一个叫乔·钱伯斯的年轻伙计。我告诉他他离开时我会多发他一个月的工资。他让我不要用这种方式安抚自己的良心。我问他此话怎讲，他说：‘你不欠我别的什么了，克利福德男爵，因此也用不着额外给我钱。如果你发现我不检点了，请指出来。’

“完了，这事暂时告一段落了。那女人走了，不知道去了哪里，但是只要她再出现在特瓦萧，就有可能遭到逮捕。我听说她非常怕被关进监狱，因为她够关起来的资格了。梅勒斯将在周六离开，这地方很快就会恢复正常。

“还有，我亲爱的康妮，如果你喜欢在威尼斯或瑞士住到八月初的话，我会很高兴你能躲避所有这些丑陋的喧嚣，这个月底这些就该会差不多过去的。

“你看，我们都是深海里的妖魔，一旦有龙虾从泥沙上经过，它就会把水搅浑，弄得大家都不好过。我们必须从哲学的角度看待这个问题。”

克利福德的信表达了他的愤慨，口气里没有任何一点同情，这让康妮心里难受。不过紧接着她收到了梅勒斯的信，看了信才算明白了克利福德的意思。

“真相大白了，一切都浮出了水面。你已经听说了吧，我的妻子伯莎回来了，遭到我的冷遇，就在村舍里住了下来。不客气地说，她从那小瓶香水里看出了问题。后来几天里她倒是没发现别的什么证据，只是冲着烧毁的照片大喊大叫。她在另一间卧室里发现了玻璃渣和衬板。麻烦的是，有人在衬板上画了一幅素描，画下面反复写了人名的缩写字头C. S. R。不过这倒没让她看出什么线索。但后来她闯进了林中小屋，发现你的那本名伶朱迪思自传扉页上有你的签名Constance Stewart Reid。这下她算抓住了证据，一连几天到处叫喊我的情妇就是查泰莱夫人。这消息最终传到了教区牧师和克利福德男爵那里，他们开始对我那忠诚的老婆采取法律措施了。她总是惧怕警察，从此就跑了。

“克利福德男爵派人来叫我，我就去了。他王顾左右而言他，似乎生我的气了。后来才问我是否知道夫人的名字被人提起了。我说我从来不听那些丑闻，从克利福德男爵这里听到这话我感到吃惊。他说这是一个巨大的侮辱。我对他说我洗涤间里的月份牌上有玛丽女王
⑪

的肖像，毫无疑问女王陛下就成了我后宫的一部分了。可他并不欣赏我的讽刺，干脆说我是个不名誉的人，马裤扣子都不系四处游荡。我也干脆告诉他，他就是解开扣子也没用。于是他就解雇了我。我下周六就离开，从此这里再也没我这个人了。

“我要去伦敦。我当年的房东英格太太住在科堡广场十七号，她会给我提供一个房间，或者帮我找到住处。

“可以肯定的是，一个人做了错事是掩盖不住的，特别是结过婚，而且老婆是叫伯莎。”

信里一个字也没提到康妮，也没直接对康妮诉说。这让康妮反感，他怎么也应该说几句安慰或宽心的话吧。但她明白，他是要给她自由，让她回拉格比府，回到克利福德身边去。这也让她反感，他用不着如此故作骑士状，她希望他对克利福德说：“没错，她是我的情人，我的情妇，我为此感到骄傲。”可他还没那份勇气。

在特瓦萧，她的名字就这样和他联系了起来！眼下是一片混乱，但很快这混乱场面就会过去的。

让她生气的是，这种复杂和混乱造成的愤怒让她手足无措。她不知道该做什么，该说什么，所以她就无所事事、三缄其口。她在威尼斯生活依旧，和邓肯·福伯斯坐船出游、沐浴，任时光流逝。邓肯十年前就爱上她了，但未获芳心，现在又旧情重燃。可她对他说：“我对男人只有一个要求，那就是他们应该让我独享清静。”

于是邓肯就让她独享清静，他确实为自己能这样做感到欣慰。与此同时，他内心里对她满怀着一腔特别的柔情，就是想陪伴她左右。

“你想过没有，”有一天他对她说，“人和人之间的接触是多么少。看看达尼埃莱！他那么英俊，如同太阳的儿子。可你看他有多孤独。我肯定他有家小，离不开他们。”

“那就问问他呀。”康妮说。

邓肯真问了。达尼埃莱说他结婚了，有两个孩子，都是男孩，一个七岁，一个九岁，说这话时他脸上一点表情都没有。

“或许只有那些真正能够与人共处的人才会有这种遗世独立的神态，”康妮说，“其余的人多少都有些病态，他们得混迹人群里才行，像乔瓦尼这样的人。”随后她心里说，“还有你，邓肯，也是这样病态的人。”

注　释

①
威尼斯西北十公里处的一座城市。

②
威尼斯以南二十五公里处的一座港口，建在泻湖的一座岛上。

③
Carlo Goldoni（1707—1793），威尼斯著名剧作家。

④
见《马太福音》第四章八至十一节与《路加福音》第四章五至八节。

⑤
这两个词用的是拉丁文。

⑥
以太曾被认为是传导无线电波和电磁放射的媒质。这一概念在十九世纪被普遍接受，但随着相对论和场的发现，以太就成了陈旧的概念被抛弃。

⑦
本韦努托·切利尼（1500—1571），意大利著名金匠与雕塑家。此处指《本韦努托·切利尼回忆录》一书（1566年版）。

⑧
1910年间一个毒死妻子的人。

⑨
萨德侯爵（1740—1814），法国性幻想作家，“虐待狂”一词衍生于他的名字。

⑩
见《古代西班牙歌谣》，Don Rodrigo每经过一次性事，都要躺下让一条双头蛇咬噬，一头咬他的阳具，一头咬他的心脏。

⑪
当时英国国王乔治五世的妻子。

第十八章

康妮该决定何去何从了。她打算在梅勒斯离开拉格比的那个星期六离开威尼斯，也就是说六天后离开。这样她在星期一就能到伦敦，然后就可以同他相见。她把给他的信寄到了他在伦敦的地址，请他将给她的回信发到哈特兰饭店并且在星期一晚上七点钟去那里相会。

她内心里感到莫名且难言的愤慨，气得浑身都麻木了。对希尔达她甚至也不愿意倾诉心事。她越来越沉默，让希尔达受了冷落，于是希尔达就开始和一个荷兰女人亲密交往起来。康妮讨厌女人之间的这种亲昵，觉得那令人窒息，可希尔达却总是沉溺其中。

马尔科姆爵士决定同康妮一起走，邓肯可以同希尔达一起走。老艺术家养尊处优惯了，明知康妮不喜欢坐豪华车，还是买了东方快车
①

上的卧铺票。康妮认为那种豪华车里的气氛着实腐败堕落，可这趟车却能让她快点到巴黎。

一想到要回到妻子身边，马尔科姆爵士心里就惴惴不安。这毛病是从他第一个妻子那会儿就落下的。可是家里很快就要举办松鸡狩猎会，他要早点回去。康妮的皮肤被晒得黑红漂亮，她坐在车里沉默不语，对车窗外的景色也视而不见。

“觉得回拉格比去有点无聊，是吧？”看她脸色阴沉，父亲便问她道。

“我还说不准回不回拉格比呢。”她脱口而出，蓝蓝的大眼睛凝视着父亲的眼睛。父亲蓝蓝的大眼睛里露出一个社会良知不太明确的人惯有的惊诧来。

“你的意思是你要继续在巴黎住上一段时间？”

“不，我的意思是永远不再回拉格比了。”

他正被自己的一些小问题纠缠着，因此不希望为她的事分心。

“怎么这么突然？”他问。

“我要生孩子了。”

这还是她头一次对别人说这事，这似乎标志着她生命的一个转折点。

“你怎么知道？”父亲问。

她笑了：“我怎么不知道！”

“可，可，不是克利福德的孩子，那是肯定的喽？”

“不是！是另外一个男人的。”

康妮开心地逗着他。

“我认识这个人吗？”马尔科姆爵士问。

“不，你从来没见过他。”

沉默了好一阵，父亲才问：“你有什么打算？”

“问题就是我不知道。”

“跟克利福德之间就弥合不了了吗？”

“我想克利福德会要这个孩子的，”康妮说，“上次你跟他谈话后他告诉我，如果我有了孩子他不会介意，条件是我得谨慎行事。”

“在这种情况下，这是他唯一能说的理智话了。既然如此，我想就没什么问题了。”

“何以见得？”康妮凝视着父亲的眼睛说。父亲生着蓝色的大眼睛，和康妮的眼睛很像，但他的眼睛里透着某种迷惑不安的神情，有时看上去颇像个局促的小男孩，有时又显得阴郁自私，但一般情况下那眼神还是既快活又谨慎的。

“你能送给克利福德一个子嗣，续上查泰莱家族的香火，让拉格比有另一个准男爵。”说着马尔科姆爵士的脸上露出带着些许肉欲的微笑来。

“可我不愿意。”她说。

“为什么不？对另一个男人有了感情？算了吧！如果你让我说真话，孩子，这就是真话。世界在继续，拉格比府还在，并会继续存在。这世界总的来说是不变的，而我们要做的是顺应它。而私下里，以我个人之见，我们是可以寻私欢的。感情是变化的。今年你可以喜欢一个男人，明年可以换一个喜欢。可拉格比还是拉格比呀。依附着拉格比吧，只要拉格比让你依附，然后再说寻私欢的事。如果你跟拉格比断了，你得不到什么好处。如果你一定要断，也可以。你有自己独立的收入，这是唯一不会让你失望的东西，可数目不那么可观呀。所以还是给拉格比添个小男爵吧，这事儿挺有意思的。”

说完，马尔科姆背靠在椅子上，又笑了。但康妮没说话。

“我希望你最终找到了一个真正的男人。”片刻后他又说，那口气很是有一股肉欲的味道。

“没错。但麻烦也在这里，世上真正的男人太少了。”她说。

“是啊，是这么回事！”他思忖道，“是太少了！好啊，亲爱的，看你这样就知道那人是幸运的。但你肯定他不会给你惹麻烦吗？”

“哦，不！他完全让我自主。”

马尔科姆爵士放心了。康妮是他最宠爱的女儿，他总是很欣赏康妮内在的女人气，她不像姐姐希尔达那样更多地继承了她们母亲的特质。他也一直不喜欢克利福德。所以他开心，对女儿加倍温柔起来，似乎那未出生的孩子是他的孩子一样。

他同她一起乘车去哈特兰饭店，把她安顿好了，然后去他的俱乐部。她这个晚上不要他陪伴。

她发现了梅勒斯给她的信，信上说：

“我不去你住的饭店，我七点就在亚当街的金鸡咖啡馆外面等你。”

他就站在那里，瘦高的个子，身着正式的礼服，一副淡然的表情。他天生与众不同，但没有康妮那个阶级的刻板。她一眼就看得出，他能够适应任何阶级。他的教养天生高贵，确实胜过刻板的阶级标志。

“嘿，你来了呀，看上去气色真好！”

“是的！可你的气色却不好。”

她焦虑地看着他的脸。他瘦了，颧骨都凸出来了。但他的眼睛在冲她笑着，让她感到亲切。刹那间，她不再矜持了。有什么东西从他身体里流溢而出，让她内心里感到坦然快乐，像是回到家里一样。她立即表现出女人的快乐本能来，那就是“他快乐我就快乐”。威尼斯的所有阳光也没有带给她这种内心的开朗和温暖。

“你受惊了吧？”她在桌子对面坐下后问他。他太瘦削了，现在她看得更清楚了。他的手放在桌上，那样子是她所熟悉的，特别漫不经心，就像一头沉睡的动物那样搭在桌上。她真想把他的手拿过来亲一亲，但她没敢那么做。

“人总是很恐怖的。”他说。

“你很苦恼吗？”

“是的，就像往常一样苦恼，而且我知道这样是愚蠢的。”

“你觉得你像一条尾巴上拴着罐头盒的狗吗？这是克利福德说你的话。”

他看看她。此时的她是残忍的，他的自尊心大受伤害。

“我想是吧。”他说。

她从来不知道他面对侮辱时心里感到有多么痛苦。

沉默了许久她又问：

“想我吗？”

“你没卷进来，这让我心里好受多了。”

又沉默片刻她问：

“可人们相信我们之间有那回事吗？”

“不！我一直不认为他们会相信。”

“那克利福德呢？”

“我想他也不会。他不假思索地就不提这事了，但那些传言让他再也不想见到我倒是真的。”

“我要有个孩子了。”

他脸色立即大变，浑身都为之一震。他看她的目光暗淡了下来，那眼神令她不解，就像一个燃着暗火的精灵在看着她。

“说你为此高兴啊！”她请求着伸手去抓他的手。她看得出他刹那间兴奋了一下，但这兴奋却被什么莫名的东西压了下去。

“那是将来的事。”他说。

“可你不高兴吗？”她坚持说。

“我对将来持非常怀疑的态度。”

“可你不用担心承担什么责任。克利福德会收养他，视为己出，他会感到高兴的。”

说这话时她看到他的脸色变苍白了，人也退缩着。他一言不发。

“那我就回到克利福德身边，给拉格比府添个小男爵了？”她问他。

他看着她，脸色苍白、神情淡漠，露出一丝丑陋的苦笑来。

“你千万不要告诉他谁是孩子的父亲。”

“嗨！”她说，“即便告诉他了，他也会要这孩子的。只要我想告诉他，我就告诉他。”

他思忖了片刻。

“嗯！”他是在自言自语，“我想他也会。”

他们沉默着，之间出现了一道鸿沟。

“可你不想让我回到克利福德身边去，对吗？”她问道。

“你自己想怎么样呢？”他反问。

“我想跟你一起生活。”她简言道。

闻之他情不自禁地感到五脏六腑里燃起了微弱的火来，随之垂下了头。他又抬起头，目光中透着恐慌，说：

“只要你觉得值就行，我可是一无所有啊。”

“你比大多数男人都富有，这你知道的。”她说。

“在某一方面，我知道。”他停顿片刻，想着什么，然后又说，“人们常说我很多地方像女人，其实他们不懂。不能因为我不想射杀鸟儿就说我像女人，也不能因为我不想赚大钱或不思进取就像女人。我可以在军队里升官，轻而易举，可我不喜欢军队，尽管我能控制男人们，他们喜欢我，而且当我发起脾气来时他们很怕我。可不行，我不喜欢军队，因为那些愚蠢死脑筋的当官的把军队整死了，弄得它愚昧、僵死。我喜欢男人，男人也喜欢我，可我不能忍受让那些满口胡言、傲慢无耻的人们统治这个世界。就因为这个，我才无法升迁。我恨金钱的无耻，也恨阶级的无耻。在这样的世界里，我能给一个女人什么呢？”

“为什么要给予什么呢？这不是在讨价还价。我们各自爱着对方，就这么简单。”她说。

“哦，不！比那要复杂得多。活着就意味着向前进，一直向前进。我的生命决不要走进那种阴沟里去，决不。所以我就成了一摊废水。我无法让一个女人进入我的生活，除非我做点什么事，有点什么功名，至少心里想这样，这才能让我们两个人都有新鲜感。一个男人必须把自己生命中的某种意义给予女人，如果他的生命能独立，如果那女人是个真正的女人的话。我不能当一个依附你的男人。”

“为什么不能？”她问。

“不能，因为我不能。那样很快就会招你讨厌的。”

“你好像不信任我。”她说。

他的脸上又露出那种苦笑来。

“钱是你的，地位是你的，主意由你拿。我不能只是夫人欢爱的工具啊。”

“那你还是什么？”

“你尽可以这么问。是什么，不在表面上。我，至少对我自己来说是挺重要的。我懂得我生存的意义，尽管我知道其他人不懂这个道理。”

“如果同我一起生活，你生存的意义就被削弱了吗？”

他停顿了很久终于说：

“或许吧。”

她也思忖片刻才说：

“你生存的意义到底何在？”

“我跟你说吧，那是看不见的。我不相信这个世界，不相信金钱，不相信升迁，也不相信我们文明的未来。如果人类必须要有未来的话，就得有一个巨大的变革才行。”

“那真正的未来得是什么样才行呢？”

“天知道！我能感到我内心里有什么东西，混杂在一腔的愤懑里。可那到底是什么，我不知道。”

“让我告诉你吗？”她凝视着他的脸道，“要我告诉你，你具备的那些别的男人没有的东西，那将创造一个未来，要我告诉你吗？”

“那就说吧。”他说。

“那就是你有勇气表现你的温存。这么说吧，就像你把手放在我的臀部，说我长着一个好看的臀。”

他的脸上闪烁起笑意来。

“就那个呀！”他说。

他坐着想了一想说：“欸！你说得对。真是那么回事，完全是那么回事。我知道男人之间有这东西。我得跟他们有身体上的接触，不能没这个。我得在肉体上意识到他们，而且要对他们表现出点温情来，即使要把他们投入地狱。这是个悟性的问题，就像佛陀说的那样。可即使是佛陀，也对肉体上的觉悟表现得暧昧，对自然的肉体温情语焉不详。其实那才是最美的东西，甚至男人之间，以恰当的男人的方式表现出来，也是如此。它让人们像真正的男人，而不是猿猴。欸，温情，真的，确实是性的觉悟。性确实就是接触，最亲密的接触。可人们怕的也正是接触。我们只有一半觉悟，只是半死不活。我们得活起来，觉悟起来。特别是英国人，必须得相互接触了，细腻点，温柔点，这是我们最需要的东西。”

她看着他，问：

“那你为什么要怕我呢？”

他看了她好一阵子，才说：

“那是因为金钱，真的，还有地位。那是你心中的世界。”

“可我就没有一点温情么？”她急切地问。

他看她的眼神开始暗淡迷离起来。

“有啊！时有时无，跟我一样。”

“可是你能不能信赖我们之间的温情？”她问，眼神焦虑地凝视着他。

她发现他的脸色缓和了下来，解除了戒备。“或许能吧！”他说。

沉默一会儿后，她说：“我想让你搂着我，想听你告诉我说你为我们要有孩子了感到开心。”

她看上去是那么可爱，那么温热，又是那么充满渴望，这模样令他的五脏六腑都为之躁动。

“要我说咱们上我的房间去吧，”他说，“不过那又将是个丑闻了。”

她看到他那股满不在乎的劲又上来了，他的脸上洋溢着温柔的激情。

他们沿着偏僻的小路朝科堡广场走去，他在一个住家顶层上租了个房间，是个阁楼，有个煤气炉自己做饭。房间不大，但整洁像样。

她脱了自己的衣服，也让他脱了衣服。初孕的她温柔光鲜。

“我不该打扰你。”他说。

“不！”她说，“爱我！爱我，告诉我你要收留我！说呀，你要收留我！说你永远也不会让我离开，不会让我去外面的世界，不会让我去任何别人那里。”

她爬近他，抱紧他消瘦但强壮的裸体，那是她唯一的家。

他双臂环绕着搂紧她，说：“那我就留着你，只要你愿意，我就留你。”

“说你为孩子高兴，”她重复着，“亲他，亲我的子宫，说他在那儿你很开心。”

这让他挺为难的。

“我很怕让孩子来到这个世界上，”他说，“我真替他们的未来担心。”

“可你把这孩子放进了我的身体里。对他温柔点儿，那就是他的未来了。亲他，亲他呀！”

他颤抖着，因为这话说得真。“对他温柔点儿，那就是他的未来了。”那一刻他感到了对这女人纯粹的爱。他亲了她的小腹，又亲了她的私处，还要去亲她的子宫和子宫里的胎儿。

“哦，你爱我！你爱我！”她轻声叫着，那叫声恰似欢爱时那盲目含混的叫喊。他轻柔地进到她里面去时，她感到那一股温柔的溪水从他的柔肠流淌而出，流进她的肠中，两个人的热情在柔肠中点燃了。

他进到她身体里去时，他明白他必须要这样做，就是要温柔地与她接触，同时不失作为男人的骄傲和自我完美。说到底，她有钱有财而他一无所有，他不为此对她滥施温情，是应该为自己感到自豪的。“我要捍卫人与人之间肉体意识的接触和温情的接触，”他对自己说，“她是我的伴儿，我们是在与金钱、机器和世界上麻木的理念化兽性作斗争。她在帮助我。谢天谢地，我有个女人支持我！感谢上帝，这女人伴随着我，对我一腔柔情，心里有我。感谢上帝，她不是无赖，不是傻瓜。感谢上帝，她是个温柔、清醒的女人。”

他在她体内播种时，他的灵魂也奔向了她，这是在创造，而不是简单的繁殖。

现在她决不要再跟他分开了，可具体怎么办还是个问题。

“你恨伯莎·库茨吗？”她问。

“别跟我提她。”

“要提，你必须让我提她，因为你曾经喜欢过她，你跟她曾经像跟我一样亲昵。所以你得告诉我，你跟她亲昵过，现在又这么恨她，这是不是很可怕呀？为什么会这样？”

“我不知道。她似乎一直在跟我作对，一直。她那可怕的女人的意志，她的自由，在跟我作对。一个女人可怕的自由会导致最野蛮的霸道！哦，她总是用她的自由来跟我作对，像往我脸上泼硫酸一样。”

“可她现在还是离不开你，她还爱着你吗？”

“不，没有！如果说她还离不开我，那是因为她那股邪火，她非想法子害我不可。”

“但她一定爱过你。”

“没有！不过，偶尔她也爱过。她是被我吸引了。我想，就连那她都悔恨。她偶尔爱我一下，但总要把那点爱收回去，然后开始欺压我。她最大的欲望就是欺压我，这毛病改不了。从一开始她的用心就错了。”

“或许她觉得你并不真爱她，她想迫使你爱她呢。”

“天啊，那也太恐怖了。”

“你并不真爱她，对吗？你那样对她。”

“我怎么会呢？开始是，我开始是爱她的，可她总是撕毁我。算了，别说这个了。这是命，的确是。她命中注定要这样。这次，如果能杀人，我会像杀一只白鼬一样杀了她，这个披着女人皮的该死的疯子！我恨不得杀了她，省得痛苦了！就应该允许杀她这样的人。一个女人变得一根筋了，就会跟所有东西作对，那才叫可怕，她就该杀。”

“可如果男人也变成了一根筋，是不是也该杀？”

“对，一样该杀！可我必须摆脱她，否则她就会再来缠我。我想告诉你，如果可能，我一定得离婚。所以咱们必须要小心，不能让人看见咱们在一起。如果她来折腾你和我，我可无法忍受。”

康妮在思考他的话。

“那我们就不能在一起了？”她说。

“六个月内不行。我想我能在九月份离成婚，然后到三月——”
②

“可孩子没准在二月底出生呢。”她说。

他沉默一会儿才说：“我真想让克利福德和伯莎之类的人都去死。”

“这话对他们来说可不够客气。”她说。

“对他们客气？对了，你能对他们做的最客气的事或许就是让他们去死。不能再让他们活下去了！因为他们只会阻碍生命。他们内心的灵魂是可怕的，死对他们来说应该是件美事。就应该让我来射杀他们。”

“可你是不会干这事的。”她说。

“我会！比射杀一只黄鼠狼还容易。黄鼠狼好歹还好看，还孤僻。可他们却成群结队。哦，我要射杀他们。”

“或许是因为你不敢，你才这么说。”

“哼！”

康妮现在要考虑的事很多。很明显他想彻底摆脱伯莎·库茨，她觉得这是对的，最近这次的打击确实太沉重了。这就意味着她要一个人独自等到春天。她会想办法让克利福德跟她离婚，可怎么离呢？如果提梅勒斯的名字，那他的婚就离不成了。真可恶！一个人怎么就不能走得远远的，走到海角天边，从而摆脱一切？

可就是不能。现如今，地球的最边角离查灵十字路
③

也不过才五分钟的路程。无线电广播正活跃着，因此就谈不上什么海角天涯。达荷美
④

的国王和西藏的喇嘛之类都在听伦敦和纽约的广播。

忍耐！忍耐！这世界是一个巨大复杂的机器，令人恐怖，如果想不被它撕碎，就得谨小慎微。

康妮对她父亲说出了秘密。

“你明白了吧，父亲，他是克利福德的猎场看守，不过以前在驻印度的军队里是个军官，只是像C. E. 弗洛伦斯上校
⑤

一样，愿意再次当个普通兵而已。”

马尔科姆爵士对那个著名的C. E. 弗洛伦斯上校不切实际的神秘主义一点也不喜欢。他看透了这种谦卑后面的哗众取宠，这种自我贬低实则是傲慢的表现，爵士最痛恨的就是这个。

“你那位猎场看守是打哪儿跑出来的？”马尔科姆爵士恼火地问。

“他是特瓦萧一个矿工的儿子，可他绝对是一表人才。”

这话让爵士艺术家更加生气了。

“我倒觉得他像个挖金矿的，”他说，“而你则明显是个容易开采的金矿。”

“不，父亲，不是那么回事。你看到他就知道了。他是个男子汉，克利福德一直因为他桀骜不驯而反感他。”

“很明显，他有不错的本能。”

马尔科姆爵士无法容忍的是，他的女儿和一个猎场看守闹出私通的丑闻来了。他倒是不在意他们私通，他在乎的是丑闻。

“我才不在乎那个家伙呢。一听就明白他能摆布你。可是看在上帝的份上，想想那些流言，想想你的继母，她怎么能接受这个！”

“我知道，”康妮说，“流言蜚语是可怕的，特别是当你活在社会里的时候。他特别想离婚。我想我们或许可以说这个孩子是某个男人的，但不提梅勒斯的名字。”

“某个男人的！什么样的男人？”

“或许可以说是邓肯·福伯斯的。他一直是我们的朋友，而且是个挺知名的艺术家，他其实是爱我的。”

“真是作孽啊！可怜的邓肯！这对他有什么好处？”

“我不知道。可他或许挺高兴呢。”

“他或许挺高兴？会吗？如果他高兴，那才怪。可你为什么从来没跟他有染呢？”

“那不行！再说他也并不真想要那个。他只是喜欢我在他身边，但不接触他。”

“天啊，这是怎样的一代人啊！”

“他最想让我做他的模特，让他画我，可我从来都不想干那个。”

“愿上帝保佑他！可他看上去潦倒得很，什么也干不成。”

“既然如此，你不会很在意有关他的闲言碎语吧。”

“天啊，康妮！这都是什么恶心的计谋呀！”

“我知道，这是恶心，可我还能怎么样呢？”

“计谋，诡计，诡计，计谋！真是活够了。”

“行了，父亲，如果你年轻时没有耍过许多计谋，你就议论别人吧。”

“可我跟你们现在不一样，我保证。”

“总是不一样。”

希尔达来了，听说了事情的新进展后也恼了。她也是无法容忍妹妹和一个猎场看守闹出公开的丑闻来，简直太掉身价了！

“我们为什么不消失到不列颠哥伦比亚去，跟你们分开，省得闹什么丑闻了？”康妮说。

可那没用，丑闻照样会公开。如果康妮和那男人走，她最好能跟他结婚，这是希尔达的主意。马尔科姆爵士对此心里没底，这段私情还是会闹得人尽皆知。

“你想见见他吗，父亲？”

可怜的马尔科姆爵士，他才没这雅兴呢。可怜的梅勒斯则更没兴趣。可他们还是见面了，两个男人单独在俱乐部的一个单间里吃了午餐，两个人都上下把对方打量了一番。

马尔科姆爵士喝了不少威士忌，梅勒斯也喝了酒。他们一直在聊印度的事，梅勒斯在这方面知道得更多些。

整顿饭期间他们都在谈印度。直到上了咖啡，侍者下去了，马尔科姆才点上雪茄，诚恳地说：“年轻人啊，我女儿怎么办？”

梅勒斯莞尔，反问：

“哦，先生，什么怎么办？”

“你已经让她怀了你的孩子。”

“那是我的荣幸！”梅勒斯笑道。

“荣幸，上帝！”马尔科姆爵士“扑哧”一下笑出声来，又变成了一个苏格兰人，露出淫荡的神情来，“荣幸！怎么样，啊？感觉好吧，孩子，是不是？”

“是的！”

“我猜就是！哈——哈——我的女儿，像我！我从来都不放过纵欢的机会。尽管她母亲，哦，上帝！”说着他眼睛朝天看去，“可是你让她热起来了，是你让她热起来的，我看出来了。哈哈！她身上流的是我的血！是你点燃了她这堆干草垛。哈哈哈！我真为这高兴，我实话跟你说吧，她需要这个，哦，她可是个好女子，一个好女子呀。我就知道她会滋润起来，只要有一个男人能点着她！哈哈哈！一个猎场看守，嘿，我的孩子！要我说呀，你是一个偷猎的好手儿。哈哈！现在，说真的，我们现在怎么办呢？说真的，你该明白！”

说真的，他们没商量出个子丑寅卯来。梅勒斯，尽管有点微醉，还是比那老爵士清醒。他让这场谈话尽量有点头绪，就是不怎么说话。

“你是个猎场看守！哦，你做得对！那场狩猎值得一个男人花工夫，对吗？试验一个女人，就得拧她的屁股。摸她的屁股就能知道她行不行，哈哈！我真羡慕你，孩子，你多大？”

“三十九了！”

爵士闻之不禁挑起眉毛来。

“都那么大了！没事，看你那模样，还有二十年的好日子呢。哦，什么猎场看守不看守的，你是只斗鸡，我闭着一只眼都看得出来。你可不像那个该死的克利福德，一条胆儿小的狗，压根儿就没劲，压根儿！我喜欢你，孩子。我敢打赌，你那家伙好使，哦，你是只小斗鸡，我看出来了，你是个斗士。猎场看守！哈哈！哼，我可不敢把我的猎场托付给你看守！不过，你看，说真的，我们怎么处理这件事？这世界上到处都是些该死的老娘们儿——”

说真的，他们什么也没做，只是在男人肉欲的问题上达成了默契。

“听我说，我的孩子，如果我能为你做什么，你可以相信我。猎场看守！我的天，真有意思！我喜欢这样，哦，我喜欢。这说明我女儿有胆识。什么？你知道的，反正她有自己的收入，不算多，不多，但饿不着。而且我会把我的财产留给她的，看在上帝的份上，我会的。她应该得到，就冲她在一个老娘儿们的世界里表现出来的胆识，她就该得。我这七十来年就一直在努力让自己摆脱老娘儿们的束缚，可就是摆脱不掉。可你是那种男子汉，我看出来了。”

“您这么想，真让我高兴。别人常旁敲侧击地说我是一只猴子。”

“哦，他们肯定会这么说！我的好伙计，对那些老娘儿们来说，你除了是猴子还能是别的什么吗？”

他们愉快地分了手，分手后梅勒斯心里乐了一天。

第二天他同康妮和希尔达在一个偏僻的地方共进午餐。

“目前这情形真是丑陋，太可惜了。”希尔达说。

“我能从中得到不少乐趣呢。”梅勒斯说。

“我觉得在你们都能自由结婚生子之前应该避免有孩子。”

“可主却让我们过早地有了。”他说。

“我认为这跟主没关系。当然了，康妮有足够的钱养活你们两个，可这情形让人受不了。”

“可您用不着受什么吧？”他问。

“如果你与她同属一个阶级——”

“或者我干脆是在动物园的笼子里——”

大家都不说话了。

“我认为，”希尔达说，“她最好让另一个不相干的男人当共同被告，而你则完全脱离干系。”

“可我觉得我要敢作敢为——”

“我指的是离婚诉讼过程。”

他不解地盯着她。康妮还没敢对他提让邓肯介入的事。

“我听不大懂。”他说。

“我们有个朋友，他很可能同意当共同被告，这样你的名字就不必出现了。”希尔达说。

“你说的是个男人吗？”

“那当然了！”

“可她没跟其他男人——？”说着他不解地看着康妮。

“不，不！”她赶紧说，“只是一个老朋友，很简单的关系，没有爱情。”

“既然如此，那家伙为什么还要承担罪名？他没从你这里得到什么好处？”

“有些男人是有骑士精神的，他们并不只想从女人那里得到什么。”希尔达说。

“我倒要见识见识，那人是谁？”

“是我们在苏格兰孩提时代就结识的朋友，一个艺术家。”

“邓肯·福伯斯！”他脱口而出，因为康妮对他说起过邓肯，“可你们怎么把祸嫁给他呢？”

“他们可以一同住在某个旅馆里，或者康妮甚至可以住在他的公寓里。”

“可我觉得这是小题大做，还得不偿失。”他说。

“你有什么别的办法吗？”希尔达说，“如果你的名字被提及，你跟你妻子就离不成婚了，那个人看上去就很难对付。”

“没辙！”他阴郁地说。

大家好久都说不出话来。

然后他说：“我们可以一走了之。”

“可康妮走不成，”希尔达说，“克利福德名气太大了。”

这话让大家都泄了气。

“这世界就这样。你们如果想一起生活但不遭到迫害，就得结婚。要结婚，你们两个人就都得先离婚才行。你们俩打算怎么办呢？”

他沉默了很久才问：“您能帮我们什么？”

“我们得看邓肯同不同意以共同被告的身份出现，然后我们必须要让克利福德与康妮离婚。你必须着手你离婚的事，而且你们俩得分开，直到都自由了再见面。”

“听上去像个疯人院。”

“也许是吧！还有，世界上的人会把你们当疯子，或许比那还坏。”

“还能坏成什么样？”

“把你们当成罪人，我想。”

“真恨不得给这世界几刀子。”他咬牙道，然后开始一个人生起闷气。

“行！”他终于说，“我全同意。这世界是个胡言乱语的傻子，谁也无法杀了它，不过我还是要尽我最大的努力。你们说得对，咱们是得尽量保全自己。”

他看着康妮，眼神里透着羞愧、愤懑、疲惫和痛苦。

他说：“我的小囡囡！这世界要往你屁股上撒盐了
⑥

。”

“我们不想让他们撒，他们就撒不成。”她说。

她把反抗世界的事想得轻松得多。

联系到邓肯后，他也想见见这个犯罪的猎场看守，于是他们四人一起吃了晚饭，在邓肯的公寓里。邓肯是个矮墩墩、黑皮肤、黑发直硬的人，他像哈姆雷特般沉默，但有着奇特的凯尔特人的傲慢。他画的都是些管状、瓣状和螺旋状的东西，色彩怪异，风格异常现代，但颇具力度，甚至有点纯粹的形式和调调。可梅勒斯就是觉得这东西残酷，令人反感，但他不好说出口，因为邓肯对自己的艺术观点抱着近乎发疯的态度，艺术之于他是一种偶像拜物和宗教。

他们在画室里观摩着画，邓肯棕色的小眼睛一直在盯着另一个男人看。他想听听一个猎场看守会说些什么，此前他已经知道康妮和希尔达的想法了。

“这纯粹是一种谋杀。”梅勒斯终于开口了。这话出自一个猎场看守之口，是邓肯绝然预料不到的。

“那谁被谋杀了呢？”希尔达语调十分冷淡地嘲讽道。

“我！它谋杀了一个男人全部的温情柔肠。”

这话令那艺术家顿生仇恨。他从另一个男人的话里听出了厌恶和蔑视。他对所谓“温情柔肠”这样的字眼是厌恶的。病态的情感！

梅勒斯站在那，身材瘦高、神情疲惫。他凝视着绘画时那若即若离的眼神，就像一只飞蛾在画布上跳动着。

“被谋杀的恐怕是愚昧，伤感的愚昧吧。”那艺术家不屑地说。

“你这么看吗？我倒觉得这些管子和颤动着的铁波纹才是愚不可及的，而且还挺伤感的，在我看来，它们表现了过多的自怜和神经质的自以为是。”

又一阵狂怒，艺术家的脸都发黄了。但他还是傲慢地沉默不语，把那些画都转过去面对墙壁。

“我想咱们还是去饭厅吧。”他说。

于是大家索然无味地鱼贯而出。

用过咖啡之后，邓肯开口道：

“我一点不介意冒充康妮孩子的父亲，但有个条件，那就是她来给我做模特儿。这事我都想了有好几年了，她总是拒绝我。”说这话时他就像中世纪的宗教裁判所的审判官发出了最后恐怖的宣判。

“啊！”梅勒斯说，“你是有条件的啊？”

“那当然了！我只有那一个条件。”那艺术家话里有话，试图表现出对对方的不屑来，但他做得有点过分了。

“最好同时连我也一起弄来当模特儿，”梅勒斯说，“最好把我们一起画进去，伏尔甘
⑦

和维纳斯罩在艺术之网中。在当猎场看守前，我曾像伏尔甘一样当过铁匠。”

“谢谢你了，”艺术家说，“我不觉得伏尔甘的模样让我感兴趣。”

“把他弄成管子形状，再给他打扮起来也不行吗？”

艺术家没有回答，他太傲慢，不屑再置一词。

这场聚会兴味索然，艺术家不再理会那另一个男人，只对女人们有一搭无一搭地说上几句话，似乎那是从他阴郁傲慢的内心深处挤出来的。

“你不喜欢他。不过他其实人挺好的，真的。他确实心地善良。”他们离开时康妮解释道。

“他是一只阴沉的小狗，脾气说上来就上来。”梅勒斯说。

“是啊，他今天表现不好。”

“那你去给他当模特吗？”

“哦，我真的不在乎了。他不会对我怎样的。只要能对我们共同生活有所帮助，我才不在乎什么呢。”

“可他只会在画布上糟蹋你。”

“我不在乎。他只是用绘画来表达对我的感情，那有什么？我不会让他碰我，绝不会。如果他用他那猫头鹰般的艺术眼光盯着我，就让他盯好了。他可以把我画成许多空管子和波纹，那是他的事。他因为你说的那些话才不喜欢你的，你说人家的管状艺术是自作多情和自以为是，不过你说的也是实话——”

注　释

①
著名的豪华客车，从巴黎通往君士坦丁堡。从1919年开始通过威尼斯。

②
劳伦斯1913年曾对他未来的妻姐解释英国当时的离婚法为“中间裁定”，或称“日后生效的裁定”，即离婚裁定要等到六个月后无人提出异议才生效。所以梅勒斯为了保证离婚成功，决定在离婚后六个月内不与康妮相会，以免功亏一篑。

③
此处是伦敦的地标，以此为起点测量伦敦与其它地方的距离。这里还是伦敦的地铁和铁路交通枢纽。

④
西非国家贝宁的前称。

⑤
即T. E. 劳伦斯上校（1888—1935），人称“阿拉伯的劳伦斯”，曾在1922—1925年间在英国皇家空军里当一名普通飞行员。

⑥
此句源自成语“drop a pinch of salt on the tail of”，是民间一则笑谈，即教孩子在鸟尾巴上撒盐以此捕鸟，意思是让谁落入圈套，这里可以理解为“这世界要害你了”。——译者注

⑦
罗马神话中伏尔甘是火神，同时也是铁匠的保护神，他抓住了妻子维纳斯和情人战神马尔斯，用网把这对情人罩上。

第十九章

“亲爱的克利福德，恐怕你预料的事已经发生了。我确实爱上了另一个男人，因此我希望你跟我离婚。现在我正住在邓肯家。我对你说过他曾和我们一起待在威尼斯。我为你感到十分难过，但请你平静地接受这个现实。你确实也不再需要我了，我也不忍再回拉格比府。我万分抱歉。但还是请你原谅我，跟我离婚，找一个比我好的人吧。我不是最适合你的人，因为我过于缺乏耐心，也过于自私，我想。但无论如何我也不能再回去和你生活在一起了。为你着想，我感到万分抱歉。不过只要你不发火，你就会发现你对此不那么在意。你过去对我这个人并不真正关心。因此请宽恕我，从此摆脱我吧——”

收到这样一封信，克利福德心里并不惊讶。他心里早就明白，她是一直想离开他的，但理智上他又决不肯承认这个事实。所以，这事看上去像是给了他可怕的打击和震惊。他一直在表面上不动声色，装作对她坚信不移。

我们大家都是这样。我们靠着意志的力量把内心的直觉与理性的认识割裂开来。这就造成了恐慌或者说是担心，一旦遭到打击，其危害就成十倍地增长。

克利福德像个发疯的孩子。他神情恐怖恍惚地从床上坐起来，把博尔顿太太着实吓了一跳。

“怎么了，克利福德男爵，这是怎么回事？”

没有回答！她吓坏了，以为他犯病了，忙去摸他的脸，摸他的脉。

“哪儿疼？赶紧告诉我，告诉我呀！”

还是没有回答。

“哦，天啊！哦，天啊！那我去给设菲尔德的卡林顿医生打电话，莱基医生也能直接赶来。”

说着她就往门口走，这时身后传来他沉重的声音：

“不用！”

她停住了脚步，凝视着他。他脸色发黄、神情恍惚，样子就像个白痴。

“你的意思是让我不叫大夫？”

“对！我不需要大夫。”他阴森森地说。

“可是，克利福德男爵，您病了，不叫大夫，我可承担不起这责任啊。我非叫大夫不可，否则出个好歹儿的就是我的错儿。”

沉默了一会儿，那沉重的声音又说了：

“我没病！是我妻子她不回来了。”似乎说话的是一幅画像。

“不回来了？您说的是夫人吗？”博尔顿太太朝床这边挪近了点，“哦，别信那个。您就相信夫人吧，她会回来的。”

床上的画像没动弹，可是把一封信从床罩上推了过来。

“读！”那阴森的声音说。

“为什么？要是夫人的信，我觉得夫人是不想让我给您读的，克利福德男爵。您可以告诉我她的想法，如果您乐意的话。”

可那张脸上的表情没动静，那凸出的蓝眼睛也没动静。

“读给我听！”那声音重复着刚才的话。

“好，如果非让我读，我就听您的，克利福德男爵。”她说。

于是她就读了信，读完了说：“哎呀，夫人真让我吃惊啊，她走的时候是那么诚恳地许诺说要回来的呀！”

床上那张脸上的表情似乎更加狂怒，也更加茫然若失。博尔顿太太看着他的脸，为他着急。她知道她要对付什么了，那就是男人的歇斯底里。她伺候过当兵的，对这种毛病略懂得一些。

她对克利福德有点不耐烦了。任何一个有脑子的人都早就该知道他妻子和别人好上了并因此要离开他了，她甚至肯定克利福德男爵心里绝对也有所意识，只是他不肯承认而已。如果他承认了并且对此有所准备，哦，如果他承认了并且积极地同自己的妻子为此作斗争，那还像个敢作敢为的男人。可是，不！他明明知道，还一直欺骗自己说没这回事。他感到了魔鬼在扯他的尾巴，却装作那是天使在冲他微笑呢。这种虚伪的状态导致了虚伪和错乱的危机，那就是歇斯底里，这其实是一种疯癫。“之所以会这样，”她思忖着，越想越恨他，“那是因为他总想着他自己。他把自己裹在所谓的永生的自我外套里，一旦受到打击，他就会像一个木乃伊，紧缩在裹尸布里。瞧他那德性！”

歇斯底里的毛病是危险的，她是个护士，有责任帮他治。任何想唤醒他男子气和自尊心的企图都只能让他的病情更糟，因为他的男子气已经死了，就算不是彻底死了，也是暂时死了。他只能变得越来越软，像只虫子，而且越来越神经错乱。

唯一能做的是释放他的自怜。像丁尼生笔下的贵妇
①

，他必须哭出来，否则非死不可。

于是博尔顿太太自己先哭起来。她用手捂住脸，低声地抽搭起来，边哭边叨叨着：“我怎么也不信夫人她会这样，想不到啊，想不到！”她哭着，过去的悲苦突然一起涌上心头，伤心的泪水夺眶而出。一旦哭起来，她就哭得十分真诚，因为她有不少值得一哭的事。

这边的克利福德，一想起自己被康妮那个女人如此背叛，又受了博尔顿太太忧伤的传染，眼里也含起泪水，随之顺着脸颊流了下来。他是为自己而哭呢。博尔顿太太一看到他茫然的脸上流下了泪，就忙不迭地用小手绢儿擦干自己的脸，朝他凑过来。

“您可别发愁，克利福德男爵！”她充满感情地说，“您可别这样儿，千万别，发愁只会愁伤身子的！”

他咽下一声抽泣，身子突然不由得抽动了一下，脸上的泪流得更快了。博尔顿太太把手放在他胳膊上，自己又开始落泪。克利福德浑身颤动起来，像是在抽搐。于是她忙搂住他的肩膀安抚他，说：“好了，好了！别发愁，别这样呀！别发愁！”她一边说一边呜咽，忍不住地掉眼泪。她把他拉进自己的怀抱，搂住他宽大的肩膀。他的脸埋在她怀里，浑身哆嗦着抽泣，宽大的双肩直颤。而她则轻轻地抚摸着他褐色的头发安慰他：“好了，好了！好了嘛！好了嘛！别发愁了，千万别发愁了。”

他伸开双臂搂住她，像个孩子一样依偎着她，泪水把她浆洗过的白围兜和胸前的浅蓝色上衣都浸湿了。最终他彻底放任了自己。

最终她吻了他，把他抱在怀里摇晃着，心里对自己说：“哦，克利福德男爵！哦，高傲强大的查泰莱家族！你就落到这步田地了吗？”摇到最后，他竟然像个孩子一样睡了。她感到疲惫不堪，回到自己房里，不禁又哭又笑，自己也歇斯底里起来。这简直是荒唐至极，恶劣至极！就这么衰落了，多丢人现眼啊！这也真让人苦恼。

打那以后，克利福德跟博尔顿太太在一起时就表现得像个孩子了。他会拉着她的手，把头倚在她怀里。当她亲吻他时，他会说：“好，吻我！吻我呀！”博尔顿太太用海绵擦洗他白皙的身体时，他也会说：“亲我呀！”于是她会在他身上什么地方轻轻地亲一下，以此来逗他。

他则像个孩子那样神情茫然地躺着，又像个孩子那样露出好奇的表情来。他睁大了孩子气的眼睛看着她，像是在崇拜圣母，从中得以放松。对他来说，这纯属一种放松，因为他放弃了男人的重负，返回童年，这样确实挺变态的。每到这时，他就把手伸到她怀里抚摸她的胸，还激动万分地吻她的胸，这是男人装孩子时的变态激动。

博尔顿太太既激动又害羞，对他的吻既喜又怕。但她并没有拒绝和斥责他。就这样他们产生了肉体上的亲昵，这是一种变态的亲昵。此时他是一个既任性又好奇的孩子，那个激动样很像是宗教的狂热，简直就是对那条古训变态而直白的诠释：“除非你再次成为幼儿。”
②

而此时的博尔顿太太则是那使万物复活的伟大母亲，充满了力量，用自己的意志和抚慰把这个碧眼金发的大男人牢牢地控制在自己的裙裾之下。

奇特的是，当克利福德这个变成了孩子的男人（他现在就是，这个变化过程经历了好多年了）出现在外界，他比原先真正的自己更锐利机敏。这个变态的孩子似的男人现在成了一个真正的企业家了。遇上重要的事，他绝对是个男人，像针一样尖锐，像钢一样坚硬。为了达到自己的目的，让矿井的开发“获利”，他在男人中表现出难以置信的精明、刻苦和大刀阔斧。他在女人面前的软弱和对母性的屈从似乎给了他洞察物质世界的买卖问题的眼光，给了他某种超凡的力量。沉溺私情、彻底贬损他男子汉的自我，这些似乎给了他第二天性，那就是冷漠的，几乎是先知的生意头脑。在生意上他简直是非人的。

博尔顿太太在这方面成功了。“他多么兴旺发达呀！”她骄傲地对自己说，“那是我的功劳！爱信不信，跟查泰莱夫人在一起他一辈子也甭想这么发达。她不是个旺夫的女人，她光想她自个儿——”

与此同时，在她那古怪的女人灵魂的某个角落里，她又是那么蔑视他，仇恨他！对她来说他就是个堕落的野兽，一个不安分的魔鬼。当她竭尽全力辅佐他时，在她那健康女性古远的角落里，她蔑视他，极端蔑视他，蔑视到极点。哪怕一个流浪汉也比他强。

他对康妮的态度令人匪夷所思。他坚持要再见她一面，而且坚持要她来拉格比府。在这一点上，他毫不让步。康妮曾答应过回来，绝不能食言。

“这样有用吗？”博尔顿太太说，“你就不能让她走、割舍下她吗？”

“不行！她答应要回来，就得回来。”

博尔顿太太不再跟他掰扯，她知道自己是在跟什么较劲。

“你的信对我的打击是毋庸置疑的，”他给在伦敦的康妮写信道，“或许你可以想象得到，尽管毫无疑问，你是不会费心为我开动一下你的想象力的。

“我唯一能说的是，我必须亲自在拉格比见你一面，然后再说怎么办。你曾经信誓旦旦许诺说要回拉格比，我希望你信守诺言。在见到你之前，我不相信任何传言，也无法理解任何说法，因为在这里一切都正常。用不着我告诉你，这里没人怀疑出了任何事，所以，你回来是很正常的事。如果我们商谈之后，你仍然感到没改变主意，毫无疑问，我们可以协商——”

康妮把这封信给梅勒斯看了。

“他要开始报复你了。”说着梅勒斯把信递回给她。

康妮沉默了。她惊讶地发现自己竟怕起克利福德来，怕接近他，似乎他是个危险的恶魔。

“我该怎么办？”她问。

“如果你不想，什么也不要做。”

她回了信，想就此打发了克利福德。可他又回信说：

“如果你现在不回拉格比来，我会认为你总有一天要回来，并为此做准备。我将一切照旧，在这里等你，哪怕等上半生。”

康妮让这话吓着了，这是一种恶毒的威胁。她毫不怀疑，他这人是说到做到的。他将不跟她离婚，那样的话孩子就成了他的，除非她能找到什么办法证明这孩子是婚外生育。

苦恼了一阵子，她决定去拉格比。希尔达将陪她同去。她写信把这个决定告诉了克利福德，他回信道：“我不欢迎你姐姐，但还不至于不让她进门。我毫不怀疑她是让你放弃义务和责任的共谋，所以不要期望见到她时我会给她好脸色——”

姐妹俩去了拉格比，她们到达时克利福德正好出门了，是博尔顿太太接待的她们。

“哦，夫人，这不是我们期待的那种愉快的回家，是吗？”她说。

“不是！”康妮说。

这就是说这个女人知道内情！那其他的仆人该会知道多少，会怎样猜疑？

她进到了这座房子里，现在她身上的每一丝皮肤都仇视它。这乱糟糟的大房子在她看来是邪恶的，简直是对她的威胁。她不再是这里的女主人，她是它的牺牲品。

“我在这儿待不长。”她害怕地对希尔达耳语道。

进到她自己的卧室，重新受到控制，装作什么都没发生是件痛苦的事。在拉格比的大墙里的每一分钟都让她感到厌恶。

她们下楼来用晚餐时才见到克利福德。他穿戴整齐，还戴了一条黑领带，显得拘谨，像个优越的绅士。席间他表现得十分彬彬有礼，并且礼貌地与大家聊天，但餐桌上的一切都让人发疯。

“仆人们都听说什么了？”那女仆出去后康妮问克利福德。

“关于你的打算吗？什么也不知道。”

“可博尔顿太太知道。”

他立即变了脸色，道：

“博尔顿太太不能完全算是个仆人。”

“是吗？我倒不在意。”

喝过咖啡后，希尔达说她要上楼回她的房间了，这时气氛开始紧张起来。

希尔达走后，克利福德和康妮默默地坐着，都不开口。让康妮释然的是，他没有顾影自怜，她尽量让他保持自尊。康妮只是安静地坐着，看着自己的手。

“我想你不介意收回自己说的话吧？”他终于开口了。

“我没有办法。”她喃喃道。

“如果你没办法，谁还有？”

“怕是谁也没有。”

他狠狠地看着她，一腔的冷漠和愤懑。他已经习惯有她了，她好像已经被植入他的意志了。可现在她怎么敢背叛他并毁掉他日常的生活规律？她怎么敢试图重构他的性格？

“你为什么背叛了一切？”他坚持要问。

“为了爱！”她说，用老生常谈来回答最好了。

“爱上了邓肯·福伯斯？可当你认识了我的时候并不认为他值得你爱。你是说你现在爱邓肯胜过生活中的一切？”

“人是会变的。”她说。

“或许是吧！或许你是心血来潮。可你还是得让我相信这变化有多重要。我就是不信你会爱上邓肯·福伯斯。”

“干吗非要信不可？你只需要跟我离婚，用不着相信我的感情。”

“为什么要把你离了？”

“因为我再也不想在这里生活下去了，而且你也并不真的需要我。”

“行了吧！我并没变。从我的角度说，既然你是我的妻子，我就愿意让你在我的屋檐下活得有尊严，活得心安理得。抛弃个人感情，请你相信，意味着丢掉很多。对我来说，仅仅因为你的心血来潮就打破拉格比的生活秩序，破坏体面的日常生活，那比死还让我痛苦。”

沉默片刻，她说：

“我没办法，我非走不可。我想我要有个孩子了。”

这话也让他沉默了片刻。

“是为了孩子的缘故你才要走的吗？”他终于开口说。

她点点头。

“为什么？邓肯对他的种就这么在乎吗？”

“肯定比你更在乎。”她说。

“真的吗？我要我的妻子，我没有理由让她离开我。如果她愿意在我的家里生个孩子，随她，那孩子也是受欢迎的，条件是生活的体面和秩序受到保护。你是想告诉我邓肯·福伯斯更能控制你吗？我不信。”

康妮沉默片刻说：“可你难道不明白，我必须离开你，必须和我爱的男人一起生活吗？”

“不，我不明白！我一点也不在乎你的爱，也不拿你爱的男人当回事。我就不信那种自欺欺人的话。”

“可你知道，我在乎，我信。”

“是吗？我亲爱的女士，以你的冰雪聪明，我肯定，你是不会相信你爱邓肯·福伯斯的。相信我吧，即使是现在你也更在乎我。既然如此，我干吗要听信这一派胡言乱语？”

她感到他说得对，还感到不能再沉默了。

“实话对你说吧，我真正爱的不是邓肯。”她抬头看着他说，“我们说是邓肯，是为了不伤害你的感情。”

“不伤害我的感情？”

“是的！因为说出来我真正爱的人会让你恨我的，他是梅勒斯先生，曾经是你这里的猎场看守。”

此时此刻，如果他能从椅子上跳起来，他一定会跳的。他的脸色一下子就变黄了，他的眼睛瞪着她，眼珠子都快要瞪出来了。随之他靠在椅子上，眼睛望着天，喘着气。

然后他还是挣扎着坐起身，问：

“你说的可是真的？”那模样令人毛骨悚然。

“是的，你知道我说的是真话。”

“你和他什么时候开始的？”

“今年春天。”

他沉默着，看上去就像一头陷阱里的野兽。

“那就是你了，在村舍的卧室里？”

看来他心里一直都清楚。

“是的！”

他仍然坐在椅子里，身子向前倾着，像一头困兽在凝视她。

“我的上帝，你们真该被从地球上清除掉！”

“凭什么呀？”她声音微弱地说。

“那个渣滓！那个傲慢的大老粗儿！那个低贱的下流坯子！你在这儿跟他鬼混，我的一个下人！我的上帝，我的上帝，女人下贱起来可真是下贱透顶了！”

他气疯了，她知道他会这样的。

“你的意思是说你要给那样一个下流坯子生个孩子？”

“是的，我要。”

“你要！你的意思是你肯定。你从什么时候开始确信有的？”

“六月份开始。”

他哑口无言了，那种孩子般奇特的茫然表情又回到了他脸上。

“你以为，”他终于说，“这样的人应该被允许生出来吗？”

“什么样的人？”她问。

他奇怪地看看她，不语。很明显，他甚至不能接受梅勒斯的存在与他的生活有关系这样的事实。他简直恨透了梅勒斯，可这仇恨又难以言说，恨也无济于事。

“你是说你要同他结婚吗，姓他的脏姓儿？”他终于说。

“没错！我就是这么想的。”

他似乎又瞠目结舌了。

“好啊！”他说，“这就说明我对你的看法一直没错，你不正常，你理智上出了毛病，你属于那类半疯癫的变态女人，非要堕落，非要追腥逐臭不可。”

他突然变成狂热的道德家了，把自己看成是善的化身，而康妮和梅勒斯之类的人则是脏和恶的化身。他似乎被罩在神圣的光环中飘飘欲仙了。

“你不觉得把我离了，从此摆脱我更好吗？”她说。

“不！你爱去哪儿就去哪儿，可我决不同你离婚。”他白痴似的说。

“为什么不？”

他沉默着，愚蠢地沉默着。

“你甚至还要那孩子在法律上属于你，当你的继承人？”她说。

“我一点也不把孩子当回事。”

“可如果是个男孩，那在法律上就是你的儿子，他会继承你的爵位，并且拥有拉格比。”

“对此我无所谓。”他说。

“可你必须有所谓！我要阻止让这孩子在法律上属于你，只要我能。如果这孩子不能属于梅勒斯，我宁可让他成为我的私生子。”

“随你的便吧。”

看来他是不会改变主意的。

“跟我离婚吧，”她说，“你可以把邓肯当成借口，那样就不用提实际上那个人的名字了，邓肯不介意。”

“我决不同你离婚。”他口气铁定地说。

“为什么？是因为我要你离你才这样的吗？”

“因为我是按照自己的意愿行事，我不愿意。”

再谈下去也没用，于是她上楼去把这个结果告诉希尔达。

“干脆明天就走，”希尔达说，“等他恢复理智再说。”

于是康妮花了半宿的时间收拾她最私密的东西。到了早上她把箱子叫人送到了车站，没有通知克利福德。她打算午饭前见他，只是说声再见而已。

不过她倒是同博尔顿太太说了会儿话。

“我得同你道别了，博尔顿太太。你知道原委，但我相信你不会对别人说出去。”

“哦，夫人您相信我就是了，不过这事对我们可是个不幸的打击呀。但我希望您跟另一位绅士生活幸福。”

“另一位绅士！是梅勒斯先生，我爱他，克利福德男爵知道这事，但请你别对别人说。如果哪一天你觉得克利福德男爵愿意跟我离婚了，请告诉我，好吗？我得同我爱的男人正式结婚。”

“我相信您会的，夫人！哦，您就把这事交给我好了。我对克利福德男爵一片忠心，对您也一样，因为我看得出来，你们俩各有各的道理。”

“谢谢你！瞧，我想把这个送给你，行吗？”就这样康妮再次离开了拉格比府，同希尔达一起去了苏格兰。梅勒斯到乡下去了，在一座农场里找到了一份工作。他的打算是，只要有可能他就要离婚，不管康妮是否离得成婚。在接下来的六个月中他会干些农场的活儿。这样的话，他和康妮将来就能经营一座自己的小农场，他会把精力都花在农场上。他得干些活，甚至是苦活儿。他得自己挣自己的生活，即便是用她的钱作启动金。

他们得等到春天，等到孩子出生，等到夏天再次来临。

格兰奇农场，老希诺

九月二十九日

“我设法在这里找到了工作，因为我认识公司的工程师理查德，我们当年在军队里共过事。这家农场不是私人的，它属于巴特勒和斯米坦姆煤矿公司，种草和燕麦喂井下拉煤车的马吃，还养着牛和猪等家畜。我在这里打工，薪水是每周三十先令。农场主罗利尽量给我派各种活计，这样我就能尽可能地多学些手艺，我会一直干到明年的复活节。关于伯莎，我没听到什么消息。我不明白在离婚裁定时她为什么不露面，也不知道她在哪里，怎么样了。只要我默默地等到三月份，估计我就能自由了。你别找克利福德男爵，这些日子里，他会想跟你分道扬镳的。如果他不干扰你，那就很不错了。

“我在一座挺老的村舍里寄宿，地点在恩金住宅区，挺不错的。房主是高地公园的火车司机，长着一脸胡子，是个虔诚的教徒。他的女人像只小鸟，喜欢所有高雅的东西，所以我也算是高雅了。她讲标准英语，一口一个‘请允许’！可他们的儿子在这次大战中战死了，他们因此一蹶不振。他们有个女儿，个子挺高，但脑子不灵，她正在接受培训，准备当小学老师，我有时帮她辅导辅导。瞧，我们像一家人似的。这可是一家正经人，待我极好，我想我比你还受宠呢。

“我挺喜欢农活儿。农活儿不那么给人精神上的享受，但我在那方面并不求什么。我习惯跟马和母牛打交道，虽然这东西很女性，但让我感到安慰。坐在她身边头挨着她挤奶时，我感到宽慰。这里有六头海福特牛呢。刚刚收过燕麦，我挺喜欢割麦，尽管手又酸又疼，天公还不作美，老下雨。我对这里的人不怎么在意，但同他们还处得来。对大多数事情还是眼不见为净。

“这里的煤矿情况很不好。像特瓦萧一样，这儿是个矿区，只是景象稍好一些。我有时候会在威灵顿酒馆里坐坐，跟人们聊聊。他们怨声载道，但又不想改变什么。人们都说，诺丁汉和达比郡的煤矿工人心长对了地方
③

，可他们别的器官肯定是没长对地方，因为这个世界不需要他们。我喜欢他们，可他们并不让我乐观，因为他们不再是原先的斗鸡了。他们大谈什么国有化，把开采权国有化，把整个行业都国有化。可总不能只把煤矿国有化，而其它产业依然维持原样。他们还谈论要找到煤炭的新用途，就像克利福德男爵试图做的那样。或许这在一些地方行得通，但我觉得不可能普遍成功。无论你生产什么，都得卖掉才行。这些人都很冷漠，他们感到这该死的一切都无可救药了，我也是这么看的。他们觉得自己也会随之完蛋。有些年轻的大谈建立一个苏维埃，可人们对此不是那么有信心。他们对什么也不抱信心，只觉得整个世界是一团糟，千疮百孔。即使是在一个苏维埃统治下，你也得把煤卖掉，麻烦就在这里。

“我们有这么多的工业人口，人人都要吃饭，所以这该死的把戏还得接着演下去。现如今女人们比男人话还多，比男人还雄赳赳的。男人们软弱无能，他们觉得反正是没戏了，干脆就摆出一副无可救药的样子来。总之，除了说东道西，谁也没有高招儿。年轻人要发疯了，因为他们没钱花。他们整个的生活就是花钱，可现在竟一文不名了。那就是我们的文明和教育：让大众完全依靠花钱生活，把钱花光拉倒。现在矿井上一周开两天或两天半的工，看样子一直到冬天也不会有什么好转。这就意味着一个男人得靠二十五到三十先令的薪水养活一家人。这样一来最受不了的是女人，她们是现今花钱最疯狂的人。

“你想跟他们讲生活和花钱不是一回事，那是讲不通的。如果他们受的教育是生活而不是挣钱和花钱，他们就能靠二十五先令过得很开心。如果像我说的那样，男人都穿上大红的裤子，他们就不会太想金钱了；如果他们能跳舞、跳跃、蹦达、引吭高歌、高视阔步、潇洒漂亮，他们只要有点钱够了。他们应该让女人快活，同时也能享受到女人给他们带来的快活。他们应该学会赤身裸体照样漂亮洒脱，动作也漂亮洒脱，能聚众合唱，能跳集体舞，会雕刻自己的凳子，会绣自己的标志，那样的话他们就不需要金钱了。这是解决工业问题的唯一途径：训练人们在美中生活，而没有花钱的需要。可谁也做不到这个。这些人现在都是一根筋，大众根本不必试图思考点什么，因为他们不能。他们应该生机勃勃，崇敬潘神
④

，那永远是大众唯一的神灵。少数人如果愿意可以有更高的崇拜偶像，但还是让大众永远别信教吧。

“可这些矿工们不是异教徒，远非异教徒。他们是一群沮丧的人，一群死气沉沉的人。对他们的女人来说他们都死了，在生命的意义上他们是死了的。年轻的男子骑着摩托带着女孩子兜风，一有机会就去跳爵士舞。可他们其实是死气缠身的人。需要钱，钱这东西一有就毒害你，可没有又让你挨饿。

“我相信你对这些是厌恶的。我不想唠叨自己的事，而且我也没什么事。我也不愿意过多想你，因为那样只能让我们两个都心烦意乱。但是说真的，我现在活着就是为了你和我将来能有一天生活在一起。我实在是怕呀，我能感到魔鬼就在空中什么地方，会把我们抓走。或者说不是魔鬼，而是金钱，我觉得说到底大众的意志就是要钱，要钱而仇视生命。反正我能感到空中有苍白的巨手在摸索着，妄图卡住那些试图超越金钱的人的脖子，将他们的生命挤出来。糟糕的日子就要来了，小伙子们，糟糕的日子就要来了！
⑤

如果这世道照旧，对这些工业大众来说，未来就什么也没有，只有死和毁灭了。有时我感到我的内脏都化成水了，你就在那里，就要生下我的孩子。不过别担心，过去的倒霉日子都没能把花朵毁灭，甚至不能毁灭女人的爱，因此它们也不能阻止我对你的欲望，不能扑灭你我之间的那点光亮。明年我们就能在一起了。尽管心有余悸，我还是相信我们会团圆。一个男人应该为最好的结局而努力，并且要相信自己有某种超常的力量。你不能给自己的未来打保票，只能对自己的优点抱以信心，并且相信自己有超越自我的能力。这么说，我相信我们之间燃烧的那团小小的火苗，对我来说，那是世界上仅存的东西了。我没有朋友，没有莫逆，只有你了。现在那团火苗是我生命中唯一关心的东西了。还有孩子，但那是次要的事。你和我之间的火舌才是降到我头上的圣灵
⑥

。旧的降灵不像那么回事，它让我觉得我和上帝都有点盛气凌人。而你我之间那小小的火舌，那才是真的！我要坚守着它，永远坚守，什么克利福德，什么伯莎，什么煤矿公司、政府和财欲横流的大众，全都不理睬。

“这才是我不愿意想你的真实原因，一想你我就感到受折磨，对你也没好处。我不想让你远离我，可如果我为此烦恼，就得受煎熬。忍吧，总得忍下去才是。这是我一生中第四十个冬天。以前的那些冬天就那么无可奈何地过去了，可这个冬天，我将守着我那团小小的圣灵之火，从中得到点安宁，我决不会让别人把它扑灭。如果说你在苏格兰，我在英格兰中部，我无法用双臂搂着你，无法用双腿缠绕着你，我总算有你点什么。我的灵魂与你轻柔地在那团小小的圣灵之火上扑闪，如同我们在心安理得地欢爱。我们欢爱，把火焰变成生命。甚至鲜花也是靠欢爱才获得生命，在太阳与大地交流后绽放。可这东西又是那么娇贵，需要隐忍和长久的等待才能获得。

“所以我现在喜爱的是贞洁，因为那是欢爱带来的安宁。我现在是个喜欢贞洁的人儿，喜欢贞洁就如同雪花莲喜爱白雪一样。我喜欢这样的贞洁，这是我们欢爱的平静中的暂歇。在我们之间现在就像有雪花莲在怒放着雪白的火焰。当真正的春日来临，咱们相聚，那时咱们就让这小火在欢爱中交成烈焰，让它熊熊燃烧起来。但不是现在，现在还不是时候！现在是保持贞洁的时候，这贞洁的滋味多好啊，就如同我灵魂中的一条清冽的河水。我喜欢我们之间流淌着的这条贞洁之河，就如同清新的水和雨。男人怎么会想要无聊地追逐女人？做一个唐璜
⑦

似的人是多么痛苦，既不能获得欢爱后的安宁，又不能让那团小小的火焰在欢爱中变成烈焰，也不能在间歇时像一条清流那样贞洁。

“好了，说了这么多，是因为我无法抚摸你的缘故。如果我能把你抱在怀里入睡，就不会这样浪费笔墨了。我们在一起能欢爱，也能贞洁相守。可我们必须要分离一段时间，我想这是最明智的方法。但愿我们心里都有底。

“不必烦恼，不必忧虑，咱们还不至于烦恼不堪。我们要真的相信那团小火，相信有莫名的神在保护着它燃烧不灭。你的一大半与我同在，真的，可惜那不是你的全部。

“不要为克利福德男爵的事忧虑。如果你没他的音讯，别着急。他怎么样不了你。等着吧，他最终会想要摆脱你，把你甩掉的。如果他不，我们也能想法子摆脱他。但他会的，最终他会把你当作可怕的物件抛弃。

“现在我简直收不住笔了。

“咱们的大部分都在一起，咱们会坚守着，为自己开辟通往聚首的路。约翰·托马斯向简夫人道晚安了，头有点低垂着，但心里充满希望。”

注　释

①
参见丁尼生的诗《公主》。

②
参见《马太福音》第十八章第三节和《马可福音》第十章第十五节。

③
“have one's heart in the right place”意思是心地善良。劳伦斯在此戏说成语，引出后面一句，意思是人的脑子有问题。为再现原句的幽默，把两句话都直译。——译者注

④
潘神是希腊神话中的牧神。

⑤
这是对一首名为《好日子就要来了》的歌曲的有意歪曲。原歌词是：“好日子就要来了／小伙子们／好日子就要来了。”

⑥
降灵节是基督教在复活节后的第五十天上纪念圣灵降临使徒头上的节日。在犹太教中这个节日被称为五旬节，在逾越节后第五十天庆祝。《新约·使徒行传》第二章第一至四节记载：“圣灵降临到使徒们头上，有如火舌。”

⑦
西班牙传奇中的风流汉，以引诱妇女著名。