LADY CHATTERLEY'S LOVER: CHAPTER 9

作者: D·H·Lawrence

Free Download Babylon Translate Software

The poster (email) is not available. 收藏推荐:

图书介绍

Author: D·H·Lawrence

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 forwards! 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 of ten, 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 lingers 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 bas 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, flamey 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 does 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