Любовник леди Чаттерлей / Lady Chatterley's Lover. Дэвид Герберт ЛоуренсЧитать онлайн книгу.

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dn’t die, and the bits seemed to grow together again. For two years he remained in the doctor’s hands. Then he could return to life again, with the lower half of his body paralysed for ever.

      This was in 1920. They returned, Clifford and Constance, to his home, Wragby Hall, the family ‘seat’. His father had died, Clifford was now a baronet, Sir Clifford, and Constance was Lady Chatterley. They came to start housekeeping and married life in the rather abandoned home of the Chatterleys on a rather inadequate income. Crippled for ever, knowing he could never have any children, Clifford came home to the Midlands[3] to keep the Chatterley name alive while he could.

      He was not really downcast. He could wheel himself about in a wheeled chair, and he had a bath-chair with a small motor, so he could drive himself slowly round the garden and into the park, of which he was really proud.

      He remained bright and cheerful, with his ruddy, healthy-looking face, and his pale-blue eyes. His shoulders were broad and strong. He was expensively dressed, and wore handsome neckties. Yet still in his face one saw the watchful look of a cripple.

      He had so very nearly lost his life, that what remained was wonderfully precious to him. It was obvious in the brightness of his eyes, how proud he was of being alive.

      Constance, his wife, was a ruddy, country-looking girl with soft brown hair and strong body. She had big, wondering eyes, and a soft voice, and seemed just to have come from her native village. It was not so at all. Her father was the once well-known R. A.[4], old Sir Malcolm Reid. Her mother had been one of the cultivated Fabians[5]. Between artists and cultured socialists, Constance and her sister Hilda had had an unconventional upbringing. They had been taken to Paris and Florence and Rome to learn art, and they had been taken also in the other direction, to the Hague[6] and Berlin, to great Socialist conventions.

      The two girls therefore were at once cosmopolitan and provincial.

      They had been sent to Dresden at the age of fifteen, for music among other things. And they had had a good time there. They lived freely among the students, they argued with the men over philosophical, sociological and artistic matters, they were just as good as the men themselves: only better, since they were women. And they went to the forests with strong youths bearing guitars. They sang the Wandervogel[7] songs, and they were free. Free! to say what they liked. It was the talk that mattered most. Love was only a minor accompaniment.

      Both Hilda and Constance had had their love-affairs by the time they were eighteen. The young men with whom they talked so passionately and sang and camped under the trees in such freedom wanted, of course, the love connexion. The girls were doubtful, but then the thing was so much talked about, it was supposed to be so important. And the men were so humble and anxious. Why couldn’t a girl be generous, and give the gift of herself?

      So they had given the gift of themselves, each to the youth with whom she had the most intimate arguments.

      The sex business was glorified by poets who were mostly men. Women had always known there was something better, something higher. And now they knew definitely that the beautiful freedom of a woman was much more wonderful than any sexual love. But men insisted on the sex thing like dogs.

      And a woman had to yield. A man was like a child with his appetites. A woman had to yield him what he wanted, or like a child he would turn nasty and spoil what was a very pleasant connexion. But a woman could take a man without really giving herself away. She could use this sex thing to have power over him. Both sisters had had their love experience by the time the war came, and they were hurried home. Neither was ever in love with a young man.

      When the girls came home for the summer holidays of 1913, when Hilda was twenty and Connie eighteen, their father could see plainly that they had had the love experience. But he was a man of experience himself, and let life take its course. As for the mother, a nervous invalid in the last few months of her life, she wanted her girls to be ‘free’, and to ‘fulfil themselves’. She had never been able to be altogether herself. She blamed her husband.

      So the girls were ‘free’, and went back to Dresden, and their music, and the university and the young men. They loved their young men, and their young men loved them with all the passion. Connie’s young man was musical, Hilda’s was technical. But they simply lived for their young women. It was obvious in them too that love had gone through them: that is, the physical experience. It is curious what change love makes, both in the body of men and women: the woman more blooming, more rounded, and her expression triumphant; the man much quieter, more inward, the very shapes of his shoulders and his back less assertive, more hesitant.

      The sisters took the sex-thrill as a sensation, and remained free. Whereas the men, in gratitude to the woman for the sex experience, let their souls go out to her. Connie’s man could be a bit sulky, and Hilda’s a bit jeering. But that is how men are! Ungrateful and never satisfied. When you don’t have them they hate you because you won’t; and when you do have them they hate you again, for some other reason. Or for no reason at all, except that they are naughty children, and can’t be satisfied whatever they get.

      However, came the war, Hilda and Connie returned home again to their mother’s funeral. Before Christmas of 1914 both their German young men were dead: the sisters wept, and loved the young men passionately, but soon forgot them.

      Both sisters lived in their father’s Kensington[8] house. Hilda, however, suddenly married a man ten years older than herself, a man with a fair amount of money, and a comfortable job in the government. She lived with him in a smallish house in Westminster[9].

      Connie did a mild form of war-work. Her ‘friend’ was a Clifford Chatterley, a young man of twenty-two, who had hurried home from Bonn, where he was studying coal-mining. He had previously spent two years at Cambridge. Now he had become a first lieutenant in a smart regiment.

      Clifford Chatterley was more upper-class than Connie. Connie was well-to-do intelligentsia, but he was aristocracy. Not the big sort, but still it.

      But Clifford, while he was better bred than Connie, and more ‘society’, was in his own way more provincial and more timid.

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

      In 1916, when Sir Geoffrey Chatterley died, Clifford became heir. He was terrified of this. Now he was heir and responsible for Wragby. Was that not terrible? and also splendid and at the same time, perhaps, purely absurd?

      Sir Geoffrey had wanted Clifford to marry and produce an heir. For willy-nilly[10] he took his baronetcy and Wragby with seriousness.

      The war had brought too much death and horror. A man needed support and comfort. A man needed to have an anchor in the safe world. A man needed a wife.

      Clifford married Connie and had his month’s honeymoon with her. It was the terrible year 1917, and they were intimate as two people who stand together on a sinking ship. He had been virgin when he married: and the sex part did not mean much to him. They were so close, he and she, apart from that. And Connie enjoyed this intimacy which was beyond sex, and beyond a man’s ‘satisfaction’. Clifford was not just keen on his ‘satisfaction’, as so many men seemed to be. No, the intimacy was deeper, more personal than that. And sex was merely an accident, one of the obsolete, organic processes, which was not really necessary. Though Connie did want children.

      But early in 1918 Clifford was shipped home smashed, and there was no child.

      Chapter 2

      Connie and Clifford came home to Wragby in the autumn of 1920.

      Wragby

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