目 录 上一节 下一节 
当局者自己也觉得可笑，却有点可笑地行动着，一时紊乱得一塌糊涂。直至前方战事严重起来，路易·佐治出来救了国内的局面，这是超乎可笑的，于是目空一切的青年们不再嘲笑了。 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? 一九-六年，克利福的哥哥哈白阵亡了。因此克利福成了唯一的继承人。甚至这个也使他害怕起来。他早就深知生在这查太莱世家的勒格贝，作佐佛来男爵儿子，是多么重要的，他决不能逃避他的命运。可是他知道在这沸腾的外面世界的人看来，也是可笑的。现在他是继承人，是勒格贝世代老家的负责人，这可不是骇人的事？这可不是显赫而同时也许是十分荒唐的事？ 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 He was pale and tense, withdrawn into himself, and obstinately determined to save his country and his own position, let it be Lloyd George or who it might.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. 佐佛来男爵却不以为有什么荒唐的地方。他脸色苍白地、紧张地固执着要救他的祖国和他的地位，不管在位的是路易·佐治或任何人。他拥护英国和路易。佐治，正如他的祖先们拥护英国和圣佐治一样；他永不明白那儿有什么不同的地方。所以佐佛来男爵吹伐他的树木，拥护英国和路易·佐治。 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. 他要克利福结婚，好生个嗣于，克利福觉得他的父亲是个不可救药的者顽固。但是他自己，除了会嘲笑一切，和极端嘲笑他自己的处境外，还有什么比他父亲更新颖的呢？因为不管他心愿与否，他是十分郑重其事地接受这爵衔和勒格贝家产了。 The gay excitement had gone out of the war...dead. Too much death and horror. A man needed support arid comfort. A man needed to have an anchor in the safe world. A man needed a wife. 太战起初时的狂热消失了。死灭了。因为死的人太多了，恐怖太大了。男子需要扶持和安慰，需要一个铁锚把他碇泊在安全地下，需要一个妻子。 
从前，查太莱兄弟姊妹三人，虽然认识的人多，却怪孤独地住在勒格贝家里，他们三人的关系是很密切的，因为他们三人觉得孤独，虽然有爵位和土地(也许正因为这个)，他们却觉得地位不坚，毫无保障。他们和生长地的米德兰工业区完全隔绝；他们甚至和同阶级的人也隔绝了，因为佐佛来男爵的性情是古怪的，"固执的，不喜与人交往的。他们嘲笑他们的父亲，但是他们却不愿人嘲笑他。 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. 他们说过要永久的住在一块，但是现在哈白已死了。而佐佛来男爵又要克利福成婚。父亲这欲望并不正式表示，i他是很少说话的人，但是他的无言的、静默地坚持，是使克利福难以反抗的。 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. 但是，爱玛却反对这事！她比克利福大十岁，她觉得克利福如果结婚，那便是离叛他们往日的约言。 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. 然而，克利福终于娶了康妮，和她过了一个月的蜜月生活。那正在可怕的一九一七那一年；夫妇俩亲切得恰如正在沉没的船上的两个难人。结婚的时候，他还是个童男，所以性的方面，于他是没有多大意义的。他们只知相亲相爱，康妮觉得这种超乎性欲的男子不求"满足"的相亲相爱，是可喜的。而克利福也不象别的男子般的追求"满足"。不，亲情是比性交更深刻，更直接的。性交不过是偶然的、附带的事，不过是一种笨拙地坚持着的官能作用，并不是真正需要的东西。可是康妮却希翼着生些孩子，好使自己的地位强国起来，去反抗爱玛。 But early in 1918 Clifford was shipped home smashed, and there was no child. And Sir Geoffrey died of chagrin. 然而，一九一八年开始的时候，克利福伤得一身破碎。被运了回来，孩子没有生成。佐佛来男爵也忧愤中死去了。 
一九二零年的秋天，康妮和克利福回勒格贝老家来，爱玛因为仍然憎恶她弟弟的失信，已到伦敦租了间小房子住去下。 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 line 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. 勒格贝是个褐色石筑的长而低的老屋。建筑于十八世纪中期，后来时加添补，直至成了一座无甚出色的大房屋，它坐落在一高丘上，在一个够优美的满是橡树的老林园中。可惜得很，从这儿看见附近煤矿场的烟雾成云的烟囱，和远处湿雾朦胧中的小山上的达娃斯哈村落，这村落差不多挨着园门开始，极其丑恶地蔓延一里之长，一行行的寒酸肌脏的砖墙小屋，黑石板的屋顶，尖锐的屋角，带着无限悲他的气概。 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 under-earth: sulphur, iron, coal, or acid. And even on the Christmas roses the smuts settled persistently, incredible, like black manna from the skies of doom. 康妮是住惯了根新洞，看惯了苏格兰的小山，和苏色克斯的海岸沙丘的人，那便是她心目中的英格兰，她用年轻的忍耐精神，把这无灵魂的、丑恶的煤铁区的米德兰浏览了一遍，便撇开不顾了，那是令人难信的可怕的环境，是不必加以思索的。以勒格贝那些阴森的房屋里，她听得见矿坑里筛子机的轹轹声，起重机的喷气声。载重车换轨时的响声，和火车头粗哑的汽笛声。达娃斯哈的煤堤在燃烧着，已经燃烧好几年了，要熄灭它非一宗大款不可，所以只好任它烧着。风从那边吹来的时候--这是常事--屋里便充满了腐土经焚烧后的硫磺臭味。甚至无风的时候，空气里也带着一种地窖下的什么恶味。甚至在毛黄花上，也铺着一层煤灰，好象是恶天降下的黑甘露。 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. 然而，世事就是这样，一切都是命定的！这是有点可怕的，但是为什么要反抗呢？反抗是无用的，事情还是一样继续下去。这便是生活，和其它一切一样！在晚上，那低低的黝黑的云天，浮动着一些斑斑的红点，肿涨着，收缩着，好象令人痛苦的火伤；那是煤地的一些高炉。起初，这种景色使康妮深深恐怖，她觉得自己生活在地窖里。以后，她渐渐习惯了。早晨的时候，天又下起雨来。 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. 克利福自称勒格贝比伦敦可爱。这地方有一种特有的坚强的意志，居民有一种强大的欲望，康妮奇怪着，他们除此以外，还有什么尝试的东西。无论如何，见解和思想他们是没有的。这些居民和这地方一样，形容枯搞，丑陋，阴森而不和睦。不过在他们的含糊不清的土话里和他们在沥青路上曳着钉底鞍。一群一群的散工回家时候的嘈杂声里，却有些什么可怕而有点神秘的东西。 
当这年轻的贵族归家时，谁也没有来欢迎他。没有宴会，没有代表，甚至一朵花也没有。只是当他的汽车在阴森的林中的潮湿空气里开过，经过那有些灰色绵羊在那里吃着草的园圃斜坡，来到那高丘上黑褐色的屋门前时，一个女管家和她的丈夫在那里等着，预备支吾几句欢迎的话。 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. 勒格贝和达娃斯哈村落是毫无来往的。村里人见了他们，也不脱帽，也不鞠躬。矿工们见了只是眼睁地望着。商人见了康妮举举帽子，和对一个任何熟人一样，对克利福相通的深渊，双方都抱着一种沉静的仇恨。起初，康妮对于村人这种淫雨似的下个不尽的仇恨，很觉痛苦。后来她忍耐下来了，反而觉得那是一服强身剂，是予人以一种生趣的什么东西，这并不是因为她和克利福不孚众望，仅仅是因为他们和矿工是完全不同的两种人罢了。在特兰以南的地方，这种人与人之间的极端隔绝也许是不存在的。但是在中部和北部的工业区，他们间的隔绝是言语所难形容的。你走你的。我走我的！奇怪的相克的人类感情！
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