Любовник леди Чаттерлей / Lady Chatterley's Lover. Книга для чтения на английском языке

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.

“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.