Читать книгу Любовник леди Чаттерлей / Lady Chatterley's Lover онлайн | страница 20

“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[31] 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.