Читать книгу Любовник леди Чаттерлей / Lady Chatterley's Lover онлайн | страница 53

“Do you like me?”

“Very much! And you see there’s no question of kissing between us, is there?”

“None at all!” said Connie. “But oughtn’t there to be?”

“Why, in God’s name? I like Clifford, but what would you say if I went and kissed him?”

“But isn’t there a difference?”

“Where does it lie, as far as we’re concerned? We’re all intelligent human beings, and the male and female business is in abeyance. Just in abeyance. How would you like me to start acting up like a continental[42] male at this moment, and parading the sex thing?”

“I should hate it.”

“Well then! I tell you, if I’m really a male thing at all, I never run across the female of my species. And I don’t miss her, I just like women. Who’s going to force me into loving or pretending to love them, working up the sex game?”

“No, I’m not. But isn’t something wrong?”

“You may feel it, I don’t.”

“Yes, I feel something is wrong between men and women. A woman has no glamour for a man any more.”

“Has a man for a woman?”

She pondered the other side of the question.

“Not much,” she said truthfully.

“Then let’s leave it all alone, and just be decent and simple, like proper human beings with one another. Be damned to the artificial sex-compulsion! I refuse it!”

Connie knew he was right, really. Yet it left her feeling so forlorn, so forlorn and stray. Like a chip on a dreary pond, she felt. What was the point, of her or anything?

It was her youth which rebelled. These men seemed so old and cold. Everything seemed old and cold. And Michaelis let one down so; he was no good. The men didn’t want one; they just didn’t really want a woman, even Michaelis didn’t.

And the bounders who pretended they did, and started working the sex game, they were worse than ever.

It was just dismal, and one had to put up with it. It was quite true, men had no real glamour for a woman: if you could fool yourself into thinking they had, even as she had fooled herself over Michaelis, that was the best you could do. Meanwhile you just lived on and there was nothing to it. She understood perfectly well why people had cocktail parties, and jazzed, and Charlestoned[43] till they were ready to drop. You had to take it out some way or other, your youth, or it ate you up. But what a ghastly thing, this youth! You felt as old as Methuselah, and yet the thing fizzed somehow, and didn’t let you be comfortable. A mean sort of life! And no prospect! She almost wished she had gone off with Mick, and made her life one long cocktail party, and jazz evening. Anyhow that was better than just mooning yourself into the grave.