Women in Love. D. H. Lawrence

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ and picturesque, very peaceful, and the house had a charm of its own.

      It was crowded now with the family and the wedding guests. The father, who was not well, withdrew to rest. Gerald was host. He stood in the homely entrance hall, friendly and easy, attending to the men. He seemed to take pleasure in his social functions, he smiled, and was abundant in hospitality.

      The women wandered about in a little confusion, chased hither and thither by the three married daughters of the house. All the while there could be heard the characteristic, imperious voice of one Crich woman or another calling “Helen, come here a minute,” “Marjory, I want you—here.” “Oh, I say, Mrs Witham—.” There was a great rustling of skirts, swift glimpses of smartly-dressed women, a child danced through the hall and back again, a maidservant came and went hurriedly.

      Meanwhile the men stood in calm little groups, chatting, smoking, pretending to pay no heed to the rustling animation of the women’s world. But they could not really talk, because of the glassy ravel of women’s excited, cold laughter and running voices. They waited, uneasy, suspended, rather bored. But Gerald remained as if genial and happy, unaware that he was waiting or unoccupied, knowing himself the very pivot of the occasion.

      Suddenly Mrs Crich came noiselessly into the room, peering about with her strong, clear face. She was still wearing her hat, and her sac coat of blue silk.

      “What is it, mother?” said Gerald.

      “Nothing, nothing!” she answered vaguely. And she went straight towards Birkin, who was talking to a Crich brother-in-law.

      “How do you do, Mr Birkin,” she said, in her low voice, that seemed to take no count of her guests. She held out her hand to him.

      “Oh Mrs Crich,” replied Birkin, in his readily-changing voice, “I couldn’t come to you before.”

      “I don’t know half the people here,” she said, in her low voice. Her son-in-law moved uneasily away.

      “And you don’t like strangers?” laughed Birkin. “I myself can never see why one should take account of people, just because they happen to be in the room with one: why should I know they are there?”

      “Why indeed, why indeed!” said Mrs Crich, in her low, tense voice. “Except that they are there. I don’t know people whom I find in the house. The children introduce them to me—‘Mother, this is Mr So-and-so.’ I am no further. What has Mr So-and-so to do with his own name?—and what have I to do with either him or his name?”

      She looked up at Birkin. She startled him. He was flattered too that she came to talk to him, for she took hardly any notice of anybody. He looked down at her tense clear face, with its heavy features, but he was afraid to look into her heavy-seeing blue eyes. He noticed instead how her hair looped in slack, slovenly strands over her rather beautiful ears, which were not quite clean. Neither was her neck perfectly clean. Even in that he seemed to belong to her, rather than to the rest of the company; though, he thought to himself, he was always well washed, at any rate at the neck and ears.

      He smiled faintly, thinking these things. Yet he was tense, feeling that he and the elderly, estranged woman were conferring together like traitors, like enemies within the camp of the other people. He resembled a deer, that throws one ear back upon the trail behind, and one ear forward, to know what is ahead.

      “People don’t really matter,” he said, rather unwilling to continue.

      The mother looked up at him with sudden, dark interrogation, as if doubting his sincerity.

      “How do you mean, matter?” she asked sharply.

      “Not many people are anything at all,” he answered, forced to go deeper than he wanted to. “They jingle and giggle. It would be much better if they were just wiped out. Essentially, they don’t exist, they aren’t there.”

      She watched him steadily while he spoke.

      “But we didn’t imagine them,” she said sharply.

      “There’s nothing to imagine, that’s why they don’t exist.”

      “Well,” she said, “I would hardly go as far as that. There they are, whether they exist or no. It doesn’t rest with me to decide on their existence. I only know that I can’t be expected to take count of them all. You can’t expect me to know them, just because they happen to be there. As far as I go they might as well not be there.”

      “Exactly,” he replied.

      “Mightn’t they?” she asked again.

      “Just as well,” he repeated. And there was a little pause.

      “Except that they are there, and that’s a nuisance,” she said. “There are my sons-in-law,” she went on, in a sort of monologue. “Now Laura’s got married, there’s another. And I really don’t know John from James yet. They come up to me and call me mother. I know what they will say—‘how are you, mother?’ I ought to say, ‘I am not your mother, in any sense.’ But what is the use? There they are. I have had children of my own. I suppose I know them from another woman’s children.”

      “One would suppose so,” he said.

      She looked at him, somewhat surprised, forgetting perhaps that she was talking to him. And she lost her thread.

      She looked round the room, vaguely. Birkin could not guess what she was looking for, nor what she was thinking. Evidently she noticed her sons.

      “Are my children all there?” she asked him abruptly.

      He laughed, startled, afraid perhaps.

      “I scarcely know them, except Gerald,” he replied.

      “Gerald!” she exclaimed. “He’s the most wanting of them all. You’d never think it, to look at him now, would you?”

      “No,” said Birkin.

      The mother looked across at her eldest son, stared at him heavily for some time.

      “Ay,” she said, in an incomprehensible monosyllable, that sounded profoundly cynical. Birkin felt afraid, as if he dared not realise. And Mrs Crich moved away, forgetting him. But she returned on her traces.

      “I should like him to have a friend,” she said. “He has never had a friend.”

      Birkin looked down into her eyes, which were blue, and watching heavily. He could not understand them. “Am I my brother’s keeper?” he said to himself, almost flippantly.

      Then he remembered, with a slight shock, that that was Cain’s cry. And Gerald was Cain, if anybody. Not that he was Cain, either, although he had slain his brother. There was such a thing as pure accident, and the consequences did not attach to one, even though one had killed one’s brother in such wise. Gerald as a boy had accidentally killed his brother. What then? Why seek to draw a brand and a curse across the life that had caused the accident? A man can live by accident, and die by accident. Or can he not? Is every man’s life subject to pure accident, is it only the race, the genus, the species, that has a universal reference? Or is this not true, is there no such thing as pure accident? Has everything that happens a universal significance? Has it? Birkin, pondering as he stood there, had forgotten Mrs Crich, as she had forgotten him.

      He СКАЧАТЬ