第十一章（第8/20页）

Tevershall! That was Tevershall! Merrie England! Shakespeare's England! No, but the England of today, as Connie had realized since she had come to live in it. It was producing a new race of mankind, over-conscious in the money and social and political side, on the spontaneous, intuitive side dead, but dead. Half-corpses, all of them: but with a terrible insistent consciousness in the other half. There was something uncanny and underground about it all. It was an under-world. And quite incalculable. How shall we understand the reactions in half-corpses? When Connie saw the great lorries full of steel-workers from Sheffield, weird, distorted smallish beings like men, off for an excursion to Matlock, her bowels fainted and she thought: Ah God, what has man done to man? What have the leaders of men been doing to their fellow men? They have reduced them to less than humanness; and now there can be no fellowship any more! It is just a nightmare.

特弗沙尔！这就是特弗沙尔！快乐的英格兰！莎翁的英格兰！不，这就是当今英格兰的缩影，自从康妮来此地定居，对这一点已经心知肚明。这里孕育出全新的人种，内心在乎的只有金钱、社会与政治，而那些自然流露、与生俱来的部分却已经泯灭，踪影不见。他们无一不是行尸走肉，但仅存的一半意识却异常执着。这实在是稀奇古怪，神秘莫测。这里与冥界无异。无法揣度和预估。我们怎能理解行尸的反应呢？一队大卡车从康妮眼前开过，满载着谢菲尔德的炼钢工人。他们个个表情怪异，身形扭曲萎缩，不成人样，正往马特洛克进发。她内心一阵抽搐，暗暗想道：啊，上帝，人类究竟对自己做了些什么？人间的卓越领袖们到底对同胞们做了些什么？他们把自己弄得人性丧尽，情谊无存。如同置身痛苦的梦魇。

She felt again in a wave of terror the grey, gritty hopelessness of it all. With such creatures for the industrial masses, and the upper classes as she knew them, there was no hope, no hope any more. Yet she was wanting a baby, and an heir to Wragby! An heir to Wragby! She shuddered with dread.

恐惧的浪潮再度袭来，她被挥之不去的阴霾绝望所笼罩。只为工业生产而活的生灵，与她所熟知的上层阶级联手，将希望全部击碎，让理想荡然无存。但她还是盼着能有个孩子，为拉格比留下子嗣！拉格比的子嗣！她心有余悸地颤抖起来。

Yet Mellors had come out of all this!— Yes, but he was as apart from it all as she was. Even in him there was no fellowship left. It was dead. The fellowship was dead. There was only apartness and hopelessness, as far as all this was concerned. And this was England, the vast bulk of England: as Connie knew, since she had motored from the centre of it.

而梅勒斯同样生长于斯——没错，但他同样出污泥而不染，和她一样超凡脱俗。即使在他身上，也找不到任何朋友情谊。已经消失殆尽。真情厚意已经不见踪影。如果说还留存着什么，那就是孤独和绝望。但这就是英格兰的真实写照，当今英格兰的绝大部分地区都是如此，对此康妮再清楚不过，因为她乘车从腹地一路驶来。

The car was rising towards Stacks Gate. The rain was holding off, and in the air came a queer pellucid gleam of May. The country rolled away in long undulations, south towards the Peak, east towards Mansfield and Nottingham. Connie was travelling South.

汽车直奔斯塔克斯门而去。云收雨歇，天空中呈现出澄明的奇异光彩，这是五月英伦特有的景象。绵延起伏的乡村景色在眼前掠过，往南是皮克，而曼斯菲尔德和诺丁汉则在东边。康妮正自北向南进发。

As she rose on to the high country, she could see on her left, on a height above the rolling land, the shadowy, powerful bulk of Warsop Castle, dark grey, with below it the reddish plastering of miners' dwellings, newish, and below those the plumes of dark smoke and white steam from the great colliery which put so many thousand pounds per annum into the pockets of the Duke and the other shareholders. The powerful old castle was a ruin, yet it hung its bulk on the low sky-line, over the black plumes and the white that waved on the damp air below.