第十七章（第17/21页）

I hear this Bertha Coutts besieges Mellors in his mother's house, having ransacked the cottage and the hut. She seized one day upon her own daughter, as that chip of the female block was returning from school; but the little one, instead of kissing the loving mother's hand, bit it firmly, and so received from the other hand a smack in the face which sent her reeling into the gutter: whence she was rescued by an indignant and harassed grandmother.

我听说贝莎·库茨先把农舍和林间小屋翻了个底朝天，又跑去梅勒斯母亲家纠缠不休。某天，适逢他们的女儿放学回家，那小家伙长得跟其母一般无二。库茨本打算将她拐走，可没想到，女儿非但没吻慈母的手，反倒结结实实地狠咬一口，结果，被她老妈赏了重重一记耳光，摇晃着跌进阴沟里。多亏其祖母即使赶来搭救，老太太见此情形，也是义愤填膺。

The woman has blown off an amazing quantity of poison-gas. She has aired in detail all those incidents of her conjugal life which are usually buried down in the deepest grave of matrimonial silence, between married couples. Having chosen to exhume them, after ten years of burial, she has a weird array. I hear these details from Linley and the doctor: the latter being amused. Of course there is really nothing in it. Humanity has always had a strange avidity for unusual sexual postures, and if a man likes to use his wife, as Benvenuto Cellini says, "in the Italian way", well that is a matter of taste. But I had hardly expected our game-keeper to be up to so many tricks. No doubt Bertha Coutts herself first put him up to them. In any case, it is a matter of their own personal squalor, and nothing to do with anybody else.

那女人散发出不可估量的毒气。她将床笫之事的种种细节都透漏出来，而这些原本应该被深埋在婚姻的静默之墓里，只有夫妻俩才清楚。而深埋十载之后，她却选择将它们全部挖出，不可思议地铺排开来。我从林利和医生那里听到事情的细节，而医生对此很感兴趣。当然，其实也没什么大不了的。人们本就喜好尝试林林总总的性交体位，如果某男人愿意如本韦努托·切利尼（注：1500-1571，意大利雕刻家）所说，跟妻子“来个意大利式”，那只不过是个人嗜好问题。但我的确没想到，咱们的守林人居然也能玩出那么多花招。毫无疑问，贝莎·库茨扮演着启蒙者的角色。无论如何，这只不过是他们恶俗的私事，跟其他人毫无干系。

However, everybody listens: as I do myself. A dozen years ago, common decency would have hushed the thing. But common decency no longer exists, and the colliers' wives are all up in arms and unabashed in voice. One would think every child in Tevershall, for the last fifty years, had been an immaculate conception, and every one of our nonconformist females was a shining Joan of Arc. That our estimable game-keeper should have about him a touch of Rabelais seems to make him more monstrous and shocking than a murderer like Crippen. Yet these people in Tevershall are a loose lot, if one is to believe all accounts.

尽管如此，几乎所有人都成为听众，连我也未能免俗。十几年前，公众的羞耻心便能让此类丑闻偃旗息鼓。可如今，这种道德意识已经荡然无存，矿工的婆娘们一个个撸胳膊挽袖子，厚着脸皮破口大骂。人们会以为过去50年间，降生于特弗沙尔的每个婴孩都是圣胎降世，每个不信奉国教的妇人都像圣女贞德那般光芒四射。我们可敬的守林人倒还真有些拉伯雷（注：1483-1553，法国作家）式的浪漫气质，可结果却似乎让他变得比杀妻犯克里平（注：1862-1910，美国医生，因谋杀其妻，在英国伦敦被绞死）更为凶残和令人发指。可是，如果特弗沙尔的村民们对这些描述都深信不疑，那么他们也都不过是群放荡之徒。

The trouble is, however, the execrable Bertha Coutts has not confined herself to her own experiences and sufferings. She has discovered, at the top of her voice, that her husband has been "keeping" women down at the cottage, and has made a few random shots at naming the women. This has brought a few decent names trailing through the mud, and the thing has gone quite considerably too far. An injunction has been taken out against the woman.