"Lawrence, D. H - Lady Chatterley's Lover" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lawrence D. H)

line old park of oak trees, but alas, one could see in the near
distance the chimney of Tevershall pit, with its clouds of steam and
smoke, and on the damp, hazy distance of the hill the raw straggle of
Tevershall village, a village which began almost at the park gates, and
trailed in utter hopeless ugliness for a long and gruesome mile
houses, rows of wretched, small, begrimed, brick houses, with black
slate roofs for lids, sharp angles and wilful, blank dreariness.

Connie was accustomed to Kensington or the Scotch hills or the Sussex
downs that was her England. With the stoicism of the young she took in
the utter, soulless ugliness of the coal-and-iron Midlands at a glance,
and left it at what it was unbelievable and not to be thought about.
From the rather dismal rooms at Wragby she heard the rattle-rattle of
the screens at the pit, the puff of the winding-engine, the clink-clink
of shunting trucks, and the hoarse little whistle of the colliery
locomotives. Tevershall pit-bank was burning, had been burning for
years, and it would cost thousands to put it out. So it had to burn.
And when the wind was that way, which was often, the house was full of
the stench of this sulphurous combustion of the earth's excrement. But
even on windless days the air always smelt of something under-earth
sulphur, iron, coal, or acid. And even on the Christmas roses the smuts
settled persistently, incredible, like black manna from the skies of
doom.

Well, there it was fated like the rest of things! It was rather awful,
but why kick You couldn't kick it away. It just went on. Life, like
all the rest! On the low dark ceiling of cloud at night red blotches
burned and quavered, dappling and swelling and contracting, like burns
that give pain. It was the furnaces. At first they fascinated Connie
with a sort of horror; she felt she was living underground. Then she
got used to them. And in the morning it rained.

Clifford professed to like Wragby better than London. This country had
a grim will of its own, and the people had guts. Connie wondered what
else they had certainly neither eyes nor minds. The people were as
haggard, shapeless, and dreary as the countryside, and as unfriendly.
Only there was something in their deep-mouthed slurring of the dialect,
and the thresh-thresh of their hob-nailed pit-boots as they trailed
home in gangs on the asphalt from work, that was terrible and a bit
mysterious.

There had been no welcome home for the young squire, no festivities, no
deputation, not even a single flower. Only a dank ride in a motor-car
up a dark, damp drive, burrowing through gloomy trees, out to the slope
of the park where grey damp sheep were feeding, to the knoll where the
house spread its dark brown facade, and the housekeeper and her husband
were hovering, like unsure tenants on the face of the earth, ready to
stammer a welcome.

There was no communication between Wragby Hall and Tevershall village,