No no,it should not be.She saw the image of him,naked white with tanned face and hands,looking down and addressing his erect penis as if it were another being,the odd grin flickering on his face.And she heard his voice again:Tha's got the nicest woman's arse of anybody!And she felt his hand warmly and softly closing over her tail again,over her secret places,like a benediction.And the warmth ran through her womb,and the little flames flickered in her knees,and she said:Oh,no!I mustn't go back on it!I must not go back on him.I must stick to him and to what I had of him,through everything.I had no warm,flamy life till he gave it me.And I won't go back on it.
She did a rash thing.She sent a letter to Ivy Bolton,enclosing a note to the keeper,and asking Mrs Bolton to give it him.And she wrote to him:I am very much distressed to hear of all the trouble your wife is making for you,but don't mind it,it is only a sort of hysteria.It will all blow over as suddenly as it came.But I'm awfully sorry about it,and I do hope you are not minding very much.After all,it isn't worth it.She is only a hysterical woman who wants to hurt you.I shall be home in ten days'time,and I do hope everything will be all right.A few days later came a letter from Clifford.He was evidently upset.I am delighted to hear you are prepared to leave Venice on the sixteenth.But if you are enjoying it,don't hurry home.We miss you,Wragby misses you.But it is essential that you should get your full amount of sunshine,sunshine and pyjamas,as the advertisements of the Lido say.
So please do stay on a little longer,if it is cheering you up and preparing you for our sufficiently awful winter.Even today,it rains.
I am assiduously,admirably looked after by Mrs Bolton.She is a queer specimen.The more I live,the more I realize what strange creatures human beings are.Some of them might Just as well have a hundred legs,like a centipede,or six,like a lobster.The human consistency and dignity one has been led to expect from one's fellow-men seem actually nonexistent.
One doubts if they exist to any startling degree even is oneself.
The scandal of the keeper continues and gets bigger like a snowball.
Mrs Bolton keeps me informed.She reminds me of a fish which,though dumb,seems to be breathing silent gossip through its gills,while ever it lives.
All goes through the sieve of her gills,and nothing surprises her.It is as if the events of other people's lives were the necessary oxygen of her own.
She is preoccupied with tie Mellors scandal,and if I will let her begin,she takes me down to the depths.Her great indignation,which even then is like the indignation of an actress playing a role,is against the wife of Mellors,whom she persists in calling Bertha Courts.I have been to the depths of the muddy lies of the Bertha Couttses of this world,and when,released from the current of gossip,I slowly rise to the surface again,I look at the daylight its wonder that it ever should be.
It seems to me absolutely true,that our world,which appears to us the surface of all things,is really the bottom of a deep ocean:
all our trees are submarine growths,and we are weird,scaly-clad submarine fauna,feeding ourselves on offal like shrimps.Only occasionally the soul rises gasping through the fathomless fathoms under which we live,far up to the surface of the ether,where there is true air.I am convinced that the air we normally breathe is a kind of water,and men and women are a species of fish.
But sometimes the soul does come up,shoots like a kittiwake into the light,with ecstasy,after having preyed on the submarine depths.It is our mortal destiny,I suppose,to prey upon the ghastly subaqueous life of our fellow-men,in the submarine jungle of mankind.But our immortal destiny is to escape,once we have swallowed our swimmy catch,up again into the bright ether,bursting out from the surface of Old Ocean into real light.Then one realizes one's eternal nature.
When I hear Mrs Bolton talk,I feel myself plunging down,down,to the depths where the fish of human secrets wriggle and swim.Carnal appetite makes one seize a beakful of prey:then up,up again,out of the dense into the ethereal,from the wet into the dry.To you I can tell the whole process.But with Mrs Bolton I only feel the downward plunge,down,horribly,among the sea-weeds and the pallid monsters of the very bottom.
I am afraid we are going to lose our game-keeper.The scandal of the truant wife,instead of dying down,has reverberated to greater and greater dimensions.He is accused of all unspeakable things and curiously enough,the woman has managed to get the bulk of the colliers'wives behind her,gruesome fish,and the village is putrescent with talk.
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.
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.
