Page 394 - lady-chatterlys-lover

I am assiduously, admirably looked after by Mrs Bolton.
She is a queer specimen. The more I live, the more I real-
ize 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 ap-
pears 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 gasp-