Page 395 - lady-chatterlys-lover

ing 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 kit-
tiwake 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 desti-
ny 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 wrig-
gle 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 pro-
cess. But with Mrs Bolton I only feel the downward plunge,
down, horribly, among the sea-weeds and the pallid mon-
sters 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 re-
verberated 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

Lady Chatterly’s Lover