Page 424 - lady-chatterlys-lover

raving idiot, and no man can kill it: though I’ll do my best.
But you re right. We must rescue ourselves as best we can.’
He looked in humiliation, anger, weariness and misery
at Connie.
’Ma lass!’ he said. ‘The world’s goin’ to put salt on thy
tail.’
’Not if we don’t let it,’ she said.
She minded this conniving against the world less than
he did.
Duncan, when approached, also insisted on seeing the
delinquent game-keeper, so there was a dinner, this time in
his flat: the four of them. Duncan was a rather short, broad,
dark-skinned, taciturn Hamlet of a fellow with straight
black hair and a weird Celtic conceit of himself. His art was
all tubes and valves and spirals and strange colours, ultra-
modern, yet with a certain power, even a certain purity of
form and tone: only Mellors thought it cruel and repellent.
He did not venture to say so, for Duncan was almost insane
on the point of his art: it was a personal cult, a personal re-
ligion with him.
They were looking at the pictures in the studio, and
Duncan kept his smallish brown eyes on the other man. He
wanted to hear what the game-keeper would say. He knew
already Connie’s and Hilda’s opinions.
’It is like a pure bit of murder,’ said Mellors at last; a
speech Duncan by no means expected from a game-keeper.
’And who is murdered?’ asked Hilda, rather coldly and
sneeringly.
’Me! It murders all the bowels of compassion in a man.’