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brave new world -
chapter one
A SQUAT grey building of only thirty-four stories.
Over the main entrance the words, CENTRAL LONDON HATCHERY AND
CONDITIONING CENTRE, and, in a shield, the World State's motto,
COMMUNITY, IDENTITY, STABILITY.
The enormous room on the ground
floor faced towards the north. Cold for all the summer beyond the
panes, for all the tropical heat of the room itself, a harsh thin
light glared through the windows, hungrily seeking some draped
lay figure, some pallid shape of academic goose-flesh, but
finding only the glass and nickel and bleakly shining porcelain
of a laboratory. Wintriness responded to wintriness. The overalls
of the workers were white, their hands gloved with a pale corpse-coloured
rubber. The light was frozen, dead, a ghost. Only from the yellow
barrels of the microscopes did it borrow a certain rich and
living substance, lying along the polished tubes like butter,
streak after luscious streak in long recession down the work
tables.
- "And this," said
the Director opening the door, "is the Fertilizing
Room."
- Bent over their instruments,
three hundred Fertilizers were plunged, as the Director
of Hatcheries and Conditioning entered the room, in the
scarcely breathing silence, the absent-minded,
soliloquizing hum or whistle, of absorbed concentration.
A troop of newly arrived students, very young, pink and
callow, followed nervously, rather abjectly, at the
Director's heels. Each of them carried a notebook, in
which, whenever the great man spoke, he desperately
scribbled. Straight from the horse's mouth. It was a rare
privilege. The D. H. C. for Central London always made a
point of personally conducting his new students round the
various departments.
- "Just to give you a
general idea," he would explain to them. For of
course some sort of general idea they must have, if they
were to do their work intelligently–though as little
of one, if they were to be good and happy members of
society, as possible. For particulars, as every one knows,
make for virtue and happiness; generalities are
intellectually necessary evils. Not philosophers but fret-sawyers
and stamp collectors compose the backbone of society.
- "To-morrow," he
would add, smiling at them with a slightly menacing
geniality, "you'll be settling down to serious work.
You won't have time for generalities. Meanwhile …"
- Meanwhile, it was a
privilege. Straight from the horse's mouth into the
notebook. The boys scribbled like mad.
- Tall and rather thin but
upright, the Director advanced into the room. He had a
long chin and big rather prominent teeth, just covered,
when he was not talking, by his full, floridly curved
lips. Old, young? Thirty? Fifty? Fifty-five? It was hard
to say. And anyhow the question didn't arise; in this
year of stability, A. F. 632, it didn't occur to you to
ask it.
- "I shall begin at the
beginning," said the D.H.C. and the more zealous
students recorded his intention in their notebooks: Begin
at the beginning. "These," he waved his
hand, "are the incubators." And opening an
insulated door he showed them racks upon racks of
numbered test-tubes. "The week's supply of ova. Kept,"
he explained, "at blood heat; whereas the male
gametes," and here he opened another door, "they
have to be kept at thirty-five instead of thirty-seven.
Full blood heat sterilizes." Rams wrapped in
theremogene beget no lambs.
- Still leaning against the
incubators he gave them, while the pencils scurried
illegibly across the pages, a brief description of the
modern fertilizing process; spoke first, of course, of
its surgical introduction–"the operation
undergone voluntarily for the good of Society, not to
mention the fact that it carries a bonus amounting to six
months' salary"; continued with some account of the
technique for preserving the excised ovary alive and
actively developing; passed on to a consideration of
optimum temperature, salinity, viscosity; referred to the
liquor in which the detached and ripened eggs were kept;
and, leading his charges to the work tables, actually
showed them how this liquor was drawn off from the test-tubes;
how it was let out drop by drop onto the specially warmed
slides of the microscopes; how the eggs which it
contained were inspected for abnormalities, counted and
transferred to a porous receptacle; how (and he now took
them to watch the operation) this receptacle was immersed
in a warm bouillon containing free-swimming
spermatozoa–at a minimum concentration of one
hundred thousand per cubic centimetre, he insisted; and
how, after ten minutes, the container was lifted out of
the liquor and its contents re-examined; how, if any of
the eggs remained unfertilized, it was again immersed,
and, if necessary, yet again; how the fertilized ova went
back to the incubators; where the Alphas and Betas
remained until definitely bottled; while the Gammas,
Deltas and Epsilons were brought out again, after only
thirty-six hours, to undergo Bokanovsky's Process.
- "Bokanovsky's Process,"
repeated the Director, and the students underlined the
words in their little notebooks.
- One egg, one embryo, one
adult-normality. But a bokanovskified egg will bud, will
proliferate, will divide. From eight to ninety-six buds,
and every bud will grow into a perfectly formed embryo,
and every embryo into a full-sized adult. Making ninety-six
human beings grow where only one grew before. Progress.
- "Essentially,"
the D.H.C. concluded, "bokanovskification consists
of a series of arrests of development. We check the
normal growth and, paradoxically enough, the egg responds
by budding."
- Responds by budding.
The pencils were busy.
- He pointed. On a very
slowly moving band a rack-full of test-tubes was entering
a large metal box, another, rack-full was emerging.
Machinery faintly purred. It took eight minutes for the
tubes to go through, he told them. Eight minutes of hard
X-rays being about as much as an egg can stand. A few
died; of the rest, the least susceptible divided into two;
most put out four buds; some eight; all were returned to
the incubators, where the buds began to develop; then,
after two days, were suddenly chilled, chilled and
checked. Two, four, eight, the buds in their turn budded;
and having budded were dosed almost to death with alcohol;
consequently burgeoned again and having budded–bud
out of bud out of bud–were thereafter–further
arrest being generally fatal–left to develop in
peace. By which time the original egg was in a fair way
to becoming anything from eight to ninety-six
embryos– a prodigious improvement, you will agree,
on nature. Identical twins–but not in piddling twos
and threes as in the old viviparous days, when an egg
would sometimes accidentally divide; actually by dozens,
by scores at a time.
- "Scores," the
Director repeated and flung out his arms, as though he
were distributing largesse. "Scores."
- But one of the students was
fool enough to ask where the advantage lay.
- "My good boy!"
The Director wheeled sharply round on him. "Can't
you see? Can't you see?" He raised a hand; his
expression was solemn. "Bokanovsky's Process is one
of the major instruments of social stability!"
- Major instruments of
social stability.
- Standard men and women; in
uniform batches. The whole of a small factory staffed
with the products of a single bokanovskified egg.
- "Ninety-six identical
twins working ninety-six identical machines!" The
voice was almost tremulous with enthusiasm. "You
really know where you are. For the first time in history."
He quoted the planetary motto. "Community, Identity,
Stability." Grand words. "If we could
bokanovskify indefinitely the whole problem would be
solved."
- Solved by standard Gammas,
unvarying Deltas, uniform Epsilons. Millions of identical
twins. The principle of mass production at last applied
to biology.
- "But, alas," the
Director shook his head, "we can't
bokanovskify indefinitely."
- Ninety-six seemed to be the
limit; seventy-two a good average. From the same ovary
and with gametes of the same male to manufacture as many
batches of identical twins as possible–that was the
best (sadly a second best) that they could do. And even
that was difficult.
- "For in nature it
takes thirty years for two hundred eggs to reach maturity.
But our business is to stabilize the population at this
moment, here and now. Dribbling out twins over a quarter
of a century–what would be the use of that?"
- Obviously, no use at all.
But Podsnap's Technique had immensely accelerated the
process of ripening. They could make sure of at least a
hundred and fifty mature eggs within two years. Fertilize
and bokanovskify–in other words, multiply by seventy-two–and
you get an average of nearly eleven thousand brothers and
sisters in a hundred and fifty batches of identical twins,
all within two years of the same age.
- "And in exceptional
cases we can make one ovary yield us over fifteen
thousand adult individuals."
- Beckoning to a fair-haired,
ruddy young man who happened to be passing at the moment.
"Mr. Foster," he called. The ruddy young man
approached. "Can you tell us the record for a single
ovary, Mr. Foster?"
"Sixteen thousand and twelve in this
Centre," Mr. Foster replied without hesitation. He
spoke very quickly, had a vivacious blue eye, and took an
evident pleasure in quoting figures. "Sixteen
thousand and twelve; in one hundred and eighty-nine
batches of identicals. But of course they've done much
better," he rattled on, "in some of the
tropical Centres. Singapore has often produced over
sixteen thousand five hundred; and Mombasa has actually
touched the seventeen thousand mark. But then they have
unfair advantages. You should see the way a negro ovary
responds to pituitary! It's quite astonishing, when you're
used to working with European material. Still," he
added, with a laugh (but the light of combat was in his
eyes and the lift of his chin was challenging), "still,
we mean to beat them if we can. I'm working on a
wonderful Delta-Minus ovary at this moment. Only just
eighteen months old. Over twelve thousand seven hundred
children already, either decanted or in embryo. And still
going strong. We'll beat them yet."
- "That's the spirit I
like!" cried the Director, and clapped Mr. Foster on
the shoulder. "Come along with us, and give these
boys the benefit of your expert knowledge."
- Mr. Foster smiled modestly.
"With pleasure." They went.
- In the Bottling Room all
was harmonious bustle and ordered activity. Flaps of
fresh sow's peritoneum ready cut to the proper size came
shooting up in little lifts from the Organ Store in the
sub-basement. Whizz and then, click! the lift-hatches hew
open; the bottle-liner had only to reach out a hand, take
the flap, insert, smooth-down, and before the lined
bottle had had time to travel out of reach along the
endless band, whizz, click! another flap of peritoneum
had shot up from the depths, ready to be slipped into yet
another bottle, the next of that slow interminable
procession on the band.
- Next to the Liners stood
the Matriculators. The procession advanced; one by one
the eggs were transferred from their test-tubes to the
larger containers; deftly the peritoneal lining was slit,
the morula dropped into place, the saline solution poured
in … and already the bottle had passed, and it was
the turn of the labellers. Heredity, date of
fertilization, membership of Bokanovsky
Group–details were transferred from test-tube to
bottle. No longer anonymous, but named, identified, the
procession marched slowly on; on through an opening in
the wall, slowly on into the Social Predestination Room.
- "Eighty-eight cubic
metres of card-index," said Mr. Foster with relish,
as they entered.
- "Containing all
the relevant information," added the Director.
- "Brought up to date
every morning."
- "And co-ordinated
every afternoon."
- "On the basis of which
they make their calculations."
- "So many individuals,
of such and such quality," said Mr. Foster.
- "Distributed in such
and such quantities."
- "The optimum Decanting
Rate at any given moment."
- "Unforeseen wastages
promptly made good."
- "Promptly,"
repeated Mr. Foster. "If you knew the amount of
overtime I had to put in after the last Japanese
earthquake!" He laughed goodhumouredly and shook his
head.
- "The Predestinators
send in their figures to the Fertilizers."
- "Who give them the
embryos they ask for."
- "And the bottles come
in here to be predestined in detail."
- "After which they are
sent down to the Embryo Store."
- "Where we now proceed
ourselves."
- And opening a door Mr.
Foster led the way down a staircase into the basement.
- The temperature was still
tropical. They descended into a thickening twilight. Two
doors and a passage with a double turn insured the cellar
against any possible infiltration of the day.
- "Embryos are like
photograph film," said Mr. Foster waggishly, as he
pushed open the second door. "They can only stand
red light."
- And in effect the sultry
darkness into which the students now followed him was
visible and crimson, like the darkness of closed eyes on
a summer's afternoon. The bulging flanks of row on
receding row and tier above tier of bottles glinted with
innumerable rubies, and among the rubies moved the dim
red spectres of men and women with purple eyes and all
the symptoms of lupus. The hum and rattle of machinery
faintly stirred the air.
- "Give them a few
figures, Mr. Foster," said the Director, who was
tired of talking.
- Mr. Foster was only too
happy to give them a few figures.
- Two hundred and twenty
metres long, two hundred wide, ten high. He pointed
upwards. Like chickens drinking, the students lifted
their eyes towards the distant ceiling.
- Three tiers of racks:
ground floor level, first gallery, second gallery.
- The spidery steel-work of
gallery above gallery faded away in all directions into
the dark. Near them three red ghosts were busily
unloading demijohns from a moving staircase.
- The escalator from the
Social Predestination Room.
- Each bottle could be placed
on one of fifteen racks, each rack, though you couldn't
see it, was a conveyor traveling at the rate of thirty-three
and a third centimetres an hour. Two hundred and sixty-seven
days at eight metres a day. Two thousand one hundred and
thirty-six metres in all. One circuit of the cellar at
ground level, one on the first gallery, half on the
second, and on the two hundred and sixty-seventh morning,
daylight in the Decanting Room. Independent
existence–so called.
- "But in the interval,"
Mr. Foster concluded, "we've managed to do a lot to
them. Oh, a very great deal." His laugh was knowing
and triumphant.
- "That's the spirit I
like," said the Director once more. "Let's walk
around. You tell them everything, Mr. Foster."
- Mr. Foster duly told them.
- Told them of the growing
embryo on its bed of peritoneum. Made them taste the rich
blood surrogate on which it fed. Explained why it had to
be stimulated with placentin and thyroxin. Told them of
the corpus luteum extract. Showed them the jets
through which at every twelfth metre from zero to 2040 it
was automatically injected. Spoke of those gradually
increasing doses of pituitary administered during the
final ninety-six metres of their course. Described the
artificial maternal circulation installed in every bottle
at Metre 112; showed them the reservoir of blood-surrogate,
the centrifugal pump that kept the liquid moving over the
placenta and drove it through the synthetic lung and
waste product filter. Referred to the embryo's
troublesome tendency to an?mia,
to the massive doses of hog's stomach extract and foetal
foal's liver with which, in consequence, it had to be
supplied.
- Showed them the simple
mechanism by means of which, during the last two metres
out of every eight, all the embryos were simultaneously
shaken into familiarity with movement. Hinted at the
gravity of the so-called "trauma of decanting,"
and enumerated the precautions taken to minimize, by a
suitable training of the bottled embryo, that dangerous
shock. Told them of the test for sex carried out in the
neighborhood of Metre 200. Explained the system of
labelling–a T for the males, a circle for the
females and for those who were destined to become
freemartins a question mark, black on a white ground.
- "For of course,"
said Mr. Foster, "in the vast majority of cases,
fertility is merely a nuisance. One fertile ovary in
twelve hundred–that would really be quite sufficient
for our purposes. But we want to have a good choice. And
of course one must always have an enormous margin of
safety. So we allow as many as thirty per cent of the
female embryos to develop normally. The others get a dose
of male sex-hormone every twenty-four metres for the rest
of the course. Result: they're decanted as
freemartins–structurally quite normal (except,"
he had to admit, "that they do have the slightest
tendency to grow beards), but sterile. Guaranteed sterile.
Which brings us at last," continued Mr. Foster,
"out of the realm of mere slavish imitation of
nature into the much more interesting world of human
invention."
- He rubbed his hands. For of
course, they didn't content themselves with merely
hatching out embryos: any cow could do that.
- "We also predestine
and condition. We decant our babies as socialized human
beings, as Alphas or Epsilons, as future sewage workers
or future …" He was going to say "future
World controllers," but correcting himself, said
"future Directors of Hatcheries," instead.
- The D.H.C. acknowledged the
compliment with a smile.
- They were passing Metre 320
on Rack 11. A young Beta-Minus mechanic was busy with
screw-driver and spanner on the blood-surrogate pump of a
passing bottle. The hum of the electric motor deepened by
fractions of a tone as he turned the nuts. Down, down
… A final twist, a glance at the revolution counter,
and he was done. He moved two paces down the line and
began the same process on the next pump.
- "Reducing the number
of revolutions per minute," Mr. Foster explained.
"The surrogate goes round slower; therefore passes
through the lung at longer intervals; therefore gives the
embryo less oxygen. Nothing like oxygen-shortage for
keeping an embryo below par." Again he rubbed his
hands.
- "But why do you want
to keep the embryo below par?" asked an ingenuous
student.
- "Ass!" said the
Director, breaking a long silence. "Hasn't it
occurred to you that an Epsilon embryo must have an
Epsilon environment as well as an Epsilon heredity?"
- It evidently hadn't
occurred to him. He was covered with confusion.
- "The lower the caste,"
said Mr. Foster, "the shorter the oxygen." The
first organ affected was the brain. After that the
skeleton. At seventy per cent of normal oxygen you got
dwarfs. At less than seventy eyeless monsters.
- "Who are no use at all,"
concluded Mr. Foster.
- Whereas (his voice became
confidential and eager), if they could discover a
technique for shortening the period of maturation what a
triumph, what a benefaction to Society!
- "Consider the horse."
- They considered it.
- Mature at six; the elephant
at ten. While at thirteen a man is not yet sexually
mature; and is only full-grown at twenty. Hence, of
course, that fruit of delayed development, the human
intelligence.
- "But in Epsilons,"
said Mr. Foster very justly, "we don't need human
intelligence."
- Didn't need and didn't get
it. But though the Epsilon mind was mature at ten, the
Epsilon body was not fit to work till eighteen. Long
years of superfluous and wasted immaturity. If the
physical development could be speeded up till it was as
quick, say, as a cow's, what an enormous saving to the
Community!
- "Enormous!"
murmured the students. Mr. Foster's enthusiasm was
infectious.
- He became rather technical;
spoke of the abnormal endocrine co-ordination which made
men grow so slowly; postulated a germinal mutation to
account for it. Could the effects of this germinal
mutation be undone? Could the individual Epsilon embryo
be made a revert, by a suitable technique, to the
normality of dogs and cows? That was the problem. And it
was all but solved.
- Pilkington, at Mombasa, had
produced individuals who were sexually mature at four and
full-grown at six and a half. A scientific triumph. But
socially useless. Six-year-old men and women were too
stupid to do even Epsilon work. And the process was an
all-or-nothing one; either you failed to modify at all,
or else you modified the whole way. They were still
trying to find the ideal compromise between adults of
twenty and adults of six. So far without success. Mr.
Foster sighed and shook his head.
- Their wanderings through
the crimson twilight had brought them to the neighborhood
of Metre 170 on Rack 9. From this point onwards Rack 9
was enclosed and the bottle performed the remainder of
their journey in a kind of tunnel, interrupted here and
there by openings two or three metres wide.
- "Heat conditioning,"
said Mr. Foster.
- Hot tunnels alternated with
cool tunnels. Coolness was wedded to discomfort in the
form of hard X-rays. By the time they were decanted the
embryos had a horror of cold. They were predestined to
emigrate to the tropics, to be miner and acetate silk
spinners and steel workers. Later on their minds would be
made to endorse the judgment of their bodies. "We
condition them to thrive on heat," concluded Mr.
Foster. "Our colleagues upstairs will teach them to
love it."
- "And that," put
in the Director sententiously, "that is the secret
of happiness and virtue–liking what you've got to do.
All conditioning aims at that: making people like their
unescapable social destiny."
- In a gap between two
tunnels, a nurse was delicately probing with a long fine
syringe into the gelatinous contents of a passing bottle.
The students and their guides stood watching her for a
few moments in silence.
- "Well, Lenina,"
said Mr. Foster, when at last she withdrew the syringe
and straightened herself up.
- The girl turned with a
start. One could see that, for all the lupus and the
purple eyes, she was uncommonly pretty.
- "Henry!" Her
smile flashed redly at him–a row of coral teeth.
- "Charming, charming,"
murmured the Director and, giving her two or three little
pats, received in exchange a rather deferential smile for
himself.
- "What are you giving
them?" asked Mr. Foster, making his tone very
professional.
- "Oh, the usual typhoid
and sleeping sickness."
- "Tropical workers
start being inoculated at Metre 150," Mr. Foster
explained to the students. "The embryos still have
gills. We immunize the fish against the future man's
diseases." Then, turning back to Lenina, "Ten
to five on the roof this afternoon," he said, "as
usual."
- "Charming," said
the Director once more, and, with a final pat, moved away
after the others.
- On Rack 10 rows of next
generation's chemical workers were being trained in the
toleration of lead, caustic soda, tar, chlorine. The
first of a batch of two hundred and fifty embryonic
rocket-plane engineers was just passing the eleven
hundred metre mark on Rack 3. A special mechanism kept
their containers in constant rotation. "To improve
their sense of balance," Mr. Foster explained.
"Doing repairs on the outside of a rocket in mid-air
is a ticklish job. We slacken off the circulation when
they're right way up, so that they're half starved, and
double the flow of surrogate when they're upside down.
They learn to associate topsy-turvydom with well-being;
in fact, they're only truly happy when they're standing
on their heads.
- "And now," Mr.
Foster went on, "I'd like to show you some very
interesting conditioning for Alpha Plus Intellectuals. We
have a big batch of them on Rack 5. First Gallery level,"
he called to two boys who had started to go down to the
ground floor.
- "They're round about
Metre 900," he explained. "You can't really do
any useful intellectual conditioning till the foetuses
have lost their tails. Follow me."
- But the Director had looked
at his watch. "Ten to three," he said. "No
time for the intellectual embryos, I'm afraid. We must go
up to the Nurseries before the children have finished
their afternoon sleep."
- Mr. Foster was disappointed.
"At least one glance at the Decanting Room," he
pleaded.
- "Very well then."
The Director smiled indulgently. "Just one glance."
chapter two
MR. FOSTER was left in the Decanting Room. The
D.H.C. and his students stepped into the nearest lift and were
carried up to the fifth floor.
- INFANT NURSERIES. NEO-PAVLOVIAN
CONDITIONING ROOMS, announced the notice board.
- The Director opened a door.
They were in a large bare room, very bright and sunny;
for the whole of the southern wall was a single window.
Half a dozen nurses, trousered and jacketed in the
regulation white viscose-linen uniform, their hair
aseptically hidden under white caps, were engaged in
setting out bowls of roses in a long row across the floor.
Big bowls, packed tight with blossom. Thousands of petals,
ripe-blown and silkily smooth, like the cheeks of
innumerable little cherubs, but of cherubs, in that
bright light, not exclusively pink and Aryan, but also
luminously Chinese, also Mexican, also apoplectic with
too much blowing of celestial trumpets, also pale as
death, pale with the posthumous whiteness of marble.
- The nurses stiffened to
attention as the D.H.C. came in.
- "Set out the books,"
he said curtly.
- In silence the nurses
obeyed his command. Between the rose bowls the books were
duly set out–a row of nursery quartos opened
invitingly each at some gaily coloured image of beast or
fish or bird.
- "Now bring in the
children."
- They hurried out of the
room and returned in a minute or two, each pushing a kind
of tall dumb-waiter laden, on all its four wire-netted
shelves, with eight-month-old babies, all exactly alike (a
Bokanovsky Group, it was evident) and all (since their
caste was Delta) dressed in khaki.
- "Put them down on the
floor."
- The infants were unloaded.
- "Now turn them so that
they can see the flowers and books."
- Turned, the babies at once
fell silent, then began to crawl towards those clusters
of sleek colours, those shapes so gay and brilliant on
the white pages. As they approached, the sun came out of
a momentary eclipse behind a cloud. The roses flamed up
as though with a sudden passion from within; a new and
profound significance seemed to suffuse the shining pages
of the books. From the ranks of the crawling babies came
little squeals of excitement, gurgles and twitterings of
pleasure.
- The Director rubbed his
hands. "Excellent!" he said. "It might
almost have been done on purpose."
- The swiftest crawlers were
already at their goal. Small hands reached out
uncertainly, touched, grasped, unpetaling the
transfigured roses, crumpling the illuminated pages of
the books. The Director waited until all were happily
busy. Then, "Watch carefully," he said. And,
lifting his hand, he gave the signal.
- The Head Nurse, who was
standing by a switchboard at the other end of the room,
pressed down a little lever.
- There was a violent
explosion. Shriller and ever shriller, a siren shrieked.
Alarm bells maddeningly sounded.
- The children started,
screamed; their faces were distorted with terror.
- "And now," the
Director shouted (for the noise was deafening), "now
we proceed to rub in the lesson with a mild electric
shock."
- He waved his hand again,
and the Head Nurse pressed a second lever. The screaming
of the babies suddenly changed its tone. There was
something desperate, almost insane, about the sharp
spasmodic yelps to which they now gave utterance. Their
little bodies twitched and stiffened; their limbs moved
jerkily as if to the tug of unseen wires.
- "We can electrify that
whole strip of floor," bawled the Director in
explanation. "But that's enough," he signalled
to the nurse.
- The explosions ceased, the
bells stopped ringing, the shriek of the siren died down
from tone to tone into silence. The stiffly twitching
bodies relaxed, and what had become the sob and yelp of
infant maniacs broadened out once more into a normal howl
of ordinary terror.
- "Offer them the
flowers and the books again."
- The nurses obeyed; but at
the approach of the roses, at the mere sight of those
gaily-coloured images of pussy and cock-a-doodle-doo and
baa-baa black sheep, the infants shrank away in horror,
the volume of their howling suddenly increased.
- "Observe," said
the Director triumphantly, "observe."
- Books and loud noises,
flowers and electric shocks–already in the infant
mind these couples were compromisingly linked; and after
two hundred repetitions of the same or a similar lesson
would be wedded indissolubly. What man has joined, nature
is powerless to put asunder.
- "They'll grow up with
what the psychologists used to call an 'instinctive'
hatred of books and flowers. Reflexes unalterably
conditioned. They'll be safe from books and botany all
their lives." The Director turned to his nurses.
"Take them away again."
- Still yelling, the khaki
babies were loaded on to their dumb-waiters and wheeled
out, leaving behind them the smell of sour milk and a
most welcome silence.
- One of the students held up
his hand; and though he could see quite well why you
couldn't have lower-cast people wasting the Community's
time over books, and that there was always the risk of
their reading something which might undesirably
decondition one of their reflexes, yet … well, he
couldn't understand about the flowers. Why go to the
trouble of making it psychologically impossible for
Deltas to like flowers?
- Patiently the D.H.C.
explained. If the children were made to scream at the
sight of a rose, that was on grounds of high economic
policy. Not so very long ago (a century or thereabouts),
Gammas, Deltas, even Epsilons, had been conditioned to
like flowers–flowers in particular and wild nature
in general. The idea was to make them want to be going
out into the country at every available opportunity, and
so compel them to consume transport.
- "And didn't they
consume transport?" asked the student.
- "Quite a lot,"
the D.H.C. replied. "But nothing else."
- Primroses and landscapes,
he pointed out, have one grave defect: they are
gratuitous. A love of nature keeps no factories busy. It
was decided to abolish the love of nature, at any rate
among the lower classes; to abolish the love of nature,
but not the tendency to consume transport. For of
course it was essential that they should keep on going to
the country, even though they hated it. The problem was
to find an economically sounder reason for consuming
transport than a mere affection for primroses and
landscapes. It was duly found.
- "We condition the
masses to hate the country," concluded the Director.
"But simultaneously we condition them to love all
country sports. At the same time, we see to it that all
country sports shall entail the use of elaborate
apparatus. So that they consume manufactured articles as
well as transport. Hence those electric shocks."
- "I see," said the
student, and was silent, lost in admiration.
- There was a silence; then,
clearing his throat, "Once upon a time," the
Director began, "while our Ford was still on earth,
there was a little boy called Reuben Rabinovitch. Reuben
was the child of Polish-speaking parents."
- The Director interrupted
himself. "You know what Polish is, I suppose?"
- "A dead language."
- "Like French and
German," added another student, officiously showing
off his learning.
- "And 'parent'?"
questioned the D.H.C.
- There was an uneasy silence.
Several of the boys blushed. They had not yet learned to
draw the significant but often very fine distinction
between smut and pure science. One, at last, had the
courage to raise a hand.
- "Human beings used to
be …" he hesitated; the blood rushed to his
cheeks. "Well, they used to be viviparous."
- "Quite right."
The Director nodded approvingly.
- "And when the babies
were decanted …"
- "'Born,'" came
the correction.
- "Well, then they were
the parents–I mean, not the babies, of course; the
other ones." The poor boy was overwhelmed with
confusion.
- "In brief," the
Director summed up, "the parents were the father and
the mother." The smut that was really science fell
with a crash into the boys' eye-avoiding silence. "Mother,"
he repeated loudly rubbing in the science; and, leaning
back in his chair, "These," he said gravely,
"are unpleasant facts; I know it. But then most
historical facts are unpleasant."
- He returned to Little
Reuben–to Little Reuben, in whose room, one evening,
by an oversight, his father and mother (crash, crash!)
happened to leave the radio turned on.
- ("For you must
remember that in those days of gross viviparous
reproduction, children were always brought up by their
parents and not in State Conditioning Centres.")
- While the child was asleep,
a broadcast programme from London suddenly started to
come through; and the next morning, to the astonishment
of his crash and crash (the more daring of the boys
ventured to grin at one another), Little Reuben woke up
repeating word for word a long lecture by that curious
old writer ("one of the very few whose works have
been permitted to come down to us"), George Bernard
Shaw, who was speaking, according to a well-authenticated
tradition, about his own genius. To Little Reuben's wink
and snigger, this lecture was, of course, perfectly
incomprehensible and, imagining that their child had
suddenly gone mad, they sent for a doctor. He,
fortunately, understood English, recognized the discourse
as that which Shaw had broadcasted the previous evening,
realized the significance of what had happened, and sent
a letter to the medical press about it.
- "The principle of
sleep-teaching, or hypnop?dia,
had been discovered." The D.H.C. made an impressive
pause.
- The principle had been
discovered; but many, many years were to elapse before
that principle was usefully applied.
- "The case of Little
Reuben occurred only twenty-three years after Our Ford's
first T-Model was put on the market." (Here the
Director made a sign of the T on his stomach and all the
students reverently followed suit.) "And yet …"
- Furiously the students
scribbled. "Hypnop?dia,
first used officially in A.F. 214. Why not before? Two
reasons. (a) …"
- "These early
experimenters," the D.H.C. was saying, "were on
the wrong track. They thought that hypnop?dia could be made an instrument of
intellectual education …"
- (A small boy asleep on his
right side, the right arm stuck out, the right hand
hanging limp over the edge of the bed. Through a round
grating in the side of a box a voice speaks softly.
- "The Nile is the
longest river in Africa and the second in length of all
the rivers of the globe. Although falling short of the
length of the Mississippi-Missouri, the Nile is at the
head of all rivers as regards the length of its basin,
which extends through 35 degrees of latitude …"
- At breakfast the next
morning, "Tommy," some one says, "do you
know which is the longest river in Africa?" A
shaking of the head. "But don't you remember
something that begins: The Nile is the …"
- "The - Nile - is - the
- longest - river - in - Africa - and - the - second - in
- length - of - all - the - rivers - of - the - globe
…" The words come rushing out. "Although -
falling - short - of …"
- "Well now, which is
the longest river in Africa?"
- The eyes are blank. "I
don't know."
- "But the Nile, Tommy."
- "The - Nile - is - the
- longest - river - in - Africa - and - second …"
- "Then which river is
the longest, Tommy?"
- Tommy burst into tears.
"I don't know," he howls.)
- That howl, the Director
made it plain, discouraged the earliest investigators.
The experiments were abandoned. No further attempt was
made to teach children the length of the Nile in their
sleep. Quite rightly. You can't learn a science unless
you know what it's all about.
- "Whereas, if they'd
only started on moral education," said the
Director, leading the way towards the door. The students
followed him, desperately scribbling as they walked and
all the way up in the lift. "Moral education, which
ought never, in any circumstances, to be rational."
- "Silence, silence,"
whispered a loud speaker as they stepped out at the
fourteenth floor, and "Silence, silence," the
trumpet mouths indefatigably repeated at intervals down
every corridor. The students and even the Director
himself rose automatically to the tips of their toes.
They were Alphas, of course, but even Alphas have been
well conditioned. "Silence, silence." All the
air of the fourteenth floor was sibilant with the
categorical imperative.
- Fifty yards of tiptoeing
brought them to a door which the Director cautiously
opened. They stepped over the threshold into the twilight
of a shuttered dormitory. Eighty cots stood in a row
against the wall. There was a sound of light regular
breathing and a continuous murmur, as of very faint
voices remotely whispering.
- A nurse rose as they
entered and came to attention before the Director.
- "What's the lesson
this afternoon?" he asked.
- "We had Elementary Sex
for the first forty minutes," she answered. "But
now it's switched over to Elementary Class Consciousness."
- The Director walked slowly
down the long line of cots. Rosy and relaxed with sleep,
eighty little boys and girls lay softly breathing. There
was a whisper under every pillow. The D.H.C. halted and,
bending over one of the little beds, listened attentively.
- "Elementary Class
Consciousness, did you say? Let's have it repeated a
little louder by the trumpet."
- At the end of the room a
loud speaker projected from the wall. The Director walked
up to it and pressed a switch.
- "… all wear green,"
said a soft but very distinct voice, beginning in the
middle of a sentence, "and Delta Children wear khaki.
Oh no, I don't want to play with Delta children. And
Epsilons are still worse. They're too stupid to be able
to read or write. Besides they wear black, which is such
a beastly colour. I'm so glad I'm a Beta."
- There was a pause; then the
voice began again.
- "Alpha children wear
grey They work much harder than we do, because they're so
frightfully clever. I'm really awfuly glad I'm a Beta,
because I don't work so hard. And then we are much better
than the Gammas and Deltas. Gammas are stupid. They all
wear green, and Delta children wear khaki. Oh no, I don't
want to play with Delta children. And Epsilons are still
worse. They're too stupid to be able …"
- The Director pushed back
the switch. The voice was silent. Only its thin ghost
continued to mutter from beneath the eighty pillows.
- "They'll have that
repeated forty or fifty times more before they wake; then
again on Thursday, and again on Saturday. A hundred and
twenty times three times a week for thirty months. After
which they go on to a more advanced lesson."
- Roses and electric shocks,
the khaki of Deltas and a whiff of asaf?tida–wedded
indissolubly before the child can speak. But wordless
conditioning is crude and wholesale; cannot bring home
the finer distinctions, cannot inculcate the more complex
courses of behaviour. For that there must be words, but
words without reason. In brief, hypnop?dia.
- "The greatest
moralizing and socializing force of all time."
- The students took it down
in their little books. Straight from the horse's mouth.
- Once more the Director
touched the switch.
- "… so frightfully
clever," the soft, insinuating, indefatigable voice
was saying, "I'm really awfully glad I'm a Beta,
because …"
- Not so much like drops of
water, though water, it is true, can wear holes in the
hardest granite; rather, drops of liquid sealing-wax,
drops that adhere, incrust, incorporate themselves with
what they fall on, till finally the rock is all one
scarlet blob.
- "Till at last the
child's mind is these suggestions, and the sum of
the suggestions is the child's mind. And not the
child's mind only. The adult's mind too–all his life
long. The mind that judges and desires and
decides–made up of these suggestions. But all these
suggestions are our suggestions!" The
Director almost shouted in his triumph. "Suggestions
from the State." He banged the nearest table. "It
therefore follows …"
- A noise made him turn round.
- "Oh, Ford!" he
said in another tone, "I've gone and woken the
children."
chapter three
OUTSIDE, in the garden, it was playtime. Naked in
the warm June sunshine, six or seven hundred little boys and
girls were running with shrill yells over the lawns, or playing
ball games, or squatting silently in twos and threes among the
flowering shrubs. The roses were in bloom, two nightingales
soliloquized in the boskage, a cuckoo was just going out of tune
among the lime trees. The air was drowsy with the murmur of bees
and helicopters.
- The Director and his
students stood for a short time watching a game of
Centrifugal Bumble-puppy. Twenty children were grouped in
a circle round a chrome steel tower. A ball thrown up so
as to land on the platform at the top of the tower rolled
down into the interior, fell on a rapidly revolving disk,
was hurled through one or other of the numerous apertures
pierced in the cylindrical casing, and had to be caught.
- "Strange," mused
the Director, as they turned away, "strange to think
that even in Our Ford's day most games were played
without more apparatus than a ball or two and a few
sticks and perhaps a bit of netting. imagine the folly of
allowing people to play elaborate games which do nothing
whatever to increase consumption. It's madness. Nowadays
the Controllers won't approve of any new game unless it
can be shown that it requires at least as much apparatus
as the most complicated of existing games." He
interrupted himself.
- "That's a charming
little group," he said, pointing.
- In a little grassy bay
between tall clumps of Mediterranean heather, two
children, a little boy of about seven and a little girl
who might have been a year older, were playing, very
gravely and with all the focussed attention of scientists
intent on a labour of discovery, a rudimentary sexual
game.
- "Charming, charming!"
the D.H.C. repeated sentimentally.
- "Charming," the
boys politely agreed. But their smile was rather
patronizing. They had put aside similar childish
amusements too recently to be able to watch them now
without a touch of contempt. Charming? but it was just a
pair of kids fooling about; that was all. Just kids.
- "I always think,"
the Director was continuing in the same rather maudlin
tone, when he was interrupted by a loud boo-hooing.
- From a neighbouring
shrubbery emerged a nurse, leading by the hand a small
boy, who howled as he went. An anxious-looking little
girl trotted at her heels.
- "What's the matter?"
asked the Director.
- The nurse shrugged her
shoulders. "Nothing much," she answered. "It's
just that this little boy seems rather reluctant to join
in the ordinary erotic play. I'd noticed it once or twice
before. And now again to-day. He started yelling just now
…"
- "Honestly," put
in the anxious-looking little girl, "I didn't mean
to hurt him or anything. Honestly."
- "Of course you didn't,
dear," said the nurse reassuringly. "And so,"
she went on, turning back to the Director, "I'm
taking him in to see the Assistant Superintendent of
Psychology. Just to see if anything's at all abnormal."
- "Quite right,"
said the Director. "Take him in. You stay here,
little girl," he added, as the nurse moved away with
her still howling charge. "What's your name?"
- "Polly Trotsky."
- "And a very good name
too," said the Director. "Run away now and see
if you can find some other little boy to play with."
- The child scampered off
into the bushes and was lost to sight.
- "Exquisite little
creature!" said the Director, looking after her.
Then, turning to his students, "What I'm going to
tell you now," he said, "may sound incredible.
But then, when you're not accustomed to history, most
facts about the past do sound incredible."
- He let out the amazing
truth. For a very long period before the time of Our Ford,
and even for some generations afterwards, erotic play
between children had been regarded as abnormal (there was
a roar of laughter); and not only abnormal, actually
immoral (no!): and had therefore been rigorously
suppressed.
- A look of astonished
incredulity appeared on the faces of his listeners. Poor
little kids not allowed to amuse themselves? They could
not believe it.
- "Even adolescents,"
the D.H.C. was saying, "even adolescents like
yourselves …"
- "Not possible!"
- "Barring a little
surreptitious auto-erotism and
homosexuality–absolutely nothing."
- "Nothing?"
- "In most cases, till
they were over twenty years old."
- "Twenty years old?"
echoed the students in a chorus of loud disbelief.
- "Twenty," the
Director repeated. "I told you that you'd find it
incredible."
- "But what happened?"
they asked. "What were the results?"
- "The results were
terrible." A deep resonant voice broke startlingly
into the dialogue.
- They looked around. On the
fringe of the little group stood a stranger–a man of
middle height, black-haired, with a hooked nose, full red
lips, eyes very piercing and dark. "Terrible,"
he repeated.
- The D.H.C. had at that
moment sat down on one of the steel and rubber benches
conveniently scattered through the gardens; but at the
sight of the stranger, he sprang to his feet and darted
forward, his hand outstretched, smiling with all his
teeth, effusive.
- "Controller! What an
unexpected pleasure! Boys, what are you thinking of? This
is the Controller; this is his fordship, Mustapha Mond."
- In the four thousand rooms
of the Centre the four thousand electric clocks
simultaneously struck four. Discarnate voices called from
the trumpet mouths.
- "Main Day-shift off
duty. Second Day-shift take over. Main Day-shift off
…"
- In the lift, on their way
up to the changing rooms, Henry Foster and the Assistant
Director of Predestination rather pointedly turned their
backs on Bernard Marx from the Psychology Bureau: averted
themselves from that unsavoury reputation.
- The faint hum and rattle of
machinery still stirred the crimson air in the Embryo
Store. Shifts might come and go, one lupus-coloured face
give place to another; majestically and for ever the
conveyors crept forward with their load of future men and
women.
- Lenina Crowne walked
briskly towards the door.
- His fordship Mustapha Mond!
The eyes of the saluting students almost popped out of
their heads. Mustapha Mond! The Resident Controller for
Western Europe! One of the Ten World Controllers. One of
the Ten … and he sat down on the bench with the D.H.C.,
he was going to stay, to stay, yes, and actually talk to
them … straight from the horse's mouth. Straight
from the mouth of Ford himself.
- Two shrimp-brown children
emerged from a neighbouring shrubbery, stared at them for
a moment with large, astonished eyes, then returned to
their amusements among the leaves.
- "You all remember,"
said the Controller, in his strong deep voice, "you
all remember, I suppose, that beautiful and inspired
saying of Our Ford's: History is bunk. History," he
repeated slowly, "is bunk."
- He waved his hand; and it
was as though, with an invisible feather wisk, he had
brushed away a little dust, and the dust was Harappa, was
Ur of the Chaldees; some spider-webs, and they were
Thebes and Babylon and Cnossos and Mycenae. Whisk.
Whisk–and where was Odysseus, where was Job, where
were Jupiter and Gotama and Jesus? Whisk–and those
specks of antique dirt called Athens and Rome, Jerusalem
and the Middle Kingdom–all were gone. Whisk–the
place where Italy had been was empty. Whisk, the
cathedrals; whisk, whisk, King Lear and the Thoughts of
Pascal. Whisk, Passion; whisk, Requiem; whisk, Symphony;
whisk …
- "Going to the Feelies
this evening, Henry?" enquired the Assistant
Predestinator. "I hear the new one at the Alhambra
is first-rate. There's a love scene on a bearskin rug;
they say it's marvellous. Every hair of the bear
reproduced. The most amazing tactual effects."
- "That's why you're
taught no history," the Controller was saying.
"But now the time has come …"
- The D.H.C. looked at him
nervously. There were those strange rumours of old
forbidden books hidden in a safe in the Controller's
study. Bibles, poetry–Ford knew what.
- Mustapha Mond intercepted
his anxious glance and the corners of his red lips
twitched ironically.
- "It's all right,
Director," he said in a tone of faint derision,
"I won't corrupt them."
- The D.H.C. was overwhelmed
with confusion.
- Those who feel themselves
despised do well to look despising. The smile on Bernard
Marx's face was contemptuous. Every hair on the bear
indeed!
- "I shall make a point
of going," said Henry Foster.
- Mustapha Mond leaned
forward, shook a finger at them. "Just try to
realize it," he said, and his voice sent a strange
thrill quivering along their diaphragms. "Try to
realize what it was like to have a viviparous mother."
- That smutty word again. But
none of them dreamed, this time, of smiling.
- "Try to imagine what 'living
with one's family' meant."
- They tried; but obviously
without the smallest success.
- "And do you know what
a 'home' was?"
- They shook their heads.
- From her dim crimson cellar
Lenina Crowne shot up seventeen stories, turned to the
right as she stepped out of the lift, walked down a long
corridor and, opening the door marked GIRLS' DRESSING-ROOM,
plunged into a deafening chaos of arms and bosoms and
underclothing. Torrents of hot water were splashing into
or gurgling out of a hundred baths. Rumbling and hissing,
eighty vibro-vacuum massage machines were simultaneously
kneading and sucking the firm and sunburnt flesh of
eighty superb female specimens. Every one was talking at
the top of her voice. A Synthetic Music machine was
warbling out a super-cornet solo.
- "Hullo, Fanny,"
said Lenina to the young woman who had the pegs and
locker next to hers.
- Fanny worked in the
Bottling Room, and her surname was also Crowne. But as
the two thousand million inhabitants of the plant had
only ten thousand names between them, the coincidence was
not particularly surprising.
- Lenina pulled at her
zippers-downwards on the jacket, downwards with a double-handed
gesture at the two that held trousers, downwards again to
loosen her undergarment. Still wearing her shoes and
stockings, she walked off towards the bathrooms.
- Home, home–a few small
rooms, stiflingly over-inhabited by a man, by a
periodically teeming woman, by a rabble of boys and girls
of all ages. No air, no space; an understerilized prison;
darkness, disease, and smells.
- (The Controller's evocation
was so vivid that one of the boys, more sensitive than
the rest, turned pale at the mere description and was on
the point of being sick.)
- Lenina got out of the bath,
toweled herself dry, took hold of a long flexible tube
plugged into the wall, presented the nozzle to her breast,
as though she meant to commit suicide, pressed down the
trigger. A blast of warmed air dusted her with the finest
talcum powder. Eight different scents and eau-de-Cologne
were laid on in little taps over the wash-basin. She
turned on the third from the left, dabbed herself with
chypre and, carrying her shoes and stockings in her hand,
went out to see if one of the vibro-vacuum machines were
free.
- And home was as squalid
psychically as physically. Psychically, it was a rabbit
hole, a midden, hot with the frictions of tightly packed
life, reeking with emotion. What suffocating intimacies,
what dangerous, insane, obscene relationships between the
members of the family group! Maniacally, the mother
brooded over her children (her children) …
brooded over them like a cat over its kittens; but a cat
that could talk, a cat that could say, "My baby, my
baby," over and over again. "My baby, and oh,
oh, at my breast, the little hands, the hunger, and that
unspeakable agonizing pleasure! Till at last my baby
sleeps, my baby sleeps with a bubble of white milk at the
corner of his mouth. My little baby sleeps …"
- "Yes," said
Mustapha Mond, nodding his head, "you may well
shudder."
- "Who are you going out
with to-night?" Lenina asked, returning from the
vibro-vac like a pearl illuminated from within, pinkly
glowing.
- "Nobody."
- Lenina raised her eyebrows
in astonishment.
- "I've been feeling
rather out of sorts lately," Fanny explained. "Dr.
Wells advised me to have a Pregnancy Substitute."
- "But, my dear, you're
only nineteen. The first Pregnancy Substitute isn't
compulsory till twenty-one."
- "I know, dear. But
some people are better if they begin earlier. Dr. Wells
told me that brunettes with wide pelvises, like me, ought
to have their first Pregnancy Substitute at seventeen. So
I'm really two years late, not two years early." She
opened the door of her locker and pointed to the row of
boxes and labelled phials on the upper shelf.
- "SYRUP OF CORPUS
LUTEUM," Lenina read the names aloud. "OVARIN,
GUARANTEED FRESH: NOT TO BE USED AFTER AUGUST 1ST, A.F.
632. MAMMARY GLAND EXTRACT: TO BE TAKEN THREE TIMES DAILY,
BEFORE MEALS, WITH A LITTLE WATER. PLACENTIN: 5cc TO BE
INJECTED INTRAVENALLY EVERY THIRD DAY … Ugh!"
Lenina shuddered. "How I loathe intravenals, don't
you?"
- "Yes. But when they do
one good …" Fanny was a particularly sensible
girl.
- Our Ford–or Our Freud,
as, for some inscrutable reason, he chose to call himself
whenever he spoke of psychological matters–Our Freud
had been the first to reveal the appalling dangers of
family life. The world was full of fathers–was
therefore full of misery; full of mothers–therefore
of every kind of perversion from sadism to chastity; full
of brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts–full of madness
and suicide.
- "And yet, among the
savages of Samoa, in certain islands off the coast of New
Guinea …"
- The tropical sunshine lay
like warm honey on the naked bodies of children tumbling
promiscuously among the hibiscus blossoms. Home was in
any one of twenty palm-thatched houses. In the Trobriands
conception was the work of ancestral ghosts; nobody had
ever heard of a father.
- "Extremes," said
the Controller, "meet. For the good reason that they
were made to meet."
- "Dr. Wells says that a
three months' Pregnancy Substitute now will make all the
difference to my health for the next three or four years."
- "Well, I hope he's
right," said Lenina. "But, Fanny, do you really
mean to say that for the next three months you're not
supposed to …"
- "Oh no, dear. Only for
a week or two, that's all. I shall spend the evening at
the Club playing Musical Bridge. I suppose you're going
out?"
- Lenina nodded.
- "Who with?"
- "Henry Foster."
- "Again?" Fanny's
kind, rather moon-like face took on an incongruous
expression of pained and disapproving astonishment.
"Do you mean to tell me you're still going
out with Henry Foster?"
- Mothers and fathers,
brothers and sisters. But there were also husbands, wives,
lovers. There were also monogamy and romance.
- "Though you probably
don't know what those are," said Mustapha Mond.
- They shook their heads.
- Family, monogamy, romance.
Everywhere exclusiveness, a narrow channelling of impulse
and energy.
- "But every one belongs
to every one else," he concluded, citing the hypnop?dic proverb.
- The students nodded,
emphatically agreeing with a statement which upwards of
sixty-two thousand repetitions in the dark had made them
accept, not merely as true, but as axiomatic, self-evident,
utterly indisputable.
- "But after all,"
Lenina was protesting, "it's only about four months
now since I've been having Henry."
- "Only four months! I
like that. And what's more," Fanny went on, pointing
an accusing finger, "there's been nobody else except
Henry all that time. Has there?"
- Lenina blushed scarlet; but
her eyes, the tone of her voice remained defiant. "No,
there hasn't been any one else," she answered almost
truculently. "And I jolly well don't see why there
should have been."
- "Oh, she jolly well
doesn't see why there should have been," Fanny
repeated, as though to an invisible listener behind
Lenina's left shoulder. Then, with a sudden change of
tone, "But seriously," she said, "I really
do think you ought to be careful. It's such horribly bad
form to go on and on like this with one man. At forty, or
thirty-five, it wouldn't be so bad. But at your
age, Lenina! No, it really won't do. And you know how
strongly the D.H.C. objects to anything intense or long-drawn.
Four months of Henry Foster, without having another
man–why, he'd be furious if he knew …"
- "Think of water under
pressure in a pipe." They thought of it. "I
pierce it once," said the Controller. "What a
jet!"
- He pierced it twenty times.
There were twenty piddling little fountains.
- "My baby. My baby
…!"
- "Mother!" The
madness is infectious.
- "My love, my one and
only, precious, precious …"
- Mother, monogamy, romance.
High spurts the fountain; fierce and foamy the wild jet.
The urge has but a single outlet. My love, my baby. No
wonder these poor pre-moderns were mad and wicked and
miserable. Their world didn't allow them to take things
easily, didn't allow them to be sane, virtuous, happy.
What with mothers and lovers, what with the prohibitions
they were not conditioned to obey, what with the
temptations and the lonely remorses, what with all the
diseases and the endless isolating pain, what with the
uncertainties and the poverty–they were forced to
feel strongly. And feeling strongly (and strongly, what
was more, in solitude, in hopelessly individual isolation),
how could they be stable?
- "Of course there's no
need to give him up. Have somebody else from time to time,
that's all. He has other girls, doesn't he?"
- Lenina admitted it.
- "Of course he does.
Trust Henry Foster to be the perfect
gentleman–always correct. And then there's the
Director to think of. You know what a stickler …"
- Nodding, "He patted me
on the behind this afternoon," said Lenina.
- "There, you see!"
Fanny was triumphant. "That shows what he
stands for. The strictest conventionality."
- "Stability," said
the Controller, "stability. No civilization without
social stability. No social stability without individual
stability." His voice was a trumpet. Listening they
felt larger, warmer.
- The machine turns, turns
and must keep on turning–for ever. It is death if it
stands still. A thousand millions scrabbled the crust of
the earth. The wheels began to turn. In a hundred and
fifty years there were two thousand millions. Stop all
the wheels. In a hundred and fifty weeks there are once
more only a thousand millions; a thousand thousand
thousand men and women have starved to death.
- Wheels must turn steadily,
but cannot turn untended. There must be men to tend them,
men as steady as the wheels upon their axles, sane men,
obedient men, stable in contentment.
- Crying: My baby, my mother,
my only, only love groaning: My sin, my terrible God;
screaming with pain, muttering with fever, bemoaning old
age and poverty–how can they tend the wheels? And if
they cannot tend the wheels … The corpses of a
thousand thousand thousand men and women would be hard to
bury or burn.
- "And after all,"
Fanny's tone was coaxing, "it's not as though there
were anything painful or disagreeable about having one or
two men besides Henry. And seeing that you ought
to be a little more promiscuous …"
- "Stability,"
insisted the Controller, "stability. The primal and
the ultimate need. Stability. Hence all this."
- With a wave of his hand he
indicated the gardens, the huge building of the
Conditioning Centre, the naked children furtive in the
undergrowth or running across the lawns.
- Lenina shook her head.
"Somehow," she mused, "I hadn't been
feeling very keen on promiscuity lately. There are times
when one doesn't. Haven't you found that too, Fanny?"
- Fanny nodded her sympathy
and understanding. "But one's got to make the effort,"
she said, sententiously, "one's got to play the game.
After all, every one belongs to every one else."
- "Yes, every one
belongs to every one else," Lenina repeated slowly
and, sighing, was silent for a moment; then, taking Fanny's
hand, gave it a little squeeze. "You're quite right,
Fanny. As usual. I'll make the effort."
- Impulse arrested spills
over, and the flood is feeling, the flood is passion, the
flood is even madness: it depends on the force of the
current, the height and strength of the barrier. The
unchecked stream flows smoothly down its appointed
channels into a calm well-being. (The embryo is hungry;
day in, day out, the blood-surrogate pump unceasingly
turns its eight hundred revolutions a minute. The
decanted infant howls; at once a nurse appears with a
bottle of external secretion. Feeling lurks in that
interval of time between desire and its consummation.
Shorten that interval, break down all those old
unnecessary barriers.
- "Fortunate boys!"
said the Controller. "No pains have been spared to
make your lives emotionally easy–to preserve you, so
far as that is possible, from having emotions at all."
- "Ford's in his flivver,"
murmured the D.H.C. "All's well with the world."
- "Lenina Crowne?"
said Henry Foster, echoing the Assistant Predestinator's
question as he zipped up his trousers. "Oh, she's a
splendid girl. Wonderfully pneumatic. I'm surprised you
haven't had her."
- "I can't think how it
is I haven't," said the Assistant Predestinator.
"I certainly will. At the first opportunity."
- From his place on the
opposite side of the changing-room aisle, Bernard Marx
overheard what they were saying and turned pale.
- "And to tell the truth,"
said Lenina, "I'm beginning to get just a tiny bit
bored with nothing but Henry every day." She pulled
on her left stocking. "Do you know Bernard Marx?"
she asked in a tone whose excessive casualness was
evidently forced.
- Fanny looked startled.
"You don't mean to say …?"
- "Why not? Bernard's an
Alpha Plus. Besides, he asked me to go to one of the
Savage Reservations with him. I've always wanted to see a
Savage Reservation."
- "But his reputation?"
- "What do I care about
his reputation?"
- "They say he doesn't
like Obstacle Golf."
- "They say, they say,"
mocked Lenina.
- "And then he spends
most of his time by himself–alone." There was
horror in Fanny's voice.
- "Well, he won't be
alone when he's with me. And anyhow, why are people so
beastly to him? I think he's rather sweet." She
smiled to herself; how absurdly shy he had been!
Frightened almost–as though she were a World
Controller and he a Gamma-Minus machine minder.
- "Consider your own
lives," said Mustapha Mond. "Has any of you
ever encountered an insurmountable obstacle?"
- The question was answered
by a negative silence.
- "Has any of you been
compelled to live through a long time-interval between
the consciousness of a desire and its fufilment?"
- "Well," began one
of the boys, and hesitated.
- "Speak up," said
the D.H.C. "Don't keep his fordship waiting."
- "I once had to wait
nearly four weeks before a girl I wanted would let me
have her."
- "And you felt a strong
emotion in consequence?"
- "Horrible!"
- "Horrible; precisely,"
said the Controller. "Our ancestors were so stupid
and short-sighted that when the first reformers came
along and offered to deliver them from those horrible
emotions, they wouldn't have anything to do with them."
- "Talking about her as
though she were a bit of meat." Bernard ground his
teeth. "Have her here, have her there." Like
mutton. Degrading her to so much mutton. She said she'd
think it over, she said she'd give me an answer this week.
Oh, Ford, Ford, Ford." He would have liked to go up
to them and hit them in the face–hard, again and
again.
- "Yes, I really do
advise you to try her," Henry Foster was saying.
- "Take Ectogenesis.
Pfitzner and Kawaguchi had got the whole technique worked
out. But would the Governments look at it? No. There was
something called Christianity. Women were forced to go on
being viviparous."
- "He's so ugly!"
said Fanny.
- "But I rather like his
looks."
- "And then so small."
Fanny made a grimace; smallness was so horribly and
typically low-caste.
- "I think that's rather
sweet," said Lenina. "One feels one would like
to pet him. You know. Like a cat."
- Fanny was shocked. "They
say somebody made a mistake when he was still in the
bottle–thought he was a Gamma and put alcohol into
his blood-surrogate. That's why he's so stunted."
- "What nonsense!"
Lenina was indignant.
- "Sleep teaching was
actually prohibited in England. There was something
called liberalism. Parliament, if you know what that was,
passed a law against it. The records survive. Speeches
about liberty of the subject. Liberty to be inefficient
and miserable. Freedom to be a round peg in a square hole."
- "But, my dear chap,
you're welcome, I assure you. You're welcome." Henry
Foster patted the Assistant Predestinator on the shoulder.
"Every one belongs to every one else, after all."
- One hundred repetitions
three nights a week for four years, thought Bernard Marx,
who was a specialist on hypnop?dia.
Sixty-two thousand four hundred repetitions make one
truth. Idiots!
- "Or the Caste System.
Constantly proposed, constantly rejected. There was
something called democracy. As though men were more than
physico-chemically equal."
- "Well, all I can say
is that I'm going to accept his invitation."
- Bernard hated them, hated
them. But they were two, they were large, they were
strong.
- "The Nine Years' War
began in A.F. 141."
- "Not even if it were
true about the alcohol in his blood-surrogate."
- "Phosgene,
chloropicrin, ethyl iodoacetate, diphenylcyanarsine,
trichlormethyl, chloroformate, dichlorethyl sulphide. Not
to mention hydrocyanic acid."
- "Which I simply don't
believe," Lenina concluded.
- "The noise of fourteen
thousand aeroplanes advancing in open order. But in the
Kurfurstendamm and the Eighth Arrondissement, the
explosion of the anthrax bombs is hardly louder than the
popping of a paper bag."
- "Because I do
want to see a Savage Reservation."
- Ch3C6H2(NO2)3+Hg(CNO)2=well,
what? An enormous hole in the ground, a pile of masonry,
some bits of flesh and mucus, a foot, with the boot still
on it, flying through the air and landing, flop, in the
middle of the geraniums–the scarlet ones; such a
splendid show that summer!
- "You're hopeless,
Lenina, I give you up."
- "The Russian technique
for infecting water supplies was particularly ingenious."
- Back turned to back, Fanny
and Lenina continued their changing in silence.
- "The Nine Years' War,
the great Economic Collapse. There was a choice between
World Control and destruction. Between stability and
…"
- "Fanny Crowne's a nice
girl too," said the Assistant Predestinator.
- In the nurseries, the
Elementary Class Consciousness lesson was over, the
voices were adapting future demand to future industrial
supply. "I do love flying," they whispered,
"I do love flying, I do love having new clothes, I
do love …"
- "Liberalism, of course,
was dead of anthrax, but all the same you couldn't do
things by force."
- "Not nearly so
pneumatic as Lenina. Oh, not nearly."
"But old clothes are beastly," continued the
untiring whisper. "We always throw away old clothes.
Ending is better than mending, ending is better than
mending, ending is better …"
- "Government's an
affair of sitting, not hitting. You rule with the brains
and the buttocks, never with the fists. For example,
there was the conscription of consumption."
- "There, I'm ready,"
said Lenina, but Fanny remained speechless and averted.
"Let's make peace, Fanny darling."
- "Every man, woman and
child compelled to consume so much a year. In the
interests of industry. The sole result …"
- "Ending is better than
mending. The more stitches, the less riches; the more
stitches …"
- "One of these days,"
said Fanny, with dismal emphasis, "you'll get into
trouble."
- "Conscientious
objection on an enormous scale. Anything not to consume.
Back to nature."
- "I do love flying. I
do love flying."
- "Back to culture. Yes,
actually to culture. You can't consume much if you sit
still and read books."
- "Do I look all right?"
Lenina asked. Her jacket was made of bottle green acetate
cloth with green viscose fur; at the cuffs and collar.
- "Eight hundred Simple
Lifers were mowed down by machine guns at Golders Green."
- "Ending is better than
mending, ending is better than mending."
- Green corduroy shorts and
white viscose-woollen stockings turned down below the
knee.
- "Then came the famous
British Museum Massacre. Two thousand culture fans gassed
with dichlorethyl sulphide."
- A green-and-white jockey
cap shaded Lenina's eyes; her shoes were bright green and
highly polished.
- "In the end,"
said Mustapha Mond, "the Controllers realized that
force was no good. The slower but infinitely surer
methods of ectogenesis, neo-Pavlovian conditioning and
hypnop?dia …"
- And round her waist she
wore a silver-mounted green morocco-surrogate cartridge
belt, bulging (for Lenina was not a freemartin) with the
regulation supply of contraceptives.
- "The discoveries of
Pfitzner and Kawaguchi were at last made use of. An
intensive propaganda against viviparous reproduction
…"
- "Perfect!" cried
Fanny enthusiastically. She could never resist Lenina's
charm for long. "And what a perfectly sweet
Malthusian belt!"
- "Accompanied by a
campaign against the Past; by the closing of museums, the
blowing up of historical monuments (luckily most of them
had already been destroyed during the Nine Years' War);
by the suppression of all books published before A.F. 15O.''
- "I simply must get one
like it," said Fanny.
- "There were some
things called the pyramids, for example.
- "My old black-patent
bandolier …"
- "And a man called
Shakespeare. You've never heard of them of course."
- "It's an absolute
disgrace–that bandolier of mine."
- "Such are the
advantages of a really scientific education."
- "The more stitches the
less riches; the more stitches the less …"
- "The introduction of
Our Ford's first T-Model …"
- "I've had it nearly
three months."
- "Chosen as the opening
date of the new era."
- "Ending is better than
mending; ending is better …"
- "There was a thing, as
I've said before, called Christianity."
- "Ending is better than
mending."
- "The ethics and
philosophy of under-consumption …"
- "I love new clothes, I
love new clothes, I love …"
- "So essential when
there was under-production; but in an age of machines and
the fixation of nitrogen–positively a crime against
society."
- "Henry Foster gave it
me."
- "All crosses had their
tops cut and became T's. There was also a thing called
God."
- "It's real morocco-surrogate."
- "We have the World
State now. And Ford's Day celebrations, and Community
Sings, and Solidarity Services."
- "Ford, how I hate them!"
Bernard Marx was thinking.
- "There was a thing
called Heaven; but all the same they used to drink
enormous quantities of alcohol."
- "Like meat, like so
much meat."
- "There was a thing
called the soul and a thing called immortality."
- "Do ask Henry where he
got it."
- "But they used to take
morphia and cocaine."
- "And what makes it
worse, she thinks of herself as meat."
- "Two thousand
pharmacologists and bio-chemists were subsidized in A.P.
178."
- "He does look glum,"
said the Assistant Predestinator, pointing at Bernard
Marx.
- "Six years later it
was being produced commercially. The perfect drug."
- "Let's bait him."
- "Euphoric, narcotic,
pleasantly hallucinant."
- "Glum, Marx, glum."
The clap on the shoulder made him start, look up. It was
that brute Henry Foster. "What you need is a gramme
of soma."
- "All the advantages of
Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects."
- "Ford, I should like
to kill him!" But all he did was to say, "No,
thank you," and fend off the proffered tube of
tablets.
- "Take a holiday from
reality whenever you like, and come back without so much
as a headache or a mythology."
- "Take it,"
insisted Henry Foster, "take it."
- "Stability was
practically assured."
- "One cubic centimetre
cures ten gloomy sentiments," said the Assistant
Predestinator citing a piece of homely hypnop?dic wisdom.
- "It only remained to
conquer old age."
- "Damn you, damn you!"
shouted Bernard Marx.
- "Hoity-toity."
- "Gonadal hormones,
transfusion of young blood, magnesium salts …"
- "And do remember that
a gramme is better than a damn." They went out,
laughing.
- "All the physiological
stigmata of old age have been abolished. And along with
them, of course …"
- "Don't forget to ask
him about that Malthusian belt," said Fanny.
- "Along with them all
the old man's mental peculiarities. Characters remain
constant throughout a whole lifetime."
- "… two rounds of
Obstacle Golf to get through before dark. I must fly."
- "Work, play–at
sixty our powers and tastes are what they were at
seventeen. Old men in the bad old days used to renounce,
retire, take to religion, spend their time reading,
thinking–thinking!"
- "Idiots, swine!"
Bernard Marx was saying to himself, as he walked down the
corridor to the lift.
- "Now–such is
progress–the old men work, the old men copulate, the
old men have no time, no leisure from pleasure, not a
moment to sit down and think–or if ever by some
unlucky chance such a crevice of time should yawn in the
solid substance of their distractions, there is always soma,
delicious soma, half a gramme for a half-holiday,
a gramme for a week-end, two grammes for a trip to the
gorgeous East, three for a dark eternity on the moon;
returning whence they find themselves on the other side
of the crevice, safe on the solid ground of daily labour
and distraction, scampering from feely to feely, from
girl to pneumatic girl, from Electromagnetic Golf course
to …"
- "Go away, little girl,"
shouted the D.H.C. angrily. "Go away, little boy!
Can't you see that his fordship's busy? Go and do your
erotic play somewhere else."
- "Suffer little
children," said the Controller.
- Slowly, majestically, with
a faint humming of machinery, the Conveyors moved forward,
thirty-three centimters an hour. In the red darkness
glinted innumerable rubies.
chapter four
THE LIFT was crowded with men from the Alpha
Changing Rooms, and Lenina's entry wars greeted by many friendly
nods and smiles. She was a popular girl and, at one time or
another, had spent a night with almost all of them.
- They were dear boys, she
thought, as she returned their salutations. Charming boys!
Still, she did wish that George Edzel's ears weren't
quite so big (perhaps he'd been given just a spot too
much parathyroid at Metre 328?). And looking at Benito
Hoover, she couldn't help remembering that he was really too
hairy when he took his clothes off.
- Turning, with eyes a little
saddened by the recollection, of Benito's curly blackness,
she saw in a corner the small thin body, the melancholy
face of Bernard Marx.
- "Bernard!" she
stepped up to him. "I was looking for you." Her
voice rang clear above the hum of the mounting lift. The
others looked round curiously. "I wanted to talk to
you about our New Mexico plan." Out of the tail of
her eye she could see Benito Hoover gaping with
astonishment. The gape annoyed her. "Surprised I
shouldn't be begging to go with him again!"
she said to herself. Then aloud, and more warmly than
ever, "I'd simply love to come with you for a
week in July," she went on. (Anyhow, she was
publicly proving her unfaithfulness to Henry. Fanny ought
to be pleased, even though it was Bernard.) "That is,"
Lenina gave him her most deliciously significant smile,
"if you still want to have me."
- Bernard's pale face flushed.
"What on earth for?" she wondered, astonished,
but at the same time touched by this strange tribute to
her power.
- "Hadn't we better talk
about it somewhere else?" he stammered, looking
horribly uncomfortable.
- "As though I'd been
saying something shocking," thought Lenina. "He
couldn't look more upset if I'd made a dirty
joke–asked him who his mother was, or something like
that."
- "I mean, with all
these people about …" He was choked with
confusion.
- Lenina's laugh was frank
and wholly unmalicious. "How funny you are!"
she said; and she quite genuinely did think him funny.
"You'll give me at least a week's warning, won't you,"
she went on in another tone. "I suppose we take the
Blue Pacific Rocket? Does it start from the Charing-T
Tower? Or is it from Hampstead?"
- Before Bernard could answer,
the lift came to a standstill.
- "Roof!" called a
creaking voice.
- The liftman was a small
simian creature, dressed in the black tunic of an Epsilon-Minus
Semi-Moron.
- "Roof!"
- He flung open the gates.
The warm glory of afternoon sunlight made him start and
blink his eyes. "Oh, roof!" he repeated in a
voice of rapture. He was as though suddenly and joyfully
awakened from a dark annihilating stupor. "Roof!"
- He smiled up with a kind of
doggily expectant adoration into the faces of his
passengers. Talking and laughing together, they stepped
out into the light. The liftman looked after them.
- "Roof?" he said
once more, questioningly.
- Then a bell rang, and from
the ceiling of the lift a loud speaker began, very softly
and yet very imperiously, to issue its commands.
- "Go down," it
said, "go down. Floor Eighteen. Go down, go down.
Floor Eighteen. Go down, go …"
- The liftman slammed the
gates, touched a button and instantly dropped back into
the droning twilight of the well, the twilight of his own
habitual stupor.
- It was warm and bright on
the roof. The summer afternoon was drowsy with the hum of
passing helicopters; and the deeper drone of the rocket-planes
hastening, invisible, through the bright sky five or six
miles overhead was like a caress on the soft air. Bernard
Marx drew a deep breath. He looked up into the sky and
round the blue horizon and finally down into Lenina's
face.
- "Isn't it beautiful!"
His voice trembled a little.
- She smiled at him with an
expression of the most sympathetic understanding. "Simply
perfect for Obstacle Golf," she answered rapturously.
"And now I must fly, Bernard. Henry gets cross if I
keep him waiting. Let me know in good time about the date."
And waving her hand she ran away across the wide flat
roof towards the hangars. Bernard stood watching the
retreating twinkle of the white stockings, the sunburnt
knees vivaciously bending and unbending again, again, and
the softer rolling of those well-fitted corduroy shorts
beneath the bottle green jacket. His face wore an
expression of pain.
- "I should say she was
pretty," said a loud and cheery voice just behind
him.
- Bernard started and looked
around. The chubby red face of Benito Hoover was beaming
down at him–beaming with manifest cordiality. Benito
was notoriously good-natured. People said of him that he
could have got through life without ever touching soma.
The malice and bad tempers from which other people had to
take holidays never afflicted him. Reality for Benito was
always sunny.
- "Pneumatic too. And
how!" Then, in another tone: "But, I say,"
he went on, "you do look glum! What you need is a
gramme of soma." Diving into his right-hand
trouser-pocket, Benito produced a phial. "One cubic
centimetre cures ten gloomy … But, I say!"
- Bernard had suddenly turned
and rushed away.
- Benito stared after him.
"What can be the matter with the fellow?" he
wondered, and, shaking his head, decided that the story
about the alcohol having been put into the poor chap's
blood-surrogate must be true. "Touched his brain, I
suppose."
- He put away the soma
bottle, and taking out a packet of sex-hormone chewing-gum,
stuffed a plug into his cheek and walked slowly away
towards the hangars, ruminating.
- Henry Foster had had his
machine wheeled out of its lock-up and, when Lenina
arrived, was already seated in the cockpit, waiting.
- "Four minutes late,"
was all his comment, as she climbed in beside him. He
started the engines and threw the helicopter screws into
gear. The machine shot vertically into the air. Henry
accelerated; the humming of the propeller shrilled from
hornet to wasp, from wasp to mosquito; the speedometer
showed that they were rising at the best part of two
kilometres a minute. London diminished beneath them. The
huge table-topped buildings were no more, in a few
seconds, than a bed of geometrical mushrooms sprouting
from the green of park and garden. In the midst of them,
thin-stalked, a taller, slenderer fungus, the Charing-T
Tower lifted towards the sky a disk of shining concrete.
- Like the vague torsos of
fabulous athletes, huge fleshy clouds lolled on the blue
air above their heads. Out of one of them suddenly
dropped a small scarlet insect, buzzing as it fell.
- "There's the Red
Rocket," said Henry, "just come in from New
York." Looking at his watch. "Seven minutes
behind time," he added, and shook his head. "These
Atlantic services–they're really scandalously
unpunctual."
- He took his foot off the
accelerator. The humming of the screws overhead dropped
an octave and a half, back through wasp and hornet to
bumble bee, to cockchafer, to stag-beetle. The upward
rush of the machine slackened off; a moment later they
were hanging motionless in the air. Henry pushed at a
lever; there was a click. Slowly at first, then faster
and faster, till it was a circular mist before their eyes,
the propeller in front of them began to revolve. The wind
of a horizontal speed whistled ever more shrilly in the
stays. Henry kept his eye on the revolution-counter; when
the needle touched the twelve hundred mark, he threw the
helicopter screws out of gear. The machine had enough
forward momentum to be able to fly on its planes.
- Lenina looked down through
the window in the floor between her feet. They were
flying over the six kilometre zone of park-land that
separated Central London from its first ring of satellite
suburbs. The green was maggoty with fore-shortened life.
Forests of Centrifugal Bumble-puppy towers gleamed
between the trees. Near Shepherd's Bush two thousand Beta-Minus
mixed doubles were playing Riemann-surface tennis. A
double row of Escalator Fives Courts lined the main road
from Notting Hill to Willesden. In the Ealing stadium a
Delta gymnastic display and community sing was in
progress.
- "What a hideous colour
khaki is," remarked Lenina, voicing the hypnop?dic prejudices of her caste.
- The buildings of the
Hounslow Feely Studio covered seven and a half hectares.
Near them a black and khaki army of labourers was busy
revitrifying the surface of the Great West Road. One of
the huge travelling crucibles was being tapped as they
flew over. The molten stone poured out in a stream of
dazzling incandescence across the road, the asbestos
rollers came and went; at the tail of an insulated
watering cart the steam rose in white clouds.
- At Brentford the Television
Corporation's factory was like a small town.
- "They must be changing
the shift," said Lenina.
- Like aphides and ants, the
leaf-green Gamma girls, the black Semi-Morons swarmed
round the entrances, or stood in queues to take their
places in the monorail tram-cars. Mulberry-coloured Beta-Minuses
came and went among the crowd. The roof of the main
building was alive with the alighting and departure of
helicopters.
- "My word," said
Lenina, "I'm glad I'm not a Gamma."
- Ten minutes later they were
at Stoke Poges and had started their first round of
Obstacle Golf.
§ 2
WITH eyes for the most part downcast and,
if ever they lighted on a fellow creature, at once and
furtively averted, Bernard hastened across the roof. He
was like a man pursued, but pursued by enemies he does
not wish to see, lest they should seem more hostile even
than he had supposed, and he himself be made to feel
guiltier and even more helplessly alone.
- "That horrible Benito
Hoover!" And yet the man had meant well enough.
Which only made it, in a way, much worse. Those who meant
well behaved in the same way as those who meant badly.
Even Lenina was making him suffer. He remembered those
weeks of timid indecision, during which he had looked and
longed and despaired of ever having the courage to ask
her. Dared he face the risk of being humiliated by a
contemptuous refusal? But if she were to say yes, what
rapture! Well, now she had said it and he was still
wretched–wretched that she should have thought it
such a perfect afternoon for Obstacle Golf, that she
should have trotted away to join Henry Foster, that she
should have found him funny for not wanting to talk of
their most private affairs in public. Wretched, in a word,
because she had behaved as any healthy and virtuous
English girl ought to behave and not in some other,
abnormal, extraordinary way.
- He opened the door of his
lock-up and called to a lounging couple of Delta-Minus
attendants to come and push his machine out on to the
roof. The hangars were staffed by a single Bokanovsky
Group, and the men were twins, identically small, black
and hideous. Bernard gave his orders in the sharp, rather
arrogant and even offensive tone of one who does not feel
himself too secure in his superiority. To have dealings
with members of the lower castes was always, for Bernard,
a most distressing experience. For whatever the cause (and
the current gossip about the alcohol in his blood-surrogate
may very likely–for accidents will happen–have
been true) Bernard's physique as hardly better than that
of the average Gamma. He stood eight centimetres short of
the standard Alpha height and was slender in proportion.
Contact with members of he lower castes always reminded
him painfully of this physical inadequacy. "I am I,
and wish I wasn't"; his self-consciousness was acute
and stressing. Each time he found himself looking on the
level, instead of downward, into a Delta's face, he felt
humiliated. Would the creature treat him with the respect
due to his caste? The question haunted him. Not without
reason. For Gammas, Deltas and Epsilons had been to some
extent conditioned to associate corporeal mass with
social superiority. Indeed, a faint hypnop?dic prejudice in favour of size was
universal. Hence the laughter of the women to whom he
made proposals, the practical joking of his equals among
the men. The mockery made him feel an outsider; and
feeling an outsider he behaved like one, which increased
the prejudice against him and intensified the contempt
and hostility aroused by his physical defects. Which in
turn increased his sense of being alien and alone. A
chronic fear of being slighted made him avoid his equals,
made him stand, where his inferiors were concerned, self-consciously
on his dignity. How bitterly he envied men like Henry
Foster and Benito Hoover! Men who never had to shout at
an Epsilon to get an order obeyed; men who took their
position for granted; men who moved through the caste
system as a fish through water–so utterly at home as
to be unaware either of themselves or of the beneficent
and comfortable element in which they had their being.
- Slackly, it seemed to him,
and with reluctance, the twin attendants wheeled his
plane out on the roof.
- "Hurry up!" said
Bernard irritably. One of them glanced at him. Was that a
kind of bestial derision that he detected in those blank
grey eyes? "Hurry up!" he shouted more loudly,
and there was an ugly rasp in his voice.
- He climbed into the plane
and, a minute later, was flying southwards, towards the
river.
- The various Bureaux of
Propaganda and the College of Emotional Engineering were
housed in a single sixty-story building in Fleet Street.
In the basement and on the low floors were the presses
and offices of the three great London newspapers–The
Hourly Radio, an upper-caste sheet, the pale green Gamma
Gazette, and, on khaki paper and in words exclusively
of one syllable, The Delta Mirror. Then came the
Bureaux of Propaganda by Television, by Feeling Picture,
and by Synthetic Voice and Music respectively–twenty-two
floors of them. Above were the search laboratories and
the padded rooms in which Sound-Track Writers and
Synthetic Composers did the delicate work. The top
eighteen floors were occupied the College of Emotional
Engineering.
- Bernard landed on the roof
of Propaganda House and stepped out.
- "Ring down to Mr.
Helmholtz Watson," he ordered the Gamma-Plus porter,
"and tell him that Mr. Bernard Marx is waiting for
him on the roof."
- He sat down and lit a
cigarette.
- Helmholtz Watson was
writing when the message came down.
- "Tell him I'm coming
at once," he said and hung up the receiver. Then,
turning to his secretary, "I'll leave you to put my
things away," he went on in the same official and
impersonal tone; and, ignoring her lustrous smile, got up
and walked briskly to the door.
- He was a powerfully built
man, deep-chested, broad-shouldered, massive, and yet
quick in his movements, springy and agile. The round
strong pillar of his neck supported a beautifully shaped
head. His hair was dark and curly, his features strongly
marked. In a forcible emphatic way, he was handsome and
looked, as his secretary was never tired of repeating,
every centimetre an Alpha Plus. By profession he was a
lecturer at the College of Emotional Engineering (Department
of Writing) and the intervals of his educational
activities, a working Emotional Engineer. He wrote
regularly for The Hourly Radio, composed feely
scenarios, and had the happiest knack for slogans and
hypnop?dic rhymes.
- "Able," was the
verdict of his superiors. "Perhaps, (and they would
shake their heads, would significantly lower their voices)
"a little too able."
- Yes, a little too able;
they were right. A mental excess had produced in
Helmholtz Watson effects very similar to those which, in
Bernard Marx, were the result of a physical defect. Too
little bone and brawn had isolated Bernard from his
fellow men, and the sense of this apartness, being, by
all the current standards, a mental excess, became in its
turn a cause of wider separation. That which had made
Helmholtz so uncomfortably aware of being himself and all
alone was too much ability. What the two men shared was
the knowledge that they were individuals. But whereas the
physically defective Bernard had suffered all his life
from the consciousness of being separate, it was only
quite recently that, grown aware of his mental excess,
Helmholtz Watson had also become aware of his difference
from the people who surrounded him. This Escalator-Squash
champion, this indefatigable lover (it was said that he
had had six hundred and forty different girls in under
four years), this admirable committee man and best mixer
had realized quite suddenly that sport, women, communal
activities were only, so far as he was concerned, second
bests. Really, and at the bottom, he was interested in
something else. But in what? In what? That was the
problem which Bernard had come to discuss with
him–or rather, since it was always Helmholtz who did
all the talking, to listen to his friend discussing, yet
once more.
- Three charming girls from
the Bureau of Propaganda by Synthetic Voice waylaid him
as he stepped out of the lift.
- "Oh, Helmholtz,
darling, do come and have a picnic supper with us
on Exmoor." They clung round him imploringly.
- He shook his head, he
pushed his way through them. "No, no."
- "We're not inviting
any other man."
- But Helmholtz remained
unshaken even by this delightful promise. "No,"
he repeated, "I'm busy." And he held resolutely
on his course. The girls trailed after him. It was not
till he had actually climbed into Bernard's plane and
slammed the door that they gave up pursuit. Not without
reproaches.
- "These women!" he
said, as the machine rose into the air. "These women!"
And he shook his head, he frowned. "Too awful,"
Bernard hypocritically agreed, wishing, as he spoke the
words, that he could have as many girls as Helmholtz did,
and with as little trouble. He was seized with a sudden
urgent need to boast. "I'm taking Lenina Crowne to
New Mexico with me," he said in a tone as casual as
he could make it.
- "Are you?" said
Helmholtz, with a total absence of interest. Then after a
little pause, "This last week or two," he went
on, "I've been cutting all my committees and all my
girls. You can't imagine what a hullabaloo they've been
making about it at the College. Still, it's been worth it,
I think. The effects …" He hesitated. "Well,
they're odd, they're very odd."
- A physical shortcoming
could produce a kind of mental excess. The process, it
seemed, was reversible. Mental excess could produce, for
its own purposes, the voluntary blindness and deafness of
deliberate solitude, the artificial impotence of
asceticism.
- The rest of the short
flight was accomplished in silence. When they had arrived
and were comfortably stretched out on the pneumatic sofas
in Bernard's room, Helmholtz began again.
- Speaking very slowly,
"Did you ever feel," he asked, "as though
you had something inside you that was only waiting for
you to give it a chance to come out? Some sort of extra
power that you aren't using–you know, like all the
water that goes down the falls instead of through the
turbines?" He looked at Bernard questioningly.
- "You mean all the
emotions one might be feeling if things were different?"
- Helmholtz shook his head.
"Not quite. I'm thinking of a queer feeling I
sometimes get, a feeling that I've got something
important to say and the power to say it–only I don't
know what it is, and I can't make any use of the power.
If there was some different way of writing … Or else
something else to write about …" He was silent;
then, "You see," he went on at last, "I'm
pretty good at inventing phrases–you know, the sort
of words that suddenly make you jump, almost as though
you'd sat on a pin, they seem so new and exciting even
though they're about something hypnop?dically obvious. But that doesn't seem
enough. It's not enough for the phrases to be good; what
you make with them ought to be good too."
- "But your things are
good, Helmholtz."
- "Oh, as far as they go."
Helmholtz shrugged his shoulders. "But they go such
a little way. They aren't important enough, somehow. I
feel I could do something much more important. Yes, and
more intense, more violent. But what? What is there more
important to say? And how can one be violent about the
sort of things one's expected to write about? Words can
be like X-rays, if you use them properly–they'll go
through anything. You read and you're pierced. That's one
of the things I try to teach my students–how to
write piercingly. But what on earth's the good of being
pierced by an article about a Community Sing, or the
latest improvement in scent organs? Besides, can you make
words really piercing–you know, like the very
hardest X-rays–when you're writing about that sort
of thing? Can you say something about nothing? That's
what it finally boils down to. I try and I try …"
- "Hush!" said
Bernard suddenly, and lifted a warning finger; they
listened. "I believe there's somebody at the door,"
he whispered.
- Helmholtz got up, tiptoed
across the room, and with a sharp quick movement flung
the door wide open. There was, of course, nobody there.
- "I'm sorry," said
Bernard, feeling and looking uncomfortably foolish.
"I suppose I've got things on my nerves a bit. When
people are suspicious with you, you start being
suspicious with them."
- He passed his hand across
his eyes, he sighed, his voice became plaintive. He was
justifying himself. "If you knew what I'd had to put
up with recently," he said almost tearfully–and
the uprush of his self-pity was like a fountain suddenly
released. "If you only knew!"
- Helmholtz Watson listened
with a certain sense of discomfort. "Poor little
Bernard!" he said to himself. But at the same time
he felt rather ashamed for his friend. He wished Bernard
would show a little more pride.
chapter five
BY EIGHT O'CLOCK the light was failing. The loud
speaker in the tower of the Stoke Poges Club House began, in a
more than human tenor, to announce the closing of the courses.
Lenina and Henry abandoned their game and walked back towards the
Club. From the grounds of the Internal and External Secretion
Trust came the lowing of those thousands of cattle which provided,
with their hormones and their milk, the raw materials for the
great factory at Farnham Royal.
- An incessant buzzing of
helicopters filled the twilight. Every two and a half
minutes a bell and the screech of whistles announced the
departure of one of the light monorail trains which
carried the lower caste golfers back from their separate
course to the metropolis.
- Lenina and Henry climbed
into their machine and started off. At eight hundred feet
Henry slowed down the helicopter screws, and they hung
for a minute or two poised above the fading landscape.
The forest of Burnham Beeches stretched like a great pool
of darkness towards the bright shore of the western sky.
Crimson at the horizon, the last of the sunset faded,
through orange, upwards into yellow and a pale watery
green. Northwards, beyond and above the trees, the
Internal and External Secretions factory glared with a
fierce electric brilliance from every window of its
twenty stories. Beneath them lay the buildings of the
Golf Club–the huge Lower Caste barracks and, on the
other side of a dividing wall, the smaller houses
reserved for Alpha and Beta members. The approaches to
the monorail station were black with the ant-like
pullulation of lower-caste activity. From under the glass
vault a lighted train shot out into the open. Following
its southeasterly course across the dark plain their eyes
were drawn to the majestic buildings of the Slough
Crematorium. For the safety of night-flying planes, its
four tall chimneys were flood-lighted and tipped with
crimson danger signals. It was a landmark.
- "Why do the smoke-stacks
have those things like balconies around them?"
enquired Lenina.
- "Phosphorus recovery,"
explained Henry telegraphically. "On their way up
the chimney the gases go through four separate treatments.
P2O5 used to go right out of
circulation every time they cremated some one. Now they
recover over ninety-eight per cent of it. More than a
kilo and a half per adult corpse. Which makes the best
part of four hundred tons of phosphorus every year from
England alone." Henry spoke with a happy pride,
rejoicing whole-heartedly in the achievement, as though
it had been his own. "Fine to think we can go on
being socially useful even after we're dead. Making
plants grow."
- Lenina, meanwhile, had
turned her eyes away and was looking perpendicularly
downwards at the monorail station. "Fine," she
agreed. "But queer that Alphas and Betas won't make
any more plants grow than those nasty little Gammas and
Deltas and Epsilons down there."
- "All men are physico-chemically
equal," said Henry sententiously. "Besides,
even Epsilons perform indispensable services."
- "Even an Epsilon
…" Lenina suddenly remembered an occasion when,
as a little girl at school, she had woken up in the
middle of the night and become aware, for the first time,
of the whispering that had haunted all her sleeps. She
saw again the beam of moonlight, the row of small white
beds; heard once more the soft, soft voice that said (the
words were there, unforgotten, unforgettable after so
many night-long repetitions): "Every one works for
every one else. We can't do without any one. Even
Epsilons are useful. We couldn't do without Epsilons.
Every one works for every one else. We can't do without
any one …" Lenina remembered her first shock of
fear and surprise; her speculations through half a
wakeful hour; and then, under the influence of those
endless repetitions, the gradual soothing of her mind,
the soothing, the smoothing, the stealthy creeping of
sleep. …
- "I suppose Epsilons
don't really mind being Epsilons," she said aloud.
- "Of course they don't.
How can they? They don't know what it's like being
anything else. We'd mind, of course. But then we've been
differently conditioned. Besides, we start with a
different heredity."
- "I'm glad I'm not an
Epsilon," said Lenina, with conviction.
- "And if you were an
Epsilon," said Henry, "your conditioning would
have made you no less thankful that you weren't a Beta or
an Alpha." He put his forward propeller into gear
and headed the machine towards London. Behind them, in
the west, the crimson and orange were almost faded; a
dark bank of cloud had crept into the zenith. As they
flew over the crematorium, the plane shot upwards on the
column of hot air rising from the chimneys, only to fall
as suddenly when it passed into the descending chill
beyond.
- "What a marvellous
switchback!" Lenina laughed delightedly.
- But Henry's tone was almost,
for a moment, melancholy. "Do you know what that
switchback was?" he said. "It was some human
being finally and definitely disappearing. Going up in a
squirt of hot gas. It would be curious to know who it
was–a man or a woman, an Alpha or an Epsilon. …"
He sighed. Then, in a resolutely cheerful voice, "Anyhow,"
he concluded, "there's one thing we can be certain
of; whoever he may have been, he was happy when he was
alive. Everybody's happy now."
- "Yes, everybody's
happy now," echoed Lenina. They had heard the words
repeated a hundred and fifty times every night for twelve
years.
- Landing on the roof of
Henry's forty-story apartment house in Westminster, they
went straight down to the dining-hall. There, in a loud
and cheerful company, they ate an excellent meal. Soma
was served with the coffee. Lenina took two half-gramme
tablets and Henry three. At twenty past nine they walked
across the street to the newly opened Westminster Abbey
Cabaret. It was a night almost without clouds, moonless
and starry; but of this on the whole depressing fact
Lenina and Henry were fortunately unaware. The electric
sky-signs effectively shut off the outer darkness. "CALVIN
STOPES AND HIS SIXTEEN SEXOPHONISTS." From the fa?ade of the new Abbey the giant letters
invitingly glared. "LONDON'S FINEST SCENT AND COLOUR
ORGAN. ALL THE LATEST SYNTHETIC MUSIC."
- They entered. The air
seemed hot and somehow breathless with the scent of
ambergris and sandalwood. On the domed ceiling of the
hall, the colour organ had momentarily painted a tropical
sunset. The Sixteen Sexophonists were playing an old
favourite: "There ain't no Bottle in all the world
like that dear little Bottle of mine." Four hundred
couples were five-stepping round the polished floor.
Lenina and Henry were soon the four hundred and first.
The saxophones wailed like melodious cats under the moon,
moaned in the alto and tenor registers as though the
little death were upon them. Rich with a wealth of
harmonics, their tremulous chorus mounted towards a
climax, louder and ever louder–until at last, with a
wave of his hand, the conductor let loose the final
shattering note of ether-music and blew the sixteen
merely human blowers clean out of existence. Thunder in A
flat major. And then, in all but silence, in all but
darkness, there followed a gradual deturgescence, a diminuendo
sliding gradually, through quarter tones, down, down to a
faintly whispered dominant chord that lingered on (while
the five-four rhythms still pulsed below) charging the
darkened seconds with an intense expectancy. And at last
expectancy was fulfilled. There was a sudden explosive
sunrise, and simultaneously, the Sixteen burst into song:
- "Bottle of mine, it's
you I've always wanted!
- Bottle of mine, why was
I ever decanted?
- Skies are
blue inside of you,
- The weather's
always fine;
- For
- There ain't no Bottle in
all the world
- Like that dear little
Bottle of mine."
- Five-stepping with the
other four hundred round and round Westminster Abbey,
Lenina and Henry were yet dancing in another
world–the warm, the richly coloured, the infinitely
friendly world of soma-holiday. How kind, how good-looking,
how delightfully amusing every one was! "Bottle of
mine, it's you I've always wanted …" But Lenina
and Henry had what they wanted … They were inside,
here and now-safely inside with the fine weather, the
perennially blue sky. And when, exhausted, the Sixteen
had laid by their saxophones and the Synthetic Music
apparatus was producing the very latest in slow
Malthusian Blues, they might have been twin embryos
gently rocking together on the waves of a bottled ocean
of blood-surrogate.
- "Good-night, dear
friends. Good-night, dear friends." The loud
speakers veiled their commands in a genial and musical
politeness. "Good-night, dear friends …"
- Obediently, with all the
others, Lenina and Henry left the building. The
depressing stars had travelled quite some way across the
heavens. But though the separating screen of the sky-signs
had now to a great extent dissolved, the two young people
still retained their happy ignorance of the night.
- Swallowing half an hour
before closing time, that second dose of soma had
raised a quite impenetrable wall between the actual
universe and their minds. Bottled, they crossed the
street; bottled, they took the lift up to Henry's room on
the twenty-eighth floor. And yet, bottled as she was, and
in spite of that second gramme of soma, Lenina did
not forget to take all the contraceptive precautions
prescribed by the regulations. Years of intensive hypnop?dia and, from twelve to seventeen,
Malthusian drill three times a week had made the taking
of these precautions almost as automatic and inevitable
as blinking.
- "Oh, and that reminds
me," she said, as she came back from the bathroom,
"Fanny Crowne wants to know where you found that
lovely green morocco-surrogate cartridge belt you gave me."
§ 2
ALTERNATE Thursdays were Bernard's
Solidarity Service days. After an early dinner at the
Aphroditzeum (to which Helrnholtz had recently been
elected under Rule Two) he took leave of his friend and,
hailing a taxi on the roof told the man to fly to the
Fordson Community Singery. The machine rose a couple of
hundred metres, then headed eastwards, and as it turned,
there before Bernard's eyes, gigantically beautiful, was
the Singery. Flood-lighted, its three hundred and twenty
metres of white Carrara-surrogate gleamed with a snowy
incandescence over Ludgate Hill; at each of the four
corners of its helicopter platform an immense T shone
crimson against the night, and from the mouths of twenty-four
vast golden trumpets rumbled a solemn synthetic music.
- "Damn, I'm late,"
Bernard said to himself as he first caught sight of Big
Henry, the Singery clock. And sure enough, as he was
paying off his cab, Big Henry sounded the hour. "Ford,"
sang out an immense bass voice from all the golden
trumpets. "Ford, Ford, Ford …" Nine times.
Bernard ran for the lift.
- The great auditorium for
Ford's Day celebrations and other massed Community Sings
was at the bottom of the building. Above it, a hundred to
each floor, were the seven thousand rooms used by
Solidarity Groups for their fortnight services. Bernard
dropped down to floor thirty-three, hurried along the
corridor, stood hesitating for a moment outside Room 3210,
then, having wound himself up, opened the door and walked
in.
- Thank Ford! he was not the
last. Three chairs of the twelve arranged round the
circular table were still unoccupied. He slipped into the
nearest of them as inconspicuously as he could and
prepared to frown at the yet later comers whenever they
should arrive.
- Turning towards him, "What
were you playing this afternoon?" the girl on his
left enquired. "Obstacle, or Electro-magnetic?"
- Bernard looked at her (Ford!
it was Morgana Rothschild) and blushingly had to admit
that he had been playing neither. Morgana stared at him
with astonishment. There was an awkward silence.
- Then pointedly she turned
away and addressed herself to the more sporting man on
her left.
- "A good beginning for
a Solidarity Service," thought Bernard miserably,
and foresaw for himself yet another failure to achieve
atonement. If only he had given himself time to look
around instead of scuttling for the nearest chair! He
could have sat between Fifi Bradlaugh and Joanna Diesel.
Instead of which he had gone and blindly planted himself
next to Morgana. Morgana! Ford! Those black
eyebrows of hers–that eyebrow, rather–for they
met above the nose. Ford! And on his right was Clara
Deterding. True, Clara's eyebrows didn't meet. But she
was really too pneumatic. Whereas Fifi and Joanna
were absolutely right. Plump, blonde, not too large
… And it was that great lout, Tom Kawaguchi, who now
took the seat between them.
- The last arrival was
Sarojini Engels.
- "You're late,"
said the President of the Group severely. "Don't let
it happen again."
- Sarojini apologized and
slid into her place between Jim Bokanovsky and Herbert
Bakunin. The group was now complete, the solidarity
circle perfect and without flaw. Man, woman, man, in a
ring of endless alternation round the table. Twelve of
them ready to be made one, waiting to come together, to
be fused, to lose their twelve separate identities in a
larger being.
- The President stood up,
made the sign of the T and, switching on the synthetic
music, let loose the soft indefatigable beating of drums
and a choir of instruments–near-wind and super-string–that
plangently repeated and repeated the brief and
unescapably haunting melody of the first Solidarity Hymn.
Again, again–and it was not the ear that heard the
pulsing rhythm, it was the midriff; the wail and clang of
those recurring harmonies haunted, not the mind, but the
yearning bowels of compassion.
- The President made another
sign of the T and sat down. The service had begun. The
dedicated soma tablets were placed in the centre
of the table. The loving cup of strawberry ice-cream soma
was passed from hand to hand and, with the formula,
"I drink to my annihilation," twelve times
quaffed. Then to the accompaniment of the synthetic
orchestra the First Solidarity Hymn was sung.
- "Ford, we are
twelve; oh, make us one,
- Like drops
within the Social River,
- Oh, make us now together
run
- As swiftly
as thy shining Flivver."
- Twelve yearning stanzas.
And then the loving cup was passed a second time. "I
drink to the Greater Being" was now the formula. All
drank. Tirelessly the music played. The drums beat. The
crying and clashing of the harmonies were an obsession in
the melted bowels. The Second Solidarity Hymn was sung.
- "Come, Greater
Being, Social Friend,
- Annihilating
Twelve-in-One!
- We long to die, for when
we end,
- Our larger
life has but begun."
- Again twelve stanzas. By
this time the soma had begun to work. Eyes shone,
cheeks were flushed, the inner light of universal
benevolence broke out on every face in happy, friendly
smiles. Even Bernard felt himself a little melted. When
Morgana Rothschild turned and beamed at him, he did his
best to beam back. But the eyebrow, that black two-in-one–alas,
it was still there; he couldn't ignore it, couldn't,
however hard he tried. The melting hadn't gone far enough.
Perhaps if he had been sitting between Fifi and Joanna
… For the third time the loving cup went round;
"I drink to the imminence of His Coming," said
Morgana Rothschild, whose turn it happened to be to
initiate the circular rite. Her tone was loud, exultant.
She drank and passed the cup to Bernard. "I drink to
the imminence of His Coming," he repeated, with a
sincere attempt to feel that the coming was imminent; but
the eyebrow continued to haunt him, and the Coming, so
far as he was concerned, was horribly remote. He drank
and handed the cup to Clara Deterding. "It'll be a
failure again," he said to himself. "I know it
will." But he went on doing his best to beam.
- The loving cup had made its
circuit. Lifting his hand, the President gave a signal;
the chorus broke out into the third Solidarity Hymn.
- "Feel how the
Greater Being comes!
- Rejoice and,
in rejoicings, die!
- Melt in the music of the
drums!
- For I am you
and you are I."
- As verse succeeded verse
the voices thrilled with an ever intenser excitement. The
sense of the Coming's imminence was like an electric
tension in the air. The President switched off the music
and, with the final note of the final stanza, there was
absolute silence–the silence of stretched expectancy,
quivering and creeping with a galvanic life. The
President reached out his hand; and suddenly a Voice, a
deep strong Voice, more musical than any merely human
voice, richer, warmer, more vibrant with love and
yearning and compassion, a wonderful, mysterious,
supernatural Voice spoke from above their heads. Very
slowly, "Oh, Ford, Ford, Ford," it said
diminishingly and on a descending scale. A sensation of
warmth radiated thrillingly out from the solar plexus to
every extremity of the bodies of those who listened;
tears came into their eyes; their hearts, their bowels
seemed to move within them, as though with an independent
life. "Ford!" they were melting, "Ford!"
dissolved, dissolved. Then, in another tone, suddenly,
startlingly. "Listen!" trumpeted the voice.
"Listen!" They listened. After a pause, sunk to
a whisper, but a whisper, somehow, more penetrating than
the loudest cry. "The feet of the Greater Being,"
it went on, and repeated the words: "The feet of the
Greater Being." The whisper almost expired. "The
feet of the Greater Being are on the stairs." And
once more there was silence; and the expectancy,
momentarily relaxed, was stretched again, tauter, tauter,
almost to the tearing point. The feet of the Greater
Being–oh, they heard them, they heard them, coming
softly down the stairs, coming nearer and nearer down the
invisible stairs. The feet of the Greater Being. And
suddenly the tearing point was reached. Her eyes staring,
her lips parted. Morgana Rothschild sprang to her feet.
- "I hear him," she
cried. "I hear him."
- "He's coming,"
shouted Sarojini Engels.
- "Yes, he's coming, I
hear him." Fifi Bradlaugh and Tom Kawaguchi rose
simultaneously to their feet.
- "Oh, oh, oh!"
Joanna inarticulately testified.
- "He's coming!"
yelled Jim Bokanovsky.
- The President leaned
forward and, with a touch, released a delirium of cymbals
and blown brass, a fever of tom-tomming.
- "Oh, he's coming!"
screamed Clara Deterding. "Aie!" and it was as
though she were having her throat cut.
- Feeling that it was time
for him to do something, Bernard also jumped up and
shouted: "I hear him; He's coming." But it wasn't
true. He heard nothing and, for him, nobody was coming.
Nobody–in spite of the music, in spite of the
mounting excitement. But he waved his arms, he shouted
with the best of them; and when the others began to jig
and stamp and shuffle, he also jigged and shuffled.
- Round they went, a circular
procession of dancers, each with hands on the hips of the
dancer preceding, round and round, shouting in unison,
stamping to the rhythm of the music with their feet,
beating it, beating it out with hands on the buttocks in
front; twelve pairs of hands beating as one; as one,
twelve buttocks slabbily resounding. Twelve as one,
twelve as one. "I hear Him, I hear Him coming."
The music quickened; faster beat the feet, faster, faster
fell the rhythmic hands. And all at once a great
synthetic bass boomed out the words which announced the
approaching atonement and final consummation of
solidarity, the coming of the Twelve-in-One, the
incarnation of the Greater Being. "Orgy-porgy,"
it sang, while the tom-toms continued to beat their
feverish tattoo:
- "Orgy-porgy, Ford
and fun,
- Kiss the girls and make
them One.
- Boys at 0ne with girls
at peace;
- Orgy-porgy gives release."
- "Orgy-porgy," the
dancers caught up the liturgical refrain, "Orgy-porgy,
Ford and fun, kiss the girls …" And as they
sang, the lights began slowly to fade–to fade and at
the same time to grow warmer, richer, redder, until at
last they were dancing in the crimson twilight of an
Embryo Store. "Orgy-porgy …" In their
blood-coloured and foetal darkness the dancers continued
for a while to circulate, to beat and beat out the
indefatigable rhythm. "Orgy-porgy …" Then
the circle wavered, broke, fell in partial disintegration
on the ring of couches which surrounded–circle
enclosing circle–the table and its planetary chairs.
"Orgy-porgy …" Tenderly the deep Voice
crooned and cooed; in the red twilight it was as though
some enormous negro dove were hovering benevolently over
the now prone or supine dancers.
- They were standing on the
roof; Big Henry had just sung eleven. The night was calm
and warm.
- "Wasn't it wonderful?"
said Fifi Bradlaugh. "Wasn't it simply wonderful?"
She looked at Bernard with an expression of rapture, but
of rapture in which there was no trace of agitation or
excitement–for to be excited is still to be
unsatisfied. Hers was the calm ecstasy of achieved
consummation, the peace, not of mere vacant satiety and
nothingness, but of balanced life, of energies at rest
and in equilibrium. A rich and living peace. For the
Solidarity Service had given as well as taken, drawn off
only to replenish. She was full, she was made perfect,
she was still more than merely herself. "Didn't you
think it was wonderful?" she insisted, looking into
Bernard's face with those supernaturally shining eyes.
- "Yes, I thought it was
wonderful," he lied and looked away; the sight of
her transfigured face was at once an accusation and an
ironical reminder of his own separateness. He was as
miserably isolated now as he had been when the service
began–more isolated by reason of his unreplenished
emptiness, his dead satiety. Separate and unatoned, while
the others were being fused into the Greater Being; alone
even in Morgana's embrace–much more alone, indeed,
more hopelessly himself than he had ever been in his life
before. He had emerged from that crimson twilight into
the common electric glare with a self-consciousness
intensified to the pitch of agony. He was utterly
miserable, and perhaps (her shining eyes accused him),
perhaps it was his own fault. "Quite wonderful,"
he repeated; but the only thing he could think of was
Morgana's eyebrow.
chapter six
ODD, ODD, odd, was Lenina's verdict on
Bernard Marx. So odd, indeed, that in the course of the
succeeding weeks she had wondered more than once whether she
shouldn't change her mind about the New Mexico holiday, and go
instead to the North Pole with Benito Hoover. The trouble was
that she knew the North Pole, had been there with George Edzel
only last summer, and what was more, found it pretty grim.
Nothing to do, and the hotel too hopelessly old-fashioned–no
television laid on in the bedrooms, no scent organ, only the most
putrid synthetic music, and not more than twenty-five Escalator-Squash
Courts for over two hundred guests. No, decidedly she couldn't
face the North Pole again. Added to which, she had only been to
America once before. And even then, how inadequately! A cheap
week-end in New York–had it been with Jean-Jacques
Habibullah or Bokanovsky Jones? She couldn't remember. Anyhow, it
was of absolutely no importance. The prospect of flying West
again, and for a whole week, was very inviting. Moreover, for at
least three days of that week they would be in the Savage
Reservation. Not more than half a dozen people in the whole
Centre had ever been inside a Savage Reservation. As an Alpha-Plus
psychologist, Bernard was one of the few men she knew entitled to
a permit. For Lenina, the opportunity was unique. And yet, so
unique also was Bernard's oddness that she had hesitated to take
it, had actually thought of risking the Pole again with funny old
Benito. At least Benito was normal. Whereas Bernard …
- "Alcohol in his blood-surrogate,"
was Fanny's explanation of every eccentricity. But Henry,
with whom, one evening when they were in bed together,
Lenina had rather anxiously discussed her new lover,
Henry had compared poor Bernard to a rhinoceros.
- "You can't teach a
rhinoceros tricks," he had explained in his brief
and vigorous style. "Some men are almost
rhinoceroses; they don't respond properly to conditioning.
Poor Devils! Bernard's one of them. Luckily for him, he's
pretty good at his job. Otherwise the Director would
never have kept him. However," he added consolingly,
"I think he's pretty harmless."
- Pretty harmless, perhaps;
but also pretty disquieting. That mania, to start with,
for doing things in private. Which meant, in practice,
not doing anything at all. For what was there that one could
do in private. (Apart, of course, from going to bed: but
one couldn't do that all the time.) Yes, what was
there? Precious little. The first afternoon they went out
together was particularly fine. Lenina had suggested a
swim at Toquay Country Club followed by dinner at the
Oxford Union. But Bernard thought there would be too much
of a crowd. Then what about a round of Electro-magnetic
Golf at St. Andrew's? But again, no: Bernard considered
that Electro-magnetic Golf was a waste of time.
- "Then what's time for?"
asked Lenina in some astonishment.
- Apparently, for going walks
in the Lake District; for that was what he now proposed.
Land on the top of Skiddaw and walk for a couple of hours
in the heather. "Alone with you, Lenina."
- "But, Bernard, we
shall be alone all night."
- Bernard blushed and looked
away. "I meant, alone for talking," he mumbled.
- "Talking? But what
about?" Walking and talking–that seemed a very
odd way of spending an afternoon.
- In the end she persuaded
him, much against his will, to fly over to Amsterdam to
see the Semi-Demi-Finals of the Women's Heavyweight
Wrestling Championship.
- "In a crowd," he
grumbled. "As usual." He remained obstinately
gloomy the whole afternoon; wouldn't talk to Lenina's
friends (of whom they met dozens in the ice-cream soma
bar between the wrestling bouts); and in spite of his
misery absolutely refused to take the half-gramme
raspberry sundae which she pressed upon him. "I'd
rather be myself," he said. "Myself and nasty.
Not somebody else, however jolly."
- "A gramme in time
saves nine," said Lenina, producing a bright
treasure of sleep-taught wisdom. Bernard pushed away the
proffered glass impatiently.
- "Now don't lose your
temper," she said. "Remember one cubic
centimetre cures ten gloomy sentiments."
- "Oh, for Ford's sake,
be quiet!" he shouted.
- Lenina shrugged her
shoulders. "A gramme is always better than a damn,"
she concluded with dignity, and drank the sundae herself.
- On their way back across
the Channel, Bernard insisted on stopping his propeller
and hovering on his helicopter screws within a hundred
feet of the waves. The weather had taken a change for the
worse; a south-westerly wind had sprung up, the sky was
cloudy.
- "Look," he
commanded.
- "But it's horrible,"
said Lenina, shrinking back from the window. She was
appalled by the rushing emptiness of the night, by the
black foam-flecked water heaving beneath them, by the
pale face of the moon, so haggard and distracted among
the hastening clouds. "Let's turn on the radio.
Quick!" She reached for the dialling knob on the
dash-board and turned it at random.
- "… skies are blue
inside of you," sang sixteen tremoloing falsettos,
"the weather's always …"
- Then a hiccough and silence.
Bernard had switched off the current.
- "I want to look at the
sea in peace," he said. "One can't even look
with that beastly noise going on."
- "But it's lovely. And
I don't want to look."
- "But I do," he
insisted. "It makes me feel as though …"
he hesitated, searching for words with which to express
himself, "as though I were more me, if you
see what I mean. More on my own, not so completely a part
of something else. Not just a cell in the social body.
Doesn't it make you feel like that, Lenina?"
- But Lenina was crying.
"It's horrible, it's horrible," she kept
repeating. "And how can you talk like that about not
wanting to be a part of the social body? After all, every
one works for every one else. We can't do without any one.
Even Epsilons …"
- "Yes, I know,"
said Bernard derisively. "'Even Epsilons are useful'!
So am I. And I damned well wish I weren't!"
- Lenina was shocked by his
blasphemy. "Bernard!" She protested in a voice
of amazed distress. "How can you?"
- In a different key, "How
can I?" he repeated meditatively. "No, the real
problem is: How is it that I can't, or
rather–because, after all, I know quite well why I
can't–what would it be like if I could, if I were
free–not enslaved by my conditioning."
- "But, Bernard, you're
saying the most awful things."
- "Don't you wish you
were free, Lenina?"
- "I don't know what you
mean. I am free. Free to have the most wonderful time.
Everybody's happy nowadays."
- He laughed, "Yes, 'Everybody's
happy nowadays.' We begin giving the children that at
five. But wouldn't you like to be free to be happy in
some other way, Lenina? In your own way, for example; not
in everybody else's way."
- "I don't know what you
mean," she repeated. Then, turning to him, "Oh,
do let's go back, Bernard," she besought; "I do
so hate it here."
- "Don't you like being
with me?"
- "But of course,
Bernard. It's this horrible place."
- "I thought we'd be
more … more together here–with nothing
but the sea and moon. More together than in that crowd,
or even in my rooms. Don't you understand that?"
- "I don't understand
anything," she said with decision, determined to
preserve her incomprehension intact. "Nothing. Least
of all," she continued in another tone "why you
don't take soma when you have these dreadful ideas
of yours. You'd forget all about them. And instead of
feeling miserable, you'd be jolly. So jolly,"
she repeated and smiled, for all the puzzled anxiety in
her eyes, with what was meant to be an inviting and
voluptuous cajolery.
- He looked at her in silence,
his face unresponsive and very grave–looked at her
intently. After a few seconds Lenina's eyes flinched away;
she uttered a nervous little laugh, tried to think of
something to say and couldn't. The silence prolonged
itself.
- When Bernard spoke at last,
it was in a small tired voice. "All right then,"
he said, "we'll go back." And stepping hard on
the accelerator, he sent the machine rocketing up into
the sky. At four thousand he started his propeller. They
flew in silence for a minute or two. Then, suddenly,
Bernard began to laugh. Rather oddly, Lenina thought, but
still, it was laughter.
- "Feeling better?"
she ventured to ask.
- For answer, he lifted one
hand from the controls and, slipping his arm around her,
began to fondle her breasts.
- "Thank Ford," she
said to herself, "he's all right again."
- Half an hour later they
were back in his rooms. Bernard swallowed four tablets of
soma at a gulp, turned on the radio and television
and began to undress.
- "Well," Lenina
enquired, with significant archness when they met next
afternoon on the roof, "did you think it was fun
yesterday?"
- Bernard nodded. They
climbed into the plane. A little jolt, and they were off.
- "Every one says I'm
awfully pneumatic," said Lenina reflectively,
patting her own legs.
- "Awfully." But
there was an expression of pain in Bernard's eyes. "Like
meat," he was thinking.
- She looked up with a
certain anxiety. "But you don't think I'm too
plump, do you?"
- He shook his head. Like so
much meat.
- "You think I'm all
right." Another nod. "In every way?"
- "Perfect," he
said aloud. And inwardly. "She thinks of herself
that way. She doesn't mind being meat."
- Lenina smiled triumphantly.
But her satisfaction was premature.
- "All the same,"
he went on, after a little pause, "I still rather
wish it had all ended differently."
- "Differently?"
Were there other endings?
- "I didn't want it to
end with our going to bed," he specified.
- Lenina was astonished.
- "Not at once, not the
first day."
- "But then what …?"
- He began to talk a lot of
incomprehensible and dangerous nonsense. Lenina did her
best to stop the ears of her mind; but every now and then
a phrase would insist on becoming audible. "…
to try the effect of arresting my impulses," she
heard him say. The words seemed to touch a spring in her
mind.
- "Never put off till to-morrow
the fun you can have to-day," she said gravely.
- "Two hundred
repetitions, twice a week from fourteen to sixteen and a
half," was all his comment. The mad bad talk rambled
on. "I want to know what passion is," she heard
him saying. "I want to feel something strongly."
- "When the individual
feels, the community reels," Lenina pronounced.
- "Well, why shouldn't
it reel a bit?"
- "Bernard!"
- But Bernard remained
unabashed.
- "Adults intellectually
and during working hours," he went on. "Infants
where feeling and desire are concerned."
- "Our Ford loved
infants."
- Ignoring the interruption.
"It suddenly struck me the other day,"
continued Bernard, "that it might be possible to be
an adult all the time."
- "I don't understand."
Lenina's tone was firm.
- "I know you don't. And
that's why we went to bed together yesterday–like
infants–instead of being adults and waiting."
- "But it was fun,"
Lenina insisted. "Wasn't it?"
- "Oh, the greatest fun,"
he answered, but in a voice so mournful, with an
expression so profoundly miserable, that Lenina felt all
her triumph suddenly evaporate. Perhaps he had found her
too plump, after all.
- "I told you so,"
was all that Fanny said, when Lenina came and made her
confidences. "It's the alcohol they put in his
surrogate."
- "All the same,"
Lenina insisted. "I do like him. He has such awfully
nice hands. And the way he moves his shoulders–that's
very attractive." She sighed. "But I wish he
weren't so odd."
HALTING for a moment outside the
door of the Director's room, Bernard drew a deep breath
and squared his shoulders, bracing himself to meet the
dislike and disapproval which he was certain of finding
within. He knocked and entered.
- "A permit for you to
initial, Director," he said as airily as possible,
and laid the paper on the writing-table.
- The Director glanced at him
sourly. But the stamp of the World Controller's Office
was at the head of the paper and the signature of
Mustapha Mond, bold and black, across the bottom.
Everything was perfectly in order. The director had no
choice. He pencilled his initials–two small pale
letters abject at the feet of Mustapha Mond–and was
about to return the paper without a word of comment or
genial Ford-speed, when his eye was caught by something
written in the body of the permit.
- "For the New Mexican
Reservation?" he said, and his tone, the face he
lifted to Bernard, expressed a kind of agitated
astonishment.
- Surprised by his surprise,
Bernard nodded. There was a silence.
- The Director leaned back in
his chair, frowning. "How long ago was it?" he
said, speaking more to himself than to Bernard. "Twenty
years, I suppose. Nearer twenty-five. I must have been
your age …" He sighed and shook his head.
- Bernard felt extremely
uncomfortable. A man so conventional, so scrupulously
correct as the Director–and to commit so gross a
solecism! lt made him want to hide his face, to run out
of the room. Not that he himself saw anything
intrinsically objectionable in people talking about the
remote past; that was one of those hypnop?dic prejudices he had (so he imagined)
completely got rid of. What made him feel shy was the
knowledge that the Director disapproved–disapproved
and yet had been betrayed into doing the forbidden thing.
Under what inward compulsion? Through his discomfort
Bernard eagerly listened.
- "I had the same idea
as you," the Director was saying. "Wanted to
have a look at the savages. Got a permit for New Mexico
and went there for my summer holiday. With the girl I was
having at the moment. She was a Beta-Minus, and I think"
(he shut his eyes), "I think she had yellow hair.
Anyhow she was pneumatic, particularly pneumatic; I
remember that. Well, we went there, and we looked at the
savages, and we rode about on horses and all that. And
then–it was almost the last day of my
leave–then … well, she got lost. We'd gone
riding up one of those revolting mountains, and it was
horribly hot and oppressive, and after lunch we went to
sleep. Or at least I did. She must have gone for a walk,
alone. At any rate, when I woke up, she wasn't there. And
the most frightful thunderstorm I've ever seen was just
bursting on us. And it poured and roared and flashed; and
the horses broke loose and ran away; and I fell down,
trying to catch them, and hurt my knee, so that I could
hardly walk. Still, I searched and I shouted and I
searched. But there was no sign of her. Then I thought
she must have gone back to the rest-house by herself. So
I crawled down into the valley by the way we had come. My
knee was agonizingly painful, and I'd lost my soma.
It took me hours. I didn't get back to the rest-house
till after midnight. And she wasn't there; she wasn't
there," the Director repeated. There was a silence.
"Well," he resumed at last, "the next day
there was a search. But we couldn't find her. She must
have fallen into a gully somewhere; or been eaten by a
mountain lion. Ford knows. Anyhow it was horrible. It
upset me very much at the time. More than it ought to
have done, I dare say. Because, after all, it's the sort
of accident that might have happened to any one; and, of
course, the social body persists although the component
cells may change." But this sleep-taught consolation
did not seem to be very effective. Shaking his head,
"I actually dream about it sometimes," the
Director went on in a low voice. "Dream of being
woken up by that peal of thunder and finding her gone;
dream of searching and searching for her under the trees."
He lapsed into the silence of reminiscence.
- "You must have had a
terrible shock," said Bernard, almost enviously.
- At the sound of his voice
the Director started into a guilty realization of where
he was; shot a glance at Bernard, and averting his eyes,
blushed darkly; looked at him again with sudden suspicion
and, angrily on his dignity, "Don't imagine,"
he said, "that I'd had any indecorous relation with
the girl. Nothing emotional, nothing long-drawn. It was
all perfectly healthy and normal." He handed Bernard
the permit. "I really don't know why I bored you
with this trivial anecdote." Furious with himself
for having given away a discreditable secret, he vented
his rage on Bernard. The look in his eyes was now frankly
malignant. "And I should like to take this
opportunity, Mr. Marx," he went on, "of saying
that I'm not at all pleased with the reports I receive of
your behaviour outside working hours. You may say that
this is not my business. But it is. I have the good name
of the Centre to think of. My workers must be above
suspicion, particularly those of the highest castes.
Alphas are so conditioned that they do not have to
be infantile in their emotional behaviour. But that is
all the more reason for their making a special effort to
conform. lt is their duty to be infantile, even against
their inclination. And so, Mr. Marx, I give you fair
warning." The Director's voice vibrated with an
indignation that had now become wholly righteous and
impersonal–was the expression of the disapproval of
Society itself. "If ever I hear again of any lapse
from a proper standard of infantile decorum, I shall ask
for your transference to a Sub-Centre–preferably to
Iceland. Good morning." And swivelling round in his
chair, he picked up his pen and began to write.
- "That'll teach him,"
he said to himself. But he was mistaken. For Bernard left
the room with a swagger, exulting, as he banged the door
behind him, in the thought that he stood alone, embattled
against the order of things; elated by the intoxicating
consciousness of his individual significance and
importance. Even the thought of persecution left him
undismayed, was rather tonic than depressing. He felt
strong enough to meet and overcome affliction, strong
enough to face even Iceland. And this confidence was the
greater for his not for a moment really believing that he
would be called upon to face anything at all. People
simply weren't transferred for things like that. Iceland
was just a threat. A most stimulating and life-giving
threat. Walking along the corridor, he actually whistled.
- Heroic was the account he
gave that evening of his interview with the D.H.C. "Whereupon,"
it concluded, "I simply told him to go to the
Bottomless Past and marched out of the room. And that was
that." He looked at Helmholtz Watson expectantly,
awaiting his due reward of sympathy, encouragement,
admiration. But no word came. Helmholtz sat silent,
staring at the floor.
- He liked Bernard; he was
grateful to him for being the only man of his
acquaintance with whom he could talk about the subjects
he felt to be important. Nevertheless, there were things
in Bernard which he hated. This boasting, for example.
And the outbursts of an abject self-pity with which it
alternated. And his deplorable habit of being bold after
the event, and full, in absence, of the most
extraordinary presence of mind. He hated these
things–just because he liked Bernard. The seconds
passed. Helmholtz continued to stare at the floor. And
suddenly Bernard blushed and turned away.
THE journey was quite uneventful.
The Blue Pacific Rocket was two and a half minutes early
at New Orleans, lost four minutes in a tornado over Texas,
but flew into a favourable air current at Longitude 95
West, and was able to land at Santa F? less than forty seconds behind schedule
time.
- "Forty seconds on a
six and a half hour flight. Not so bad," Lenina
conceded.
- They slept that night at
Santa F?. The hotel was
excellent–incomparably better, for example, than
that horrible Aurora Bora Palace in which Lenina had
suffered so much the previous summer. Liquid air,
television, vibro-vacuum massage, radio, boiling caffeine
solution, hot contraceptives, and eight different kinds
of scent were laid on in every bedroom. The synthetic
music plant was working as they entered the hall and left
nothing to be desired. A notice in the lift announced
that there were sixty Escalator-Squash-Racket Courts in
the hotel, and that Obstacle and Electro-magnetic Golf
could both be played in the park.
- "But it sounds simply
too lovely," cried Lenina. "I almost wish we
could stay here. Sixty Escalator-Squash Courts …"
- "There won't be any in
the Reservation," Bernard warned her. "And no
scent, no television, no hot water even. If you feel you
can't stand it, stay here till I come back."
- Lenina was quite offended.
"Of course I can stand it. I only said it was lovely
here because … well, because progress is
lovely, isn't it?"
- "Five hundred
repetitions once a week from thirteen to seventeen,"
said Bernard wearily, as though to himself.
- "What did you say?"
- "I said that progress
was lovely. That's why you mustn't come to the
Reservation unless you really want to."
- "But I do want to."
- "Very well, then,"
said Bernard; and it was almost a threat.
- Their permit required the
signature of the Warden of the Reservation, at whose
office next morning they duly presented themselves. An
Epsilon-Plus negro porter took in Bernard's card, and
they were admitted almost immediately.
- The Warden was a blond and
brachycephalic Alpha-Minus, short, red, moon-faced, and
broad-shouldered, with a loud booming voice, very well
adapted to the utterance of hypnop?dic
wisdom. He was a mine of irrelevant information and
unasked-for good advice. Once started, he went on and
on–boomingly.
- "… five hundred
and sixty thousand square kilometres, divided into four
distinct Sub-Reservations, each surrounded by a high-tension
wire fence."
- At this moment, and for no
apparent reason, Bernard suddenly remembered that he had
left the Eau de Cologne tap in his bathroom wide open and
running.
- "… supplied with
current from the Grand Canyon hydro-electric station."
- "Cost me a fortune by
the time I get back." With his mind's eye, Bernard
saw the needle on the scent meter creeping round and
round, antlike, indefatigable. "Quickly telephone to
Helmholtz Watson."
- "… upwards of
five thousand kilometres of fencing at sixty thousand
volts."
- "You don't say so,"
said Lenina politely, not knowing in the least what the
Warden had said, but taking her cue from his dramatic
pause. When the Warden started booming, she had
inconspicuously swallowed half a gramme of soma,
with the result that she could now sit, serenely not
listening, thinking of nothing at all, but with her large
blue eyes fixed on the Warden's face in an expression of
rapt attention.
- "To touch the fence is
instant death," pronounced the Warden solemnly.
"There is no escape from a Savage Reservation."
- The word "escape"
was suggestive. "Perhaps," said Bernard, half
rising, "we ought to think of going." The
little black needle was scurrying, an insect, nibbling
through time, eating into his money.
- "No escape,"
repeated the Warden, waving him back into his chair; and
as the permit was not yet countersigned Bernard had no
choice but to obey. "Those who are born in the
Reservation–and remember, my dear young lady,"
he added, leering obscenely at Lenina, and speaking in an
improper whisper, "remember that, in the Reservation,
children still are born, yes, actually born,
revolting as that may seem …" (He hoped that
this reference to a shameful subject would make Lenina
blush; but she only smiled with simulated intelligence
and said, "You don't say so!" Disappointed, the
Warden began again. ) "Those, I repeat who are born
in the Reservation are destined to die there."
- Destined to die … A
decilitre of Eau de Cologne every minute. Six litres an
hour. "Perhaps," Bernard tried again, "we
ought …"
- Leaning forward, the Warden
tapped the table with his forefinger. "You ask me
how many people live in the Reservation. And I reply"–triumphantly–"I
reply that we do not know. We can only guess."
- "You don't say so."
- "My dear young lady, I
do say so."
- Six times twenty-four–no,
it would be nearer six times thirty-six. Bernard was pale
and trembling with impatience. But inexorably the booming
continued.
- "… about sixty
thousand Indians and half-breeds … absolute savages
… our inspectors occasionally visit … otherwise,
no communication whatever with the civilized world …
still preserve their repulsive habits and customs …
marriage, if you know what that is, my dear young lady;
families … no conditioning … monstrous
superstitions … Christianity and totemism and
ancestor worship … extinct languages, such as Zu?i and Spanish and Athapascan … pumas,
porcupines and other ferocious animals … infectious
diseases … priests … venomous lizards …"
- "You don't say so?"
- They got away at last.
Bernard dashed to the telephone. Quick, quick; but it
took him nearly three minutes to get on to Helmholtz
Watson. "We might be among the savages already,"
he complained. "Damned incompetence!"
- "Have a gramme,"
suggested Lenina.
- He refused, preferring his
anger. And at last, thank Ford, he was through and, yes,
it was Helmholtz; Helmholtz, to whom he explained what
had happened, and who promised to go round at once, at
once, and turn off the tap, yes, at once, but took this
opportunity to tell him what the D.H.C. had said, in
public, yesterday evening …
- "What? He's looking
out for some one to take my place?" Bernard's voice
was agonized. "So it's actually decided? Did he
mention Iceland? You say he did? Ford! Iceland …"
He hung up the receiver and turned back to Lenina. His
face was pale, his expression utterly dejected.
- "What's the matter?"
she asked.
- "The matter?" He
dropped heavily into a chair. "I'm going to be sent
to Iceland."
- Often in the past he had
wondered what it would be like to be subjected (soma-less
and with nothing but his own inward resources to rely on)
to some great trial, some pain, some persecution; he had
even longed for affliction. As recently as a week ago, in
the Director's office, he had imagined himself
courageously resisting, stoically accepting suffering
without a word. The Director's threats had actually
elated him, made him feel larger than life. But that, as
he now realized, was because he had not taken the threats
quite seriously, he had not believed that, when it came
to the point, the D.H.C. would ever do anything. Now that
it looked as though the threats were really to be
fulfilled, Bernard was appalled. Of that imagined
stoicism, that theoretical courage, not a trace was left.
- He raged against
himself–what a fool!–against the
Director–how unfair not to give him that other
chance, that other chance which, he now had no doubt at
all, he had always intended to take. And Iceland, Iceland
…
- Lenina shook her head.
"Was and will make me ill," she quoted, "I
take a gramme and only am."
- In the end she persuaded
him to swallow four tablets of soma. Five minutes
later roots and fruits were abolished; the flower of the
present rosily blossomed. A message from the porter
announced that, at the Warden's orders, a Reservation
Guard had come round with a plane and was waiting on the
roof of the hotel. They went up at once. An octoroon in
Gamma-green uniform saluted and proceeded to recite the
morning's programme.
- A bird's-eye view of ten or
a dozen of the principal pueblos, then a landing for
lunch in the valley of Malpais. The rest-house was
comfortable there, and up at the pueblo the savages would
probably be celebrating their summer festival. It would
be the best place to spend the night.
- They took their seats in
the plane and set off. Ten minutes later they were
crossing the frontier that separated civilization from
savagery. Uphill and down, across the deserts of salt or
sand, through forests, into the violet depth of canyons,
over crag and peak and table-topped mesa, the fence
marched on and on, irresistibly the straight line, the
geometrical symbol of triumphant human purpose. And at
its foot, here and there, a mosaic of white bones, a
still unrotted carcase dark on the tawny ground marked
the place where deer or steer, puma or porcupine or
coyote, or the greedy turkey buzzards drawn down by the
whiff of carrion and fulminated as though by a poetic
justice, had come too close to the destroying wires.
- "They never learn,"
said the green-uniformed pilot, pointing down at the
skeletons on the ground below them. "And they never
will learn," he added and laughed, as though he had
somehow scored a personal triumph over the electrocuted
animals.
- Bernard also laughed; after
two grammes of soma the joke seemed, for some
reason, good. Laughed and then, almost immediately,
dropped off to sleep, and sleeping was carried over Taos
and Tesuque; over Nambe and Picuris and Pojoaque, over
Sia and Cochiti, over Laguna and Acoma and the Enchanted
Mesa, over Zu?i and Cibola and Ojo Caliente,
and woke at last to find the machine standing on the
ground, Lenina carrying the suit-cases into a small
square house, and the Gamma-green octoroon talking
incomprehensibly with a young Indian.
- "Malpais,"
explained the pilot, as Bernard stepped out. "This
is the rest-house. And there's a dance this afternoon at
the pueblo. He'll take you there." He pointed to the
sullen young savage. "Funny, I expect." He
grinned. "Everything they do is funny." And
with that he climbed into the plane and started up the
engines. "Back to-morrow. And remember," he
added reassuringly to Lenina, "they're perfectly
tame; savages won't do you any harm. They've got enough
experience of gas bombs to know that they mustn't play
any tricks." Still laughing, he threw the helicopter
screws into gear, accelerated, and was gone.
chapter seven
THE MESA was like a ship becalmed in a strait of
lion-coloured dust. The channel wound between precipitous banks,
and slanting from one wall to the other across the valley ran a
streak of green-the river and its fields. On the prow of that
stone ship in the centre of the strait, and seemingly a part of
it, a shaped and geometrical outcrop of the naked rock, stood the
pueblo of Malpais. Block above block, each story smaller than the
one below, the tall houses rose like stepped and amputated
pyramids into the blue sky. At their feet lay a straggle of low
buildings, a criss-cross of walls; and on three sides the
precipices fell sheer into the plain. A few columns of smoke
mounted perpendicularly into the windless air and were lost.
- "Queer," said
Lenina. "Very queer." It was her ordinary word
of condemnation. "I don't like it. And I don't like
that man." She pointed to the Indian guide who had
been appointed to take them up to the pueblo. Her feeling
was evidently reciprocated; the very back of the man, as
he walked along before them, was hostile, sullenly
contemptuous.
- "Besides," she
lowered her voice, "he smells."
- Bernard did not attempt to
deny it. They walked on.
- Suddenly it was as though
the whole air had come alive and were pulsing, pulsing
with the indefatigable movement of blood. Up there, in
Malpais, the drums were being beaten. Their feet fell in
with the rhythm of that mysterious heart; they quickened
their pace. Their path led them to the foot of the
precipice. The sides of the great mesa ship towered over
them, three hundred feet to the gunwale.
- "I wish we could have
brought the plane," said Lenina, looking up
resentfully at the blank impending rock-face. "I
hate walking. And you feel so small when you're on the
ground at the bottom of a hill."
- They walked along for some
way in the shadow of the mesa, rounded a projection, and
there, in a water-worn ravine, was the way up the
companion ladder. They climbed. It was a very steep path
that zigzagged from side to side of the gully. Sometimes
the pulsing of the drums was all but inaudible, at others
they seemed to be beating only just round the corner.
- When they were half-way up,
an eagle flew past so close to them that the wind of his
wings blew chill on their faces. In a crevice of the rock
lay a pile of bones. It was all oppressively queer, and
the Indian smelt stronger and stronger. They emerged at
last from the ravine into the full sunlight. The top of
the mesa was a flat deck of stone.
- "Like the Charing-T
Tower," was Lenina's comment. But she was not
allowed to enjoy her discovery of this reassuring
resemblance for long. A padding of soft feet made them
turn round. Naked from throat to navel, their dark brown
bodies painted with white lines ("like asphalt
tennis courts," Lenina was later to explain), their
faces inhuman with daubings of scarlet, black and ochre,
two Indians came running along the path. Their black hair
was braided with fox fur and red flannel. Cloaks of
turkey feathers fluttered from their shoulders; huge
feather diadems exploded gaudily round their heads. With
every step they took came the clink and rattle of their
silver bracelets, their heavy necklaces of bone and
turquoise beads. They came on without a word, running
quietly in their deerskin moccasins. One of them was
holding a feather brush; the other carried, in either
hand, what looked at a distance like three or four pieces
of thick rope. One of the ropes writhed uneasily, and
suddenly Lenina saw that they were snakes.
- The men came nearer and
nearer; their dark eyes looked at her, but without giving
any sign of recognition, any smallest sign that they had
seen her or were aware of her existence. The writhing
snake hung limp again with the rest. The men passed.
- "I don't like it,"
said Lenina. "I don't like it."
- She liked even less what
awaited her at the entrance to the pueblo, where their
guide had left them while he went inside for instructions.
The dirt, to start with, the piles of rubbish, the dust,
the dogs, the flies. Her face wrinkled up into a grimace
of disgust. She held her handkerchief to her nose.
- "But how can they live
like this?" she broke out in a voice of indignant
incredulity. (It wasn't possible.)
- Bernard shrugged his
shoulders philosophically. "Anyhow," he said,
"they've been doing it for the last five or six
thousand years. So I suppose they must be used to it by
now."
- "But cleanliness is
next to fordliness," she insisted.
- "Yes, and civilization
is sterilization," Bernard went on, concluding on a
tone of irony the second hypnop?dic
lesson in elementary hygiene. "But these people have
never heard of Our Ford, and they aren't civilized. So
there's no point in …"
- "Oh!" She gripped
his arm. "Look."
- An almost naked Indian was
very slowly climbing down the ladder from the first-floor
terrace of a neighboring house–rung after rung, with
the tremulous caution of extreme old age. His face was
profoundly wrinkled and black, like a mask of obsidian.
The toothless mouth had fallen in. At the corners of the
lips, and on each side of the chin, a few long bristles
gleamed almost white against the dark skin. The long
unbraided hair hung down in grey wisps round his face.
His body was bent and emaciated to the bone, almost
fleshless. Very slowly he came down, pausing at each rung
before he ventured another step.
- "What's the matter
with him?" whispered Lenina. Her eyes were wide with
horror and amazement.
- "He's old, that's all,"
Bernard answered as carelessly as he could. He too was
startled; but he made an effort to seem unmoved.
- "Old?" she
repeated. "But the Director's old; lots of people
are old; they're not like that."
- "That's because we don't
allow them to be like that. We preserve them from
diseases. We keep their internal secretions artificially
balanced at a youthful equilibrium. We don't permit their
magnesium-calcium ratio to fall below what it was at
thirty. We give them transfusion of young blood. We keep
their metabolism permanently stimulated. So, of course,
they don't look like that. Partly," he added, "because
most of them die long before they reach this old creature's
age. Youth almost unimpaired till sixty, and then, crack!
the end."
- But Lenina was not
listening. She was watching the old man. Slowly, slowly
he came down. His feet touched the ground. He turned. In
their deep-sunken orbits his eyes were still
extraordinarily bright. They looked at her for a long
moment expressionlessly, without surprise, as though she
had not been there at all. Then slowly, with bent back
the old man hobbled past them and was gone.
- "But it's terrible,"
Lenina whispered. "It's awful. We ought not to have
come here." She felt in her pocket for her soma–only
to discover that, by some unprecedented oversight, she
had left the bottle down at the rest-house. Bernard's
pockets were also empty.
- Lenina was left to face the
horrors of Malpais unaided. They came crowding in on her
thick and fast. The spectacle of two young women giving
breast to their babies made her blush and turn away her
face. She had never seen anything so indecent in her life.
And what made it worse was that, instead of tactfully
ignoring it, Bernard proceeded to make open comments on
this revoltingly viviparous scene. Ashamed, now that the
effects of the soma had worn off, of the weakness
he had displayed that morning in the hotel, he went out
of his way to show himself strong and unorthodox.
- "What a wonderfully
intimate relationship," he said, deliberately
outrageous. "And what an intensity of feeling it
must generate! I often think one may have missed
something in not having had a mother. And perhaps you've
missed something in not being a mother, Lenina. Imagine
yourself sitting there with a little baby of your own.
…"
- "Bernard! How can you?"
The passage of an old woman with ophthalmia and a disease
of the skin distracted her from her indignation.
- "Let's go away,"
she begged. "I don't like it."
- But at this moment their
guide came back and, beckoning them to follow, led the
way down the narrow street between the houses. They
rounded a corner. A dead dog was lying on a rubbish heap;
a woman with a goitre was looking for lice in the hair of
a small girl. Their guide halted at the foot of a ladder,
raised his hand perpendicularly, then darted it
horizontally forward. They did what he mutely
commanded–climbed the ladder and walked through the
doorway, to which it gave access, into a long narrow room,
rather dark and smelling of smoke and cooked grease and
long-worn, long-unwashed clothes. At the further end of
the room was another doorway, through which came a shaft
of sunlight and the noise, very loud and close, of the
drums.
- They stepped across the
threshold and found themselves on a wide terrace. Below
them, shut in by the tall houses, was the village square,
crowded with Indians. Bright blankets, and feathers in
black hair, and the glint of turquoise, and dark skins
shining with heat. Lenina put her handkerchief to her
nose again. In the open space at the centre of the square
were two circular platforms of masonry and trampled
clay–the roofs, it was evident, of underground
chambers; for in the centre of each platform was an open
hatchway, with a ladder emerging from the lower darkness.
A sound of subterranean flute playing came up and was
almost lost in the steady remorseless persistence of the
drums.
- Lenina liked the drums.
Shutting her eyes she abandoned herself to their soft
repeated thunder, allowed it to invade her consciousness
more and more completely, till at last there was nothing
left in the world but that one deep pulse of sound. It
reminded her reassuringly of the synthetic noises made at
Solidarity Services and Ford's Day celebrations. "Orgy-porgy,"
she whispered to herself. These drums beat out just the
same rhythms.
- There was a sudden
startling burst of singing–hundreds of male voices
crying out fiercely in harsh metallic unison. A few long
notes and silence, the thunderous silence of the drums;
then shrill, in a neighing treble, the women's answer.
Then again the drums; and once more the men's deep savage
affirmation of their manhood.
- Queer–yes. The place
was queer, so was the music, so were the clothes and the
goitres and the skin diseases and the old people. But the
performance itself–there seemed to be nothing
specially queer about that.
- "It reminds me of a
lower-caste Community Sing," she told Bernard.
- But a little later it was
reminding her a good deal less of that innocuous function.
For suddenly there had swarmed up from those round
chambers underground a ghastly troop of monsters.
Hideously masked or painted out of all semblance of
humanity, they had tramped out a strange limping dance
round the square; round and again round, singing as they
went, round and round–each time a little faster; and
the drums had changed and quickened their rhythm, so that
it became like the pulsing of fever in the ears; and the
crowd had begun to sing with the dancers, louder and
louder; and first one woman had shrieked, and then
another and another, as though they were being killed;
and then suddenly the leader of the dancers broke out of
the line, ran to a big wooden chest which was standing at
one end of the square, raised the lid and pulled out a
pair of black snakes. A great yell went up from the crowd,
and all the other dancers ran towards him with out-stretched
hands. He tossed the snakes to the first-comers, then
dipped back into the chest for more. More and more, black
snakes and brown and mottled-he flung them out. And then
the dance began again on a different rhythm. Round and
round they went with their snakes, snakily, with a soft
undulating movement at the knees and hips. Round and
round. Then the leader gave a signal, and one after
another, all the snakes were flung down in the middle of
the square; an old man came up from underground and
sprinkled them with corn meal, and from the other
hatchway came a woman and sprinkled them with water from
a black jar. Then the old man lifted his hand and,
startlingly, terrifyingly, there was absolute silence.
The drums stopped beating, life seemed to have come to an
end. The old man pointed towards the two hatchways that
gave entrance to the lower world. And slowly, raised by
invisible hands from below, there emerged from the one a
painted image of an eagle, from the other that of a man,
naked, and nailed to a cross. They hung there, seemingly
self-sustained, as though watching. The old man clapped
his hands. Naked but for a white cotton breech-cloth, a
boy of about eighteen stepped out of the crowd and stood
before him, his hands crossed over his chest, his head
bowed. The old man made the sign of the cross over him
and turned away. Slowly, the boy began to walk round the
writhing heap of snakes. He had completed the first
circuit and was half-way through the second when, from
among the dancers, a tall man wearing the mask of a
coyote and holding in his hand a whip of plaited leather,
advanced towards him. The boy moved on as though unaware
of the other's existence. The coyote-man raised his whip,
there was a long moment of expectancy, then a swift
movement, the whistle of the lash and its loud flat-sounding
impact on the flesh. The boy's body quivered; but he made
no sound, he walked on at the same slow, steady pace. The
coyote struck again, again; and at every blow at first a
gasp, and then a deep groan went up from the crowd. The
boy walked. Twice, thrice, four times round he went. The
blood was streaming. Five times round, six times round.
Suddenly Lenina covered her face shish her hands and
began to sob. "Oh, stop them, stop them!" she
implored. But the whip fell and fell inexorably. Seven
times round. Then all at once the boy staggered and,
still without a sound, pitched forward on to his face.
Bending over him, the old man touched his back with a
long white feather, held it up for a moment, crimson, for
the people to see then shook it thrice over the snakes. A
few drops fell, and suddenly the drums broke out again
into a panic of hurrying notes; there was a great shout.
The dancers rushed forward, picked up the snakes and ran
out of the square. Men, women, children, all the crowd
ran after them. A minute later the square was empty, only
the boy remained, prone where he had fallen, quite still.
Three old women came out of one of the houses, and with
some difficulty lifted him and carried him in. The eagle
and the man on the cross kept guard for a little while
over the empty pueblo; then, as though they had seen
enough, sank slowly down through their hatchways, out of
sight, into the nether world.
- Lenina was still sobbing.
"Too awful," she kept repeating, and all
Bernard's consolations were in vain. "Too awful!
That blood!" She shuddered. "Oh, I wish I had
my soma."
- There was the sound of feet
in the inner room.
- Lenina did not move, but
sat with her face in her hands, unseeing, apart. Only
Bernard turned round.
- The dress of the young man
who now stepped out on to the terrace was Indian; but his
plaited hair was straw-coloured, his eyes a pale blue,
and his skin a white skin, bronzed.
- "Hullo. Good-morrow,"
said the stranger, in faultless but peculiar English.
"You're civilized, aren't you? You come from the
Other Place, outside the Reservation?"
- "Who on earth … ?"
Bernard began in astonishment.
- The young man sighed and
shook his head. "A most unhappy gentleman." And,
pointing to the bloodstains in the centre of the square,
"Do you see that damned spot?" he asked in a
voice that trembled with emotion.
- "A gramme is better
than a damn," said Lenina mechanically from behind
her hands. "I wish I had my soma!"
- "I ought to
have been there," the young man went on. "Why
wouldn't they let me be the sacrifice? I'd have gone
round ten times–twelve, fifteen. Palowhtiwa only got
as far as seven. They could have had twice as much blood
from me. The multitudinous seas incarnadine." He
flung out his arms in a lavish gesture; then,
despairingly, let them fall again. "But they wouldn't
let me. They disliked me for my complexion. It's always
been like that. Always." Tears stood in the young
man's eyes; he was ashamed and turned away.
- Astonishment made Lenina
forget the deprivation of soma. She uncovered her
face and, for the first time, looked at the stranger.
"Do you mean to say that you wanted to be hit
with that whip?"
- Still averted from her, the
young man made a sign of affirmation. "For the sake
of the pueblo–to make the rain come and the corn
grow. And to please Pookong and Jesus. And then to show
that I can bear pain without crying out. Yes," and
his voice suddenly took on a new resonance, he turned
with a proud squaring of the shoulders, a proud, defiant
lifting of the chin "to show that I'm a man …
Oh!" He gave a gasp and was silent, gaping. He had
seen, for the first time in his life, the face of a girl
whose cheeks were not the colour of chocolate or dogskin,
whose hair was auburn and permanently waved, and whose
expression (amazing novelty!) was one of benevolent
interest. Lenina was smiling at him; such a nice-looking
boy, she was thinking, and a really beautiful body. The
blood rushed up into the young man's face; he dropped his
eyes, raised them again for a moment only to find her
still smiling at him, and was so much overcome that he
had to turn away and pretend to be looking very hard at
something on the other side of the square.
- Bernard's questions made a
diversion. Who? How? When? From where? Keeping his eyes
fixed on Bernard's face (for so passionately did he long
to see Lenina smiling that he simply dared not look at
her), the young man tried to explain himself. Linda and
he–Linda was his mother (the word made Lenina look
uncomfortable)–were strangers in the Reservation.
Linda had come from the Other Place long ago, before he
was born, with a man who was his father. (Bernard pricked
up his ears.) She had gone walking alone in those
mountains over there to the North, had fallen down a
steep place and hurt her head. ("Go on, go on,"
said Bernard excitedly.) Some hunters from Malpais had
found her and brought her to the pueblo. As for the man
who was his father, Linda had never seen him again. His
name was Tomakin. (Yes, "Thomas" was the D.H.C.'s
first name.) He must have flown away, back to the Other
Place, away without her–a bad, unkind, unnatural man.
- "And so I was born in
Malpais," he concluded. "In Malpais." And
he shook his head.
- The squalor of that little
house on the outskirts of the pueblo!
- A space of dust and rubbish
separated it from the village. Two famine-stricken dogs
were nosing obscenely in the garbage at its door. Inside,
when they entered, the twilight stank and was loud with
flies.
- "Linda!" the
young man called.
- From the inner room a
rather hoarse female voice said, "Coming."
- They waited. In bowls on
the floor were the remains of a meal, perhaps of several
meals.
- The door opened. A very
stout blonde squaw stepped across the threshold and stood
looking at the strangers staring incredulously, her mouth
open. Lenina noticed with disgust that two of the front
teeth were missing. And the colour of the ones that
remained … She shuddered. It was worse than the old
man. So fat. And all the lines in her face, the
flabbiness, the wrinkles. And the sagging cheeks, with
those purplish blotches. And the red veins on her nose,
the bloodshot eyes. And that neck–that neck; and the
blanket she wore over her head–ragged and filthy.
And under the brown sack-shaped tunic those enormous
breasts, the bulge of the stomach, the hips. Oh, much
worse than the old man, much worse! And suddenly the
creature burst out in a torrent of speech, rushed at her
with outstretched arms and–Ford! Ford! it was too
revolting, in another moment she'd be sick–pressed
her against the bulge, the bosom, and began to kiss her.
Ford! to kiss, slobberingly, and smelt too
horrible, obviously never had a bath, and simply reeked
of that beastly stuff that was put into Delta and Epsilon
bottles (no, it wasn't true about Bernard), positively
stank of alcohol. She broke away as quickly as she could.
- A blubbered and distorted
face confronted her; the creature was crying.
- "Oh, my dear, my dear."
The torrent of words flowed sobbingly. "If you knew
how glad–after all these years! A civilized face.
Yes, and civilized clothes. Because I thought I should
never see a piece of real acetate silk again." She
fingered the sleeve of Lenina's shirt. The nails were
black. "And those adorable viscose velveteen shorts!
Do you know, dear, I've still got my old clothes, the
ones I came in, put away in a box. I'll show them you
afterwards. Though, of course, the acetate has all gone
into holes. But such a lovely white bandolier–though
I must say your green morocco is even lovelier. Not that
it did me much good, that bandolier." Her
tears began to flow again. "I suppose John told you.
What I had to suffer–and not a gramme of soma
to be had. Only a drink of mescal every now and
then, when Pop? used to bring it. Pop? is a boy I used to know. But it makes you
feel so bad afterwards. the mescal does, and you're
sick with the peyotl; besides it always made that
awful feeling of being ashamed much worse the next day.
And I was so ashamed. Just think of it: me, a
Beta–having a baby: put yourself in my place."
(The mere suggestion made Lenina shudder.) "Though
it wasn't my fault, I swear; because I still don't know
how it happened, seeing that I did all the Malthusian
Drill–you know, by numbers, One, two, three, four,
always, I swear it; but all the same it happened, and of
course there wasn't anything like an Abortion Centre here.
Is it still down in Chelsea, by the way?" she asked.
Lenina nodded. "And still floodlighted on Tuesdays
and Fridays?" Lenina nodded again. "That lovely
pink glass tower!" Poor Linda lifted her face and
with closed eyes ecstatically contemplated the bright
remembered image. "And the river at night," she
whispered. Great tears oozed slowly out from behind her
tight-shut eyelids. "And flying back in the evening
from Stoke Poges. And then a hot bath and vibro-vacuum
massage … But there." She drew a deep breath,
shook her head, opened her eyes again, sniffed once or
twice, then blew her nose on her fingers and wiped them
on the skirt of her tunic. "Oh, I'm so sorry,"
she said in response to Lenina's involuntary grimace of
disgust. "I oughtn't to have done that. I'm sorry.
But what are you to do when there aren't any
handkerchiefs? I remember how it used to upset me, all
that dirt, and nothing being aseptic. I had an awful cut
on my head when they first brought me here. You can't
imagine what they used to put on it. Filth, just filth. 'Civilization
is Sterilization,' I used to say t them. And 'Streptocock-Gee
to Banbury-T, to see a fine bathroom and W.C.' as though
they were children. But of course they didn't understand.
How should they? And in the end I suppose I got used to
it. And anyhow, how can you keep things clean when
there isn't hot water laid on? And look at these clothes.
This beastly wool isn't like acetate. It lasts and lasts.
And you're supposed to mend it if it gets torn. But I'm a
Beta; I worked in the Fertilizing Room; nobody ever
taught me to do anything like that. It wasn't my business.
Besides, it never used to be right to mend clothes. Throw
them away when they've got holes in them and buy new. 'The
more stitches, the less riches.' Isn't that right?
Mending's anti-social. But it's all different here. It's
like living with lunatics. Everything they do is mad."
She looked round; saw John and Bernard had left them and
were walking up and down in the dust and garbage outside
the house; but, none the less confidentially lowering her
voice, and leaning, while Lenina stiffened and shrank, so
close that the blown reek of embryo-poison stirred the
hair on her cheek. "For instance," she hoarsely
whispered, "take the way they have one another here.
Mad, I tell you, absolutely mad. Everybody belongs to
every one else–don't they? don't they?" she
insisted, tugging at Lenina's sleeve. Lenina nodded her
averted head, let out the breath she had been holding and
managed to draw another one, relatively untainted. "Well,
here," the other went on, "nobody's supposed to
belong to more than one person. And if you have people in
the ordinary way, the others think you're wicked and anti-social.
They hate and despise you. Once a lot of women came and
made a scene because their men came to see me. Well, why
not? And then they rushed at me … No, it was too
awful. I can't tell you about it." Linda covered her
face with her hands and shuddered. "They're so
hateful, the women here. Mad, mad and cruel. And of
course they don't know anything about Malthusian Drill,
or bottles, or decanting, or anything of that sort. So
they're having children all the time–like dogs. It's
too revolting. And to think that I … Oh, Ford, Ford,
Ford! And yet John was a great comfort to me. I
don't know what I should have done without him. Even
though he did get so upset whenever a man … Quite as
a tiny boy, even. Once (but that was when he was bigger)
he tried to kill poor Waihusiwa–or was it Pop??–just because I used to have them
sometimes. Because I never could make him understand that
that was what civilized people ought to do. Being mad's
infectious I believe. Anyhow, John seems to have caught
it from the Indians. Because, of course, he was with them
a lot. Even though they always were so beastly to him and
wouldn't let him do all the things the other boys did.
Which was a good thing in a way, because it made it
easier for me to condition him a little. Though you've no
idea how difficult that is. There's so much one doesn't
know; it wasn't my business to know. I mean, when a child
asks you how a helicopter works or who made the
world–well, what are you to answer if you're a Beta
and have always worked in the Fertilizing Room? What are
you to answer?"
chapter eight
OUTSIDE, in the dust and among the garbage (there
were four dogs now), Bernard and John were walking slowly up and
down.
- "So hard for me to
realize," Bernard was saying, "to reconstruct.
As though we were living on different planets, in
different centuries. A mother, and all this dirt, and
gods, and old age, and disease …" He shook his
head. "It's almost inconceivable. I shall never
understand, unless you explain."
- "Explain what?"
- "This." He
indicated the pueblo. "That." And it was the
little house outside the village. "Everything. All
your life."
- "But what is there to
say?"
- "From the beginning.
As far back as you can remember."
- "As far back as I can
remember." John frowned. There was a long silence.
- It was very hot. They had
eaten a lot of tortillas and sweet corn. Linda said,
"Come and lie down, Baby." They lay down
together in the big bed. "Sing," and Linda sang.
Sang "Streptocock-Gee to Banbury-T" and "Bye
Baby Banting, soon you'll need decanting." Her voice
got fainter and fainter …
- There was a loud noise, and
he woke with a start. A man was saying something to Linda,
and Linda was laughing. She had pulled the blanket up to
her chin, but the man pulled it down again. His hair was
like two black ropes, and round his arm was a lovely
silver bracelet with blue stones in it. He liked the
bracelet; but all the same, he was frightened; he hid his
face against Linda's body. Linda put her hand on him and
he felt safer. In those other words he did not understand
so well, she said to the man, "Not with John here."
The man looked at him, then again at Linda, and said a
few words in a soft voice. Linda said, "No."
But the man bent over the bed towards him and his face
was huge, terrible; the black ropes of hair touched the
blanket. "No," Linda said again, and he felt
her hand squeezing him more tightly. "No, no!"
But the man took hold of one of his arms, and it hurt. He
screamed. The man put up his other hand and lifted him up.
Linda was still holding him, still saying, "No, no."
The man said something short and angry, and suddenly her
hands were gone. "Linda, Linda." He kicked and
wriggled; but the man carried him across to the door,
opened it, put him down on the floor in the middle of the
other room, and went away, shutting the door behind him.
He got up, he ran to the door. Standing on tiptoe he
could just reach the big wooden latch. He lifted it and
pushed; but the door wouldn't open. "Linda," he
shouted. She didn't answer.
- He remembered a huge room,
rather dark; and there were big wooden things with
strings fastened to them, and lots of women standing
round them–making blankets, Linda said. Linda told
him to sit in the corner with the other children, while
she went and helped the women. He played with the little
boys for a long time. Suddenly people started talking
very loud, and there were the women pushing Linda away,
and Linda was crying. She went to the door and he ran
after her. He asked her why they were angry. "Because
I broke something," she said. And then she got angry
too. "How should I know how to do their beastly
weaving?" she said. "Beastly savages." He
asked her what savages were. When they got back to their
house, Pop? was waiting at the door, and he
came in with them. He had a big gourd full of stuff that
looked like water; only it wasn't water, but something
with a bad smell that burnt your mouth and made you cough.
Linda drank some and Pop? drank
some, and then Linda laughed a lot and talked very loud;
and then she and Pop? went into the other room. When
Pop? went away, he went into the room.
Linda was in bed and so fast asleep that he couldn't wake
her.
- Pop? used
to come often. He said the stuff in the gourd was called mescal;
but Linda said it ought to be called soma; only it
made you feel ill afterwards. He hated Pop?. He hated them all–all the men who
came to see Linda. One afternoon, when he had been
playing with the other children–it was cold, he
remembered, and there was snow on the mountains–he
came back to the house and heard angry voices in the
bedroom. They were women's voices, and they said words he
didn't understand, but he knew they were dreadful words.
Then suddenly, crash! something was upset; he heard
people moving about quickly, and there was another crash
and then a noise like hitting a mule, only not so bony;
then Linda screamed. "Oh, don't, don't, don't!"
she said. He ran in. There were three women in dark
blankets. Linda was on the bed. One of the women was
holding her wrists. Another was lying across her legs, so
that she couldn't kick. The third was hitting her with a
whip. Once, twice, three times; and each time Linda
screamed. Crying, he tugged at the fringe of the woman's
blanket. "Please, please." With her free hand
she held him away. The whip came down again, and again
Linda screamed. He caught hold of the woman's enormous
brown hand between his own and bit it with all his might.
She cried out, wrenched her hand free, and gave him such
a push that he fell down. While he was lying on the
ground she hit him three times with the whip. It hurt
more than anything he had ever felt–like fire. The
whip whistled again, fell. But this time it was Linda who
screamed.
- "But why did they want
to hurt you, Linda?'' he asked that night. He was crying,
because the red marks of the whip on his back still hurt
so terribly. But he was also crying because people were
so beastly and unfair, and because he was only a little
boy and couldn't do anything against them. Linda was
crying too. She was grown up, but she wasn't big enough
to fight against three of them. It wasn't fair for her
either. "Why did they want to hurt you, Linda?"
- "I don't know. How
should I know?" It was difficult to hear what she
said, because she was lying on her stomach and her face
was in the pillow. "They say those men are their
men," she went on; and she did not seem to be
talking to him at all; she seemed to be talking with some
one inside herself. A long talk which she didn't
understand; and in the end she started crying louder than
ever.
- "Oh, don't cry, Linda.
Don't cry."
- He pressed himself against
her. He put his arm round her neck. Linda cried out.
"Oh, be careful. My shoulder! Oh!" and she
pushed him away, hard. His head banged against the wall.
"Little idiot!" she shouted; and then, suddenly,
she began to slap him. Slap, slap …
- "Linda," he cried
out. "Oh, mother, don't!"
- "I'm not your mother.
I won't be your mother."
- "But, Linda … Oh!"
She slapped him on the cheek.
- "Turned into a savage,"
she shouted. "Having young ones like an animal
… If it hadn't been for you, I might have gone to
the Inspector, I might have got away. But not with a baby.
That would have been too shameful."
- He saw that she was going
to hit him again, and lifted his arm to guard his face.
"Oh, don't, Linda, please don't."
- "Little beast!"
She pulled down his arm; his face was uncovered.
- "Don't, Linda."
He shut his eyes, expecting the blow.
- But she didn't hit him.
After a little time, he opened his eyes again and saw
that she was looking at him. He tried to smile at her.
Suddenly she put her arms round him and kissed him again
and again.
- Sometimes, for several days,
Linda didn't get up at all. She lay in bed and was sad.
Or else she drank the stuff that Pop?
brought and laughed a great deal and went to sleep.
Sometimes she was sick. Often she forgot to wash him, and
there was nothing to eat except cold tortillas. He
remembered the first time she found those little animals
in his hair, how she screamed and screamed.
- The happiest times were
when she told him about the Other Place. "And you
really can go flying, whenever you like?"
- "Whenever you like."
And she would tell him about the lovely music that came
out of a box, and all the nice games you could play, and
the delicious things to eat and drink, and the light that
came when you pressed a little thing in the wall, and the
pictures that you could hear and feel and smell, as well
as see, and another box for making nice smells, and the
pink and green and blue and silver houses as high as
mountains, and everybody happy and no one ever sad or
angry, and every one belonging to every one else, and the
boxes where you could see and hear what was happening at
the other side of the world, and babies in lovely clean
bottles–everything so clean, and no nasty smells, no
dirt at all–and people never lonely, but living
together and being so jolly and happy, like the summer
dances here in Malpais, but much happier, and the
happiness being there every day, every day. … He
listened by the hour. And sometimes, when he and the
other children were tired with too much playing, one of
the old men of the pueblo would talk to them, in those
other words, of the great Transformer of the World, and
of the long fight between Right Hand and Left Hand,
between Wet and Dry; of Awonawilona, who made a great fog
by thinking in the night, and then made the whole world
out of the fog; of Earth Mother and Sky Father; of
Ahaiyuta and Marsailema, the twins of War and Chance; of
Jesus and Pookong; of Mary and Etsanatlehi, the woman who
makes herself young again; of the Black Stone at Laguna
and the Great Eagle and Our Lady of Acoma. Strange
stories, all the more wonderful to him for being told in
the other words and so not fully understood. Lying in bed,
he would think of Heaven and London and Our Lady of Acoma
and the rows and rows of babies in clean bottles and
Jesus flying up and Linda flying up and the great
Director of World Hatcheries and Awonawilona.
- Lots of men came to see
Linda. The boys began to point their fingers at him. In
the strange other words they said that Linda was bad;
they called her names he did not understand, but that he
knew were bad names. One day they sang a song about her,
again and again. He threw stones at them. They threw back;
a sharp stone cut his cheek. The blood wouldn't stop; he
was covered with blood.
- Linda taught him to read.
With a piece of charcoal she drew pictures on the
wall–an animal sitting down, a baby inside a bottle;
then she wrote letters. THE CAT IS ON THE MAT. THE TOT IS
IN THE POT. He learned quickly and easily. When he knew
how to read all the words she wrote on the wall, Linda
opened her big wooden box and pulled out from under those
funny little red trousers she never wore a thin little
book. He had often seen it before. "When you're
bigger," she had said, "you can read it."
Well, now he was big enough. He was proud. "I'm
afraid you won't find it very exciting," she said.
"But it's the only thing I have." She sighed.
"If only you could see the lovely reading machines
we used to have in London!" He began reading. The
Chemical and Bacteriological Conditioning of the Embryo.
Practical Instructions for Beta Embryo-Store Workers.
It took him a quarter of an hour to read the title alone.
He threw the book on the floor. "Beastly, beastly
book!" he said, and began to cry.
- The boys still sang their
horrible song about Linda. Sometimes, too, they laughed
at him for being so ragged. When he tore his clothes,
Linda did not know how to mend them. In the Other Place,
she told him, people threw away clothes with holes in
them and got new ones. "Rags, rags!" the boys
used to shout at him. "But I can read," he said
to himself, "and they can't. They don't even know
what reading is." It was fairly easy, if he thought
hard enough about the reading, to pretend that he didn't
mind when they made fun of him. He asked Linda to give
him the book again.
- The more the boys pointed
and sang, the harder he read. Soon he could read all the
words quite well. Even the longest. But what did they
mean? He asked Linda; but even when she could answer it
didn't seem to make it very clear, And generally she
couldn't answer at all.
- "What are chemicals?"
he would ask.
- "Oh, stuff like
magnesium salts, and alcohol for keeping the Deltas and
Epsilons small and backward, and calcium carbonate for
bones, and all that sort of thing."
- "But how do you make
chemicals, Linda? Where do they come from?"
- "Well, I don't know.
You get them out of bottles. And when the bottles are
empty, you send up to the Chemical Store for more. It's
the Chemical Store people who make them, I suppose. Or
else they send to the factory for them. I don't know. I
never did any chemistry. My job was always with the
embryos. It was the same with everything else he asked
about. Linda never seemed to know. The old men of the
pueblo had much more definite answers.
- "The seed of men and
all creatures, the seed of the sun and the seed of earth
and the seed of the sky–Awonawilona made them all
out of the Fog of Increase. Now the world has four wombs;
and he laid the seeds in the lowest of the four wombs.
And gradually the seeds began to grow …"
- One day (John calculated
later that it must have been soon after his twelfth
birthday) he came home and found a book that he had never
seen before lying on the floor in the bedroom. It was a
thick book and looked very old. The binding had been
eaten by mice; some of its pages were loose and crumpled.
He picked it up, looked at the title-page: the book was
called The Complete Works of William Shakespeare.
- Linda was lying on the bed,
sipping that horrible stinking mescal out of a cup.
"Pop? brought it," she said. Her
voice was thick and hoarse like somebody else's voice.
"It was lying in one of the chests of the Antelope
Kiva. It's supposed to have been there for hundreds of
years. I expect it's true, because I looked at it, and it
seemed to be full of nonsense. Uncivilized. Still, it'll
be good enough for you to practice your reading on."
She took a last sip, set the cup down on the floor beside
the bed, turned over on her side, hiccoughed once or
twice and went to sleep.
- He opened the book at
random.
-
-
- Nay, but to live
- In the rank sweat of an
enseamed bed,
- Stew'd in corruption,
honeying and making love
- Over the nasty sty
…
- The strange words rolled
through his mind; rumbled, like talking thunder; like the
drums at the summer dances, if the drums could have
spoken; like the men singing the Corn Song, beautiful,
beautiful, so that you cried; like old Mitsima saying
magic over his feathers and his carved sticks and his
bits of bone and stone–kiathla tsilu silokwe silokwe
silokwe. Kiai silu silu, tsithl–but better than
Mitsima's magic, because it meant more, because it talked
to him, talked wonderfully and only half-understandably,
a terrible beautiful magic, about Linda; about Linda
lying there snoring, with the empty cup on the floor
beside the bed; about Linda and Pop?,
Linda and Pop?.
- He hated Pop? more and more. A man can smile and smile
and be a villain. Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous,
kindless villain. What did the words exactly mean? He
only half knew. But their magic was strong and went on
rumbling in his head, and somehow it was as though he had
never really hated Pop? before; never really hated him
because he had never been able to say how much he hated
him. But now he had these words, these words like drums
and singing and magic. These words and the strange,
strange story out of which they were taken (he couldn't
make head or tail of it, but it was wonderful, wonderful
all the same)–they gave him a reason for hating Pop?; and they made his hatred more real; they
even made Pop? himself more real.
- One day, when he came in
from playing, the door of the inner room was open, and he
saw them lying together on the bed, asleep–white
Linda and Pop? almost black beside her, with
one arm under her shoulders and the other dark hand on
her breast, and one of the plaits of his long hair lying
across her throat, like a black snake trying to strangle
her. Pop?'s gourd and a cup were standing
on the floor near the bed. Linda was snoring.
- His heart seemed to have
disappeared and left a hole. He was empty. Empty, and
cold, and rather sick, and giddy. He leaned against the
wall to steady himself. Remorseless, treacherous,
lecherous … Like drums, like the men singing for the
corn, like magic, the words repeated and repeated
themselves in his head. From being cold he was suddenly
hot. His cheeks burnt with the rush of blood, the room
swam and darkened before his eyes. He ground his teeth.
"I'll kill him, I'll kill him, I'll kill him,"
he kept saying. And suddenly there were more words.
- When he is drunk asleep,
or in his rage
- Or in the incestuous
pleasure of his bed …
The magic was
on his side, the magic explained and gave orders. He
stepped back in the outer room. "When he is drunk
asleep …" The knife for the meat was lying on
the floor near the fireplace. He picked it up and tiptoed
to the door again. "When he is drunk asleep, drunk
asleep …" He ran across the room and
stabbed–oh, the blood!–stabbed again, as Pop? heaved out of his sleep, lifted his hand
to stab once more, but found his wrist caught, held
and–oh, oh!–twisted. He couldn't move, he was
trapped, and there were Pop?'s
small black eyes, very close, staring into his own. He
looked away. There were two cuts on Pop?'s left shoulder. "Oh, look at the
blood!" Linda was crying. "Look at the blood!"
She had never been able to bear the sight of blood. Pop? lifted his other hand–to strike him,
he thought. He stiffened to receive the blow. But the
hand only took him under the chin and turned his face, so
that he had to look again into Pop?'s
eyes. For a long time, for hours and hours. And
suddenly–he couldn't help it–he began to cry.
Pop? burst out laughing. "Go,"
he said, in the other Indian words. "Go, my brave
Ahaiyuta." He ran out into the other room to hide
his tears.
- "You are fifteen,"
said old Mitsima, in the Indian words. "Now I may
teach you to work the clay."
- Squatting by the river,
they worked together.
- "First of all,"
said Mitsima, taking a lump of the wetted clay between
his hands, "we make a little moon." The old man
squeezed the lump into a disk, then bent up the edges,
the moon became a shallow cup.
- Slowly and unskilfully he
imitated the old man's delicate gestures.
- "A moon, a cup, and
now a snake." Mitsima rolled out another piece of
clay into a long flexible cylinder, trooped it into a
circle and pressed it on to the rim of the cup. "Then
another snake. And another. And another." Round by
round, Mitsima built up the sides of the pot; it was
narrow, it bulged, it narrowed again towards the neck.
Mitsima squeezed and patted, stroked and scraped; and
there at last it stood, in shape the familiar water pot
of Malpais, but creamy white instead of black, and still
soft to the touch. The crooked parody of Mitsima's, his
own stood beside it. Looking at the two pots, he had to
laugh.
- "But the next one will
be better," he said, and began to moisten another
piece of clay.
- To fashion, to give form,
to feel his fingers gaining in skill and power–this
gave him an extraordinary pleasure. "A, B, C,
Vitamin D," he sang to himself as he worked. "The
fat's in the liver, the cod's in the sea." And
Mitsima also sang–a song about killing a bear. They
worked all day, and all day he was filled with an intense,
absorbing happiness.
- "Next winter,"
said old Mitsima, "I will teach you to make the bow."
- He stood for a long time
outside the house, and at last the ceremonies within were
finished. The door opened; they came out. Kothlu came
first, his right hand out-stretched and tightly closed,
as though over some precious jewel. Her clenched hand
similarly outstretched, Kiakim?
followed. They walked in silence, and in silence, behind
them, came the brothers and sisters and cousins and all
the troop of old people.
- They walked out of the
pueblo, across the mesa. At the edge of the cliff they
halted, facing the early morning sun. Kothlu opened his
hand. A pinch of corn meal lay white on the palm; he
breathed on it, murmured a few words, then threw it, a
handful of white dust, towards the sun. Kiakim? did the same. Then Khakim?'s father stepped forward, and holding up
a feathered prayer stick, made a long prayer, then threw
the stick after the corn meal.
- "It is finished,"
said old Mitsima in a loud voice. "They are married."
- "Well," said
Linda, as they turned away, "all I can say is, it
does seem a lot of fuss to make about so little. In
civilized countries, when a boy wants to have a girl, he
just … But where are you going, John?"
- He paid no attention to her
calling, but ran on, away, away, anywhere to be by
himself.
- It is finished Old Mitsima's
words repeated themselves in his mind. Finished, finished
… In silence and from a long way off, but violently,
desperately, hopelessly, he had loved Kiakim?. And now it was finished. He was sixteen.
- At the full moon, in the
Antelope Kiva, secrets would be told, secrets would be
done and borne. They would go down, boys, into the kiva
and come out again, men. The boys were all afraid and at
the same time impatient. And at last it was the day. The
sun went down, the moon rose. He went with the others.
Men were standing, dark, at the entrance to the kiva; the
ladder went down into the red lighted depths. Already the
leading boys had begun to climb down. Suddenly, one of
the men stepped forward, caught him by the arm, and
pulled him out of the ranks. He broke free and dodged
back into his place among the others. This time the man
struck him, pulled his hair. "Not for you, white-hair!"
"Not for the son of the she-dog," said one of
the other men. The boys laughed. "Go!" And as
he still hovered on the fringes of the group, "Go!"
the men shouted again. One of them bent down, took a
stone, threw it. "Go, go, go!" There was a
shower of stones. Bleeding, he ran away into the darkness.
From the red-lit kiva came the noise of singing. The last
of the boys had climbed down the ladder. He was all alone.
- All alone, outside the
pueblo, on the bare plain of the mesa. The rock was like
bleached bones in the moonlight. Down in the valley, the
coyotes were howling at the moon. The bruises hurt him,
the cuts were still bleeding; but it was not for pain
that he sobbed; it was because he was all alone, because
he had been driven out, alone, into this skeleton world
of rocks and moonlight. At the edge of the precipice he
sat down. The moon was behind him; he looked down into
the black shadow of the mesa, into the black shadow of
death. He had only to take one step, one little jump.
… He held out his right hand in the moonlight. From
the cut on his wrist the blood was still oozing. Every
few seconds a drop fell, dark, almost colourless in the
dead light. Drop, drop, drop. To-morrow and to-morrow and
to-morrow …
- He had discovered Time and
Death and God.
- "Alone, always alone,"
the young man was saying.
- The words awoke a plaintive
echo in Bernard's mind. Alone, alone … "So am I,"
he said, on a gush of confidingness. "Terribly alone."
- "Are you?" John
looked surprised. "I thought that in the Other Place
… I mean, Linda always said that nobody was ever
alone there."
- Bernard blushed
uncomfortably. "You see," he said, mumbling and
with averted eyes, "I'm rather different from most
people, I suppose. If one happens to be decanted
different …"
- "Yes, that's just it."
The young man nodded. "If one's different, one's
bound to be lonely. They're beastly to one. Do you know,
they shut me out of absolutely everything? When the other
boys were sent out to spend the night on the
mountains–you know, when you have to dream which
your sacred animal is–they wouldn't let me go with
the others; they wouldn't tell me any of the secrets. I
did it by myself, though," he added. "Didn't
eat anything for five days and then went out one night
alone into those mountains there." He pointed.
- Patronizingly, Bernard
smiled. "And did you dream of anything?" he
asked.
- The other nodded. "But
I mustn't tell you what." He was silent for a little;
then, in a low voice, "Once," he went on,
"I did something that none of the others did: I
stood against a rock in the middle of the day, in summer,
with my arms out, like Jesus on the Cross."
- "What on earth for?"
- "I wanted to know what
it was like being crucified. Hanging there in the sun
…"
- "But why?"
- "Why? Well …"
He hesitated. "Because I felt I ought to. If Jesus
could stand it. And then, if one has done something wrong
… Besides, I was unhappy; that was another reason."
- "It seems a funny way
of curing your unhappiness," said Bernard. But on
second thoughts he decided that there was, after all,
some sense in it. Better than taking soma …
- "I fainted after a
time," said the young man. "Fell down on my
face. Do you see the mark where I cut myself?" He
lifted the thick yellow hair from his forehead. The scar
showed, pale and puckered, on his right temple.
- Bernard looked, and then
quickly, with a little shudder, averted his eyes. His
conditioning had made him not so much pitiful as
profoundly squeamish. The mere suggestion of illness or
wounds was to him not only horrifying, but even repulsive
and rather disgusting. Like dirt, or deformity, or old
age. Hastily he changed the subject.
- "I wonder if you'd
like to come back to London with us?" he asked,
making the first move in a campaign whose strategy he had
been secretly elaborating ever since, in the little house,
he had realized who the "father" of this young
savage must be. "Would you like that?"
- The young man's face lit up.
"Do you really mean it?"
- "Of course; if I can
get permission, that is."
- "Linda too?"
- "Well …" He
hesitated doubtfully. That revolting creature! No, it was
impossible. Unless, unless … It suddenly occurred to
Bernard that her very revoltingness might prove an
enormous asset. "But of course!" he cried,
making up for his first hesitations with an excess of
noisy cordiality.
- The young man drew a deep
breath. "To think it should be coming true–what
I've dreamt of all my life. Do you remember what Miranda
says?"
- "Who's Miranda?"
- But the young man had
evidently not heard the question. "O wonder!"
he was saying; and his eyes shone, his face was brightly
flushed. "How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is!" The flush suddenly
deepened; he was thinking of Lenina, of an angel in
bottle-green viscose, lustrous with youth and skin food,
plump, benevolently smiling. His voice faltered. "O
brave new world," he began, then-suddenly
interrupted himself; the blood had left his cheeks; he
was as pale as paper.
- "Are you married to
her?" he asked.
- "Am I what?"
- "Married. You
know–for ever. They say 'for ever' in the Indian
words; it can't be broken."
- "Ford, no!"
Bernard couldn't help laughing.
- John also laughed, but for
another reason–laughed for pure joy.
- "O brave new world,"
he repeated. "O brave new world that has such people
in it. Let's start at once."
- "You have a most
peculiar way of talking sometimes," said Bernard,
staring at the young man in perplexed astonishment.
"And, anyhow, hadn't you better wait till you
actually see the new world?"
chapter nine
LENINA felt herself entitled, after this day of
queerness and horror, to a complete and absolute holiday. As soon
as they got back to the rest-house, she swallowed six half-gramme
tablets of soma, lay down on her bed, and within ten
minutes had embarked for lunar eternity. It would be eighteen
hours at the least before she was in time again.
- Bernard meanwhile lay
pensive and wide-eyed in the dark. It was long after
midnight before he fell asleep. Long after midnight; but
his insomnia had not been fruitless; he had a plan.
- Punctually, on the
following morning, at ten o'clock, the green-uniformed
octoroon stepped out of his helicopter. Bernard was
waiting for him among the agaves.
- "Miss Crowne's gone on
soma-holiday," he explained. "Can hardly
be back before five. Which leaves us seven hours."
- He could fly to Santa F?, do all the business he had to do, and be
in Malpais again long before she woke up.
- "She'll be quite safe
here by herself?"
- "Safe as helicopters,"
the octoroon assured him.
- They climbed into the
machine and started off at once. At ten thirty-four they
landed on the roof of the Santa F? Post
Office; at ten thirty-seven Bernard had got through to
the World Controller's Office in Whitehall; at ten thirty-seven
he was speaking to his fordship's fourth personal
secretary; at ten forty-four he was repeating his story
to the first secretary, and at ten forty-seven and a half
it was the deep, resonant voice of Mustapha Mond himself
that sounded in his ears.
- "I ventured to think,"
stammered Bernard, "that your fordship might find
the matter of sufficient scientific interest …"
- "Yes, I do find it of
sufficient scientific interest," said the deep voice.
"Bring these two individuals back to London with you."
- "Your fordship is
aware that I shall need a special permit …"
- "The necessary orders,"
said Mustapha Mond, "are being sent to the Warden of
the Reservation at this moment. You will proceed at once
to the Warden's Office. Good-morning, Mr. Marx."
- There was silence. Bernard
hung up the receiver and hurried up to the roof.
- "Warden's Office,"
he said to the Gamma-green octoroon.
- At ten fifty-four Bernard
was shaking hands with the Warden.
- "Delighted, Mr. Marx,
delighted." His boom was deferential. "We have
just received special orders …"
- "I know," said
Bernard, interrupting him. "I was talking to his
fordship on the phone a moment ago." His bored tone
implied that he was in the habit of talking to his
fordship every day of the week. He dropped into a chair.
"If you'll kindly take all the necessary steps as
soon as possible. As soon as possible," he
emphatically repeated. He was thoroughly enjoying himself.
- At eleven three he had all
the necessary papers in his pocket.
- "So long," he
said patronizingly to the Warden, who had accompanied him
as far as the lift gates. "So long."
- He walked across to the
hotel, had a bath, a vibro-vac massage, and an
electrolytic shave, listened in to the morning's news,
looked in for half an hour on the televisor, ate a
leisured luncheon, and at half-past two flew back with
the octoroon to Malpais.
- The young man stood outside
the rest-house.
- "Bernard," he
called. "Bernard!" There was no answer.
- Noiseless on his deerksin
moccasins, he ran up the steps and tried the door. The
door was locked.
- They were gone! Gone! It
was the most terrible thing that had ever happened to him.
She had asked him to come and see them, and now they were
gone. He sat down on the steps and cried.
- Half an hour later it
occurred to him to look through the window. The first
thing he saw was a green suit-case, with the initials L.C.
painted on the lid. Joy flared up like fire within him.
He picked up a stone. The smashed glass tinkled on the
floor. A moment later he was inside the room. He opened
the green suit-case; and all at once he was breathing
Lenina's perfume, filling his lungs with her essential
being. His heart beat wildly; for a moment he was almost
faint. Then, bending over the precious box, he touched,
he lifted into the light, he examined. The zippers on
Lenina's spare pair of viscose velveteen shorts were at
first a puzzle, then solved, a delight. Zip, and then zip;
zip, and then zip; he was enchanted. Her green slippers
were the most beautiful things he had ever seen. He
unfolded a pair of zippicamiknicks, blushed, put them
hastily away again; but kissed a perfumed acetate
handkerchief and wound a scarf round his neck. Opening a
box, he spilt a cloud of scented powder. His hands were
floury with the stuff. He wiped them on his chest, on his
shoulders, on his bare arms. Delicious perfume! He shut
his eyes; he rubbed his cheek against his own powdered
arm. Touch of smooth skin against his face, scent in his
nostrils of musky dust–her real presence. "Lenina,"
he whispered. "Lenina!"
- A noise made him start,
made him guiltily turn. He crammed up his thieveries into
the suit-case and shut the lid; then listened again,
looked. Not a sign of life, not a sound. And yet he had
certainly heard something–something like a sigh,
something like the creak of a board. He tiptoed to the
door and, cautiously opening it, found himself looking on
to a broad landing. On the opposite side of the landing
was another door, ajar. He stepped out, pushed, peeped.
- There, on a low bed, the
sheet flung back, dressed in a pair of pink one-piece
zippyjamas, lay Lenina, fast asleep and so beautiful in
the midst of her curls, so touchingly childish with her
pink toes and her grave sleeping face, so trustful in the
helplessness of her limp hands and melted limbs, that the
tears came to his eyes.
- With an infinity of quite
unnecessary precautions–for nothing short of a
pistol shot could have called Lenina back from her soma-holiday
before the appointed time–he entered the room, he
knelt on the floor beside the bed. He gazed, he clasped
his hands, his lips moved. "Her eyes," he
murmured,
- "Her eyes, her hair,
her cheek, her gait, her voice;
- Handlest in thy
discourse O! that her hand,
- In whose comparison all
whites are ink
- Writing their own
reproach; to whose soft seizure
- The cygnet's down is
harsh …"
- A fly buzzed round her; he
waved it away. "Flies," he remembered,
- "On the white
wonder of dear Juliet's hand, may seize
- And steal immortal
blessing from her lips,
- Who, even in pure and
vestal modesty,
- Still blush, as thinking
their own kisses sin."
- Very slowly, with the
hesitating gesture of one who reaches forward to stroke a
shy and possibly rather dangerous bird, he put out his
hand. It hung there trembling, within an inch of those
limp fingers, on the verge of contact. Did he dare? Dare
to profane with his unworthiest hand that … No, he
didn't. The bird was too dangerous. His hand dropped back.
How beautiful she was! How beautiful!
- Then suddenly he found
himself reflecting that he had only to take hold of the
zipper at her neck and give one long, strong pull …
He shut his eyes, he shook his head with the gesture of a
dog shaking its ears as it emerges from the water.
Detestable thought! He was ashamed of himself. Pure and
vestal modesty …
- There was a humming in the
air. Another fly trying to steal immortal blessings? A
wasp? He looked, saw nothing. The humming grew louder and
louder, localized itself as being outside the shuttered
windows. The plane! In a panic, he scrambled to his feet
and ran into the other room, vaulted through the open
window, and hurrying along the path between the tall
agaves was in time to receive Bernard Marx as he climbed
out of the helicopter.
chapter ten
THE HANDS of all the four thousand electric clocks
in all the Bloomsbury Centre's four thousand rooms marked twenty-seven
minutes past two. "This hive of industry," as the
Director was fond of calling it, was in the full buzz of work.
Every one was busy, everything in ordered motion. Under the
microscopes, their long tails furiously lashing, spermatozoa were
burrowing head first into eggs; and, fertilized, the eggs were
expanding, dividing, or if bokanovskified, budding and breaking
up into whole populations of separate embryos. From the Social
Predestination Room the escalators went rumbling down into the
basement, and there, in the crimson darkness, stewingly warm on
their cushion of peritoneum and gorged with blood-surrogate and
hormones, the foetuses grew and grew or, poisoned, languished
into a stunted Epsilonhood. With a faint hum and rattle the
moving racks crawled imperceptibly through the weeks and the
recapitulated aeons to where, in the Decanting Room, the newly-unbottled
babes uttered their first yell of horror and amazement.
- The dynamos purred in the
sub-basement, the lifts rushed up and down. On all the
eleven floors of Nurseries it was feeding time. From
eighteen hundred bottles eighteen hundred carefully
labelled infants were simultaneously sucking down their
pint of pasteurized external secretion.
- Above them, in ten
successive layers of dormitory, the little boys and girls
who were still young enough to need an afternoon sleep
were as busy as every one else, though they did not know
it, listening unconsciously to hypnop?dic lessons in hygiene and sociability, in
class-consciousness and the toddler's love-life. Above
these again were the playrooms where, the weather having
turned to rain, nine hundred older children were amusing
themselves with bricks and clay modelling, hunt-the-zipper,
and erotic play.
- Buzz, buzz! the hive was
humming, busily, joyfully. Blithe was the singing of the
young girls over their test-tubes, the Predestinators
whistled as they worked, and in the Decanting Room what
glorious jokes were cracked above the empty bottles! But
the Director's face, as he entered the Fertilizing Room
with Henry Foster, was grave, wooden with severity.
- "A public example,"
he was saying. "In this room, because it contains
more high-caste workers than any other in the Centre. I
have told him to meet me here at half-past two."
- "He does his work very
well," put in Henry, with hypocritical generosity.
- "I know. But that's
all the more reason for severity. His intellectual
eminence carries with it corresponding moral
responsibilities. The greater a man's talents, the
greater his power to lead astray. It is better that one
should suffer than that many should be corrupted.
Consider the matter dispassionately, Mr. Foster, and you
will see that no offence is so heinous as unorthodoxy of
behaviour. Murder kills only the individual–and,
after all, what is an individual?" With a sweeping
gesture he indicated the rows of microscopes, the test-tubes,
the incubators. "We can make a new one with the
greatest ease–as many as we like. Unorthodoxy
threatens more than the life of a mere individual; it
strikes at Society itself. Yes, at Society itself,"
he repeated. "Ah, but here he comes."
- Bernard had entered the
room and was advancing between the rows of fertilizers
towards them. A veneer of jaunty self-confidence thinly
concealed his nervousness. The voice in which he said,
"Good-morning, Director," was absurdly too loud;
that in which, correcting his mistake, he said, "You
asked me to come and speak to you here,"
ridiculously soft, a squeak.
- "Yes, Mr. Marx,"
said the Director portentously. "I did ask you to
come to me here. You returned from your holiday last
night, I understand."
- "Yes," Bernard
answered.
- "Yes-s," repeated
the Director, lingering, a serpent, on the "s."
Then, suddenly raising his voice, "Ladies and
gentlemen," he trumpeted, "ladies and gentlemen."
- The singing of the girls
over their test-tubes, the preoccupied whistling of the
Microscopists, suddenly ceased. There was a profound
silence; every one looked round.
- "Ladies and gentlemen,"
the Director repeated once more, "excuse me for thus
interrupting your labours. A painful duty constrains me.
The security and stability of Society are in danger. Yes,
in danger, ladies and gentlemen. This man," he
pointed accusingly at Bernard, "this man who stands
before you here, this Alpha-Plus to whom so much has been
given, and from whom, in consequence, so much must be
expected, this colleague of yours–or should I
anticipate and say this ex-colleague?–has grossly
betrayed the trust imposed in him. By his heretical views
on sport and soma, by the scandalous unorthodoxy
of his sex-life, by his refusal to obey the teachings of
Our Ford and behave out of office hours, 'even as a
little infant,'" (here the Director made the sign of
the T), "he has proved himself an enemy of Society,
a subverter, ladies and gentlemen, of all Order and
Stability, a conspirator against Civilization itself. For
this reason I propose to dismiss him, to dismiss him with
ignominy from the post he has held in this Centre; I
propose forthwith to apply for his transference to a
Subcentre of the lowest order and, that his punishment
may serve the best interest of Society, as far as
possible removed from any important Centre of population.
In Iceland he will have small opportunity to lead others
astray by his unfordly example." The Director paused;
then, folding his arms, he turned impressively to Bernard.
"Marx," he said, "can you show any reason
why I should not now execute the judgment passed upon you?"
- "Yes, I can,"
Bernard answered in a very loud voice.
- Somewhat taken aback, but
still majestically, "Then show it," said the
Director.
- "Certainly. But it's
in the passage. One moment." Bernard hurried to the
door and threw it open. "Come in," he commanded,
and the reason came in and showed itself.
- There was a gasp, a murmur
of astonishment and horror; a young girl screamed;
standing on a chair to get a better view some one upset
two test-tubes full of spermatozoa. Bloated, sagging, and
among those firm youthful bodies, those undistorted faces,
a strange and terrifying monster of middle-agedness,
Linda advanced into the room, coquettishly smiling her
broken and discoloured smile, and rolling as she walked,
with what was meant to be a voluptuous undulation, her
enormous haunches. Bernard walked beside her.
- "There he is," he
said, pointing at the Director.
- "Did you think I didn't
recognize him?" Linda asked indignantly; then,
turning to the Director, "Of course I knew you;
Tomakin, I should have known you anywhere, among a
thousand. But perhaps you've forgotten me. Don't you
remember? Don't you remember, Tomakin? Your Linda."
She stood looking at him, her head on one side, still
smiling, but with a smile that became progressively, in
face of the Director's expression of petrified disgust,
less and less self-confident, that wavered and finally
went out. "Don't you remember, Tomakin?" she
repeated in a voice that trembled. Her eyes were anxious,
agonized. The blotched and sagging face twisted
grotesquely into the grimace of extreme grief. "Tomakin!"
She held out her arms. Some one began to titter.
- "What's the meaning,"
began the Director, "of this monstrous …"
- "Tomakin!" She
ran forward, her blanket trailing behind her, threw her
arms round his neck, hid her face on his chest.
- A howl of laughter went up
irrepressibly.
- "… this monstrous
practical joke," the Director shouted.
- Red in the face, he tried
to disengage himself from her embrace. Desperately she
clung. "But I'm Linda, I'm Linda."' The
laughter drowned her voice. "You made me have a baby,"
she screamed above the uproar. There was a sudden and
appalling hush; eyes floated uncomfortably, not knowing
where to look. The Director went suddenly pale, stopped
struggling and stood, his hands on her wrists, staring
down at her, horrified. "Yes, a baby–and I was
its mother." She flung the obscenity like a
challenge into the outraged silence; then, suddenly
breaking away from him, ashamed, ashamed, covered her
face with her hands, sobbing. "It wasn't my fault,
Tomakin. Because I always did my drill, didn't I? Didn't
I? Always … I don't know how … If you knew how
awful, Tomakin … But he was a comfort to me, all the
same." Turning towards the door, "John!"
she called. "John!"
- He came in at once, paused
for a moment just inside the door, looked round, then
soft on his moccasined feet strode quickly across the
room, fell on his knees in front of the Director, and
said in a clear voice: "My father!"
- The word (for "father"
was not so much obscene as–with its connotation of
something at one remove from the loathsomeness and moral
obliquity of child-bearing–merely gross, a
scatological rather than a pornographic impropriety); the
comically smutty word relieved what had become a quite
intolerable tension. Laughter broke out, enormous, almost
hysterical, peal after peal, as though it would never
stop. My father–and it was the Director! My father!
Oh Ford, oh Ford! That was really too good. The whooping
and the roaring renewed themselves, faces seemed on the
point of disintegration, tears were streaming. Six more
test-tubes of spermatozoa were upset. My father!
- Pale, wild-eyed, the
Director glared about him in an agony of bewildered
humiliation.
- My father! The
laughter, which had shown signs of dying away, broke out
again more loudly than ever. He put his hands over his
ears and rushed out of the room.
chapter eleven
AFTER the scene in the Fertilizing Room, all upper-caste
London was wild to see this delicious creature who had fallen on
his knees before the Director of Hatcheries and
Conditioning–or rather the ex-Director, for the poor man had
resigned immediately afterwards and never set foot inside the
Centre again–had flopped down and called him (the joke was
almost too good to be true!) "my father." Linda, on the
contrary, cut no ice; nobody had the smallest desire to see Linda.
To say one was a mother–that was past a joke: it was an
obscenity. Moreover, she wasn't a real savage, had been hatched
out of a bottle and conditioned like any one else: so couldn't
have really quaint ideas. Finally–and this was by far the
strongest reason for people's not wanting to see poor
Linda–there was her appearance. Fat; having lost her youth;
with bad teeth, and a blotched complexion, and that figure (Ford!)–you
simply couldn't look at her without feeling sick, yes, positively
sick. So the best people were quite determined not to see
Linda. And Linda, for her part, had no desire to see them. The
return to civilization was for her the return to soma, was
the possibility of lying in bed and taking holiday after holiday,
without ever having to come back to a headache or a fit of
vomiting, without ever being made to feel as you always felt
after peyotl, as though you'd done something so shamefully
anti-social that you could never hold up your head again. Soma
played none of these unpleasant tricks. The holiday it gave was
perfect and, if the morning after was disagreeable, it was so,
not intrinsically, but only by comparison with the joys of the
holiday. The remedy was to make the holiday continuous. Greedily
she clamoured for ever larger, ever more frequent doses. Dr. Shaw
at first demurred; then let her have what she wanted. She took as
much as twenty grammes a day.
- "Which will finish her
off in a month or two," the doctor confided to
Bernard. "One day the respiratory centre will be
paralyzed. No more breathing. Finished. And a good thing
too. If we could rejuvenate, of course it would be
different. But we can't."
- Surprisingly, as every one
thought (for on soma-holiday Linda was most
conveniently out of the way), John raised objections.
- "But aren't you
shortening her life by giving her so much?"
- "In one sense, yes,"
Dr. Shaw admitted. "But in another we're actually
lengthening it." The young man stared,
uncomprehending. "Soma may make you lose a
few years in time," the doctor went on. "But
think of the enormous, immeasurable durations it can give
you out of time. Every soma-holiday is a bit of
what our ancestors used to call eternity."
- John began to understand.
"Eternity was in our lips and eyes," he
murmured.
- "Eh?"
- "Nothing."
- "Of course," Dr.
Shaw went on, "you can't allow people to go popping
off into eternity if they've got any serious work to do.
But as she hasn't got any serious work …"
- "All the same,"
John persisted, "I don't believe it's right."
- The doctor shrugged his
shoulders. "Well, of course, if you prefer to have
her screaming mad all the time …"
- In the end John was forced
to give in. Linda got her soma. Thenceforward she
remained in her little room on the thirty-seventh floor
of Bernard's apartment house, in bed, with the radio and
television always on, and the patchouli tap just dripping,
and the soma tablets within reach of her
hand–there she remained; and yet wasn't there at all,
was all the time away, infinitely far away, on holiday;
on holiday in some other world, where the music of the
radio was a labyrinth of sonorous colours, a sliding,
palpitating labyrinth, that led (by what beautifully
inevitable windings) to a bright centre of absolute
conviction; where the dancing images of the television
box were the performers in some indescribably delicious
all-singing feely; where the dripping patchouli was more
than scent–was the sun, was a million saxophones,
was Pop? making love, only much more so,
incomparably more, and without end.
- "No, we can't
rejuvenate. But I'm very glad," Dr. Shaw had
concluded, "to have had this opportunity to see an
example of senility in a human being. Thank you so much
for calling me in." He shook Bernard warmly by the
hand.
- It was John, then, they
were all after. And as it was only through Bernard, his
accredited guardian, that John could be seen, Bernard now
found himself, for the first time in his life, treated
not merely normally, but as a person of outstanding
importance. There was no more talk of the alcohol in his
blood-surrogate, no gibes at his personal appearance.
Henry Foster went out of his way to be friendly; Benito
Hoover made him a present of six packets of sex-hormone
chewing-gum; the Assistant Predestinator came out and
cadged almost abjectly for an invitation to one of
Bernard's evening parties. As for the women, Bernard had
only to hint at the possibility of an invitation, and he
could have whichever of them he liked.
- "Bernard's asked me to
meet the Savage next Wednesday," Fanny announced
triumphantly.
- "I'm so glad,"
said Lenina. "And now you must admit that you were
wrong about Bernard. Don't you think he's really rather
sweet?"
- Fanny nodded. "And I
must say," she said, "I was quite agreeably
surprised."
- The Chief Bottler, the
Director of Predestination, three Deputy Assistant
Fertilizer-Generals, the Professor of Feelies in the
College of Emotional Engineering, the Dean of the
Westminster Community Singery, the Supervisor of
Bokanovskification–the list of Bernard's
notabilities was interminable.
- "And I had six girls
last week," he confided to Helmholtz Watson. "One
on Monday, two on Tuesday, two more on Friday, and one on
Saturday. And if I'd had the time or the inclination,
there were at least a dozen more who were only too
anxious …"
- Helmholtz listened to his
boastings in a silence so gloomily disapproving that
Bernard was offended.
- "You're envious,"
he said.
- Helmholtz shook his head.
"I'm rather sad, that's all," he answered.
- Bernard went off in a huff.
Never, he told himself, never would he speak to Helmholtz
again.
- The days passed. Success
went fizzily to Bernard's head, and in the process
completely reconciled him (as any good intoxicant should
do) to a world which, up till then, he had found very
unsatisfactory. In so far as it recognized him as
important, the order of things was good. But, reconciled
by his success, he yet refused to forego the privilege of
criticizing this order. For the act of criticizing
heightened his sense of importance, made him feel larger.
Moreover, he did genuinely believe that there were things
to criticize. (At the same time, he genuinely liked being
a success and having all the girls he wanted.) Before
those who now, for the sake of the Savage, paid their
court to him, Bernard would parade a carping unorthodoxy.
He was politely listened to. But behind his back people
shook their heads. "That young man will come to a
bad end," they said, prophesying the more
confidently in that they themselves would in due course
personally see to it that the end was bad. "He won't
find another Savage to help him out a second time,"
they said. Meanwhile, however, there was the first Savage;
they were polite. And because they were polite, Bernard
felt positively gigantic–gigantic and at the same
time light with elation, lighter than air.
- "Lighter than air,"
said Bernard, pointing upwards.
- Like a pearl in the sky,
high, high above them, the Weather Department's captive
balloon shone rosily in the sunshine.
- "… the said
Savage," so ran Bernard's instructions, "to be
shown civilized life in all its aspects. …"
- He was being shown a bird's-eye
view of it at present, a bird's-eye view from the
platform of the Charing-T Tower. The Station Master and
the Resident Meteorologist were acting as guides. But it
was Bernard who did most of the talking. Intoxicated, he
was behaving as though, at the very least, he were a
visiting World Controller. Lighter than air.
- The Bombay Green Rocket
dropped out of the sky. The passengers alighted. Eight
identical Dravidian twins in khaki looked out of the
eight portholes of the cabin–the stewards.
- "Twelve hundred and
fifty kilometres an hour," said the Station Master
impressively. "What do you think of that, Mr. Savage?"
- John thought it very nice.
"Still," he said, "Ariel could put a
girdle round the earth in forty minutes."
- "The Savage,"
wrote Bernard in his report to Mustapha Mond, "shows
surprisingly little astonishment at, or awe of, civilized
inventions. This is partly due, no doubt, to the fact
that he has heard them talked about by the woman Linda,
his m–––."
- (Mustapha Mond frowned.
"Does the fool think I'm too squeamish to see the
word written out at full length?")
- "Partly on his
interest being focussed on what he calls 'the soul,'
which he persists in regarding as an entity independent
of the physical environment, whereas, as I tried to point
out to him …"
- The Controller skipped the
next sentences and was just about to turn the page in
search of something more interestingly concrete, when his
eye was caught by a series of quite extraordinary phrases.
" … though I must admit," he read, "that
I agree with the Savage in finding civilized infantility
too easy or, as he puts it, not expensive enough; and I
would like to take this opportunity of drawing your
fordship's attention to …"
- Mustapha Mond's anger gave
place almost at once to mirth. The idea of this creature
solemnly lecturing him–him-about the social
order was really too grotesque. The man must have gone
mad. "I ought to give him a lesson," he said to
himself; then threw back his head and laughed aloud. For
the moment, at any rate, the lesson would not be given.
- It was a small factory of
lighting-sets for helicopters, a branch of the Electrical
Equipment Corporation. They were met on the roof itself (for
that circular letter of recommendation from the
Controller was magical in its effects) by the Chief
Technician and the Human Element Manager. They walked
downstairs into the factory.
- "Each process,"
explained the Human Element Manager, "is carried out,
so far as possible, by a single Bokanovsky Group."
- And, in effect, eighty-three
almost noseless black brachycephalic Deltas were cold-pressing.
The fifty-six four-spindle chucking and turning machines
were being manipulated by fifty-six aquiline and ginger
Gammas. One hundred and seven heat-conditioned Epsilon
Senegalese were working in the foundry. Thirty-three
Delta females, long-headed, sandy, with narrow pelvises,
and all within 20 millimetres of 1 metre 69 centimetres
tall, were cutting screws. In the assembling room, the
dynamos were being put together by two sets of Gamma-Plus
dwarfs. The two low work-tables faced one another;
between them crawled the conveyor with its load of
separate parts; forty-seven blonde heads were confronted
by forty-seven brown ones. Forty-seven snubs by forty-seven
hooks; forty-seven receding by forty-seven prognathous
chins. The completed mechanisms were inspected by
eighteen identical curly auburn girls in Gamma green,
packed in crates by thirty-four short-legged, left-handed
male Delta-Minuses, and loaded into the waiting trucks
and lorries by sixty-three blue-eyed, flaxen and freckled
Epsilon Semi-Morons.
- "O brave new world
…" By some malice of his memory the Savage
found himself repeating Miranda's words. "O brave
new world that has such people in it."
- "And I assure you,"
the Human Element Manager concluded, as they left the
factory, "we hardly ever have any trouble with our
workers. We always find …"
- But the Savage had suddenly
broken away from his companions and was violently
retching, behind a clump of laurels, as though the solid
earth had been a helicopter in an air pocket.
- "The Savage,"
wrote Bernard, "refuses to take soma, and
seems much distressed because of the woman Linda, his
m–––, remains permanently on holiday. It
is worthy of note that, in spite of his
m–––'s senility and the extreme
repulsiveness of her appearance, the Savage frequently
goes to see her and appears to be much attached to
her–an interesting example of the way in which early
conditioning can be made to modify and even run counter
to natural impulses (in this case, the impulse to recoil
from an unpleasant object)."
- At Eton they alighted on
the roof of Upper School. On the opposite side of School
Yard, the fifty-two stories of Lupton's Tower gleamed
white in the sunshine. College on their left and, on
their right, the School Community Singery reared their
venerable piles of ferro-concrete and vita-glass. In the
centre of the quadrangle stood the quaint old chrome-steel
statue of Our Ford.
- Dr. Gaffney, the Provost,
and Miss Keate, the Head Mistress, received them as they
stepped out of the plane.
- "Do you have many
twins here?" the Savage asked rather apprehensively,
as they set out on their tour of inspection.
- "Oh, no," the
Provost answered. "Eton is reserved exclusively for
upper-caste boys and girls. One egg, one adult. It makes
education more difficult of course. But as they'll be
called upon to take responsibilities and deal with
unexpected emergencies, it can't be helped." He
sighed.
- Bernard, meanwhile, had
taken a strong fancy to Miss Keate. "If you're free
any Monday, Wednesday, or Friday evening," he was
saying. Jerking his thumb towards the Savage, "He's
curious, you know," Bernard added. "Quaint."
- Miss Keate smiled (and her
smile was really charming, he thought); said Thank you;
would be delighted to come to one of his parties. The
Provost opened a door.
- Five minutes in that Alpha
Double Plus classroom left John a trifle bewildered.
- "What is
elementary relativity?" he whispered to Bernard.
Bernard tried to explain, then thought better of it and
suggested that they should go to some other classroom.
- From behind a door in the
corridor leading to the Beta-Minus geography room, a
ringing soprano voice called, "One, two, three, four,"
and then, with a weary impatience, "As you were."
- "Malthusian Drill,"
explained the Head Mistress. "Most of our girls are
freemartins, of course. I'm a freemartin myself."
She smiled at Bernard. "But we have about eight
hundred unsterilized ones who need constant drilling."
- In the Beta-Minus geography
room John learnt that "a savage reservation is a
place which, owing to unfavourable climatic or geological
conditions, or poverty of natural resources, has not been
worth the expense of civilizing." A click; the room
was darkened; and suddenly, on the screen above the
Master's head, there were the Penitentes of Acoma
prostrating themselves before Our Lady, and wailing as
John had heard them wail, confessing their sins before
Jesus on the Cross, before the eagle image of Pookong.
The young Etonians fairly shouted with laughter. Still
wailing, the Penitentes rose to their feet,
stripped off their upper garments and, with knotted whips,
began to beat themselves, blow after blow. Redoubled, the
laughter drowned even the amplified record of their
groans.
- "But why do they laugh?"
asked the Savage in a pained bewilderment.
- "Why?" The
Provost turned towards him a still broadly grinning face.
"Why? But because it's so extraordinarily
funny."
- In the cinematographic
twilight, Bernard risked a gesture which, in the past,
even total darkness would hardly have emboldened him to
make. Strong in his new importance, he put his arm around
the Head Mistress's waist. It yielded, willowily. He was
just about to snatch a kiss or two and perhaps a gentle
pinch, when the shutters clicked open again.
- "Perhaps we had better
go on," said Miss Keate, and moved towards the door.
- "And this," said
the Provost a moment later, "is Hypnop?dic Control Room."
- Hundreds of synthetic music
boxes, one for each dormitory, stood ranged in shelves
round three sides of the room; pigeon-holed on the fourth
were the paper sound-track rolls on which the various
hypnop?dic lessons were printed.
- "You slip the roll in
here," explained Bernard, interrupting Dr. Gaffney,
"press down this switch …"
- "No, that one,"
corrected the Provost, annoyed.
- "That one, then. The
roll unwinds. The selenium cells transform the light
impulses into sound waves, and …"
- "And there you are,"
Dr. Gaffney concluded.
- "Do they read
Shakespeare?" asked the Savage as they walked, on
their way to the Bio-chemical Laboratories, past the
School Library.
- "Certainly not,"
said the Head Mistress, blushing.
- "Our library,"
said Dr. Gaffney, "contains only books of reference.
If our young people need distraction, they can get it at
the feelies. We don't encourage them to indulge in any
solitary amusements."
- Five bus-loads of boys and
girls, singing or in a silent embracement, rolled past
them over the vitrified highway.
- "Just returned,"
explained Dr. Gaffney, while Bernard, whispering, made an
appointment with the Head Mistress for that very evening,
"from the Slough Crematorium. Death conditioning
begins at eighteen months. Every tot spends two mornings
a week in a Hospital for the Dying. All the best toys are
kept there, and they get chocolate cream on death days.
They learn to take dying as a matter of course."
- "Like any other
physiological process," put in the Head Mistress
professionally.
- Eight o'clock at the Savoy.
It was all arranged.
- On their way back to London
they stopped at the Television Corporation's factory at
Brentford.
- "Do you mind waiting
here a moment while I go and telephone?" asked
Bernard.
- The Savage waited and
watched. The Main Day-Shift was just going off duty.
Crowds of lower-caste workers were queued up in front of
the monorail station-seven or eight hundred Gamma, Delta
and Epsilon men and women, with not more than a dozen
faces and statures between them. To each of them, with
his or her ticket, the booking clerk pushed over a little
cardboard pillbox. The long caterpillar of men and women
moved slowly forward.
- "What's in those"
(remembering The Merchant of Venice) "those
caskets?" the Savage enquired when Bernard had
rejoined him.
- "The day's soma
ration," Bernard answered rather indistinctly; for
he was masticating a piece of Benito Hoover's chewing-gum.
"They get it after their work's over. Four half-gramme
tablets. Six on Saturdays."
- He took John's arm
affectionately and they walked back towards the
helicopter.
- Lenina came singing into
the Changing Room.
- "You seem very pleased
with yourself," said Fanny.
- "I am pleased,"
she answered. Zip! "Bernard rang up half an hour ago."
Zip, zip! She stepped out of her shorts. "He has an
unexpected engagement." Zip! "Asked me if I'd
take the Savage to the feelies this evening. I must fly."
She hurried away towards the bathroom.
- "She's a lucky girl,"
Fanny said to herself as she watched Lenina go.
- There was no envy in the
comment; good-natured Fanny was merely stating a fact.
Lenina was lucky; lucky in having shared with Bernard a
generous portion of the Savage's immense celebrity, lucky
in reflecting from her insignificant person the moment's
supremely fashionable glory. Had not the Secretary of the
Young Women's Fordian Association asked her to give a
lecture about her experiences? Had she not been invited
to the Annual Dinner of the Aphroditeum Club? Had she not
already appeared in the Feelytone News–visibly,
audibly and tactually appeared to countless millions all
over the planet?
- Hardly less flattering had
been the attentions paid her by conspicuous individuals.
The Resident World Controller's Second Secretary had
asked her to dinner and breakfast. She had spent one week-end
with the Ford Chief-Justice, and another with the Arch-Community-Songster
of Canterbury. The President of the Internal and External
Secretions Corporation was perpetually on the phone, and
she had been to Deauville with the Deputy-Governor of the
Bank of Europe.
- "It's wonderful, of
course. And yet in a way," she had confessed to
Fanny, "I feel as though I were getting something on
false pretences. Because, of course, the first thing they
all want to know is what it's like to make love to a
Savage. And I have to say I don't know." She shook
her head. "Most of the men don't believe me, of
course. But it's true. I wish it weren't," she added
sadly and sighed. "He's terribly good-looking; don't
you think so?"
- "But doesn't he like
you?" asked Fanny.
- "Sometimes I think he
does and sometimes I think he doesn't. He always does his
best to avoid me; goes out of the room when I come in;
won't touch me; won't even look at me. But sometimes if I
turn round suddenly, I catch him staring; and
then–well, you know how men look when they like you."
- Yes, Fanny knew.
- "I can't make it out,"
said Lenina.
- She couldn't make it out;
and not only was bewildered; was also rather upset.
- "Because, you see,
Fanny, I like him."
- Liked him more and more.
Well, now there'd be a real chance, she thought, as she
scented herself after her bath. Dab, dab, dab–a real
chance. Her high spirits overflowed in a song.
- ''Hug me till you drug
me, honey;
- Kiss me till I'm in a
coma;
- Hug me, honey, snuggly
bunny;
- Love's as good as soma."
- The scent organ was playing
a delightfully refreshing Herbal Capriccio–rippling
arpeggios of thyme and lavender, of rosemary, basil,
myrtle, tarragon; a series of daring modulations through
the spice keys into ambergris; and a slow return through
sandalwood, camphor, cedar and newmown hay (with
occasional subtle touches of discord–a whiff of
kidney pudding, the faintest suspicion of pig's dung)
back to the simple aromatics with which the piece began.
The final blast of thyme died away; there was a round of
applause; the lights went up. In the synthetic music
machine the sound-track roll began to unwind. It was a
trio for hyper-violin, super-cello and oboe-surrogate
that now filled the air with its agreeable languor.
Thirty or forty bars–and then, against this
instrumental background, a much more than human voice
began to warble; now throaty, now from the head, now
hollow as a flute, now charged with yearning harmonics,
it effortlessly passed from Gaspard's Forster's low
record on the very frontiers of musical tone to a trilled
bat-note high above the highest C to which (in 1770, at
the Ducal opera of Parma, and to the astonishment of
Mozart) Lucrezia Ajugari, alone of all the singers in
history, once piercingly gave utterance.
- Sunk in their pneumatic
stalls, Lenina and the Savage sniffed and listened. It
was now the turn also for eyes and skin.
- The house lights went down;
fiery letters stood out solid and as though self-supported
in the darkness. THREE WEEKS IN A HELICOPTER . AN ALL-SUPER-SINGING,
SYNTHETIC-TALK1NG, COLOURED, STEREOSCOPIC FEELY. WITH
SYNCHRONIZED SCENT-ORGAN ACCOMPANIMENT.
- "Take hold of those
metal knobs on the arms of your chair," whispered
Lenina. "Otherwise you won't get any of the feely
effects."
- The Savage did as he was
told.
- Those fiery letters,
meanwhile, had disappeared; there were ten seconds of
complete darkness; then suddenly, dazzling and
incomparably more solid-looking than they would have
seemed in actual flesh and blood, far more real than
reality, there stood the stereoscopic images, locked in
one another's arms, of a gigantic negro and a golden-haired
young brachycephalic Beta-Plus female.
- The Savage started. That
sensation on his lips! He lifted a hand to his mouth; the
titillation ceased; let his hand fall back on the metal
knob; it began again. The scent organ, meanwhile,
breathed pure musk. Expiringly, a sound-track super-dove
cooed "Oo-ooh"; and vibrating only thirty-two
times a second, a deeper than African bass made answer:
"Aa-aah." "Ooh-ah! Ooh-ah!" the
stereoscopic lips came together again, and once more the
facial erogenous zones of the six thousand spectators in
the Alhambra tingled with almost intolerable galvanic
pleasure. "Ooh …"
- The plot of the film was
extremely simple. A few minutes after the first Oohs and
Aahs (a duet having been sung and a little love made on
that famous bearskin, every hair of which–the
Assistant Predestinator was perfectly right–could be
separately and distinctly felt), the negro had a
helicopter accident, fell on his head. Thump! what a
twinge through the forehead! A chorus of ow's and aie's
went up from the audience.
- The concussion knocked all
the negro's conditioning into a cocked hat. He developed
for the Beta blonde an exclusive and maniacal passion.
She protested. He persisted. There were struggles,
pursuits, an assault on a rival, finally a sensational
kidnapping. The Beta blond was ravished away into the sky
and kept there, hovering, for three weeks in a wildly
anti-social t?te-?-t?te with the black madman. Finally,
after a whole series of adventures and much aerial
acrobacy three handsome young Alphas succeeded in
rescuing her. The negro was packed off to an Adult Re-conditioning
Centre and the film ended happily and decorously, with
the Beta blonde becoming the mistress of all her three
rescuers. They interrupted themselves for a moment to
sing a synthetic quartet, with full super-orchestral
accompaniment and gardenias on the scent organ. Then the
bearskin made a final appearance and, amid a blare of
saxophones, the last stereoscopic kiss faded into
darkness, the last electric titillation died on the lips
like a dying moth that quivers, quivers, ever more feebly,
ever more faintly, and at last is quiet, quite still.
- But for Lenina the moth did
not completely die. Even after the lights had gone up,
while they were shuffling slowly along with the crowd
towards the lifts, its ghost still fluttered against her
lips, still traced fine shuddering roads of anxiety and
pleasure across her skin. Her cheeks were flushed. She
caught hold of the Savage's arm and pressed it, limp,
against her side. He looked down at her for a moment,
pale, pained, desiring, and ashamed of his desire. He was
not worthy, not … Their eyes for a moment met. What
treasures hers promised! A queen's ransom of temperament.
Hastily he looked away, disengaged his imprisoned arm. He
was obscurely terrified lest she should cease to be
something he could feel himself unworthy of.
- "I don't think you
ought to see things like that," he said, making
haste to transfer from Lenina herself to the surrounding
circumstances the blame for any past or possible future
lapse from perfection.
- "Things like what,
John?"
- "Like this horrible
film."
- "Horrible?"
Lenina was genuinely astonished. "But I thought it
was lovely."
- "It was base," he
said indignantly, "it was ignoble."
- She shook her head. "I
don't know what you mean." Why was he so queer? Why
did he go out of his way to spoil things?
- In the taxicopter he hardly
even looked at her. Bound by strong vows that had never
been pronounced, obedient to laws that had long since
ceased to run, he sat averted and in silence. Sometimes,
as though a finger had plucked at some taut, almost
breaking string, his whole body would shake with a sudden
nervous start.
- The taxicopter landed on
the roof of Lenina's apartment house. "At last,"
she thought exultantly as she stepped out of the cab. At
last–even though he had been so queer just
now. Standing under a lamp, she peered into her hand
mirror. At last. Yes, her nose was a bit shiny. She shook
the loose powder from her puff. While he was paying off
the taxi–there would just be time. She rubbed at the
shininess, thinking: "He's terribly good-looking. No
need for him to be shy like Bernard. And yet … Any
other man would have done it long ago. Well, now at last."
That fragment of a face in the little round mirror
suddenly smiled at her.
- "Good-night,"
said a strangled voice behind her. Lenina wheeled round.
He was standing in the doorway of the cab, his eyes fixed,
staring; had evidently been staring all this time while
she was powdering her nose, waiting–but what for? or
hesitating, trying to make up his mind, and all the time
thinking, thinking–she could not imagine what
extraordinary thoughts. "Good-night, Lenina,"
he repeated, and made a strange grimacing attempt to
smile.
- "But, John … I
thought you were … I mean, aren't you? …"
- He shut the door and bent
forward to say something to the driver. The cab shot up
into the air.
- Looking down through the
window in the floor, the Savage could see Lenina's
upturned face, pale in the bluish light of the lamps. The
mouth was open, she was calling. Her foreshortened figure
rushed away from him; the diminishing square of the roof
seemed to be falling through the darkness.
- Five minutes later he was
back in his room. From its hiding-place he took out his
mouse-nibbled volume, turned with religious care its
stained and crumbled pages, and began to read Othello.
Othello, he remembered, was like the hero of Three
Weeks in a Helicopter–a black man.
Drying her eyes, Lenina walked
across the roof to the lift. On her way down to the
twenty-seventh floor she pulled out her soma
bottle. One gramme, she decided, would not be enough;
hers had been more than a one-gramme affliction. But if
she took two grammes, she ran the risk of not waking up
in time to-morrow morning. She compromised and, into her
cupped left palm, shook out three half-gramme tablets.
chapter twelve
BERNARD had to shout through the locked door; the
Savage would not open.
- "But everybody's there,
waiting for you."
- "Let them wait,"
came back the muffled voice through the door.
- "But you know quite
well, John" (how difficult it is to sound persuasive
at the top of one's voice!) "I asked them on purpose
to meet you."
- "You ought to have
asked me first whether I wanted to meet them."
- "But you always came
before, John."
- "That's precisely why
I don't want to come again."
- "Just to please me,"
Bernard bellowingly wheedled. "Won't you come to
please me?"
- "No."
- "Do you seriously mean
it?"
- "Yes."
- Despairingly, "But
what shall I do?" Bernard wailed.
- "Go to hell!"
bawled the exasperated voice from within.
- "But the Arch-Community-Songster
of Canterbury is there to-night." Bernard was almost
in tears.
- "Ai yaa t?kwa!" It was only in Zu?i that the Savage could adequately express
what he felt about the Arch-Community-Songster. "H?ni!" he added as an after-thought;
and then (with what derisive ferocity!): "Sons ?so tse-n?."
And he spat on the ground, as Pop? might
have done.
- In the end Bernard had to
slink back, diminished, to his rooms and inform the
impatient assembly that the Savage would not be appearing
that evening. The news was received with indignation. The
men were furious at having been tricked into behaving
politely to this insignificant fellow with the unsavoury
reputation and the heretical opinions. The higher their
position in the hierarchy, the deeper their resentment.
- "To play such a joke
on me," the Arch-Songster kept repeating, "on me!"
- As for the women, they
indignantly felt that they had been had on false
pretences–had by a wretched little man who had had
alcohol poured into his bottle by mistake–by a
creature with a Gamma-Minus physique. It was an outrage,
and they said so, more and more loudly. The Head Mistress
of Eton was particularly scathing.
- Lenina alone said nothing.
Pale, her blue eyes clouded with an unwonted melancholy,
she sat in a corner, cut off from those who surrounded
her by an emotion which they did not share. She had come
to the party filled with a strange feeling of anxious
exultation. "In a few minutes," she had said to
herself, as she entered the room, "I shall be seeing
him, talking to him, telling him" (for she had come
with her mind made up) "that I like him–more
than anybody I've ever known. And then perhaps he'll say
…"
- What would he say? The
blood had rushed to her cheeks.
- "Why was he so strange
the other night, after the feelies? So queer. And yet I'm
absolutely sure he really does rather like me. I'm sure
…"
- It was at this moment that
Bernard had made his announcement; the Savage wasn't
coming to the party.
- Lenina suddenly felt all
the sensations normally experienced at the beginning of a
Violent Passion Surrogate treatment–a sense of
dreadful emptiness, a breathless apprehension, a nausea.
Her heart seemed to stop beating.
- "Perhaps it's because
he doesn't like me," she said to herself. And at
once this possibility became an established certainty:
John had refused to come because he didn't like her. He
didn't like her. …
- "It really is a bit too
thick," the Head Mistress of Eton was saying to the
Director of Crematoria and Phosphorus Reclamation. "When
I think that I actually …"
- "Yes," came the
voice of Fanny Crowne, "it's absolutely true about
the alcohol. Some one I know knew some one who was
working in the Embryo Store at the time. She said to my
friend, and my friend said to me …"
- "Too bad, too bad,"
said Henry Foster, sympathizing with the Arch-Community-Songster.
"It may interest you to know that our ex-Director
was on the point of transferring him to Iceland."
- Pierced by every word that
was spoken, the tight balloon of Bernard's happy self-confidence
was leaking from a thousand wounds. Pale, distraught,
abject and agitated, he moved among his guests,
stammering incoherent apologies, assuring them that next
time the Savage would certainly be there, begging them to
sit down and take a carotene sandwich, a slice of vitamin
A p?t?,
a glass of champagne-surrogate. They duly ate, but
ignored him; drank and were either rude to his face or
talked to one another about him, loudly and offensively,
as though he had not been there.
- "And now, my friends,"
said the Arch-Community-Songster of Canterbury, in that
beautiful ringing voice with which he led the proceedings
at Ford's Day Celebrations, "Now, my friends, I
think perhaps the time has come …" He rose, put
down his glass, brushed from his purple viscose waistcoat
the crumbs of a considerable collation, and walked
towards the door.
- Bernard darted forward to
intercept him.
- "Must you really, Arch-Songster?
… It's very early still. I'd hoped you would …"
- Yes, what hadn't he hoped,
when Lenina confidentially told him that the Arch-Community-Songster
would accept an invitation if it were sent. "He's
really rather sweet, you know." And she had shown
Bernard the little golden zipper-fastening in the form of
a T which the Arch-Songster had given her as a memento of
the week-end she had spent at Lambeth. To meet the
Arch-Community-Songster of Canterbury and Mr. Savage.
Bernard had proclaimed his triumph on every invitation
card. But the Savage had chosen this evening of all
evenings to lock himself up in his room, to shout "H?ni!" and even (it was lucky
that Bernard didn't understand Zu?i) "Sons
?so tse-n?!" What should have been the
crowning moment of Bernard's whole career had turned out
to be the moment of his greatest humiliation.
- "I'd so much hoped
…" he stammeringly repeated, looking up at the
great dignitary with pleading and distracted eyes.
- "My young friend,"
said the Arch-Community-Songster in a tone of loud and
solemn severity; there was a general silence. "Let
me give you a word of advice." He wagged his finger
at Bernard. "Before it's too late. A word of good
advice." (His voice became sepulchral.) "Mend
your ways, my young friend, mend your ways." He made
the sign of the T over him and turned away. "Lenina,
my dear," he called in another tone. "Come with
me."
- Obediently, but unsmiling
and (wholly insensible of the honour done to her) without
elation, Lenina walked after him, out of the room. The
other guests followed at a respectful interval. The last
of them slammed the door. Bernard was all alone.
- Punctured, utterly deflated,
he dropped into a chair and, covering his face with his
hands, began to weep. A few minutes later, however, he
thought better of it and took four tablets of soma.
- Upstairs in his room the
Savage was reading Romeo and Juliet.
- Lenina and the Arch-Community-Songster
stepped out on to the roof of Lambeth Palace. "Hurry
up, my young friend–I mean, Lenina," called the
Arch-Songster impatiently from the lift gates. Lenina,
who had lingered for a moment to look at the moon,
dropped her eyes and came hurrying across the roof to
rejoin him.
-
- "A New Theory of
Biology" was the title of the paper which Mustapha
Mond had just finished reading. He sat for some time,
meditatively frowning, then picked up his pen and wrote
across the title-page: "The author's mathematical
treatment of the conception of purpose is novel and
highly ingenious, but heretical and, so far as the
present social order is concerned, dangerous and
potentially subversive. Not to be published."
He underlined the words. "The author will be kept
under supervision. His transference to the Marine
Biological Station of St. Helena may become necessary."
A pity, he thought, as he signed his name. It was a
masterly piece of work. But once you began admitting
explanations in terms of purpose–well, you didn't
know what the result might be. It was the sort of idea
that might easily decondition the more unsettled minds
among the higher castes–make them lose their faith
in happiness as the Sovereign Good and take to believing,
instead, that the goal was somewhere beyond, somewhere
outside the present human sphere, that the purpose of
life was not the maintenance of well-being, but some
intensification and refining of consciousness, some
enlargement of knowledge. Which was, the Controller
reflected, quite possibly true. But not, in the present
circumstance, admissible. He picked up his pen again, and
under the words "Not to be published"
drew a second line, thicker and blacker than the first;
then sighed, "What fun it would be," he thought,
"if one didn't have to think about happiness!"
-
- With closed eyes, his face
shining with rapture, John was softly declaiming to
vacancy:
- "Oh! she doth teach
the torches to burn bright.
- It seems she hangs upon
the cheek of night,
- Like a rich jewel in an
Ethiop's ear;
- Beauty too rich for use,
for earth too dear …"
- The golden T lay shining on
Lenina's bosom. Sportively, the Arch-Community-Songster
caught hold of it, sportively he pulled, pulled. "I
think," said Lenina suddenly, breaking a long
silence, "I'd better take a couple of grammes of soma."
-
- Bernard, by this time, was
fast asleep and smiling at the private paradise of his
dreams. Smiling, smiling. But inexorably, every thirty
seconds, the minute hand of the electric clock above his
bed jumped forward with an almost imperceptible click.
Click, click, click, click … And it was morning.
Bernard was back among the miseries of space and time. It
was in the lowest spirits that he taxied across to his
work at the Conditioning Centre. The intoxication of
success had evaporated; he was soberly his old self; and
by contrast with the temporary balloon of these last
weeks, the old self seemed unprecedentedly heavier than
the surrounding atmosphere.
- To this deflated Bernard
the Savage showed himself unexpectedly sympathetic.
- "You're more like what
you were at Malpais," he said, when Bernard had told
him his plaintive story. "Do you remember when we
first talked together? Outside the little house. You're
like what you were then."
- "Because I'm unhappy
again; that's why."
- "Well, I'd rather be
unhappy than have the sort of false, lying happiness you
were having here."
- "I like that,"
said Bernard bitterly. "When it's you who were the
cause of it all. Refusing to come to my party and so
turning them all against me!" He knew that what he
was saying was absurd in its injustice; he admitted
inwardly, and at last even aloud, the truth of all that
the Savage now said about the worthlessness of friends
who could be turned upon so slight a provocation into
persecuting enemies. But in spite of this knowledge and
these admissions, in spite of the fact that his friend's
support and sympathy were now his only comfort, Bernard
continued perversely to nourish, along with his quite
genuine affection, a secret grievance against the Savage,
to mediate a campaign of small revenges to be wreaked
upon him. Nourishing a grievance against the Arch-Community-Songster
was useless; there was no possibility of being revenged
on the Chief Bottler or the Assistant Predestinator. As a
victim, the Savage possessed, for Bernard, this enormous
superiority over the others: that he was accessible. One
of the principal functions of a friend is to suffer (in a
milder and symbolic form) the punishments that we should
like, but are unable, to inflict upon our enemies.
- Bernard's other victim-friend
was Helmholtz. When, discomfited, he came and asked once
more for the friendship which, in his prosperity, he had
not thought it worth his while to preserve. Helmholtz
gave it; and gave it without a reproach, without a
comment, as though he had forgotten that there had ever
been a quarrel. Touched, Bernard felt himself at the same
time humiliated by this magnanimity–a magnanimity
the more extraordinary and therefore the more humiliating
in that it owed nothing to soma and everything to
Helmholtz's character. It was the Helmholtz of daily life
who forgot and forgave, not the Helmholtz of a half-gramme
holiday. Bernard was duly grateful (it was an enormous
comfort to have his friend again) and also duly resentful
(it would be pleasure to take some revenge on Helmholtz
for his generosity).
- At their first meeting
after the estrangement, Bernard poured out the tale of
his miseries and accepted consolation. It was not till
some days later that he learned, to his surprise and with
a twinge of shame, that he was not the only one who had
been in trouble. Helmholtz had also come into conflict
with Authority.
- "It was over some
rhymes," he explained. "I was giving my usual
course of Advanced Emotional Engineering for Third Year
Students. Twelve lectures, of which the seventh is about
rhymes. 'On the Use of Rhymes in Moral Propaganda and
Advertisement,' to be precise. I always illustrate my
lecture with a lot of technical examples. This time I
thought I'd give them one I'd just written myself. Pure
madness, of course; but I couldn't resist it." He
laughed. "I was curious to see what their reactions
would be. Besides," he added more gravely, "I
wanted to do a bit of propaganda; I was trying to
engineer them into feeling as I'd felt when I wrote the
rhymes. Ford!" He laughed again. "What an
outcry there was! The Principal had me up and threatened
to hand me the immediate sack. l'm a marked man."
- "But what were your
rhymes?" Bernard asked.
- "They were about being
alone."
- Bernard's eyebrows went up.
-
- "I'll recite them to
you, if you like." And Helmholtz began:
- "Yesterday's
committee,
Sticks, but a broken drum,
Midnight in the City,
Flutes in a vacuum,
Shut lips, sleeping faces,
Every stopped machine,
The dumb and littered places
Where crowds have been: …
All silences rejoice,
Weep (loudly or low),
Speak–but with the voice
Of whom, I do not know.
Absence, say, of Susan's,
Absence of Egeria's
Arms and respective bosoms,
Lips and, ah, posteriors,
Slowly form a presence;
Whose? and, I ask, of what
So absurd an essence,
That something, which is not,
Nevertheless should populate
Empty night more solidly
- Than that with which we
copulate,
Why should it seem so squalidly?
- Well, I gave them that as
an example, and they reported me to the Principal."
- "I'm not surprised,"
said Bernard. "It's flatly against all their sleep-teaching.
Remember, they've had at least a quarter of a million
warnings against solitude."
- "I know. But I thought
I'd like to see what the effect would be."
- "Well, you've seen now."
- Helmholtz only laughed.
"I feel," he said, after a silence, as though I
were just beginning to have something to write about. As
though I were beginning to be able to use that power I
feel I've got inside me–that extra, latent power.
Something seems to be coming to me." In spite of all
his troubles, he seemed, Bernard thought, profoundly
happy.
- Helmholtz and the Savage
took to one another at once. So cordially indeed that
Bernard felt a sharp pang of jealousy. In all these weeks
he had never come to so close an intimacy with the Savage
as Helmholtz immediately achieved. Watching them,
listening to their talk, he found himself sometimes
resentfully wishing that he had never brought them
together. He was ashamed of his jealousy and alternately
made efforts of will and took soma to keep himself
from feeling it. But the efforts were not very successful;
and between the soma-holidays there were, of
necessity, intervals. The odious sentiment kept on
returning.
- At his third meeting with
the Savage, Helmholtz recited his rhymes on Solitude.
- "What do you think of
them?" he asked when he had done.
- The Savage shook his head.
"Listen to this," was his answer; and unlocking
the drawer in which he kept his mouse-eaten book, he
opened and read:
- "Let the bird of
loudest lay
- On the sole Arabian tree,
Herald sad and trumpet be …"
- Helmholtz listened with a
growing excitement. At "sole Arabian tree" he
started; at "thou shrieking harbinger" he
smiled with sudden pleasure; at "every fowl of
tyrant wing" the blood rushed up into his cheeks;
but at "defunctive music" he turned pale and
trembled with an unprecedented emotion. The Savage read
on:
-
- "Property was thus
appall'd,
That the self was not the same;
Single nature's double name
Neither two nor one was call'd
Reason in itself confounded
Saw division grow together …"
-
- "Orgy-porgy!"
said Bernard, interrupting the reading with a loud,
unpleasant laugh. "It's just a Solidarity Service
hymn." He was revenging himself on his two friends
for liking one another more than they liked him.
- In the course of their next
two or three meetings he frequently repeated this little
act of vengeance. It was simple and, since both Helmholtz
and the Savage were dreadfully pained by the shattering
and defilement of a favourite poetic crystal, extremely
effective. In the end, Helmholtz threatened to kick him
out of the room if he dared to interrupt again. And yet,
strangely enough, the next interruption, the most
disgraceful of all, came from Helmholtz himself.
- The Savage was reading Romeo
and Juliet aloud–reading (for all the time he
was seeing himself as Romeo and Lenina as Juliet) with an
intense and quivering passion. Helmholtz had listened to
the scene of the lovers' first meeting with a puzzled
interest. The scene in the orchard had delighted him with
its poetry; but the sentiments expressed had made him
smile. Getting into such a state about having a
girl–it seemed rather ridiculous. But, taken detail
by verbal detail, what a superb piece of emotional
engineering! "That old fellow," he said, "he
makes our best propaganda technicians look absolutely
silly." The Savage smiled triumphantly and resumed
his reading. All went tolerably well until, in the last
scene of the third act, Capulet and Lady Capulet began to
bully Juliet to marry Paris. Helmholtz had been restless
throughout the entire scene; but when, pathetically mimed
by the Savage, Juliet cried out:
- "Is there no pity
sitting in the clouds,
- That sees into the
bottom of my grief?
O sweet my mother, cast me not away:
Delay this marriage for a month, a week;
Or, if you do not, make the bridal bed
In that dim monument where Tybalt lies …"when Juliet said this, Helmholtz
broke out in an explosion of uncontrollable guffawing.
- The mother and father (grotesque
obscenity) forcing the daughter to have some one she didn't
want! And the idiotic girl not saying that she was having
some one else whom (for the moment, at any rate) she
preferred! In its smutty absurdity the situation was
irresistibly comical. He had managed, with a heroic
effort, to hold down the mounting pressure of his
hilarity; but "sweet mother" (in the Savage's
tremulous tone of anguish) and the reference to Tybalt
lying dead, but evidently uncremated and wasting his
phosphorus on a dim monument, were too much for him. He
laughed and laughed till the tears streamed down his
face–quenchlessly laughed while, pale with a sense
of outrage, the Savage looked at him over the top of his
book and then, as the laughter still continued, closed it
indignantly, got up and, with the gesture of one who
removes his pearl from before swine, locked it away in
its drawer.
"And
yet," said Helmholtz when, having recovered breath
enough to apologize, he had mollified the Savage into
listening to his explanations, "I know quite well
that one needs ridiculous, mad situations like that; one
can't write really well about anything else. Why was that
old fellow such a marvellous propaganda technician?
Because he had so many insane, excruciating things to get
excited about. You've got to be hurt and upset; otherwise
you can't think of the really good, penetrating, X-rayish
phrases. But fathers and mothers!" He shook his head.
"You can't expect me to keep a straight face about
fathers and mothers. And who's going to get excited about
a boy having a girl or not having her?" (The Savage
winced; but Helmholtz, who was staring pensively at the
floor, saw nothing.) "No." he concluded, with a
sigh, "it won't do. We need some other kind of
madness and violence. But what? What? Where can one find
it?" He was silent; then, shaking his head, "I
don't know," he said at last, "I don't know."
chapter
thirteen
HENRY FOSTER loomed up through the twilight of the
Embryo Store.
- "Like to come to a
feely this evening?"
- Lenina shook her head
without speaking.
- "Going out with some
one else?" It interested him to know which of his
friends was being had by which other. "Is it Benito?"
he questioned.
- She shook her head again.
- Henry detected the
weariness in those purple eyes, the pallor beneath that
glaze of lupus, the sadness at the corners of the
unsmiling crimson mouth. "You're not feeling ill,
are you?" he asked, a trifle anxiously, afraid that
she might be suffering from one of the few remaining
infectious diseases.
- Yet once more Lenina shook
her head.
- "Anyhow, you ought to
go and see the doctor," said Henry. "A doctor a
day keeps the jim-jams away," he added heartily,
driving home his hypnop?dic adage with a clap on the
shoulder. "Perhaps you need a Pregnancy Substitute,"
he suggested. "Or else an extra-strong V.P.S.
treatment. Sometimes, you know, the standard passion
surrogate isn't quite …"
- "Oh, for Ford's sake,"
said Lenina, breaking her stubborn silence, "shut up!"
And she turned back to her neglected embryos.
- A V.P.S. treatment indeed!
She would have laughed, if she hadn't been on the point
of crying. As though she hadn't got enough V. P. of her
own! She sighed profoundly as she refilled her syringe.
"John," she murmured to herself, "John
…" Then "My Ford," she wondered,
"have I given this one its sleeping sickness
injection, or haven't I?" She simply couldn't
remember. In the end, she decided not to run the risk of
letting it have a second dose, and moved down the line to
the next bottle.
- Twenty-two years, eight
months, and four days from that moment, a promising young
Alpha-Minus administrator at Mwanza-Mwanza was to die of
trypanosomiasis–the first case for over half a
century. Sighing, Lenina went on with her work.
- An hour later, in the
Changing Room, Fanny was energetically protesting. "But
it's absurd to let yourself get into a state like this.
Simply absurd," she repeated. "And what about?
A man–one man."
- "But he's the one I
want."
- "As though there weren't
millions of other men in the world."
- "But I don't want them."
- "How can you know till
you've tried?"
- "I have tried."
- "But how many?"
asked Fanny, shrugging her shoulders contemptuously.
"One, two?"
- "Dozens. But,"
shaking her head, "it wasn't any good," she
added.
- "Well, you must
persevere," said Fanny sententiously. But it was
obvious that her confidence in her own prescriptions had
been shaken. "Nothing can be achieved without
perseverance."
- "But meanwhile …"
- "Don't think of him."
- "I can't help it."
- "Take soma,
then."
- "I do."
- "Well, go on."
- "But in the intervals
I still like him. I shall always like him."
- "Well, if that's the
case," said Fanny, with decision, "why don't
you just go and take him. Whether he wants it or no."
- "But if you knew how
terribly queer he was!"
- "All the more reason
for taking a firm line."
- "It's all very well to
say that."
- "Don't stand any
nonsense. Act." Fanny's voice was a trumpet; she
might have been a Y.W.F.A. lecturer giving an evening
talk to adolescent Beta-Minuses. "Yes, act–at
once. Do it now."
- "I'd be scared,"
said Lenina
- "Well, you've only got
to take half a gramme of soma first. And now I'm
going to have my bath." She marched off, trailing
her towel.
The
bell rang, and the Savage, who was impatiently hoping
that Helmholtz would come that afternoon (for having at
last made up his mind to talk to Helmholtz about Lenina,
he could not bear to postpone his confidences a moment
longer), jumped up and ran to the door.
- "I had a premonition
it was you, Helmholtz," he shouted as he opened.
- On the threshold, in a
white acetate-satin sailor suit, and with a round white
cap rakishly tilted over her left ear, stood Lenina.
- "Oh!" said the
Savage, as though some one had struck him a heavy blow.
- Half a gramme had been
enough to make Lenina forget her fears and her
embarrassments. "Hullo, John," she said,
smiling, and walked past him into the room. Automatically
he closed the door and followed her. Lenina sat down.
There was a long silence.
- "You don't seem very
glad to see me, John," she said at last.
- "Not glad?" The
Savage looked at her reproachfully; then suddenly fell on
his knees before her and, taking Lenina's hand,
reverently kissed it. "Not glad? Oh, if you only
knew," he whispered and, venturing to raise his eyes
to her face, "Admired Lenina," he went on,
"indeed the top of admiration, worth what's dearest
in the world." She smiled at him with a luscious
tenderness. "Oh, you so perfect" (she was
leaning towards him with parted lips), "so perfect
and so peerless are created" (nearer and nearer)
"of every creature's best." Still nearer. The
Savage suddenly scrambled to his feet. "That's why,"
he said speaking with averted face, "I wanted to do
something first … I mean, to show I was worthy of
you. Not that I could ever really be that. But at any
rate to show I wasn't absolutely un-worthy. I
wanted to do something."
- "Why should you think
it necessary …" Lenina began, but left the
sentence unfinished. There was a note of irritation in
her voice. When one has leant forward, nearer and nearer,
with parted lips–only to find oneself, quite
suddenly, as a clumsy oaf scrambles to his feet, leaning
towards nothing at all–well, there is a reason, even
with half a gramme of soma circulating in one's
blood-stream, a genuine reason for annoyance.
- "At Malpais," the
Savage was incoherently mumbling, "you had to bring
her the skin of a mountain lion–I mean, when you
wanted to marry some one. Or else a wolf."
- "There aren't any
lions in England," Lenina almost snapped.
- "And even if there
were," the Savage added, with sudden contemptuous
resentment, "people would kill them out of
helicopters, I suppose, with poison gas or something. I
wouldn't do that, Lenina." He squared his
shoulders, he ventured to look at her and was met with a
stare of annoyed incomprehension. Confused, "I'll do
anything," he went on, more and more incoherently.
"Anything you tell me. There be some sports are
painful–you know. But their labour delight in them
sets off. That's what I feel. I mean I'd sweep the floor
if you wanted."
- "But we've got vacuum
cleaners here," said Lenina in bewilderment. "It
isn't necessary."
- "No, of course it isn't
necessary. But some kinds of baseness are nobly
undergone. I'd like to undergo something nobly. Don't you
see?"
- "But if there are
vacuum cleaners …"
- "That's not the point."
- "And Epsilon Semi-Morons
to work them," she went on, "well, really, why?"
- "Why? But for you, for
you. Just to show that I …"
- "And what on earth
vacuum cleaners have got to do with lions …"
- "To show how much
…"
- "Or lions with being
glad to see me …" She was getting more
and more exasperated.
- "How much I love you,
Lenina," he brought out almost desperately.
- An emblem of the inner tide
of startled elation, the blood rushed up into Lenina's
cheeks. "Do you mean it, John?"
- "But I hadn't meant to
say so," cried the Savage, clasping his hands in a
kind of agony. "Not until … Listen, Lenina; in
Malpais people get married."
- "Get what?" The
irritation had begun to creep back into her voice. What
was he talking about now?
- "For always. They make
a promise to live together for always."
- "What a horrible idea!"
Lenina was genuinely shocked.
- "Outliving beauty's
outward with a mind that cloth renew swifter than blood
decays."
- "What?"
- "It's like that in
Shakespeare too. 'If thou cost break her virgin knot
before all sanctimonious ceremonies may with full and
holy rite …'"
- "For Ford's sake, John,
talk sense. I can't understand a word you say. First it's
vacuum cleaners; then it's knots. You're driving me crazy."
She jumped up and, as though afraid that he might run
away from her physically, as well as with his mind,
caught him by the wrist. "Answer me this question:
do you really like me, or don't you?"
- There was a moment's
silence; then, in a very low voice, "I love you more
than anything in the world," he said.
- "Then why on earth
didn't you say so?" she cried, and so intense was
her exasperation that she drove her sharp nails into the
skin of his wrist. "Instead of drivelling away about
knots and vacuum cleaners and lions, and making me
miserable for weeks and weeks."
- She released his hand and
flung it angrily away from her.
- "If I didn't like you
so much," she said, "I'd be furious with you."
- And suddenly her arms were
round his neck; he felt her lips soft against his own. So
deliciously soft, so warm and electric that inevitably he
found himself thinking of the embraces in Three Weeks
in a Helicopter. Ooh! ooh! the stereoscopic blonde
and anh! the more than real blackamoor. Horror, horror,
horror … he fired to disengage himself; but Lenina
tightened her embrace.
- "Why didn't you say so?"
she whispered, drawing back her face to look at him. Her
eyes were tenderly reproachful.
- "The murkiest den, the
most opportune place" (the voice of conscience
thundered poetically), "the strongest suggestion our
worser genius can, shall never melt mine honour into lust.
Never, never!" he resolved.
- "You silly boy!"
she was saying. "I wanted you so much. And if you
wanted me too, why didn't you? …"
- "But, Lenina …"
he began protesting; and as she immediately untwined her
arms, as she stepped away from him, he thought, for a
moment, that she had taken his unspoken hint. But when
she unbuckled her white patent cartridge belt and hung it
carefully over the back of a chair, he began to suspect
that he had been mistaken.
- "Lenina!" he
repeated apprehensively.
- She put her hand to her
neck and gave a long vertical pull; her white sailor's
blouse was ripped to the hem; suspicion condensed into a
too, too solid certainty. "Lenina, what are
you doing?"
- Zip, zip! Her answer was
wordless. She stepped out of her bell-bottomed trousers.
Her zippicamiknicks were a pale shell pink. The Arch-Community-Songster's
golden T dangled at her breast.
- "For those milk paps
that through the window bars bore at men's eyes...."
The singing, thundering, magical words made her seem
doubly dangerous, doubly alluring. Soft, soft, but how
piercing! boring and drilling into reason, tunnelling
through resolution. "The strongest oaths are straw
to the fire i' the blood. Be more abstemious, or else
…"
- Zip! The rounded pinkness
fell apart like a neatly divided apple. A wriggle of the
arms, a lifting first of the right foot, then the left:
the zippicamiknicks were lying lifeless and as though
deflated on the floor.
- Still wearing her shoes and
socks, and her rakishly tilted round white cap, she
advanced towards him. "Darling. Darling! If only you'd
said so before!" She held out her arms.
- But instead of also saying
"Darling!" and holding out his arms, the Savage
retreated in terror, flapping his hands at her as though
he were trying to scare away some intruding and dangerous
animal. Four backwards steps, and he was brought to bay
against the wall.
- "Sweet!" said
Lenina and, laying her hands on his shoulders, pressed
herself against him. "Put your arms round me,"
she commanded. "Hug me till you drug me, honey."
She too had poetry at her command, knew words that sang
and were spells and beat drums. "Kiss me"; she
closed her eyes, she let her voice sink to a sleepy
murmur, "Kiss me till I'm in a coma. Hug me, honey,
snuggly …"
- The Savage caught her by
the wrists, tore her hands from his shoulders, thrust her
roughly away at arm's length.
- "Ow, you're hurting me,
you're … oh!" She was suddenly silent. Terror
had made her forget the pain. Opening her eyes, she had
seen his face–no, not his face, a ferocious
stranger's, pale, distorted, twitching with some insane,
inexplicable fury. Aghast, "But what is it, John?"
she whispered. He did not answer, but only stared into
her face with those mad eyes. The hands that held her
wrists were trembling. He breathed deeply and irregularly.
Faint almost to imperceptibility, but appalling, she
suddenly heard the grinding of his teeth. "What is
it?" she almost screamed.
- And as though awakened by
her cry he caught her by the shoulders and shook her.
"Whore!" he shouted "Whore! Impudent
strumpet!"
- "Oh, don't, do-on't,"
she protested in a voice made grotesquely tremulous by
his shaking.
- "Whore!"
- "Plea-ease."
- "Damned whore!"
- "A gra-amme is be-etter
…" she began.
- The Savage pushed her away
with such force that she staggered and fell. "Go,"
he shouted, standing over her menacingly, "get out
of my sight or I'll kill you." He clenched his fists.
- Lenina raised her arm to
cover her face. "No, please don't, John …"
- "Hurry up. Quick!"
- One arm still raised, and
following his every movement with a terrified eye, she
scrambled to her feet and still crouching, still covering
her head, made a dash for the bathroom.
- The noise of that
prodigious slap by which her departure was accelerated
was like a pistol shot.
- "Ow!" Lenina
bounded forward.
- Safely locked into the
bathroom, she had leisure to take stock of her injuries.
Standing with her back to the mirror, she twisted her
head. Looking over her left shoulder she could see the
imprint of an open hand standing out distinct and crimson
on the pearly flesh. Gingerly she rubbed the wounded spot.
- Outside, in the other room,
the Savage was striding up and down, marching, marching
to the drums and music of magical words. "The wren
goes to't and the small gilded fly does lecher in my
sight." Maddeningly they rumbled in his ears. "The
fitchew nor the soiled horse goes to't with a more
riotous appetite. Down from the waist they are Centaurs,
though women all above. But to the girdle do the gods
inherit. Beneath is all the fiend's. There's hell, there's
darkness, there is the sulphurous pit, burning scalding,
stench, consumption; fie, fie, fie, pain, pain! Give me
an ounce of civet, good apothecary, to sweeten my
imagination."
- "John!" ventured
a small ingratiating voice from the bathroom. "John!"
- "O thou weed, who are
so lovely fair and smell'st so sweet that the sense aches
at thee. Was this most goodly book made to write 'whore'
upon? Heaven stops the nose at it …"
- But her perfume still hung
about him, his jacket was white with the powder that had
scented her velvety body. "Impudent strumpet,
impudent strumpet, impudent strumpet." The
inexorable rhythm beat itself out. "Impudent …"
- "John, do you think I
might have my clothes?"
- He picked up the bell-bottomed
trousers, the blouse, the zippicamiknicks.
- "Open!" he
ordered, kicking the door.
- "No, I won't."
The voice was frightened and defiant.
- "Well, how do you
expect me to give them to you?"
- "Push them through the
ventilator over the door."
- He did what she suggested
and returned to his uneasy pacing of the room. "Impudent
strumpet, impudent strumpet. The devil Luxury with his
fat rump and potato finger …"
- "John."
- He would not answer. "Fat
rump and potato finger."
- "John."
- "What is it?" he
asked gruffly.
- "I wonder if you'd
mind giving me my Malthusian belt."
- Lenina sat, listening to
the footsteps in the other room, wondering, as she
listened, how long he was likely to go tramping up and
down like that; whether she would have to wait until he
left the flat; or if it would be safe, after allowing his
madness a reasonable time to subside, to open the
bathroom door and make a dash for it.
- She was interrupted in the
midst of these uneasy speculations by the sound of the
telephone bell ringing in the other room. Abruptly the
tramping ceased. She heard the voice of the Savage
parleying with silence.
- "Hullo."
- . . . . .
- "Yes."
- . . . . .
- "If I do not usurp
myself, I am."
- . . . . .
- "Yes, didn't you hear
me say so? Mr. Savage speaking."
- . . . . .
- "What? Who's ill? Of
course it interests me."
- . . . . .
- "But is it serious? Is
she really bad? I'll go at once …"
- . . . . .
- "Not in her rooms any
more? Where has she been taken?"
- . . . . .
- "Oh, my God! What's
the address?"
- . . . . .
- "Three Park
Lane–is that it? Three? Thanks."
- Lenina heard the click of
the replaced receiver, then hurrying steps. A door
slammed. There was silence. Was he really gone?
With an infinity of precautions
she opened the door a quarter of an inch; peeped through
the crack; was encouraged by the view of emptiness;
opened a little further, and put her whole head out;
finally tiptoed into the room; stood for a few seconds
with strongly beating heart, listening, listening; then
darted to the front door, opened, slipped through,
slammed, ran. It was not till she was in the lift and
actually dropping down the well that she began to feel
herself secure.
chapter
fourteen
THE Park Lane Hospital for the Dying was a sixty-story
tower of primrose tiles. As the Savage stepped out of his
taxicopter a convoy of gaily-coloured aerial hearses rose
whirring from the roof and darted away across the Park, westwards,
bound for the Slough Crematorium. At the lift gates the presiding
porter gave him the information he required, and he dropped down
to Ward 81 (a Galloping Senility ward, the porter explained) on
the seventeenth floor.
- It was a large room bright
with sunshine and yellow paint, and containing twenty
beds, all occupied. Linda was dying in company–in
company and with all the modern conveniences. The air was
continuously alive with gay synthetic melodies. At the
foot of every bed, confronting its moribund occupant, was
a television box. Television was left on, a running tap,
from morning till night. Every quarter of an hour the
prevailing perfume of the room was automatically changed.
"We try," explained the nurse, who had taken
charge of the Savage at the door, "we try to create
a thoroughly pleasant atmosphere here–something
between a first-class hotel and a feely-palace, if you
take my meaning."
- "Where is she?"
asked the Savage, ignoring these polite explanations.
- The nurse was offended.
"You are in a hurry," she said.
- "Is there any hope?"
he asked.
- "You mean, of her not
dying?" (He nodded.) "No, of course there isn't.
When somebody's sent here, there's no …"
Startled by the expression of distress on his pale face,
she suddenly broke off. "Why, whatever is the matter?"
she asked. She was not accustomed to this kind of thing
in visitors. (Not that there were many visitors anyhow:
or any reason why there should be many visitors.) "You're
not feeling ill, are you?"
- He shook his head. "She's
my mother," he said in a scarcely audible voice.
- The nurse glanced at him
with startled, horrified eyes; then quickly looked away.
From throat to temple she was all one hot blush.
- "Take me to her,"
said the Savage, making an effort to speak in an ordinary
tone.
- Still blushing, she led the
way down the ward. Faces still fresh and unwithered (for
senility galloped so hard that it had no time to age the
cheeks–only the heart and brain) turned as they
passed. Their progress was followed by the blank,
incurious eyes of second infancy. The Savage shuddered as
he looked.
- Linda was lying in the last
of the long row of beds, next to the wall. Propped up on
pillows, she was watching the Semi-finals of the South
American Riemann-Surface Tennis Championship, which were
being played in silent and diminished reproduction on the
screen of the television box at the foot of the bed.
Hither and thither across their square of illuminated
glass the little figures noiselessly darted, like fish in
an aquarium–the silent but agitated inhabitants of
another world.
- Linda looked on, vaguely
and uncomprehendingly smiling. Her pale, bloated face
wore an expression of imbecile happiness. Every now and
then her eyelids closed, and for a few seconds she seemed
to be dozing. Then with a little start she would wake up
again–wake up to the aquarium antics of the Tennis
Champions, to the Super-Vox-Wurlitzeriana rendering of
"Hug me till you drug me, honey," to the warm
draught of verbena that came blowing through the
ventilator above her head–would wake to these things,
or rather to a dream of which these things, transformed
and embellished by the soma in her blood, were the
marvellous constituents, and smile once more her broken
and discoloured smile of infantile contentment.
- "Well, I must go,"
said the nurse. "I've got my batch of children
coming. Besides, there's Number 3." She pointed up
the ward. "Might go off any minute now. Well, make
yourself comfortable." She walked briskly away.
- The Savage sat down beside
the bed.
- "Linda," he
whispered, taking her hand.
- At the sound of her name,
she turned. Her vague eyes brightened with recognition.
She squeezed his hand, she smiled, her lips moved; then
quite suddenly her head fell forward. She was asleep. He
sat watching her–seeking through the tired flesh,
seeking and finding that young, bright face which had
stooped over his childhood in Malpais, remembering (and
he closed his eyes) her voice, her movements, all the
events of their life together. "Streptocock-Gee to
Banbury T …" How beautiful her singing had been!
And those childish rhymes, how magically strange and
mysterious!
- A, B, C, vitamin D:
- The fat's in the liver,
the cod's in the sea.
- He felt the hot tears
welling up behind his eyelids as he recalled the words
and Linda's voice as she repeated them. And then the
reading lessons: The tot is in the pot, the cat is on the
mat; and the Elementary Instructions for Beta Workers in
the Embryo Store. And long evenings by the fire or, in
summertime, on the roof of the little house, when she
told him those stories about the Other Place, outside the
Reservation: that beautiful, beautiful Other Place, whose
memory, as of a heaven, a paradise of goodness and
loveliness, he still kept whole and intact, undefiled by
contact with the reality of this real London, these
actual civilized men and women.
- A sudden noise of shrill
voices made him open his eyes and, after hastily brushing
away the tears, look round. What seemed an interminable
stream of identical eight-year-old male twins was pouring
into the room. Twin after twin, twin after twin, they
came–a nightmare. Their faces, their repeated
face–for there was only one between the lot of
them–puggishly stared, all nostrils and pale
goggling eyes. Their uniform was khaki. All their mouths
hung open. Squealing and chattering they entered. In a
moment, it seemed, the ward was maggoty with them. They
swarmed between the beds, clambered over, crawled under,
peeped into the television boxes, made faces at the
patients.
- Linda astonished and rather
alarmed them. A group stood clustered at the foot of her
bed, staring with the frightened and stupid curiosity of
animals suddenly confronted by the unknown.
- "Oh, look, look!"
They spoke in low, scared voices. "Whatever is the
matter with her? Why is she so fat?"
- They had never seen a face
like hers before–had never seen a face that was not
youthful and taut-skinned, a body that had ceased to be
slim and upright. All these moribund sexagenarians had
the appearance of childish girls. At forty-four, Linda
seemed, by contrast, a monster of flaccid and distorted
senility.
- "Isn't she awful?"
came the whispered comments. "Look at her teeth!"
- Suddenly from under the bed
a pug-faced twin popped up between John's chair and the
wall, and began peering into Linda's sleeping face.
- "I say …" he
began; but the sentence ended prematurely in a squeal.
The Savage had seized him by the collar, lifted him clear
over the chair and, with a smart box on the ears, sent
him howling away.
- His yells brought the Head
Nurse hurrying to the rescue.
- "What have you been
doing to him?" she demanded fiercely. "I won't
have you striking the children."
- "Well then, keep them
away from this bed." The Savage's voice was
trembling with indignation. "What are these filthy
little brats doing here at all? It's disgraceful!"
- "Disgraceful? But what
do you mean? They're being death-conditioned. And I tell
you," she warned him truculently, "if I have
any more of your interference with their conditioning, I'll
send for the porters and have you thrown out."
- The Savage rose to his feet
and took a couple of steps towards her. His movements and
the expression on his face were so menacing that the
nurse fell back in terror. With a great effort he checked
himself and, without speaking, turned away and sat down
again by the bed.
- Reassured, but with a
dignity that was a trifle shrill and uncertain, "I've
warned you," said the nurse, "I've warned you,"
said the nurse, "so mind." Still, she led the
too inquisitive twins away and made them join in the game
of hunt-the-zipper, which had been organized by one of
her colleagues at the other end of the room.
- "Run along now and
have your cup of caffeine solution, dear," she said
to the other nurse. The exercise of authority restored
her confidence, made her feel better. "Now children!"
she called.
- Linda had stirred uneasily,
had opened her eyes for a moment, looked vaguely around,
and then once more dropped off to sleep. Sitting beside
her, the Savage tried hard to recapture his mood of a few
minutes before. "A, B, C, vitamin D," he
repeated to himself, as though the words were a spell
that would restore the dead past to life. But the spell
was ineffective. Obstinately the beautiful memories
refused to rise; there was only a hateful resurrection of
jealousies and uglinesses and miseries. Pop? with the blood trickling down from his
cut shoulder; and Linda hideously asleep, and the flies
buzzing round the spilt mescal on the floor beside the
bed; and the boys calling those names as she passed.
… Ah, no, no! He shut his eyes, he shook his head in
strenuous denial of these memories. "A, B, C,
vitamin D …" He tried to think of those times
when he sat on her knees and she put her arms about him
and sang, over and over again, rocking him, rocking him
to sleep. "A, B, C, vitamin D, vitamin D, vitamin D
…"
- The Super-Vox-Wurlitzeriana
had risen to a sobbing crescendo; and suddenly the
verbena gave place, in the scent-circulating system, to
an intense patchouli. Linda stirred, woke up, stared for
a few seconds bewilderly at the Semi-finalists, then,
lifting her face, sniffed once or twice at the newly
perfumed air and suddenly smiled–a smile of childish
ecstasy.
- "Pop?!" she murmured, and closed her eyes.
"Oh, I do so like it, I do …" She sighed
and let herself sink back into the pillows.
- "But, Linda!" The
Savage spoke imploringly, "Don't you know me?"
He had tried so hard, had done his very best; why wouldn't
she allow him to forget? He squeezed her limp hand almost
with violence, as though he would force her to come back
from this dream of ignoble pleasures, from these base and
hateful memories–back into the present, back into
reality: the appalling present, the awful
reality–but sublime, but significant, but
desperately important precisely because of the imminence
of that which made them so fearful. "Don't you know
me, Linda?"
- He felt the faint answering
pressure of her hand. The tears started into his eyes. He
bent over her and kissed her.
- Her lips moved. "Pop?!" she whispered again, and it was as
though he had had a pailful of ordure thrown in his face.
- Anger suddenly boiled up in
him. Balked for the second time, the passion of his grief
had found another outlet, was transformed into a passion
of agonized rage.
- "But I'm John!"
he shouted. "I'm John!" And in his furious
misery he actually caught her by the shoulder and shook
her.
- Linda's eyes fluttered open;
she saw him, knew him–"John!"–but
situated the real face, the real and violent hands, in an
imaginary world–among the inward and private
equivalents of patchouli and the Super-Wurlitzer, among
the transfigured memories and the strangely transposed
sensations that constituted the universe of her dream.
She knew him for John, her son, but fancied him an
intruder into that paradisal Malpais where she had been
spending her soma-holiday with Pop?. He was angry because she liked Pop?, he was shaking her because Pop? was there in the bed–as though there
were something wrong, as though all civilized people didn't
do the same. "Every one belongs to every …"
Her voice suddenly died into an almost inaudible
breathless croaking. Her mouth fell open: she made a
desperate effort to fill her lungs with air. But it was
as though she had forgotten how to breathe. She tried to
cry out–but no sound came; only the terror of her
staring eyes revealed what she was suffering. Her hands
went to her throat, then clawed at the air–the air
she could no longer breathe, the air that, for her, had
ceased to exist.
- The Savage was on his feet,
bent over her. "What is it, Linda? What is it?"
His voice was imploring; it was as though he were begging
to be reassured.
- The look she gave him was
charged with an unspeakable terror–with terror and,
it seemed to him, reproach.
- She tried to raise herself
in bed, but fell back on to the pillows. Her face was
horribly distorted, her lips blue.
- The Savage turned and ran
up the ward.
- "Quick, quick!"
he shouted. "Quick!"
- Standing in the centre of a
ring of zipper-hunting twins, the Head Nurse looked round.
The first moment's astonishment gave place almost
instantly to disapproval. "Don't shout! Think of the
little ones," she said, frowning. "You might
decondition … But what are you doing?" He had
broken through the ring. "Be careful!" A child
was yelling.
- "Quick, quick!"
He caught her by the sleeve, dragged her after him.
"Quick! Something's happened. I've killed her."
- By the time they were back
at the end of the ward Linda was dead.
- The Savage stood for a
moment in frozen silence, then fell on his knees beside
the bed and, covering his face with his hands, sobbed
uncontrollably.
- The nurse stood irresolute,
looking now at the kneeling figure by the bed (the
scandalous exhibition!) and now (poor children!) at the
twins who had stopped their hunting of the zipper and
were staring from the other end of the ward, staring with
all their eyes and nostrils at the shocking scene that
was being enacted round Bed 20. Should she speak to him?
try to bring him back to a sense of decency? remind him
of where he was? of what fatal mischief he might do to
these poor innocents? Undoing all their wholesome death-conditioning
with this disgusting outcry–as though death were
something terrible, as though any one mattered as much as
all that! It might give them the most disastrous ideas
about the subject, might upset them into reacting in the
entirely wrong, the utterly anti-social way.
- She stepped forward, she
touched him on the shoulder. "Can't you behave?"
she said in a low, angry voice. But, looking around, she
saw that half a dozen twins were already on their feet
and advancing down the ward. The circle was
disintegrating. In another moment … No, the risk was
too great; the whole Group might be put back six or seven
months in its conditioning. She hurried back towards her
menaced charges.
- "Now, who wants a
chocolate ?clair?" she asked in a loud,
cheerful tone.
- "Me!" yelled the
entire Bokanovsky Group in chorus. Bed 20 was completely
forgotten.
- "Oh, God, God, God
…" the Savage kept repeating to himself. In the
chaos of grief and remorse that filled his mind it was
the one articulate word. "God!" he whispered it
aloud. "God …"
- "Whatever is he
saying?" said a voice, very near, distinct and
shrill through the warblings of the Super-Wurlitzer.
- The Savage violently
started and, uncovering his face, looked round. Five
khaki twins, each with the stump of a long ?clair in his right hand, and their
identical faces variously smeared with liquid chocolate,
were standing in a row, puggily goggling at him.
- They met his eyes and
simultaneously grinned. One of them pointed with his ?clair butt.
- "Is she dead?" he
asked.
- The Savage stared at them
for a moment in silence. Then in silence he rose to his
feet, in silence slowly walked towards the door.
- "Is she dead?"
repeated the inquisitive twin trotting at his side.
The Savage looked down at him and
still without speaking pushed him away. The twin fell on
the floor and at once began to howl. The Savage did not
even look round.
chapter fifteen
THE menial staff of the Park Lane Hospital for the
Dying consisted of one hundred and sixty-two Deltas divided into
two Bokanovsky Groups of eighty-four red headed female and
seventy-eight dark dolychocephalic male twins, respectively. At
six, when their working day was over, the two Groups assembled in
the vestibule of the Hospital and were served by the Deputy Sub-Bursar
with their soma ration.
- From the lift the Savage
stepped out into the midst of them. But his mind was
elsewhere–with death, with his grief, and his
remorse; mechanicaly, without consciousness of what he
was doing, he began to shoulder his way through the crowd.
- "Who are you pushing?
Where do you think you're going?"
- High, low, from a multitude
of separate throats, only two voices squeaked or growled.
Repeated indefinitely, as though by a train of mirrors,
two faces, one a hairless and freckled moon haloed in
orange, the other a thin, beaked bird-mask, stubbly with
two days' beard, turned angrily towards him. Their words
and, in his ribs, the sharp nudging of elbows, broke
through his unawareness. He woke once more to external
reality, looked round him, knew what he saw–knew it,
with a sinking sense of horror and disgust, for the
recurrent delirium of his days and nights, the nightmare
of swarming indistinguishable sameness. Twins, twins.
… Like maggots they had swarmed defilingly over the
mystery of Linda's death. Maggots again, but larger, full
grown, they now crawled across his grief and his
repentance. He halted and, with bewildered and horrified
eyes, stared round him at the khaki mob, in the midst of
which, overtopping it by a full head, he stood. "How
many goodly creatures are there here!" The singing
words mocked him derisively. "How beauteous mankind
is! O brave new world …"
- "Soma
distribution!" shouted a loud voice. "In good
order, please. Hurry up there."
- A door had been opened, a
table and chair carried into the vestibule. The voice was
that of a jaunty young Alpha, who had entered carrying a
black iron cash-box. A murmur of satisfaction went up
from the expectant twins. They forgot all about the
Savage. Their attention was now focused on the black cash-box,
which the young man had placed on the table, and was now
in process of unlocking. The lid was lifted.
- "Oo-oh!" said all
the hundred and sixty-two simultaneously, as though they
were looking at fireworks.
- The young man took out a
handful of tiny pill-boxes. "Now," he said
peremptorily, "step forward, please. One at a time,
and no shoving."
- One at a time, with no
shoving, the twins stepped forward. First two males, then
a female, then another male, then three females, then
…
- The Savage stood looking on.
"O brave new world, O brave new world …"
In his mind the singing words seemed to change their tone.
They had mocked him through his misery and remorse,
mocked him with how hideous a note of cynical derision!
Fiendishly laughing, they had insisted on the low squalor,
the nauseous ugliness of the nightmare. Now, suddenly,
they trumpeted a call to arms. "O brave new world!"
Miranda was proclaiming the possibility of loveliness,
the possibility of transforming even the nightmare into
something fine and noble. "O brave new world!"
It was a challenge, a command.
- "No shoving there now!"
shouted the Deputy Sub-Bursar in a fury. He slammed down
he lid of his cash-box. "I shall stop the
distribution unless I have good behaviour."
- The Deltas muttered,
jostled one another a little, and then were still. The
threat had been effective. Deprivation of soma–appalling
thought!
- "That's better,"
said the young man, and reopened his cash-box.
- Linda had been a slave,
Linda had died; others should live in freedom, and the
world be made beautiful. A reparation, a duty. And
suddenly it was luminously clear to the Savage what he
must do; it was as though a shutter had been opened, a
curtain drawn back.
- "Now," said the
Deputy Sub-Bursar.
- Another khaki female
stepped forward.
- "Stop!" called
the Savage in a loud and ringing voice. "Stop!"
- He pushed his way to the
table; the Deltas stared at him with astonishment.
- "Ford!" said the
Deputy Sub-Bursar, below his breath. "It's the
Savage." He felt scared.
- "Listen, I beg of you,"
cried the Savage earnestly. "Lend me your ears
…" He had never spoken in public before, and
found it very difficult to express what he wanted to say.
"Don't take that horrible stuff. It's poison, it's
poison."
- "I say, Mr. Savage,"
said the Deputy Sub-Bursar, smiling propitiatingly.
"Would you mind letting me …"
- "Poison to soul as
well as body."
- "Yes, but let me get
on with my distribution, won't you? There's a good fellow."
With the cautious tenderness of one who strokes a
notoriously vicious animal, he patted the Savage's arm.
"Just let me …"
- "Never!" cried
the Savage.
- "But look here, old
man …"
- "Throw it all away,
that horrible poison."
- The words "Throw it
all away" pierced through the enfolding layers of
incomprehension to the quick of the Delta's consciousness.
An angry murmur went up from the crowd.
- "I come to bring you
freedom," said the Savage, turning back towards the
twins. "I come …"
- The Deputy Sub-Bursar heard
no more; he had slipped out of the vestibule and was
looking up a number in the telephone book.
- "Not in his own rooms,"
Bernard summed up. "Not in mine, not in yours. Not
at the Aphroditaum; not at the Centre or the College.
Where can he have got to?"
- Helmholtz shrugged his
shoulders. They had come back from their work expecting
to find the Savage waiting for them at one or other of
the usual meeting-places, and there was no sign of the
fellow. Which was annoying, as they had meant to nip
across to Biarritz in Helmholtz's four-seater
sporticopter. They'd be late for dinner if he didn't come
soon.
- "We'll give him five
more minutes," said Helmholtz. "If he doesn't
turn up by then, we'll …"
- The ringing of the
telephone bell interrupted him. He picked up the receiver.
"Hullo. Speaking." Then, after a long interval
of listening, "Ford in Flivver!" he swore.
"I'll come at once."
- "What is it?"
Bernard asked.
- "A fellow I know at
the Park Lane Hospital," said Helmholtz. "The
Savage is there. Seems to have gone mad. Anyhow, it's
urgent. Will you come with me?"
- Together they hurried along
the corridor to the lifts.
- "But do you like being
slaves?" the Savage was saying as they entered the
Hospital. His face was flushed, his eyes bright with
ardour and indignation. "Do you like being babies?
Yes, babies. Mewling and puking," he added,
exasperated by their bestial stupidity into throwing
insults at those he had come to save. The insults bounced
off their carapace of thick stupidity; they stared at him
with a blank expression of dull and sullen resentment in
their eyes. "Yes, puking!" he fairly shouted.
Grief and remorse, compassion and duty–all were
forgotten now and, as it were, absorbed into an intense
overpowering hatred of these less than human monsters.
"Don't you want to be free and men? Don't you even
understand what manhood and freedom are?" Rage was
making him fluent; the words came easily, in a rush.
"Don't you?" he repeated, but got no answer to
his question. "Very well then," he went on
grimly. "I'll teach you; I'll make you be
free whether you want to or not." And pushing open a
window that looked on to the inner court of the Hospital,
he began to throw the little pill-boxes of soma
tablets in handfuls out into the area.
- For a moment the khaki mob
was silent, petrified, at the spectacle of this wanton
sacrilege, with amazement and horror.
- "He's mad,"
whispered Bernard, staring with wide open eyes. "They'll
kill him. They'll …" A great shout suddenly
went up from the mob; a wave of movement drove it
menacingly towards the Savage. "Ford help him!"
said Bernard, and averted his eyes.
- "Ford helps those who
help themselves." And with a laugh, actually a laugh
of exultation, Helmholtz Watson pushed his way through
the crowd.
- "Free, free!" the
Savage shouted, and with one hand continued to throw the soma
into the area while, with the other, he punched the
indistinguishable faces of his assailants. "Free!"
And suddenly there was Helmholtz at his side–"Good
old Helmholtz!"–also punching–"Men at
last!"–and in the interval also throwing the
poison out by handfuls through the open window. "Yes,
men! men!" and there was no more poison left. He
picked up the cash-box and showed them its black
emptiness. "You're free!"
- Howling, the Deltas charged
with a redoubled fury.
- Hesitant on the fringes of
the battle. "They're done for," said Bernard
and, urged by a sudden impulse, ran forward to help them;
then thought better of it and halted; then, ashamed,
stepped forward again; then again thought better of it,
and was standing in an agony of humiliated
indecision–thinking that they might be killed
if he didn't help them, and that he might be
killed if he did–when (Ford be praised!), goggle-eyed
and swine-snouted in their gas-masks, in ran the police.
- Bernard dashed to meet them.
He waved his arms; and it was action, he was doing
something. He shouted "Help!" several times,
more and more loudly so as to give himself the illusion
of helping. "Help! Help! HELP!"
- The policemen pushed him
out of the way and got on with their work. Three men with
spraying machines buckled to their shoulders pumped thick
clouds of soma vapour into the air. Two more were
busy round the portable Synthetic Music Box. Carrying
water pistols charged with a powerful an?sthetic, four others had pushed their way
into the crowd and were methodically laying out, squirt
by squirt, the more ferocious of the fighters.
- "Quick, quick!"
yelled Bernard. "They'll be killed if you don't
hurry. They'll … Oh!" Annoyed by his chatter,
one of the policemen had given him a shot from his water
pistol. Bernard stood for a second or two wambling
unsteadily on legs that seemed to have lost their bones,
their tendons, their muscles, to have become mere sticks
of jelly, and at last not even jelly-water: he tumbled in
a heap on the floor.
- Suddenly, from out of the
Synthetic Music Box a Voice began to speak. The Voice of
Reason, the Voice of Good Feeling. The sound-track roll
was unwinding itself in Synthetic Anti-Riot Speech Number
Two (Medium Strength). Straight from the depths of a non-existent
heart, "My friends, my friends!" said the Voice
so pathetically, with a note of such infinitely tender
reproach that, behind their gas masks, even the policemen's
eyes were momentarily dimmed with tears, "what is
the meaning of this? Why aren't you all being happy and
good together? Happy and good," the Voice repeated.
"At peace, at peace." It trembled, sank into a
whisper and momentarily expired. "Oh, I do want you
to be happy," it began, with a yearning earnestness.
"I do so want you to be good! Please, please be good
and …"
- Two minutes later the Voice
and the soma vapour had produced their effect. In
tears, the Deltas were kissing and hugging one
another–half a dozen twins at a time in a
comprehensive embrace. Even Helmholtz and the Savage were
almost crying. A fresh supply of pill-boxes was brought
in from the Bursary; a new distribution was hastily made
and, to the sound of the Voice's richly affectionate,
baritone valedictions, the twins dispersed, blubbering as
though their hearts would break. "Good-bye, my
dearest, dearest friends, Ford keep you! Good-bye, my
dearest, dearest friends, Ford keep you. Good-bye my
dearest, dearest …"
- When the last of the Deltas
had gone the policeman switched off the current. The
angelic Voice fell silent.
- "Will you come quietly?"
asked the Sergeant, "or must we an?sthetize?" He pointed his water
pistol menacingly.
- "Oh, we'll come
quietly," the Savage answered, dabbing alternately a
cut lip, a scratched neck, and a bitten left hand.
- Still keeping his
handkerchief to his bleeding nose Helmholtz nodded in
confirmation.
- Awake and having recovered
the use of his legs, Bernard had chosen this moment to
move as inconspicuously as he could towards the door.
- "Hi, you there,"
called the Sergeant, and a swine-masked policeman hurried
across the room and laid a hand on the young man's
shoulder.
- Bernard turned with an
expression of indignant innocence. Escaping? He hadn't
dreamed of such a thing. "Though what on earth you
want me for," he said to the Sergeant, "I
really can't imagine."
- "You're a friend of
the prisoner's, aren't you?"
- "Well …"
said Bernard, and hesitated. No, he really couldn't deny
it. "Why shouldn't I be?" he asked.
"Come on then," said
the Sergeant, and led the way towards the door and the
waiting police car.
chapter sixteen
THE ROOM into which the three were ushered was the
Controller's study.
- "His fordship will be
down in a moment." The Gamma butler left them to
themselves.
- Helmholtz laughed aloud.
- "It's more like a
caffeine-solution party than a trial," he said, and
let himself fall into the most luxurious of the pneumatic
arm-chairs. "Cheer up, Bernard," he added,
catching sight of his friend's green unhappy face. But
Bernard would not be cheered; without answering, without
even looking at Helmholtz, he went and sat down on the
most uncomfortable chair in the room, carefully chosen in
the obscure hope of somehow deprecating the wrath of the
higher powers.
- The Savage meanwhile
wandered restlessly round the room, peering with a vague
superficial inquisitiveness at the books in the shelves,
at the sound-track rolls and reading machine bobbins in
their numbered pigeon-holes. On the table under the
window lay a massive volume bound in limp black leather-surrogate,
and stamped with large golden T's. He picked it up and
opened it. MY LIFE AND WORK, BY OUR FORD. The book had
been published at Detroit by the Society for the
Propagation of Fordian Knowledge. Idly he turned the
pages, read a sentence here, a paragraph there, and had
just come to the conclusion that the book didn't interest
him, when the door opened, and the Resident World
Controller for Western Europe walked briskly into the
room.
- Mustapha Mond shook hands
with all three of them; but it was to the Savage that he
addressed himself. "So you don't much like
civilization, Mr. Savage," he said.
- The Savage looked at him.
He had been prepared to lie, to bluster, to remain
sullenly unresponsive; but, reassured by the good-humoured
intelligence of the Controller's face, he decided to tell
the truth, straightforwardly. "No." He shook
his head.
- Bernard started and looked
horrified. What would the Controller think? To be
labelled as the friend of a man who said that he didn't
like civilization–said it openly and, of all people,
to the Controller–it was terrible. "But, John,"
he began. A look from Mustapha Mond reduced him to an
abject silence.
- "Of course," the
Savage went on to admit, "there are some very nice
things. All that music in the air, for instance …"
- "Sometimes a thousand
twangling instruments will hum about my ears and
sometimes voices."
- The Savage's face lit up
with a sudden pleasure. "Have you read it too?"
he asked. "I thought nobody knew about that book
here, in England."
- "Almost nobody. I'm
one of the very few. It's prohibited, you see. But as I
make the laws here, I can also break them. With impunity,
Mr. Marx," he added, turning to Bernard. "Which
I'm afraid you can't do."
- Bernard sank into a yet
more hopeless misery.
- "But why is it
prohibited?" asked the Savage. In the excitement of
meeting a man who had read Shakespeare he had momentarily
forgotten everything else.
- The Controller shrugged his
shoulders. "Because it's old; that's the chief
reason. We haven't any use for old things here."
- "Even when they're
beautiful?"
- "Particularly when
they're beautiful. Beauty's attractive, and we don't want
people to be attracted by old things. We want them to
like the new ones."
- "But the new ones are
so stupid and horrible. Those plays, where there's
nothing but helicopters flying about and you feel
the people kissing." He made a grimace. "Goats
and monkeys!" Only in Othello's word could he find
an adequate vehicle for his contempt and hatred.
- "Nice tame animals,
anyhow," the Controller murmured parenthetically.
- "Why don't you let
them see Othello instead?"
- "I've told you; it's
old. Besides, they couldn't understand it."
- Yes, that was true. He
remembered how Helmholtz had laughed at Romeo and
Juliet. "Well then," he said, after a pause,
"something new that's like Othello, and that
they could understand."
- "That's what we've all
been wanting to write," said Helmholtz, breaking a
long silence.
- "And it's what you
never will write," said the Controller. "Because,
if it were really like Othello nobody could
understand it, however new it might be. And if were new,
it couldn't possibly be like Othello."
- "Why not?"
- "Yes, why not?"
Helmholtz repeated. He too was forgetting the unpleasant
realities of the situation. Green with anxiety and
apprehension, only Bernard remembered them; the others
ignored him. "Why not?"
- "Because our world is
not the same as Othello's world. You can't make flivvers
without steel–and you can't make tragedies without
social instability. The world's stable now. People are
happy; they get what they want, and they never want what
they can't get. They're well off; they're safe; they're
never ill; they're not afraid of death; they're
blissfully ignorant of passion and old age; they're
plagued with no mothers or fathers; they've got no wives,
or children, or lovers to feel strongly about; they're so
conditioned that they practically can't help behaving as
they ought to behave. And if anything should go wrong,
there's soma. Which you go and chuck out of the
window in the name of liberty, Mr. Savage. Liberty!"
He laughed. "Expecting Deltas to know what liberty
is! And now expecting them to understand Othello!
My good boy!"
- The Savage was silent for a
little. "All the same," he insisted obstinately,
"Othello's good, Othello's better than
those feelies."
- "Of course it is,"
the Controller agreed. "But that's the price we have
to pay for stability. You've got to choose between
happiness and what people used to call high art. We've
sacrificed the high art. We have the feelies and the
scent organ instead."
- "But they don't mean
anything."
- "They mean themselves;
they mean a lot of agreeable sensations to the audience."
- "But they're …
they're told by an idiot."
- The Controller laughed.
"You're not being very polite to your friend, Mr.
Watson. One of our most distinguished Emotional Engineers
…"
- "But he's right,"
said Helmholtz gloomily. "Because it is idiotic.
Writing when there's nothing to say …"
- "Precisely. But that
requires the most enormous ingenuity. You're making
flivvers out of the absolute minimum of steel–works
of art out of practically nothing but pure sensation."
- The Savage shook his head.
"It all seems to me quite horrible."
- "Of course it does.
Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in
comparison with the over-compensations for misery. And,
of course, stability isn't nearly so spectacular as
instability. And being contented has none of the glamour
of a good fight against misfortune, none of the
picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal
overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand."
- "I suppose not,"
said the Savage after a silence. "But need it be
quite so bad as those twins?" He passed his hand
over his eyes as though he were trying to wipe away the
remembered image of those long rows of identical midgets
at the assembling tables, those queued-up twin-herds at
the entrance to the Brentford monorail station, those
human maggots swarming round Linda's bed of death, the
endlessly repeated face of his assailants. He looked at
his bandaged left hand and shuddered. "Horrible!"
- "But how useful! I see
you don't like our Bokanovsky Groups; but, I assure you,
they're the foundation on which everything else is built.
They're the gyroscope that stabilizes the rocket plane of
state on its unswerving course." The deep voice
thrillingly vibrated; the gesticulating hand implied all
space and the onrush of the irresistible machine.
Mustapha Mond's oratory was almost up to synthetic
standards.
- "I was wondering,"
said the Savage, "why you had them at
all–seeing that you can get whatever you want out of
those bottles. Why don't you make everybody an Alpha
Double Plus while you're about it?"
- Mustapha Mond laughed.
"Because we have no wish to have our throats cut,"
he answered. "We believe in happiness and stability.
A society of Alphas couldn't fail to be unstable and
miserable. Imagine a factory staffed by Alphas–that
is to say by separate and unrelated individuals of good
heredity and conditioned so as to be capable (within
limits) of making a free choice and assuming
responsibilities. Imagine it!" he repeated.
- The Savage tried to imagine
it, not very successfully.
- "It's an absurdity. An
Alpha-decanted, Alpha-conditioned man would go mad if he
had to do Epsilon Semi-Moron work–go mad, or start
smashing things up. Alphas can be completely
socialized–but only on condition that you make them
do Alpha work. Only an Epsilon can be expected to make
Epsilon sacrifices, for the good reason that for him they
aren't sacrifices; they're the line of least resistance.
His conditioning has laid down rails along which he's got
to run. He can't help himself; he's foredoomed. Even
after decanting, he's still inside a bottle–an
invisible bottle of infantile and embryonic fixations.
Each one of us, of course," the Controller
meditatively continued, "goes through life inside a
bottle. But if we happen to be Alphas, our bottles are,
relatively speaking, enormous. We should suffer acutely
if we were confined in a narrower space. You cannot pour
upper-caste champagne-surrogate into lower-caste bottles.
It's obvious theoretically. But it has also been proved
in actual practice. The result of the Cyprus experiment
was convincing."
- "What was that?"
asked the Savage.
- Mustapha Mond smiled.
"Well, you can call it an experiment in rebottling
if you like. It began in A.F. 473. The Controllers had
the island of Cyprus cleared of all its existing
inhabitants and re-colonized with a specially prepared
batch of twenty-two thousand Alphas. All agricultural and
industrial equipment was handed over to them and they
were left to manage their own affairs. The result exactly
fulfilled all the theoretical predictions. The land wasn't
properly worked; there were strikes in all the factories;
the laws were set at naught, orders disobeyed; all the
people detailed for a spell of low-grade work were
perpetually intriguing for high-grade jobs, and all the
people with high-grade jobs were counter-intriguing at
all costs to stay where they were. Within six years they
were having a first-class civil war. When nineteen out of
the twenty-two thousand had been killed, the survivors
unanimously petitioned the World Controllers to resume
the government of the island. Which they did. And that
was the end of the only society of Alphas that the world
has ever seen."
- The Savage sighed,
profoundly.
- "The optimum
population," said Mustapha Mond, "is modelled
on the iceberg–eight-ninths below the water line,
one-ninth above."
- "And they're happy
below the water line?"
- "Happier than above it.
Happier than your friend here, for example." He
pointed.
- "In spite of that
awful work?"
- "Awful? They
don't find it so. On the contrary, they like it. It's
light, it's childishly simple. No strain on the mind or
the muscles. Seven and a half hours of mild, unexhausting
labour, and then the soma ration and games and
unrestricted copulation and the feelies. What more can
they ask for? True," he added, "they might ask
for shorter hours. And of course we could give them
shorter hours. Technically, it would be perfectly simple
to reduce all lower-caste working hours to three or four
a day. But would they be any the happier for that? No,
they wouldn't. The experiment was tried, more than a
century and a half ago. The whole of Ireland was put on
to the four-hour day. What was the result? Unrest and a
large increase in the consumption of soma; that
was all. Those three and a half hours of extra leisure
were so far from being a source of happiness, that people
felt constrained to take a holiday from them. The
Inventions Office is stuffed with plans for labour-saving
processes. Thousands of them." Mustapha Mond made a
lavish gesture. "And why don't we put them into
execution? For the sake of the labourers; it would be
sheer cruelty to afflict them with excessive leisure. It's
the same with agriculture. We could synthesize every
morsel of food, if we wanted to. But we don't. We prefer
to keep a third of the population on the land. For their
own sakes–because it takes longer to get food
out of the land than out of a factory. Besides, we have
our stability to think of. We don't want to change. Every
change is a menace to stability. That's another reason
why we're so chary of applying new inventions. Every
discovery in pure science is potentially subversive; even
science must sometimes be treated as a possible enemy.
Yes, even science."
- Science? The Savage frowned.
He knew the word. But what it exactly signified he could
not say. Shakespeare and the old men of the pueblo had
never mentioned science, and from Linda he had only
gathered the vaguest hints: science was something you
made helicopters with, some thing that caused you to
laugh at the Corn Dances, something that prevented you
from being wrinkled and losing your teeth. He made a
desperate effort to take the Controller's meaning.
- "Yes," Mustapha
Mond was saying, "that's another item in the cost of
stability. It isn't only art that's incompatible with
happiness; it's also science. Science is dangerous; we
have to keep it most carefully chained and muzzled."
- "What?" said
Helmholtz, in astonishment. "But we're always saying
that science is everything. It's a hypnop?dic platitude."
- "Three times a week
between thirteen and seventeen," put in Bernard.
- "And all the science
propaganda we do at the College …"
- "Yes; but what sort of
science?" asked Mustapha Mond sarcastically. "You've
had no scientific training, so you can't judge. I was a
pretty good physicist in my time. Too good–good
enough to realize that all our science is just a cookery
book, with an orthodox theory of cooking that nobody's
allowed to question, and a list of recipes that mustn't
be added to except by special permission from the head
cook. I'm the head cook now. But I was an inquisitive
young scullion once. I started doing a bit of cooking on
my own. Unorthodox cooking, illicit cooking. A bit of
real science, in fact." He was silent.
- "What happened?"
asked Helmholtz Watson.
- The Controller sighed.
"Very nearly what's going to happen to you young men.
I was on the point of being sent to an island."
- The words galvanized
Bernard into violent and unseemly activity. "Send me
to an island?" He jumped up, ran across the room,
and stood gesticulating in front of the Controller.
"You can't send me. I haven't done anything.
lt was the others. I swear it was the others." He
pointed accusingly to Helmholtz and the Savage. "Oh,
please don't send me to Iceland. I promise I'll do what I
ought to do. Give me another chance. Please give me
another chance." The tears began to flow. "I
tell you, it's their fault," he sobbed. "And
not to Iceland. Oh please, your fordship, please …"
And in a paroxysm of abjection he threw himself on his
knees before the Controller. Mustapha Mond tried to make
him get up; but Bernard persisted in his grovelling; the
stream of words poured out inexhaustibly. In the end the
Controller had to ring for his fourth secretary.
- "Bring three men,"
he ordered, "and take Mr. Marx into a bedroom. Give
him a good soma vaporization and then put him to
bed and leave him."
- The fourth secretary went
out and returned with three green-uniformed twin footmen.
Still shouting and sobbing. Bernard was carried out.
- "One would think he
was going to have his throat cut," said the
Controller, as the door closed. "Whereas, if he had
the smallest sense, he'd understand that his punishment
is really a reward. He's being sent to an island. That's
to say, he's being sent to a place where he'll meet the
most interesting set of men and women to be found
anywhere in the world. All the people who, for one reason
or another, have got too self-consciously individual to
fit into community-life. All the people who aren't
satisfied with orthodoxy, who've got independent ideas of
their own. Every one, in a word, who's any one. I almost
envy you, Mr. Watson."
- Helmholtz laughed. "Then
why aren't you on an island yourself?"
- "Because, finally, I
preferred this," the Controller answered. "I
was given the choice: to be sent to an island, where I
could have got on with my pure science, or to be taken on
to the Controllers' Council with the prospect of
succeeding in due course to an actual Controllership. I
chose this and let the science go." After a little
silence, "Sometimes," he added, "I rather
regret the science. Happiness is a hard master–particularly
other people's happiness. A much harder master, if one
isn't conditioned to accept it unquestioningly, than
truth." He sighed, fell silent again, then continued
in a brisker tone, "Well, duty's duty. One can't
consult one's own preference. I'm interested in truth, I
like science. But truth's a menace, science is a public
danger. As dangerous as it's been beneficent. It has
given us the stablest equilibrium in history. China's was
hopelessly insecure by comparison; even the primitive
matriarchies weren't steadier than we are. Thanks, l
repeat, to science. But we can't allow science to undo
its own good work. That's why we so carefully limit the
scope of its researches–that's why I almost got sent
to an island. We don't allow it to deal with any but the
most immediate problems of the moment. All other
enquiries are most sedulously discouraged. It's curious,"
he went on after a little pause, "to read what
people in the time of Our Ford used to write about
scientific progress. They seemed to have imagined that it
could be allowed to go on indefinitely, regardless of
everything else. Knowledge was the highest good, truth
the supreme value; all the rest was secondary and
subordinate. True, ideas were beginning to change even
then. Our Ford himself did a great deal to shift the
emphasis from truth and beauty to comfort and happiness.
Mass production demanded the shift. Universal happiness
keeps the wheels steadily turning; truth and beauty can't.
And, of course, whenever the masses seized political
power, then it was happiness rather than truth and beauty
that mattered. Still, in spite of everytung, unrestricted
scientific research was still permitted. People still
went on talking about truth and beauty as though they
were the sovereign goods. Right up to the time of the
Nine Years' War. That made them change their tune
all right. What's the point of truth or beauty or
knowledge when the anthrax bombs are popping all around
you? That was when science first began to be
controlled–after the Nine Years' War. People were
ready to have even their appetites controlled then.
Anything for a quiet life. We've gone on controlling ever
since. It hasn't been very good for truth, of course. But
it's been very good for happiness. One can't have
something for nothing. Happiness has got to be paid for.
You're paying for it, Mr. Watson–paying because you
happen to be too much interested in beauty. I was too
much interested in truth; I paid too."
- "But you didn't
go to an island," said the Savage, breaking a long
silence.
- The Controller smiled.
"That's how I paid. By choosing to serve happiness.
Other people's–not mine. It's lucky," he added,
after a pause, "that there are such a lot of islands
in the world. I don't know what we should do without them.
Put you all in the lethal chamber, I suppose. By the way,
Mr. Watson, would you like a tropical climate? The
Marquesas, for example; or Samoa? Or something rather
more bracing?"
- Helmholtz rose from his
pneumatic chair. "I should like a thoroughly bad
climate," he answered. "I believe one would
write better if the climate were bad. If there were a lot
of wind and storms, for example …"
- The Controller nodded his
approbation. "I like your spirit, Mr. Watson. I like
it very much indeed. As much as I officially disapprove
of it." He smiled. "What about the Falkland
Islands?"
"Yes,
I think that will do," Helmholtz answered. "And
now, if you don't mind, I'll go and see how poor Bernard's
getting on."
chapter
seventeen
ART, SCIENCE–you seem to have paid a fairly
high price for your happiness," said the Savage, when they
were alone. "Anything else?"
- "Well, religion, of
course," replied the Controller. "There used to
be something called God–before the Nine Years' War.
But I was forgetting; you know all about God, I suppose."
- "Well …" The
Savage hesitated. He would have liked to say something
about solitude, about night, about the mesa lying pale
under the moon, about the precipice, the plunge into
shadowy darkness, about death. He would have liked to
speak; but there were no words. Not even in Shakespeare.
- The Controller, meanwhile,
had crossed to the other side of the room and was
unlocking a large safe set into the wall between the
bookshelves. The heavy door swung open. Rummaging in the
darkness within, "It's a subject," he said,
"that has always had a great interest for me."
He pulled out a thick black volume. "You've never
read this, for example."
- The Savage took it. "The
Holy Bible, containing the Old and New Testaments,"
he read aloud from the title-page.
- "Nor this." It
was a small book and had lost its cover.
- "The Imitation of
Christ."
- "Nor this." He
handed out another volume.
- "The Varieties of
Religious Experience. By William James."
- "And I've got plenty
more," Mustapha Mond continued, resuming his seat.
"A whole collection of pornographic old books. God
in the safe and Ford on the shelves." He pointed
with a laugh to his avowed library–to the shelves of
books, the rack full of reading-machine bobbins and sound-track
rolls.
- "But if you know about
God, why don't you tell them?" asked the Savage
indignantly. "Why don't you give them these books
about God?"
- "For the same reason
as we don't give them Othello: they're old; they're
about God hundreds of years ago. Not about God now."
- "But God doesn't
change."
- "Men do, though."
- "What difference does
that make?"
- "All the difference in
the world," said Mustapha Mond. He got up again and
walked to the safe. "There was a man called Cardinal
Newman," he said. "A cardinal," he
exclaimed parenthetically, "was a kind of Arch-Community-Songster."
- "'I Pandulph, of fair
Milan, cardinal.' I've read about them in Shakespeare."
- "Of course you have.
Well, as I was saying, there was a man called Cardinal
Newman. Ah, here's the book." He pulled it out.
"And while I'm about it I'll take this one too. It's
by a man called Maine de Biran. He was a philosopher, if
you know what that was."
- "A man who dreams of
fewer things than there are in heaven and earth,"
said the Savage promptly.
- "Quite so. I'll read
you one of the things he did dream of in a moment.
Meanwhile, listen to what this old Arch-Community-Songster
said." He opened the book at the place marked by a
slip of paper and began to read. "'We are not our
own any more than what we possess is our own. We did not
make ourselves, we cannot be supreme over ourselves. We
are not our own masters. We are God's property. Is it not
our happiness thus to view the matter? Is it any
happiness or any comfort, to consider that we are
our own? It may be thought so by the young and prosperous.
These may think it a great thing to have everything, as
they suppose, their own way–to depend on no
one–to have to think of nothing out of sight, to be
without the irksomeness of continual acknowledgment,
continual prayer, continual reference of what they do to
the will of another. But as time goes on, they, as all
men, will find that independence was not made for
man–that it is an unnatural state–will do for a
while, but will not carry us on safely to the end …'"
Mustapha Mond paused, put down the first book and,
picking up the other, turned over the pages. "Take
this, for example," he said, and in his deep voice
once more began to read: "'A man grows old; he feels
in himself that radical sense of weakness, of
listlessness, of discomfort, which accompanies the
advance of age; and, feeling thus, imagines himself
merely sick, lulling his fears with the notion that this
distressing condition is due to some particular cause,
from which, as from an illness, he hopes to recover. Vain
imaginings! That sickness is old age; and a horrible
disease it is. They say that it is the fear of death and
of what comes after death that makes men turn to religion
as they advance in years. But my own experience has given
me the conviction that, quite apart from any such terrors
or imaginings, the religious sentiment tends to develop
as we grow older; to develop because, as the passions
grow calm, as the fancy and sensibilities are less
excited and less excitable, our reason becomes less
troubled in its working, less obscured by the images,
desires and distractions, in which it used to be absorbed;
whereupon God emerges as from behind a cloud; our soul
feels, sees, turns towards the source of all light; turns
naturally and inevitably; for now that all that gave to
the world of sensations its life and charms has begun to
leak away from us, now that phenomenal existence is no
more bolstered up by impressions from within or from
without, we feel the need to lean on something that
abides, something that will never play us false–a
reality, an absolute and everlasting truth. Yes, we
inevitably turn to God; for this religious sentiment is
of its nature so pure, so delightful to the soul that
experiences it, that it makes up to us for all our other
losses.'" Mustapha Mond shut the book and leaned
back in his chair. "One of the numerous things in
heaven and earth that these philosophers didn't dream
about was this" (he waved his hand), "us, the
modern world. 'You can only be independent of God while
you've got youth and prosperity; independence won't take
you safely to the end.' Well, we've now got youth and
prosperity right up to the end. What follows? Evidently,
that we can be independent of God. 'The religious
sentiment will compensate us for all our losses.' But
there aren't any losses for us to compensate; religious
sentiment is superfluous. And why should we go hunting
for a substitute for youthful desires, when youthful
desires never fail? A substitute for distractions, when
we go on enjoying all the old fooleries to the very last?
What need have we of repose when our minds and bodies
continue to delight in activity? of consolation, when we
have soma? of something immovable, when there is
the social order?"
- "Then you think there
is no God?"
- "No, I think there
quite probably is one."
- "Then why? …"
- Mustapha Mond checked him.
"But he manifests himself in different ways to
different men. In premodern times he manifested himself
as the being that's described in these books. Now …"
- "How does he manifest
himself now?" asked the Savage.
- "Well, he manifests
himself as an absence; as though he weren't there at all."
- "That's your fault."
- "Call it the fault of
civilization. God isn't compatible with machinery and
scientific medicine and universal happiness. You must
make your choice. Our civilization has chosen machinery
and medicine and happiness. That's why I have to keep
these books locked up in the safe. They're smut. People
would be shocked it …"
- The Savage interrupted him.
"But isn't it natural to feel there's a God?"
- "You might as well ask
if it's natural to do up one's trousers with zippers,"
said the Controller sarcastically. "You remind me of
another of those old fellows called Bradley. He defined
philosophy as the finding of bad reason for what one
believes by instinct. As if one believed anything by
instinct! One believes things because one has been
conditioned to believe them. Finding bad reasons for what
one believes for other bad reasons–that's philosophy.
People believe in God because they've been conditioned to.
- "But all the same,"
insisted the Savage, "it is natural to believe in
God when you're alone–quite alone, in the night,
thinking about death …"
- "But people never are
alone now," said Mustapha Mond. "We make them
hate solitude; and we arrange their lives so that it's
almost impossible for them ever to have it."
- The Savage nodded gloomily.
At Malpais he had suffered because they had shut him out
from the communal activities of the pueblo, in civilized
London he was suffering because he could never escape
from those communal activities, never be quietly alone.
- "Do you remember that
bit in King Lear?" said the Savage at last.
"'The gods are just and of our pleasant vices make
instruments to plague us; the dark and vicious place
where thee he got cost him his eyes,' and Edmund
answers–you remember, he's wounded, he's dying–'Thou
hast spoken right; 'tis true. The wheel has come full
circle; I am here.' What about that now? Doesn't there
seem to be a God managing things, punishing, rewarding?"
- "Well, does there?"
questioned the Controller in his turn. "You can
indulge in any number of pleasant vices with a freemartin
and run no risks of having your eyes put out by your son's
mistress. 'The wheel has come full circle; I am here.'
But where would Edmund be nowadays? Sitting in a
pneumatic chair, with his arm round a girl's waist,
sucking away at his sex-hormone chewing-gum and looking
at the feelies. The gods are just. No doubt. But their
code of law is dictated, in the last resort, by the
people who organize society; Providence takes its cue
from men."
- "Are you sure?"
asked the Savage. "Are you quite sure that the
Edmund in that pneumatic chair hasn't been just as
heavily punished as the Edmund who's wounded and bleeding
to death? The gods are just. Haven't they used his
pleasant vices as an instrument to degrade him?"
- "Degrade him from what
position? As a happy, hard-working, goods-consuming
citizen he's perfect. Of course, if you choose some other
standard than ours, then perhaps you might say he was
degraded. But you've got to stick to one set of
postulates. You can't play Electro-magnetic Golf
according to the rules of Centrifugal Bumble-puppy."
- "But value dwells not
in particular will," said the Savage. "It holds
his estimate and dignity as well wherein 'tis precious of
itself as in the prizer."
- "Come, come,"
protested Mustapha Mond, "that's going rather far,
isn't it?"
- "If you allowed
yourselves to think of God, you wouldn't allow yourselves
to be degraded by pleasant vices. You'd have a reason for
bearing things patiently, for doing things with courage.
I've seen it with the Indians."
- "l'm sure you have,"
said Mustapha Mond. "But then we aren't Indians.
There isn't any need for a civilized man to bear anything
that's seriously unpleasant. And as for doing
things–Ford forbid that he should get the idea into
his head. It would upset the whole social order if men
started doing things on their own."
- "What about self-denial,
then? If you had a God, you'd have a reason for self-denial."
- "But industrial
civilization is only possible when there's no self-denial.
Self-indulgence up to the very limits imposed by hygiene
and economics. Otherwise the wheels stop turning."
- "You'd have a reason
for chastity!" said the Savage, blushing a little as
he spoke the words.
- "But chastity means
passion, chastity means neurasthenia. And passion and
neurasthenia mean instability. And instability means the
end of civilization. You can't have a lasting
civilization without plenty of pleasant vices."
- "But God's the reason
for everything noble and fine and heroic. If you had a
God …"
- "My dear young friend,"
said Mustapha Mond, "civilization has absolutely no
need of nobility or heroism. These things are symptoms of
political inefficiency. In a properly organized society
like ours, nobody has any opportunities for being noble
or heroic. Conditions have got to be thoroughly unstable
before the occasion can arise. Where there are wars,
where there are divided allegiances, where there are
temptations to be resisted, objects of love to be fought
for or defended–there, obviously, nobility and
heroism have some sense. But there aren't any wars
nowadays. The greatest care is taken to prevent you from
loving any one too much. There's no such thing as a
divided allegiance; you're so conditioned that you can't
help doing what you ought to do. And what you ought to do
is on the whole so pleasant, so many of the natural
impulses are allowed free play, that there really aren't
any temptations to resist. And if ever, by some unlucky
chance, anything unpleasant should somehow happen, why,
there's always soma to give you a holiday from the
facts. And there's always soma to calm your anger,
to reconcile you to your enemies, to make you patient and
long-suffering. In the past you could only accomplish
these things by making a great effort and after years of
hard moral training. Now, you swallow two or three half-gramme
tablets, and there you are. Anybody can be virtuous now.
You can carry at least half your mortality about in a
bottle. Christianity without tears–that's what soma
is."
- "But the tears are
necessary. Don't you remember what Othello said? 'If
after every tempest came such calms, may the winds blow
till they have wakened death.' There's a story one of the
old Indians used to tell us, about the Girl of M?taski. The young men who wanted to marry
her had to do a morning's hoeing in her garden. It seemed
easy; but there were flies and mosquitoes, magic ones.
Most of the young men simply couldn't stand the biting
and stinging. But the one that could–he got the girl."
- "Charming! But in
civilized countries," said the Controller, "you
can have girls without hoeing for them, and there aren't
any flies or mosquitoes to sting you. We got rid of them
all centuries ago."
- The Savage nodded, frowning.
"You got rid of them. Yes, that's just like you.
Getting rid of everything unpleasant instead of learning
to put up with it. Whether 'tis better in the mind to
suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to
take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end
them … But you don't do either. Neither suffer nor
oppose. You just abolish the slings and arrows. It's too
easy."
- He was suddenly silent,
thinking of his mother. In her room on the thirty-seventh
floor, Linda had floated in a sea of singing lights and
perfumed caresses–floated away, out of space, out of
time, out of the prison of her memories, her habits, her
aged and bloated body. And Tomakin, ex-Director of
Hatcheries and Conditioning, Tomakin was still on holiday–on
holiday from humiliation and pain, in a world where he
could not hear those words, that derisive laughter, could
not see that hideous face, feel those moist and flabby
arms round his neck, in a beautiful world …
- "What you need,"
the Savage went on, "is something with tears
for a change. Nothing costs enough here."
- ("Twelve and a half
million dollars," Henry Foster had protested when
the Savage told him that. "Twelve and a half
million–that's what the new Conditioning Centre cost.
Not a cent less.")
- "Exposing what is
mortal and unsure to all that fortune, death and danger
dare, even for an eggshell. Isn't there something in that?"
he asked, looking up at Mustapha Mond. "Quite apart
from God–though of course God would be a reason for
it. Isn't there something in living dangerously?"
- "There's a great deal
in it," the Controller replied. "Men and women
must have their adrenals stimulated from time to time."
- "What?"
questioned the Savage, uncomprehending.
- "It's one of the
conditions of perfect health. That's why we've made the V.P.S.
treatments compulsory."
- "V.P.S.?"
- "Violent Passion
Surrogate. Regularly once a month. We flood the whole
system with adrenin. It's the complete physiological
equivalent of fear and rage. All the tonic effects of
murdering Desdemona and being murdered by Othello,
without any of the inconveniences."
- "But I like the
inconveniences."
- "We don't," said
the Controller. "We prefer to do things comfortably."
- "But I don't want
comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I
want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin."
- "In fact," said
Mustapha Mond, "you're claiming the right to be
unhappy."
- "All right then,"
said the Savage defiantly, "I'm claiming the right
to be unhappy."
- "Not to mention the
right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to
have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to
eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant
apprehension of what may happen to-morrow; the right to
catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable
pains of every kind." There was a long silence.
- "I claim them all,"
said the Savage at last.
Mustapha Mond shrugged his shoulders.
"You're welcome," he said.
chapter
eighteen
THE DOOR was ajar; they entered.
- "John!"
- From the bathroom came an unpleasant and characteristic
sound.
- "Is there anything the matter?" Helmholtz
called.
- There was no answer. The unpleasant sound was repeated,
twice; there was silence. Then, with a click the bathroom
door opened and, very pale, the Savage emerged.
- "I say," Helmholtz exclaimed solicitously,
"you do look ill, John!"
- "Did you eat something that didn't agree with you?"
asked Bernard.
- The Savage nodded. "I ate civilization."
- "What?"
- "It poisoned me; I was defiled. And then," he
added, in a lower tone, "I ate my own wickedness."
- "Yes, but what exactly? … I mean, just now you
were …"
- "Now I am purified," said the Savage. "I
drank some mustard and warm water."
- The others stared at him in astonishment. "Do you
mean to say that you were doing it on purpose?"
asked Bernard.
- "That's how the Indians always purify themselves."
He sat down and, sighing, passed his hand across his
forehead. "I shall rest for a few minutes," he
said. "I'm rather tired."
- "Well, I'm not surprised," said Helmholtz.
After a silence, "We've come to say good-bye,"
he went on in another tone. "We're off to-morrow
morning."
- "Yes, we're off to-morrow," said Bernard on
whose face the Savage remarked a new expression of
determined resignation. "And by the way, John,"
he continued, leaning forward in his chair and laying a
hand on the Savage's knee, "I want to say how sorry
I am about everything that happened yesterday." He
blushed. "How ashamed," he went on, in spite of
the unsteadiness of his voice, "how really …"
- The Savage cut him short and, taking his hand,
affectionately pressed it.
- "Helmholtz was wonderful to me," Bernard
resumed, after a little pause. "If it hadn't been
for him, I should …"
- "Now, now," Helmholtz protested.
- There was a silence. In spite of their
sadness–because of it, even; for their sadness was
the symptom of their love for one another–the three
young men were happy.
- "I went to see the Controller this morning,"
said the Savage at last.
- "What for?"
- "To ask if I mightn't go to the islands with you."
- "And what did he say?" asked Helmholtz eagerly.
- The Savage shook his head. "He wouldn't let me."
- "Why not?"
- "He said he wanted to go on with the experiment. But
I'm damned," the Savage added, with sudden fury,
"I'm damned if I'll go on being experimented with.
Not for all the Controllers in the world. l shall go away
to-morrow too."
- "But where?" the others asked in unison.
- The Savage shrugged his shoulders. "Anywhere. I don't
care. So long as I can be alone."
- From Guildford the down-line followed the Wey valley to
Godalming, then, over Milford and Witley, proceeded to
Haslemere and on through Petersfield towards Portsmouth.
Roughly parallel to it, the upline passed over Worplesden,
Tongham, Puttenham, Elstead and Grayshott. Between the
Hog's Back and Hindhead there were points where the two
lines were not more than six or seven kilometres apart.
The distance was too small for careless
flyers–particularly at night and when they had taken
half a gramme too much. There had been accidents. Serious
ones. It had been decided to deflect the upline a few
kilometres to the west. Between Grayshott and Tongham
four abandoned air-lighthouses marked the course of the
old Portsmouth-to-London road. The skies above them were
silent and deserted. It was over Selborne, Bordon and
Farnham that the helicopters now ceaselessly hummed and
roared.
- The Savage had chosen as his hermitage the old light-house
which stood on the crest of the hill between Puttenham
and Elstead. The building was of ferro-concrete and in
excellent condition–almost too comfortable the
Savage had thought when he first explored the place,
almost too civilizedly luxurious. He pacified his
conscience by promising himself a compensatingly harder
self-discipline, purifications the more complete and
thorough. His first night in the hermitage was,
deliberately, a sleepless one. He spent the hours on his
knees praying, now to that Heaven from which the guilty
Claudius had begged forgiveness, now in Zu?i to
Awonawilona, now to Jesus and Pookong, now to his own
guardian animal, the eagle. From time to time he
stretched out his arms as though he were on the Cross,
and held them thus through long minutes of an ache that
gradually increased till it became a tremulous and
excruciating agony; held them, in voluntary crucifixion,
while he repeated, through clenched teeth (the sweat,
meanwhile, pouring down his face), "Oh, forgive me!
Oh, make me pure! Oh, help me to be good!" again and
again, till he was on the point of fainting from the pain.
- When morning came, he felt he had earned the right to
inhabit the lighthouse; yet, even though there still was
glass in most of the windows, even though the view from
the platform was so fine. For the very reason why he had
chosen the lighthouse had become almost instantly a
reason for going somewhere else. He had decided to live
there because the view was so beautiful, because, from
his vantage point, he seemed to be looking out on to the
incarnation of a divine being. But who was he to be
pampered with the daily and hourly sight of loveliness?
Who was he to be living in the visible presence of God?
All he deserved to live in was some filthy sty, some
blind hole in the ground. Stiff and still aching after
his long night of pain, but for that very reason inwardly
reassured, he climbed up to the platform of his tower, he
looked out over the bright sunrise world which he had
regained the right to inhabit. On the north the view was
bounded by the long chalk ridge of the Hog's Back, from
behind whose eastern extremity rose the towers of the
seven skyscrapers which constituted Guildford. Seeing
them, the Savage made a grimace; but he was to become
reconciled to them in course of time; for at night they
twinkled gaily with geometrical constellations, or else,
flood-lighted, pointed their luminous fingers (with a
gesture whose significance nobody in England but the
Savage now understood) solemnly towards the plumbless
mysteries of heaven.
- In the valley which separated the Hog's Back from the
sandy hill on which the lighthouse stood, Puttenham was a
modest little village nine stories high, with silos, a
poultry farm, and a small vitamin-D factory. On the other
side of the lighthouse, towards the South, the ground
fell away in long slopes of heather to a chain of ponds.
- Beyond them, above the intervening woods, rose the
fourteen-story tower of Elstead. Dim in the hazy English
air, Hindhead and Selborne invited the eye into a blue
romantic distance. But it was not alone the distance that
had attracted the Savage to his lighthouse; the near was
as seductive as the far. The woods, the open stretches of
heather and yellow gorse, the clumps of Scotch firs, the
shining ponds with their overhanging birch trees, their
water lilies, their beds of rushes–these were
beautiful and, to an eye accustomed to the aridities of
the American desert, astonishing. And then the solitude!
Whole days passed during which he never saw a human being.
The lighthouse was only a quarter of an hour's flight
from the Charing-T Tower; but the hills of Malpais were
hardly more deserted than this Surrey heath. The crowds
that daily left London, left it only to play Electro-magnetic
Golf or Tennis. Puttenham possessed no links; the nearest
Riemann-surfaces were at Guildford. Flowers and a
landscape were the only attractions here. And so, as
there was no good reason for coming, nobody came. During
the first days the Savage lived alone and undisturbed.
- Of the money which, on his first arrival, John had
received for his personal expenses, most had been spent
on his equipment. Before leaving London he had bought
four viscose-woollen blankets, rope and string, nails,
glue, a few tools, matches (though he intended in due
course to make a fire drill), some pots and pans, two
dozen packets of seeds, and ten kilogrammes of wheat
flour. "No, not synthetic starch and cotton-waste
flour-substitute," he had insisted. "Even
though it is more nourishing." But when it came to
pan-glandular biscuits and vitaminized beef-surrogate, he
had not been able to resist the shopman's persuasion.
Looking at the tins now, he bitterly reproached himself
for his weakness. Loathesome civilized stuff! He had made
up his mind that he would never eat it, even if he were
starving. "That'll teach them," he thought
vindictively. It would also teach him.
- He counted his money. The little that remained would be
enough, he hoped, to tide him over the winter. By next
spring, his garden would be producing enough to make him
independent of the outside world. Meanwhile, there would
always be game. He had seen plenty of rabbits, and there
were waterfowl on the ponds. He set to work at once to
make a bow and arrows.
- There were ash trees near the lighthouse and, for arrow
shafts, a whole copse full of beautifully straight hazel
saplings. He began by felling a young ash, cut out six
feet of unbranched stem, stripped off the bark and,
paring by paring, shaved away the white wood, as old
Mitsima had taught him, until he had a stave of his own
height, stiff at the thickened centre, lively and quick
at the slender tips. The work gave him an intense
pleasure. After those weeks of idleness in London, with
nothing to do, whenever he wanted anything, but to press
a switch or turn a handle, it was pure delight to be
doing something that demanded skill and patience.
- He had almost finished whittling the stave into shape,
when he realized with a start that he was singing-singing!
It was as though, stumbling upon himself from the outside,
he had suddenly caught himself out, taken himself
flagrantly at fault. Guiltily he blushed. After all, it
was not to sing and enjoy himself that he had come here.
It was to escape further contamination by the filth of
civilized life; it was to be purified and made good; it
was actively to make amends. He realized to his dismay
that, absorbed in the whittling of his bow, he had
forgotten what he had sworn to himself he would
constantly remember–poor Linda, and his own
murderous unkindness to her, and those loathsome twins,
swarming like lice across the mystery of her death,
insulting, with their presence, not merely his own grief
and repentance, but the very gods themselves. He had
sworn to remember, he had sworn unceasingly to make
amends. And there was he, sitting happily over his bow-stave,
singing, actually singing. …
- He went indoors, opened the box of mustard, and put some
water to boil on the fire.
- Half an hour later, three Delta-Minus landworkers from
one of the Puttenham Bokanovsky Groups happened to be
driving to Elstead and, at the top of the hill, were
astonished to see a young man standing 0utside the
abandoned lighthouse stripped to the waist and hitting
himself with a whip of knotted cords. His back was
horizontally streaked with crimson, and from weal to weal
ran thin trickles of blood. The driver of the lorry
pulled up at the side of the road and, with his two
companions, stared open-mouthed at the extraordinary
spectacle. One, two three–they counted the strokes.
After the eighth, the young man interrupted his self-punishment
to run to the wood's edge and there be violently sick.
When he had finished, he picked up the whip and began
hitting himself again. Nine, ten, eleven, twelve …
- "Ford!" whispered the driver. And his twins
were of the same opinion.
- "Fordey!" they said.
- Three days later, like turkey buzzards settling on a
corpse, the reporters came.
- Dried and hardened over a slow fire of green wood, the
bow was ready. The Savage was busy on his arrows. Thirty
hazel sticks had been whittled and dried, tipped with
sharp nails, carefully nocked. He had made a raid one
night on the Puttenham poultry farm, and now had feathers
enough to equip a whole armoury. It was at work upon the
feathering of his shafts that the first of the reporters
found him. Noiseless on his pneumatic shoes, the man came
up behind him.
- "Good-morning, Mr. Savage," he said. "I am
the representative of The Hourly Radio."
- Startled as though by the bite of a snake, the Savage
sprang to his feet, scattering arrows, feathers, glue-pot
and brush in all directions.
- "I beg your pardon," said the reporter, with
genuine compunction. "I had no intention …"
He touched his hat–the aluminum stove-pipe hat in
which he carried his wireless receiver and transmitter.
"Excuse my not taking it off," he said. "It's
a bit heavy. Well, as I was saying, I am the
representative of The Hourly …"
- "What do you want?" asked the Savage, scowling.
The reporter returned his most ingratiating smile.
- "Well, of course, our readers would be profoundly
interested …" He put his head on one side, his
smile became almost coquettish. "Just a few words
from you, Mr. Savage." And rapidly, with a series of
ritual gestures, he uncoiled two wires connected to the
portable battery buckled round his waist; plugged them
simultaneously into the sides of his aluminum hat;
touched a spring on the crown–and antenn? shot up
into the air; touched another spring on the peak of the
brim–and, like a jack-in-the-box, out jumped a
microphone and hung there, quivering, six inches in front
of his nose; pulled down a pair of receivers over his
ears; pressed a switch on the left side of the hat-and
from within came a faint waspy buzzing; turned a knob on
the right–and the buzzing was interrupted by a
stethoscopic wheeze and cackle, by hiccoughs and sudden
squeaks. "Hullo," he said to the microphone,
"hullo, hullo …" A bell suddenly rang
inside his hat. "Is that you, Edzel? Primo Mellon
speaking. Yes, I've got hold of him. Mr. Savage will now
take the microphone and say a few words. Won't you, Mr.
Savage?" He looked up at the Savage with another of
those winning smiles of his. "Just tell our readers
why you came here. What made you leave London (hold on,
Edzel!) so very suddenly. And, of course, that whip."
(The Savage started. How did they know about the whip?)
"We're all crazy to know about the whip. And then
something about Civilization. You know the sort of stuff.
'What I think of the Civilized Girl.' Just a few words, a
very few …"
- The Savage obeyed with a disconcerting literalness. Five
words he uttered and no more-five words, the same as
those he had said to Bernard about the Arch-Community-Songster
of Canterbury. "H?ni! Sons ?so tse-n?!"
And seizing the reporter by the shoulder, he spun him
round (the young man revealed himself invitingly well-covered),
aimed and, with all the force and accuracy of a champion
foot-and-mouth-baller, delivered a most prodigious kick.
- Eight minutes later, a new edition of The Hourly Radio
was on sale in the streets of London. "HOURLY RADIO
REPORTER HAS COCCYX KICKED BY MYSTERY SAVAGE," ran
the headlines on the front page. "SENSATION IN
SURREY."
- "Sensation even in London," thought the
reporter when, on his return, he read the words. And a
very painful sensation, what was more. He sat down
gingerly to his luncheon.
- Undeterred by that cautionary bruise on their colleague's
coccyx, four other reporters, representing the New York Times,
the Frankfurt Four-Dimensional Continuum, The
Fordian Science Monitor, and The Delta Mirror,
called that afternoon at the lighthouse and met with
receptions of progressively increasing violence.
- From a safe distance and still rubbing his buttocks,
"Benighted fool!" shouted the man from The
Fordian Science Monitor, "why don't you take soma?"
- "Get away!" The Savage shook his fist.
- The other retreated a few steps then turned round again.
"Evil's an unreality if you take a couple of grammes."
- "Kohakwa iyathtokyai!" The tone was
menacingly derisive.
- "Pain's a delusion."
- "Oh, is it?" said the Savage and, picking up a
thick hazel switch, strode forward.
- The man from The Fordian Science Monitor made a dash for
his helicopter.
- After that the Savage was left for a time in peace. A few
helicopters came and hovered inquisitively round the
tower. He shot an arrow into the importunately nearest of
them. It pierced the aluminum floor of the cabin; there
was a shrill yell, and the machine went rocketing up into
the air with all the acceleration that its super-charger
could give it. The others, in future, kept their distance
respectfully. Ignoring their tiresome humming (he likened
himself in his imagination to one of the suitors of the
Maiden of M?tsaki, unmoved and persistent among the
winged vermin), the Savage dug at what was to be his
garden. After a time the vermin evidently became bored
and flew away; for hours at a stretch the sky above his
head was empty and, but for the larks, silent.
- The weather was breathlessly hot, there was thunder in
the air. He had dug all the morning and was resting,
stretched out along the floor. And suddenly the thought
of Lenina was a real presence, naked and tangible, saying
"Sweet!" and "Put your arms round me!"–in
shoes and socks, perfumed. Impudent strumpet! But oh, oh,
her arms round his neck, the lifting of her breasts, her
mouth! Eternity was in our lips and eyes. Lenina …
No, no, no, no! He sprang to his feet and, half naked as
he was, ran out of the house. At the edge of the heath
stood a clump of hoary juniper bushes. He flung himself
against them, he embraced, not the smooth body of his
desires, but an armful of green spikes. Sharp, with a
thousand points, they pricked him. He tried to think of
poor Linda, breathless and dumb, with her clutching hands
and the unutterable terror in her eyes. Poor Linda whom
he had sworn to remember. But it was still the presence
of Lenina that haunted him. Lenina whom he had promised
to forget. Even through the stab and sting of the juniper
needles, his wincing flesh was aware of her, unescapably
real. "Sweet, sweet … And if you wanted me too,
why didn't you …"
- The whip was hanging on a nail by the door, ready to hand
against the arrival of reporters. In a frenzy the Savage
ran back to the house, seized it, whirled it. The knotted
cords bit into his flesh.
- "Strumpet! Strumpet!" he shouted at every blow
as though it were Lenina (and how frantically, without
knowing it, he wished it were), white, warm, scented,
infamous Lenina that he was dogging thus. "Strumpet!"
And then, in a voice of despair, "Oh, Linda, forgive
me. Forgive me, God. I'm bad. I'm wicked. I'm … No,
no, you strumpet, you strumpet!"
- From his carefully constructed hide in the wood three
hundred metres away, Darwin Bonaparte, the Feely
Corporation's most expert big game photographer had
watched the whole proceedings. Patience and skill had
been rewarded. He had spent three days sitting inside the
bole of an artificial oak tree, three nights crawling on
his belly through the heather, hiding microphones in
gorse bushes, burying wires in the soft grey sand.
Seventy-two hours of profound discomfort. But now me
great moment had come–the greatest, Darwin Bonaparte
had time to reflect, as he moved among his instruments,
the greatest since his taking of the famous all-howling
stereoscopic feely of the gorillas' wedding. "Splendid,"
he said to himself, as the Savage started his astonishing
performance. "Splendid!" He kept his telescopic
cameras carefully aimed–glued to their moving
objective; clapped on a higher power to get a close-up of
the frantic and distorted face (admirable!); switched
over, for half a minute, to slow motion (an exquisitely
comical effect, he promised himself); listened in,
meanwhile, to the blows, the groans, the wild and raving
words that were being recorded on the sound-track at the
edge of his film, tried the effect of a little
amplification (yes, that was decidedly better); was
delighted to hear, in a momentary lull, the shrill
singing of a lark; wished the Savage would turn round so
that he could get a good close-up of the blood on his
back–and almost instantly (what astonishing luck!)
the accommodating fellow did turn round, and he was able
to take a perfect close-up.
- "Well, that was grand!" he said to himself when
it was all over. "Really grand!" He mopped his
face. When they had put in the feely effects at the
studio, it would be a wonderful film. Almost as good,
thought Darwin Bonaparte, as the Sperm Whale's Love-Life–and
that, by Ford, was saying a good deal!
- Twelve days later The Savage of Surrey had been released
and could be seen, heard and felt in every first-class
feely-palace in Western Europe.
- The effect of Darwin Bonaparte's film was immediate and
enormous. On the afternoon which followed the evening of
its release John's rustic solitude was suddenly broken by
the arrival overhead of a great swarm of helicopters.
- He was digging in his garden–digging, too, in his
own mind, laboriously turning up the substance of his
thought. Death–and he drove in his spade once, and
again, and yet again. And all our yesterdays have lighted
fools the way to dusty death. A convincing thunder
rumbled through the words. He lifted another spadeful of
earth. Why had Linda died? Why had she been allowed to
become gradually less than human and at last … He
shuddered. A good kissing carrion. He planted his foot on
his spade and stamped it fiercely into the tough ground.
As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; they kill us
for their sport. Thunder again; words that proclaimed
themselves true–truer somehow than truth itself. And
yet that same Gloucester had called them ever-gentle gods.
Besides, thy best of rest is sleep and that thou oft
provok'st; yet grossly fear'st thy death which is no more.
No more than sleep. Sleep. Perchance to dream. His spade
struck against a stone; he stooped to pick it up. For in
that sleep of death, what dreams? …
- A humming overhead had become a roar; and suddenly he was
in shadow, there was something between the sun and him.
He looked up, startled, from his digging, from his
thoughts; looked up in a dazzled bewilderment, his mind
still wandering in that other world of truer-than-truth,
still focused on the immensities of death and deity;
looked up and saw, close above him, the swarm of hovering
machines. Like locusts they came, hung poised, descended
all around him on the heather. And from out of the
bellies of these giant grasshoppers stepped men in white
viscose-flannels, women (for the weather was hot) in
acetate-shantung pyjamas or velveteen shorts and
sleeveless, half-unzippered singlets–one couple from
each. In a few minutes there were dozens of them,
standing in a wide circle round the lighthouse, staring,
laughing, clicking their cameras, throwing (as to an ape)
peanuts, packets of sex-hormone chewing-gum, pan-glandular
petite beurres. And every moment–for across
the Hog's Back the stream of traffic now flowed
unceasingly–their numbers increased. As in a
nightmare, the dozens became scores, the scores hundreds.
- The Savage had retreated towards cover, and now, in the
posture of an animal at bay, stood with his back to the
wall of the lighthouse, staring from face to face in
speechless horror, like a man out of his senses.
- From this stupor he was aroused to a more immediate sense
of reality by the impact on his cheek of a well-aimed
packet of chewing-gum. A shock of startling pain–and
he was broad awake, awake and fiercely angry.
- "Go away!" he shouted.
- The ape had spoken; there was a burst of laughter and
hand-clapping. "Good old Savage! Hurrah, hurrah!"
And through the babel he heard cries of: "Whip, whip,
the whip!"
- Acting on the word's suggestion, he seized the bunch of
knotted cords from its nail behind the door and shook it
at his tormentors.
- There was a yell of ironical applause.
- Menacingly he advanced towards them. A woman cried out in
fear. The line wavered at its most immediately threatened
point, then stiffened again, stood firm. The
consciousness of being in overwhelming force had given
these sightseers a courage which the Savage had not
expected of them. Taken aback, he halted and looked round.
- "Why don't you leave me alone?" There was an
almost plaintive note in his anger.
- "Have a few magnesium-salted almonds!" said the
man who, if the Savage were to advance, would be the
first to be attacked. He held out a packet. "They're
really very good, you know," he added, with a rather
nervous smile of propitiation. "And the magnesium
salts will help to keep you young."
- The Savage ignored his offer. "What do you want with
me?" he asked, turning from one grinning face to
another. "What do you want with me?"
- "The whip," answered a hundred voices
confusedly. "Do the whipping stunt. Let's see the
whipping stunt."
- Then, in unison and on a slow, heavy rhythm, "We-want-the
whip," shouted a group at the end of the line.
"We–want–the whip."
- Others at once took up the cry, and the phrase was
repeated, parrot-fashion, again and again, with an ever-growing
volume of sound, until, by the seventh or eighth
reiteration, no other word was being spoken. "We–want–the
whip."
- They were all crying together; and, intoxicated by the
noise, the unanimity, the sense of rhythmical atonement,
they might, it seemed, have gone on for hours-almost
indefinitely. But at about the twenty-fifth repetition
the proceedings were startlingly interrupted. Yet another
helicopter had arrived from across the Hog's Back, hung
poised above the crowd, then dropped within a few yards
of where the Savage was standing, in the open space
between the line of sightseers and the lighthouse. The
roar of the air screws momentarily drowned the shouting;
then, as the machine touched the ground and the engines
were turned off: "We–want–the whip;
we–want–the whip," broke out again in the
same loud, insistent monotone.
- The door of the helicopter opened, and out stepped, first
a fair and ruddy-faced young man, then, in green
velveteen shorts, white shirt, and jockey cap, a young
woman.
- At the sight of the young woman, the Savage started,
recoiled, turned pale.
- The young woman stood, smiling at him–an uncertain,
imploring, almost abject smile. The seconds passed. Her
lips moved, she was saying something; but the sound of
her voice was covered by the loud reiterated refrain of
the sightseers.
- "We–want–the whip! We–want–the
whip!"
- The young woman pressed both hands to her left side, and
on that peach-bright, doll-beautiful face of hers
appeared a strangely incongruous expression of yearning
distress. Her blue eyes seemed to grow larger, brighter;
and suddenly two tears rolled down her cheeks. Inaudibly,
she spoke again; then, with a quick, impassioned gesture
stretched out her arms towards the Savage, stepped
forward.
- "We–want–the whip! We–want …"
- And all of a sudden they had what they wanted.
- "Strumpet!" The Savage had rushed at her like a
madman. "Fitchew!" Like a madman, he was
slashing at her with his whip of small cords.
- Terrified, she had turned to flee, had tripped and fallen
in the heather. "Henry, Henry!" she shouted.
But her ruddy-faced companion had bolted out of harm's
way behind the helicopter.
- With a whoop of delighted excitement the line broke;
there was a convergent stampede towards that magnetic
centre of attraction. Pain was a fascinating horror.
- "Fry, lechery, fry!" Frenzied, the Savage
slashed again.
- Hungrily they gathered round, pushing and scrambling like
swine about the trough.
- "Oh, the flesh!" The Savage ground his teeth.
This time it was on his shoulders that the whip descended.
"Kill it, kill it!"
- Drawn by the fascination of the horror of pain and, from
within, impelled by that habit of cooperation, that
desire for unanimity and atonement, which their
conditioning had so ineradicably implanted in them, they
began to mime the frenzy of his gestures, striking at one
another as the Savage struck at his own rebellious flesh,
or at that plump incarnation of turpitude writhing in the
heather at his feet.
- "Kill it, kill it, kill it …" The Savage
went on shouting.
- Then suddenly somebody started singing "Orgy-porgy"
and, in a moment, they had all caught up the refrain and,
singing, had begun to dance. Orgy-porgy, round and round
and round, beating one another in six-eight time. Orgy-porgy
…
- It was after midnight when the last of the helicopters
took its flight. Stupefied by soma, and exhausted by a
long-drawn frenzy of sensuality, the Savage lay sleeping
in the heather. The sun was already high when he awoke.
He lay for a moment, blinking in owlish incomprehension
at the light; then suddenly remembered–everything.
- "Oh, my God, my God!" He covered his eyes with
his hand.
- That evening the swarm of helicopters that came buzzing
across the Hog's Back was a dark cloud ten kilometres
long. The description of last night's orgy of atonement
had been in all the papers.
- "Savage!" called the first arrivals, as they
alighted from their machine. "Mr. Savage!"
- There was no answer.
- The door of the lighthouse was ajar. They pushed it open
and walked into a shuttered twilight. Through an archway
on the further side of the room they could see the bottom
of the staircase that led up to the higher floors. Just
under the crown of the arch dangled a pair of feet.
- "Mr. Savage!"
- Slowly, very slowly, like two unhurried compass needles,
the feet turned towards the right; north, north-east,
east, south-east, south, south-south-west; then paused,
and, after a few seconds, turned as unhurriedly back
towards the left. South-south-west, south, south-east,
east. …
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