Author: Aldous Huxley
Category: Literature
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‘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 those 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 fulfilment?’
‘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 hypnopædia. 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 Kurfürstendamm 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 hypnopædia . . .’
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. 150.’
‘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.f. 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. ‘W
hat 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 hypnopædic 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.