Author: Aldous Huxley
Category: Literature
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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 hypnopædically 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 V
§ 1
BY EIGHT O’CLOCK the light was failing. The loud-speakers 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 south-easterly 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 round 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, s
oft 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 façade 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 sexophones 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 ethermusic 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 sexophones 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.
Swallowed 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 hypnopædia 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 Aphroditæum (to which Helmholtz 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 fortnightly 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 loo
ked 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 round 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.