Author: Aldous Huxley
Category: Literature
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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.’
§ 2
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! It 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 hypnopædic 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 gulley 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. It 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, exulti
ng, 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.
§ 3
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 Fé 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 Fé. 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-Racquet 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 hypnopædic 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, ant-like, indefatigably. ‘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 Director 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 Zuñi 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.