Author: Aldous Huxley
Category: Literature
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He could fly to Santa Fé, 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 Fé Post Office; at ten thirty-seven Bernard had got through to the World Controller’s Office in Whitehall; at ten thirty-nine 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 deerskin 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 pisto-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 X
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 fœtuses 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 æons 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 hypnopædic 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 “like a babe in a bottle” ’ (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 Sub-Centre 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 twitched 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 XI
AFTER THE SCENE in the Fer
tilizing 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 paralysed. No more breathing. Finished. And a good thing too. If we could rejuvenate, of course it would be different. But we can’t.’