Author: Aldous Huxley
Category: Literature
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‘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 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 new-mown 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 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-Talking, 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-oh’; 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 Ooh’s and Aah’s (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 blonde was ravished away into the sky and kept there, hovering, for three weeks in a wildly anti-social tête-à-tête 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 sexophones, 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 quite, 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, her eyes dewily bright, her breath came deeply. 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 squ
are 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 crumpled 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 XII
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 tákwa!’ It was only in Zuñi that the Savage could adequately express what he felt about the Arch-Community-Songster. ‘Háni!’ he added as an afterthought; and then (with what derisive ferocity!): ‘Sons éso tse-ná.’ And he spat on the ground, as Popé 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 carotine sandwich, a slice of vitamin A pâté, 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 the Diocesan Singery. 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 ‘Háni!’ and even (it was lucky that Bernard didn’t understand Zuñi) ‘Sons éso tse-ná!’ 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 the Singery. ‘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 pur
pose 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 de-condition 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:
‘O, 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.