Author: Aldous Huxley
Category: Literature
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To this deflated Bernard the Savage showed himself unexpectedly sympathetic.
‘You’re more like what you were at Malpais,’ he said, when Bernard had told him his plaintive story. ‘Do you remember when we first talked together? Outside the little house. You’re like what you were then.’
‘Because I’m unhappy again; that’s why.’
‘Well, I’d rather be unhappy than have the sort of false, lying happiness you were having here.’
‘I like that,’ said Bernard bitterly. ‘When it’s you who were the cause of it all. Refusing to come to my party and so turning them all against me!’ He knew that what he was saying was absurd in its injustice; he admitted inwardly, and at last even aloud, the truth of all that the Savage now said about the worthlessness of friends who could be turned upon so slight a provocation into persecuting enemies. But in spite of this knowledge and these admissions, in spite of the fact that his friend’s support and sympathy were now his only comfort, Bernard continued perversely to nourish, along with his quite genuine affection, a secret grievance against the Savage, to meditate a campaign of small revenges to be wreaked upon him. Nourishing a grievance against the Arch-Community-Songster was useless; there was no possibility of being revenged on the Chief Bottler or the Assistant Predestinator. As a victim, the Savage possessed, for Bernard, this enormous superiority over the others: that he was accessible. One of the principal functions of a friend is to suffer (in a milder and symbolic form) the punishments that we should like, but are unable, to inflict upon our enemies.
Bernard’s other victim-friend was Helmholtz. When, discomfited, he came and asked once more for the friendship which in his prosperity he had not thought it worth his while to preserve, Helmholtz gave it; and gave it without a reproach, without a comment, as though he had forgotten that there had ever been a quarrel. Touched, Bernard felt himself at the same time humiliated by this magnanimity — a magnanimity the more extraordinary and therefore the more humiliating in that it owed nothing to soma and everything to Helmholtz’s character. It was the Helmholtz of daily life who forgot and forgave, not the Helmholtz of a half-gramme holiday. Bernard was duly grateful (it was an enormous comfort to have his friend again) and also duly resentful (it would be a pleasure to take some revenge on Helmholtz for his generosity.)
At their first meeting after the estrangement, Bernard poured out the tale of his miseries and accepted consolation. It was not till some days later that he learned, to his surprise and with a twinge of shame, that he was not the only one who had been in trouble. Helmholtz had also come into conflict with Authority.
‘It was over some rhymes,’ he explained. ‘I was giving my usual course of Advanced Emotional Engineering for Third Year Students. Twelve lectures, of which the seventh is about rhymes. “On the Use of Rhymes in Moral Propaganda and Advertisement,” to be precise. I always illustrate my lecture with a lot of technical examples. This time I thought I’d give them one I’d just written myself. Pure madness, of course; but I couldn’t resist it.’ He laughed. ‘I was curious to see what their reactions would be. Besides,’ he added more gravely, ‘I wanted to do a bit of propaganda; I was trying to engineer them into feeling as I’d felt when I wrote the rhymes. Ford!’ He laughed again. ‘What an outcry there was! The Principal had me up and threatened to hand me the immediate sack. I’m a marked man.’
‘But what were your rhymes?’ Bernard asked.
‘They were about being alone.’
Bernard’s eyebrows went up.
‘I’ll recite them to you, if you like.’ And Helmholtz began:
‘Yesterday’s committee,
Sticks, but a broken drum,
Midnight in the City,
Flutes in a vacuum,
Shut lips, sleeping faces,
Every stopped machine,
The dumb and littered places
Where crowds have been —
All silences rejoice,
Weep (loudly or low),
Speak — but with the voice
Of whom, I do not know.
Absence, say, of Susan’s,
Absence of Egeria’s
Arms and respective bosoms,
Lips and, ah, posteriors,
Slowly form a presence;
Whose? and, I ask, of what
So absurd an essence,
That something, which is not,
Nevertheless should populate
Empty night more solidly
Than that with which we copulate,
Why should it seem so squalidly?
Well, I gave them that as an example, and they reported me to the Principal.’
‘I’m not surprised,’ said Bernard. ‘It’s flatly against all their sleep-teaching. Remember, they’ve had at least a quarter of a million warnings against solitude.’
‘I know. But I thought I’d like to see what the effect would be.’
‘Well, you’ve seen now.’
Helmholtz only laughed. ‘I feel,’ he said, after a silence, ‘as though I were just beginning to have something to write about. As though I were beginning to be able to use that power I feel I’ve got inside me — that extra, latent power. Something seems to be coming to me.’ In spite of all his troubles, he seemed, Bernard thought, profoundly happy.
Helmholtz and the Savage took to one another at once. So cordially indeed that Bernard felt a sharp pang of jealousy. In all these weeks he had never come to so close an intimacy with the Savage as Helmholtz immediately achieved. Watching them, listening to their talk, he found himself sometimes resentfully wishing that he had never brought them together. He was ashamed of his jealousy and alternately made efforts of will and took soma to keep himself from feeling it. But the efforts were not very successful; and between the soma-holidays there were, of necessity, intervals. The odious sentiment kept on returning.
At his third meeting with the Savage, Helmholtz recited his rhymes on Solitude.
‘What do you think of them?’ he asked when he had done.
The Savage shook his head. ‘Listen to this,’ was his answer; and unlocking the drawer in which he kept his mouse-eaten book, he opened and read:
‘Let the bird of loudest lay,
On the sole Arabian tree,
Herald sad and trumpet be . . .’
Helmholtz listened with a growing excitement. At ‘sole Arabian tree’ he started; at ‘thou shrieking harbinger’ he smiled with sudden pleasure; at ‘every fowl of tyrant wing’ the blood rushed up into his cheeks; but at ‘defunctive music’ he turned pale and trembled with an unprecedented emotion. The Savage read on:
‘Property was thus appall’d,
That the self was not the same;
Single nature’s double name
Neither two nor one was call’d.
Reason in itself confounded
Saw division grow together . . .’
‘Orgy-porgy!’ said Bernard, interrupting the reading with a loud, unpleasant laugh. ‘It’s just a Solidarity Service hymn.’ He was revenging himself on his two friends for liking one another more than they liked him.
In the course of their next two or three meetings he frequently repeated this little act of vengeance. It was simple and, since both Helmholtz and the Savage were dreadfully pained by the shattering and defilement of a favourite poetic crystal, extremely effective. In the end, Helmholtz threatened to kick him out of the room if he dared to interrupt again. And yet, strangely enough, the next interruption, the most disgraceful of all, came from Helmholtz himself.
The Savage was reading Romeo and Juliet aloud — reading (for all the time he was seeing himself as Romeo and Lenina as Juliet) with an intense and quivering passion. Helmholtz had listened to the scene of the lovers’ first meeting with a puzzled interest. The scene in the orchard had delighted him with its poetry; but the sentiments expressed had made him smile. Getting into such a state about having a girl — it seemed rather ridiculous. But, taken detail by verbal detail, what a superb piece of emot
ional engineering! ‘That old fellow,’ he said, ‘he makes our best propaganda technicians look absolutely silly.’ The Savage smiled triumphantly and resumed his reading. All went tolerably well until, in the last scene of the third act, Capulet and Lady Capulet began to bully Juliet to marry Paris. Helmholtz had been restless throughout the entire scene; but when, pathetically mimed by the Savage, Juliet cried out:
‘Is there no pity sitting in the clouds,
That sees into the bottom of my grief?
O, sweet my mother, cast me not away!
Delay this marriage for a month, a week;
Or, if you do not, make the bridal bed
In that dim monument where Tybalt lies . . .’
when Juliet said this, Helmholtz broke out in an explosion of uncontrollable guffawing.
The mother and father (grotesque obscenity) forcing the daughter to have some one she didn’t want! And the idiotic girl not saying that she was having some one else whom (for the moment, at any rate) she preferred! In its smutty absurdity the situation was irresistibly comical. He had managed, with a heroic effort, to hold down the mounting pressure of his hilarity; but ‘sweet mother’ (in the Savage’s tremulous tone of anguish) and the reference to Tybalt lying dead, but evidently uncremated and wasting his phosphorus on a dim monument, were too much for him. He laughed and laughed till the tears streamed down his face — quenchlessly laughed while, pale with a sense of outrage, the Savage looked at him over the top of his book and then, as the laughter still continued, closed it indignantly, got up and, with the gesture of one who removes his pearl from before swine, locked it away in its drawer.
‘And yet,’ said Helmholtz when, having recovered breath enough to apologize, he had mollified the Savage into listening to his explanations, ‘I know quite well that one needs ridiculous, mad situations like that; one can’t write really well about anything else. Why was that old fellow such a marvellous propaganda technician? Because he had so many insane, excruciating things to get excited about. You’ve got to be hurt and upset; otherwise you can’t think of the really good, penetrating, X-rayish phrases. But fathers and mothers!’ He shook his head. ‘You can’t expect me to keep a straight face about fathers and mothers. And who’s going to get excited about a boy having a girl or not having her?’ (The Savage winced; but Helmholtz, who was staring pensively at the floor, saw nothing.) ‘No,’ he concluded, with a sigh, ‘it won’t do. We need some other kind of madness and violence. But what? What? Where can one find it?’ He was silent; then, shaking his head, ‘I don’t know,’ he said at last, ‘I don’t know.’
Chapter XIII
HENRY FOSTER LOOMED up through the twilight of the Embryo Store.
‘Like to come to a feely this evening?’
Lenina shook her head without speaking.
‘Going out with some one else?’ It interested him to know which of his friends was being had by which other. ‘Is it Benito?’ he questioned.
She shook her head again.
Henry detected the weariness in those purple eyes, the pallor beneath that glaze of lupus, the sadness at the corners of the unsmiling crimson mouth. ‘You’re not feeling ill, are you?’ he asked, a trifle anxiously, afraid that she might be suffering from one of the few remaining infectious diseases.
Yet once more Lenina shook her head.
‘Anyhow, you ought to go and see the doctor,’ said Henry. ‘A doctor a day keeps the jim-jams away,’ he added heartily, driving home his hypnopædic adage with a clap on the shoulder. ‘Perhaps you need a Pregnancy Substitute,’ he suggested. ‘Or else an extra-strong V.P.S. treatment. Sometimes, you know, the standard passion-surrogate isn’t quite . . .’
‘Oh, for Ford’s sake,’ said Lenina, breaking her stubborn silence, ‘shut up!’ And she turned back to her neglected embryos.
A V.P.S. treatment indeed! She would have laughed, if she hadn’t been on the point of crying. As though she hadn’t got enough V.P. of her own! She sighed profoundly as she refilled her syringe. ‘John,’ she murmured to herself, ‘John . . .’ Then ‘My Ford,’ she wondered, ‘have I given this one its sleeping-sickness injection, or haven’t I?’ She simply couldn’t remember. In the end, she decided not to run the risk of letting it have a second dose, and moved down the line to the next bottle.
Twenty-two years eight months and four days from that moment, a promising young Alpha-Minus administrator at Mwanza-Mwanza was to die of trypanosomiasis — the first case for over half a century. Sighing, Lenina went on with her work.
An hour later, in the Changing Room, Fanny was energetically protesting. ‘But it’s absurd to let yourself get into a state like this. Simply absurd,’ she repeated. ‘And what about? A man — one man.’
‘But he’s the one I want.’
‘As though there weren’t millions of other men in the world.’
‘But I don’t want them.’
‘How can you know till you’ve tried?’
‘I have tried.’
‘But how many?’ asked Fanny, shrugging her shoulders contemptuously. ‘One, two?’
‘Dozens. But,’ shaking her head, ‘it wasn’t any good,’ she added.
‘Well, you must persevere,’ said Fanny sententiously. But it was obvious that her confidence in her own prescriptions had been shaken. ‘Nothing can be achieved without perseverance.’
‘But meanwhile . . .’
‘Don’t think of him.’
‘I can’t help it.’
‘Take soma, then.’
‘I do.’
‘Well, go on.’
‘But in the intervals I still like him. I shall always like him.’
‘Well, if that’s the case,’ said Fanny, with decision, ‘why don’t you just go and take him. Whether he wants it or no.’
‘But if you knew how terribly queer he was!’
‘All the more reason for taking a firm line.’
‘It’s all very well to say that.’
‘Don’t stand any nonsense. Act.’ Fanny’s voice was a trumpet; she might have been a Y.W.F.A. lecturer giving an evening talk to adolescent Beta-Minuses. ‘Yes, act — at once. Do it now.’
‘I’d be scared,’ said Lenina.
‘Well, you’ve only got to take half a gramme of soma first. And now I’m going to have my bath.’ She marched off, trailing her towel.
The bell rang, and the Savage, who was impatiently hoping that Helmholtz would come that afternoon (for having at last made up his mind to talk to Helmholtz about Lenina, he could not bear to postpone his confidences a moment longer), jumped up and ran to the door.
‘I had a premonition it was you, Helmholtz,’ he shouted as he opened.
On the threshold, in a white acetate-satin sailor suit, and with a round white cap rakishly tilted over her left ear, stood Lenina.
‘Oh!’ said the Savage, as though some one had struck him a heavy blow.
Half a gramme had been enough to make Lenina forget her fears and her embarrassments. ‘Hullo, John,’ she said, smiling, and walked past him into the room. Automatically he closed the door and followed her. Lenina sat down. There was a long silence.
‘You don’t seem very glad to see me, John,’ she said at last.
‘Not glad?’ The Savage looked at her reproachfully; then suddenly fell on his knees before her and, taking Lenina’s hand, reverently kissed it. ‘Not glad? Oh, if you only knew,’ he whispered, and, venturing to raise his eyes to her face, ‘Admired Lenina,’ he went on, ‘indeed the top of admiration, worth what’s dearest in the world.’ She smiled at him with a luscious tenderness. ‘Oh, you so perfect’ (she was leaning towards him with parted lips), ‘so perfect and so peerless are created’ (nearer and nearer) ‘of every creature’s best.’ Still nearer. The Savage suddenly scrambled to his feet. ‘That’s why,’ he said, speaking with averted face,’ I wanted to do something first . . . I mean, to show I was worthy of you. Not that I could ever really be that. But at any rate to show I wasn’t absolutely unworthy. I wanted
to do something.’
‘Why should you think it necessary . . .’ Lenina began, but left the sentence unfinished. There was a note of irritation in her voice. When one has leant forward, nearer and nearer, with parted lips — only to find oneself, quite suddenly, as a clumsy oaf scrambles to his feet, leaning towards nothing at all — well, there is a reason, even with half a gramme of soma circulating in one’s blood-stream, a genuine reason for annoyance.
‘At Malpais,’ the Savage was incoherently mumbling, ‘you had to bring her the skin of a mountain lion — I mean, when you wanted to marry some one. Or else a wolf.’
‘There aren’t any lions in England,’ Lenina almost snapped.
‘And even if there were,’ the Savage added, with sudden contemptuous resentment, ‘people would kill them out of helicopters, I suppose, with poison gas or something. I wouldn’t do that, Lenina.’ He squared his shoulders, he ventured to look at her and was met with a stare of annoyed incomprehension. Confused, ‘I’ll do anything,’ he went on, more and more incoherently. ‘Anything you tell me. There be some sports are painful — you know. But their labour delight in them sets off. That’s what I feel. I mean I’d sweep the floor if you wanted.’
‘But we’ve got vacuum cleaners here,’ said Lenina in bewilderment. ‘It isn’t necessary.’
‘No, of course it isn’t necessary. But some kinds of baseness are nobly undergone. I’d like to undergo something nobly. Don’t you see?’
‘But if there are vacuum cleaners . . .’
‘That’s not the point.’
‘And Epsilon Semi-Morons to work them,’ she went on, ‘well, really, why?’
‘Why? But for you, for you. Just to show that I . . .’