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 Eleven
AFTER the scene in the Fertilizing 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
coudn'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 paralyzed. No more breathing. Finished. And a
good thing too. If we could rejuvenate, of course it would be different. But we can't."
Surprisingly, as every one thought (for on soma-holiday Linda was most conveniently
out of the way), John raised objections.
"But aren't you shortening her life by giving her so much?"
"In one sense, yes," Dr. Shaw admitted. "But in another we're actually lengthening
it." The young man stared, uncomprehending. "Soma may make you lose a few
years in time," the doctor went on. "But think of the enornous, immeasurable
durations it can give you out of time. Every soma-holiday is a bit of what our
ancestors used to call eternity."
John began to understand. "Eternity was in our lips and eyes," he murmured.
"Eh?"
"Nothing."
"Of course," Dr. Shaw went on, "you can't allow people to go popping off into
eternity if they've got any serious work to do. But as she hasn't got any serious work
…"
"All the same," John persisted, "I don't believe it's right."
The doctor shrugged his shoulders. "Well, of course, if you prefer to have her
screaming mad all the time …"
In the end John was forced to give in. Linda got her soma. Thenceforward she
remained in her little room on the thirty-seventh floor of Bernard's apartment
house, in bed, with the radio and television always on, and the patchouli tap just
dripping, and the soma tablets within reach of her hand–there she remained; and
yet wasn't there at all, was all the time away, infinitely far away, on holiday; on
holiday in some other world, where the music of the radio was a labyrinth of
sonorous colours, a sliding, palpitating labyrinth, that led (by what beautifully
inevitable windings) to a bright centre of absolute conviction; where the dancing
images of the television box were the performers in some indescribably delicious
all-singing feely; where the dripping patchouli was more than scent–was the sun,
was a million saxophones, was Popé making love, only much more so,
incomparably more, and without end.
"No, we can't rejuvenate. But I'm very glad," Dr. Shaw had concluded, "to have had
this opportunity to see an example of senility in a human being. Thank you so
much for calling me in." He shook Bernard warmly by the hand.
It was John, then, they were all after. And as it was only through Bernard, his
accredited guardian, that John could be seen, Bernard now found himself, for the
first time in his life, treated not merely normally, but as a person of outstanding
importance. There was no more talk of the alcohol in his blood-surrogate, no gibes
at his personal appearance. Henry Foster went out of his way to be friendly; Benito
Hoover made him a present of six packets of sex-hormone chewing-gum; the
Assistant Predestinator came out and cadged almost abjectly for an invitation to one
of Bernard's evening parties. As for the women, Bernard had only to hint at the
possibility of an invitation, and he could have whichever of them he liked.
"Bernard's asked me to meet the Savage next Wednesday," Fanny announced
triumphantly.
"I'm so glad," said Lenina. "And now you must admit that you were wrong about
Bernard. Don't you think he's really rather sweet?"
Fanny nodded. "And I must say," she said, "I was quite agreeably surprised."
The Chief Bottler, the Director of Predestination, three Deputy Assistant
Fertilizer-Generals, the Professor of Feelies in the College of Emotional Engineering,
the Dean of the Westminster Community Singery, the Supervisor of
Bokanovskification–the list of Bernard's notabilities was interminable.
"And I had six girls last week," he confided to Helmholtz Watson. "One on Monday,
two on Tuesday, two more on Friday, and one on Saturday. And if I'd had the time
or the inclination, there were at least a dozen more who were only too anxious …"
Helmholtz listened to his boastings in a silence so gloomily disapproving that
Bernard was offended.
"You're envious," he said.
Helmholtz shook his head. "I'm rather sad, that's all," he answered.
Bernard went off in a huff. Never, he told himself, never would he speak to
Helmholtz again.
The days passed. Success went fizzily to Bernard's head, and in the process
completely reconciled him (as any good intoxicant should do) to a world which, up
till then, he had found very unsatisfactory. In so far as it recognized him as
important, the order of things was good. But, reconciled by his success, he yet
refused to forego the privilege of criticizing this order. For the act of criticizing
heightened his sense of importance, made him feel larger. Moreover, he did
genuinely believe that there were things to criticize. (At the same time, he genuinely
liked being a success and having all the girls he wanted.) Before those who now, for
the sake of the Savage, paid their court to him, Bernard would parade a carping
unorthodoxy. He was politely listened to. But behind his back people shook their
heads. "That young man will come to a bad end," they said, prophesying the more
confidently in that they themselves would in due course personally see to it that the
end was bad. "He won't find another Savage to help him out a second time," they
said. Meanwhile, however, there was the first Savage; they were polite. And because
they were polite, Bernard felt positively gigantic–gigantic and at the same time light
with elation, lighter than air.
"Lighter than air," said Bernard, pointing upwards.
Like a pearl in the sky, high, high above them, the Weather Department's captive
balloon shone rosily in the sunshine.
"… the said Savage," so ran Bernard's instructions, "to be shown civilized life in all
its aspects. …"
He was being shown a bird's-eye view of it at present, a bird's-eye view from the
platform of the Charing-T Tower. The Station Master and the Resident Meteorologist
were acting as guides. But it was Bernard who did most of the talking. Intoxicated,
he was behaving as though, at the very least, he were a visiting World Controller.
Lighter than air.
The Bombay Green Rocket dropped out of the sky. The passengers alighted. Eight
identical Dravidian twins in khaki looked out of the eight portholes of the cabin–the
stewards.
"Twelve hundred and fifty kilometres an hour," said the Station Master impressively.
"What do you think of that, Mr. Savage?"
John thought it very nice. "Still," he said, "Ariel could put a girdle round the earth in
forty minutes."
"The Savage," wrote Bernard in his report to Mustapha Mond, "shows surprisingly
little astonishment at, or awe of, civilized inventions. This is partly due, no doubt, to
the fact that he has heard them talked about by the woman Linda, his m–––."
(Mustapha Mond frowned. "Does the fool think I'm too squeamish to see the word
written out at full length?")
"Partly on his interest being focussed on what he calls 'the soul,' which he persists in
regarding as an entity independent of the physical environment, whereas, as I tried
to point out to him …"
The Controiler skipped the next sentences and was just about to turn the page in
search of something more interestingly concrete, when his eye was caught by a
series of quite extraordinary phrases. " … though I must admit," he read, "that I
agree with the Savage in finding civilized infantility too easy or, as he puts it, not
expensive enough; and I would like to take this opportunity of drawing your
fordship's attention to …"
Mustapha Mond's anger gave place almost at once to mirth. The idea of this
creature solemnly lecturing him–him-about the social order was really too grotesque.
The man must have gone mad. "I ought to give him a lesson," he said to hiniself;
then threw back his head and haughed aloud. For the moment, at any rate, the
lesson would not be given.
It was a small factory of lighting-sets for helicopters, a branch of the Electrical
Equipment Corporation. They were met on the roof itself (for that circular letter of
recommendation from the Controller was magical in its effects) by the Chief
Technician and the Human Element Manager. They walked downstairs into the
factory.
"Each process," explained the Human Element Manager, "is carried out, so far as
possible, by a single Bokanovsky Group."
And, in effect, eighty-three almost noseless black brachycephalic Deltas were
cold-pressing. The fifty-six four-spindle chucking and turning machines were being
manipulated by fifty-six aquiline and ginger Gammas. One hundred and seven
heat-conditioned Epsilon Senegalese were working in the foundry. Thirty-three Delta
females, long-headed, sandy, with narrow pelvises, and all within 20 millimetres of
1 metre 69 centimetres tall, were cutting screws. In the assembling room, the
dynamos were being put together by two sets of Gamma-Plus dwarfs. The two low
work-tables faced one another; between them crawled the conveyor with its load of
separate parts; forty-seven blonde heads were confronted by forty-seven brown
ones. Forty-seven snubs by forty-seven hooks; forty-seven receding by forty-seven
prognathous chins. The completed mechanisms were inspected by eighteen identical
curly auburn girls in Gamma green, packed in crates by thirty-four short-legged,
left-handed male Delta-Minuses, and loaded into the waiting trucks and lorries by
sixty-three blue-eyed, flaxen and freckled Epsilon Semi-Morons.
"O brave new world …" By some malice of his memory the Savage found himself
repeating Miranda's words. "O brave new world that has such people in it."
"And I assure you," the Human Element Manager concluded, as they left the factory,
"we hardly ever have any trouble with our workers. We always find …"
But the Savage had suddenly broken away from his companions and was violently
retching, behind a clump of laurels, as though the solid earth had been a helicopter
in an air pocket.
"The Savage," wrote Bernard, "refuses to take soma, and seems much distressed
because of the woman Linda, his m–––, remains permanently on holiday. It is
worthy of note that, in spite of his m–––'s senility and the extreme repulsiveness of
her appearance, the Savage frequently goes to see her and appears to be much
attached to her–an interesting example of the way in which early conditioning can be
