across her skin. Her cheeks were flushed. 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 fioor, 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 square 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 crumbled 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 Twelve
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 Zu?i that the Savage could adequately express what he
felt about the Arch-Community-Songster. "Háni!" he added as an after-thought; 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 carotene sandwich, a slice of vitamin A paté, 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 Lambeth. 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 Zu?i) "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 Lambeth
Palace. "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 hirn.
"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 purpose 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 decondition 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:
"Oh! 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 puled, 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.
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
