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 mediate 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 reseritful (it would be pleasure to take some revenge on Helmholtz for his
generosity).
At their first meeing 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. l'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,
Absenee 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 odius 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 emotional 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 Thirteen
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 hypnop?dic 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."
