. . . . .
"But is it serious? Is she really bad? I'll go at once …"
. . . . .
"Not in her rooms any more? Where has she been taken?"
. . . . .
"Oh, my God! What's the address?"
. . . . .
"Three Park Lane–is that it? Three? Thanks."
Lenina heard the click of the replaced receiver, then hurrying steps. A door
slammed. There was silence. Was he really gone?
With an infinity of precautions she opened the door a quarter of an inch; peeped
through the crack; was encouraged by the view of emptiness; opened a little further,
and put her whole head out; finally tiptoed into the room; stood for a few seconds
with strongly beating heart, listening, listening; then darted to the front door,
opened, slipped through, slammed, ran. It was not till she was in the lift and
actually dropping down the well that she began to feel herself secure.
Chapter Fourteen
THE Park Lane Hospital for the Dying was a sixty-story tower of primrose tiles. As
the Savage stepped out of his taxicopter a convoy of gaily-coloured aerial hearses
rose whirring from the roof and darted away across the Park, westwards, bound for
the Slough Crematorium. At the lift gates the presiding porter gave him the
information he required, and he dropped down to Ward 81 (a Galloping Senility
ward, the porter explained) on the seventeenth floor.
It was a large room bright with sunshine and yellow paint, and containing twenty
beds, all occupied. Linda was dying in company–in company and with all the modern
conveniences. The air was continuously alive with gay synthetic melodies. At the foot
of every bed, confronting its moribund occupant, was a television box. Television
was left on, a running tap, from morning till night. Every quarter of an hour the
prevailing perfume of the room was automatically changed. "We try," explained the
nurse, who had taken charge of the Savage at the door, "we try to create a
thoroughly pleasant atmosphere here–something between a first-class hotel and a
feely-palace, if you take my meaning."
"Where is she?" asked the Savage, ignoring these polite explanations.
The nurse was offended. "You are in a hurry," she said.
"Is there any hope?" he asked.
"You mean, of her not dying?" (He nodded.) "No, of course there isn't. When
somebody's sent here, there's no …" Startled by the expression of distress on his
pale face, she suddenly broke off. "Why, whatever is the matter?" she asked. She
was not accustomed to this kind of thing in visitors. (Not that there were many
visitors anyhow: or any reason why there should be many visitors.) "You're not
feeling ill, are you?"
He shook his head. "She's my mother," he said in a scarcely audible voice.
The nurse glanced at him with startled, horrified eyes; then quickly looked away.
From throat to temple she was all one hot blush.
"Take me to her," said the Savage, making an effort to speak in an ordinary tone.
Still blushing, she led the way down the ward. Faces still fresh and unwithered (for
senility galloped so hard that it had no time to age the cheeks–only the heart and
brain) turned as they passed. Their progress was followed by the blank, incurious
eyes of second infancy. The Savage shuddered as he looked.
Linda was lying in the last of the long row of beds, next to the wall. Propped up on
pillows, she was watching the Semi-finals of the South American Riemann-Surface
Tennis Championship, which were being played in silent and diminished
reproduction on the screen of the television box at the foot of the bed. Hither and
thither across their square of illuminted glass the little figures noiselessly darted,
like fish in an aquarium–the silent but agitated inhabitants of another world.
Linda looked on, vaguely and uncomprehendingly smiling. Her pale, bloated face
wore an expression of imbecile happiness. Every now and then her eyelids closed,
and for a few seconds she seemed to be dozing. Then with a little start she would
wake up again–wake up to the aquarium antics of the Tennis Champions, to the
Super-Vox-Wurlitzeriana rendering of "Hug me till you drug me, honey," to the
warm draught of verbena that came blowing through the ventilator above her
head–would wake to these things, or rather to a dream of which these things,
transformed and embellished by the soma in her blood, were the marvellous
constituents, and smile once more her broken and discoloured smile of infantile
contentment.
"Well, I must go," said the nurse. "I've got my batch of children coming. Besides,
there's Number 3." She pointed up the ward. "Might go off any minute now. Well,
make yourself comfortable." She walked briskly away.
The Savage sat down beside the bed.
"Linda," he whispered, taking her hand.
At the sound of her name, she turned. Her vague eyes brightened with recognition.
She squeezed his hand, she smiled, her lips moved; then quite suddenly her head
fell forward. She was asleep. He sat watching her–seeking through the tired flesh,
seeking and finding that young, bright face which had stooped over his childhood in
Malpais, remembering (and he closed his eyes) her voice, her movements, all the
events of their life together. "Streptocock-Gee to Banbury T …" How beautiful her
singing had been! And those childish rhymes, how magically strange and mysterious!
A, B, C, vitamin D:
The fat's in the liver, the cod's in the sea.
He felt the hot tears welling up behind his eyelids as he recalled the words and
Linda's voice as she repeated them. And then the reading lessons: The tot is in the
pot, the cat is on the mat; and the Elementary Instructions for Beta Workers in the
Embryo Store. And long evenings by the fire or, in summertime, on the roof of the
little house, when she told him those stories about the Other Place, outside the
Reservation: that beautiful, beautiful Other Place, whose memory, as of a heaven,
a paradise of goodness and loveliness, he still kept whole and intact, undefiled by
contact with the reality of this real London, these actual civilized men and women.
A sudden noise of shrill voices made him open his eyes and, after hastily brushing
away the tears, look round. What seemed an interminable stream of identical
eight-year-old male twins was pouring into the room. Twin after twin, twin after twin,
they came–a nightmare. Their faces, their repeated face–for there was only one
between the lot of them–puggishly stared, all nostrils and pale goggling eyes. Their
uniform was khaki. All their mouths hung open. Squealing and chattering they
entered. In a moment, it seemed, the ward was maggoty with them. They swarmed
between the beds, clambered over, crawled under, peeped into the television boxes,
made faces at the patients.
Linda astonished and rather alarmed them. A group stood clustered at the foot of
her bed, staring with the frightened and stupid curiosity of animals suddenly
confronted by the unknown.
"Oh, look, look!" They spoke in low, scared voices. "Whatever is the matter with
her? Why is she so fat?"
They had never seen a face like hers before–had never seen a face that was not
youthful and taut-skinned, a body that had ceased to be slim and upright. All these
moribund sexagenarians had the appearance of childish girls. At forty-four, Linda
seemed, by contrast, a monster of flaccid and distorted senility.
"Isn't she awful?" came the whispered comments. "Look at her teeth!"
Suddenly from under the bed a pug-faced twin popped up between John's chair and
the wall, and began peering into Linda's sleeping face.
"I say …" he began; but the sentence ended prematurely in a squeal. The Savage
had seized him by the collar, lifted him clear over the chair and, with a smart box on
the ears, sent him howling away.
His yells brought the Head Nurse hurrying to the rescue.
"What have you been doing to him?" she demanded fiercely. "I won't have you
striking the children."
"Well then, keep them away from this bed." The Savage's voice was trembling with
indigation. "What are these filthy little brats doing here at all? It's disgraceful!"
"Disgraceful? But what do you mean? They're being death-conditioned. And I tell
you," she warned him truculently, "if I have any more of your interference with their
conditioning, I'll send for the porters and have you thrown out."
The Savage rose to his feet and took a couple of steps towards her. His movements
and the expression on his face were so menacing that the nurse fell back in terror.
With a great effort he checked himself and, without speaking, turned away and sat
down again by the bed.
Reassured, but with a dignity that was a trifle shrill and uncertain, "I've warned you,"
said the nurse, "I've warned you," said the nurse, "so mind." Still, she led the too
inquisitive twins away and made them join in the game of hunt-the-zipper, which
had been organized by one of her colleagues at the other end of the room.
"Run along now and have your cup of caffeine solution, dear," she said to the other
nurse. The exercise of authority restored her confidence, made her feel better. "Now
children!" she called.
Linda had stirred uneasily, had opened her eyes for a moment, looked vaguely
around, and then once more dropped off to sleep. Sitting beside her, the Savage
tried hard to recapture his mood of a few minutes before. "A, B, C, vitamin D," he
repeated to himself, as though the words were a spell that would restore the dead
past to life. But the spell was ineffective. Obstinately the beautiful memories
refused to rise; there was only a hateful resurrection of jealousies and uglinesses
and miseries. Popé with the blood trickling down from his cut shoulder; and Linda
hideously asleep, and the flies buzzing round the spilt mescal on the floor beside
the bed; and the boys calling those names as she passed. … Ah, no, no! He shut
his eyes, he shook his head in strenuous denial of these memories. "A, B, C,
vitamin D …" He tried to think of those times when he sat on her knees and she put
her arms about him and sang, over and over again, rocking him, rocking him to
sleep. "A, B, C, vitamin D, vitamin D, vitamin D …"
The Super-Vox-Wurlitzeriana had risen to a sobbing crescendo; and suddenly the
verbena gave place, in the scent-circulating system, to an intense patchouli. Linda
stirred, woke up, stared for a few seconds bewilderly at the Semi-finalists, then,
lifting her face, sniffed once or twice at the newly perfumed air and suddenly
smiled–a smile of childish ectasy.
"Popé!" she murmured, and closed her eyes. "Oh, I do so like it, I do …" She
sighed and let herself sink back into the pillows.
"But, Linda!" The Savage spoke imploringly, "Don't you know me?" He had tried so
hard, had done his very best; why woudn't she allow him to forget? He squeezed her
limp hand almost with violence, as though he would force her to come back from
this dream of ignoble pleasures, from these base and hateful memories–back into
the present, back into reality: the appalling present, the awful reality–but sublime,
but significant, but desperately important precisely because of the immience of that
which made them so fearful. "Don't you know me, Linda?"
He felt the faint answering pressure of her hand. The tears started into his eyes. He
bent over her and kissed her.
Her lips moved. "Popé!" she whispered again, and it was as though he had had a
pailful of ordure thrown in his face.
Anger suddenly boiled up in him. Balked for the second time, the passion of his
grief had found another outlet, was transformed into a passion of agonized rage.
"But I'm John!" he shouted. "I'm John!" And in his furious misery he actually caught
her by the shouder and shook her.
Linda's eyes fluttered open; she saw him, knew him–"John!"–but situated the real
face, the real and violent hands, in an imaginary world–among the inward and
private equivalents of patchouli and the Super-Wurlitzer, among the transfigured
memories and the strangely transposed sensations that constituted the universe of
her dream. She knew him for John, her son, but fancied him an intruder into that
paradisal Malpais where she had been spending her soma-holiday with Popé. He was
angry because she liked Popé, he was shaking her because Popé was there in the
bed–as though there were something wrong, as though all civilized people didn't do
the same. "Every one belongs to every …" Her voice suddenly died into an almost
inaudible breathless croaking. Her mouth fell open: she made a desperate effort to
fill her lungs with air. But it was as though she had forgotten how to breathe. She
tried to cry out–but no sound came; only the terror of her staring eyes revealed
what she was suffering. Her hands went to her throat, then clawed at the air–the air
she coud no longer breathe, the air that, for her, had ceased to exist.
The Savage was on his feet, bent over her. "What is it, Linda? What is it?" His voice
was imploring; it was as though he were begging to be reassured.
The look she gave him was charged with an unspeakable terror–with terror and, it
seemed to him, reproach.
She tried to raise herself in bed, but fell back on to the pillows. Her face was horribly
distorted, her lips blue.
The Savage turned and ran up the ward.
"Quick, quick!" he shouted. "Quick!"
Standing in the centre of a ring of zipper-hunting twins, the Head Nurse looked
round. The first moment's astonishment gave place almost instantly to disapproval.
"Don't shout! Think of the little ones," she said, frowning. "You might decondition …
But what are you doing?" He had broken through the ring. "Be careful!" A child was
yelling.
"Quick, quick!" He caught her by the sleeve, dragged her after him. "Quick!
