is better …"
"Government's an affair of sitting, not hitting. You rule with the brains and the
buttocks, never with the fists. For example, there was the conscription of
consumption."
"There, I'm ready," said Lenina, but Fanny remained speechless and averted. "Let's
make peace, Fanny darling."
"Every man, woman and child compelled to consume so much a year. In the
interests of industry. The sole result …"
"Ending is better than mending. The more stitches, the less riches; the more
stitches …"
"One of these days," said Fanny, with dismal emphasis, "you'll get into trouble."
"Conscientious objection on an enormous scale. Anything not to consume. Back to
nature."
"I do love flying. I do love flying."
"Back to culture. Yes, actually to culture. You can't consume much if you sit still and
read books."
"Do I look all right?" Lenina asked. Her jacket was made of bottle green acetate
cloth with green viscose fur; at the cuffs and collar.
"Eight hundred Simple Lifers were mowed down by machine guns at Golders Green."
"Ending is better than mending, ending is better than mending."
Green corduroy shorts and white viscose-woollen stockings turned down below the
knee.
"Then came the famous British Museum Massacre. Two thousand culture fans
gassed with dichlorethyl sulphide."
A green-and-white jockey cap shaded Lenina's eyes; her shoes were bright green
and highly polished.
"In the end," said Mustapha Mond, "the Controllers realized that force was no good.
The slower but infinitely surer methods of ectogenesis, neo-Pavlovian conditioning
and hypnop?dia …"
And round her waist she wore a silver-mounted green morocco-surrogate cartridge
belt, bulging (for Lenina was not a freemartin) with the regulation supply of
contraceptives.
"The discoveries of Pfitzner and Kawaguchi were at last made use of. An intensive
propaganda against viviparous reproduction …"
"Perfect!" cried Fanny enthusiastically. She could never resist Lenina's charm for
long. "And what a perfectly sweet Malthusian belt!"
"Accompanied by a campaign against the Past; by the closing of museums, the
blowing up of historical monuments (luckily most of them had already been
destroyed during the Nine Years' War); by the suppression of all books published
before A.F. 15O.''
"I simply must get one like it," said Fanny.
"There were some things called the pyramids, for example.
"My old black-patent bandolier …"
"And a man called Shakespeare. You've never heard of them of course."
"It's an absolute disgrace–that bandolier of mine."
"Such are the advantages of a really scientific education."
"The more stitches the less riches; the more stitches the less …"
"The introduction of Our Ford's first T-Model …"
"I've had it nearly three months."
"Chosen as the opening date of the new era."
"Ending is better than mending; ending is better …"
"There was a thing, as I've said before, called Christianity."
"Ending is better than mending."
"The ethics and philosophy of under-consumption …"
"I love new clothes, I love new clothes, I love …"
"So essential when there was under-production; but in an age of machines and the
fixation of nitrogen–positively a crime against society."
"Henry Foster gave it me."
"All crosses had their tops cut and became T's. There was also a thing called God."
"It's real morocco-surrogate."
"We have the World State now. And Ford's Day celebrations, and Community Sings,
and Solidarity Services."
"Ford, how I hate them!" Bernard Marx was thinking.
"There was a thing called Heaven; but all the same they used to drink enormous
quantities of alcohol."
"Like meat, like so much meat."
"There was a thing called the soul and a thing called immortality."
"Do ask Henry where he got it."
"But they used to take morphia and cocaine."
"And what makes it worse, she tlainks of herself as meat."
"Two thousand pharmacologists and bio-chemists were subsidized in A.P. 178."
"He does look glum," said the Assistant Predestinator, pointing at Bernard Marx.
"Six years later it was being produced commercially. The perfect drug."
"Let's bait him."
"Euphoric, narcotic, pleasantly hallucinant."
"Glum, Marx, glum." The clap on the shoulder made him start, look up. It was that
brute Henry Foster. "What you need is a gramme of soma."
"All the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects."
"Ford, I should like to kill him!" But all he did was to say, "No, thank you," and fend
off the proffered tube of tablets.
"Take a holiday from reality whenever you like, and come back without so much as
a headache or a mythology."
"Take it," insisted Henry Foster, "take it."
"Stability was practically assured."
"One cubic centimetre cures ten gloomy sentiments," said the Assistant
Predestinator citing a piece of homely hypnop?dic wisdom.
"It only remained to conquer old age."
"Damn you, damn you!" shouted Bernard Marx.
"Hoity-toity."
"Gonadal hormones, transfusion of young blood, magnesium salts …"
"And do remember that a gramme is better than a damn." They went out, laughing.
"All the physiological stigmata of old age have been abolished. And along with
them, of course …"
"Don't forget to ask him about that Malthusian belt," said Fanny.
"Along with them all the old man's mental peculiarities. Characters remain constant
throughout a whole lifetime."
"… two rounds of Obstacle Golf to get through before dark. I must fly."
"Work, play–at sixty our powers and tastes are what they were at seventeen. Old
men in the bad old days used to renounce, retire, take to religion, spend their time
reading, thinking–thinking!"
"Idiots, swine!" Bernard Marx was saying to himself, as he walked down the corridor
to the lift.
"Now–such is progress–the old men work, the old men copulate, the old men have
no time, no leisure from pleasure, not a moment to sit down and think–or if ever by
some unlucky chance such a crevice of time shoud yawn in the solid substance of
their distractions, there is always soma, delicious soma, half a gramme for a
half-holiday, a gramme for a week-end, two grammes for a trip to the gorgeous
East, three for a dark eternity on the moon; returning whence they find themselves
on the other side of the crevice, safe on the solid ground of daily labour and
distraction, scampering from feely to feely, from girl to pneumatic girl, from
Electromagnetic Golf course to …"
"Go away, little girl," shouted the D.H.C. angrily. "Go away, little boy! Can't you see
that his fordship's busy? Go and do your erotic play somewhere else."
"Suffer little children," said the Controller.
Slowly, majestically, with a faint humming of machinery, the Conveyors moved
forward, thirty-three centimters an hour. In the red darkness glinted innumerable
rubies.
Chapter Four
THE LIFT was crowded with men from the Alpha Changing Rooms, and Lenina's entry
wars greeted by many friendly nods and smiles. She was a popular girl and, at one
time or another, had spent a night with almost all of them.
They were dear boys, she thought, as she returned their salutations. Charming
boys! Still, she did wish that George Edzel's ears weren't quite so big (perhaps he'd
been given just a spot too much parathyroid at Metre 328?). And looking at Benito
Hoover, she couldn't help remembering that he was really too hairy when he took his
clothes off.
Turning, with eyes a little saddened by the recollection, of Benito's curly blackness,
she saw in a corner the small thin body, the melancholy face of Bernard Marx.
"Bernard!" she stepped up to him. "I was looking for you." Her voice rang clear
above the hum of the mounting lift. The others looked round curiously. "I wanted to
talk to you about our New Mexico plan." Out of the tail of her eye she could see
Benito Hoover gaping with astonishment. The gape annoyed her. "Surprised I
shouldn't be begging to go with him again!" she said to herself. Then aloud, and
more warmly than ever, "I'd simply love to come with you for a week in July," she
went on. (Anyhow, she was publicly proving her unfaithfulness to Henry. Fanny ought
to be pleased, even though it was Bernard.) "That is," Lenina gave him her most
deliciously significant smile, "if you still want to have me."
Bernard's pale face flushed. "What on earth for?" she wondered, astonished, but at
the same time touched by this strange tribute to her power.
"Hadn't we better talk about it somewhere else?" he stammered, looking horribly
uncomfortable.
"As though I'd been saying something shocking," thought Lenina. "He couldn't look
more upset if I'd made a dirty joke–asked him who his mother was, or something
like that."
"I mean, with all these people about …" He was choked with confusion.
Lenina's laugh was frank and wholly unmalicious. "How funny you are!" she said;
and she quite genuinely did think him funny. "You'll give me at least a week's
warning, won't you," she went on in another tone. "I suppose we take the Blue
Pacific Rocket? Does it start from the Charing-T Tower? Or is it from Hampstead?"
Before Bernard could answer, the lift came to a standstill.
"Roof!" called a creaking voice.
The liftman was a small simian creature, dressed in the black tunic of an
Epsilon-Minus Semi-Moron.
"Roof!"
He flung open the gates. The warm glory of afternoon sunlight made him start and
blink his eyes. "Oh, roof!" he repeated in a voice of rapture. He was as though
suddenly and joyfully awakened from a dark annihilating stupor. "Roof!"
He smiled up with a kind of doggily expectant adoration into the faces of his
passengers. Talking and laughing together, they stepped out into the light. The
liftman looked after them.
"Roof?" he said once more, questioningly.
Then a bell rang, and from the ceiling of the lift a loud speaker began, very softly
and yet very imperiously, to issue its commands.
"Go down," it said, "go down. Floor Eighteen. Go down, go down. Floor Eighteen. Go
down, go …"
The liftman slammed the gates, touched a button and instantly dropped back into
the droning twilight of the well, the twilight of his own habitual stupor.
It was warm and bright on the roof. The summer afternoon was drowsy with the hum
of passing helicopters; and the deeper drone of the rocket-planes hastening,
invisible, through the bright sky five or six miles overhead was like a caress on the
soft air. Bernard Marx drew a deep breath. He looked up into the sky and round the
blue horizon and finally down into Lenina's face.
"Isn't it beautiful!" His voice trembled a little.
She smiled at him with an expression of the most sympathetic understanding.
"Simply perfect for Obstacle Golf," she answered rapturously. "And now I must fly,
Bernard. Henry gets cross if I keep him waiting. Let me know in good time about
the date." And waving her hand she ran away across the wide flat roof towards the
hangars. Bernard stood watching the retreating twinkle of the white stockings, the
sunburnt knees vivaciously bending and unbending again, again, and the softer
rolling of those well-fitted corduroy shorts beneath the bottle green jacket. His face
wore an expression of pain.
"I should say she was pretty," said a loud and cheery voice just behind him.
Bernard started and looked around. The chubby red face of Benito Hoover was
beaming down at him–beaming with manifest cordiality. Benito was notoriously
good-natured. People said of him that he could have got through life without ever
touching soma. The malice and bad tempers from which other people had to take
holidays never afflicted him. Reality for Benito was always sunny.
"Pneumatic too. And how!" Then, in another tone: "But, I say," he went on, "you do
look glum! What you need is a gramme of soma." Diving into his right-hand
trouser-pocket, Benito produced a phial. "One cubic centimetre cures ten gloomy …
But, I say!"
Bernard had suddenly turned and rushed away.
Benito stared after him. "What can be the matter with the fellow?" he wondered,
and, shaking his head, decided that the story about the alcohol having been put
into the poor chap's blood-surrogate must be true. "Touched his brain, I suppose."
He put away the soma bottle, and taking out a packet of sex-hormone
chewing-gum, stuffed a plug into his cheek and walked slowly away towards the
hangars, ruminating.
Henry Foster had had his machine wheeled out of its lock-up and, when Lenina
arrived, was already seated in the cockpit, waiting.
"Four minutes late," was all his comment, as she climbed in beside him. He started
the engines and threw the helicopter screws into gear. The machine shot vertically
into the air. Henry accelerated; the humming of the propeller shrilled from hornet to
wasp, from wasp to mosquito; the speedometer showed that they were rising at the
best part of two kilometres a minute. London diminished beneath them. The huge
table-topped buildings were no more, in a few seconds, than a bed of geometrical
mushrooms sprouting from the green of park and garden. In the midst of them,
