important to say? And how can one be violent about the sort of things one's
expected to write about? Words can be like X-rays, if you use them properly–they'll
go through anything. You read and you're pierced. That's one of the things I try to
teach my students–how to write piercingly. But what on earth's the good of being
pierced by an article about a Community Sing, or the latest improvement in scent
organs? Besides, can you make words really piercing–you know, like the very
hardest X-rays–when you're writing about that sort of thing? Can you say something
about nothing? That's what it finally boils down to. I try and I try …"
"Hush!" said Bernard suddenly, and lifted a warning finger; they listened. "I believe
there's somebody at the door," he whispered.
Helmholtz got up, tiptoed across the room, and with a sharp quick movement flung
the door wide open. There was, of course, nobody there.
"I'm sorry," said Bernard, feelling and looking uncomfortably foolish. "I suppose
I've got things on my nerves a bit. When people are suspicious with you, you start
being suspicious with them."
He passed his hand across his eyes, he sighed, his voice became plaintive. He was
justifying himself. "If you knew what I'd had to put up with recently," he said almost
tearfully–and the uprush of his self-pity was like a fountain suddenly released. "If
you only knew!"
Helmholtz Watson listened with a certain sense of discomfort. "Poor little Bernard!"
he said to himself. But at the same time he felt rather ashamed for his friend. He
wished Bernard would show a little more pride.
Chapter Five
BY EIGHT O'CLOCK the light was failing. The loud speaker in the tower of the Stoke
Poges Club House began, in a more than human tenor, to announce the closing of
the courses. Lenina and Henry abandoned their game and walked back towards the
Club. From the grounds of the Internal and External Secretion Trust came the lowing
of those thousands of cattle which provided, with their hormones and their milk, the
raw materials for the great factory at Farnham Royal.
An incessant buzzing of helicopters filled the twilight. Every two and a half minutes a
bell and the screech of whistles announced the departure of one of the light
monorail trains which carried the lower caste golfers back from their separate course
to the metropolis.
Lenina and Henry climbed into their machine and started off. At eight hundred feet
Henry slowed down the helicopter screws, and they hung for a minute or two poised
above the fading landscape. The forest of Burnham Beeches stretched like a great
pool of darkness towards the bright shore of the western sky. Crimson at the
horizon, the last of the sunset faded, through orange, upwards into yellow and a
pale watery green. Northwards, beyond and above the trees, the Internal and
External Secretions factory glared with a fierce electric brilliance from every window of
its twenty stories. Beneath them lay the buildings of the Golf Club–the huge Lower
Caste barracks and, on the other side of a dividing wall, the smaller houses
reserved for Alpha and Beta members. The approaches to the monorail station were
black with the ant-like pullulation of lower-caste activity. From under the glass vault
a lighted train shot out into the open. Following its southeasterly course across the
dark plain their eyes were drawn to the majestic buildings of the Slough
Crematorium. For the safety of night-flying planes, its four tall chimneys were
flood-lighted and tipped with crimson danger signals. It was a landmark.
"Why do the smoke-stacks have those things like balconies around them?"
enquired Lenina.
"Phosphorus recovery," explained Henry telegraphically. "On their way up the
chimney the gases go through four separate treatments. P2O5 used to go right out
of circulation every time they cremated some one. Now they recover over
ninety-eight per cent of it. More than a kilo and a half per adult corpse. Which
makes the best part of four hundred tons of phosphorus every year from England
alone." Henry spoke with a happy pride, rejoicing whole-heartedly in the
achievement, as though it had been his own. "Fine to think we can go on being
socially useful even after we're dead. Making plants grow."
Lenina, meanwhile, had turned her eyes away and was looking perpendicularly
downwards at the monorail station. "Fine," she agreed. "But queer that Alphas and
Betas won't make any more plants grow than those nasty little Gammas and Deltas
and Epsilons down there."
"All men are physico-chemically equal," said Henry sententiously. "Besides, even
Epsilons perform indispensable services."
"Even an Epsilon …" Lenina suddenly remembered an occasion when, as a little girl
at school, she had woken up in the middle of the night and become aware, for the
first time, of the whispering that had haunted all her sleeps. She saw again the
beam of moonlight, the row of small white beds; heard once more the soft, soft
voice that said (the words were there, unforgotten, unforgettable after so many
night-long repetitions): "Every one works for every one else. We can't do without
any one. Even Epsilons are useful. We couldn't do without Epsilons. Every one works
for every one else. We can't do without any one …" Lenina remembered her first
shock of fear and surprise; her speculations through half a wakeful hour; and then,
under the influence of those endless repetitions, the gradual soothing of her mind,
the soothing, the smoothing, the stealthy creeping of sleep. …
"I suppose Epsilons don't really mind being Epsilons," she said aloud.
"Of course they don't. How can they? They don't know what it's like being anything
else. We'd mind, of course. But then we've been differently conditioned. Besides, we
start with a different heredity."
"I'm glad I'm not an Epsilon," said Lenina, with conviction.
"And if you were an Epsilon," said Henry, "your conditioning would have made you
no less thankful that you weren't a Beta or an Alpha." He put his forward propeller
into gear and headed the machine towards London. Behind them, in the west, the
crimson and orange were almost faded; a dark bank of cloud had crept into the
zenith. As they flew over the crematorium, the plane shot upwards on the column of
hot air rising from the chimneys, only to fall as suddenly when it passed into the
descending chill beyond.
"What a marvellous switchback!" Lenina laughed delightedly.
But Henry's tone was almost, for a moment, melancholy. "Do you know what that
switchback was?" he said. "It was some human being finally and definitely
disappearing. Going up in a squirt of hot gas. It would be curious to know who it
was–a man or a woman, an Alpha or an Epsilon. …" He sighed. Then, in a resolutely
cheerful voice, "Anyhow," he concluded, "there's one thing we can be certain of;
whoever he may have been, he was happy when he was alive. Everybody's happy
now."
"Yes, everybody's happy now," echoed Lenina. They had heard the words repeated
a hundred and fifty times every night for twelve years.
Landing on the roof of Henry's forty-story apartment house in Westminster, they
went straight down to the dining-hall. There, in a loud and cheerful company, they
ate an excellent meal. Soma was served with the coffee. Lenina took two
half-gramme tablets and Henry three. At twenty past nine they walked across the
street to the newly opened Westminster Abbey Cabaret. It was a night almost
without clouds, moonless and starry; but of this on the whole depressing fact Lenina
and Henry were fortunately unaware. The electric sky-signs effectively shut off the
outer darkness. "CALVIN STOPES AND HIS SIXTEEN SEXOPHONISTS." From the
fa?ade of the new Abbey the giant letters invitingly glared. "LONDON'S FINEST SCENT
AND COLOUR ORGAN. ALL THE LATEST SYNTHETIC MUSIC."
They entered. The air seemed hot and somehow breathless with the scent of
ambergris and sandalwood. On the domed ceiling of the hall, the colour organ had
momentarily painted a tropical sunset. The Sixteen Sexophonists were playing an
old favourite: "There ain't no Bottle in all the world like that dear little Bottle of
mine." Four hundred couples were five-stepping round the polished floor. Lenina
and Henry were soon the four hundred and first. The saxophones wailed like
melodious cats under the moon, moaned in the alto and tenor registers as though
the little death were upon them. Rich with a wealth of harmonics, their tremulous
chorus mounted towards a climax, louder and ever louder–until at last, with a wave
of his hand, the conductor let loose the final shattering note of ether-music and
blew the sixteen merely human blowers clean out of existence. Thunder in A flat
major. And then, in all but silence, in all but darkness, there followed a gradual
deturgescence, a diminuendo sliding gradually, through quarter tones, down, down to
a faintly whispered dominant chord that lingered on (while the five-four rhythms still
pulsed below) charging the darkened seconds with an intense expectancy. And at
last expectancy was fulfilled. There was a sudden explosive sunrise, and
simultaneously, the Sixteen burst into song:
"Bottle of mine, it's you I've always wanted!
Bottle of mine, why was I ever decanted?
Skies are blue inside of you,
The weather's always fine;
For
There ain't no Bottle in all the world
Like that dear little Bottle of mine."
Five-stepping with the other four hundred round and round Westminster Abbey,
Lenina and Henry were yet dancing in another world–the warm, the richly coloured,
the infinitely friendly world of soma-holiday. How kind, how good-looking, how
delightfully amusing every one was! "Bottle of mine, it's you I've always wanted …"
But Lenina and Henry had what they wanted … They were inside, here and
now-safely inside with the fine weather, the perennially blue sky. And when,
exhausted, the Sixteen had laid by their saxophones and the Synthetic Music
apparatus was producing the very latest in slow Malthusian Blues, they might have
been twin embryos gently rocking together on the waves of a bottled ocean of
blood-surrogate.
"Good-night, dear friends. Good-night, dear friends." The loud speakers veiled their
commands in a genial and musical politeness. "Good-night, dear friends …"
Obediently, with all the others, Lenina and Henry left the building. The depressing
stars had travelled quite some way across the heavens. But though the separating
screen of the sky-signs had now to a great extent dissolved, the two young people
still retained their happy ignorance of the night.
Swallowing half an hour before closing time, that second dose of soma had raised a
quite impenetrable wall between the actual universe and their minds. Bottled, they
crossed the street; bottled, they took the lift up to Henry's room on the
twenty-eighth floor. And yet, bottled as she was, and in spite of that second
gramme of soma, Lenina did not forget to take all the contraceptive precautions
prescribed by the regulations. Years of intensive hypnop?dia and, from twelve to
seventeen, Malthusian drill three times a week had made the taking of these
precautions almost as automatic and inevitable as blinking.
"Oh, and that reminds me," she said, as she came back from the bathroom, "Fanny
Crowne wants to know where you found that lovely green morocco-surrogate
cartridge belt you gave me."
§ 2
ALTERNATE Thursdays were Bernard's Solidarity Service days. After an early dinner at
the Aphroditzeum (to which Helrnholtz had recently been elected under Rule Two) he
took leave of his friend and, hailing a taxi on the roof told the man to fly to the
Fordson Community Singery. The machine rose a couple of hundred metres, then
headed eastwards, and as it turned, there before Bernard's eyes, gigantically
beautiful, was the Singery. Flood-lighted, its three hundred and twenty metres of
white Carrara-surrogate gleamed with a snowy incandescence over Ludgate Hill; at
each of the four corners of its helicopter platform an immense T shone crimson
against the night, and from the mouths of twenty-four vast golden trumpets
rumbled a solemn synthetic music.
"Damn, I'm late," Bernard said to himself as he first caught sight of Big Henry, the
Singery clock. And sure enough, as he was paying off his cab, Big Henry sounded
the hour. "Ford," sang out an immense bass voice from all the golden trumpets.
"Ford, Ford, Ford …" Nine times. Bernard ran for the lift.
The great auditorium for Ford's Day celebrations and other massed Community
Sings was at the bottom of the building. Above it, a hundred to each floor, were the
seven thousand rooms used by Solidarity Groups for their fortnight services. Bernard
dropped down to floor thirty-three, hurried along the corridor, stood hesitating for a
moment outside Room 3210, then, having wound himself up, opened the door and
walked in.
Thank Ford! he was not the last. Three chairs of the twelve arranged round the
circular table were still unoccupied. He slipped into the nearest of them as
inconspicuously as he could and prepared to frown at the yet later comers whenever
they should arrive.
Turning towards him, "What were you playing this afternoon?" the girl on his left
enquired. "Obstacle, or Electro-magnetic?"
Bernard looked at her (Ford! it was Morgana Rothschild) and blushingly had to admit
that he had been playing neither. Morgana stared at him with astonishment. There
was an awkward silence.
Then pointedly she turned away and addressed herself to the more sporting man on
her left.
"A good beginning for a Solidarity Service," thought Bernard miserably, and foresaw
for himself yet another failure to achieve atonement. If only he had given himself
