THE LIFT was crowded with men from the Alpha Changing
Rooms, and Lenina's entry was 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, thin-stalked, a taller, slenderer
fungus, the Charing-T Tower lifted towards the sky a disk of shining concrete.
Like the vague torsos of fabulous athletes, huge fleshy clouds lolled on
the blue air above their heads. Out of one of them suddenly dropped a small
scarlet insect, buzzing as it fell.
"There's the Red Rocket," said Henry, "just come in from New York."
Looking at his watch. "Seven minutes behind time," he added, and shook his
head. "These Atlantic services–they're really scandalously unpunctual."
He took his foot off the accelerator. The humming of the screws overhead
dropped an octave and a half, back through wasp and hornet to bumble bee, to
cockchafer, to stag-beetle. The upward rush of the machine slackened off; a
moment later they were hanging motionless in the air. Henry pushed at a lever;
there was a click. Slowly at first, then faster and faster, till it was a
circular mist before their eyes, the propeller in front of them began to
revolve. The wind of a horizontal speed whistled ever more shrilly in the
stays. Henry kept his eye on the revolution-counter; when the needle touched
the twelve hundred mark, he threw the helicopter screws out of gear. The
machine had enough forward momentum to be able to fly on its planes.
Lenina looked down through the window in the floor between her feet. They
were flying over the six kilometre zone of park-land that separated Central
London from its first ring of satellite suburbs. The green was maggoty with
fore-shortened life. Forests of Centrifugal Bumble-puppy towers gleamed
between the trees. Near Shepherd's Bush two thousand Beta-Minus mixed doubles
were playing Riemann-surface tennis. A double row of Escalator Fives Courts
lined the main road from Notting Hill to Willesden. In the Ealing stadium a
Delta gymnastic display and community sing was in progress.
"What a hideous colour khaki is," remarked Lenina, voicing the hypnopædic
prejudices of her caste.
The buildings of the Hounslow Feely Studio covered seven and a half
hectares. Near them a black and khaki army of labourers was busy revitrifying
the surface of the Great West Road. One of the huge travelling crucibles was
being tapped as they flew over. The molten stone poured out in a stream of
dazzling incandescence across the road, the asbestos rollers came and went; at
the tail of an insulated watering cart the steam rose in white clouds.
At Brentford the Television Corporation's factory was like a small town.
"They must be changing the shift," said Lenina.
Like aphides and ants, the leaf-green Gamma girls, the black Semi-Morons
swarmed round the entrances, or stood in queues to take their places in the
monorail tram-cars. Mulberry-coloured Beta-Minuses came and went among the
crowd. The roof of the main building was alive with the alighting and
departure of helicopters.
"My word," said Lenina, "I'm glad I'm not a Gamma."
Ten minutes later they were at Stoke Poges and had started their first
round of Obstacle Golf.
§ 2
WITH eyes for the most part downcast and, if ever they
lighted on a fellow creature, at once and furtively averted, Bernard hastened
across the roof. He was like a man pursued, but pursued by enemies he does not
wish to see, lest they should seem more hostile even than he had supposed, and
he himself be made to feel guiltier and even more helplessly alone.
"That horrible Benito Hoover!" And yet the man had meant well enough.
Which only made it, in a way, much worse. Those who meant well behaved in the
same way as those who meant badly. Even Lenina was making him suffer. He
remembered those weeks of timid indecision, during which he had looked and
longed and despaired of ever having the courage to ask her. Dared he face the
risk of being humiliated by a contemptuous refusal? But if she were to say
yes, what rapture! Well, now she had said it and he was still
wretched–wretched that she should have thought it such a perfect afternoon for
Obstacle Golf, that she should have trotted away to join Henry Foster, that
she should have found him funny for not wanting to talk of their most private
affairs in public. Wretched, in a word, because she had behaved as any healthy
and virtuous English girl ought to behave and not in some other, abnormal,
extraordinary way.
He opened the door of his lock-up and called to a lounging couple of
Delta-Minus attendants to come and push his machine out on to the roof. The
hangars were staffed by a single Bokanovsky Group, and the men were twins,
identically small, black and hideous. Bernard gave his orders in the sharp,
rather arrogant and even offensive tone of one who does not feel himself too
secure in his superiority. To have dealings with members of the lower castes
was always, for Bernard, a most distressing experience. For whatever the cause
(and the current gossip about the alcohol in his blood-surrogate may very
likely–for accidents will happen–have been true) Bernard's physique was hardly
better than that of the average Gamma. He stood eight centimetres short of the
standard Alpha height and was slender in proportion. Contact with members of
the lower castes always reminded him painfully of this physical inadequacy. "I
am I, and wish I wasn't"; his self-consciousness was acute and stressing. Each
time he found himself looking on the level, instead of downward, into a
Delta's face, he felt humiliated. Would the creature treat him with the
respect due to his caste? The question haunted him. Not without reason. For
Gammas, Deltas and Epsilons had been to some extent conditioned to associate
corporeal mass with social superiority. Indeed, a faint hypnopædic prejudice
in favour of size was universal. Hence the laughter of the women to whom he
made proposals, the practical joking of his equals among the men. The mockery
made him feel an outsider; and feeling an outsider he behaved like one, which
increased the prejudice against him and intensified the contempt and hostility
aroused by his physical defects. Which in turn increased his sense of being
alien and alone. A chronic fear of being slighted made him avoid his equals,
made him stand, where his inferiors were concerned, self-consciously on his
dignity. How bitterly he envied men like Henry Foster and Benito Hoover! Men
who never had to shout at an Epsilon to get an order obeyed; men who took
their position for granted; men who moved through the caste system as a fish
through water–so utterly at home as to be unaware either of themselves or of
the beneficent and comfortable element in which they had their being.
Slackly, it seemed to him, and with reluctance, the twin attendants
wheeled his plane out on the roof.
"Hurry up!" said Bernard irritably. One of them glanced at him. Was that a
kind of bestial derision that he detected in those blank grey eyes? "Hurry
up!" he shouted more loudly, and there was an ugly rasp in his voice.
He climbed into the plane and, a minute later, was flying southwards,
towards the river.
The various Bureaux of Propaganda and the College of Emotional Engineering
were housed in a single sixty-story building in Fleet Street. In the basement
and on the low floors were the presses and offices of the three great London
newspapers–The Hourly Radio, an upper-caste sheet, the pale green
Gamma Gazette, and, on khaki paper and in words exclusively of one
syllable, The Delta Mirror. Then came the Bureaux of Propaganda by
Television, by Feeling Picture, and by Synthetic Voice and Music
respectively–twenty-two floors of them. Above were the search laboratories and
the padded rooms in which Sound-Track Writers and Synthetic Composers did the
delicate work. The top eighteen floors were occupied the College of Emotional
Engineering.
Bernard landed on the roof of Propaganda House and stepped out.
"Ring down to Mr. Helmholtz Watson," he ordered the Gamma-Plus porter,
"and tell him that Mr. Bernard Marx is waiting for him on the roof."
He sat down and lit a cigarette.
Helmholtz Watson was writing when the message came down.
"Tell him I'm coming at once," he said and hung up the receiver. Then,
turning to his secretary, "I'll leave you to put my things away," he went on
in the same official and impersonal tone; and, ignoring her lustrous smile,
got up and walked briskly to the door.
He was a powerfully built man, deep-chested, broad-shouldered, massive,
and yet quick in his movements, springy and agile. The round strong pillar of
his neck supported a beautifully shaped head. His hair was dark and curly, his
features strongly marked. In a forcible emphatic way, he was handsome and
looked, as his secretary was never tired of repeating, every centimetre an
Alpha Plus. By profession he was a lecturer at the College of Emotional
Engineering (Department of Writing) and the intervals of his educational
activities, a working Emotional Engineer. He wrote regularly for The Hourly
Radio, composed feely scenarios, and had the happiest knack for slogans
and hypnopædic rhymes.
"Able," was the verdict of his superiors. "Perhaps, (and they would shake
their heads, would significantly lower their voices) "a little too
able."
Yes, a little too able; they were right. A mental excess had produced in
Helmholtz Watson effects very similar to those which, in Bernard Marx, were
the result of a physical defect. Too little bone and brawn had isolated
Bernard from his fellow men, and the sense of this apartness, being, by all
the current standards, a mental excess, became in its turn a cause of wider
separation. That which had made Helmholtz so uncomfortably aware of being
himself and all alone was too much ability. What the two men shared was
the knowledge that they were individuals. But whereas the physically defective
Bernard had suffered all his life from the consciousness of being separate, it
was only quite recently that, grown aware of his mental excess, Helmholtz
Watson had also become aware of his difference from the people who surrounded
him. This Escalator-Squash champion, this indefatigable lover (it was said
that he had had six hundred and forty different girls in under four years),
this admirable committee man and best mixer had realized quite suddenly that
sport, women, communal activities were only, so far as he was concerned,
second bests. Really, and at the bottom, he was interested in something else.
But in what? In what? That was the problem which Bernard had come to discuss
with him–or rather, since it was always Helmholtz who did all the talking, to
listen to his friend discussing, yet once more.
Three charming girls from the Bureau of Propaganda by Synthetic Voice
waylaid him as he stepped out of the lift.
"Oh, Helmholtz, darling, do come and have a picnic supper with us
on Exmoor." They clung round him imploringly.
He shook his head, he pushed his way through them. "No, no."
"We're not inviting any other man."
But Helmholtz remained unshaken even by this delightful promise. "No," he
repeated, "I'm busy." And he held resolutely on his course. The girls trailed
after him. It was not till he had actually climbed into Bernard's plane and
slammed the door that they gave up pursuit. Not without reproaches.
"These women!" he said, as the machine rose into the air. "These women!"
And he shook his head, he frowned. "Too awful," Bernard hypocritically agreed,
wishing, as he spoke the words, that he could have as many girls as Helmholtz
did, and with as little trouble. He was seized with a sudden urgent need to
boast. "I'm taking Lenina Crowne to New Mexico with me," he said in a tone as
casual as he could make it.
"Are you?" said Helmholtz, with a total absence of interest. Then after a
little pause, "This last week or two," he went on, "I've been cutting all my
committees and all my girls. You can't imagine what a hullabaloo they've been
making about it at the College. Still, it's been worth it, I think. The
effects …" He hesitated. "Well, they're odd, they're very odd."
A physical shortcoming could produce a kind of mental excess. The process,
it seemed, was reversible. Mental excess could produce, for its own purposes,
the voluntary blindness and deafness of deliberate solitude, the artificial
impotence of asceticism.
The rest of the short flight was accomplished in silence. When they had
arrived and were comfortably stretched out on the pneumatic sofas in Bernard's
room, Helmholtz began again.
Speaking very slowly, "Did you ever feel," he asked, "as though you had
something inside you that was only waiting for you to give it a chance to come
out? Some sort of extra power that you aren't using–you know, like all the
water that goes down the falls instead of through the turbines?" He looked at
Bernard questioningly.
"You mean all the emotions one might be feeling if things were different?"
Helmholtz shook his head. "Not quite. I'm thinking of a queer feeling I
sometimes get, a feeling that I've got something important to say and the
power to say it–only I don't know what it is, and I can't make any use of the
power. If there was some different way of writing … Or else something else to
write about …" He was silent; then, "You see," he went on at last, "I'm pretty
good at inventing phrases–you know, the sort of words that suddenly make you
jump, almost as though you'd sat on a pin, they seem so new and exciting even
though they're about something hypnopædically obvious. But that doesn't seem
enough. It's not enough for the phrases to be good; what you make with them
ought to be good too."
"But your things are good, Helmholtz."
"Oh, as far as they go." Helmholtz shrugged his shoulders. "But they go
such a little way. They aren't important enough, somehow. I feel I could do
something much more important. Yes, and more intense, more violent. But what?
What is there more 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, feeling 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.
