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. If there was some different way of writing … Or else something else to write about … You see, I’m pretty good at inventing phrases. 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. But what? What is there more important to say? 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?”
“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 and sighed. “If you knew what I’d had to put up with recently,” he said almost tearfully. “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
1
By eight o’clock the light was failing. Lenina and Henry abandoned their game and walked back towards the Club.
A buzzing of helicopters filled the twilight. Every two and a half minutes a bell 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 above the fading landscape. The forest of Burnham Beeches stretched like a great pool of darkness towards the western sky. Their eyes were drawn to the 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.
“Why do the smoke-stacks have those things like balconies around them?” enquired Lenina.
“Phosphorus recovery,” explained Henry. “P2O5 used to go right out of circulation every time they cremated someone. Now they recover over ninety-eight per cent of it. More than a kilo and a half per adult corpse. 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. “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.”
“All men are equal on the chemical level. Besides, even Epsilons perform important 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: “Everyone works for everyone else. We can’t do without anyone. Even Epsilons are useful. We couldn’t do without Epsilons. Everyone works for everyone else. We can’t do without anyone…” Lenina remembered her first shock of fear and surprise; her speculations through half a wakeful hour; and then, under the influence of the endless repetition, the gradual soothing of her mind…
“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.”
“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.
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 Lenina and Henry were fortunately unaware. The electric sky-signs effectively shut off the outer darkness. “CALVIN STOPES AND HIS SIXTEEN SEXOPHONISTS.” From the facade 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 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.
“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 everyone 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 blue sky.
“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.
Swallowed half an hour before closing time, that second dose of soma had raised an impenetrable wall between the actual universe and their minds. Bottled, they crossed the street; bottled, they took the lift up to Henry’s room. And yet, bottled as she was[23], Lenina did not forget to take all the contraceptive precautions. Years of intensive hypnopaedia and Malthusian drill three times a week had made it almost as automatic 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 he hailed a taxi on the roof and told the man to fly to the Fordson Community Singery.
“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