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 hypnopaedically 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, 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
