Helmholtz and the Savage took to one another at once. So cordially indeed that Bernard felt a sharp pang of jealousy. In all these weeks he had never come to so close an intimacy with the Savage as Helmholtz immediately achieved. Watching them, listening to their talk, he found himself sometimes resentfully wishing that he had never brought them together. He was ashamed of his jealousy and alternately made efforts of will and took soma to keep himself from feeling it. But the efforts were not very successful; and between the soma-holidays there were, of necessity, intervals. The odius sentiment kept on returning.
At his third meeting with the Savage, Helmholtz recited his rhymes on Solitude.
«What do you think of them?» he asked when he had done. The Savage shook his head. «Listen to this,» was his answer; and unlocking the drawer in which he kept his mouse-eaten book, he opened and read:
«Let the bird of loudest lay
On the sole Arabian tree,
Herald sad and trumpet be…»
Helmholtz listened with a growing excitement. At «sole Arabian tree» he started; at «thou shrieking harbinger» he smiled with sudden pleasure; at «every fowl of tyrant wing» the blood rushed up into his cheeks; but at «defunctive music» he turned pale and trembled with an unprecedented emotion. The Savage read on:
«Property was thus appall’d,
That the self was not the same;
Single nature’s double name
Neither two nor one was call’d
Reason in itself confounded
Saw division grow together…»
«Orgy-porgy!» said Bernard, interrupting the reading with a loud, unpleasant laugh.
«It’s just a Solidarity Service hymn.» He was revenging himself on his two friends for liking one another more than they liked him.
In the course of their next two or three meetings he frequently repeated this little act of vengeance. It was simple and, since both Helmholtz and the Savage were dreadfully pained by the shattering and defilement of a favourite poetic crystal, extremely effective. In the end, Helmholtz threatened to kick him out of the room if he dared to interrupt again. And yet, strangely enough, the next interruption, the most disgraceful of all, came from Helmholtz himself.
The Savage was reading Romeo and Juliet aloud-reading (for all the time he was seeing himself as Romeo and Lenina as Juliet) with an intense and quivering passion. Helmholtz had listened to the scene of the lovers’ first meeting with a puzzled interest. The scene in the orchard had delighted him with its poetry; but the sentiments expressed had made him smile. Getting into such a state about having a girl-it seemed rather ridiculous. But, taken detail by verbal detail, what a superb piece of emotional engineering! «That old fellow,» he said, «he makes our best propaganda technicians look absolutely silly.» The Savage smiled triumphantly and resumed his reading. All went tolerably well until, in the last scene of the third act, Capulet and Lady Capulet began to bully Juliet to marry Paris. Helmholtz had been restless throughout the entire scene; but when, pathetically mimed by the Savage, Juliet cried out:
«Is there no pity sitting in the clouds,
That sees into the bottom of my grief?
O sweet my mother, cast me not away:
Delay this marriage for a month, a week;
Or, if you do not, make the bridal bed,
In that dim monument where Tybalt lies…» When Juliet said this, Helmholtz broke out in an explosion of uncontrollable guffawing.
The mother and father (grotesque obscenity) forcing the daughter to have some one she didn’t want! And the idiotic girl not saying that she was having some one else whom (for the moment, at any rate) she preferred! In its smutty absurdity the situation was irresistibly comical. He had managed, with a heroic effort, to hold down the mounting pressure of his hilarity; but «sweet mother» (in the Savage’s tremulous tone of anguish) and the reference to Tybalt lying dead, but evidently uncremated and wasting his phosphorus on a dim monument, were too much for him. He laughed and laughed till the tears streamed down his face-quenchlessly laughed while, pale with a sense of outrage, the Savage looked at him over the top of his book and then, as the laughter still continued, closed it indignantly, got up and, with the gesture of one who removes his pearl from before swine, locked it away in its drawer.
«And yet,» said Helmholtz when, having recovered breath enough to apologize, he had mollified the Savage into listening to his explanations, «I know quite well that one needs ridiculous, mad situations like that; one can’t write really well about anything else. Why was that old fellow such a marvellous propaganda technician?
Because he had so many insane, excruciating things to get excited about. You’ve got to be hurt and upset; otherwise you can’t think of the really good, penetrating, X-rayish phrases. But fathers and mothers!» He shook his head. «You can’t expect me to keep a straight face about fathers and mothers. And who’s going to get excited about a boy having a girl or not having her?» (The Savage winced; but Helmholtz, who was staring pensively at the floor, saw nothing.) «No.» he concluded, with a sigh, «it won’t do. We need some other kind of madness and violence. But what? What? Where can one find it?» He was silent; then, shaking his head, «I don’t know,» he said at last, «I don’t know.»
Chapter Thirteen
HENRY FOSTER loomed up through the twilight of the Embryo Store.
«Like to come to a feely this evening?»
Lenina shook her head without speaking.
«Going out with some one else?» It interested him to know which of his friends was being had by which other. «Is it Benito?» he questioned. She shook her head again.
Henry detected the weariness in those purple eyes, the pallor beneath that glaze of lupus, the sadness at the corners of the unsmiling crimson mouth. «You’re not feeling ill, are you?» he asked, a trifle anxiously, afraid that she might be suffering from one of the few remaining infectious diseases.
Yet once more Lenina shook her head.
«Anyhow, you ought to go and see the doctor,» said Henry. «A doctor a day keeps the jim-jams away,» he added heartily, driving home his hypnopaedic adage with a clap on the shoulder. «Perhaps you need a Pregnancy Substitute,» he suggested.
«Or else an extra-strong V.P.S. treatment. Sometimes, you know, the standard passion surrogate isn’t quite…»
«Oh, for Ford’s sake,» said Lenina, breaking her stubborn silence, «shut up!» And she turned back to her neglected embryos.
A V.P.S. treatment indeed! She would have laughed, if she hadn’t been on the point of crying. As though she hadn’t got enough V. P. of her own! She sighed profoundly as she refilled her syringe. «John,» she murmured to herself, «John…» Then «My Ford,» she wondered, «have I given this one its sleeping sickness injection, or haven’t I?» She simply couldn’t remember. In the end, she decided not to run the risk of letting it have a second dose, and moved down the line to the next bottle. Twenty-two years, eight months, and four days from that moment, a promising young Alpha-Minus administrator at Mwanza-Mwanza was to die of trypanosomiasis-the first case for over half a century. Sighing, Lenina went on with her work.
An hour later, in the Changing Room, Fanny was energetically protesting. «But it’s absurd to let yourself get into a state like this. Simply absurd,» she repeated. «And what about? A man- one man.»
«But he’s the one I want.»
«As though there weren’t millions of other men in the world.»
«But I don’t want them.»
«How can you know till you’ve tried?»
«I have tried.»
«But how many?» asked Fanny, shrugging her shoulders contemptuously. «One, two?»
«Dozens. But,» shaking her head, «it wasn’t any good,» she added.
«Well, you must persevere,» said Fanny sententiously. But it was obvious that her confidence in her own prescriptions had been shaken. «Nothing can be achieved without perseverance.»
«But meanwhile…»
«Don’t think of him.»
«I can’t help it.»
«Take soma, then.»
«I do.»
«Well, go on.»
«But in the intervals I still like him. I shall always like him.»
«Well, if that’s the case,» said Fanny, with decision, «why don’t you just go and take him. Whether he wants it or no.»
«But if you knew how terribly queer he was!»
«All the more reason for taking a firm line.»
«It’s all very well to say that.»
«Don’t stand any nonsense. Act.» Fanny’s voice was a trumpet; she might have been a Y.W.F.A. lecturer giving an evening talk to adolescent Beta-Minuses. «Yes, act-at once. Do it now.»
«I’d be scared,» said Lenina.
«Well, you’ve only got to take half a gramme of soma first. And now I’m going to have my bath.» She marched off, trailing her towel. The bell rang, and the Savage, who was impatiently hoping that Helmholtz would come that afternoon (for having at last made up his mind to talk to Helmholtz about Lenina, he could not bear to postpone his confidences a moment longer), jumped up and ran to the door.
«I had a premonition it was you, Helmholtz,» he shouted as he opened. On the threshold, in a white acetate-satin sailor suit,and with a round white cap rakishly tilted over her left ear, stood Lenina.
«Oh!» said the Savage, as though some one had struck him a heavy blow. Half a gramme had been enough to make Lenina forget her fears and her embarrassments. «Hullo, John,» she said, smiling, and walked past him into the room. Automatically he closed the door and followed her. Lenina sat down. There was a long silence.
«You don’t seem very glad to see me, John,» she said at last.
«Not glad?» The Savage looked
