«Disgraceful? But what do you mean? They’re being death-conditioned. And I tell you,» she warned him truculently, «if I have any more of your interference with their conditioning, I’ll send for the porters and have you thrown out.» The Savage rose to his feet and took a couple of steps towards her. His movements and the expression on his face were so menacing that the nurse fell back in terror. With a great effort he checked himself and, without speaking, turned away and sat down again by the bed.
Reassured, but with a dignity that was a trifle shrill and uncertain, «I’ve warned you,» said the nurse, «I’ve warned you,» said the nurse, «so mind.» Still, she led the too inquisitive twins away and made them join in the game of hunt-the-zipper, which had been organized by one of her colleagues at the other end of the room.
«Run along now and have your cup of caffeine solution, dear,» she said to the other nurse. The exercise of authority restored her confidence, made her feel better. «Now children!» she called.
Linda had stirred uneasily, had opened her eyes for a moment, looked vaguely around, and then once more dropped off to sleep. Sitting beside her, the Savage tried hard to recapture his mood of a few minutes before. «A, B, C, vitamin D,» he repeated to himself, as though the words were a spell that would restore the dead past to life. But the spell was ineffective. Obstinately the beautiful memories refused to rise; there was only a hateful resurrection of jealousies and uglinesses and miseries. Popé with the blood trickling down from his cut shoulder; and Linda hideously asleep, and the flies buzzing round the spilt mescal on the floor beside the bed; and the boys calling those names as she passed… Ah, no, no! He shut his eyes, he shook his head in strenuous denial of these memories.
«A, B, C, vitamin D…» He tried to think of those times when he sat on her knees and she put her arms about him and sang, over and over again, rocking him, rocking him to sleep. «A, B, C, vitamin D, vitamin D, vitamin D…» The Super-Vox-Wurlitzeriana had risen to a sobbing crescendo; and suddenly the verbena gave place, in the scent-circulating system, to an intense patchouli. Linda stirred, woke up, stared for a few seconds bewilderly at the Semi-finalists, then, lifting her face, sniffed once or twice at the newly perfumed air and suddenly smiled-a smile of childish ectasy.
«Popé!» she murmured, and closed her eyes. «Oh, I do so like it, I do…» She sighed and let herself sink back into the pillows.
«But, Linda!» The Savage spoke imploringly, «Don’t you know me?» He had tried so hard, had done his very best; why woudn’t she allow him to forget? He squeezed her limp hand almost with violence, as though he would force her to come back from this dream of ignoble pleasures, from these base and hateful memories-back into the present, back into reality: the appalling present, the awful reality-but sublime, but significant, but desperately important precisely because of the immience of that which made them so fearful. «Don’t you know me, Linda?» He felt the faint answering pressure of her hand. The tears started into his eyes. He bent over her and kissed her.
Her lips moved. «Popé!» she whispered again, and it was as though he had had a pailful of ordure thrown in his face.
Anger suddenly boiled up in him. Balked for the second time, the passion of his grief had found another outlet, was transformed into a passion of agonized rage.
«But I’m John!» he shouted. «I’m John!» And in his furious misery he actually caught her by the shouder and shook her.
Linda’s eyes fluttered open; she saw him, knew him-«John!»-but situated the real face, the real and violent hands, in an imaginary world-among the inward and private equivalents of patchouli and the Super-Wurlitzer, among the transfigured memories and the strangely transposed sensations that constituted the universe of her dream. She knew him for John, her son, but fancied him an intruder into that paradisal Malpais where she had been spending her soma-holiday with Popé. He was angry because she liked Popé, he was shaking her because Popé was there in the bed-as though there were something wrong, as though all civilized people didn’t do the same. «Every one belongs to every…» Her voice suddenly died into an almost inaudible breathless croaking.
Her mouth fell open: she made a desperate effort to fill her lungs with air. But it was as though she had forgotten how to breathe. She tried to cry out-but no sound came; only the terror of her staring eyes revealed what she was suffering. Her hands went to her throat, then clawed at the air-the air she coud no longer breathe, the air that, for her, had ceased to exist. The Savage was on his feet, bent over her. «What is it, Linda? What is it?» His voice was imploring; it was as though he were begging to be reassured. The look she gave him was charged with an unspeakable terror-with terror and, it seemed to him, reproach.
She tried to raise herself in bed, but fell back on to the pillows. Her face was horribly distorted, her lips blue.
The Savage turned and ran up the ward.
«Quick, quick!» he shouted. «Quick!» Standing in the centre of a ring of zipper-hunting twins, the Head Nurse looked round. The first moment’s astonishment gave place almost instantly to disapproval.
«Don’t shout! Think of the little ones,» she said, frowning. «You might decondition…
But what are you doing?» He had broken through the ring. «Be careful!» A child was yelling.
«Quick, quick!» He caught her by the sleeve, dragged her after him. «Quick!
Something’s happened. I’ve killed her.»
By the time they were back at the end of the ward Linda was dead. The Savage stood for a moment in frozen silence, then fell on his knees beside the bed and, covering his face with his hands, sobbed uncontrollably. The nurse stood irresolute, looking now at the kneeling figure by the bed (the scandalous exhibition!) and now (poor children!) at the twins who had stopped their hunting of the zipper and were staring from the other end of the ward, staring with all their eyes and nostrils at the shocking scene that was being enacted round Bed 20. Should she speak to him? try to bring him back to a sense of decency? remind him of where he was? of what fatal mischief he might do to these poor innocents?
Undoing all their wholesome death-conditioning with this disgusting outcry-as though death were something terrible, as though any one mattered as much as all that! It might give them the most disastrous ideas about the subject, might upset them into reacting in the entirely wrong, the utterly anti-social way. She stepped forward, she touched him on the shoulder. «Can’t you behave?» she said in a low, angry voice. But, looking around, she saw that half a dozen twins were already on their feet and advancing down the ward. The circle was distintegrating. In another moment… No, the risk was too great; the whole Group might be put back six or seven months in its conditioning. She hurried back towards her menaced charges.
«Now, who wants a chocolate éclair?» she asked in a loud, cheerful tone.
«Me!» yelled the entire Bokanovsky Group in chorus. Bed 20 was completely forgotten.
«Oh, God, God, God…» the Savage kept repeating to himself. In the chaos of grief and remorse that filled his mind it was the one articulate word. «God!» he whispered it aloud. «God…»
«Whatever is he saying?» said a voice, very near, distinct and shrill through the warblings of the Super-Wurlitzer.
The Savage violently started and, uncovering his face, looked round. Five khaki twins, each with the stump of a long éclair in his right hand, and their identical faces variously smeared with liquid chocolate, were standing in a row, puggily goggling at him.
They met his eyes and simultaneously grinned. One of them pointed with his éclair butt.
«Is she dead?» he asked.
The Savage stared at them for a moment in silence. Then in silence he rose to his feet, in silence slowly walked towards the door.
«Is she dead?» repeated the inquisitive twin trotting at his side. The Savage looked down at him and still without speaking pushed him away. The twin fell on the floor and at once began to howl. The Savage did not even look round.
Chapter Fifteen
THE menial staff of the Park Lane Hospital for the Dying consisted of one hundred and sixty-two Deltas divided into two Bokanovsky Groups of eighty-four red headed female and seventy-eight dark dolychocephalic male twins, respectively. At six, when their working day was over, the two Groups assembled in the vestibule of the Hospital and were served by the Deputy Sub-Bursar with their soma ration. From the lift the Savage stepped out into the midst of them. But his mind was elsewhere-with death, with his grief, and his remorse; mechanicaly, without consciousness of what he was doing, he began to shoulder his way through the crowd.
«Who are you pushing? Where do you think you’re going?» High, low, from a multitude of separate throats, only two voices squeaked or growled. Repeated indefinitely, as though by a train of mirrors, two faces, one a hairless and freckled moon haloed in orange, the other a thin, beaked bird-mask, stubbly with two days’ beard, turned angrily towards him. Their words and, in his ribs, the sharp nudging of elbows,
