With a wave of his hand he indicated the gardens, the huge building of the Conditioning Centre, the naked children furtive in the undergrowth or running across the lawns.
Lenina shook her head. «Somehow,» she mused, «I hadn’t been feeling very keen on promiscuity lately. There are times when one doesn’t. Haven’t you found that too, Fanny?»
Fanny nodded her sympathy and understanding. «But one’s got to make the effort,» she said, sententiously, «one’s got to play the game. After all, every one belongs to every one else.»
«Yes, every one belongs to every one else,» Lenina repeated slowly and, sighing, was silent for a moment; then, taking Fanny’s hand, gave it a little squeeze.
«You’re quite right, Fanny. As usual. I’ll make the effort.» Impulse arrested spills over, and the flood is feeling, the flood is passion, the flood is even madness: it depends on the force of the current, the height and strength of the barrier. The unchecked stream flows smoothly down its appointed channels into a calm well-being. (The embryo is hungry; day in, day out, the blood-surrogate pump unceasingly turns its eight hundred revolutions a minute. The decanted infant howls; at once a nurse appears with a bottle of external secretion. Feeling lurks in that interval of time between desire and its consummation. Shorten that interval, break down all those old unnecessary barriers.
«Fortunate boys!» said the Controller. «No pains have been spared to make your lives emotionally easy-to preserve you, so far as that is possible, from having emotions at all.»
«Ford’s in his flivver,» murmured the D.H.C. «All’s well with the world.»
«Lenina Crowne?» said Henry Foster, echoing the Assistant Predestinator’s question as he zipped up his trousers. «Oh, she’s a splendid girl. Wonderfully pneumatic. I’m surprised you haven’t had her.»
«I can’t think how it is I haven’t,» said the Assistant Predestinator. «I certainly will. At the first opportunity.»
From his place on the opposite side of the changing-room aisle, Bernard Marx overheard what they were saying and turned pale.
«And to tell the truth,» said Lenina, «I’m beginning to get just a tiny bit bored with nothing but Henry every day.» She pulled on her left stocking. «Do you know Bernard Marx?» she asked in a tone whose excessive casualness was evidently forced. Fanny looked startled. «You don’t mean to say…?»
«Why not? Bernard’s an Alpha Plus. Besides, he asked me to go to one of the Savage Reservations with him. I’ve always wanted to see a Savage Reservation.»
«But his reputation?»
«What do I care about his reputation?»
«They say he doesn’t like Obstacle Golf.»
«They say, they say,» mocked Lenina.
«And then he spends most of his time by himself-alone.» There was horror in Fanny’s voice.
«Well, he won’t be alone when he’s with me. And anyhow, why are people so beastly to him? I think he’s rather sweet.» She smiled to herself; how absurdly shy he had been! Frightened almost-as though she were a World ControUer and he a Gamma-Minus machine minder.
«Consider your own lives,» said Mustapha Mond. «Has any of you ever encountered an insurmountable obstacle?»
The question was answered by a negative silence.
«Has any of you been compelled to live through a long time-interval between the consciousness of a desire and its fufilment?»
«Well,» began one of the boys, and hesitated.
«Speak up,» said the D.H.C. «Don’t keep his fordship waiting.»
«I once had to wait nearly four weeks before a girl I wanted woud let me have her.»
«And you felt a strong emotion in consequence?»
«Horrible!»
«Horrible; precisely,» said the Controller. «Our ancestors were so stupid and short-sighted that when the first reformers came along and offered to deliver them from those horrible emotions, they woudn’t have anything to do with them.»
«Talking about her as though she were a bit of meat.» Bernard ground his teeth.
«Have her here, have her there.» Like mutton. Degrading her to so much mutton. She said she’d think it over, she said she’d give me an answer this week. Oh, Ford, Ford, Ford.» He would have liked to go up to them and hit them in the face-hard, again and again.
«Yes, I really do advise you to try her,» Henry Foster was saying.
«Take Ectogenesis. Pfitzner and Kawaguchi had got the whole technique worked out. But would the Governments look at it? No. There was something called Christianity. Women were forced to go on being viviparous.»
«He’s so ugly!» said Fanny.
«But I rather like his looks.»
«And then so small.» Fanny made a grimace; smallness was so horribly and typically low-caste.
«I think that’s rather sweet,» said Lenina. «One feels one would like to pet him. You know. Like a cat.»
Fanny was shocked. «They say somebody made a mistake when he was still in the bottle-thought he was a Gamma and put alcohol into his blood-surrogate. That’s why he’s so stunted.»
«What nonsense!» Lenina was indignant.
«Sleep teaching was actually prohibited in England. There was something called liberalism. Parliament, if you know what that was, passed a law against it. The records survive. Speeches about liberty of the subject. Liberty to be inefficient and miserable. Freedom to be a round peg in a square hole.»
«But, my dear chap, you’re welcome, I assure you. You’re welcome.» Henry Foster patted the Assistant Predestinator on the shoulder. «Every one belongs to every one else, after all.»
One hundred repetitions three nights a week for four years, thought Bernard Marx, who was a specialist on hypnopaedia. Sixty-two thousand four hundred repetitions make one truth. Idiots!
«Or the Caste System. Constantly proposed, constantly rejected. There was something called democracy. As though men were more than physico-chemically equal.»
«Well, all I can say is that I’m going to accept his invitation.» Bernard hated them, hated them. But they were two, they were large, they were strong.
«The Nine Years’ War began in A.F. 141.»
«Not even if it were true about the alcohol in his blood-surrogate.»
«Phosgene, chloropicrin, ethyl iodoacetate, diphenylcyanarsine, trichlormethyl, chloroformate, dichlorethyl sulphide. Not to mention hydrocyanic acid.»
«Which I simply don’t believe,» Lenina concluded.
«The noise of fourteen thousand aeroplanes advancing in open order. But in the Kurfurstendamm and the Eighth Arrondissement, the explosion of the anthrax bombs is hardly louder than the popping of a paper bag.»
«Because I do want to see a Savage Reservation.» Ch3C6H2(NO2)3+Hg(CNO)2=well, what? An enormous hole in the ground, a pile of masonry, some bits of flesh and mucus, a foot, with the boot still on it, flying through the air and landing, flop, in the middle of the geraniums-the scarlet ones; such a splendid show that summer!”
«You’re hopeless, Lenina, I give you up.»
«The Russian technique for infecting water supplies was particularly ingenious.» Back turned to back, Fanny and Lenina continued their changing in silence.
«The Nine Years’ War, the great Economic Collapse. There was a choice between World Control and destruction. Between stability and…»
«Fanny Crowne’s a nice girl too,» said the Assistant Predestmator. In the nurseries, the Elementary Class Consciousness lesson was over, the voices were adapting future demand to future industrial supply. «I do love flying,» they whispered, «I do love flying, I do love having new clothes, I do love…»
«Liberalism, of course, was dead of anthrax, but all the same you couldn’t do things by force.»
«Not nearly so pneumatic as Lenina. Oh, not nearly.»
«But old clothes are beastly,» continued the untiring whisper. «We always throw away old clothes. Ending is better than mending, ending is better thast mending, ending is better…»
«Government’s an affair of sitting, not hitting. You rule with the brains and the buttocks, never with the fists. For example, there was the conscription of consumption.»
«There, I’m ready,» said Lenina, but Fanny remained speechless and averted. «Let’s make peace, Fanny darling.»
«Every man, woman and child compelled to consume so much a year. In the interests of industry. The sole result…»
«Ending is better than mending. The more stitches, the less riches; the more stitches…»
«One of these days,» said Fanny, with dismal emphasis, «you’ll get into trouble.»
«Conscientious objection on an enormous scale. Anything not to consume. Back to nature.»
«I do love flying. I do love flying.»
«Back to culture. Yes, actually to culture. You can’t consume much if you sit still and read books.»
«Do I look all right?» Lenina asked. Her jacket was made of bottle green acetate cloth with green viscose fur; at the cuffs and collar.
«Eight hundred Simple Lifers were mowed down by machine guns at Golders Green.»
«Ending is better than mending, ending is better than mending.» Green corduroy shorts and white viscose-woollen stockings turned down below the knee.
«Then came the famous British Museum Massacre. Two thousand culture fans gassed with dichlorethyl sulphide.»
A green-and-white jockey cap shaded Lenina’s eyes; her shoes were bright green and highly polished.
«In the end,» said Mustapha Mond, «the Controllers realized that force was no good. The slower but infinitely surer methods of ectogenesis, neo-Pavlovian conditioning and hypnopaedia…»
And round her waist she wore a silver-mounted green morocco-surrogate cartridge belt, bulging (for Lenina was not a freemartin) with the regulation supply of contraceptives.
«The discoveries of Pfitzner and Kawaguchi were at last made use of. An intensive propaganda against viviparous reproduction…»
«Perfect!» cried Fanny enthusiastically. She could never resist Lenina’s charm for long. «And what a perfectly sweet Malthusian belt!»
«Accompanied by a campaign against the Past; by the closing of museums, the blowing up of historical monuments (luckily most of them had already been destroyed during the Nine Years’ War); by the suppression of all books published before A.F. 15O.»
«I simply must get one like it,» said Fanny.
«There were some things called the pyramids, for example.
«My old black-patent bandolier…»
«And a man called Shakespeare. You’ve never heard of them of course.»
«It’s an absolute disgrace-that bandolier of mine.»
«Such are the advantages of a really scientific education.»
«The more stitches the less riches; the more stitches the less…»
«The introduction of Our Ford’s first T-Model…»
«I’ve had
