Brave New World, Page 9

  “You must have had a terrible shock,” said Bernard, almost enviously.

  At the sound of his voice the Director started into a guilty realization of where he was; shot a glance at Bernard, and averting his eyes, blushed darkly; looked at him again with sudden suspicion and, angrily on his dignity, “Don’t imagine,” he said, “that I’d had any indecorous relation with the girl. Nothing emotional, nothing longdrawn. It was all perfectly healthy and normal.” He handed Bernard the permit. “I really don’t know why I bored you with this trivial anecdote.” Furious with himself for having given away a discreditable secret, he vented his rage on Bernard. The look in his eyes was now frankly malignant. “And I should like to take this opportunity, Mr. Marx,” he went on, “of saying that I’m not at all pleased with the reports I receive of your behaviour outside working hours. You may say that this is not my business. But it is. I have the good name of the Centre to think of. My workers must be above suspicion, particularly those of the highest castes. Alphas are so conditioned that they do not have to be infantile in their emotional behaviour. But that is all the more reason for their making a special effort to conform. It is their duty to be infantile, even against their inclination. And so, Mr. Marx, I give you fair warning.” The Director’s voice vibrated with an indignation that had now become wholly righteous and impersonal—was the expression of the disapproval of Society itself. “If ever I hear again of any lapse from a proper standard of infantile decorum, I shall ask for your transference to a Sub-Centre—preferably to Iceland. Good morning.” And swivelling round in his chair, he picked up his pen and began to write.

  “That’ll teach him,” he said to himself. But he was mistaken. For Bernard left the room with a swagger, exulting, as he banged the door behind him, in the thought that he stood alone, embattled against the order of things; elated by the intoxicating consciousness of his individual significance and importance. Even the thought of persecution left him undismayed, was rather tonic than depressing. He felt strong enough to meet and overcome affliction, strong enough to face even Iceland. And this confidence was the greater for his not for a moment really believing that he would be called upon to face anything at all. People simply weren’t transferred for things like that. Iceland was just a threat. A most stimulating and life-giving threat. Walking along the corridor, he actually whistled.

  Heroic was the account he gave that evening of his interview with the D.H.C. “Whereupon,” it concluded, “I simply told him to go to the Bottomless Past and marched out of the room. And that was that.” He looked at Helmholtz Watson expectantly, awaiting his due reward of sympathy, encouragement, admiration. But no word came. Helmholtz sat silent, staring at the floor.

  He liked Bernard; he was grateful to him for being the only man of his acquaintance with whom he could talk about the subjects he felt to be important. Nevertheless, there were things in Bernard which he hated. This boasting, for example. And the outbursts of an abject self-pity with which it alternated. And his deplorable habit of being bold after the event, and full, in absence, of the most extraordinary presence of mind. He hated these things—just because he liked Bernard. The seconds passed. Helmholtz continued to stare at the floor. And suddenly Bernard blushed and turned away.

  Part 3

  The journey was quite uneventful. The Blue Pacific Rocket was two and a half minutes early at New Orleans, lost four minutes in a tornado over Texas, but flew into a favourable air current at Longitude 95 West, and was able to land at Santa Fé less than forty seconds behind schedule time.

  “Forty seconds on a six and a half hour flight. Not so bad,” Lenina conceded.

  They slept that night at Santa Fé. The hotel was excellent—incomparably better, for example, than that horrible Aurora Bora Palace in which Lenina had suffered so much the previous summer. Liquid air, television, vibro-vacuum massage, radio, boiling caffeine solution, hot contraceptives, and eight different kinds of scent were laid on in every bedroom. The synthetic music plant was working as they entered the hall and left nothing to be desired. A notice in the lift announced that there were sixty Escalator-Squash Racket Courts in the hotel, and that Obstacle and Electro-magnetic Golf could both be played in the park.

  “But it sounds simply too lovely,” cried Lenina. “I almost wish we could stay here. Sixty Escalator-Squash Courts …”

  “There won’t be any in the Reservation,” Bernard warned her. “And no scent, no television, no hot water even. If you feel you can’t stand it, stay here till I come back.”

  Lenina was quite offended. “Of course I can stand it. I only said it was lovely here because … well, because progress is lovely, isn’t it?”

  “Five hundred repetitions once a week from thirteen to seventeen,” said Bernard wearily, as though to himself.

  “What did you say?”

  “I said that progress was lovely. That’s why you mustn’t come to the Reservation unless you really want to.”

  “But I do want to.”

  “Very well, then,” said Bernard; and it was almost a threat.

  Their permit required the signature of the Warden of the Reservation, at whose office next morning they duly presented themselves. An Epsilon-Plus negro porter took in Bernard’s card, and they were admitted almost immediately.

  The Warden was a blond and brachycephalic Alpha-Minus, short, red, moon-faced, and broad-shouldered, with a loud booming voice, very well adapted to the utterance of hypnopædic wisdom. He was a mine of irrelevant information and unasked-for good advice. Once started, he went on and on—boomingly.

  “… five hundred and sixty thousand square Kilometers, divided into four distinct Sub-Reservations, each surrounded by a high-tension wire fence.”

  At this moment, and for no apparent reason, Bernard suddenly remembered that he had left the Eau de Cologne tap in his bathroom wide open and running.

  “… supplied with current from the Grand Canyon hydroelectric station.”

  “Cost me a fortune by the time I get back.” With his mind’s eye, Bernard saw the needle on the scent meter creeping round and round, antlike, indefatigable. “Quickly telephone to Helmholtz Watson.”

  “… upwards of five thousand kilometres of fencing at sixty thousand volts.”

  “You don’t say so,” said Lenina politely, not knowing in the least what the Warden had said, but taking her cue from his dramatic pause. When the Warden started booming, she had inconspicuously swallowed half a gramme of soma, with the result that she could now sit, serenely not listening, thinking of nothing at all, but with her large blue eyes fixed on the Warden’s face in an expression of rapt attention.

  “To touch the fence is instant death,” pronounced the Warden solemnly. “There is no escape from a Savage Reservation.”

  The word “escape” was suggestive. “Perhaps,” said Bernard, half rising, “we ought to think of going.” The little black needle was scurrying, an insect, nibbling through time, eating into his money.

  “No escape,” repeated the Warden, waving him back into his chair; and as the permit was not yet countersigned, Bernard had no choice but to obey. “Those who are born in the Reservation—and remember, my dear young lady,” he added, leering obscenely at Lenina, and speaking in an improper whisper, “remember that, in the Reservation, children still are born, yes, actually born, revolting as that may seem …” (He hoped that this reference to a shameful subject would make Lenina blush; but she only smiled with simulated intelligence and said, “You don’t say so!” Disappointed, the Warden began again.) “Those, I repeat, who are born in the Reservation are destined to die there.”

  Destined to die … A decilitre of Eau de Cologne every minute. Six litres an hour. “Perhaps,” Bernard tried again, “we ought …”

  Leaning forward, the Warden tapped the table with his forefinger. “You ask me how many people live in the Reservation. And I reply”—triumphantly—“I reply that we do not know. We can only guess.”

  “You don’t say so.”

&
nbsp; “My dear young lady, I do say so.”

  Six times twenty-four—no, it would be nearer six times thirty-six. Bernard was pale and trembling with impatience. But inexorably the booming continued.

  “… about sixty thousand Indians and half-breeds … absolute savages … our inspectors occasionally visit … otherwise, no communication whatever with the civilized world … still preserve their repulsive habits and customs … marriage, if you know what that is, my dear young lady; families … no conditioning … monstrous superstitions … Christianity and totemism and ancestor worship … extinct languages, such as Zuñi and Spanish and Athapascan … pumas, porcupines and other ferocious animals … infectious diseases … priests … venomous lizards …”

  “You don’t say so?”

  They got away at last. Bernard dashed to the telephone. Quick, quick; but it took him nearly three minutes to get on to Helmholtz Watson. “We might be among the savages already,” he complained. “Damned incompetence!”

  “Have a gramme,” suggested Lenina.

  He refused, preferring his anger. And at last, thank Ford, he was through and, yes, it was Helmholtz; Helmholtz, to whom he explained what had happened, and who promised to go round at once, at once, and turn off the tap, yes, at once, but took this opportunity to tell him what the D.H.C. had said, in public, yesterday evening .…

  “What? He’s looking out for some one to take my place?” Bernard’s voice was agonized. “So it’s actually decided? Did he mention Iceland? You say he did? Ford! Iceland …” He hung up the receiver and turned back to Lenina. His face was pale, his expression utterly dejected.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked.

  “The matter?” He dropped heavily into a chair. “I’m going to be sent to Iceland.”

  Often in the past he had wondered what it would be like to be subjected (soma-less and with nothing but his own inward resources to rely on) to some great trial, some pain, some persecution; he had even longed for affliction. As recently as a week ago, in the Director’s office, he had imagined himself courageously resisting, stoically accepting suffering without a word. The Director’s threats had actually elated him, made him feel larger than life. But that, as he now realized, was because he had not taken the threats quite seriously; he had not believed that, when it came to the point, the D.H.C. would ever do anything. Now that it looked as though the threats were really to be fulfilled, Bernard was appalled. Of that imagined stoicism, that theoretical courage, not a trace was left.

  He raged against himself—what a fool!—against the Director—how unfair not to give him that other chance, that other chance which, he now had no doubt at all, he had always intended to take. And Iceland, Iceland …

  Lenina shook her head. “Was and will make me ill,” she quoted, “I take a gramme and only am.”

  In the end she persuaded him to swallow four tablets of soma. Five minutes later roots and fruits were abolished; the flower of the present rosily blossomed. A message from the porter announced that, at the Warden’s orders, a Reservation Guard had come round with a plane and was waiting on the roof of the hotel. They went up at once. An octoroon in Gamma-green uniform saluted and proceeded to recite the morning’s programme.

  A bird’s-eye view of ten or a dozen of the principal pueblos, then a landing for lunch in the valley of Malpais. The rest-house was comfortable there, and up at the pueblo the savages would probably be celebrating their summer festival. It would be the best place to spend the night.

  They took their seats in the plane and set off. Ten minutes later they were crossing the frontier that separated civilization from savagery. Uphill and down, across the deserts of salt or sand, through forests, into the violet depth of canyons, over crag and peak and table-topped mesa, the fence marched on and on, irresistibly the straight line, the geometrical symbol of triumphant human purpose. And at its foot, here and there, a mosaic of white bones, a still unrotted carcase dark on the tawny ground marked the place where deer or steer, puma or porcupine or coyote, or the greedy turkey buzzards drawn down by the whiff of carrion and fulminated as though by a poetic justice, had come too close to the destroying wires.

  “They never learn,” said the green-uniformed pilot, pointing down at the skeletons on the ground below them. “And they never will learn,” he added and laughed, as though he had somehow scored a personal triumph over the electrocuted animals.

  Bernard also laughed; after two grammes of soma the joke seemed, for some reason, good. Laughed and then, almost immediately, dropped off to sleep, and sleeping was carried over Taos and Tesuque; over Nambe and Picuris and Pojoaque, over Sia and Cochiti, over Laguna and Acoma and the Enchanted Mesa, over Zuñi and Cibola and Ojo Caliente, and woke at last to find the machine standing on the ground, Lenina carrying the suit-cases into a small square house, and the Gamma-green octoroon talking incomprehensibly with a young Indian.

  “Malpais,” explained the pilot, as Bernard stepped out. “This is the rest-house. And there’s a dance this afternoon at the pueblo. He’ll take you there.” He pointed to the sullen young savage. “Funny, I expect.” He grinned. “Everything they do is funny.” And with that he climbed into the plane and started up the engines. “Back to-morrow. And remember,” he added reassuringly to Lenina, “they’re perfectly tame; savages won’t do you any harm. They’ve got enough experience of gas bombs to know that they mustn’t play any tricks.” Still laughing, he threw the helicopter screws into gear, accelerated, and was gone.

  7

  The mesa was like a ship becalmed in a strait of lion-coloured dust. The channel wound between precipitous banks, and slanting from one wall to the other across the valley ran a streak of green—the river and its fields. On the prow of that stone ship in the centre of the strait, and seemingly a part of it, a shaped and geometrical outcrop of the naked rock, stood the pueblo of Malpais. Block above block, each story smaller than the one below, the tall houses rose like stepped and amputated pyramids into the blue sky. At their feet lay a straggle of low buildings, a criss-cross of walls; and on three sides the precipices fell sheer into the plain. A few columns of smoke mounted perpendicularly into the windless air and were lost.

  “Queer,” said Lenina. “Very queer.” It was her ordinary word of condemnation. “I don’t like it. And I don’t like that man.” She pointed to the Indian guide who had been appointed to take them up to the pueblo. Her feeling was evidently reciprocated; the very back of the man, as he walked along before them, was hostile, sullenly contemptuous.

  “Besides,” she lowered her voice, “he smells.”

  Bernard did not attempt to deny it. They walked on.

  Suddenly it was as though the whole air had come alive and were pulsing, pulsing with the indefatigable movement of blood. Up there, in Malpais, the drums were being beaten. Their feet fell in with the rhythm of that mysterious heart; they quickened their pace. Their path led them to the foot of the precipice. The sides of the great mesa ship towered over them, three hundred feet to the gunwale.

  “I wish we could have brought the plane,” said Lenina, looking up resentfully at the blank impending rock-face. “I hate walking. And you feel so small when you’re on the ground at the bottom of a hill.”

  They walked along for some way in the shadow of the mesa, rounded a projection, and there, in a water-worn ravine, was the way up the companion ladder. They climbed. It was a very steep path that zigzagged from side to side of the gully. Sometimes the pulsing of the drums was all but inaudible, at others they seemed to be beating only just round the corner.