|
[Chapters] [Sociology] |
|
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 are useful. We couldn't do without Epsilons. Every
one works for every one else. We can't do without any one …"
Lenina remembered her first shock of fear and surprise; her speculations
through half a wakeful hour; and then, under the influence of those endless
repetitions, the gradual soothing of her mind, the soothing, the smoothing,
the stealthy creeping of sleep….
"I suppose Epsilons don't really mind being Epsilons," she
said aloud.
"Of course they don't. How can they? They don't know what it's
like being anything else. We'd mind, of course. But then we've been differently
conditioned. Besides, we start with a different heredity."
"I'm glad I'm not an Epsilon," said Lenina, with conviction.
"And if you were an Epsilon," said Henry, "your conditioning
would have made you no less thankful that you weren't a Beta or an Alpha."
He put his forward propeller into gear and headed the machine towards
London. Behind them, in the west, the crimson and orange were almost faded;
a dark bank of cloud had crept into the zenith. As they flew over the
crematorium, the plane shot upwards on the column of hot air rising from
the chimneys, only to fall as suddenly when it passed into the descending
chill beyond.
"What a marvellous switchback!" Lenina laughed delightedly.
But Henry's tone was almost, for a moment, melancholy. "Do you
know what that switchback was?" he said. "It was some human
being finally and definitely disappearing. Going up in a squirt of hot
gas. It would be curious to know who it was-a man or a woman, an Alpha
or an Epsilon.... " He sighed. Then, in a resolutely cheerful voice,
"Anyhow," he concluded, "there's one thing we can be certain
of; whoever he may have been, he was happy when he was alive. Everybody's
happy now."
"Yes, everybody's happy now," echoed Lenina. They had heard
the words repeated a hundred and fifty times every night for twelve years.
Landing on the roof of Henry's forty-story apartment house in Westminster,
they went straight down to the dining-hall. There, in a loud and cheerful
company, they ate an excellent meal. Soma was served with the
coffee. Lenina took two half-gramme tablets and Henry three. At twenty
past nine they walked across the street to the newly opened Westminster
Abbey Cabaret. It was a night almost without clouds, moonless and starry;
but of this on the whole depressing fact Lenina and Henry were fortunately
unaware. The electric sky-signs effectively shut off the outer darkness.
"CALVIN STOPES AND HIS SIXTEEN SEXOPHONISTS." From the facade
of the new Abbey the giant letters invitingly glared. "LONDON'S FINEST
SCENT AND COLOUR ORGAN. ALL THE LATEST SYNTHETIC MUSIC."
They entered. The air seemed hot and somehow breathless with the scent
of ambergris and sandalwood. On the domed ceiling of the hall, the colour
organ had momentarily painted a tropical sunset. The Sixteen Sexophonists
were playing an old favourite: "There ain't no Bottle
in all the world like that dear little Bottle of mine." Four hundred
couples were five-stepping round the polished floor. Lenina and Henry
were soon the four hundred and first. The saxophones wailed like melodious
cats under the moon, moaned in the alto and tenor registers as though
the little death were upon them. Rich with a wealth of harmonics, their
tremulous chorus mounted towards a climax, louder and ever louder-until
at last, with a wave of his hand, the conductor let loose the final shattering
note of ether-music and blew the sixteen merely human blowers clean out
of existence. Thunder in A flat major. And then, in all but silence, in
all but darkness, there followed a gradual detumescence, a diminuendo
sliding gradually, through quarter tones, down, down to a faintly whispered
dominant chord that lingered on (while the five-four rhythms still pulsed
below) charging the darkened seconds with an intense expectancy. And at
last expectancy was fulfilled. There was a sudden explosive sunrise, and
simultaneously, the Sixteen burst into song:
"Bottle of mine, it's you I've always wanted!
Bottle of mine, why was I ever decanted?
Skies are blue inside of you,
The weather's always fine;
For
There ain't no Bottle in all the world
Like that dear little Bottle of mine."
"Good-night, dear friends. Good-night, dear friends." The
loud speakers veiled their commands in a genial and musical politeness.
"Good-night, dear friends …"
Obediently, with all the others, Lenina and Henry left the building.
The depressing stars had travelled quite some way across the heavens.
But though the separating screen of the sky-signs had now to a great extent
dissolved, the two young people still retained their happy ignorance of
the night.
Swallowing half an hour before closing time, that second dose of soma
had raised a quite impenetrable wall between the actual universe and their
minds. Bottled, they crossed the street; bottled, they took the lift up
to Henry's room on the twenty-eighth floor. And yet, bottled as she was,
and in spite of that second gramme of soma, Lenina did not forget
to take all the contraceptive precautions prescribed by the regulations.
Years of intensive hypnopaedia and, from twelve to seventeen, Malthusian
drill three times a week had made the taking of these precautions almost
as automatic and inevitable as blinking.
"Oh, and that reminds me," she said, as she came back from
the bathroom, "Fanny Crowne wants to know where you found that lovely
green morocco-surrogate cartridge belt you gave me."
ß 2
ALTERNATE Thursdays were Bernard's Solidarity
Service days. After an early dinner at the Aphroditaeum (to which
Helrnholtz had recently been elected under Rule Two) he took leave of
his friend and, hailing a taxi on the roof told the man to fly to the
Fordson Community Singery. The machine rose a couple of hundred metres,
then headed eastwards, and as it turned, there before Bernard's eyes,
gigantically beautiful, was the Singery. Flood-lighted, its three hundred
and twenty metres of white Carrara-surrogate gleamed with a snowy incandescence
over Ludgate Hill; at each of the four corners of its helicopter platform
an immense T shone crimson against the night, and from the mouths of twenty-four
vast golden trumpets rumbled a solemn synthetic music.
"Damn, I'm late," Bernard said to himself as he first caught
sight of Big Henry, the Singery clock. And sure enough, as he was paying
off his cab, Big Henry sounded the hour. "Ford," sang out an
immense bass voice from all the golden trumpets. "Ford, Ford, Ford
…" Nine times. Bernard ran for the lift.
The great auditorium for Ford's Day celebrations and other massed Community
Sings was at the bottom of the building. Above it, a hundred to each floor,
were the seven thousand rooms used by Solidarity Groups for their fortnight
services. Bernard dropped down to floor thirty-three, hurried along the
corridor, stood hesitating for a moment outside Room 3210, then, having
wound himself up, opened the door and walked in.
Thank Ford! he was not the last. Three chairs of the twelve arranged
round the circular table were still unoccupied. He slipped into the nearest
of them as inconspicuously as he could and prepared to frown at the yet
later comers whenever they should arrive.
Turning towards him, "What were you playing this afternoon?"
the girl on his left enquired. "Obstacle, or Electro-magnetic?"
Bernard looked at her (Ford! it was Morgana Rothschild) and blushingly
had to admit that he had been playing neither. Morgana stared at him with
astonishment. There was an awkward silence.
Then pointedly she turned away and addressed herself to the more sporting
man on her left.
"A good beginning for a Solidarity Service," thought Bernard
miserably, and foresaw for himself yet another failure to achieve atonement.
If only he had given himself time to look around instead of scuttling
for the nearest chair! He could have sat between Fifi Bradlaugh and Joanna
Diesel. Instead of which he had gone and blindly planted himself next
to Morgana. Morgana! Ford! Those black eyebrows of hers-that
eyebrow, rather-for they met above the nose. Ford! And on his right was
Clara Deterding. True, Clara's eyebrows didn't meet. But she was really
too pneumatic. Whereas Fifi and Joanna were absolutely right.
Plump, blonde, not too large … And it was that great lout, Tom Kawaguchi,
who now took the seat between them.
The last arrival was Sarojini Engels.
"You're late," said the President of the Group severely. "Don't
let it happen again."
Sarojini apologized and slid into her place between Jim Bokanovsky and
Herbert Bakunin. The group was now complete, the solidarity circle perfect
and without flaw. Man, woman, man, in a ring of endless alternation round
the table. Twelve of them ready to be made one, waiting to come together,
to be fused, to lose their twelve separate identities in a larger being.
The President stood up, made the sign of the T and, switching on the
synthetic music, let loose the soft indefatigable beating of drums and
a choir of instruments-near-wind and super-string-that plangently repeated
and repeated the brief and unescapably haunting melody of the first Solidarity
Hymn. Again, again-and it was not the ear that heard the pulsing rhythm,
it was the midriff; the wail and clang of those recurring harmonies haunted,
not the mind, but the yearning bowels of compassion.
The President made another sign of the T and sat down. The service had
begun. The dedicated soma tablets were placed in the centre of
the table. The loving cup of strawberry ice-cream soma was passed
from hand to hand and, with the formula, "I drink to my annihilation,"
twelve times quaffed. Then to the accompaniment of the synthetic orchestra
the First Solidarity Hymn was sung.
"Ford, we are twelve; oh, make us one,
Like drops within the Social River,
Oh, make us now together run"
As swiftly as thy shining Flivver." Twelve yearning stanzas. And then the loving cup was passed a second
time. "I drink to the Greater Being" was now the formula. All
drank. Tirelessly the music played. The drums beat. The crying and clashing
of the harmonies were an obsession in the melted bowels. The Second Solidarity
Hymn was sung.
"Come, Greater Being, Social Friend,
Annihilating Twelve-in-One!
We long to die, for when we end,
Our larger life has but begun."
The loving cup had made its circuit. Lifting his hand, the President
gave a signal; the chorus broke out into the third Solidarity Hymn.
"Feel how the Greater Being comes!
Rejoice and, in rejoicings, die!
Melt in the music of the drums!
For I am you and you are I."
"I hear him," she cried. "I hear him."
"He's coming," shouted Sarojini Engels.
"Yes, he's coming, I hear him." Fifi Bradlaugh and Tom Kawaguchi
rose simultaneously to their feet.
"Oh, oh, oh!" Joanna inarticulately testified.
"He's coming!" yelled Jim Bokanovsky.
The President leaned forward and, with a touch, released a delirium
of cymbals and blown brass, a fever of tom-tomming.
"Oh, he's coming!" screamed Clara Deterding. "Aie!"
and it was as though she were having her throat cut.
Feeling that
it was time for him to do something, Bernard also jumped up and shouted:
"I hear him; He's coming." But it wasn't true. He heard nothing
and, for him, nobody was coming. Nobody-in spite of the music, in spite
of the mounting excitement. But he waved his arms, he shouted with the
best of them; and when the others began to jig and stamp and shuffle,
he also jigged and shuffled.
Round they went, a circular procession of dancers, each with hands on
the hips of the dancer preceding, round and round, shouting in unison,
stamping to the rhythm of the music with their feet, beating it, beating
it out with hands on the buttocks in front; twelve pairs of hands beating
as one; as one, twelve buttocks slabbily resounding. Twelve as one, twelve
as one. "I hear Him, I hear Him coming." The music quickened;
faster beat the feet, faster, faster fell the rhythmic hands. And all
at once a great synthetic bass boomed out the words which announced the
approaching atonement and final consummation of solidarity, the coming
of the Twelve-in-One, the incarnation of the Greater Being. "Orgy-porgy,"
it sang, while the tom-toms continued to beat their feverish tattoo:
"Orgy-porgy, Ford and fun,
Kiss the girls and make them One.
Boys at 0ne with girls at peace;
Orgy-porgy gives release."
They were standing on the roof; Big Henry had just sung eleven. The
night was calm and warm.
"Wasn't it wonderful?" said Fifi Bradlaugh. "Wasn't it
simply wonderful?" She looked at Bernard with an expression of rapture,
but of rapture in which there was no trace of agitation or excitement-for
to be excited is still to be unsatisfied. Hers was the calm ecstasy
of achieved consummation, the peace, not of mere vacant satiety and nothingness,
but of balanced life, of energies at rest and in equilibrium. A rich and
living peace. For the Solidarity Service had given as well as taken, drawn
off only to replenish. She was full, she was made perfect, she was still
more than merely herself. "Didn't you think it was wonderful?"
she insisted, looking into Bernard's face with those supernaturally shining
eyes.
"Yes, I thought it was wonderful," he lied and looked away;
the sight of her transfigured face was at once an accusation and an ironical
reminder of his own separateness. He was as miserably isolated now as
he had been when the service began-more isolated by reason of his unreplenished
emptiness, his dead satiety. Separate and unatoned, while the others were
being fused into the Greater Being; alone even in Morgana's embrace-much
more alone, indeed, more hopelessly himself than he had ever been in his
life before. He had emerged from that crimson twilight into the common
electric glare with a self-consciousness intensified to the pitch of agony.
He was utterly miserable, and perhaps (her shining eyes accused him),
perhaps it was his own fault. "Quite wonderful," he repeated;
but the only thing he could think of was Morgana's eyebrow. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18
|
|