Chapter Eighteen

The door was ajar; they entered.

“John!”

From the bathroom came an unpleasant and characteristic sound.

“Is there anything the matter?” Helmholtz called.

There was no answer. The unpleasant sound was repeated, twice; there was silence. Then, with a click the bathroom door opened and, very pale, the Savage emerged.

“I say,” Helmholtz exclaimed solicitously, “you do look ill, John!”

“Did you eat something that didn’t agree with you?” asked Bernard.

The Savage nodded. “I ate civilization.”

“What?”

“It poisoned me; I was defiled. And then,” he added, in a lower tone, “I ate my own wickedness.”

“Yes, but what exactly?… I mean, just now you

were…”

“Now I am purified,” said the Savage. “I drank some mustard and warm water.”

The others stared at him in astonishment. “Do you mean to say that you were doing it on purpose?” asked Bernard.

“That’s how the Indians always purify themselves.” He sat down and, sighing, passed his hand across his forehead. “I shall rest for a few minutes,” he said. “I’m rather tired.”

“Well, I’m not surprised,” said Helmholtz. After a silence, “We’ve come to say good-bye,” he went on in another tone. “We’re off tomorrow morning.”

“Yes, we’re off tomorrow,” said Bernard on whose face the Savage remarked a new expression of determined resignation. “And by the way, John,” he continued, leaning forward in his chair and laying a hand on the Savage’s knee, “I want to say how sorry I am about everything that happened yesterday.” He blushed. “How ashamed,” he went on, in spite of the unsteadiness of his voice, “how really…”

The Savage cut him short and, taking his hand, affectionately pressed it.

“Helmholtz was wonderful to me,” Bernard resumed, after a little pause. “If it hadn’t been for him, I

should…”

“Now, now,” Helmholtz protested.

There was a silence. In spite of their sadness-because of it, even; for their sadness was the symptom of their love for one another-the three young men were happy.

“I went to see the Controller this morning,” said the Savage at last.

“What for?”

“To ask if I mightn’t go to the islands with you.”

“And what did he say?” asked Helmholtz eagerly.

The Savage shook his head. “He wouldn’t let me.”

“Why not?”

“He said he wanted to go on with the experiment. But I’m damned,” the Savage added, with sudden fury, “I’m damned if I’ll go on being experimented with. Not for all the Controllers in the world. I shall go away tomorrow too.”

“But where?” the others asked in unison.

The Savage shrugged his shoulders. “Anywhere. I don’t care. So long as I can be alone.”

From Guildford the line followed the Wey valley to Godalming, then, over Milford and Witley, proceeded to Haslemere and on through Petersfield towards Portsmouth. Roughly parallel to it, the road passed over Worplesden, Tongham, Puttenham, Elstead and Grayshott. Between the Hog’s Back and Hindhead there were points where the two lines were not more than six or seven kilometres apart. The distance was too small for careless flyers-particularly at night and when they had taken half a gramme too much. There had been accidents. Serious ones. It had been decided to deflect the upline a few kilometres to the west. Between Grayshott and Tongham four abandoned air-lighthouses marked the course of the old Portsmouth-to-London road. The skies above them were silent and deserted.

The Savage had chosen as his hermitage the old light-house which stood on the crest of the hill between Puttenham and Elstead. The building was of ferro-concrete and in excellent condition-it was almost too comfortable. The Savage pacified his conscience by promising himself a compensatingly harder self-discipline. His first night in the hermitage was, deliberately, a sleepless one. He spent the hours on his knees praying, now to that Heaven from which the guilty Claudius had begged forgiveness, now in Zuni to Awonawilona, now to Jesus and Pookong, now to his own guardian animal, the eagle. From time to time he stretched out his arms as though he were on the Cross, and held them thus through long minutes of an ache that gradually increased till it became a tremulous and excruciating agony; held them, while repeating, through clenched teeth, “Oh, forgive me! Oh, make me pure! Oh, help me to be good!” again and again, till he was on the point of fainting from the pain.

When morning came, he felt he had earned the right to inhabit the lighthouse. Yet, the very reason why he had chosen the lighthouse had become almost instantly a reason for going somewhere else. He had decided to live there because the view was so beautiful. But who was he to be pampered with the daily and hourly sight of loveliness? All he deserved was to live in some blind hole in the ground. Stiff and still aching after his long night of pain, but for that very reason inwardly reassured, he climbed up to the platform of his tower, he looked out over the bright sunrise world which he had regained the right to inhabit.

Close to the lighthouse were the woods, the open stretches of heather and yellow gorse, the shining ponds with their overhanging birch trees, their water lilies, their beds of rushes-these were beautiful and astonishing. And then the solitude! Whole days passed during which he never saw a human being. The lighthouse was only a quarter of an hour’s flight from the Charing-T Tower; but the hills of Malpais were hardly more deserted than this Surrey heath. During the first days the Savage lived alone and undisturbed.

Of the money which, on his first arrival, John had received for his personal expenses, most had been spent on his equipment. Before leaving London he had bought four viscose-woollen blankets, rope and string, nails, glue, a few tools, matches (though he intended in due course to make a fire drill), some pots and pans, two dozen packets of seeds, and ten kilogrammes of wheat flour. “No, not synthetic starch and flour-substitute,” he had insisted. “Even though it is more nourishing.”

He counted his money. The little that remained would be enough, he hoped, to tide him over the winter. By next spring, his garden would be producing enough to make him independent of the outside world. Meanwhile, there would always be game. He had seen plenty of rabbits, and there were fish in the ponds. He set to work at once to make a bow and arrows.

He decided to use ash tree and hazel to make his weapon. The work gave him an intense pleasure. After those weeks in London, with nothing to do-it was pure delight to be doing something that demanded skill and patience.

He had almost finished whittling the stave into shape, when he realized with a start that he was singing-singing! Guiltily he blushed. After all, it was not to sing and enjoy himself that he had come here. It was to escape further contamination by the filth of civilized life; it was to be purified and made good; it was actively to make amends. He realized that, absorbed in the whittling of his bow, he had forgotten what he had sworn to himself he would constantly remember-poor Linda, and his own murderous unkindness to her, and those loathsome twins. He had sworn to remember, he had sworn unceasingly to make amends. And there was he, sitting happily over his bow, singing, actually singing…

He went indoors, opened the box of mustard, and put some water to boil on the fire.

Half an hour later, three Delta-Minus landworkers happened to be driving to Elstead and, at the top of the hill, were astonished to see a young man standing outside the abandoned lighthouse. He was stripped to the waist and hitting himself with a whip of knotted cords. His back was horizontally streaked with crimson. The driver pulled up at the side of the road and, with his two companions, stared open-mouthed at the spectacle. One, two three-they counted the strokes. After the eighth, the young man interrupted his self-punishment to run to the wood’s edge and there be violently sick. When he had finished, he picked up the whip and began hitting himself again. Nine, ten, eleven, twelve…

“Ford!” whispered the driver. And his twins were of the same opinion.

Three days later, like flies settling on a corpse, the reporters came.

The bow was ready. The Savage was busy on his arrows. Thirty hazel sticks had been whittled and dried, tipped with sharp nails. He had made a raid one night on the Puttenham poultry farm, and now had enough feathers to equip a whole armoury. It was at work upon the feathering of his shafts that the first of the reporters found him. Noiseless, the man came up behind him.

“Good-morning, Mr. Savage,” he said. “I am the representative of The Hourly Radio.”

Startled, the Savage sprang to his feet, scattering arrows, feathers, glue-pot and brush in all directions.

“I beg your pardon,” said the reporter, “I had no intention…” He touched his hat-the aluminum hat in which he carried his wireless receiver and transmitter. “Excuse my not taking it off,” he said. “It’s a bit heavy. Well, as I was saying, I am the representative of The Hourly…”

“What do you want?” asked the Savage, scowling.

“Well, of course, our readers would be very interested…” He put his head on one side, his smile became almost coquettish. “Just a few words from you, Mr. Savage.” And rapidly, he uncoiled two wires connected to the portable battery buckled round his waist; plugged them into the sides of his aluminum hat; touched another spring on the peak of the brim-and, like a jack-in-the-box, out jumped a microphone. “Hullo,” he said to the microphone, “hullo, hullo… Edzel? Primo Mellon speaking. Yes, I’ve got hold of him. Mr. Savage will now take the microphone and say a few words. Won’t you, Mr. Savage?” He looked up at the Savage with another of those winning smiles of his. “Just tell our readers why you came here. What made you leave London so very suddenly. And, of course, that whip.” (The Savage started. How did they know about the whip?) Just a few words, a very few…”

The Savage obeyed. Five words he uttered and no more-five words, the same as those he had said to Bernard about the Arch-Community-Songster of Canterbury. “Hani! Sons eso tse-na!” And seizing the reporter by the shoulder, he spun him round and, with all the force and accuracy of a champion foot-and-mouth-baller, delivered a most prodigious kick.

Eight minutes later, a new edition of The Hourly Radio was on sale in the streets of London. “HOURLY RADIO REPORTER HAS COCCYX KICKED BY MYSTERY SAVAGE,” ran the headlines on the front page. “SENSATION IN SURREY.”

Undeterred by that, four other reporters, representing the New York Times, the Frankfurt Four-Dimensional Continuum, The Fordian Science Monitor, and The Delta Mirror, called that afternoon at the lighthouse and were met with with progressively increasing violence.

From a safe distance and still rubbing his buttocks, “Fool!” shouted the man from The Fordian Science Monitor, “why don’t you take soma?”

“Get away!” The Savage shook his fist.

The other retreated a few steps. “Evil’s an unreality if you take a couple of grammes.”

“Kohakwa iyathtokyai!” The tone was menacingly derisive.

“Pain’s a delusion.”

“Oh, is it?” said the Savage and, picking up a thick hazel switch, walked forward.

The man from The Fordian Science Monitor made a dash for his helicopter.

After that the Savage was left for a time in peace. A few helicopters came and hovered round the tower. He shot an arrow into the nearest of them. It pierced the aluminum floor of the cabin; there was a shrill yell, and the machine went rocketing up into the air. The others, in future, kept their distance respectfully. Ignoring their humming, the Savage dug at what was to be his garden. After a time the vermin evidently became bored and flew away; for hours at a stretch the sky above his head was empty and silent.

The weather was breathlessly hot, there was thunder in the air. He had dug all the morning and was resting, stretched out on the floor. And suddenly thought of Lenina, saying “Sweet!” and “Put your arms round me!” Impudent strumpet! But oh, oh, her arms round his neck, the lifting of her breasts, her mouth! Eternity was in our lips and eyes. Lenina… No, no, no, no! He sprang to his feet and, half naked as he was, ran out of the house. At the edge of the heath stood a clump of juniper bushes. He flung himself against them, against the green spikes. Sharp, with a thousand points, they pricked him. He tried to think of poor Linda, breathless and dumb, with her clutching hands and the unutterable terror in her eyes. Poor Linda whom he had sworn to remember. But it was still the presence of Lenina that haunted him. Lenina, whom he had promised to forget. Even through the stab and sting of the juniper needles, his wincing flesh was aware of her, unescapably real. “Sweet, sweet… And if you wanted me too, why didn’t you…”

The whip was hanging on a nail by the door. In a frenzy the Savage ran back to the house, seized it, whirled it. The knotted cords bit into his flesh.

“Strumpet! Strumpet!” he shouted at every blow as though it were Lenina (and how frantically, without knowing it, he wished it were), white, warm, scented Lenina. “Strumpet!” And then, in a voice of despair, “Oh, Linda, forgive me. Forgive me, God. I’m bad. I’m wicked. I’m… No, no, you strumpet, you strumpet!”

From his carefully constructed hide in the wood three hundred metres away, Darwin Bonaparte, the Feely Corporation’s most expert big game photographer had watched the whole proceedings. Patience and skill had been rewarded. He had spent three days sitting inside an artificial oak tree; three days of setting up cameras and microphones. Seventy-two hours of profound discomfort. But now the great moment had come. “Splendid,” he said to himself, as the Savage started his astonishing performance. “Splendid!” He kept his telescopic cameras carefully aimed-glued to their moving objective; clapped on a higher power to get a close-up of the frantic and distorted face (admirable!); switched over, for half a minute, to slow motion (an exquisitely comical effect, he promised himself); listened in, meanwhile, to the blows, the groans, the wild and raving words that were being recorded on the sound-track at the edge of his film, tried the effect of a little amplification (yes, that was decidedly better); wished the Savage would turn round so that he could get a good close-up of the blood on his back-and almost instantly (what astonishing luck!) the fellow did turn round, and he was able to take a perfect close-up.

“Well, that was grand!” he said to himself when it was all over. “Really grand!” When they had put in the feely effects at the studio, it would be a wonderful film. Almost as good, thought Darwin Bonaparte, as the Sperm Whale’s Love-Life-and that, by Ford, was saying a good deal!

Twelve days later The Savage of Surrey had been released and could be seen, heard and felt in every first-class feely-palace in Western Europe.

The effect of Darwin Bonaparte’s film was immediate and enormous. On the afternoon which followed the evening of its release John’s solitude was suddenly broken by the arrival of a great swarm of helicopters.

He was digging in his garden-digging, too, in his own mind. Death-and he drove in his spade once, and again, and yet again. And all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death. A convincing thunder rumbled through the words. He lifted another spadeful of earth. Why had Linda died? Why had she been allowed to become gradually less than human and at last… He shuddered and stamped the spade fiercely into the tough ground. As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport. Thunder again. His spade struck against a stone; he stooped to pick it up. For in that sleep of death, what dreams?…

A humming overhead had become a roar; and suddenly he was in shadow, there was something between the sun and him. He looked up, startled, from his digging, from his thoughts; looked up in a dazzled bewilderment and saw, close above him, the swarm of hovering machines. Like locusts they came, descended all around him. And out of them stepped men in white viscose-flannels, women in velveteen shorts and sleeveless, half-unzippered singlets-one couple from each. In a few minutes there were dozens of them, standing in a wide circle round the lighthouse, staring, laughing, clicking their cameras, throwing (as to an ape) peanuts, packets of sex-hormone chewing-gum.

The Savage had retreated towards cover, and now, in the posture of an animal at bay, stood with his back to the wall of the lighthouse, staring from face to face in speechless horror, like a man out of his senses.

From this stupor he was aroused to a more immediate sense of reality by the impact on his cheek of a well-aimed packet of chewing-gum. A shock of startling pain-and he was broad awake, awake and fiercely angry.

“Go away!” he shouted.

The ape had spoken; there was a burst of laughter and hand-clapping. “Good old Savage! Hurrah, hurrah!” Then he heard the cries of: “Whip, whip, the whip!”

Acting on the word’s suggestion, he took the bunch of knotted cords from its nail behind the door and shook it at his tormentors.

There was a yell of ironical applause.

Menacingly he advanced towards them. A woman cried out in fear. The line wavered, then stiffened again. They were an overwhelming force and it had given them courage which the Savage had not expected of them. Taken aback, he halted and looked round.

“Why don’t you leave me alone?”

“Have a few magnesium-salted almonds!” said the man closest to him. He held out a packet. “They’re really very good, you know,” he added, with a rather nervous smile. “And the magnesium salts will help to keep you young.”

The Savage ignored his offer. “What do you want with me?” he asked, turning from one grinning face to another. “What do you want with me?”

“The whip,” answered a hundred voices confusedly. “Do the whipping stunt. Let’s see the whipping stunt.”

Then, in unison and on a slow, heavy rhythm, “We-want-the whip,” shouted a group at the end of the line. “We-want-the whip.”

Others at once took up the cry, and the phrase was repeated again and again, with an ever-growing volume of sound, until no other word was being spoken. “We-want-the whip.”

They were all crying together; and, intoxicated by the noise, the unanimity, they might, it seemed, have gone on for hours-almost forever. But at about the twenty-fifth repetition something else happened. Yet another helicopter had arrived.

The door of the helicopter opened, and out stepped, first a fair and ruddy-faced young man, then, in green velveteen shorts, white shirt, and jockey cap, a young woman.

At the sight of the young woman, the Savage started, recoiled, turned pale.

The young woman stood, smiling at him-an uncertain smile. The seconds passed. Her lips moved, she was saying something; but the sound of her voice was covered by the loud refrain of the sightseers.

“We-want-the whip! We-want-the whip!”

The young woman pressed both hands to her left side, and on that beautiful face of hers appeared a strange expression of yearning distress. Her blue eyes seemed to grow larger, brighter; and suddenly two tears rolled down her cheeks. She spoke again; then, with a quick gesture stretched out her arms towards the Savage, stepped forward.

“We-want-the whip! We-want…”

And all of a sudden they had what they wanted.

“Strumpet!” The Savage had rushed at her like a madman. “Fitchew!” Like a madman, he was slashing at her with his whip of small cords.

Terrified, she had turned to flee, had tripped and fallen on the ground. “Henry, Henry!” she shouted. But her companion had bolted out of harm’s way behind the helicopter.

The line broke; there was a stampede towards that magnetic centre of attraction. Pain was a fascinating horror.

“Fry, lechery, fry!” Frenzied, the Savage slashed again.

Hungrily they gathered round, pushing and scrambling.

“Oh, the flesh!” The Savage ground his teeth. This time he hit himself. “Kill it, kill it!”

Drawn by the fascination of the horror of pain and, from within, impelled by that habit of cooperation, that desire for unanimity and atonement, they began to mime the frenzy of his gestures.

“Kill it, kill it, kill it…” The Savage went on shouting.

Then suddenly somebody started singing “Orgy-porgy” and, in a moment, they had all caught up the refrain and, singing, had begun to dance. Orgy-porgy, round and round and round, beating one another in six-eight time. Orgy-porgy…

It was after midnight when the last of the helicopters took its flight. Stupefied by soma, and exhausted by a long-drawn frenzy of sensuality, the Savage lay sleeping on the ground. The sun was already high when he awoke. He lay for a moment, blinking at the light; then suddenly remembered-everything.

“Oh, my God, my God!” He covered his eyes with his hand.

That evening the swarm of helicopters was much larger. The description of last night’s orgy of atonement had been in all the papers.

“Savage!” called the first arrivals, as they got out of their machine. “Mr. Savage!”

There was no answer.

The door of the lighthouse was ajar. They pushed it open and walked inside. Through an archway on the further side of the room they could see the bottom of the staircase that led up to the higher floors. Just under the crown of the arch dangled a pair of feet.

“Mr. Savage!”

Slowly, very slowly, the feet turned towards the right; north, north-east, east, south-east, south, south-south-west; then paused, and, after a few seconds, turned back towards the left. South-south-west, south, south-east, east…