Chapter Four

1

The lift was crowded with men from the Alpha Changing Rooms, and Lenina was greeted by many friendly nods and smiles. She was a popular girl and, at one time or another, had spent a night with almost all of them.

In the corner, she saw the small thin body and the melancholy face of Bernard Marx.

“Bernard!” she stepped up to him. “I was looking for you. I wanted to talk to you about our New Mexico plan.” Out of the corner of her eye she could see Benito Hoover gaping with astonishment. It annoyed her. “I’d love to come with you for a week in July,” she went on. “That is, if you still want to have me.”

Bernard’s pale face flushed.

“Shouldn’t we talk about it somewhere else?” he stammered. “With all these people about…”

Lenina laughed. “How funny you are! You’ll give me at least a week’s warning, won’t you?”

Before Bernard could answer, the lift came to a standstill. They walked out to the roof.

It was warm and bright. The summer afternoon was drowsy with the hum of passing helicopters. Bernard Marx drew a deep breath. He looked up into the sky and round the blue horizon and finally down into Lenina’s face.

She smiled at him. “I must fly, Bernard. Henry gets cross if I keep him waiting. Let me know in good time about the date.” And waving her hand she ran away towards the hangars.

Henry Foster was already seated in the cockpit of his machine, waiting, when Lenina arrived.

“Four minutes late,” was all his comment, as she climbed in beside him. He started the engines. The machine shot vertically into the air. The speedometer showed that they were rising at the best part of two kilometres a minute. London diminished beneath them. The huge table-topped buildings were no more, in a few seconds, than a bed of geometrical mushrooms sprouting from the green of park and garden. In the midst of them, a taller fungus, the Charing-T Tower, lifted towards the sky.

Lenina looked down through the window in the floor between her feet. They were flying over the six kilometre zone of park-land that separated Central London from its first ring of suburbs. Centrifugal Bumble-puppy towers gleamed between the trees. Below, a Delta gymnastic display and community sing was in progress.

“What a hideous colour khaki is,” remarked Lenina, voicing the hypnopaedic prejudices of her caste. “I’m glad I’m not a Delta or a Gamma.”

Ten minutes later they were at Stoke Poges and had started their first round of Obstacle Golf.

2

Bernard has tened across the roof.

Lenina was making him suffer. He remembered those weeks of timid indecision, during which he had no courage to ask her. Dared he face the risk of being humiliated? But if she were to say yes! Well, now she had said it and he was still wretched-wretched that she went to join Henry Foster, that she found him funny for not wanting to talk of their most private affairs in public. Wretched because she had behaved as any healthy and virtuous English girl would have.

He opened the door of his lock-up and called to a lounging couple of Delta-Minus attendants to come and push his machine out on to the roof. The hangars were staffed by a single Bokanovsky Group, and the men were twins, identically small, black and hideous. For whatever the cause Bernard’s physique was hardly better than that of the average Gamma. He stood eight centimetres short of the standard Alpha height and was too slender. Contact with members of the lower castes always reminded him of this.

Slackly, it seemed to him, and with reluctance, the twin attendants wheeled his plane out on the roof.

“Hurry up!” said Bernard irritably. One of them glanced at him. “Hurry up!” he shouted more loudly, and there was an ugly rasp in his voice.

He climbed into the plane and, a minute later, was flying southwards, towards the river.

The various Bureau of Propaganda and the College of Emotional Engineering were housed in a single sixty-story building in Fleet Street. In the basement and on the low floors were the presses and offices of the three great London newspapers – 777e Hourly Radio, an upper-caste sheet, the pale green Gamma Gazette, and, on khaki paper and in words exclusively of one syllable, The Delta Mirror. Then came the Bureau of Propaganda by Television, by Feeling Picture, and by Synthetic Voice and Music respectively-twenty-two floors of them. Above were the search laboratories and the Sound-Track Writers and Synthetic Composers rooms. The top eighteen floors were occupied the College of Emotional Engineering.

Bernard landed on the roof of Propaganda House and stepped out.

“Ring down to Mr. Helmholtz Watson,” he ordered the Gamma-Plus porter, “and tell him that Mr. Bernard Marx is waiting for him on the roof.”

He sat down and lit a cigarette.

Helmholtz Watson was writing when the message came down.

“Tell him I’m coming at once,” he said and hung up the receiver. Then he got up and walked briskly to the door.

He was a powerfully built man, broad-shouldered, massive, and yet quick in his movements. His hair was dark and curly. He was handsome and looked like an Alpha Plus. By profession he was a lecturer at the College of Emotional Engineering (Department of Writing) and a working Emotional Engineer. He wrote regularly for The Hourly Radio, composed feely scenarios, and had the knack for slogans and hypnopaedic rhymes.

“Able,” was the verdict of his superiors. “Perhaps, a little too able.”

Yes, a little too able; they were right. A mental excess had produced in Helmholtz Watson effects very similar to those in Bernard Marx. It had isolated Bernard from his fellow men, and the sense of this became in turn a cause of wider separation. Helmholtz Watson had also become aware of his difference from the people who surrounded him. He had realized quite suddenly that sport, women, communal activities were only, so far as he was concerned, second bests. Really, and at the bottom, he was interested in something else. But in what? In what?

Three charming girls from the Bureau of Propaganda by Synthetic Voice walked up to him as he stepped out of the lift.

“Oh, Helmholtz, darling, do come and have a picnic supper with us on Exmoor.”

He shook his head, he pushed his way through them. “No, no. I’m busy.”

It was not till he had actually climbed into Bernard’s plane and slammed the door that they gave up pursuit.

“These women!” he said, as the machine rose into the air. “These women!” And he shook his head, he frowned. “Too awful,” Bernard hypocritically agreed, wishing that he could have as many girls as Helmholtz did, and with as little trouble. He was seized with a sudden urgent need to boast. “I’m taking Lenina Crowne to New Mexico with me,” he said in a tone as casual as he could make it.

“Are you?” said Helmholtz, with a total absence of interest. Then after a little pause, “This last week or two I’ve been cutting all my committees and all my girls. It’s been worth it, I think.”

The rest of the short flight was accomplished in silence. When they had arrived and were comfortably stretched out on the pneumatic sofas in Bernard’s room, Helmholtz began again.

Speaking very slowly, “Did you ever feel,” he asked, “as though you had something inside you that was only waiting for you to give it a chance to come out? Some sort of extra power that you aren’t using?” He looked at Bernard questioningly.

“You mean all the emotions one might be feeling if things were different?”

Helmholtz shook his head. “Not quite. I’m thinking of a queer feeling I sometimes get, a feeling that I’ve got something important to say and the power to say it-only I don’t know what it is. If there was some different way of writing… Or else something else to write about… You see, I’m pretty good at inventing phrases. But that doesn’t seem enough. It’s not enough for the phrases to be good; what you make with them ought to be good too.”

“But your things are good, Helmholtz.”

“Oh, as far as they go.” Helmholtz shrugged his shoulders. “But they go such a little way. They aren’t important enough, somehow. I feel I could do something much more important. But what? What is there more important to say? Words can be like X-rays, if you use them properly-they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced. That’s one of the things I try to teach my students-how to write piercingly. But what on earth’s the good of being pierced by an article about a Community Sing, or the latest improvement in scent organs?”

“Hush!” said Bernard suddenly, and lifted a warning finger; they listened. “I believe there’s somebody at the door,” he whispered.

Helmholtz got up, tiptoed across the room, and with a sharp quick movement flung the door wide open. There was, of course, nobody there.

“I’m sorry,” said Bernard, feeling and looking uncomfortably foolish. “I suppose I’ve got things on my nerves a bit. When people are suspicious with you, you start being suspicious with them.”

He passed his hand across his eyes and sighed. “If you knew what I’d had to put up with recently,” he said almost tearfully. “If you only knew!”

Helmholtz Watson listened with a certain sense of discomfort. “Poor little Bernard!” he said to himself. But at the same time he felt rather ashamed for his friend. He wished Bernard would show a little more pride.