Chapter X
The
hands of all the four thousand electric clocks in all the Bloomsbury Centre's
four thousand rooms marked twenty-seven minutes past two. "This hive of industry," as the
Director was fond of calling it, was in the full buzz of work. Everyone was busy, everything in ordered
motion. Under the microscopes, their
long tails furiously lashing, spermatozoa were burrowing head first into eggs;
and, fertilized, the eggs were expanding, dividing, or if bokanovskified,
budding and breaking up into whole populations of separate embryos. From the Social Predestination Room the
escalators went rumbling down into the basement, and there, in the crimson
darkness, stewingly warm on their cushion of
peritoneum and gorged with blood-surrogate and hormones, the foetuses grew and
grew or, poisoned, languished into a stunted Epsilonhood. With a faint hum and rattle the moving racks
crawled imperceptibly through the weeks and the recapitulated aeons to where,
in the Decanting Room, the newly-unbottled babes
uttered their first yell of horror and amazement.
The dynamos purred in the sub-basement,
the lifts rushed up and down. On all the
eleven floors of Nurseries it was feeding time.
From eighteen hundred bottles eighteen hundred carefully labelled
infants were simultaneously sucking down their pint of pasteurized external secretion.
Above them, in ten successive layers of
dormitory, the little boys and girls who were still young enough to need an
afternoon sleep were as busy as everyone else, though they did not know it,
listening unconsciously to hypnopaedic lessons in hygiene
and sociability, in class-consciousness and the toddler's love-life. Above these again were the playrooms where,
the weather having turned to rain, nine hundred older children were amusing themselves with bricks and clay modelling,
hunt-the-slipper, and erotic play.
Buzz, buzz! the
hive was humming busily, joyfully.
Blithe was the singing of the young girls over their test-tubes, the Predestinators whistled as they worked, and in the
Decanting Room what glorious jokes were cracked above the empty bottles! But the Director's face, as he entered the
Fertilizing Room with Henry Foster, was grave, wooden with severity.
"A public example," he was
saying. "In this
room, because it contains more high-caste workers than any other in the Centre. I have told him to meet me here at half-past
two."
"He does his work very well,"
put in Henry, with hypocritical generosity.
"I know. But that's all the more reason for
severity. His intellectual eminence
carries with it corresponding moral responsibilities. The greater a man's
talents, the greater his power to lead astray. It is better than one should suffer than that
many should be corrupted. Consider the
matter dispassionately, Mr Foster, and you will see that no offence is so heinous as unorthodoxy of behaviour. Murder kills only the individual -and, after
all, what is an individual?" With a
sweeping gesture he indicated the rows of microscopes, the test-tubes, the
incubators. "We can make a new one
with the greatest ease - as many as we like.
Unorthodoxy threatens more than the life of a mere individual; it
strikes at Society itself. Yes, at
Society itself," he repeated.
"Ah, but here he comes."
Bernard had entered the room and was
advancing between the rows of fertilizers towards them. A veneer of jaunty self-confidence thinly
concealed his nervousness. The voice in
which he said "Good morning, Director," was absurdly too loud; that
in which, correcting his mistake, he said, "You asked me to come and speak
to you here," ridiculously soft, a squeak.
"Yes, Mr Marx," said the
Director portentously. "I did ask
you to come to me here. You returned
from your holiday last night, I understand."
"Yes," Bernard answered.
"Yes-s," repeated the Director,
lingering, a serpent, on the 's'. Then, suddenly raising his voice,
"Ladies and gentlemen," he trumpeted, "ladies and
gentlemen."
The singing of the girls over their
test-tubes, the preoccupied whistling of the Microscopists,
suddenly ceased. There was a profound
silence; everyone looked round.
"Ladies and gentlemen," the
Director repeated once more, "excuse me for thus interrupting your
labours. A painful duty constrains
me. The security and stability of
Society are in danger. Yes, in danger,
ladies and gentlemen. This man," he
pointed accusingly at Bernard, "this man who stands before you here, this
Alpha-Plus to whom so much has been given, and from whom, in consequence, so
much must be expected, this colleague of yours - or should I anticipate and say
this ex-colleague - has grossly betrayed the trust imposed in him. By his heretical views on sport and soma,
by the scandalous unorthodoxy of his sex-life, by his refusal to obey the
teachings of Our Ford and behave out of office hours 'like a babe in a
bottle'" (here the Director made the sign of the T), "he has proved
himself an enemy of Society, a subverter, ladies and
gentlemen, of all Order and Stability, a conspirator against Civilization
itself. For this reason I propose to
dismiss him, to dismiss him with ignominy from the post he has held in this
Centre; I propose forthwith to apply for his transference to a Sub-Centre of
the lowest order and, that his punishment may serve the best interest of
Society, as far as possible removed from an important Centre of population. In
"Yes, I can," Bernard answered
in a very loud voice.
Somewhat taken aback, but still
majestically, "Then show it," said the Director.
"Certainly. But it's in the passage. One moment." Bernard hurried to the door and threw it
open. "Come in," he commanded,
and the reason came in and showed itself.
There was a gasp, a murmur of
astonishment and horror; a young girl screamed; standing on a chair to get a
better view, someone upset two test-tubes of spermatozoa. Bloated, sagging, and among those firm youthful
bodies, those undistorted faces, a strange and terrifying monster of
middle-agedness, Linda advanced into the room, coquettishly smiling her broken
and discoloured smile, and rolling as she walked, with what was meant to be a
voluptuous undulation, her enormous haunches.
Bernard walked beside her.
"There he is," he said,
pointing at the Director.
"Did you think I didn't recognize
him?" Linda asked indignantly; then, turning to the Director, "Of
course I knew you; Tomakin, I should have known you anywhere,
among a thousand. But perhaps you've
forgotten me. Don't you remember, Tomakin? Your Linda." She
stood looking at him, her head on one side, still smiling, but with a smile
that became progressively, in face of the Director's expression of petrified
disgust, less and less self-confident, that wavered and finally went out. "Don't you remember, Tomakin?"
she repeated in a voice that trembled.
Her eyes were anxious, agonized.
The blotched and sagging face twitched grotesquely into the grimace of
extreme grief. "Tomakin!"
She held out her arms. Someone
began to titter.
"What's the meaning," began the
Director, "of this monstrous ..."
"Tomakin!"
She ran forward, her blanket trailing behind her,
threw her arms round his neck, hid her face on his chest.
A howl of laughter went up irrepressibly.
“... this monstrous practical joke,"
the Director shouted.
Red in the face, he tried to disengage
himself from her embrace. Desperately
she clung. "But I'm Linda, I'm
Linda." The laughter drowned her
voice. "You made me have a
baby," she screamed above the uproar.
There was a sudden and appalling hush; eyes floated uncomfortably, not
knowing where to look. The Director went
suddenly pale, stopped struggling and stood, his hands
on her wrists, staring down at her, horrified.
"Yes, a baby - and I was its mother." She flung the obscenity like a challenge into
the outraged silence; then, suddenly breaking away from him, ashamed, ashamed,
covered her face with her hands, sobbing.
"It wasn't my fault, Tomakin. Because I always did my drill, didn't I? Didn't I?
Always ... I don't know how ... If you knew how awful, Tomakin ... But he was a comfort to me, all the
same." Turning towards the door,
"John!" she called.
"John!"
He came in at once, paused for a moment
just inside the door, looked round, then soft on his moccasined feet strode quickly across the room, fell on his
knees in front of the Director, and said in a clear voice: "My
father!"
The word (for 'father' was not so much
obscene as - with its connotation of something at one remove from the
loathsomeness and moral-obliquity of child-bearing - merely gross, a
scatological rather than a pornographic impropriety), the comically smutty word
relieved what had become a quite intolerable tension. Laughter broke out, enormous, almost
hysterical, peal after peal, as though it would never stop. My father - and it was the Director! My father! Oh Ford, of Ford! That was really too good. The whooping and the roaring renewed
themselves, faces seemed on the point of disintegration, tears were
streaming. Six more test-tubes of
spermatozoa were upset. My father!
Pale, wild-eyes, the Director glared
about him in an agony of bewildered humiliation.
My father! The laughter, which had shown signs of dying
away, broke out again more loudly than ever.
He put his hands over his ears and rushed out of the room.