Chapter XIV
The
It was a large room bright with sunshine
and yellow paint, and containing twenty beds, all occupied. Linda was dying in company - in company and
with all the modern conveniences. The
air was continuously alive with gay synthetic melodies. At the foot of every bed, confronting its
moribund occupant, was a television box. Television was left on, a running tap, from
morning till night. Every quarter of an
hour the prevailing perfume of the room was automatically changed. "We try," explained the nurse, who
had taken charge of the Savage at the door, "we try to create a thoroughly
pleasant atmosphere here - something between a first-class hotel and a
feely-palace, if you take my meaning."
"Where is she?" asked the
Savage, ignoring these polite explanations.
The nurse was offended. "You are in a hurry," she
said.
"Is there any hope?" he asked.
"You mean, of her not
dying?" (He nodded.) "No, of course there isn't. When somebody's sent here, there's no ...“ Startled by the expression of distress on his pale face,
she suddenly broke off. "Why,
whatever is the matter?" she asked.
She was not accustomed to this kind of thing in visitors. (Not that there were many visitors anyhow: or
any reason why there should be many visitors.)
"You're not feeling ill, are you?"
He shook his head. "She's my mother," he said in a
scarcely audible voice.
The nurse glanced at him with startled,
horrified eyes; then quickly looked away.
From throat to temple she was all one hot blush.
"Take me to her," said the
Savage, making an effort to speak in an ordinary tone.
Still blushing, she led the way down the
ward. Faces still fresh and unwithered (for senility galloped so hard that it had no
time to age the cheeks - only the heart and brain) turned as they passed. Their progress was followed by the blank,
incurious eyes of secondary infancy. The
Savage shuddered as he looked.
Linda was lying in the last of the long
row of beds, next to the wall. Propped
up on pillows, she was watching the Semi-finals of the South American
Riemann-Surface Tennis Championship, which were being played in silent and
diminished reproduction on the screen of the television box at the foot of the
bed. Hither and thither across their
square of illumined glass the little figures noiselessly darted, like fish in
an aquarium - the silent but agitated inhabitants of another world.
Linda looked on, vaguely and
uncomprehendingly smiling. Her pale,
bloated face wore an expression of imbecile happiness. Every now and then her eyelids closed, and
for a few seconds she seemed to be dozing.
Then with a little start she would wake up again - waking up to the
aquarium antics of the Tennis Champions, to the Super-Vox-Wurlitzeriana
rendering of 'Hug my till you drug me, honey,' to the warm draught of verbena
that came blowing through the ventilator above her head - would take to these
things, or rather to a dream of which these things, transformed and embellished
by the soma in her blood, were the marvellous constituents, and smile
once more her broken and discoloured smile of infantile contentment.
"Well, I must go," said the
nurse. "I've got my batch of
children coming. Besides, there's Number
3." She pointed up the ward. "Might go off any
minute now. Well, make yourself
comfortable." She walked briskly
away.
The Savage sat down beside the bed.
"Linda," he whispered, taking
her hand.
At the sound of her name, she
turned. Her vague eyes brightened with
recognition. She squeezed his hand, she
smiled, her lips moved; then quite suddenly her head
fell forward. She was asleep. He sat watching her - seeking through the
tired flesh, seeking and finding that young bright face which had stooped over
his childhood in Malpais, remembering (and his closed
his eyes) her voice, her movements, all the events of their life together. "Streptocock-Gee
to Banbury-T ...” How beautiful her singing had been! And those childish rhymes, how magically
strange and mysterious!
A,
B, C, vitamin D:
The
fat's in the liver, the cod's in the sea.
He felt the hot tears welling up behind
his eyelids as he recalled the words and Linda's voice as she repeated
them. And then the reading lessons; The tot is in the pot, the cat is on the mat; and the
Elementary Instructions for Beta Workers in the Embryo Store. And long evenings by the fire or, in summer
time, on the roof of the little house, when she told him those stories about
the Other Place, outside the Reservation: that beautiful, beautiful Other
Place, whose memory, as of a heaven, a paradise of goodness and loveliness, he
still kept whole and intact, undefiled by contact with the reality of this real
London, these actual civilized men and women.
A sudden noise of shrill voices made him
open his eyes and, after hastily brushing away the tears, look round. What seemed an interminable stream of
identical eight-year-old male twins was pouring into the room. Twin after twin, twin after twin, they came -
a nightmare. Their faces, their repeated
face - for there was only one between the lot of them
- puggishly stared, all nostrils and pale goggling
eyes. Their uniform was khaki. All their mouths hung open. Squealing and chattering they entered. In a moment, it seemed, the ward was maggoty
with them. They swarmed between the
beds, clambered over, crawled under, peeped into the television boxes, made faces at the patients.
Linda astonished and rather alarmed them. A group stood clustered at the foot of her
bed, staring with the frightened and stupid curiosity of animals suddenly
confronted by the unknown.
"Oh, look, look!" They spoke in low, scared voices. "Whatever is the matter with her? Why is she so fat?"
They had never seen a face like hers
before - had never seen a face that was not youthful and taut-skinned, a body
that had ceased to be slim and upright.
All these moribund sexagenerians had the
appearance of childish girls. At
forty-four, Linda seemed, by contrast, a monster of flaccid and distorted
senility.
"Isn't she awful?" came the
whispered comments. "Look at her
teeth!"
Suddenly from under the bed a pug-faced
twin popped up between John's chair and the wall, and began peering into
Linda's sleeping face.
"I say ..." he began; but his
sentence ended prematurely in a squeal.
The Savage had seized him by the collar, lifted him clear over the chair
and, with a smart box on the ears, sent him howling away.
His yells brought the Head Nurse hurrying
to the rescue.
"What have you been doing to
him?" she demanded fiercely.
"I won't have you striking the children."
"Well, then, keep them away from
this bed." The Savage's voice was
trembling with indignation. "What
are these filthy little brats doing her at all?
It's disgraceful!"
"Disgraceful? But what do you mean? They're being death-conditioned. And I tell you," she warmed him
truculently, "if I have any more of your interference with their
conditioning, I'll send for the porters and have you thrown out."
The Savage rose to his feet and took a
couple of steps towards her. His
movements and the expression on his face were so menacing that the nurse fell
back in terror. With a great effort he
checked himself and, without speaking, turned away and sat down again by the
bed.
Reassured, but with a dignity that was a
trifle shrill and uncertain, "I've warned you," said the nurse,
"so mind." Still, she led the
too inquisitive twins away and made them join in the game of hunt-the-zipper,
which had been organized by one of her colleagues at the other end of the room.
"Run along now and have your cup of
caffeine solution, dear," she said to the other nurse. The exercise of authority restored her
confidence, made her feel better. "Now
children!" she called.
Linda had stirred uneasily, had opened
her eyes for a moment, looked vaguely around, and then once more dropped off to
sleep. Sitting beside her, the Savage
tried hard to recapture his mood of a few minutes before. "A, B, C, vitamin D," he repeated
to himself, as though the words were a spell that would restore the dead past
to life. But the spell was
ineffective. Obstinately the beautiful
memories refused to rise; there was only a hateful resurrection of jealousies
and uglinessess and miseries. Popé with the blood
trickling down from his cut shoulder; and Linda hideously asleep, and the flies
buzzing round the spilt mescal on the floor beside the bed; and the boys
calling those names as she passed ... Ah, no, no! He shut his eyes, he
shook his head in strenuous denial of these memories. "A, B, C, vitamin D ...” He tried to
think of those times when he sat on her knees and she put her arms about him
and sang, over and over again, rocking him, rocking him to sleep. "A, B, C, vitamin D, vitamin D ..."
The Super-Vox Wurlitzeriana had risen to a sobbing crescendo; and
suddenly the verbena gave place, in the scent-circulating system, to an intense patchouli.
Linda stirred, woke up, stared for a few seconds bewilderedly at the
Semi-finalists, then,
lifting her face, sniffed once or twice at the newly perfumed air and suddenly
smiled - a smile of childish ecstasy.
"Popé!"
she murmured, and closed her eyes.
"Oh, I do so like it, I do ...” She sighed and let herself sink
back into the pillows.
"But, Linda!" The Savage spoke imploringly. "Don't you know me?" He had tried so hard, had done his very best;
why wouldn't she allow him to forget? He
squeezed her limp hand almost with violence, as though he would force her to
come back from this dream of ignoble pleasures, from these base and hateful
memories - back into the present, back into reality' the appalling present, the
awful reality - but sublime, but significant, but desperately important
precisely because of the imminence of that which made them so fearful. "Don't you know me, Linda?"
He felt the faint answering pressure of
her hand. The tears started into his
eyes. He bent over her and kissed her.
Her lips moved. "Popé!" she whispered again,
and it was as though he had had a pailful of ordure
thrown into his face.
Anger suddenly boiled up in him. Balked for the second time, the passion of
his grief had found another outlet, was transformed into a passion of agonized
rage.
"But I'm John!" he
shouted. "I'm John!" And in his furious misery he actually caught
her by the shoulder and shook her.
Linda's eyes fluttered open; she saw him,
knew him - "John!" - but situated the real face, the real and violent
hands, in an imaginary world - among the inward and private equivalents of
patchouli and the Super-Wurlitzer, among the transfigured memories and the
strangely transposed sensations that constituted the universe of her
dream. She knew him for John, her son,
but fancied him an intruder into that paradisal Malpais where she had been spending her soma-holiday
with Popé. He
was angry because she liked Popé, he was shaking her because Popé
was there in the bed - as though there was something wrong, as though all
civilized people didn't do the same?
"Everyone belongs to every ...” Her voice suddenly died into an
almost inaudible breathless croaking: her mouth fell open: she made a desperate
effort to fill her lungs with air. But
it was as though she had forgotten how to breathe. She tried to cry out - but no sound came; only
the terror of her staring eyes revealed what she was suffering. Her hands went to her throat, then clawed at
the air - the air she could no longer breathe, the air that, for her, had
ceased to exist.
The Savage was on his feet, bent over
her. "What is it, Linda? What is it?" His voice was imploring; it was as though he
were begging to be reassured.
The look she gave him was charged with an
unspeakable terror - with terror and, it seemed to him, reproach. She tired to raise herself in bed, but fell
back on to the pillows. Her face was
horribly distorted, her lips blue.
The Savage turned and ran up the ward.
"Quick, quick!" he
shouted. "Quick!"
Standing in the centre of a ring of
zipper-hunting twins, the Head Nurse looked round. The first moment's astonishment gave place
almost instantly to disapproval.
"Don't shout! Think of the
little ones," she said, frowning. "You
might decondition ... But what are you
doing?" He had broken through the
ring. "Be careful!" A child was yelling.
"Quick,
quick!" He caught her by the
sleeve, dragger her after him.
"Quick! Something's
happened. I've killed her."
By the time they were back at the end of
the ward Linda was dead.
The Savage stood for a moment in frozen
silence, then fell on his knees beside the bed and, covering his face with his
hands, sobbed uncontrollably.
The nurse stood irresolute, looking now
at the kneeling figure by the bed (the scandalous exhibition!) and now (poor
children!) at the twins who had stopped their hunting of the zipper and were
staring from the other end of the ward, staring with all their eyes and
nostrils at the shocking scene that was being enacted round Bed 20. Should she speak to him? try
to bring him back to a sense of decency? remind him of
where he was? of what fatal mischief he might do to
these poor innocents? Undoing all their
wholesome death-conditioning with this disgusting outcry - as though death were
something terrible, as though anyone mattered as much as all that! It might give them the most disastrous ideas
about the subject, might upset them into reacting in the entirely wrong way,
the utterly anti-social way.
She stepped forward,
she touched him on the shoulder.
"Can't you behave?" she said in a low, angry voice. But, looking round, she saw that half a dozen
twins were already on their feet and advancing down the ward. The circle was disintegrating. In another moment ... No, the risk was too
great; the whole group might be put back six or seven months in its
conditioning. She hurried back towards
her menaced charges.
"Now, who wants a chocolate
éclair?" she asked in a loud, cheerful tone.
"Me!" yelled the entire Bokanovsky Group in chorus.
Bed 20 was completely forgotten.
"Oh, God, God, God ..." the
Savage kept repeating to himself. In the
chaos of grief and remorse that filled his mind it was the one articulate
word. "God!" He whispered it aloud. "God ..."
"Whatever is he saying?"
said a voice, very near, distinct and shrill through the warblings
of the Super-Wurlitzer.
The Savage violently started and,
uncovering his face, looked round. Five
khaki twins, each with the stump of a long éclair in his right hand, and their
identical faces variously smeared with liquid chocolate, were standing in a
row, puggily goggling at him.
They met his eyes and simultaneously
grinned. One of them pointed with his
éclair butt.
"Is she dead?" he asked.
The Savage stared at him for a moment in
silence. Then, in silence he rose to his
feet, in silence slowly walked towards the door.
"Is she dead?" repeated the
inquisitive twin, trotting at his side.
The Savage looked down at him and still
without speaking pushed him away. The
twin fell on the floor and at once began to howl. The Savage did not even look round.