Chapter XV
The
menial staff for the
From the lift the Savage stepped out into
the midst of them. But his mind was
elsewhere - with death, with his grief, and his remorse; mechanically, without
consciousness of what he was doing, he began to shoulder his way through the
crowd.
"Who are you pushing? Where do you think you're going?"
High, low, from a multitude of separate
throats, only two voices squeaked or growled.
Repeated indefinitely, as though by a train of mirrors, two faces, one a
hairless and freckled moon haloed in orange, the other a thin, beaked
bird-mask, stubbly with two days' beard, turned angrily towards him. Their words and, in his ribs, the sharp
nudging of elbows, broke through his unawareness. He woke once more to external reality, looked
round him, knew what he saw - knew it, with a sinking sense of horror and
disgust, for the recurrent delirium of his days and nights, the nightmare of
swarming indistinguishable sameness.
Twins, twins ... Like maggots they had swarmed defilingly
over the mystery of Linda's death.
Maggots again, but larger, full grown, they now crawled across his grief
and his repentance. He halted and, with
bewildered and horrified eyes, stared round him at the khaki mob, in the midst
of which, overtopping it by a full head, he stood. "How many goodly creatures are there here!" The
singing words mocked him derisively.
"How beauteous mankind is! O
brave new world ..."
"Soma distribution!"
shouted a loud voice. "In good
order please. Hurry up there."
A door had been opened, a table and chair
carried into the vestibule. The voice
was that of a jaunty young Alpha, who had entered carrying a black iron
cash-box. A murmur of satisfaction went
up from the expectant twins. They forgot
all about the Savage. Their attention
was now focused upon the black cash-box, which the young man had placed on the
table, and was now in process of unlocking.
The lid was lifted.
"Oo-oh!"
said all the hundred and sixty-two simultaneously, as though they were looking
at fireworks.
The young man took out a handful of tiny
pill-boxes. "Now," he said
peremptorily, "step forward, please.
One at a time, and no shoving."
One at a time, with no shoving, the twins
stepped forward. First two males, then a
female, then another male, then three females, then ..."
The Savage stood looking on. "O brave new world, O brave new
world ..." In his mind the singing words seemed
to change their tone. They had mocked
him through his misery and remorse, mocking him with how hideous a note of
comical derision! Fiendishly laughing,
they had insisted on the low squalor, the nauseous ugliness of the
nightmare. Now, suddenly, they trumpeted
a call to arms. "O brave new
world!" Miranda was proclaiming the
possibility of loveliness, the possibility of transforming even the nightmare
into something fine and noble. "O
brave new world!" It was a
challenge, a command.
"No shoving there, now!"
shouted the Deputy Sub-Bursar in a fury.
He slammed down the lid of his cash-box.
"I shall stop the distribution unless I have good behaviour."
The Deltas muttered, jostled one another
a little, and then were still. The
threat had been effective. Deprivation
of soma - appalling thought!
"That's better," said the young
man, and re-opened his cash-box.
Linda had been a slave, Linda had died;
others should live in freedom, and the world be made beautiful. A reparation, a
duty. And suddenly it was luminously
clear to the Savage what he must do; it was as though a shutter had been
opened, a curtain drawn back.
"Now," said the Deputy
Sub-Bursar.
Another khaki female stepped forward.
"Stop!" called the Savage in a
loud and ringing voice. "Stop!"
He pushed his way to the table; the
Deltas stared at him with astonishment.
"Ford!" said the Deputy
Sub-Bursar below his breath. "It's
the Savage." He felt scared.
"Listen, I beg you," cried the
Savage earnestly. "Lend me your
ears ...” He had never spoken in public before, and found it very difficult to
express what he wanted to say.
"Don't take that horrible stuff.
It's poison, it's poison."
"I say, Mr Savage," said the
Deputy Sub-Bursar, smiling propitiatingly. "Would you mind letting me ..."
"Poison to soul as well as
body."
"Yes, but let me get on with my
distribution, won't you? There's a good
fellow." With the cautious
tenderness of one who strokes a notoriously vicious animal, he patted the
Savage's arm. "Just let me
..."
"Never!" cried the Savage.
"But look here, old man ..."
"Throw it all away, that horrible
poison."
The words 'Throw it all away' pierced
through the enfolding layers of incomprehension to the quick of the Deltas'
consciousness. An angry murmur went up
from the crowd.
"I come to bring you freedom,"
said the Savage, turning back towards the twins. "I come ..."
The Deputy Sub-Bursar heard no more; he
had slipped out of the vestibule and was looking up a number in the telephone
book.
"Not in his own rooms," Bernard
summed up. "Not in mine, not in
yours. Not at the Aphroditaeum;
not at the Centre or the College. Where
can he have got to?"
Helmholtz
shrugged his shoulders. They had come
back from their work expected to find the Savage waiting for them at one or
other of their usual meeting-places, and there was no sign of the fellow. Which was annoying, as they
had meant to nip across to
"We'll give him five more
minutes," said Helmholtz. "If he doesn't turn up by then, we'll
..."
The ringing of the telephone bell
interrupted him. He picked up the
receiver. "Hello. Speaking." Then, after a long interval of listening,
"Ford in Flivver!" he swore.
"I'll come at once."
"What is it?" Bernard asked.
"A fellow I know at the
Together they hurried along the corridor
to the lifts.
"But do you like being slaves?"
the Savage was saying as they entered the Hospital. His face was flushed, his eyes bright with
ardour and indignation. "Do you
like being babies? Yes, babies. Mewling and puking," he added,
exasperated by their bestial stupidity into throwing insults at those he had
come to save. The insults bounced off
their carapace of thick stupidity; they stared at him with a blank expression
of dull and sullen resentment in their eyes.
"Yes, puking!" he fairly shouted. Grief and remorse, compassion and duty - all were forgotten now and, as it were,
absorbed into an intense overpowering hatred of these less than human
monsters. "Don't you want to be
free and men? Don't you even understand
what manhood and freedom are?" Rage
was making him fluent; the words came easily, in a rush. "Don't you?" he repeated, but got
no answer to his question. "Very
well, then," he went on grimly.
"I'll teach you; I'll make you be free whether you want to
or not." And pushing open a window
that looked on to the inner court of the Hospital, he began to throw the little
pill-boxes of soma tablets in handfuls out into the area.
For a moment the khaki mob was silent,
petrified, at the spectacle of this wanton sacrilege, with amazement and
horror.
"He's mad," whispered Bernard,
staring with wide open eyes.
"They'll kill him. They'll
...” A great shout suddenly went up from the mob; a wave of movement drove it
menacingly towards the Savage.
"Ford help him!" said Bernard, and
averted his eyes.
"Ford helps those who help
themselves." And with a laugh,
actually a laugh of exultation, Helmholtz Watson
pushed his way through the crowd.
"Free, free!" the Savage
shouted, and with one hand continued to throw the soma into the area
while, with the other, he punched the indistinguishable faces of his
assailants. "Free!" And suddenly there was Helmholtz
at his side - "Good old Helmholtz!" - also punching - "Men at last!" - and in the interval also throwing the poison out by handfuls
through the open window. "Yes, men! men!" and
there was no more poison left. He picked
up the cash-box and showed them its black emptiness. "You're free."
Howling, the Deltas charged with a
redoubled fury.
Hesitant on the fringes of the battle,
"They're done for," said Bernard and, urged by a sudden impulse, ran
forward to help them; then thought better of it and halted; then, ashamed,
stepped forward again; then again thought better of it, and was standing in an
agony of humiliated indecision - thinking that they might be killed if
he didn't help them, and that he might be killed if he did - when (Ford
be praised!), goggle-eyed and swine-snouted in their
gas-masks, in ran the police.
Bernard dashed to meet them. He waved his arms; and it was action, he was
doing something. He shouted
"Help!" several times, more and more loudly so as to give himself the
illusion of helping. "Help!
Help! HELP!"
The policemen pushed him out of the way
and got on with their work. Three men
with spraying machines buckled to their shoulders pumped thick clouds of soma
vapour into the air. Two more were busy
round the portable Synthetic Music Box.
Carrying water pistols charged with a powerful anesthetic,
four others had pushed their way into the crowd and were methodically laying
out, squirt by squirt, the more ferocious of the fighters.
"Quick, quick!" yelled
Bernard. "They'll be killed if you
don't hurry. They'll ... Oh!" Annoyed by his chatter, one of the policemen
had given him a shot from his water pistol.
Bernard stood for a second or two wambling
unsteadily on legs that seemed to have lost their bones, their tendons, their muscles, to have become mere sticks of jelly, and at
last not even jelly - water: he tumbled in a heap on the floor.
Suddenly, from out of the Synthetic Music
Box a Voice began to speak. The Voice of
Reason, the Voice of Good Feeling. The
soundtrack roll was unwinding itself in Synthetic Anti-Riot Speech Number Two
(Medium Strength). Straight from the
depths of a non-existent heart, "My friends, my friends!" said the
Voice so pathetically, with a note of such infinitely tender reproach that,
behind their gas-masks, even the policemen's eyes were momentarily dimmed with
tears, "what is the meaning of this?
Why aren't you all being happy and good together? Happy and good," the Voice repeated. "At peace,
peace." It trembled, sank
into a whisper and momentarily expired.
"Oh, I do want you to be happy," it began, with a yearning
earnestness. "I do so want you to
be good! Please, please be good and
..."
Two minutes later the Voice and the soma
vapour had produced their effect. In
tears, the Deltas were kissing and hugging one another - half a dozen twins at
a time in a comprehensive embrace. Even Helmholtz and the Savage were almost crying. A fresh supply of pill-boxes was brought in
from the Bursary; a new distribution was hastily made and, to the sound of the
Voice's richly affectionate, baritone valedictions, the twins dispersed,
blubbering as though their hears would break.
"Goodbye, my dearest, dearest friends, Ford keep you! Goodbye, my dearest, dearest friends, Ford
keep you. Goodbye, my dearest, dearest
..."
When the last of the Deltas had gone, the
policeman switched off the current. The
angelic Voice fell silent.
"Will you come quietly?" asked
the Sergeant, "or must we anaesthetize?" He pointed his water pistol menacingly.
"Oh, we'll come quietly," the
Savage answered, dabbing alternately a cut lip, a scratched neck, and a bitten
left hand.
Still keeping his handkerchief to his
bleeding nose, Helmholtz nodded in confirmation.
Awake and having recovered the use of his
legs, Bernard had chosen this moment to move as inconspicuously as he could
towards the door.
"Hi, you there," called the
Sergeant, and a swine-masked policeman hurried across the room and laid a hand
on the young man's shoulder.
Bernard turned with an expression of
indignant innocence. Escaping? He hadn't dreamed of such a thing. "Though what on earth you want me
for," he said to the Sergeant, "I really can't imagine."
"You're a friend of the prisoners, aren't
you?"
"Well ..." said Bernard, and
hesitated. No, he really couldn't deny
it. "Why shouldn't I be?" he
asked.
"Come on, then," said the
Sergeant, and led the way towards the door and the waiting police car.