Bernard blushed and looked away. “I meant, alone for talking,” he mumbled.
“Talking? But what about?”
In the end she persuaded him, much against his will, to fly over to Amsterdam to see the Women’s Heavyweight Wrestling Championship.
“In a crowd,” he grumbled. “As usual.” He remained gloomy the whole afternoon; wouldn’t talk to Lenina’s friends and refused to take the half-gramme raspberry soma sundae. “I’d rather be myself,” he said. “Myself and nasty. Not somebody else, however jolly.”
Lenina shrugged her shoulders. “A gramme is always better than a damn,” she concluded with dignity, and drank the sundae herself.
On their way back across the Channel, Bernard insisted on stopping his propeller and hovering within a hundred feet of the waves. The weather had taken a change for the worse; a south-westerly wind had sprung up, the sky was cloudy.
“Look,” he commanded.
“But it’s horrible,” said Lenina, shrinking back from the window. She was appalled by the rushing emptiness of the night, by the black water beneath them, by the pale face of the moon. “Let’s turn on the radio!”
“I want to look at the sea in peace,” he said. “One can’t even look with that beastly noise going on.”
“But I don’t want to look.”
“But I do,” he insisted. “It makes me feel as though I am… more. More on my own, not a part of something else.”
Lenina was crying. “It’s horrible, it’s horrible,” she kept repeating. “And how can you talk like that about not wanting to be a part of the social body? After all, everyone works for everyone else. We can’t do without anyone. Even Epsilons…”
“Yes, I know,” said Bernard. “‘Even Epsilons are useful’! So am I. And I damned well wish I weren’t!”
“Bernard, you’re saying the most awful things.”
“Don’t you wish you were free, Lenina?”
“I don’t know what you mean. I am free. Free to have the most wonderful time. Everybody’s happy nowadays.”
He laughed, “Yes, ‘Everybody’s happy nowadays.’ Wouldn’t you like to be free to be happy in some other way, Lenina? In your own way; not in everybody else’s way.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” she repeated. “Oh, do let’s go back, Bernard. I do so hate it here.”
“Don’t you like being with me?”
“I do, Bernard. It’s this horrible place.”
“I thought we’d be more… more together here. More together than in that crowd, or even in my rooms. Don’t you understand that?”
“I don’t understand anything,” she said with decision. “Nothing. Least of all, why you don’t take soma when you have these dreadful ideas of yours.”
He looked at her in silence, his face unresponsive and very grave. After a few seconds Lenina’s eyes flinched away; she uttered a nervous little laugh, tried to think of something to say and couldn’t. The silence prolonged itself.
When Bernard spoke at last, it was in a small tired voice. “All right then,” he said, “we’ll go back.” And stepping hard on the accelerator, he sent the machine up into the sky. They flew in silence for a minute or two. Then, suddenly, Bernard began to laugh.
“Feeling better?” she asked.
For answer, he lifted one hand from the controls and, slipping his arm around her, began to fondle her breasts.
“Thank Ford,” she said to herself, “he’s all right again.”
Half an hour later they were back in his rooms. Bernard swallowed four tablets of soma, turned on the radio and television and began to undress.
“Well,” Lenina enquired, with when they met next afternoon on the roof, “did you think it was fun yesterday?”
Bernard nodded. They climbed into the plane. A little jolt, and they were off.
“Everyone says I’m awfully plump,” said Lenina, patting her own legs.
“Awfully.” But there was an expression of pain in Bernard’s eyes. “Like meat,” he was thinking.
She looked up with a certain anxiety. “But you don’t think I’m too plump, do you?”
He shook his head. Like so much meat.
“You think I’m all right.” Another nod. “In every way?”
“Perfect,” he said aloud. And inwardly. “She thinks of herself that way. She doesn’t mind being meat.”
“All the same,” he went on, after a little pause, “I still rather wish it had all ended differently. I didn’t want it to end with our going to bed. Not at once, not the first day.”
“But then what…?”
He began to talk a lot of incomprehensible and dangerous nonsense. Lenina did her best to stop the ears of her mind; but every now and then a phrase would insist on becoming audible.
“I want to know what passion is,” she heard him saying. “I want to feel something strongly.”
“When the individual feels, the community reels,” Lenina pronounced.
“Well, why shouldn’t it reel a bit?”
“Bernard!”
“Adults intellectually and during working hours,” he went on. “Infants where feeling and desire are concerned. It might be possible to be an adult all the time.”
“I don’t understand.” Lenina’s tone was firm.
“I know you don’t. And that’s why we went to bed together yesterday-like infants-instead of being adults and waiting.”
“But it was fun,” Lenina insisted. “Wasn’t it?”
“Oh, the greatest fun,” he answered, but in a voice so mournful, that Lenina felt all her triumph suddenly evaporate.
“I told you so,” was all that Fanny said. “It’s the alcohol they put in his surrogate.”
“All the same[25],” Lenina insisted. “I do like him. But I wish he weren’t so odd.”
Stopping for a moment outside the door of the Director’s room, Bernard drew a deep breath. He knocked and entered.
“A permit for you to sign, Director,” he said as airily as possible, and laid the paper on the writing-table.
The Director glanced at him sourly. But the stamp of the World Controller’s Office was at the head of the paper and the signature of Mustapha Mond, bold and black, across the bottom. Everything was perfectly in order. The director had no choice. He signed and was about to return the paper without a word of comment, when his eye was caught by something written in the permit.
“For the New Mexican Reservation?” he said, and his face expressed a kind of agitated astonishment.
Surprised by his surprise, Bernard nodded. There was a silence.
The Director leaned back in his chair, frowning. “How long ago was it?” he said, speaking more to himself than to Bernard. “Twenty years, I suppose. Twenty-five. I must have been your age…” He sighed and shook his head.
“I had the same idea as you,” the Director was saying. “Wanted to have a look at the savages. Got a permit for New Mexico and went there for my summer holiday. With the girl I was having at the moment. She was a Beta-Minus, and I think” (he shut his eyes), “I think she had yellow hair. Well, we went there, and we looked at the savages, and we rode about on horses and all that. And then-it was almost the last day of my leave… well, she got lost. She must have gone for a walk, alone. At any rate, when I woke up, she wasn’t there. And the most frightful thunderstorm I’ve ever seen was just bursting on us. I searched and I shouted and I searched. But there was no sign of her. The next day there was a search. But we couldn’t find anything. She must have fallen into a gully somewhere; or been eaten by a mountain lion. Ford knows. Anyhow it was horrible. It upset me very much at the time, more than it ought to have done, I dare say. Because, after all, it’s the sort of accident that might have happened to anyone. I actually dream about it sometimes,” the Director went on in a low voice. “Dream of being woken up by thunder and finding her gone; dream of searching and searching for her under the trees.” He fell silent.
“You must have had a terrible shock,” said Bernard, almost enviously.