by Eliana Simonetti
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There, on a low bed, the sheet flung back, dressed in a pair of pink one-piece zippyjamas, lay Lenina, fast asleep and so beautiful in the midst of her curls, so touchingly childish with her pink toes and her grave sleeping face, so trustful in the helplessness of her limp hands and melted limbs, that the tears came to his eyes. With an infinity of quite unnecessary precautions-for nothing short of a pistol shot could have called Lenina back from her soma-holiday before the appointed time-he entered the room, he knelt on the floor beside
the bed. He gazed, he clasped his hands, his lips moved. "Her eyes,"
he murmured,
"Her eyes, her hair, her cheek, her gait, her voice;
Handiest in thy discourse O! that her hand,
In whose comparison all whites are ink
Writing their own reproach; to whose soft seizure
The cygnet's down is harsh ..."
A fly buzzed round her; he waved it away. "Flies," he remembered,
"On the white wonder of dear Juliet's hand, may seize
And steal immortal blessing from her lips,
Who, even in pure and vestal modesty,
Still blush, as thinking their own kisses sin."
Very slowly, with the hesitating gesture of one who reaches forward to
stroke a shy and possibly rather dangerous bird, he put out his hand.
It hung there trembling, within an inch of those limp fingers, on the
verge of contact. Did he dare? Dare to profane with his unworthiest
hand that ... No, he didn't. The bird was too dangerous. His hand
dropped back. How beautiful she was! How beautiful!
Then suddenly he found himself reflecting that he had only to take
hold of the zipper at her neck and give one long, strong pull ... He shut
his eyes, he shook his head with the gesture of a dog shaking its ears
as it emerges from the water. Detestable thought! He was ashamed of
himself. Pure and vestal modesty ...
There was a humming in the air. Another fly trying to steal immortal
blessings? A wasp? He looked, saw nothing. The humming grew louder
and louder, localized itself as being outside the shuttered windows. The
plane! In a panic, he scrambled to his feet and ran into the other
room, vaulted through the open window, and hurrying along the path
between the tall agaves was in time to receive Bernard Marx as he
climbed out of the helicopter.
Chapter Ten
THE HANDS of all the four thousand electric clocks in all the Blooms-bury 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. Every one 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 every one 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-zipper, 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.
