Chapter Three

Outside, in the garden, it was playtime. Six or seven hundred of naked little boys and girls were running with shrill yells over the lawns, or playing ball games, or squatting silently in twos and threes among the flowering shrubs. The air was drowsy with the murmur of bees and helicopters.

“That’s a charming little group,” said the Director, pointing.

In a little grassy bay two children, a little boy of about seven and a little girl who might have been a year older, were playing, very gravely and with all the focused attention of scientists intent on a labour of discovery, a rudimentary sexual game.

From a neighbouring shrubbery emerged a nurse, leading by the hand a small boy, who cried as he went. An anxious-looking little girl followed them.

“What’s the matter?” asked the Director.

The nurse shrugged her shoulders. “Nothing much,” she answered. “This little boy seems rather reluctant to join in the ordinary erotic play. I’d noticed it once or twice before. And now again today. He started yelling just now…”

“I didn’t mean to hurt him or anything. Honestly,” said the anxious-looking little girl.

“Of course you didn’t, dear,” said the nurse reassuringly. She turned back to the Director. “I’m taking him to see the Assistant Superintendent of Psychology. Just to see if anything’s at all abnormal.”

“Quite right,” said the Director. “Take him. You stay here, little girl,” he added, as the nurse and the boy walked away. “What’s your name?”

“Polly Trotsky.”

“Run away now and see if you can find some other little boy to play with.”

The child scampered off into the bushes and was lost to sight^[15].

The Director turned to his students. “What I’m going to tell you now,” he said, “may sound incredible. But then, when you’re not accustomed to history, most facts about the past do.”

He let out the amazing truth. For a very long period before the time of Our Ford, and even for some generations afterwards, erotic play between children had been regarded as abnormal (there was a roar of laughter); and not only abnormal, actually immoral (no!); and had therefore been rigorously suppressed.

An astonished look appeared on the faces of his listeners. They could not believe it.

“Even adolescents,” the D.H.C. was saying, “even adolescents like yourselves…”

“Not possible! Nothing?”

“In most cases, till they were over twenty years old.”

“Twenty years old?” echoed the students in disbelief.

“I told you that you’d find it incredible.”

“But what happened?” they asked. “What were the results?”

“The results were terrible.” A deep resonant voice broke startlingly into the dialogue.

They looked around. On the side stood a stranger—a man of middle height, black-haired, with a hooked nose, full red lips, eyes very piercing and dark.

The D.H.C. darted forward, his hand outstretched, smiling with all his teeth.

“Controller! What an unexpected pleasure! Boys, what are you thinking of? This is the Controller; this is his fordship, Mustapha Mond.”

The clock struck four. Voices called from the trumpet mouths.

“Main Day-shift off duty. Second Day-shift take over. Main Day-shift off…”

In the lift, on their way up to the changing rooms, Henry Foster and the Assistant Director of Predestination rather pointedly ^[16]turned their backs on Bernard Marx from the Psychology Bureau.

Despite the change between shifts, machinery was still humming in the Embryo Store. The conveyors crept forward with their load of future men and women no matter what.

Lenina Crowne walked briskly towards the door.

His fordship Mustapha Mond! The eyes of the students almost popped out of their heads. Mustapha Mond! The Resident Controller for Western Europe! One of the Ten World Controllers. One of the Ten … and he was going to stay, to stay, yes, and actually talk to them … straight from the horse’s mouth. Straight from the mouth of Ford himself.

“You all remember,” said the Controller, in his strong deep voice, “you all remember, I suppose, that beautiful saying of Our Ford’s: History is bunk. History,” he repeated slowly, “is bunk.”

He waved his hand; and it was as though, with an invisible feather whisk, he had brushed away a little dust, and the dust was Harappa, was Ur of the Chaldees; some spider-webs, and they were Thebes and Babylon and Cnossos and Mycenae. Whisk. Whisk—and where was Odysseus, where was Job, where was Jesus? Whisk—and those specks of antique dirt called Athens and Rome, Jerusalem and the Middle Kingdom—all were gone. Whisk—the place where Italy had been was empty. Whisk, the cathedrals; whisk, whisk, King Lear and the Thoughts of Pascal. Whisk, Passion; whisk, Requiem; whisk, Symphony; whisk…

“Going to the Feelies this evening, Henry?” enquired the Assistant Predestinator. “I hear the new one at the Alhambra is great. There’s a love scene on a bearskin rug. Every hair of the bear reproduced. The most amazing tactual effects.”

“That’s why you’re taught no history,” the Controller was saying. “But now the time has come…”

The D.H.C. looked at him nervously.

Mustapha Mond intercepted his anxious glance and the corners of his red lips twitched ironically.

“It’s all right, Director,” he said in a tone of faint derision, “I won’t corrupt them.”

The D.H.C. was overwhelmed with confusion.

Those who feel themselves despised do well to look despising^[17]. The smile on Bernard Marx’s face was contemptuous. Every hair on the bear indeed!

“I shall make a point of going,” said Henry Foster.

Mustapha Mond leaned forward, shook a finger at them. “Just try to realize it,” he said. “Try to realize what it was like to have a viviparous mother.”

That smutty word again. But none of them smiled this time.

“Try to imagine what ‘living with one’s family’ meant.”

They tried; obviously without success.

“And do you know what a ‘home’ was?”

They shook their heads.

Lenina Crowne opened the door marked GIRLS’ DRESSING-ROOM and walked into a deafening chaos of arms and bosoms and underclothing.

“Hullo, Fanny,” said she to the young woman who had the locker next to hers.

Fanny worked in the Bottling Room, and her surname was also Crowne. But as the two thousand million inhabitants of the plant had only ten thousand names between them, the coincidence was not particularly surprising.

Lenina pulled at her zippers—downwards on the jacket, downwards at the two that held trousers, downwards again to loosen her undergarment. Still wearing her shoes and stockings, she walked off towards the bathrooms.

Home, home—a few small rooms, stiflingly over-inhabited by people. No air, no space; a prison; darkness, disease, and smells.

(The Controller’s description was so vivid that one of the boys, more sensitive than the rest, turned pale at the mere description and was on the point of being sick.)

Lenina got out of the bath and toweled herself dry. Eight different scents and eau-de-cologne were laid on in little taps over the wash-basin. She turned on the third from the left, dabbed herself with chypre and, carrying her shoes and stockings in her hand, went out to see if one of the vibro-vacuum machines were free.

And home was as squalid psychically as possible. Psychically, it was a rabbit hole, hot with the frictions of tightly packed life, reeking with emotion. Maniacally, the mother brooded over her children (her children)… like a cat over its kittens; “My baby, my baby,” over and over again. “My baby, and oh, oh, at my breast, the little hands, the hunger! Till at last my baby sleeps, my baby sleeps with a bubble of white milk at the corner of his mouth. My little baby sleeps…”

“Yes,” said Mustapha Mond, nodding his head, “you may well shudder^[18].”

“Who are you going out with tonight?” Lenina asked, returning from the vibro-vac.

“Nobody.”

Lenina raised her eyebrows in astonishment.

“I’ve been feeling rather out of sorts ^[19]lately,” Fanny explained. “Dr. Wells advised me to have a Pregnancy Substitute.”

“But you’re only nineteen. The first Pregnancy Substitute isn’t compulsory till twenty-one.”

“I know, dear. But some people are better if they begin earlier.” She opened the door of her locker and pointed to the row of boxes and labelled phials on the upper shelf.

“SYRUP OF CORPUS LUTEUM,” Lenina read the names aloud. “OVARIN, GUARANTEED FRESH: NOT TO BE USED AFTER AUGUST 1ST, A.F. 632. MAMMARY GLAND EXTRACT: TO BE TAKEN THREE TIMES DAILY, BEFORE MEALS, WITH A LITTLE WATER. PLACENTIN: 5cc TO BE INJECTED INTRAVENALLY EVERY THIRD DAY… Ugh!” Lenina shuddered. “How I loathe intravenals, don’t you?”

“Yes. But when they do one good…” Fanny was a particularly sensible girl.

Our Ford—or Our Freud, as, for some reason, he chose to call himself whenever he spoke of psychological matters—had been the first to reveal the appalling dangers of family life.

“Extremes,” said the Controller, “meet. For the good reason that they were made to meet.”

“Dr. Wells says that a three months’ Pregnancy Substitute will make all the difference to my health for the next three or four years.”

“Well, I hope he’s right,” said Lenina. “But, Fanny, do you really mean to say that for the next three months you’re not supposed to…”

“Oh no, dear. Only for a week or two, that’s all. I suppose you’re going out?”

Lenina nodded.

“Who with?”

“Henry Foster.”

“Again?” Fanny’s face took on an expression of pained and disapproving astonishment. “Do you mean to tell me you’re still going out with Henry Foster?”

Mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters. But there were also husbands, wives, lovers. There were also monogamy and romance.

“Though you probably don’t know what those are,” said Mustapha Mond.

They shook their heads.

Family, monogamy, romance. Everywhere exclusiveness.

“But everyone belongs to everyone else,” he concluded, citing the hypnopaedic proverb.

The students nodded, agreeing with a statement which upwards of sixty-two thousand repetitions in the dark had made them accept as self-evident and utterly indisputable.

“But after all,” Lenina was protesting, “it’s only about four months now since I’ve been having Henry.”

“Only four months! And there’s been nobody else except Henry all that time. Has there?”

Lenina blushed scarlet. “No, there hasn’t been anyone else,” she answered. “And I jolly well don’t see why there should have been.”

“Oh, she jolly well doesn’t see why there should have been,” Fanny repeated. Then, with a sudden change of tone, “But seriously,” she said, “I really do think you ought to be careful. At forty, or thirty-five, it wouldn’t be so bad. But at your age, Lenina! And you know how strongly the D.H.C. objects to anything intense or long-drawn. Four months of Henry Foster, without having another man—why, he’d be furious if he knew…”

Mother, monogamy, romance. The urge has but a single outlet. My love, my baby. No wonder these poor pre-moderns were mad and wicked and miserable. Their world didn’t allow them to take things easily, didn’t allow them to be sane, virtuous, happy. What with mothers and lovers, what with the prohibitions they were not conditioned to obey, what with the temptations and the lonely remorses, what with all the diseases and the endless isolating pain, what with the uncertainties and the poverty—they were forced to feel strongly. And feeling strongly, how could they be stable?

“Of course there’s no need to give him up. Have somebody else from time to time, that’s all. He has other girls, doesn’t he?”

Lenina admitted it.

“Of course he does. Trust Henry Foster to be the perfect gentleman. And then there’s the Director to think of. You know what a stickler…”

Nodding, “He patted me on the behind this afternoon,” said Lenina.

“There, you see!” Fanny was triumphant. “That shows what he stands for. The strictest conventionality.”

“Stability,” said the Controller. “No civilization without social stability. No social stability without individual stability.” His voice was a trumpet.

The machine turns, turns and must keep on turning—forever. It is death if it stands still. Wheels must turn steadily, but cannot turn untended. There must be men to tend them, men as steady as the wheels upon their axles, sane men, obedient men.

Crying, screaming with pain, muttering with fever, bemoaning old age and poverty—how can they tend the wheels? And if they cannot tend the wheels…