Brave New World - Aldous Huxley [92]
“Why don’t you leave me alone?” There was an almost plaintive note in his anger.
“Have a few magnesium-salted almonds!” said the man who, if the Savage were to advance, would be the first to be attacked. He held out a packet. “They’re really very good, you know,” he added, with a rather nervous smile of propitiation. “And the magnesium salts will help to keep you young.”
The Savage ignored his offer. “What do you want with me?” he asked, turning from one grinning face to another. “What do you want with me?”
“The whip,” answered a hundred voices confusedly. “Do the whipping stunt. Let’s see the whipping stunt.”
Then, in unison, and on a slow, heavy rhythm, “We—want—the whip,” shouted a group at the end of the line. “We—want—the whip.”
Others at once took up the cry, and the phrase was repeated, parrot-fashion, again and again, with an ever-growing volume of sound, until, by the seventh or eighth reiteration, no other word was being spoken. “We—want—the whip.”
They were all crying together; and, intoxicated by the noise, the unanimity, the sense of rhythmical atonement, they might, it seemed, have gone on for hours—almost indefinitely. But at about the twenty-fifth repetition the proceedings were startlingly interrupted. Yet another helicopter had arrived from across the Hog’s Back, hung poised above the crowd, then dropped within a few yards of where the Savage was standing, in the open space between the line of sightseers and the lighthouse. The roar of the air screws momentarily drowned the shouting; then, as the machine touched the ground and the engines were turned off: “We—want—the whip; we—want—the whip,” broke out again in the same loud, insistent monotone.
The door of the helicopter opened, and out stepped, first a fair and ruddy-faced young man, then, in green velveteen shorts, white shirt, and jockey cap, a young woman.
At the sight of the young woman, the Savage started, recoiled, turned pale.
The young woman stood, smiling at him—an uncertain, imploring, almost abject smile. The seconds passed. Her lips moved, she was saying something; but the sound of her voice was covered by the loud reiterated refrain of the sightseers.
“We—want—the whip! We—want—the whip!”
The young woman pressed both hands to her left side, and on that peach-bright, doll-beautiful face of hers appeared a strangely incongruous expression of yearning distress. Her blue eyes seemed to grow larger, brighter; and suddenly two tears rolled down her cheeks. Inaudibly, she spoke again; then, with a quick, impassioned gesture stretched out her arms towards the Savage, stepped forward.
“We—want—the whip! We—want …”
And all of a sudden they had what they wanted.
“Strumpet!” The Savage had rushed at her like a madman. “Fitchew!” Like a madman, he was slashing at her with his whip of small cords.
Terrified, she had turned to flee, had tripped and fallen in the heather. “Henry, Henry!” she shouted. But her ruddy-faced companion had bolted out of harm’s way behind the helicopter.
With a whoop of delighted excitement the line broke; there was a convergent stampede towards that magnetic centre of attraction. Pain was a fascinating horror.
“Fry, lechery, fry!” Frenzied, the Savage slashed again.
Hungrily they gathered round, pushing and scrambling like swine about the trough.
“Oh, the flesh!” The Savage ground his teeth. This time it was on his shoulders that the whip descended. “Kill it, kill it!”
Drawn by the fascination of the horror of pain and, from within, impelled by that habit of cooperation, that desire for unanimity and atonement, which their conditioning had so ineradicably implanted in them, they began to mime the frenzy of his gestures, striking at one another as the Savage struck at his own rebellious flesh, or at that plump incarnation of turpitude