Brave New World - Aldous Huxley [93]
'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 focussed on the black cash-box, which the young man had placed on the table, and was now in the 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, mocked him with how hideous a note of cynical 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-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