But the Savage had chosen this evening of all evenings to lock himself up in his room, to shout
"Hani!" and even (it was lucky that Bernard didn't understand Zuni) "Sons eso tse-na!"
What should have been the crowning moment of Bernard's whole career had turned out to be the moment of his greatest humiliation.
"I'd so much hoped ..." he stammeringly repeated, looking up at the great dignitary with pleading and distracted eyes.
"My young friend," said the Arch-Community-Songster in a tone of loud and solemn severity; there was a general silence.
"Let me give you a word of advice."
He wagged his finger at Bernard.
"Before it's too late. A word of good advice." (His voice became sepulchral.)
"Mend your ways, my young friend, mend your ways."
He made the sign of the T over him and turned away.
"Lenina, my dear," he called in another tone.
"Come with me."
Obediently, but unsmiling and (wholly insensible of the honour done to her) without elation, Lenina walked after him, out of the room.
The other guests followed at a respectful interval.
The last of them slammed the door.
Bernard was all alone.
Punctured, utterly deflated, he dropped into a chair and, covering his face with his hands, began to weep.
A few minutes later, however, he thought better of it and took four tablets of soma.
Upstairs in his room the Savage was reading Romeo and Juliet.
Lenina and the Arch-Community-Songster stepped out on to the roof of Lambeth Palace.
"Hurry up, my young friend-I mean, Lenina," called the Arch-Songster impatiently from the lift gates.
Lenina, who had lingered for a moment to look at the moon, dropped her eyes and came hurrying across the roof to rejoin him.
"A New Theory of Biology" was the title of the paper which Mustapha Mond had just finished reading.
He sat for some time, meditatively frowning, then picked up his pen and wrote across the title-page:
"The author's mathematical treatment of the conception of purpose is novel and highly ingenious, but heretical and, so far as the present social order is concerned, dangerous and potentially subversive.
Not to be published." He underlined the words.
"The author will be kept under supervision.
His transference to the Marine Biological Station of St. Helena may become necessary."
A pity, he thought, as he signed his name.
It was a masterly piece of work.
But once you began admitting explanations in terms of purpose-well, you didn't know what the result might be.
It was the sort of idea that might easily decondition the more unsettled minds among the higher castes-make them lose their faith in happiness as the Sovereign Good and take to believing, instead, that the goal was somewhere beyond, somewhere outside the present human sphere, that the purpose of life was not the maintenance of well-being, but some intensification and refining of consciousness, some enlargement of knowledge.
Which was, the Controller reflected, quite possibly true.
But not, in the present circumstance, admissible.
He picked up his pen again, and under the words
"Not to be published" drew a second line, thicker and blacker than the first; then sighed,
"What fun it would be," he thought, "if one didn't have to think about happiness!"
With closed eyes, his face shining with rapture, John was softly declaiming to vacancy:
"Oh! she doth teach the torches to burn bright. It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night, Like a rich jewel in an Ethiop's ear; Beauty too rich for use, for earth too dear..."
The golden T lay shining on Lenina's bosom.
Sportively, the Arch-Community-Songster caught hold of it, sportively he pulled, pulled.
"I think," said Lenina suddenly, breaking a long silence,
"I'd better take a couple of grammes of soma."
Bernard, by this time, was fast asleep and smiling at the private paradise of his dreams.
Smiling, smiling.
But inexorably, every thirty seconds, the minute hand of the electric clock above his bed jumped forward with an almost imperceptible click.
Click, click, click, click ... And it was morning.
Bernard was back among the miseries of space and time.
It was in the lowest spirits that he taxied across to his work at the Conditioning Centre.
The intoxication of success had evaporated; he was soberly his old self; and by contrast with the temporary balloon of these last weeks, the old self seemed unprecedentedly heavier than the surrounding atmosphere.