Page 103 - BraveNewWorld

Eleven

AFTER the scene in the Fertilizing Room, all upper-caste London was wild to
see this delicious creature who had fallen on his knees before the Director of
Hatcheries and Conditioning-or rather the ex-Director, for the poor man had
resigned immediately afterwards and never set foot inside the Centre again-
had flopped down and called him (the joke was almost too good to be true!)
“my father.” Linda, on the contrary, cut no ice; nobody had the smallest desire
to see Linda. To say one was a mother-that was past a joke: it was an obscenity.
Moreover, she wasn’t a real savage, had been hatched out of a bottle and con-
ditioned like any one else: so coudn’t have really quaint ideas. Finally-and this
was by far the strongest reason for people’s not wanting to see poor Linda-there
was her appearance. Fat; having lost her youth; with bad teeth, and a blotched
complexion, and that figure (Ford!)-you simply couldn’t look at her without fe-
eling sick, yes, positively sick. So the best people were quite determined not to
see Linda. And Linda, for her part, had no desire to see them. The return to ci-
vilization was for her the return to soma, was the possibility of lying in bed and
taking holiday after holiday, without ever having to come back to a headache or
a fit of vomiting, without ever being made to feel as you always felt after peyo-
tl, as though you’d done something so shamefully anti- social that you could
never hold up your head again. Soma played none of these unpleasant tricks.
The holiday it gave was perfect and, if the morning after was disagreeable, it
was so, not intrinsically, but only by comparison with the joys of the holiday.
The remedy was to make the holiday continuous. Greedily she clamoured for
ever larger, ever more frequent doses. Dr. Shaw at first demurred; then let her
have what she wanted. She took as much as twenty grammes a day.

“Which will finish her off in a month or two,” the doctor confided to Bernard.
“One day the respiratory centre will be paralyzed. No more breathing. Fi-
nished. And a good thing too. If we could rejuvenate, of course it would be
different. But we can’t.”
Surprisingly, as every one thought (for on soma-holiday Linda was most con-
veniently out of the way), John raised objections.

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