Page 114 - BraveNewWorld

114 IDPH

Bernard. And yet. Any other man would have done it long ago. Well, now at
last.” That fragment of a face in the little round mirror suddenly smiled at her.

“Good-night,” said a strangled voice behind her. Lenina wheeled round. He
was standing in the doorway of the cab, his eyes fixed, staring; had eviden-
tly been staring all this time while she was powdering her nose, waiting-but
what for? or hesitating, trying to make up his mind, and all the time thinking,
thinking-she could not imagine what extraordinary thoughts. “Good-night, Le-
nina,” he repeated, and made a strange grimacing attempt to smile.
“But, John. I thought you were. I mean, aren’t you? .”

He shut the door and bent forward to say something to the driver. The cab shot
up into the air.
Looking down through the window in the fioor, the Savage could see Lenina’s
upturned face, pale in the bluish light of the lamps. The mouth was open, she
was calling. Her foreshortened figure rushed away from him; the diminishing
square of the roof seemed to be falling through the darkness.
Five minutes later he was back in his room. From its hiding-place he took out
his mouse-nibbled volume, turned with religious care its stained and crumbled
pages, and began to read Othello. Othello, he remembered, was like the hero of
Three Weeks in a Helicopter-a black man.
Drying her eyes, Lenina walked across the roof to the lift. On her way down
to the twenty-seventh floor she pulled out her soma bottle. One gramme, she
decided, would not be enough; hers had been more than a one-gramme afflic-
tion. But if she took two grammes, she ran the risk of not waking up in time
to-morrow morning. She compromised and, into her cupped left palm, shook
out three half-gramme tablets.

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