Page 119 - BraveNewWorld

IDPH 119

his dreams. Smiling, smiling. But inexorably, every thirty seconds, the minute
hand of the electric clock above his bed jumped forward with an almost imper-
ceptible 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 bal-
loon of these last weeks, the old self seemed unprecedentedly heavier than the
surrounding atmosphere.

To this deflated Bernard the Savage showed himself unexpectedly sympathetic.
“You’re more like what you were at Malpais,” he said, when Bernard had told
him his plaintive story. “Do you remember when we first talked together? Out-
side the little house. You’re like what you were then.”
“Because I’m unhappy again; that’s why.”

“Well, I’d rather be unhappy than have the sort of false, lying happiness you
were having here.”
“I like that,” said Bernard bitterly. “When it’s you who were the cause of it
all. Refusing to come to my party and so turning them all against me!” He
knew that what he was saying was absurd in its injustice; he admitted inwar-
dly, and at last even aloud, the truth of all that the Savage now said about the
worthlessness of friends who could be turned upon so slight a provocation in-
to persecuting enemies. But in spite of this knowledge and these admissions,
in spite of the fact that his friend’s support and sympathy were now his only
comfort, Bernard continued perversely to nourish, along with his quite genuine
affection, a secret grievance against the Savage, to mediate a campaign of small
revenges to be wreaked upon him. Nourishing a grievance against the Arch-
Community-Songster was useless; there was no possibility of being revenged
on the Chief Bottler or the Assistant Predestinator. As a victim, the Savage
possessed, for Bernard, this enormous superiority over the others: that he was
accessible. One of the principal functions of a friend is to suffer (in a milder and
symbolic form) the punishments that we should like, but are unable, to inflict
upon our enemies.
Bernard’s other victim-friend was Helmholtz. When, discomfited, he came and
asked once more for the friendship which, in his prosperity, he had not thought
it worth his while to preserve. Helmholtz gave it; and gave it without a re-
proach, without a comment, as though he had forgotten that there had ever
been a quarrel. Touched, Bernard felt himself at the same time humiliated by
this magnanimity-a magnanimity the more extraordinary and therefore the mo-
re humiliating in that it owed nothing to soma and everything to Helmholtz’s
character. It was the Helmholtz of daily life who forgot and forgave, not the
Helmholtz of a half-gramme holiday. Bernard was duly grateful (it was an

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