Page 120 - BraveNewWorld

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enormous comfort to have his friend again) and also duly reseritful (it would
be pleasure to take some revenge on Helmholtz for his generosity).

At their first meeing after the estrangement, Bernard poured out the tale of
his miseries and accepted consolation. It was not till some days later that he
learned, to his surprise and with a twinge of shame, that he was not the only one
who had been in trouble. Helmholtz had also come into conflict with Authority.
“It was over some rhymes,” he explained. “I was giving my usual course of
Advanced Emotional Engineering for Third Year Students. Twelve lectures, of
which the seventh is about rhymes. ’On the Use of Rhymes in Moral Propa-
ganda and Advertisement,’ to be precise. I always illustrate my lecture with a
lot of technical examples. This time I thought I’d give them one I’d just written
myself. Pure madness, of course; but I couldn’t resist it.” He laughed. “I was
curious to see what their reactions would be. Besides,” he added more gravely,
“I wanted to do a bit of propaganda; I was trying to engineer them into feeling
as I’d felt when I wrote the rhymes. Ford!” He laughed again. “What an outcry
there was! The Principal had me up and threatened to hand me the immediate
sack. l’m a marked man.”

“But what were your rhymes?” Bernard asked.
“They were about being alone.”
Bernard’s eyebrows went up.

“I’ll recite them to you, if you like.” And Helmholtz began:
“Yesterday’s committee,
Sticks, but a broken drum,
Midnight in the City,

Flutes in a vacuum,
Shut lips, sleeping faces,
Every stopped machine,

The dumb and littered places
Where crowds have been:.
All silences rejoice,
Weep (loudly or low),

Speak-but with the voice
Of whom, I do not know.

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