Page 167 - BraveNewWorld

IDPH 167

the helicopters now ceaselessly hummed and roared.
The Savage had chosen as his hermitage the old light-house which stood on
the crest of the hill between Puttenham and Elstead. The building was of
ferro-concrete and in excellent condition-almost too comfortable the Savage
had thought when he first explored the place, almost too civilizedly luxurious.
He pacified his conscience by promising himself a compensatingly harder self-
discipline, purifications the more complete and thorough. His first night in the
hermitage was, deliberately, a sleepless one. He spent the hours on his knees
praying, now to that Heaven from which the guilty Claudius had begged for-
giveness, now in Zuñi to Awonawilona, now to Jesus and Pookong, now to his
own guardian animal, the eagle. From time to time he stretched out his arms as
though he were on the Cross, and held them thus through long minutes of an
ache that gradually increased till it became a tremulous and excruciating agony;
held them, in voluntary crucifixion, while he repeated, through clenched teeth
(the sweat, meanwhile, pouring down his face), “Oh, forgive me! Oh, make me
pure! Oh, help me to be good!” again and again, till he was on the point of
fainting from the pain.
When morning came, he felt he had earned the right to inhabit the lighthou-
se; yet, even though there still was glass in most of the windows, even though
the view from the platform was so fine. For the very reason why he had cho-
sen the lighthouse had become almost instantly a reason for going somewhere
else. He had decided to live there because the view was so beautiful, becau-
se, from his vantage point, he seemed to be looking out on to the incarnation
of a divine being. But who was he to be pampered with the daily and hourly
sight of loveliness? Who was he to be living in the visible presence of God?
All he deserved to live in was some filthy sty, some blind hole in the ground.
Stiff and still aching after his long night of pain, but for that very reason inwar-
dly reassured, he climbed up to the platform of his tower, he looked out over
the bright sunrise world which he had regained the right to inhabit. On the
north the view was bounded by the long chalk ridge of the Hog’s Back, from
behind whose eastern extremity rose the towers of the seven skyscrapers which
constituted Guildford. Seeing them, the Savage made a grimace; but he was
to become reconciled to them in course of time; for at night they twinued gaily
with geometrical constellations, or else, flood-lighted, pointed their luminous
fingers (with a gesture whose significance nobody in England but the Savage
now understood) solemnly towards the plumbless mysteries of heaven.
In the valley which separated the Hog’s Back from the sandy hill on which the
lighthouse stood, Puttenham was a modest little village nine stories high, with
silos, a poultry farm, and a small vitamin-D factory. On the other side of the
lighthouse, towards the South, the ground fell away in long slopes of heather
to a chain of ponds.

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