Page 169 - BraveNewWorld

IDPH 169

He had almost finished whittling the stave into shape, when he realized with
a start that he was singing-singing! It was as though, stumbling upon himself
from the outside, he had suddenly caught himself out, taken himself flagrantly
at fault. Guiltily he blushed. After all, it was not to sing and enjoy himself that
he had come here. It was to escape further contamination by the filth of civili-
zed life; it was to be purified and made good; it was actively to make amends.
He realized to his dismay that, absorbed in the whittling of his bow, he had
forgotten what he had sworn to himself he would constantly remember-poor
Linda, and his own murderous unkindness to her, and those loathsome twins,
swarming like lice across the mystery of her death, insulting, with their presen-
ce, not merely his own grief and repentance, but the very gods themselves. He
had sworn to remember, he had sworn unceasingly to make amends. And there
was he, sitting happily over his bow-stave, singing, actually singing..
He went indoors, opened the box of mustard, and put some water to boil on the
fire.

Half an hour later, three Delta-Minus landworkers from one of the Puttenham
Bokanovsky Groups happened to be driving to Elstead and, at the top of the hill,
were astonished to see a young man standing 0utside the abandoned lighthou-
se stripped to the waist and hitting himself with a whip of knotted cords. His
back was horizontally streaked with crimson, and from weal to weal ran thin
trickles of blood. The driver of the lorry pulled up at the side of the road and,
with his two companions, stared open-mouthed at the extraordinary spectacle.
One, two three-they counted the strokes. After the eighth, the young man in-
terrupted his self-punishment to run to the wood’s edge and there be violently
sick. When he had finished, he picked up the whip and began hitting himself
again. Nine, ten, eleven, twelve.
“Ford!” whispered the driver. And his twins were of the same opinion.
“Fordey!” they said.

Three days later, like turkey buzzards setthug on a corpse, the reporters came.
Dried and hardened over a slow fire of green wood, the bow was ready. The
Savage was busy on his arrows. Thirty hazel sticks had been whittled and dri-
ed, tipped with sharp nails, carefully nocked. He had made a raid one night on
the Puttenham poultry farm, and now had feathers enough to equip a whole
armoury. It was at work upon the feathering of his shafts that the first of the re-
porters found him. Noiseless on his pneumatic shoes, the man came up behind
him.
“Good-morning, Mr. Savage,” he said. “I am the representative of The Hourly
Radio.”
Startled as though by the bite of a snake, the Savage sprang to his feet, scattering

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