Page 52 - BraveNewWorld

52 IDPH

Skies are blue inside of you,
The weather’s always fine;
For

There ain’t no Bottle in all the world
Like that dear little Bottle of mine.”
Five-stepping with the other four hundred round and round Westminster Ab-
bey, Lenina and Henry were yet dancing in another world-the warm, the richly
coloured, the infinitely friendly world of soma-holiday. How kind, how good-
looking, how delightfully amusing every one was! “Bottle of mine, it’s you I’ve
always wanted .” But Lenina and Henry had what they wanted. They were
inside, here and now-safely inside with the fine weather, the perennially blue
sky. And when, exhausted, the Sixteen had laid by their saxophones and the
Synthetic Music apparatus was producing the very latest in slow Malthusian
Blues, they might have been twin embryos gently rocking together on the wa-
ves of a bottled ocean of blood-surrogate.
“Good-night, dear friends. Good-night, dear friends.” The loud speakers veiled
their commands in a genial and musical politeness. “Good-night, dear friends
.”
Obediently, with all the others, Lenina and Henry left the building. The de-
pressing stars had travelled quite some way across the heavens. But though the
separating screen of the sky-signs had now to a great extent dissolved, the two
young people still retained their happy ignorance of the night.
Swallowing half an hour before closing time, that second dose of soma had
raised a quite impenetrable wall between the actual universe and their minds.
Bottled, they crossed the street; bottled, they took the lift up to Henry’s room on
the twenty-eighth floor. And yet, bottled as she was, and in spite of that second
gramme of soma, Lenina did not forget to take all the contraceptive precautions
prescribed by the regulations. Years of intensive hypnopædia and, from twelve
to seventeen, Malthusian drill three times a week had made the taking of these
precautions almost as automatic and inevitable as blinking.
“Oh, and that reminds me,” she said, as she came back from the bathroom,
“Fanny Crowne wants to know where you found that lovely green morocco-
surrogate cartridge belt you gave me.”

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