You can’t make flivvers without steel-and you can’t make tragedies without social instability. “Because our world is not the same as Othello’s world. Green with anxiety and apprehension, only Bernard remembered them the others ignored him. He too was forgetting the unpleasant realities of the situation. And if were new, it couldn’t possibly be like Othello.”
“Because, if it were really like Othello nobody could understand it, however new it might be. “And it’s what you never will write,” said the Controller. “That’s what we’ve all been wanting to write,” said Helmholtz, breaking a long silence. “Well then,” he said, after a pause, “something new that’s like Othello, and that they could understand.” He remembered how Helmholtz had laughed at Romeo and Juliet. “Why don’t you let them see Othello instead?” “Nice tame animals, anyhow,” the Controller murmured parenthetically. “Goats and monkeys!” Only in Othello’s word could he find an adequate vehicle for his contempt and hatred. Those plays, where there’s nothing but helicopters flying about and you feel the people kissing.” He made a grimace. “But the new ones are so stupid and horrible. Beauty’s attractive, and we don’t want people to be attracted by old things. “Because it’s old that’s the chief reason. In the excitement of meeting a man who had read Shakespeare he had momentarily forgotten everything else. “But why is it prohibited?” asked the Savage. “Which I’m afraid you can’t do.”īernard sank into a yet more hopeless misery. But as I make the laws here, I can also break them. “I thought nobody knew about that book here, in England.” The Savage’s face lit up with a sudden pleasure. “Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments will hum about my ears and sometimes voices.” All that music in the air, for instance …” “Of course,” the Savage went on to admit, “there are some very nice things. A look from Mustapha Mond reduced him to an abject silence. What would the Controller think? To be labelled as the friend of a man who said that he didn’t like civilization-said it openly and, of all people, to the Controller-it was terrible. “No.” He shook his head.īernard started and looked horrified. He had been prepared to lie, to bluster, to remain sullenly unresponsive but, reassured by the good-humoured intelligence of the Controller’s face, he decided to tell the truth, straightforwardly. “So you don’t much like civilization, Mr. Mustapha Mond shook hands with all three of them but it was to the Savage that he addressed himself.
Idly he turned the pages, read a sentence here, a paragraph there, and had just come to the conclusion that the book didn’t interest him, when the door opened, and the Resident World Controller for Western Europe walked briskly into the room. The book had been published at Detroit by the Society for the Propagation of Fordian Knowledge. On the table under the window lay a massive volume bound in limp black leather-surrogate, and stamped with large golden T’s. The Savage meanwhile wandered restlessly round the room, peering with a vague superficial inquisitiveness at the books in the shelves, at the sound-track rolls and reading machine bobbins in their numbered pigeon-holes. But Bernard would not be cheered without answering, without even looking at Helmholtz, he went and sat down on the most uncomfortable chair in the room, carefully chosen in the obscure hope of somehow deprecating the wrath of the higher powers. “Cheer up, Bernard,” he added, catching sight of his friend’s green unhappy face. “It’s more like a caffeine-solution party than a trial,” he said, and let himself fall into the most luxurious of the pneumatic arm-chairs. “His fordship will be down in a moment.” The Gamma butler left them to themselves. THE ROOM into which the three were ushered was the Controller’s study.
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