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(单词翻译:双击或拖选)
Brave New World
by Aldous Huxley
Chapter Six
ODD, ODD, odd, was Lenina's verdict on Bernard Marx. So odd, indeed, that in the course of the succeeding weeks she had wondered more than once whether she shouldn't change her mind about the New Mexico holiday, and go instead to the North Pole with Benito Hoover. The trouble was that she knew the North Pole, had been there with George Edzel only last summer, and what was more, found it pretty grim. Nothing to do, and the hotel too hopelessly old-fashioned-no television laid on in the bedrooms, no scent1 organ, only the most putrid2 synthetic3 music, and not more than twenty-five Escalator-Squash Courts for over two hundred guests. No, decidedly she couldn't face the North Pole again. Added to which, she had only been to America once before. And even then, how inadequately4! A cheap week-end in New York-had it been with Jean-Jacques Habibullah or Bokanovsky Jones? She couldn't remember. Anyhow, it was of absolutely no importance. The prospect5 of flying West again, and for a whole week, was very inviting6. Moreover, for at least three days of that week they would be in the Savage7 Reservation. Not more than half a dozen people in the whole Centre had ever been inside a Savage Reservation. As an Alpha-Plus psychologist, Bernard was one of the few men she knew entitled to a permit. For Lenina, the opportunity was unique. And yet, so unique also was Bernard's oddness that she had hesitated to take
it, had actually thought of risking the Pole again with funny old Benito. At least Benito was normal. Whereas Bernard ...
"Alcohol in his blood-surrogate," was Fanny's explanation of every eccentricity8. But Henry, with whom, one evening when they were in bed together, Lenina had rather anxiously discussed her new lover, Henry had compared poor Bernard to a rhinoceros9.
"You can't teach a rhinoceros tricks," he had explained in his brief and vigorous style. "Some men are almost rhinoceroses10; they don't respond properly to conditioning. Poor Devils! Bernard's one of them. Luckily for him, he's pretty good at his job. Otherwise the Director would never have kept him. However," he added consolingly, "I think he's pretty harmless."
Pretty harmless, perhaps; but also pretty disquieting11. That mania12, to start with, for doing things in private. Which meant, in practice, not doing anything at all. For what was there that one could do in private. (Apart, of course, from going to bed: but one couldn't do that all the time.) Yes, what was there? Precious little. The first afternoon they went out together was particularly fine. Lenina had suggested a swim at Toquay Country Club followed by dinner at the Oxford13 Union. But Bernard thought there would be too much of a crowd. Then what about a round of Electro-magnetic Golf at St. Andrew's? But again, no: Bernard considered that Electro-magnetic Golf was a waste of time.
"Then what's time for?" asked Lenina in some astonishment15.
Apparently16, for going walks in the Lake District; for that was what he now proposed. Land on the top of Skiddaw and walk for a couple of hours in the heather. "Alone with you, Lenina."
"But, Bernard, we shall be alone all night."
"Talking? But what about?" Walking and talking-that seemed a very odd way of spending an afternoon.
In the end she persuaded him, much against his will, to fly over to Amsterdam to see the Semi-Demi-Finals of the Women's Heavyweight Wrestling Championship.
"In a crowd," he grumbled18. "As usual." He remained obstinately19 gloomy the whole afternoon; wouldn't talk to Lenina's friends (of whom they met dozens in the ice-cream soma bar between the wrestling bouts); and in spite of his misery20 absolutely refused to take the half-gramme raspberry sundae which she pressed upon him. "I'd rather be myself," he said. "Myself and nasty. Not somebody else, however jolly."
"A gramme in time saves nine," said Lenina, producing a bright treasure of sleep-taught wisdom. Bernard pushed away the proffered21 glass impatiently.
"Now don't lose your temper," she said. "Remember one cubic centimetre cures ten gloomy sentiments."
Lenina shrugged22 her shoulders. "A gramme is always better than a damn," she concluded with dignity, and drank the sundae herself.
On their way back across the Channel, Bernard insisted on stopping his propeller23 and hovering24 on his helicopter screws within a hundred feet of the waves. The weather had taken a change for the worse; a southwesterly wind had sprung up, the sky was cloudy.
"Look," he commanded.
"But it's horrible," said Lenina, shrinking back from the window. She was appalled25 by the rushing emptiness of the night, by the black foam-flecked water heaving beneath them, by the pale face of the moon, so haggard and distracted among the hastening clouds. "Let's turn on the radio. Quick!" She reached for the dialling knob on the dash-board and turned it at random26.
"... skies are blue inside of you," sang sixteen tremoloing falsettos, "the weather's always ..."
Then a hiccough and silence. Bernard had switched off the current.
"I want to look at the sea in peace," he said. "One can't even look with that beastly noise going on."
"But it's lovely. And I don't want to look."
"But I do," he insisted. "It makes me feel as though ..." he hesitated, searching for words with which to express himself, "as though I were more me, if you see what I mean. More on my own, not so completely a part of something else. Not just a cell in the social body. Doesn't it make you feel like that, Lenina?"
But Lenina was crying. "It's horrible, it's horrible," she kept repeating. "And how can you talk like that about not wanting to be a part of the social body? After all, every one works for every one else. We can't do without any one. Even Epsilons ..."
"Yes, I know," said Bernard derisively27. '"Even Epsilons are useful'! So am I. And I damned well wish I weren't!"
Lenina was shocked by his blasphemy28. "Bernard!" She protested in a voice of amazed distress29. "How can you?"
In a different key, "How can I?" he repeated meditatively30. "No, the real problem is: How is it that I can't, or rather-because, after all, I know quite well why I can't-what would it be like if I could, if I were free-not enslaved by my conditioning."
"But, Bernard, you're saying the most awful things."
"Don't you wish you were free, Lenina?"
"I don't know what you mean. I am free. Free to have the most wonderful time. Everybody's happy nowadays."
He laughed, "Yes, 'Everybody's happy nowadays.' We begin giving the children that at five. But wouldn't you like to be free to be happy in some other way, Lenina? In your own way, for example; not in everybody else's way."
"I don't know what you mean," she repeated. Then, turning to him, "Oh, do let's go back, Bernard," she besought31; "I do so hate it here."
"Don't you like being with me?"
"But of course, Bernard. It's this horrible place."
"I thought we'd be more ... more together here-with nothing but the sea and moon. More together than in that crowd, or even in my rooms. Don't you understand that?"
"I don't understand anything," she said with decision, determined32 to preserve her incomprehension intact. "Nothing. Least of all," she continued in another tone "why you don't take soma when you have these dreadful ideas of yours. You'd forget all about them. And instead of feeling miserable33, you'd be jolly. So jolly," she repeated and smiled, for all the puzzled anxiety in her eyes, with what was meant to be an inviting and voluptuous34 cajolery.
He looked at her in silence, his face unresponsive and very grave-looked at her intently. After a few seconds Lenina's eyes flinched35 away; she uttered a nervous little laugh, tried to think of something to say and couldn't. The silence prolonged itself.
When Bernard spoke36 at last, it was in a small tired voice. "All right then," he said, "we'll go back." And stepping hard on the accelerator, he sent the machine rocketing up into the sky. At four thousand he started his propeller. They flew in silence for a minute or two. Then, suddenly, Bernard began to laugh. Rather oddly, Lenina thought, but still, it was laughter.
"Feeling better?" she ventured to ask.
For answer, he lifted one hand from the controls and, slipping his arm around her, began to fondle her breasts.
"Thank Ford," she said to herself, "he's all right again."
Half an hour later they were back in his rooms. Bernard swallowed four tablets of soma at a gulp37, turned on the radio and television and began to undress.
"Well," Lenina enquired38, with significant archness when they met next afternoon on the roof, "did you think it was fun yesterday?"
"Awfully." But there was an expression of pain in Bernard's eyes. "Like meat," he was thinking.
She looked up with a certain anxiety. "But you don't think I'm too plump, do you?"
He shook his head. Like so much meat.
"You think I'm all right." Another nod. "In every way?"
"Perfect," he said aloud. And inwardly. "She thinks of herself that way. She doesn't mind being meat."
"All the same," he went on, after a little pause, "I still rather wish it had all ended differently."
"Differently?" Were there other endings?
Lenina was astonished.
"Not at once, not the first day."
"But then what ...?"
He began to talk a lot of incomprehensible and dangerous nonsense. Lenina did her best to stop the ears of her mind; but every now and then a phrase would insist on becoming audible. "... to try the effect of arresting my impulses," she heard him say. The words seemed to touch a spring in her mind.
"Never put off till to-morrow the fun you can have to-day," she said gravely.
"Two hundred repetitions, twice a week from fourteen to sixteen and a half," was all his comment. The mad bad talk rambled44 on. "I want to know what passion is," she heard him saying. "I want to feel something strongly."
"When the individual feels, the community reels," Lenina pronounced.
"Well, why shouldn't it reel a bit?"
"Bernard!"
But Bernard remained unabashed.
"Adults intellectually and during working hours," he went on. "Infants where feeling and desire are concerned."
"Our Ford loved infants."
Ignoring the interruption. "It suddenly struck me the other day," continued Bernard, "that it might be possible to be an adult all the time."
"I don't understand." Lenina's tone was firm.
"I know you don't. And that's why we went to bed together yesterday-like infants-instead of being adults and waiting."
"But it was fun," Lenina insisted. "Wasn't it?"
"Oh, the greatest fun," he answered, but in a voice so mournful, with an expression so profoundly miserable, that Lenina felt all her triumph suddenly evaporate. Perhaps he had found her too plump, after all.
"I told you so," was all that Fanny said, when Lenina came and made her confidences. "It's the alcohol they put in his surrogate."
"All the same," Lenina insisted. "I do like him. He has such awfully nice hands. And the way he moves his shoulders-that's very attractive." She sighed. "But I wish he weren't so odd."
§2
HALTING for a moment outside the door of the Director's room, Bernard drew a deep breath and squared his shoulders, bracing45 himself to
meet the dislike and disapproval46 which he was certain of finding within. He knocked and entered.
"A permit for you to initial, Director," he said as airily as possible, and laid the paper on the writing-table.
The Director glanced at him sourly. But the stamp of the World Controller's Office was at the head of the paper and the signature of Mus-tapha Mond, bold and black, across the bottom. Everything was perfectly47 in order. The director had no choice. He pencilled his initials-two small pale letters abject48 at the feet of Mustapha Mond-and was about to return the paper without a word of comment or genial49 Ford-speed, when his eye was caught by something written in the body of the permit.
"For the New Mexican Reservation?" he said, and his tone, the face he lifted to Bernard, expressed a kind of agitated50 astonishment.
Surprised by his surprise, Bernard nodded. There was a silence.
The Director leaned back in his chair, frowning. "How long ago was it?" he said, speaking more to himself than to Bernard. "Twenty years, I suppose. Nearer twenty-five. I must have been your age ..." He sighed and shook his head.
Bernard felt extremely uncomfortable. A man so conventional, so scrupulously51 correct as the Director-and to commit so gross a solecism! It made him want to hide his face, to run out of the room. Not that he himself saw anything intrinsically objectionable in people talking about the remote past; that was one of those hypnopaedic prejudices he had (so he imagined) completely got rid of. What made him feel shy was the knowledge that the Director disapproved-disapproved and yet had been betrayed into doing the forbidden thing. Under what inward compulsion? Through his discomfort52 Bernard eagerly listened.
"I had the same idea as you," the Director was saying. "Wanted to have a look at the savages53. Got a permit for New Mexico and went there for my summer holiday. With the girl I was having at the moment. She was a Beta-Minus, and I think" (he shut his eyes), "I think she had yellow hair. Anyhow she was pneumatic, particularly pneumatic; I remember that. Well, we went there, and we looked at the savages, and we rode about on horses and all that. And then-it was almost the last day of my leave-then ... well, she got lost. We'd gone riding up one of those revolting mountains, and it was horribly hot and oppressive, and after lunch we went to sleep. Or at least I did. She must have gone for a walk, alone. At any rate, when I woke up, she wasn't there. And the most frightful54 thunderstorm I've ever seen was just bursting on us. And it poured and roared and flashed; and the horses broke loose and ran away; and I fell down, trying to catch them, and hurt my knee, so that I could hardly walk. Still, I searched and I shouted and I searched. But there was no sign of her. Then I thought she must have gone back to the rest-house by herself. So I crawled down into the valley by the way we had come. My knee was agonizingly painful, and I'd lost my soma. It took me hours. I didn't get back to the rest-house till after midnight. And she wasn't there; she wasn't there," the Director repeated. There was a silence. "Well," he resumed at last, "the next day there was a search. But we couldn't find her. She must have fallen into a gully somewhere; or been eaten by a mountain lion. Ford knows. Anyhow it was horrible. It upset me very much at the time. More than it ought to have done, I dare say. Because, after all, it's the sort of accident that might have happened to any one; and, of course, the social body persists although the component55 cells may change." But this sleep-taught consolation56 did not seem to be very effective. Shaking his head, "I actually dream about it sometimes," the Director went on in a low voice. "Dream of being woken up by that peal57 of thunder and finding her gone; dream of searching and searching for her under the trees." He lapsed58 into the silence of reminiscence.
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1
scent
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| n.气味，香味，香水，线索，嗅觉；v.嗅，发觉 | |
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putrid
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| adj.腐臭的；有毒的；已腐烂的；卑劣的 | |
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synthetic
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| adj.合成的，人工的；综合的；n.人工制品 | |
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inadequately
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| ad.不够地；不够好地 | |
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prospect
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| n.前景，前途；景色，视野 | |
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inviting
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| adj.诱人的，引人注目的 | |
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savage
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| adj.野蛮的；凶恶的，残暴的；n.未开化的人 | |
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eccentricity
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| n.古怪，反常，怪癖 | |
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rhinoceros
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| n.犀牛 | |
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rhinoceroses
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| n.钱，钞票( rhino的名词复数 )；犀牛(=rhinoceros)；犀牛( rhinoceros的名词复数 )；脸皮和犀牛皮一样厚 | |
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11
disquieting
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| adj.令人不安的，令人不平静的v.使不安，使忧虑，使烦恼( disquiet的现在分词 ) | |
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mania
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| n.疯狂；躁狂症，狂热，癖好 | |
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Oxford
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| n.牛津（英国城市） | |
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Ford
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| n.浅滩，水浅可涉处；v.涉水，涉过 | |
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15
astonishment
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| n.惊奇，惊异 | |
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apparently
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| adv.显然地；表面上，似乎 | |
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mumbled
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| 含糊地说某事，叽咕，咕哝( mumble的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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grumbled
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| 抱怨( grumble的过去式和过去分词 )； 发牢骚； 咕哝； 发哼声 | |
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obstinately
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| ad.固执地，顽固地 | |
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misery
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| n.痛苦，苦恼，苦难；悲惨的境遇，贫苦 | |
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proffered
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| v.提供，贡献，提出( proffer的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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22
shrugged
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| vt.耸肩（shrug的过去式与过去分词形式） | |
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propeller
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| n.螺旋桨，推进器 | |
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24
hovering
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| 鸟( hover的现在分词 )； 靠近（某事物）； （人）徘徊； 犹豫 | |
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25
appalled
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| v.使惊骇，使充满恐惧( appall的过去式和过去分词)adj.惊骇的；丧胆的 | |
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random
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| adj.随机的；任意的；n.偶然的(或随便的)行动 | |
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derisively
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| adv. 嘲笑地，嘲弄地 | |
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28
blasphemy
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| n.亵渎，渎神 | |
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distress
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| n.苦恼，痛苦，不舒适；不幸；vt.使悲痛 | |
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meditatively
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| adv.冥想地 | |
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31
besought
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| v.恳求，乞求（某事物）( beseech的过去式和过去分词 )；(beseech的过去式与过去分词) | |
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determined
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| adj.坚定的；有决心的 | |
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miserable
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| adj.悲惨的，痛苦的；可怜的，糟糕的 | |
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voluptuous
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| adj.肉欲的，骄奢淫逸的 | |
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flinched
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| v.（因危险和痛苦）退缩，畏惧( flinch的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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36
spoke
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| n.（车轮的）辐条；轮辐；破坏某人的计划；阻挠某人的行动 v.讲，谈（speak的过去式）；说；演说；从某种观点来说 | |
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gulp
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| vt.吞咽，大口地吸（气）；vi.哽住；n.吞咽 | |
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38
enquired
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| 打听( enquire的过去式和过去分词 )； 询问； 问问题； 查问 | |
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39
jolt
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| v.（使）摇动，（使）震动，（使）颠簸 | |
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40
awfully
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| adv.可怕地，非常地，极端地 | |
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41
triumphantly
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| ad.得意洋洋地；得胜地；成功地 | |
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42
premature
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| adj.比预期时间早的；不成熟的，仓促的 | |
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43
specified
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| adj.特定的 | |
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44
rambled
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| （无目的地）漫游( ramble的过去式和过去分词 )； （喻）漫谈； 扯淡； 长篇大论 | |
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45
bracing
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| adj.令人振奋的 | |
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46
disapproval
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| n.反对，不赞成 | |
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perfectly
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| adv.完美地，无可非议地，彻底地 | |
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48
abject
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| adj.极可怜的，卑屈的 | |
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49
genial
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| adj.亲切的，和蔼的，愉快的，脾气好的 | |
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50
agitated
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| adj.被鼓动的，不安的 | |
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51
scrupulously
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| adv.一丝不苟地；小心翼翼地，多顾虑地 | |
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52
discomfort
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| n.不舒服，不安，难过，困难，不方便 | |
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53
savages
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| 未开化的人，野蛮人( savage的名词复数 ) | |
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54
frightful
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| adj.可怕的；讨厌的 | |
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55
component
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| n.组成部分，成分，元件；adj.组成的，合成的 | |
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56
consolation
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| n.安慰，慰问 | |
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57
peal
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| n.钟声；v.鸣响 | |
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58
lapsed
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| adj.流失的，堕落的v.退步( lapse的过去式和过去分词 )；陷入；倒退；丧失 | |
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enviously
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| adv.满怀嫉妒地 | |
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