now his only comfort, Bernard continued perversely to nourish, along with his quite genuine affection, a secret grievance against the Savage, to meditate a campaign of small revenges to be wreaked upon him. Nourishing a grievance against the Arch-Community-Songster was useless; there was no possibility of being revenged on the Chief Bottler or the Assistant Predestinator. As a victim, the Savage possessed, for Bernard, this enormous superiority over the others: that he was accessible. One of the principal functions of a friend is to suffer (in a milder and symbolic form) the punishments that we should like, but are unable, to inflict upon our enemies.

Bernard’s other victim-friend was Helmholtz. When, discomfited, he came and asked once more for the friendship which in his prosperity he had not thought it worth his while to preserve, Helmholtz gave it; and gave it without a reproach, without a comment, as though he had forgotten that there had ever been a quarrel. Touched, Bernard felt himself at the same time humiliated by this magnanimity—a magnanimity the more extraordinary and therefore the more humiliating in that it owed nothing to soma and everything to Helmholtz’s character. It was the Helmholtz of daily life who forgot and forgave, not the Helmholtz of a halfgramme holiday. Bernard was duly grateful (it was an enormous comfort to have his friend again) and also duly resentful (it would be a pleasure to take some revenge on Helmholtz for his generosity.)

At their first meeting after the estrangement, Bernard poured out the tale of his miseries and accepted consolation. It was not till some days later that he learned, to his surprise and with a twinge of shame, that he was not the only one who had been in trouble. Helmholtz had also come into conflict with Authority.

‘It was over some rhymes,’ he explained. ‘I was giving my usual course of Advanced Emotional Engineering for Third Year Students. Twelve lectures, of which the seventh is about rhymes. “On the Use of Rhymes in Moral Propaganda and Advertisement,” to be precise. I always illustrate my lecture with a lot of technical examples. This time I thought I’d give them one I’d just written myself. Pure madness, of course; but I couldn’t resist it.’ He laughed. ‘I was curious to see what their reactions would be. Besides,’ he added more gravely, ‘I wanted to do a bit of propaganda; I was trying to engineer them into feeling as I’d felt when I wrote the rhymes. Ford!’ He laughed again. ‘What an outcry there was! The Principal had me up and threatened to hand me the immediate sack. I’m a marked man.’

‘But what were your rhymes?’ Bernard asked.

‘They were about being alone.’

Bernard’s eyebrows went up.

‘I’ll recite them to you, if you like.’ And Helmholtz began:

‘Yesterday’s committee,   Sticks, but a broken drum,   Midnight in the City,   Flutes in a vacuum,   Shut lips, sleeping faces,   Every stopped machine,   The dumb and littered places   Where crowds have been—   All silences rejoice,   Weep (loudly or low),   Speak—but with the voice   Of whom, I do not know.   Absence, say, of Susan’s,   Absence of Egeria’s   Arms and respective bosoms,   Lips and, ah, posteriors,   Slowly form a presence;   Whose? and, I ask, of what   So absurd an essence,   That something, which is not,   Nevertheless should populate   Empty night more solidly   Than that with which we copulate,   Why should it seem so squalidly?

Well, I gave them that as an example, and they reported me to the Principal.’

‘I’m not surprised,’ said Bernard. ‘It’s flatly against all their sleep-teaching. Remember, they’ve had at least a quarter of a million warnings against solitude.’

‘I know. But I thought I’d like to see what the effect would be.’

‘Well, you’ve seen now.’

Helmholtz only laughed. ‘I feel,’ he said, after a silence, ‘as though I were just beginning to have something to write about. As though I were beginning to be able to use that power I feel I’ve got inside me—that