extra, latent power. Something seems to be coming to me.’ In spite of all his troubles, he seemed, Bernard thought, profoundly happy.

Helmholtz and the Savage took to one another at once. So cordially indeed that Bernard felt a sharp pang of jealousy. In all these weeks he had never come to so close an intimacy with the Savage as Helmholtz immediately achieved. Watching them, listening to their talk, he found himself sometimes resentfully wishing that he had never brought them together. He was ashamed of his jealousy and alternately made efforts of will and took soma to keep himself from feeling it. But the efforts were not very successful; and between the soma-holidays there were, of necessity, intervals. The odious sentiment kept on returning.

At his third meeting with the Savage, Helmholtz recited his rhymes on Solitude.

‘What do you think of them?’ he asked when he had done.

The Savage shook his head. ‘Listen to this,’ was his answer; and unlocking the drawer in which he kept his mouse-eaten book, he opened and read:

‘Let the bird of loudest lay,   On the sole Arabian tree,   Herald sad and trumpet be …’

Helmholtz listened with a growing excitement. At ‘sole Arabian tree’ he started; at ‘thou shrieking harbinger’ he smiled with sudden pleasure; at ‘every fowl of tyrant wing’ the blood rushed up into his cheeks; but at ‘defunctive music’ he turned pale and trembled with an unprecedented emotion. The Savage read on:

‘Property was thus appall’d,   That the self was not the same;   Single nature’s double name   Neither two nor one was call’d.

Reason in itself confounded   Saw division grow together …’

‘Orgy-porgy!’ said Bernard, interrupting the reading with a loud, unpleasant laugh. ‘It’s just a Solidarity Service hymn.’ He was revenging himself on his two friends for liking one another more than they liked him.

In the course of their next two or three meetings he frequently repeated this little act of vengeance. It was simple and, since both Helmholtz and the Savage were dreadfully pained by the shattering and defilement of a favourite poetic crystal, extremely effective. In the end, Helmholtz threatened to kick him out of the room if he dared to interrupt again. And yet, strangely enough, the next interruption, the most disgraceful of all, came from Helmholtz himself.

The Savage was reading Romeo and Juliet aloud—reading (for all the time he was seeing himself as Romeo and Lenina as Juliet) with an intense and quivering passion. Helmholtz had listened to the scene of the lovers’ first meeting with a puzzled interest. The scene in the orchard had delighted him with its poetry; but the sentiments expressed had made him smile. Getting into such a state about having a girl—it seemed rather ridiculous. But, taken detail by verbal detail, what a superb piece of emotional engineering! ‘That old fellow,’ he said, ‘he makes our best propaganda technicians look absolutely silly.’ The Savage smiled triumphantly and resumed his reading. All went tolerably well until, in the last scene of the third act, Capulet and Lady Capulet began to bully Juliet to marry Paris. Helmholtz had been restless throughout the entire scene; but when, pathetically mimed by the Savage, Juliet cried out:

‘Is there no pity sitting in the clouds,   That sees into the bottom of my grief?   O, sweet my mother, cast me not away!   Delay this marriage for a month, a week;   Or, if you do not, make the bridal bed   In that dim monument where Tybalt lies …’

when Juliet said this, Helmholtz broke out in an explosion of uncontrollable guffawing.

The mother and father (grotesque obscenity) forcing the daughter to have some one she didn’t want! And the idiotic girl not saying that she was having some one else whom (for the moment, at any rate) she preferred! In its smutty absurdity the situation was irresistibly comical. He had managed, with a heroic effort, to hold down the mounting pressure of his hilarity; but ‘sweet mother’ (in the Savage’s tremulous tone of anguish and the reference to Tybalt lying dead, but evidently uncremated and wasting his phosphorus on a dim monument, were too much for him. He laughed and laughed till the tears streamed down his