Andrew’s? But again, no: Bernard considered that Electro-magnetic Golf was a waste of time. Then what about a round of Electro-magnetic Golf at St. But Bernard thought there would be too much of a crowd. Lenina had suggested a swim at Toquay Country Club followed by dinner at the Oxford Union. The first afternoon they went out together was particularly fine. (Apart, of course, from going to bed: but one couldn’t do that all the time.) Yes, what was there? Precious little. For what was there that one could do in private. Which meant, in practice, not doing anything at all. That mania, to start with, for doing things in private. Pretty harmless, perhaps but also pretty disquieting. However,” he added consolingly, “I think he’s pretty harmless.” Otherwise the Director would never have kept him.
Luckily for him, he’s pretty good at his job. “Some men are almost rhinoceroses they don’t respond properly to conditioning. “You can’t teach a rhinoceros tricks,” he had explained in his brief and vigorous style. 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 rhinoceros. “Alcohol in his blood-surrogate,” was Fanny’s explanation of every eccentricity. 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. As an Alpha-Plus psychologist, Bernard was one of the few men she knew entitled to a permit. Not more than half a dozen people in the whole Centre had ever been inside a Savage Reservation. Moreover, for at least three days of that week they would be in the Savage Reservation. The prospect of flying West again, and for a whole week, was very inviting. Anyhow, it was of absolutely no importance. And even then, how inadequately! A cheap week-end in New York–had it been with Jean-Jacques Habibullah or Bokanovsky Jones? She couldn’t remember. Added to which, she had only been to America once before. No, decidedly she couldn’t face the North Pole again.
Nothing to do, and the hotel too hopelessly old-fashioned–no television laid on in the bedrooms, no scent organ, only the most putrid synthetic music, and not more than twenty-five Escalator-Squash Courts for over two hundred guests. 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. 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. ODD, ODD, odd, was Lenina’s verdict on Bernard Marx.
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