Brave New World by Aldous Leonard Huxley《美丽新世界》5(6)

?" 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 rambled 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, bracing himself to meet the dislike and disapproval 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 Mustapha Mond, bold and black, across the bottom. Everything was perfectly in order. The director had no choice. He pencilled his initials–two small pale letters abject at the feet of Mustapha Mond–and was about to return the paper without a word of comment or genial 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 agitated 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 …