Crome Yellow by Aldous Huxley

with a delicate old-maidish precision of utterance.
    â€˜Couldn’t you give the animals a little holiday from producing children?’ asked Anne. ‘I’m sorry for the poor things.’
    Mr Wimbush shook his head. ‘Personally,’ he said, ‘I rather like seeing fourteen pigs grow where only one grew before. The spectacle of so much crude life is refreshing.’
    â€˜I’m glad to hear you say so,’ Gombauld broke in warmly. ‘Lots of life: that’s what we want. I like pullulation; everything ought to increase and multiply as hard as it can.’
    Gombauld grew lyrical. Everybody ought to have children – Anne ought to have them, Mary ought to have them – dozens and dozens. He emphasized his point by thumping with his walking-stick on the bull’s leather flanks. Mr Scogan ought to pass on his intelligence to little Scogans, and Denis to little Denises. The bull turned his head to see what was happening, regarded the drumming stick for several seconds, then turned back again satisfied, it seemed, that nothing was happening. Sterility was odious, unnatural, a sin against life. Life, life, and still more life. The ribs of the placid bull resounded.
    Standing with his back against the farmyard pump, a little apart, Denis examined the group. Gombauld, passionate and vivacious, was its centre. The others stood round, listening – Henry Wimbush, calm and polite beneath his grey bowler; Mary, with parted lips and eyes that shone with the indignation of a convinced birth-controller. Anne looked on through half-shut eyes, smiling; and beside her stood Mr Scogan, bolt upright in an attitude of metallic rigidity that contrasted strangely with that fluid grace of hers which even in stillness suggested a soft movement.
    Gombauld ceased talking, and Mary, flushed and outraged, opened her mouth to refute him. But she was too slow. Before she could utter a word Mr Scogan’s fluty voice hadpronounced the opening phrases of a discourse. There was no hope of getting so much as a word in edgeways; Mary had perforce to resign herself.
    â€˜Even your eloquence, my dear Gombauld,’ he was saying – ‘even your eloquence must prove inadequate to reconvert the world to a belief in the delights of mere multiplication. With the gramophone, the cinema, and the automatic pistol, the goddess of Applied Science has presented the world with another gift, more precious even than these – the means of dissociating love from propagation. Eros, for those who wish it, is now an entirely free god; his deplorable associations with Lucina may be broken at will. In the course of the next few centuries, who knows? the world may see a more complete severance. I look forward to it optimistically. Where the great Erasmus Darwin and Miss Anna Seward, Swan of Lichfield, experimented – and, for all their scientific ardour, failed – our descendants will experiment and succeed. An impersonal generation will take the place of Nature’s hideous system. In vast state incubators, rows upon rows of gravid bottles will supply the world with the population it requires. The family system will disappear; society, sapped at its very base, will have to find new foundations; and Eros, beautifully and irresponsibly free, will flit like a gay butterfly from flower to flower through a sunlit world.’
    â€˜It sounds lovely,’ said Anne.
    â€˜The distant future always does.’
    Mary’s china blue eyes, more serious and more astonished than ever, were fixed on Mr Scogan. ‘Bottles?’ she said. ‘Do you really think so? Bottles. . . .’

CHAPTER VI
    MR BARBECUE-SMITH ARRIVED in time for tea on Saturday afternoon. He was a short and corpulent man, with a very large head and no neck. In his earlier middle age he had been distressed by this absence of neck, but was comforted by reading in Balzac’s
Louis Lambert
that all the world’s great men have been