He lifted it and pushed but the door wouldn't open. Standing on tiptoe he could just reach the big wooden latch. "Linda, Linda." He kicked and wriggled but the man carried him across to the door, opened it, put him down on the floor in the middle of the other room, and went away, shutting the door behind him. Linda was still holding him, still saying, "No, no." The man said something short and angry, and suddenly her hands were gone. The man put up his other hand and lifted him up. "No, no!" But the man took hold of one of his arms, and it hurt. "No," Linda said again, and he felt her hand squeezing him more tightly. Linda said, "No." But the man bent over the bed towards him and his face was huge, terrible the black ropes of hair touched the blanket. In those other words he did not understand so well, she said to the man, "Not with John here." The man looked at him, then again at Linda, and said a few words in a soft voice. There was a sudden explosive sunrise, and simultaneously, the Sixteen burst into song. And then, in all but silence, in all but darkness, there followed a gradual deturgescence, a diminuendo sliding gradually, through quarter tones, down, down to a faintly whispered dominant chord that lingered on (while the five-four rhythms still pulsed below) charging the darkened seconds with an intense expectancy. Rich with a wealth of harmonics, their tremulous chorus mounted towards a climax, louder and ever louder-until at last, with a wave of his hand, the conductor let loose the final shattering note of ether-music and blew the sixteen merely human blowers clean out of existence.
The saxophones wailed like melodious cats under the moon, moaned in the alto and tenor registers as though the little death were upon them. Lenina and Henry were soon the four hundred and first. The Sixteen Sexophonists were playing an old favourite: "There ain't no Bottle in all the world like that dear little Bottle of mine." Four hundred couples were five-stepping round the polished floor.
On the domed ceiling of the hall, the colour organ had momentarily painted a tropical sunset. The air seemed hot and somehow breathless with the scent of ambergris and sandalwood.
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