Chapter X - Summary

The Director and Henry Foster are in the midst of the Centre’s frenzy of workplace activity talking about Bernard Marx.

The Director tells Foster than he plans on making Bernard an example in front of the higher-ranked workers in the Centre. Foster retaliates hypocritically with that Bernard does his job very well. The Director agrees but that just deepens the severity of the punishment he plans on giving Bernard. He feels that ‘the greater a man’s talents, the greater his power to lead astray’.

He states that if one person has to live in misery in order for the rest of the society to retain order, then so be it. He asks Foster to view the matter in a dispassionate way – murder can kill an individual, but what is an individual in the society? Another can be made just as easily. It is the unorthodox behaviour of Bernard that threatens an entire society, not just the life of an individual.

Bernard then enters the room appearing translucently confident. His voice level trembles as he greets the Director.

The Director asks for the attention for the workers in the room and declares that Bernard has been living unorthodoxly in the society with his contrary to accepted belief of the society’s sports and soma, and especially of his sex-life. He booms to the crowd that Bernard has refused to obey the teachings of Ford and is therefore an enemy to Order, Stability, and Civilization in general. The Director proposes to dismiss Bernard by a transfer to a Sub-Centre in Iceland as the lowest order in society, where he will have a smaller chance of leading others astray by his ‘unfordly examples’.

The Director, obviously content with his massive speech, asks Bernard if he has anything to say that could prove why he should not be given the judgements passed upon him.

Bernard answers loudly that he does. The Director is taken back but allows him to show him.

Bernard opened a door. The workers gasped at the horrifying sight of the bloated, distorted shaped Linda as she smiled shyly. Linda recognizes the Director immediately and talks about how she would never forget his face, even if he had forgotten all about her. She asks if he remembers ‘his Linda’ and looks at him smiling expectedly.

The Director stares at Linda in petrified disgust as his confidence goes out like a light.

Linda asks once again if he remembers her in an anxious trembled voice. Her face is described as twisting grotesquely as she feels complete and utter grief. She holds out her arms and yells, “Tomakin!” (the name that she called him when describing him to John).

The Director asks what the meaning is of such an atrocious being but is interrupted by Linda running towards him and burying her face in his chest.

The higher ranked workers began howling in laughter.

The Director tried to unchain himself from Linda as she clung to him crying that she is Linda. The laughter drowned her out until she screamed, “You made me have a baby”.

There was complete silence as the Director stared horrified at Linda. She talks about her baby and how she is a mother in front of all of the workers as they stand silenced in outrage by the obscenity. Linda breaks away from the Director and begins sobbing how she did not understand and that it was not her fault, as she followed all the contraceptive drills as she always did. She then called for her son.

John enters swiftly and falls to his knees in front of the Director exclaiming, “My father!”
This not so serious obscenity as calling oneself or another ‘mother’ broke the tense situation for the workers looking on and laughter broke out. They found it hysterically hilarious that he would call the Director, of all people, ‘father’. They were uncontrollably laughing as the Director glared at John in agony and bewildered humiliation. The Director put his hands over his ears and ran out of the room as it began laughing at him, more loudly than before.