A Clockwork Orange - Burgess, Anthony [63]
“That’s what the charles said, sir,” I said. “The prison chaplain, I mean.”
“Did he, did he? Of course he did. He’d have to, wouldn’t he, being a Christian? Well, now then,” he said, still wiping the same plate he’d been wiping ten minutes ago, “we shall have a few people in to see you tomorrow. I think you can be used, poor boy. I think that you can help dislodge this overbearing Government. To turn a decent young man into a piece of clockwork should not, surely, be seen as any triumph for any government, save one that boasts of its repressiveness.” He was still wiping this same plate. I said:
“Sir, you’re still wiping that same plate, I agree with you, sir, about boasting. This Government seems to be very boastful.”
“Oh,” he said, like viddying this plate for the first time and then putting it down. “I’m still not too handy,” he said, “with domestic chores. My wife used to do them all and leave me to my writing.”
“Your wife, sir?” I said. “Has she gone and left you?” I really wanted to know about his wife, remembering very well. “Yes, left me,” he said, in a like loud and bitter goloss. “She died, you see. She was brutally raped and beaten. The shock was very great. It was in this house,” his rookers were trembling, holding a wiping-up cloth, “in that room next door. I have had to steel myself to continue to live here, but she would have wished me to stay where her fragrant memory still lingers. Yes yes yes. Poor little girl.” I viddied all clearly, my brothers, what had happened that far-off nochy, and vid-dying myself on that job, I began to feel I wanted to sick and the pain started up in my gulliver. This veck viddied this, because my litso felt it was all drained of red red krovvy, very pale, and he would be able to viddy this. “You go to bed now,” he said kindly. “I’ve got the spare room ready. Poor poor boy, you must have had a terrible time. A victim of the modern age, just as she was. Poor poor poor girl.”
A Clockwork Orange
5
I had a real horrorshow night’s sleep, brothers, with no dreams at all, and the morning was very clear and like frosty, and there was the very pleasant like von of breakfast frying away down below. It took me some little time to remember where I was, as it always does, but it soon came back to me and then I felt like warmed and protected. But, as I laid there in the bed, waiting to be called down to breakfast, it struck me that I ought to get to know the name of this kind protecting and like motherly veck, so I had a pad round in my nagoy nogas looking for ‘A Clockwork Orange’, which would be bound to have his eemya in, he being the author. There was nothing in my bedroom except a bed and a chair and a light, so I ittied next door to this veck’s own room, and there I viddied his wife on the wall, a bolshy blown-up photo, so I felt a malenky bit sick remembering. But there were two or three shelves of books there too, and there was, as I thought there must be, a copy of ‘A Clockwork Orange’, and on the back of the book, like on the spine, was the author’s eemya -F. Alexander. Good Bog, I thought, he is another Alex. Then I leafed through, standing in his pyjamas and bare nogas but not feeling one malenky bit cold, the cottage being warm all through, and I could not viddy what the book was about. It seemed written in a very bezoomny like style, full of Ah and Oh and all that cal, but what seemed to come out of it was that all lewdies nowadays were being turned into machines and that they were really - you and me and him and kiss-my-sharries - more like a natural growth like a fruit. F. Alexander seemed to think that we all like grow on what he called the world-tree in the world-orchard that like Bog or God planted, and we were there because Bog or God had need of us to quench his thirsty love, or some such cal. I didn’t like the shoom of this