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Bernard has invited the Arch-Community-Songster of Canterbury, along with the Head Mistress of Eton, for a special party to meet the Savage, but John refuses to come out of his room. No amount of begging or wheedling persuades him to come out; instead, he flings Zuni curses through the closed door. Bernard has to tell his guests the Savage won't be appearing. The guests are furious. They accuse Bernard of playing a joke on them and begin talking about him, loudly and within earshot. Suddenly, Bernard is again a wretched little man who had alcohol poured in his bottle by mistake. Henry Foster tells the Arch-Community-Songster that the D.H.C. had been on the verge of transferring Bernard to Iceland. Lenina is miserable, imagining that John won't appear because he doesn't like her. She suffers the same dreadful emptiness and nausea that precedes a Violent Passion Surrogate treatment. When the Arch-Community-Songster tells her to come with him, she goes, but she pauses outside the helicopter to look at the moon. Later, as the Arch-Community-Songster begins undressing her, she says she'd better take a couple of grams of soma. Bernard is completely dejected and retreats into soma at night. During the day, the contrast between the intoxication of success and being his old self again makes him more miserable than ever. John comments to him that he's much more like the person he'd been at the Reservation, but Bernard tells him it's because he's unhappy. John says he'd rather be unhappy than have the fake happiness Bernard was having here. Bernard blames John, knowing it's unfair, but powerless to take revenge on the people who actually snubbed him. So he sets about exacting small forms of vengeance on John, and on Helmholtz, who formed an immediate bond with John that's closer than Bernard ever enjoyed. Helmholtz, being a man of character, immediately forgave Bernard for his behavior, which made Bernard as resentful as he was grateful. Recently, Helmholtz admitted that he's been in some trouble of his own: in one of his lectures, he used some rhymes on solitude and the well-conditioned students promptly turned him in to the Principal. Now Helmholtz is a marked man. Nevertheless, Helmholtz frequently visits John, who reads to him from his Shakespeare book. Helmholtz listens to the verses with excitement, until Bernard interrupts with caustic remarks. This is Bernard's revenge—shattering a favorite passage, defiling the words, saying a particular verse is just a Solidarity Service hymn. But it's Helmholtz who ultimately commits the worst offense. One day, as John reads from Romeo and Juliet, Helmhotz erupts into uncontrollable laughter. The idea of a mother and father, obscenities, both of them, forcing a girl to have someone she doesn't want, and the idiotic girl not telling them she was having someone she preferred, is absurd. And bodies lying dead, un-cremated, wasting phosphorus, is too much for Helmholtz. The tears stream down his face and John, furious, locks the book away. A little while later, Helmhotz apologizes. He says he supposes people need ridiculous, mad situations, and old Shakespeare was such a marvelous propaganda technician precisely because he had so many insane things to get excited about. But who's going to get excited about a boy having or not having a girl? Helmholtz thinks they need some other kind of madness, if only he knew where to find it. Chapter 12 completes Bernard's inevitable downfall. Rather than resisting society with courage, he took revenge on it using John and Linda, innocent victims, and John, whose illusions have been destroyed, resists. Ironically, John echoes what Bernard earlier told Lenina when he says he'd rather be unhappy than have fake happiness. Bernard is now too miserable to care. Helmholtz's forgiveness only drives home to Bernard that his problem, rather than being a physical defect, is a lack of character. Helmholtz, on the other hand, isn't afraid to rebel, and he does so knowing he'll be punished. He understands the power of words, and it is through these words that he and John are able to form a true bond. However, Helmholtz can't help his own conditioning, which prevents him from finding any real meaning in Shakespeare's works, and thus the madness in his present situation. Lenina, unable to have John and not understanding why, feels the unfamiliar pangs of misery. In Huxley's world of instant gratification, the ability to have everything one wants fails to prepare Lenina for the violent emotions of not having.
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