I
It was the middle of the morning, and Winston had left the
cubicle to go to the lavatory.
A solitary figure was coming towards him from the other
end of the long, brightly-lit corridor. It was the girl with
dark hair. Four days had gone past since the evening when he
had run into her outside the junk-shop. As she came nearer he
saw that her right arm was in a sling, not noticeable at a
distance because it was of the same colour as her overalls.
Probably she had crushed her hand while swinging round one of
the big kaleidoscopes on which the plots of novels were
'roughed in'. It was a common accident in the Fiction
Department.
They were perhaps four metres apart when the girl stumbled
and fell almost flat on her face. A sharp cry of pain was wrung
out of her. She must have fallen right on the injured arm.
Winston stopped short. The girl had risen to her knees. Her
face had turned a milky yellow colour against which her mouth
stood out redder than ever. Her eyes were fixed on his, with an
appealing expression that looked more like fear than pain.
A curious emotion stirred in Winston's heart. In front of
him was an enemy who was trying to kill him: in front of him,
also, was a human creature, in pain and perhaps with a broken
bone. Already he had instinctively started forward to help her.
In the moment when he had seen her fall on the bandaged arm, it
had been as though he felt the pain in his own body.
'You're hurt?' he said.
'It's nothing. My arm. It'll be all right in a second.'
She spoke as though her heart were fluttering. She had
certainly turned very pale.
'You haven't broken anything?'
'No, I'm all right. It hurt for a moment, that's all.'
She held out her free hand to him, and he helped her up.
She had regained some of her colour, and appeared very much
better.
'It's nothing,' she repeated shortly. 'I only gave my
wrist a bit of a bang. Thanks, comrade!'
And with that she walked on in the direction in which she
had been going, as briskly as though it had really been
nothing. The whole incident could not have taken as much as
half a minute. Not to let one's feelings appear in one's face
was a habit that had acquired the status of an instinct, and in
any case they had been standing straight in front of a
telescreen when the thing happened. Nevertheless it had been
very difficult not to betray a momentary surprise, for in the
two or three seconds while he was helping her up the girl had
slipped something into his hand. There was no question that she
had done it intentionally. It was something small and flat. As
he passed through the lavatory door he transferred it to his
pocket and felt it with the tips of his fingers. It was a scrap
of paper folded into a square.
While he stood at the urinal he managed, with a little
more fingering, to get it unfolded. Obviously there must be a
message of some kind written on it. For a moment he was tempted
to take it into one of the water-closets and read it at once.
But that would be shocking folly, as he well knew. There was no
place where you could be more certain that the telescreens were
watched continuously.
He went back to his cubicle, sat down, threw the fragment
of paper casually among the other papers on the desk, put on
his spectacles and hitched the speakwrite towards him. 'five
minutes,' he told himself, 'five minutes at the very least!'
His heart bumped in his breast with frightening loudness.
Fortunately the piece of work he was engaged on was mere
routine, the rectification of a long list of figures, not
needing close attention.
Whatever was written on the paper, it must have some kind
of political meaning. So far as he could see there were two
possibilities. One, much the more likely, was that the girl was
an agent of the Thought Police, just as he had feared. He did
not know why the Thought Police should choose to deliver their
messages in such a fashion, but perhaps they had their reasons.
The thing that was written on the paper might be a threat, a
summons, an order to commit suicide, a trap of some
description. But there was another, wilder possibility that
kept raising its head, though he tried vainly to suppress it.
This was, that the message did not come from the Thought Police
at all, but from some kind of underground organization. Perhaps
the Brotherhood existed after all! Perhaps the girl was part of
it! No doubt the idea was absurd, but it had sprung into his
mind in the very instant of feeling the scrap of paper in his
hand. It was not till a couple of minutes later that the other,
more probable explanation had occurred to him. And even now,
though his intellect told him that the message probably meant
death -- still, that was not what he believed, and the
unreasonable hope persisted, and his heart banged, and it was
with difficulty that he kept his voice from trembling as he
murmured his figures into the speakwrite.
He rolled up the completed bundle of work and slid it into
the pneumatic tube. Eight minutes had gone by. He re- adjusted
his spectacles on his nose, sighed, and drew the next batch of
work towards him, with the scrap of paper on top of it. He
flattened it out. On it was written, in a large unformed
handwriting:
I love you.
For several seconds he was too stunned even to throw the
incriminating thing into the memory hole. When he did so,
although he knew very well the danger of showing too much
interest, he could not resist reading it once again, just to
make sure that the words were really there.
For the rest of the morning it was very difficult to work.
What was even worse than having to focus his mind on a series
of niggling jobs was the need to conceal his agitation from the
telescreen. He felt as though a fire were burning in his belly.
Lunch in the hot, crowded, noise- filled canteen was torment.
He had hoped to be alone for a little while during the lunch
hour, but as bad luck would have it the imbecile Parsons
flopped down beside him, the tang of his sweat almost defeating
the tinny smell of stew, and kept up a stream of talk about the
preparations for Hate Week. He was particularly enthusiastic
about a papier- ma^che/ model of Big Brother's head, two metres
wide, which was being made for the occasion by his daughter's
troop of Spies. The irritating thing was that in the racket of
voices Winston could hardly hear what Parsons was saying, and
was constantly having to ask for some fatuous remark to be
repeated. Just once he caught a glimpse of the girl, at a table
with two other girls at the far end of the room. She appeared
not to have seen him, and he did not look in that direction
again.
The afternoon was more bearable. Immediately after lunch
there arrived a delicate, difficult piece of work which would
take several hours and necessitated putting everything else
aside. It consisted in falsifying a series of production
reports of two years ago, in such a way as to cast discredit on
a prominent member of the Inner Party, who was now under a
cloud. This was the kind of thing that Winston was good at, and
for more than two hours he succeeded in shutting the girl out
of his mind altogether. Then the memory of her face came back,
and with it a raging, intolerable desire to be alone. Until he
could be alone it was impossible to think this new development
out. Tonight was one of his nights at the Community Centre. He
wolfed another tasteless meal in the canteen, hurried off to
the Centre, took part in the solemn foolery of a 'discussion
group', played two games of table tennis, swallowed several
glasses of gin, and sat for half an hour through a lecture
entitled 'Ingsoc in relation to chess'. His soul writhed with
boredom, but for once he had had no impulse to shirk his
evening at the Centre. At the sight of the words I love
you the desire to stay alive had welled up in him, and the
taking of minor risks suddenly seemed stupid. It was not till
twenty-three hours, when he was home and in bed -- in the
darkness, where you were safe even from the telescreen so long
as you kept silent -- that he was able to think continuously.
It was a physical problem that had to be solved: how to
get in touch with the girl and arrange a meeting. He did not
consider any longer the possibility that she might be laying
some kind of trap for him. He knew that it was not so, because
of her unmistakable agitation when she handed him the note.
Obviously she had been frightened out of her wits, as well she
might be. Nor did the idea of refusing her advances even cross
his mind. Only five nights ago he had contemplated smashing her
skull in with a cobblestone, but that was of no importance. He
thought of her naked, youthful body, as he had seen it in his
dream. He had imagined her a fool like all the rest of them,
her head stuffed with lies and hatred, her belly full of ice. A
kind of fever seized him at the thought that he might lose her,
the white youthful body might slip away from him! What he
feared more than anything else was that she would simply change
her mind if he did not get in touch with her quickly. But the
physical difficulty of meeting was enormous. It was like trying
to make a move at chess when you were already mated. Whichever
way you turned, the telescreen faced you. Actually, all the
possible ways of communicating with her had occurred to him
within five minutes of reading the note; but now, with time to
think, he went over them one by one, as though laying out a row
of instruments on a table.
Obviously the kind of encounter that had happened this
morning could not be repeated. If she had worked in the Records
Department it might have been comparatively simple, but he had
only a very dim idea whereabouts in the building the Fiction
Departrnent lay, and he had no pretext for going there. If he
had known where she lived, and at what time she left work, he
could have contrived to meet her somewhere on her way home; but
to try to follow her home was not safe, because it would mean
loitering about outside the Ministry, which was bound to be
noticed. As for sending a letter through the mails, it was out
of the question. By a routine that was not even secret, all
letters were opened in transit. Actually, few people ever wrote
letters. For the messages that it was occasionally necessary to
send, there were printed postcards with long lists of phrases,
and you struck out the ones that were inapplicable. In any case
he did not know the girl's name, let alone her address. Finally
he decided that the safest place was the canteen. If he could
get her at a table by herself, somewhere in the middle of the
room, not too near the telescreens, and with a sufficient buzz
of conversation all round -- if these conditions endured for,
say, thirty seconds, it might be possible to exchange a few
words.
For a week after this, life was like a restless dream. On
the next day she did not appear in the canteen until he was
leaving it, the whistle having already blown. Presumably she
had been changed on to a later shift. They passed each other
without a glance. On the day after that she was in the canteen
at the usual time, but with three other girls and immediately
under a telescreen. Then for three dreadful days she did not
appear at all. His whole mind and body seemed to be afflicted
with an unbearable sensitivity, a sort of transparency, which
made every movement, every sound, every contact, every word
that he had to speak or listen to, an agony. Even in sleep he
could not altogether escape from her image. He did not touch
the diary during those days. If there was any relief, it was in
his work, in which he could sometimes forget himself for ten
minutes at a stretch. He had absolutely no clue as to what had
happened to her. There was no enquiry he could make. She might
have been vaporized, she might have committed suicide, she
might have been transferred to the other end of Oceania: worst
and likeliest of all, she might simply have changed her mind
and decided to avoid him.
The next day she reappeared. Her arm was out of the sling
and she had a band of sticking-plaster round her wrist. The
relief of seeing her was so great that he could not resist
staring directly at her for several seconds. On the following
day he very nearly succeeded in speaking to her. When he came
into the canteen she was sitting at a table well out from the
wall, and was quite alone. It was early, and the place was not
very full. The queue edged forward till Winston was almost at
the counter, then was held up for two minutes because someone
in front was complaining that he had not received his tablet of
saccharine. But the girl was still alone when Winston secured
his tray and began to make for her table. He walked casually
towards her, his eyes searching for a place at some table
beyond her. She was perhaps three metres away from him. Another
two seconds would do it. Then a voice behind him called,
'Smith!' He pretended not to hear. 'Smith !' repeated the
voice, more loudly. It was no use. He turned round. A
blond-headed, silly-faced young man named Wilsher, whom he
barely knew, was inviting him with a smile to a vacant place at
his table. It was not safe to refuse. After having been
recognized, he could not go and sit at a table with an
unattended girl. It was too noticeable. He sat down with a
friendly smile. The silly blond face beamed into his. Winston
had a hallucination of himself smashing a pick-axe right into
the middle of it. The girl's table filled up a few minutes
later.
But she must have seen him coming towards her, and perhaps
she would take the hint. Next day he took care to arrive early.
Surely enough, she was at a table in about the same place, and
again alone. The person immediately ahead of him in the queue
was a small, swiftly-moving, beetle-like man with a flat face
and tiny, suspicious eyes. As Winston turned away from the
counter with his tray, he saw that the little man was making
straight for the girl's table. His hopes sank again. There was
a vacant place at a table further away, but something in the
little man's appearance suggested that he would be sufficiently
attentive to his own comfort to choose the emptiest table. With
ice at his heart Winston followed. It was no use unless he
could get the girl alone. At this moment there was a tremendous
crash. The little man was sprawling on all fours, his tray had
gone flying, two streams of soup and coffee were flowing across
the floor. He started to his feet with a malignant glance at
Winston, whom he evidently suspected of having tripped him up.
But it was all right. Five seconds later, with a thundering
heart, Winston was sitting at the girl's table.
He did not look at her. He unpacked his tray and promptly
began eating. It was all-important to speak at once, before
anyone else came, but now a terrible fear had taken possession
of him. A week had gone by since she had first approached him.
She would have changed her mind, she must have changed her
mind! It was impossible that this affair should end
successfully; such things did not happen in real life. He might
have flinched altogether from speaking if at this moment he had
not seen Ampleforth, the hairy-eared poet, wandering limply
round the room with a tray, looking for a place to sit down. In
his vague way Ampleforth was attached to Winston, and would
certainly sit down at his table if he caught sight of him.
There was perhaps a minute in which to act. Both Winston and
the girl were eating steadily. The stuff they were eating was a
thin stew, actually a soup, of haricot beans. In a low murmur
Winston began speaking. Neither of them looked up; steadily
they spooned the watery stuff into their mouths, and between
spoonfuls exchanged the few necessary words in low
expressionless voices.
'What time do you leave work?'
'Eighteen-thirty.'
'Where can we meet?'
'Victory Square, near the monument.
'It's full of telescreens.'
'It doesn't matter if there's a crowd.'
'Any signal?'
'No. Don't come up to me until you see me among a lot of
people. And don't look at me. Just keep somewhere near me.'
'What time?'
'Nineteen hours.'
'All right.'
Ampleforth failed to see Winston and sat down at another
table. They did not speak again, and, so far as it was possible
for two people sitting on opposite sides of the same table,
they did not look at one another. The girl finished her lunch
quickly and made off, while Winston stayed to smoke a
cigarette.
Winston was in Victory Square before the appointed time.
He wandered round the base of the enormous fluted column, at
the top of which Big Brother's statue gazed southward towards
the skies where he had vanquished the Eurasian aeroplanes (the
Eastasian aeroplanes, it had been, a few years ago) in the
Battle of Airstrip One. In the street in front of it there was
a statue of a man on horseback which was supposed to represent
Oliver Cromwell. At five minutes past the hour the girl had
still not appeared. Again the terrible fear seized upon
Winston. She was not coming, she had changed her mind! He
walked slowly up to the north side of the square and got a sort
of pale-coloured pleasure from identifying St Martin's Church,
whose bells, when it had bells, had chimed 'You owe me three
farthings.' Then he saw the girl standing at the base of the
monument, reading or pretending to read a poster which ran
spirally up the column. It was not safe to go near her until
some more people had accumulated. There were telescreens all
round the pediment. But at this moment there was a din of
shouting and a zoom of heavy vehicles from somewhere to the
left. Suddenly everyone seemed to be running across the square.
The girl nipped nimbly round the lions at the base of the
monument and joined in the rush. Winston followed. As he ran,
he gathered from some shouted remarks that a convoy of Eurasian
prisoners was passing.
Already a dense mass of people was blocking the south side
of the square. Winston, at normal times the kind of person who
gravitates to the outer edge of any kind of scrimmage, shoved,
butted, squirmed his way forward into the heart of the crowd.
Soon he was within arm's length of the girl, but the way was
blocked by an enormous prole and an almost equally enormous
woman, presumably his wife, who seemed to form an impenetrable
wall of flesh. Winston wriggled himself sideways, and with a
violent lunge managed to drive his shoulder between them. For a
moment it felt as though his entrails were being ground to pulp
between the two muscular hips, then he had broken through,
sweating a little. He was next to the girl. They were shoulder
to shoulder, both staring fixedly in front of them.
A long line of trucks, with wooden-faced guards armed with
sub-machine guns standing upright in each corner, was passing
slowly down the street. In the trucks little yellow men in
shabby greenish uniforms were squatting, jammed close together.
Their sad, Mongolian faces gazed out over the sides of the
trucks utterly incurious. Occasionally when a truck jolted
there was a clankclank of metal: all the prisoners were wearing
leg-irons. Truckload after truck-load of the sad faces passed.
Winston knew they were there but he saw them only
intermittently. The girl's shoulder, and her arm right down to
the elbow, were pressed against his. Her cheek was almost near
enough for him to feel its warmth. She had immediately taken
charge of the situation, just as she had done in the canteen.
She began speaking in the same expressionless voice as before,
with lips barely moving, a mere murmur easily drowned by the
din of voices and the rumbling of the trucks.
'Can you hear me?'
'Yes.'
'Can you get Sunday afternoon off?'
'Yes.'
'Then listen carefully. You'll have to remember this. Go
to Paddington Station-'
With a sort of military precision that astonished him, she
outlined the route that he was to follow. A half-hour railway
journey; turn left outside the station; two kilometres along
the road: a gate with the top bar missing; a path across a
field; a grass-grown lane; a track between bushes; a dead tree
with moss on it. It was as though she had a map inside her
head. 'Can you remember all that?' she murmured finally.
'Yes.'
'You turn left, then right, then left again. And the
gate's got no top bar.'
'Yes. What time?'
'About fifteen. You may have to wait. I'll get there by
another way. Are you sure you remember everything?'
'Yes.'
'Then get away from me as quick as you can.'
She need not have told him that. But for the moment they
could not extricate themselves from the crowd. The trucks were
still filing post, the people still insatiably gaping. At the
start there had been a few boos and hisses, but it came only
from the Party members among the crowd, and had soon stopped.
The prevailing emotion was simply curiosity. Foreigners,
whether from Eurasia or from Eastasia, were a kind of strange
animal. One literally never saw them except in the guise of
prisoners, and even as prisoners one never got more than a
momentary glimpse of them. Nor did one know what became of
them, apart from the few who were hanged as war-criminals: te
others simply vanished, presumably into forced-labour camps.
The round Mogol faces had given way to faces of a more European
type, dirty, bearded and exhausted. From over scrubby
cheekbones eyes looked into Winston's, sometimes with strange
intensity, and flashed away again. The convoy was drawing to an
end. In the last truck he could see an aged man, his face a
mass of grizzled hair, standing upright with wrists crossed in
front of him, as though he were used to having them bound
together. It was almost time for Winston and the girl to part.
But at the last moment, while the crowd still hemmed them in,
her hand felt for his and gave it a fleeting squeeze.
It could not have been ten seconds, and yet it seemed a
long time that their hands were clasped together. He had time
to learn every detail of her hand. He explored the long
fingers, the shapely nails, the work-hardened palm with its row
of callouses, the smooth flesh under the wrist. Merely from
feeling it he would have known it by sight. In the same instant
it occurred to him that he did not know what colour the girl's
eyes were. They were probably brown, but people with dark hair
sometimes had blue eyes. To turn his head and look at her would
have been inconceivable folly. With hands locked together,
invisible among the press of bodies, they stared steadily in
front of them, and instead of the eyes of the girl, the eyes of
the aged prisoner gazed mournfully at Winston out of nests of
hair.
x x x
Winston picked his way up the lane through dappled light
and shade, stepping out into pools of gold wherever the boughs
parted. Under the trees to the left of him the ground was misty
with bluebells. The air seemed to kiss one's skin. It was the
second of May. From somewhere deeper in the heart of the wood
came the droning of ring doves.
He was a bit early. There had been no difficulties about
the journey, and the girl was so evidently experienced that he
was less frightened than he would normally have been.
Presumably she could be trusted to find a safe place. In
general you could not assume that you were much safer in the
country than in London. There were no telescreens, of course,
but there was always the danger of concealed microphones by
which your voice might be picked up and recognized; besides, it
was not easy to make a journey by yourself without attracting
attention. For distances of less than 100 kilometres it was not
necessary to get your passport endorsed, but sometimes there
were patrols hanging about the railway stations, who examined
the papers of any Party member they found there and asked
awkward questions. However, no patrols had appeared, and on the
walk from the station he had made sure by cautious backward
glances that he was not being followed. The train was full of
proles, in holiday mood because of the summery weather. The
wooden- seated carriage in which he travelled was filled to
overflowing by a single enormous family. ranging from a
toothless great-grandmother to a month-old baby, going out to
spend an afternoon with 'in-laws' in the country, and, as they
freely explained to Winston, to get hold of a little
blackmarket butter.
The lane widened, and in a minute he came to the footpath
she had told him of, a mere cattle-track which plunged between
the bushes. He had no watch, but it could not be fifteen yet.
The bluebells were so thick underfoot that it was impossible
not to tread on them. He knelt down and began picking some
partly to pass the time away, but also from a vague idea that
he would like to have a bunch of flowers to offer to the girl
when they met. He had got together a big bunch and was smelling
their faint sickly scent when a sound at his back froze him,
the unmistakable crackle of a foot on twigs. He went on picking
bluebells. It was the best thing to do. It might be the girl,
or he might have been followed after all. To look round was to
show guilt. He picked another and another. A hand fell lightly
on his shoulder.
He looked up. It was the girl. She shook her head,
evidently as a warning that he must keep silent, then parted
the bushes and quickly led the way along the narrow track into
the wood. Obviously she had been that way before, for she
dodged the boggy bits as though by habit. Winston followed,
still clasping his bunch of flowers. His first feeling was
relief, but as he watched the strong slender body moving in
front of him, with the scarlet sash that was just tight enough
to bring out the curve of her hips, the sense of his own
inferiority was heavy upon him. Even now it seemed quite likely
that when she turned round and looked at him she would draw
back after all. The sweetness of the air and the greenness of
the leaves daunted him. Already on the walk from the station
the May sunshine had made him feel dirty and etiolated, a
creature of indoors, with the sooty dust of London in the pores
of his skin. It occurred to him that till now she had probably
never seen him in broad daylight in the open. They came to the
fallen tree that she had spoken of. The girl hopped over and
forced apart the bushes, in which there did not seem to be an
opening. When Winston followed her, he found that they were in
a natural clearing, a tiny grassy knoll surrounded by tall
saplings that shut it in completely. The girl stopped and
turned.
'Here we are,' she said.
He was facing her at several paces' distance. As yet he
did not dare move nearer to her.
'I didn't want to say anything in the lane,' she went on,
'in case there's a mike hidden there. I don't suppose there is,
but there could be. There's always the chance of one of those
swine recognizing your voice. We're all right here.'
He still had not the courage to approach her. 'We're all
right here?' he repeated stupidly.
'Yes. Look at the trees.' They were small ashes, which at
some time had been cut down and had sprouted up again into a
forest of poles, none of them thicker than one's wrist.
'There's nothing big enough to hide a mike in. Besides, I've
been here before.'
They were only making conversation. He had managed to move
closer to her now. She stood before him very upright, with a
smile on her face that looked faintly ironical, as though she
were wondering why he was so slow to act. The bluebells had
cascaded on to the ground. They seemed to have fallen of their
own accord. He took her hand.
'Would you believe,' he said, 'that till this moment I
didn't know what colour your eyes were?' They were brown, he
noted, a rather light shade of brown, with dark lashes. 'Now
that you've seen what I'm really like, can you still bear to
look at me?'
'Yes, easily.'
'I'm thirty-nine years old. I've got a wife that I can't
get rid of. I've got varicose veins. I've got five false
teeth.'
'I couldn't care less,' said the girl.
The next moment, it was hard to say by whose act, she was
in his his arms. At the beginning he had no feeling except
sheer incredulity. The youthful body was strained against his
own, the mass of dark hair was against his face, and yes !
actually she had turned her face up and he was kissing the wide
red mouth. She had clasped her arms about his neck, she was
calling him darling, precious one, loved one. He had pulled her
down on to the ground, she was utterly unresisting, he could do
what he liked with her. But the truth was that he had no
physical sensation, except that of mere contact. All he felt
was incredulity and pride. He was glad that this was happening,
but he had no physical desire. It was too soon, her youth and
prettiness had frightened him, he was too much used to living
without women -- he did not know the reason. The girl picked
herself up and pulled a bluebell out of her hair. She sat
against him, putting her arm round his waist.
'Never mind, dear. There's no hurry. We've got the whole
afternoon. Isn't this a splendid hide-out? I found it when I
got lost once on a community hike. If anyone was coming you
could hear them a hundred metres away.'
'What is your name?' said Winston.
'Julia. I know yours. It's Winston -- Winston Smith.'
'How did you find that out?'
'I expect I'm better at finding things out than you are,
dear. Tell me, what did you think of me before that day I gave
you the note?'
He did not feel any temptation to tell lies to her. It was
even a sort of love-offering to start off by telling the worst.
'I hated the sight of you,' he said. 'I wanted to rape you
and then murder you afterwards. Two weeks ago I thought
seriously of smashing your head in with a cobblestone. If you
really want to know, I imagined that you had something to do
with the Thought Police.'
The girl laughed delightedly, evidently taking this as a
tribute to the excellence of her disguise.
'Not the Thought Police! You didn't honestly think that?'
'Well, perhaps not exactly that. But from your general
appearance -- merely because you're young and fresh and
healthy, you understand -- I thought that probably-'
'You thought I was a good Party member. Pure in word and
deed. Banners, processions, slogans, games, community hikes all
that stuff. And you thought that if I had a quarter of a chance
I'd denounce you as a thought-criminal and get you killed off?'
'Yes, something of that kind. A great many young girls are
like that, you know.'
'It's this bloody thing that does it,' she said, ripping
off the scarlet sash of the Junior Anti-Sex League and flinging
it on to a bough. Then, as though touching her waist had
reminded her of something, she felt in the pocket of her
overalls and produced a small slab of chocolate. She broke it
in half and gave one of the pieces to Winston. Even before he
had taken it he knew by the smell that it was very unusual
chocolate. It was dark and shiny, and was wrapped in silver
paper. Chocolate normally was dullbrown crumbly stuff that
tasted, as nearly as one could describe it, like the smoke of a
rubbish fire. But at some time or another he had tasted
chocolate like the piece she had given him. The first whiff of
its scent had stirred up some memory which he could not pin
down, but which was powerful and troubling.
'Where did you get this stuff?' he said.
'Black market,' she said indifferently. 'Actually I am
that sort of girl, to look at. I'm good at games. I was a
troop-leader in the Spies. I do voluntary work three evenings a
week for the Junior Anti-Sex League. Hours and hours I've spent
pasting their bloody rot all over London. I always carry one
end of a banner in the processions. I always Iook cheerful and
I never shirk anything. Always yell with the crowd, that's what
I say. It's the only way to be safe.'
The first fragment of chocolate had meIted on Winston's
tongue. The taste was delightful. But there was still that
memory moving round the edges of his consciousness, something
strongly felt but not reducible to definite shape, like an
object seen out of the corner of one's eye. He pushed it away
from him, aware only that it was the memory of some action
which he would have liked to undo but could not.
'You are very young,' he said. 'You are ten or fifteen
years younger than I am. What could you see to attract you in a
man like me?'
'It was something in your face. I thought I'd take a
chance. I'm good at spotting people who don't belong. As soon
as I saw you I knew you were against them.'Them, it appeared, meant the Party, and above all
the Inner Party, about whom she talked with an open jeering
hatred which made Winston feel uneasy, although he knew that
they were safe here if they could be safe anywhere. A thing
that astonished him about her was the coarseness of her
language. Party members were supposed not to swear, and Winston
himself very seldom did swear, aloud, at any rate. Julia,
however, seemed unable to mention the Party, and especially the
Inner Party, without using the kind of words that you saw
chalked up in dripping alley-ways. He did not dislike it. It
was merely one symptom of her revolt against the Party and all
its ways, and somehow it seemed natural and healthy, like the
sneeze of a horse that smells bad hay. They had left the
clearing and were wandering again through the chequered shade,
with their arms round each other's waists whenever it was wide
enough to walk two abreast. He noticed how much softer her
waist seemed to feel now that the sash was gone. They did not
speak above a whisper. Outside the clearing, Julia said, it was
better to go quietly. Presently they had reached the edge of
the little wood. She stopped him.
'Don't go out into the open. There might be someone
watching. We're all right if we keep behind the boughs.'
They were standing in the shade of hazel bushes. The
sunlight, filtering through innumerable leaves, was still hot
on their faces. Winston looked out into the field beyond, and
underwent a curious, slow shock of recognition. He knew it by
sight. An old, closebitten pasture, with a footpath wandering
across it and a molehill here and there. In the ragged hedge on
the opposite side the boughs of the elm trees swayed just
perceptibly in the breeze, and their leaves stirred faintly in
dense masses like women's hair. Surely somewhere nearby, but
out of sight, there must be a stream with green pools where
dace were swimming?
'Isn't there a stream somewhere near here?' he whispered.
'That's right, there is a stream. It's at the edge of the
next field, actually. There are fish in it, great big ones. You
can watch them lying in the pools under the willow trees,
waving their tails.'
'It's the Golden Country -- almost,' he murmured.
'The Golden Country?'
'It's nothing, really. A landscape I've seen sometimes in
a dream.'
'Look!' whispered Julia.
A thrush had alighted on a bough not five metres away,
almost at the level of their faces. Perhaps it had not seen
them. It was in the sun, they in the shade. It spread out its
wings, fitted them carefully into place again, ducked its head
for a moment, as though making a sort of obeisance to the sun,
and then began to pour forth a torrent of song. In the
afternoon hush the volume of sound was startling. Winston and
Julia clung together, fascinated. The music went on and on,
minute after minute, with astonishing variations, never once
repeating itself, almost as though the bird were deliberately
showing off its virtuosity. Sometimes it stopped for a few
seconds, spread out and resettled its wings, then swelled its
speckled breast and again burst into song. Winston watched it
with a sort of vague reverence. For whom, for what, was that
bird singing? No mate, no rival was watching it. What made it
sit at the edge of the lonely wood and pour its music into
nothingness? He wondered whether after all there was a
microphone hidden somewhere near. He and Julia had spoken only
in low whispers, and it would not pick up what they had said,
but it would pick up the thrush. Perhaps at the other end of
the instrument some small, beetle-like man was listening
intently -- listening to that. But by degrees the flood
of music drove all speculations out of his mind. It was as
though it were a kind of liquid stuff that poured all over him
and got mixed up with the sunlight that filtered through the
leaves. He stopped thinking and merely felt. The girl's waist
in the bend of his arm was soft and warm. He pulled her round
so that they were breast to breast; her body seemed to melt
into his. Wherever his hands moved it was all as yielding as
water. Their mouths clung together; it was quite different from
the hard kisses they had exchanged earlier. When they moved
their faces apart again both of them sighed deeply. The bird
took fright and fled with a clatter of wings.
Winston put his lips against her ear. 'Now,' he
whispered.
'Not here,' she whispered back. 'Come back to the hide-
out. It's safer.'
Quickly, with an occasional crackle of twigs, they
threaded their way back to the clearing. When they were once
inside the ring of saplings she turned and faced him. They were
both breathing fast. but the smile had reappeared round the
corners of her mouth. She stood looking at him for an instant,
then felt at the zipper of her overalls. And, yes! it was
almost as in his dream. Almost as swiftly as he had imagined
it, she had torn her clothes off, and when she flung them aside
it was with that same magnificent gesture by which a whole
civilization seemed to be annihilated. Her body gleamed white
in the sun. But for a moment he did not look at her body; his
eyes were anchored by the freckled face with its faint, bold
smile. He knelt down before her and took her hands in his
'Have you done this before?'
'Of course. Hundreds of times -- well scores of times
anyway
'With Party members.'
'Yes, always with Party members.'
'With members of the Inner Party?'
'Not with those swine, no. But there's plenty that
would if they got half a chance. They're not so holy as
they make out.'
His heart leapt. Scores of times she had done it: he
wished it had been hundreds -- thousands. Anything that hinted
at corruption always filled him with a wild hope. Who knew,
perhaps the Party was rotten under the surface, its cult of
strenuousness and selfdenial simply a sham concealing iniquity.
If he could have infected the whole lot of them with leprosy or
syphilis, how gladly he would have done so! Anything to rot, to
weaken, to undermine! He pulled her down so that they were
kneeling face to face.
'Listen. The more men you've had, the more I love you. Do
you understand that?'
'Yes, perfectly.'
'I hate purity, I hate goodness! I don't want any virtue
to exist anywhere. I want everyone to be corrupt to the bones.
'Well then, I ought to suit you, dear. I'm corrupt to the
bones.'
'You like doing this? I don't mean simply me: I mean the
thing in itself?'
'I adore it.'
That was above all what he wanted to hear. Not merely the
love of one person but the animal instinct, the simple
undifferentiated desire: that was the force that would tear the
Party to pieces. He pressed her down upon the grass, among the
fallen bluebells. This time there was no difficulty. Presently
the rising and falling of their breasts slowed to normal speed,
and in a sort of pleasant helplessness they fell apart. The sun
seemed to have grown hotter. They were both sleepy. He reached
out for the discarded overalls and pulled them partly over her.
Almost immediately they fell asleep and slept for about half an
hour.
Winston woke first. He sat up and watched the freckled
face, still peacefully asleep, pillowed on the palm of her
hand. Except for her mouth, you could not call her beautiful.
There was a line or two round the eyes, if you looked closely.
The short dark hair was extraordinarily thick and soft. It
occurred to him that he still did not know her surname or where
she lived.
The young, strong body, now helpless in sleep, awoke in
him a pitying, protecting feeling. But the mindless tenderness
that he had felt under the hazel tree, while the thrush was
singing, had not quite come back. He pulled the overalls aside
and studied her smooth white flank. In the old days, he
thought, a man looked at a girl's body and saw that it was
desirable, and that was the end of the story. But you could not
have pure love or pure lust nowadays. No emotion was pure,
because everything was mixed up with fear and hatred. Their
embrace had been a battle, the climax a victory. It was a blow
struck against the Party. It was a political act.
x x x
'We can come here once again,' said Julia. 'It's generally
safe to use any hide-out twice. But not for another month or
two, of course.'
As soon as she woke up her demeanour had changed. She
became alert and business-like, put her clothes on, knotted the
scarlet sash about her waist, and began arranging the details
of the journey home. It seemed natural to leave this to her.
She obviously had a practical cunning which Winston lacked, and
she seemed also to have an exhaustive knowledge of the
countryside round London, stored away from innumerable
community hikes. The route she gave him was quite different
from the one by which he had come, and brought him out at a
different railway station. 'Never go home the same way as you
went out,' she said, as though enunciating an important general
principle. She would leave first, and Winston was to wait half
an hour before following her.
She had named a place where they could meet after work,
four evenings hence. It was a street in one of the poorer
quarters, where there was an open market which was generally
crowded and noisy. She would be hanging about among the stalls,
pretending to be in search of shoelaces or sewing- thread. If
she judged that the coast was clear she would blow her nose
when he approached; otherwise he was to walk past her without
recognition. But with luck, in the middle of the crowd, it
would be safe to talk for a quarter of an hour and arrange
another meeting.
'And now I must go,' she said as soon as he had mastered
his instructions. 'I'm due back at nineteen-thirty. I've got to
put in two hours for the Junior Anti-Sex League, handing out
leaflets, or something. Isn't it bloody? Give me a brush-down,
would you? Have I got any twigs in my hair? Are you sure? Then
good-bye, my love, good-bye!'
She flung herself into his arms, kissed him almost
violently, and a moment later pushed her way through the
saplings and disappeared into the wood with very little noise.
Even now he had not found out her surname or her address.
However, it made no difference, for it was inconceivable that
they could ever meet indoors or exchange any kind of written
communication.
As it happened, they never went back to the clearing in
the wood. During the month of May there was only one further
occasion on which they actually succeeded in making love. That
was in another hidlng-place known to Julia, the belfry of a
ruinous church in an almost-deserted stretch of country where
an atomic bomb had fallen thirty years earlier. It was a good
hiding-place when once you got there, but the getting there was
very dangerous. For the rest they could meet only in the
streets, in a different place every evening and never for more
than half an hour at a time. In the street it was usually
possible to talk, after a fashion. As they drifted down the
crowded pavements, not quite abreast and never looking at one
another, they carried on a curious, intermittent conversation
which flicked on and off like the beams of a lighthouse,
suddenly nipped into silence by the approach of a Party uniform
or the proximity of a telescreen, then taken up again minutes
later in the middle of a sentence, then abruptly cut short as
they parted at the agreed spot, then continued almost without
introduction on the following day. Julia appeared to be quite
used to this kind of conversation, which she called 'talking by
instalments'. She was also surprisingly adept at speaking
without moving her lips. Just once in almost a month of nightly
meetings they managed to exchange a kiss. They were passing in
silence down a side-street (Julia would never speak when they
were away from the main streets) when there was a deafening
roar, the earth heaved, and the air darkened, and Winston found
himself lying on his side, bruised and terrified. A rocket bomb
must have dropped quite near at hand. Suddenly he became aware
of Julia's face a few centimetres from his own, deathly white,
as white as chalk. Even her lips were white. She was dead! He
clasped her against him and found that he was kissing a live
warm face. But there was some powdery stuff that got in the way
of his lips. Both of their faces were thickly coated with
plaster.
There were evenings when they reached their rendezvous and
then had to walk past one another without a sign, because a
patrol had just come round the corner or a helicopter was
hovering overhead. Even if it had been less dangerous, it would
still have been difficult to find time to meet. Winston's
working week was sixty hours, Julia's was even longer, and
their free days varied according to the pressure of work and
did not often coincide. Julia, in any case, seldom had an
evening completely free. She spent an astonishing amount of
time in attending lectures and demonstrations, distributing
literature for the junior Anti-Sex League, preparing banners
for Hate Week, making collections for the savings campaign, and
such-like activities. It paid, she said, it was camouflage. If
you kept the small rules, you could break the big ones. She
even induced Winston to mortgage yet another of his evenings by
enrolling himself for the part-time munition work which was
done voluntarily by zealous Party members. So, one evening
every week, Winston spent four hours of paralysing boredom,
screwing together small bits of metal which were probably parts
of bomb fuses, in a draughty, ill-lit workshop where the
knocking of hammers mingled drearily with the music of the
telescreens.
When they met in the church tower the gaps in their
fragmentary conversation were filled up. It was a blazing
afternoon. The air in the little square chamber above the bells
was hot and stagnant, and smelt overpoweringly of pigeon dung.
They sat talking for hours on the dusty, twig- littered floor,
one or other of them getting up from time to time to cast a
glance through the arrowslits and make sure that no one was
coming.
Julia was twenty-six years old. She lived in a hostel with
thirty other girls ('Always in the stink of women! How I hate
women!' she said parenthetically), and she worked, as he had
guessed, on the novel-writing machines in the Fiction
Department. She enjoyed her work, which consisted chiefly in
running and servicing a powerful but tricky electric motor. She
was 'not clever', but was fond of using her hands and felt at
home with machinery. She could describe the whole process of
composing a novel, from the general directive issued by the
Planning Committee down to the final touching-up by the Rewrite
Squad. But she was not interested in the finished product. She
'didn't much care for reading,' she said. Books were just a
commodity that had to be produced, like jam or bootlaces.
She had no memories of anything before the early sixties
and the only person she had ever known who talked frequently of
the days before the Revolution was a grandfather who had
disappeared when she was eight. At school she had been captain
of the hockey team and had won the gymnastics trophy two years
running. She had been a troop-leader in the Spies and a branch
secretary in the Youth League before joining the Junior
Anti-Sex League. She had always borne an excellent character.
She had even (an infallibIe mark of good reputation) been
picked out to work in Pornosec, the sub- section of the Fiction
Department which turned out cheap pornography for distribution
among the proles. It was nicknamed Muck House by the people who
worked in it, she remarked. There she had remained for a year,
helping to produce booklets in sealed packets with titles like
Spanking Stories or OneNight in a Girls'
School, to be bought furtively by proletarian youths who
were under the impression that they were buying something
illegal.
'What are these books like?' said Winston curiously.
'Oh, ghastly rubbish. They're boring, really. They only
have six plots, but they swap them round a bit. Of course I was
only on the kaleidoscopes. I was never in the Rewrite Squad.
I'm not literary, dear -- not even enough for that.'
He learned with astonishment that all the workers in
Pornosec, except the heads of the departments, were girls. The
theory was that men, whose sex instincts were less controllable
than those of women, were in greater danger of being corrupted
by the filth they handled.
'They don't even like having married women there,' she
added. Girls are always supposed to be so pure. Here's one who
isn't, anyway.
She had had her first love-affair when she was sixteen,
with a Party member of sixty who later committed suicide to
avoid arrest. 'And a good job too,' said Julia, 'otherwise
they'd have had my name out of him when he confessed.' Since
then there had been various others. Life as she saw it was
quite simple. You wanted a good time; 'they', meaning the
Party, wanted to stop you having it; you broke the rules as
best you couId. She seemed to think it just as natural that
'they' should want to rob you of your pleasures as that you
should want to avoid being caught. She hated the Party, and
said so in the crudest words, but she made no general criticism
of it. Except where it touched upon her own life she had no
interest in Party doctrine. He noticed that she never used
Newspeak words except the ones that had passed into everyday
use. She had never heard of the Brotherhood, and refused to
believe in its existence. Any kind of organized revolt against
the Party, which was bound to be a failure, struck her as
stupid. The clever thing was to break the rules and stay alive
all the same. He wondered vaguely how many others like her
there might be in the younger generation people who had grown
up in the world of the Revolution, knowing nothing else,
accepting the Party as something unalterable, like the sky, not
rebelling against its authority but simply evading it, as a
rabbit dodges a dog.
They did not discuss the possibility of getting married.
It was too remote to be worth thinking about. No imaginable
committee would ever sanction such a marriage even if
Katharine, Winston's wife, could somehow have been got rid of.
It was hopeless even as a daydream.
'What was she like, your wife?' said Julia.
'She was -- do you know the Newspeak word
goodthinkful? Meaning naturally orthodox, incapable of
thinking a bad thought?'
'No, I didn't know the word, but I know the kind of
person, right enough.'
He began telling her the story of his married life, but
curiousIy enough she appeared to know the essential parts of it
already. She described to him, almost as though she had seen or
felt it, the stiffening of Katharine's body as soon as he
touched her, the way in which she still seemed to be pushing
him from her with all her strength, even when her arms were
clasped tightly round him. With Julia he felt no difficulty in
talking about such things: Katharine, in any case, had long
ceased to be a painful memory and became merely a distasteful
one.
'I could have stood it if it hadn't been for one thing,'
he said. He toId her about the frigid little ceremony that
Katharine had forced him to go through on the same night every
week. 'She hated it, but nothing would make her stop doing it.
She used to call it -- but you'll never guess.'
'Our duty to the Party,' said Julia promptly.
'How did you know that?'
'I've been at school too, dear. Sex talks once a month for
the over-sixteens. And in the Youth Movement. They rub it into
you for years. I dare say it works in a lot of cases. But of
course you can never tell; peopIe are such hypocrites.'
She began to enlarge upon the subject. With Julia,
everything came back to her own sexuality. As soon as this was
touched upon in any way she was capable of great acuteness.
Unlike Winston, she had grasped the inner meaning of the
Party's sexual puritanism. It was not merely that the sex
instinct created a world of its own which was outside the
Party's control and which therefore had to be destroyed if
possible. What was more important was that sexual privation
induced hysteria, which was desirable because it could be
transformed into war-fever and leader-worship. The way she put
it was:
'When you make love you're using up energy; and afterwards
you feel happy and don't give a damn for anything. They can't
bear you to feel like that. They want you to be bursting with
energy all the time. All this marching up and down and cheering
and waving flags is simpIy sex gone sour. If you're happy
inside yourself, why should you get excited about Big Brother
and the Three-Year Plans and the Two Minutes Hate and all the
rest of their bloody rot?'
That was very true, he thought. There was a direct
intimate connexion between chastity and political orthodoxy.
For how could the fear, the hatred, and the lunatic credulity
which the Party needed in its members be kept at the right
pitch, except by bottling down some powerful instinct and using
it as a driving force? The sex impulse was dangerous to the
Party, and the Party had turned it to account. They had played
a similar trick with the instinct of parenthood. The family
could not actually be abolished, and, indeed, people were
encouraged to be fond of their children, in almost the
old-fashioned way. The children, on the other hand, were
systematically turned against their parents and taught to spy
on them and report their deviations. The family had become in
effect an extension of the Thought Police. It was a device by
means of which everyone could be surrounded night and day by
informers who knew him intimately.
Abruptly his mind went back to Katharine. Katharine would
unquestionably have denounced him to the Thought Police if she
had not happened to be too stupid to detect the unorthodoxy of
his opinions. But what really recalled her to him at this
moment was the stifling heat of the afternoon, which had
brought the sweat out on his forehead. He began telling Julia
of something that had happened, or rather had failed to happen,
on another sweltering summer afternoon, eleven years ago.
It was three or four months after they were married. They
had lost their way on a community hike somewhere in Kent. They
had only lagged behind the others for a couple of minutes, but
they took a wrong turning, and presently found themselves
pulled up short by the edge of an old chalk quarry. It was a
sheer drop of ten or twenty metres, with boulders at the
bottom. There was nobody of whom they could ask the way. As
soon as she realized that they were lost Katharine became very
uneasy. To be away from the noisy mob of hikers even for a
moment gave her a feeling of wrong- doing. She wanted to hurry
back by the way they had come and start searching in the other
direction. But at this moment Winston noticed some tufts of
loosestrife growing in the cracks of the cliff beneath them.
One tuft was of two colours, magenta and brick-red, apparently
growing on the same root. He had never seen anything of the
kind before, and he called to Katharine to come and look at it.
'Look, Katharine ! Look at those flowers. That clump down
near the bottom. Do you see they're two different colours?'
She had already turned to go, but she did rather fretfully
come back for a moment. She even leaned out over the cliff face
to see where he was pointing. He was standing a little behind
her, and he put his hand on her waist to steady her. At this
moment it suddenly occurred to him how completely alone they
were. There was not a human creature anywhere, not a leaf
stirring, not even a bird awake. In a place like this the
danger that there would be a hidden microphone was very small,
and even if there was a microphone it would only pick up
sounds. It was the hottest sleepiest hour of the afternoon. The
sun blazed down upon them, the sweat tickled his face. And the
thought struck him . . .
'Why didn't you give her a good shove?' said Julia. 'I
would have.'
'Yes, dear, you would have. I would, if I'd been the same
person then as I am now. Or perhaps I would -- I'm not
certain.'
'Are you sorry you didn't?'
'Yes. On the whole I'm sorry I didn't.'
They were sitting side by side on the dusty floor. He
pulled her closer against him. Her head rested on his shoulder,
the pleasant smell of her hair conquering the pigeon dung. She
was very young, he thought, she still expected something from
life, she did not understand that to push an inconvenient
person over a cliff solves nothing.
'Actually it would have made no difference,' he said.
'Then why are you sorry you didn't do it?'
'Only because I prefer a positive to a negative. In this
game that we're playing, we can't win. Some kinds of failure
are better than other kinds, that's all.'
He felt her shoulders give a wriggle of dissent. She
always contradicted him when he said anything of this kind. She
would not accept it as a law of nature that the individual is
always defeated. In a way she realized that she herself was
doomed, that sooner or later the Thought Police would catch her
and kill her, but with another part of her mind she believed
that it was somehow possible to construct a secret world in
which you could live as you chose. All you needed was luck and
cunning and boldness. She did not understand that there was no
such thing as happiness, that the only victory lay in the far
future, long after you were dead, that from the moment of
declaring war on the Party it was better to think of yourself
as a corpse.
'We are the dead,' he said.
'We're not dead yet,' said Julia prosaically.
'Not physically. Six months, a year -- five years,
conceivably. I am afraid of death. You are young, so presumably
you're more afraid of it than I am. Obviously we shall put it
off as long as we can. But it makes very little difference. So
long as human beings stay human, death and life are the same
thing.'
'Oh, rubbish! Which would you sooner sleep with, me or a
skeleton? Don't you enjoy being alive? Don't you like feeling:
This is me, this is my hand, this is my leg, I'm real, I'm
solid, I'm alive! Don't you like this?'
She twisted herself round and pressed her bosom against
him. He could feel her breasts, ripe yet firm, through her
overalls. Her body seemed to be pouring some of its youth and
vigour into his.
'Yes, I like that,' he said.
'Then stop talking about dying. And now listen, dear,
we've got to fix up about the next time we meet. We may as well
go back to the place in the wood. We've given it a good long
rest. But you must get there by a different way this time. I've
got it all planned out. You take the train -- but look, I'll
draw it out for you.'
And in her practical way she scraped together a small
square of dust, and with a twig from a pigeon's nest began
drawing a map on the floor.
x x x
Winston looked round the shabby little room above Mr
Charrington's shop. Beside the window the enormous bed was made
up, with ragged blankets and a coverless bolster. The
old-fashioned clock with the twelve-hour face was ticking away
on the mantelpiece. In the corner, on the gateleg table, the
glass paperweight which he had bought on his last visit gleamed
softly out of the half-darkness.
In the fender was a battered tin oilstove, a saucepan, and
two cups, provided by Mr Charrington. Winston lit the burner
and set a pan of water to boil. He had brought an envelope full
of Victory Coffee and some saccharine tablets. The clock's
hands said seventeen-twenty: it was nineteen- twenty really.
She was coming at nineteen-thirty.
Folly, folly, his heart kept saying: conscious,
gratuitous, suicidal folly. Of all the crimes that a Party
member could commit, this one was the least possible to
conceal. Actually the idea had first floated into his head in
the form of a vision, of the glass paperweight mirrored by the
surface of the gateleg table. As he had foreseen, Mr
Charrington had made no difficulty about letting the room. He
was obviously glad of the few dollars that it would bring him.
Nor did he seem shocked or become offensively knowing when it
was made clear that Winston wanted the room for the purpose of
a love-affair. Instead he looked into the middle distance and
spoke in generalities, with so delicate an air as to give the
impression that he had become partly invisible. Privacy, he
said, was a very valuable thing. Everyone wanted a place where
they could be alone occasionally. And when they had such a
place, it was only common courtesy in anyone else who knew of
it to keep his knowledge to himself. He even, seeming almost to
fade out of existence as he did so, added that there were two
entries to the house, one of them through the back yard, which
gave on an alley.
Under the window somebody was singing. Winston peeped out,
secure in the protection of the muslin curtain. The June sun
was still high in the sky, and in the sun-filled court below, a
monstrous woman, solid as a Norman pillar, with brawny red
forearms and a sacking apron strapped about her middle, was
stumping to and fro between a washtub and a clothes line,
pegging out a series of square white things which Winston
recognized as babies' diapers. Whenever her mouth was not
corked with clothes pegs she was singing in a powerful
contralto:
It was only an 'opeless fancy.
It passed like an Ipril dye,
But a look an' a word an' the dreams they stirred!
They 'ave stolen my 'eart awye!
The tune had been haunting London for weeks past. It was
one of countless similar songs published for the benefit of the
proles by a sub-section of the Music Department. The words of
these songs were composed without any human intervention
whatever on an instrument known as a versificator. But the
woman sang so tunefully as to turn the dreadful rubbish into an
almost pleasant sound. He could hear the woman singing and the
scrape of her shoes on the flagstones, and the cries of the
children in the street, and somewhere in the far distance a
faint roar of traffic, and yet the room seemed curiously
silent, thanks to the absence of a telescreen.
Folly, folly, folly! he thought again. It was
inconceivable that they could frequent this place for more than
a few weeks without being caught. But the temptation of having
a hiding-place that was truly their own, indoors and near at
hand, had been too much for both of them. For some time after
their visit to the church belfry it had been impossible to
arrange meetings. Working hours had been drastically increased
in anticipation of Hate Week. It was more than a month distant,
but the enormous, complex preparations that it entailed were
throwing extra work on to everybody. Finally both of them
managed to secure a free afternoon on the same day. They had
agreed to go back to the clearing in the wood. On the evening
beforehand they met briefly in the street. As usual, Winston
hardly looked at Julia as they drifted towards one another in
the crowd, but from the short glance he gave her it seemed to
him that she was paler than usual.
'It's all off,' she murmured as soon as she judged it safe
to speak. 'Tomorrow, I mean.'
'What?'
'Tomorrow afternoon. I can't come.'
'Why not?'
'Oh, the usual reason. It's started early this time.'
For a moment he was violently angry. During the month that
he had known her the nature of his desire for her had changed.
At the beginning there had been little true sensuality in it.
Their first love-making had been simply an act of the will. But
after the second time it was different. The smell of her hair,
the taste of her mouth, the feeling of her skin seemed to have
got inside him, or into the air all round him. She had become a
physical necessity, something that he not only wanted but felt
that he had a right to. When she said that she could not come,
he had the feeling that she was cheating him. But just at this
moment the crowd pressed them together and their hands
accidentally met. She gave the tips of his fingers a quick
squeeze that seemed to invite not desire but affection. It
struck him that when one lived with a woman this particular
disappointment must be a normal, recurring event; and a deep
tenderness, such as he had not felt for her before, suddenly
took hold of him. He wished that they were a married couple of
ten years' standing. He wished that he were walking through the
streets with her just as they were doing now but openly and
without fear, talking of trivialities and buying odds and ends
for the household. He wished above all that they had some place
where they could be alone together without feeling the
obligation to make love every time they met. It was not
actually at that moment, but at some time on the following day,
that the idea of renting Mr Charrington's room had occurred to
him. When he suggested it to Julia she had agreed with
unexpected readiness. Both of them knew that it was lunacy. It
was as though they were intentionally stepping nearer to their
graves. As he sat waiting on the edge of the bed he thought
again of the cellars of the Ministry of Love. It was curious
how that predestined horror moved in and out of one's
consciousness. There it lay, fixed in future times, preceding
death as surely as 99 precedes 100. One could not avoid it, but
one could perhaps postpone it: and yet instead, every now and
again, by a conscious, wilful act, one chose to shorten the
interval before it happened.
At this moment there was a quick step on the stairs. Julia
burst into the room. She was carrying a tool-bag of coarse
brown canvas, such as he had sometimes seen her carrying to and
fro at the Ministry. He started forward to take her in his
arms, but she disengaged herself rather hurriedly, partly
because she was still holding the tool-bag.
'Half a second,' she said. 'Just let me show you what I've
brought. Did you bring some of that filthy Victory Coffee? I
thought you would. You can chuck it away again, because we
shan't be needing it. Look here.'
She fell on her knees, threw open the bag, and tumbled out
some spanners and a screwdriver that filled the top part of it.
Underneath were a number of neat paper packets. The first
packet that she passed to Winston had a strange and yet vaguely
familiar feeling. It was filled with some kind of heavy,
sand-like stuff which yielded wherever you touched it.
'It isn't sugar?' he said.
'Real sugar. Not saccharine, sugar. And here's a loaf of
bread proper white bread, not our bloody stuff -- and a little
pot of jam. And here's a tin of milk -- but look! This is the
one I'm really proud of. I had to wrap a bit of sacking round
it, because-'
But she did not need to tell him why she had wrapped it
up. The smell was already filling the room, a rich hot smell
which seemed like an emanation from his early childhood, but
which one did occasionally meet with even now, blowing down a
passage-way before a door slammed, or diffusing itself
mysteriously in a crowded street, sniffed for an instant and
then lost again.
'It's coffee,' he murmured, 'real coffee.'
'It's Inner Party coffee. There's a whole kilo here, she
said.
'How did you manage to get hold of all these things?'
'It's all Inner Party stuff. There's nothing those swine
don't have, nothing. But of course waiters and servants and
people pinch things, and -- look, I got a little packet of tea
as well.'
Winston had squatted down beside her. He tore open a
corner of the packet.
'It's real tea. Not blackberry leaves.'
'There's been a lot of tea about lately. They've captured
India, or something,' she said vaguely. 'But listen, dear. I
want you to turn your back on me for three minutes. Go and sit
on the other side of the bed. Don't go too near the window. And
don't turn round till I tell you.'
Winston gazed abstractedly through the muslin curtain.
Down in the yard the red-armed woman was still marching to and
fro between the washtub and the line. She took two more pegs
out of her mouth and sang with deep feeling:
They sye that time 'eals all things,
They sye you can always forget;
But the smiles an' the tears acrorss the years
They twist my 'eart-strings yet!
She knew the whole drivelling song by heart, it seemed.
Her voice floated upward with the sweet summer air, very
tuneful, charged with a sort of happy melancholy. One had the
feeling that she would have been perfectly content, if the June
evening had been endless and the supply of clothes
inexhaustible, to remain there for a thousand years, pegging
out diapers and singing rubbish. It struck him as a curious
fact that he had never heard a member of the Party singing
alone and spontaneously. It would even have seemed slightly
unorthodox, a dangerous eccentricity, like talking to oneself.
Perhaps it was only when people were somewhere near the
starvation level that they had anything to sing about.
'You can turn round now,' said Julia.
He turned round, and for a second almost failed to
recognize her. What he had actually expected was to see her
naked. But she was not naked. The transformation that had
happened was much more surprising than that. She had painted
her face.
She must have slipped into some shop in the proletarian
quarters and bought herself a complete set of make-up
materials. Her lips were deeply reddened, her cheeks rouged,
her nose powdered; there was even a touch of something under
the eyes to make them brighter. It was not very skilfully done,
but Winston's standards in such matters were not high. He had
never before seen or imagined a woman of the Party with
cosmetics on her face. The improvement in her appearance was
startling. With just a few dabs of colour in the right places
she had become not only very much prettier, but, above all, far
more feminine. Her short hair and boyish overalls merely added
to the effect. As he took her in his arms a wave of synthetic
violets flooded his nostrils. He remem bered the half-darkness
of a basement kitchen, and a woman's cavernous mouth. It was
the very same scent that she had used; but at the moment it did
not seem to matter.
'Scent too!' he said.
'Yes, dear, scent too. And do you know what I'm going to
do next? I'm going to get hold of a real woman's frock from
somewhere and wear it instead of these bloody trousers. I'll
wear silk stockings and high-heeled shoes! In this room I'm
going to be a woman, not a Party comrade.'
They flung their clothes off and climbed into the huge
mahogany bed. It was the first time that he had stripped
himself naked in her presence. Until now he had been too much
ashamed of his pale and meagre body, with the varicose veins
standing out on his calves and the discoloured patch over his
ankle. There were no sheets, but the blanket they lay on was
threadbare and smooth, and the size and springiness of the bed
astonished both of them. 'It's sure to be full of bugs, but who
cares?' said Julia. One never saw a double bed nowadays, except
in the homes of the proles. Winston had occasionally slept in
one in his boyhood: Julia had never been in one before, so far
as she could remember.
Presently they fell asleep for a little while. When
Winston woke up the hands of the clock had crept round to
nearly nine. He did not stir, because Julia was sleeping with
her head in the crook of his arm. Most of her make-up had
transferred itself to his own face or the bolster, but a light
stain of rouge still brought out the beauty of her cheekbone. A
yellow ray from the sinking sun fell across the foot of the bed
and lighted up the fireplace, where the water in the pan was
boiling fast. Down in the yard the woman had stopped singing,
but the faint shouts of children floated in from the street. He
wondered vaguely whether in the abolished past it had been a
normal experience to lie in bed like this, in the cool of a
summer evening, a man and a woman with no clothes on, making
love when they chose, talking of what they chose, not feeling
any compulsion to get up, simply lying there and listening to
peaceful sounds outside. Surely there could never have been a
time when that seemed ordinary? Julia woke up, rubbed her eyes,
and raised herself on her elbow to look at the oilstove.
'Half that water's boiled away,' she said. 'I'll get up
and make some coffee in another moment. We've got an hour. What
time do they cut the lights off at your flats?'
'Twenty-three thirty.'
'It's twenty-three at the hostel. But you have to get in
earlier than that, because -- Hi! Get out, you filthy brute!'
She suddenly twisted herself over in the bed, seized a
shoe from the floor, and sent it hurtling into the corner with
a boyish jerk of her arm, exactly as he had seen her fling the
dictionary at Goldstein, that morning during the Two Minutes
Hate.
'What was it?' he said in surprise.
'A rat. I saw him stick his beastly nose out of the
wainscoting. There's a hole down there. I gave him a good
fright, anyway.'
'Rats!' murmured Winston. 'In this room!'
'They're all over the place,' said Julia indifferently as
she lay down again. 'We've even got them in the kitchen at the
hostel. Some parts of London are swarming with them. Did you
know they attack children? Yes, they do. In some of these
streets a woman daren't leave a baby alone for two minutes.
It's the great huge brown ones that do it. And the nasty thing
is that the brutes always-'
'Don't go on!' said Winston, with his eyes tightly
shut.
'Dearest! You've gone quite pale. What's the matter? Do
they make you feel sick?'
'Of all horrors in the world -- a rat!'
She pressed herself against him and wound her limbs round
him, as though to reassure him with the warmth of her body. He
did not reopen his eyes immediately. For several moments he had
had the feeling of being back in a nightmare which had recurred
from time to time throughout his life. It was always very much
the same. He was standing in front of a wall of darkness, and
on the other side of it there was something unendurable,
something too dreadful to be faced. In the dream his deepest
feeling was always one of self- deception, because he did in
fact know what was behind the wall of darkness. With a deadly
effort, like wrenching a piece out of his own brain, he could
even have dragged the thing into the open. He always woke up
without discovering what it was: but somehow it was connected
with what Julia had been saying when he cut her short.
'I'm sorry,' he said, 'it's nothing. I don't like rats,
that's all.'
'Don't worry, dear, we're not going to have the filthy
brutes in here. I'll stuff the hole with a bit of sacking
before we go. And next time we come here I'll bring some
plaster and bung it up properly.'
Already the black instant of panic was half-forgotten.
Feeling slightly ashamed of himself, he sat up against the
bedhead. Julia got out of bed, pulled on her overalls, and made
the coffee. The smell that rose from the saucepan was so
powerful and exciting that they shut the window lest anybody
outside should notice it and become inquisitive. What was even
better than the taste of the coffee was the silky texture given
to it by the sugar, a thing Winston had almost forgotten after
years of saccharine. With one hand in her pocket and a piece of
bread and jam in the other, Julia wandered about the room,
glancing indifferently at the bookcase, pointing out the best
way of repairing the gateleg table, plumping herself down in
the ragged arm-chair to see if it was comfortable, and
examining the absurd twelve-hour clock with a sort of tolerant
amusement. She brought the glass paperweight over to the bed to
have a look at it in a better light. He took it out of her
hand, fascinated, as always, by the soft, rainwatery appearance
of the glass.
'What is it, do you think?' said Julia.
'I don't think it's anything-I mean, I don't think it was
ever put to any use. That's what I like about it. It's a little
chunk of history that they've forgotten to alter. It's a
message from a hundred years ago, if one knew how to read it.'
'And that picture over there' -- she nodded at the
engraving on the opposite wall-'would that be a hundred years
old?'
'More. Two hundred, I dare say. One can't tell. It's
impossible to discover the age of anything nowadays.'
She went over to look at it. 'Here's where that brute
stuck his nose out,' she said, kicking the wainscoting
immediately below the picture. 'What is this place? I've seen
it before somewhere.'
'It's a church, or at least it used to be. St Clement
Danes its name was.' The fragment of rhyme that Mr Charrington
had taught him came back into his head, and he added
half-nostalgically: "Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St
Clement's!"
To his astonishment she capped the line:
'You owe me three farthings, say the bells of St Martin's,
When will you pay me? say the bells of Old Bailey -- '
'I can't remember how it goes on after that. But anyway I
remember it ends up, "Here comes a candle to light you to bed,
here comes a chopper to chop off your head!"
It was like the two halves of a countersign. But there
must be another line after 'the bells of Old Bailey'. Perhaps
it could be dug out of Mr Charrington's memory, if he were
suitably prompted.
'Who taught you that?' he said.
'My grandfather. He used to say it to me when I was a
little girl. He was vaporized when I was eight -- at any rate,
he disappeared. I wonder what a lemon was,' she added
inconsequently. 'I've seen oranges. They're a kind of round
yellow fruit with a thick skin.'
'I can remember lemons,' said Winston. 'They were quite
common in the fifties. They were so sour that it set your teeth
on edge even to smell them.'
'I bet that picture's got bugs behind it,' said Julia.
'I'll take it down and give it a good clean some day. I suppose
it's almost time we were leaving. I must start washing this
paint off. What a bore! I'll get the lipstick off your face
afterwards.'
Winston did not get up for a few minutes more. The room
was darkening. He turned over towards the light and lay gazing
into the glass paperweight. The inexhaustibly interesting thing
was not the fragment of coral but the interior of the glass
itself. There was such a depth of it, and yet it was almost as
transparent as air. It was as though the surface of the glass
had been the arch of the sky, enclosing a tiny world with its
atmosphere complete. He had the feeling that he could get
inside it, and that in fact he was inside it, along with the
mahogany bed and the gateleg table, and the clock and the steel
engraving and the paperweight itself. The paperweight was the
room he was in, and the coral was Julia's life and his own,
fixed in a sort of eternity at the heart of the crystal.
x x x
Syme had vanished. A morning came, and he was missing from
work: a few thoughtless people commented on his absence. On the
next day nobody mentioned him. On the third day Winston went
into the vestibule of the Records Department to look at the
notice-board. One of the notices carried a printed list of the
members of the Chess Committee, of whom Syme had been one. It
looked almost exactly as it had looked before -- nothing had
been crossed out -- but it was one name shorter. It was enough.
Syme had ceased to exist: he had never existed.
The weather was baking hot. In the labyrinthine Ministry
the windowless, air-conditioned rooms kept their normal
temperature, but outside the pavements scorched one's feet and
the stench of the Tubes at the rush hours was a horror. The
preparations for Hate Week were in full swing, and the staffs
of all the Ministries were working overtime. Processions,
meetings, military parades, lectures, waxworks, displays, film
shows, telescreen programmes all had to be organized; stands
had to be erected, effigies built, slogans coined, songs
written, rumours circulated, photographs faked. Julia's unit in
the Fiction Department had been taken off the production of
novels and was rushing out a series of atrocity pamphlets.
Winston, in addition to his regular work, spent long periods
every day in going through back files of The Times and
altering and embellishing news items which were to be quoted in
speeches. Late at night, when crowds of rowdy proles roamed the
streets, the town had a curiously febrile air. The rocket bombs
crashed oftener than ever, and sometimes in the far distance
there were enormous explosions which no one could explain and
about which there were wild rumours.
The new tune which was to be the theme-song of Hate Week
(the Hate Song, it was called) had already been composed and
was being endlessly plugged on the telescreens. It had a
savage, barking rhythm which could not exactly be called music,
but resembled the beating of a drum. Roared out by hundreds of
voices to the tramp of marching feet, it was terrifying. The
proles had taken a fancy to it, and in the midnight streets it
competed with the still- popular 'It was only a hopeless
fancy'. The Parsons children played it at all hours of the
night and day, unbearably, on a comb and a piece of toilet
paper. Winston's evenings were fuller than ever. Squads of
volunteers, organized by Parsons, were preparing the street for
Hate Week, stitching banners, painting posters, erecting
flagstaffs on the roofs, and perilously slinging wires across
the street for the reception of streamers. Parsons boasted that
Victory Mansions alone would display four hundred metres of
bunting. He was in his native element and as happy as a lark.
The heat and the manual work had even given him a pretext for
reverting to shorts and an open shirt in the evenings. He was
everywhere at once, pushing, pulling, sawing, hammering,
improvising, jollying everyone along with comradely
exhortations and giving out from every fold of his body what
seemed an inexhaustible supply of acrid-smelling sweat.
A new poster had suddenly appeared all over London. It had
no caption, and represented simply the monstrous figure of a
Eurasian soldier, three or four metres high, striding forward
with expressionless Mongolian face and enormous boots, a
submachine gun pointed from his hip. From whatever angle you
looked at the poster, the muzzle of the gun, magnified by the
foreshortening, seemed to be pointed straight at you. The thing
had been plastered on every blank space on every wall, even
outnumbering the portraits of Big Brother. The proles, normally
apathetic about the war, were being lashed into one of their
periodical frenzies of patriotism. As though to harmonize with
the general mood, the rocket bombs had been killing larger
numbers of people than usual. One fell on a crowded film
theatre in Stepney, burying several hundred victims among the
ruins. The whole population of the neighbourhood turned out for
a long, trailing funeral which went on for hours and was in
effect an indignation meeting. Another bomb fell on a piece of
waste ground which was used as a playground and several dozen
children were blown to pieces. There were further angry
demonstrations, Goldstein was burned in effigy, hundreds of
copies of the poster of the Eurasian soldier were torn down and
added to the flames, and a number of shops were looted in the
turmoil; then a rumour flew round that spies were directing the
rocket bombs by means of wireless waves, and an old couple who
were suspected of being of foreign extraction had their house
set on fire and perished of suffocation.
In the room over Mr Charrington's shop, when they could
get there, Julia and Winston lay side by side on a stripped bed
under the open window, naked for the sake of coolness. The rat
had never come back, but the bugs had multiplied hideously in
the heat. It did not seem to matter. Dirty or clean, the room
was paradise. As soon as they arrived they would sprinkle
everything with pepper bought on the black market, tear off
their clothes, and make love with sweating bodies, then fall
asleep and wake to find that the bugs had rallied and were
massing for the counter-attack.
Four, five, six -- seven times they met during the month
of June. Winston had dropped his habit of drinking gin at all
hours. He seemed to have lost the need for it. He had grown
fatter, his varicose ulcer had subsided, leaving only a brown
stain on the skin above his ankle, his fits of coughing in the
early morning had stopped. The process of life had ceased to be
intolerable, he had no longer any impulse to make faces at the
telescreen or shout curses at the top of his voice. Now that
they had a secure hiding- place, almost a home, it did not even
seem a hardship that they could only meet infrequently and for
a couple of hours at a time. What mattered was that the room
over the junk- shop should exist. To know that it was there,
inviolate, was almost the same as being in it. The room was a
world, a pocket of the past where extinct animals could walk.
Mr Charrington, thought Winston, was another extinct animal. He
usually stopped to talk with Mr Charrington for a few minutes
on his way upstairs. The old man seemed seldom or never to go
out of doors, and on the other hand to have almost no
customers. He led a ghostlike existence between the tiny, dark
shop, and an even tinier back kitchen where he prepared his
meals and which contained, among other things, an unbelievably
ancient gramophone with an enormous horn. He seemed glad of the
opportunity to talk. Wandering about among his worthless stock,
with his long nose and thick spectacles and his bowed shoulders
in the velvet jacket, he had always vaguely the air of being a
collector rather than a tradesman. With a sort of faded
enthusiasm he would finger this scrap of rubbish or that -- a
china bottle-stopper, the painted lid of a broken snuffbox, a
pinchbeck locket containing a strand of some long-dead baby's
hair -- never asking that Winston should buy it, merely that he
should admire it. To talk to him was like listening to the
tinkling of a worn-out musical-box. He had dragged out from the
corners of his memory some more fragments of forgotten rhymes.
There was one about four and twenty blackbirds, and another
about a cow with a crumpled horn, and another about the death
of poor Cock Robin. 'It just occurred to me you might be
interested,' he would say with a deprecating little laugh
whenever he produced a new fragment. But he could never recall
more than a few lines of any one rhyme.
Both of them knew-in a way, it was never out of their
minds that what was now happening could not last long. There
were times when the fact of impending death seemed as palpable
as the bed they lay on, and they would cling together with a
sort of despairing sensuality, like a damned soul grasping at
his last morsel of pleasure when the clock is within five
minutes of striking. But there were also times when they had
the illusion not only of safety but of permanence. So long as
they were actually in this room, they both felt, no harm could
come to them. Getting there was difficult and dangerous, but
the room itself was sanctuary. It was as when Winston had gazed
into the heart of the paperweight, with the feeling that it
would be possible to get inside that glassy world, and that
once inside it time could be arrested. Often they gave
themselves up to daydreams of escape. Their luck would hold
indefinitely, and they would carry on their intrigue, just like
this, for the remainder of their natural lives. Or Katharine
would die, and by subtle manoeuvrings Winston and Julia would
succeed in getting married. Or they would commit suicide
together. Or they would disappear, alter themselves out of
recognition, learn to speak with proletarian accents, get jobs
in a factory and live out their lives undetected in a
back-street. It was all nonsense, as they both knew. In reality
there was no escape. Even the one plan that was practicable,
suicide, they had no intention of carrying out. To hang on from
day to day and from week to week, spinning out a present that
had no future, seemed an unconquerable instinct, just as one's
lungs will always draw the next breath so long as there is air
available.
Sometimes, too, they talked of engaging in active
rebellion against the Party, but with no notion of how to take
the first step. Even if the fabulous Brotherhood was a reality,
there still remained the difficulty of finding one's way into
it. He told her of the strange intimacy that existed, or seemed
to exist, between himself and O'Brien, and of the impulse he
sometimes felt, simply to walk into O'Brien's presence,
announce that he was the enemy of the Party, and demand his
help. Curiously enough, this did not strike her as an
impossibly rash thing to do. She was used to judging people by
their faces, and it seemed natural to her that Winston should
believe O'Brien to be trustworthy on the strength of a single
flash of the eyes. Moreover she took it for granted that
everyone, or nearly everyone, secretly hated the Party and
would break the rules if he thought it safe to do so. But she
refused to believe that widespread, organized opposition
existed or could exist. The tales about Goldstein and his
underground army, she said, were simply a lot of rubbish which
the Party had invented for its own purposes and which you had
to pretend to believe in. Times beyond number, at Party rallies
and spontaneous demonstrations, she had shouted at the top of
her voice for the execution of people whose names she had never
heard and in whose supposed crimes she had not the faintest
belief. When public trials were happening she had taken her
place in the detachments from the Youth League who surrounded
the courts from morning to night, chanting at intervals 'Death
to the traitors!' During the Two Minutes Hate she always
excelled all others in shouting insults at Goldstein. Yet she
had only the dimmest idea of who Goldstein was and what
doctrines he was supposed to represent. She had grown up since
the Revolution and was too young to remember the ideological
battles of the fifties and sixties. Such a thing as an
independent political movement was outside her imagination: and
in any case the Party was invincible. It would always exist,
and it would always be the same. You could only rebel against
it by secret disobedience or, at most, by isolated acts of
violence such as killing somebody or blowing something up.
In some ways she was far more acute than Winston, and far
less susceptible to Party propaganda. Once when he happened in
some connexion to mention the war against Eurasia, she startled
him by saying casually that in her opinion the war was not
happening. The rocket bombs which fell daily on London were
probably fired by the Government of Oceania itself, 'just to
keep people frightened'. This was an idea that had literally
never occurred to him. She also stirred a sort of envy in him
by telling him that during the Two Minutes Hate her great
difficulty was to avoid bursting out laughing. But she only
questioned the teachings of the Party when they in some way
touched upon her own life. Often she was ready to accept the
official mythology, simply because the difference between truth
and falsehood did not seem important to her. She believed, for
instance, having learnt it at school, that the Party had
invented aeroplanes. (In his own schooldays, Winston
remembered, in the late fifties, it was only the helicopter
that the Party claimed to have invented; a dozen years later,
when Julia was at school, it was already claiming the
aeroplane; one generation more, and it would be claiming the
steam engine.) And when he told her that aeroplanes had been in
existence before he was born and long before the Revolution,
the fact struck her as totally uninteresting. After all, what
did it matter who had invented aeroplanes? It was rather more
of a shock to him when he discovered from some chance remark
that she did not remember that Oceania, four years ago, had
been at war with Eastasia and at peace with Eurasia. It was
true that she regarded the whole war as a sham: but apparently
she had not even noticed that the name of the enemy had
changed. 'I thought we'd always been at war with Eurasia,' she
said vaguely. It frightened him a little. The invention of
aeroplanes dated from long before her birth, but the switchover
in the war had happened only four years ago, well after she was
grown up. He argued with her about it for perhaps a quarter of
an hour. In the end he succeeded in forcing her memory back
until she did dimly recall that at one time Eastasia and not
Eurasia had been the enemy. But the issue still struck her as
unimportant. 'Who cares?' she said impatiently. 'It's always
one bloody war after another, and one knows the news is all
lies anyway.
Sometimes he talked to her of the Records Department and
the impudent forgeries that he committed there. Such things did
not appear to horrify her. She did not feel the abyss opening
beneath her feet at the thought of lies becoming truths. He
told her the story of Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford and the
momentous slip of paper which he had once held between his
fingers. It did not make much impression on her. At first,
indeed, she failed to grasp the point of the story.
'Were they friends of yours?' she said.
'No, I never knew them. They were Inner Party members.
Besides, they were far older men than I was. They belonged to
the old days, before the Revolution. I barely knew them by
sight.'
'Then what was there to worry about? People are being
killed off all the time, aren't they?'
He tried to make her understand. 'This was an exceptional
case. It wasn't just a question of somebody being killed. Do
you realize that the past, starting from yesterday, has been
actually abolished? If it survives anywhere, it's in a few
solid objects with no words attached to them, like that lump of
glass there. Already we know almost literally nothing about the
Revolution and the years before the Revolution. Every record
has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten,
every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and
building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And
that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute.
History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present
in which the Party is always right. I know, of course,
that the past is falsified, but it would never be possible for
me to prove it, even when I did the falsification myself. After
the thing is done, no evidence ever remains. The only evidence
is inside my own mind, and I don't know with any certainty that
any other human being shares my memories. Just in that one
instance, in my whole life, I did possess actual concrete
evidence after the event -- years after it.'
'And what good was that?'
'It was no good, because I threw it away a few minutes
later. But if the same thing happened today, I should keep it.'
'Well, I wouldn't!' said Julia. 'I'm quite ready to take
risks, but only for something worth while, not for bits of old
newspaper. What could you have done with it even if you had
kept it?'
'Not much, perhaps. But it was evidence. It might have
planted a few doubts here and there, supposing that I'd dared
to show it to anybody. I don't imagine that we can alter
anything in our own lifetime. But one can imagine little knots
of resistance springing up here and there -- small groups of
people banding themselves together, and gradually growing, and
even leaving a few records behind, so that the next generations
can carry on where we leave off.'
'I'm not interested in the next generation, dear. I'm
interested in us.
'You're only a rebel from the waist downwards,' he told
her.
She thought this brilliantly witty and flung her arms
round him in delight.
In the ramifications of party doctrine she had not the
faintest interest. Whenever he began to talk of the principles
of Ingsoc, doublethink, the mutability of the past, and the
denial of objective reality, and to use Newspeak words, she
became bored and confused and said that she never paid any
attention to that kind of thing. One knew that it was all
rubbish, so why let oneself be worried by it? She knew when to
cheer and when to boo, and that was all one needed. If he
persisted in talking of such subjects, she had a disconcerting
habit of falling asleep. She was one of those people who can go
to sleep at any hour and in any position. Talking to her, he
realized how easy it was to present an appearance of orthodoxy
while having no grasp whatever of what orthodoxy meant. In a
way, the world-view of the Party imposed itself most
successfully on people incapable of understanding it. They
could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of
reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what
was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in
public events to notice what was happening. By lack of
understanding they remained sane. They simply swallowed
everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm, because
it left no residue behind, just as a grain of corn will pass
undigested through the body of a bird.
x x x
It had happened at last. The expected message had come.
All his life, it seemed to him, he had been waiting for this to
happen.
He was walking down the long corridor at the Ministry and
he was almost at the spot where Julia had slipped the note into
his hand when he became aware that someone larger than himself
was walking just behind him. The person, whoever it was, gave a
small cough, evidently as a prelude to speaking. Winston
stopped abruptly and turned. It was O'Brien.
At last they were face to face, and it seemed that his
only impulse was to run away. His heart bounded violently. He
would have been incapable of speaking. O'Brien, however, had
continued forward in the same movement, laying a friendly hand
for a moment on Winston's arm, so that the two of them were
walking side by side. He began speaking with the peculiar grave
courtesy that differentiated him from the majority of Inner
Party members.
'I had been hoping for an opportunity of talking to you,'
he said. 'I was reading one of your Newspeak articles in The
Times the other day. You take a scholarly interest in
Newspeak, I believe?'
Winston had recovered part of his self-possession. 'Hardly
scholarly,' he said. 'I'm only an amateur. It's not my subject.
I have never had anything to do with the actual construction of
the language.'
'But you write it very elegantly,' said O'Brien. 'That is
not only my own opinion. I was talking recently to a friend of
yours who is certainly an expert. His name has slipped my
memory for the moment.'
Again Winston's heart stirred painfully. It was
inconceivable that this was anything other than a reference to
Syme. But Syme was not only dead, he was abolished, an
unperson. Any identifiable reference to him would have
been mortally dangerous. O'Brien's remark must obviously have
been intended as a signal, a codeword. By sharing a small act
of thoughtcrime he had turned the two of them into accomplices.
They had continued to stroll slowly down the corridor, but now
O'Brien halted. With the curious, disarming friendliness that
he always managed to put in to the gesture he resettled his
spectacles on his nose. Then he went on:
'What I had really intended to say was that in your
article I noticed you had used two words which have become
obsolete. But they have only become so very recently. Have you
seen the tenth edition of the Newspeak Dictionary?'
'No,' said Winston. 'I didn't think it had been issued
yet. We are still using the ninth in the Records Department.'
'The tenth edition is not due to appear for some months, I
believe. But a few advance copies have been circulated. I have
one myself. It might interest you to look at it, perhaps?'
'Very much so,' said Winston, immediately seeing where
this tended.
'Some of the new developments are most ingenious. The
reduction in the number of verbs -- that is the point that will
appeal to you, I think. Let me see, shall I send a messenger to
you with the dictionary? But I am afraid I invariably forget
anything of that kind. Perhaps you could pick it up at my flat
at some time that suited you? Wait. Let me give you my
address.'
They were standing in front of a telescreen. Somewhat
absentmindedly O'Brien felt two of his pockets and then
produced a small leather-covered notebook and a gold ink-
pencil. Immediately beneath the telescreen, in such a position
that anyone who was watching at the other end of the instrument
could read what he was writing, he scribbled an address, tore
out the page and handed it to Winston.
'I am usually at home in the evenings,' he said. 'If not,
my servant will give you the dictionary.'
He was gone, leaving Winston holding the scrap of paper,
which this time there was no need to conceal. Nevertheless he
carefully memorized what was written on it, and some hours
later dropped it into the memory hole along with a mass of
other papers.
They had been talking to one another for a couple of
minutes at the most. There was only one meaning that the
episode could possibly have. It had been contrived as a way of
letting Winston know O'Brien's address. This was necessary,
because except by direct enquiry it was never possible to
discover where anyone lived. There were no directories of any
kind. 'If you ever want to see me, this is where I can be
found,' was what O'Brien had been saying to him. Perhaps there
would even be a message concealed somewhere in the dictionary.
But at any rate, one thing was certain. The conspiracy that he
had dreamed of did exist, and he had reached the outer edges of
it.
He knew that sooner or later he would obey O'Brien's
summons. Perhaps tomorrow, perhaps after a long delay -- he was
not certain. What was happening was only the working-out of a
process that had started years ago. The first step had been a
secret, involuntary thought, the second had been the opening of
the diary. He had moved from thoughts to words, and now from
words to actions. The last step was something that would happen
in the Ministry of Love. He had accepted it. The end was
contained in the beginning. But it was frightening: or, more
exactly, it was like a foretaste of death, like being a little
less alive. Even whiIe he was speaking to O'Brien, when the
meaning of the words had sunk in, a chilly shuddering feeling
had taken possession of his body. He had the sensation of
stepping into the dampness of a grave, and it was not much
better because he had always known that the grave was there and
waiting for him.
x x x
Winston had woken up with his eyes full of tears. Julia
rolled sleepily against him, murmuring something that might
have been 'What's the matter?'
'I dreamt-' he began, and stopped short. It was too
complex to be put into words. There was the dream itself, and
there was a memory connected with it that had swum into his
mind in the few seconds after waking.
He lay back with his eyes shut, still sodden in the
atmosphere of the dream. It was a vast, luminous dream in which
his whole life seemed to stretch out before him like a
landscape on a summer evening after rain. It had all occurred
inside the glass paperweight, but the surface of the glass was
the dome of the sky, and inside the dome everything was flooded
with clear soft light in which one could see into interminable
distances. The dream had also been comprehended by -- indeed,
in some sense it had consisted in -- a gesture of the arm made
by his mother, and made again thirty years later by the Jewish
woman he had seen on the news film, trying to shelter the small
boy from the bullets, before the helicopter blew them both to
pieces.
'Do you know,' he said, 'that until this moment I believed
I had murdered my mother?'
'Why did you murder her?' said Julia, almost asleep.
'I didn't murder her. Not physically.'
In the dream he had remembered his last glimpse of his
mother, and within a few moments of waking the cluster of small
events surrounding it had all come back. It was a memory that
he must have deliberately pushed out of his consciousness over
many years. He was not certain of the date, but he could not
have been less than ten years old, possibly twelve, when it had
happened.
His father had disappeared some time earlier, how much
earlier he could not remember. He remembered better the
rackety, uneasy circumstances of the time: the periodical
panics about air-raids and the sheltering in Tube stations, the
piles of rubble everywhere, the unintelligible proclamations
posted at street corners, the gangs of youths in shirts all the
same colour, the enormous queues outside the bakeries, the
intermittent machine-gun fire in the distance -- above all, the
fact that there was never enough to eat. He remembered long
afternoons spent with other boys in scrounging round dustbins
and rubbish heaps, picking out the ribs of cabbage leaves,
potato peelings, sometimes even scraps of stale breadcrust from
which they carefully scraped away the cinders; and also in
waiting for the passing of trucks which travelled over a
certain route and were known to carry cattle feed, and which,
when they jolted over the bad patches in the road, sometimes
spilt a few fragments of oil-cake.
When his father disappeared, his mother did not show any
surprise or any violent grief, but a sudden change came over
her. She seemed to have become completely spiritless. It was
evident even to Winston that she was waiting for something that
she knew must happen. She did everything that was needed --
cooked, washed, mended, made the bed, swept the floor, dusted
the mantelpiece -- always very slowly and with a curious lack
of superfluous motion, like an artist's lay- figure moving of
its own accord. Her large shapely body seemed to relapse
naturally into stillness. For hours at a time she would sit
almost immobile on the bed, nursing his young sister, a tiny,
ailing, very silent child of two or three, with a face made
simian by thinness. Very occasionally she would take Winston in
her arms and press him against her for a long time without
saying anything. He was aware, in spite of his youthfulness and
selfishness, that this was somehow connected with the
never-mentioned thing that was about to happen.
He remembered the room where they lived, a dark,
closesmelling room that seemed half filled by a bed with a
white counterpane. There was a gas ring in the fender, and a
shelf where food was kept, and on the landing outside there was
a brown earthenware sink, common to several rooms. He
remembered his mother's statuesque body bending over the gas
ring to stir at something in a saucepan. Above all he
remembered his continuous hunger, and the fierce sordid battles
at mealtimes. He would ask his mother naggingly, over and over
again, why there was not more food, he would shout and storm at
her (he even remembered the tones of his voice, which was
beginning to break prematurely and sometimes boomed in a
peculiar way), or he would attempt a snivelling note of pathos
in his efforts to get more than his share. His mother was quite
ready to give him more than his share. She took it for granted
that he, 'the boy', should have the biggest portion; but
however much she gave him he invariably demanded more. At every
meal she would beseech him not to be selfish and to remember
that his little sister was sick and also needed food, but it
was no use. He would cry out with rage when she stopped
ladling, he would try to wrench the saucepan and spoon out of
her hands, he would grab bits from his sister's plate. He knew
that he was starving the other two, but he could not help it;
he even felt that he had a right to do it. The clamorous hunger
in his belly seemed to justify him. Between meals, if his
mother did not stand guard, he was constantly pilfering at the
wretched store of food on the shelf.
One day a chocolate-ration was issued. There had been no
such issue for weeks or months past. He remembered quite
clearly that precious little morsel of chocolate. It was a
two-ounce slab (they still talked about ounces in those days)
between the three of them. It was obvious that it ought to be
divided into three equal parts. Suddenly, as though he were
listening to somebody else, Winston heard himself demanding in
a loud booming voice that he should be given the whole piece.
His mother told him not to be greedy. There was a long, nagging
argument that went round and round, with shouts, whines, tears,
remonstrances, bargainings. His tiny sister, clinging to her
mother with both hands, exactly like a baby monkey, sat looking
over her shoulder at him with large, mournful eyes. In the end
his mother broke off three-quarters of the chocolate and gave
it to Winston, giving the other quarter to his sister. The
little girl took hold of it and looked at it dully, perhaps not
knowing what it was. Winston stood watching her for a moment.
Then with a sudden swift spring he had snatched the piece of
chocolate out of his sister's hand and was fleeing for the
door.
'Winston, Winston!' his mother called after him. 'Come
back! Give your sister back her chocolate!'
He stopped, but did not come back. His mother's anxious
eyes were fixed on his face. Even now he was thinking about the
thing, he did not know what it was that was on the point of
happening. His sister, conscious of having been robbed of
something, had set up a feeble wail. His mother drew her arm
round the child and pressed its face against her breast.
Something in the gesture told him that his sister was dying. He
turned and fled down the stairs. with the chocolate growing
sticky in his hand.
He never saw his mother again. After he had devoured the
chocolate he felt somewhat ashamed of himself and hung about in
the streets for several hours, until hunger drove him home.
When he came back his mother had disappeared. This was already
becoming normal at that time. Nothing was gone from the room
except his mother and his sister. They had not taken any
clothes, not even his mother's overcoat. To this day he did not
know with any certainty that his mother was dead. It was
perfectly possible that she had merely been sent to a
forced-labour camp. As for his sister, she might have been
removed, like Winston himself, to one of the colonies for
homeless children (Reclamation Centres, they were called) which
had grown up as a result of the civil war, or she might have
been sent to the labour camp along with his mother, or simply
left somewhere or other to die.
The dream was still vivid in his mind, especially the
enveloping protecting gesture of the arm in which its whole
meaning seemed to be contained. His mind went back to another
dream of two months ago. Exactly as his mother had sat on the
dingy whitequilted bed, with the child clinging to her, so she
had sat in the sunken ship, far underneath him, and drowning
deeper every minute, but still looking up at him through the
darkening water.
He told Julia the story of his mother's disappearance.
Without opening her eyes she rolled over and settled herself
into a more comfortable position.
'I expect you were a beastly little swine in those days,'
she said indistinctly. 'All children are swine.'
'Yes. But the real point of the story-'
From her breathing it was evident that she was going off
to sleep again. He would have liked to continue talking about
his mother. He did not suppose, from what he could remember of
her, that she had been an unusual woman, still less an
intelligent one; and yet she had possessed a kind of nobility,
a kind of purity, simply because the standards that she obeyed
were private ones. Her feelings were her own, and could not be
altered from outside. It would not have occurred to her that an
action which is ineffectual thereby becomes meaningless. If you
loved someone, you loved him, and when you had nothing else to
give, you still gave him love. When the last of the chocolate
was gone, his mother had clasped the child in her arms. It was
no use, it changed nothing, it did not produce more chocolate,
it did not avert the child's death or her own; but it seemed
natural to her to do it. The refugee woman in the boat had also
covered the little boy with her arm, which was no more use
against the bullets than a sheet of paper. The terrible thing
that the Party had done was to persuade you that mere impulses,
mere feelings, were of no account, while at the same time
robbing you of all power over the material world. When once you
were in the grip of the Party, what you felt or did not feel,
what you did or refrained from doing, made literally no
difference. Whatever happened you vanished, and neither you nor
your actions were ever heard of again. You were lifted clean
out of the stream of history. And yet to the people of only two
generations ago this would not have seemed all-important,
because they were not attempting to alter history. They were
governed by private loyalties which they did not question. What
mattered were individual relationships, and a completely
helpless gesture, an embrace, a tear, a word spoken to a dying
man, could have value in itself. The proles, it suddenly
occurred to him, had remained in this condition. They were not
loyal to a party or a country or an idea, they were loyal to
one another. For the first time in his life he did not despise
the proles or think of them merely as an inert force which
would one day spring to life and regenerate the world. The
proles had stayed human. They had not become hardened inside.
They had held on to the primitive emotions which he himself had
to re-learn by conscious effort. And in thinking this he
remembered, without apparent relevance, how a few weeks ago he
had seen a severed hand lying on the pavement and had kicked it
into the gutter as though it had been a cabbage-stalk.
'The proles are human beings,' he said aloud. 'We are not
human.'
'Why not?' said Julia, who had woken up again.
He thought for a little while. 'Has it ever occurred to
you. he said, 'that the best thing for us to do would be simply
to walk out of here before it's too late, and never see each
other again?'
'Yes, dear, it has occurred to me, several times. But I'm
not going to do it, all the same.'
'We've been lucky,' he said 'but it can't last much
longer. You're young. You look normal and innocent. If you keep
clear of people like me, you might stay alive for another fifty
years.'
'No. I've thought it all out. What you do, I'm going to
do. And don't be too downhearted. I'm rather good at staying
alive.'
'We may be together for another six months -- a year --
there's no knowing. At the end we're certain to be apart. Do
you realize how utterly alone we shall be? When once they get
hold of us there will be nothing, literally nothing, that
either of us can do for the other. If I confess, they'll shoot
you, and if I refuse to confess, they'll shoot you just the
same. Nothing that I can do or say, or stop myself from saying,
will put off your death for as much as five minutes. Neither of
us will even know whether the other is alive or dead. We shall
be utterly without power of any kind. The one thing that
matters is that we shouldn't betray one another, although even
that can't make the slightest difference.'
'If you mean confessing,' she said, 'we shall do that,
right enough. Everybody always confesses. You can't help it.
They torture you.'
'I don't mean confessing. Confession is not betrayal. What
you say or do doesn't matter: only feelings matter. If they
could make me stop loving you -- that would be the real
betrayal.'
She thought it over. 'They can't do that,' she said
finally. 'It's the one thing they can't do. They can make you
say anything -- any-thing -- but they can't make
you believe it. They can't get inside you.'
'No,' he said a little more hopefully, 'no; that's quite
true. They can't get inside you. If you can feel that
staying human is worth while, even when it can't have any
result whatever, you've beaten them.'
He thought of the telescreen with its never-sleeping ear.
They could spy upon you night and day, but if you kept your
head you could still outwit them. With all their cleverness
they had never mastered the secret of finding out what another
human being was thinking. Perhaps that was less true when you
were actually in their hands. One did not know what happened
inside the Ministry of Love, but it was possible to guess:
tortures, drugs, delicate instruments that registered your
nervous reactions, gradual wearing-down by sleeplessness and
solitude and persistent questioning. Facts, at any rate, could
not be kept hidden. They could be tracked down by enquiry, they
could be squeezed out of you by torture. But if the object was
not to stay alive but to stay human, what difference did it
ultimately make? They could not alter your feelings: for that
matter you could not alter them yourself, even if you wanted
to. They could lay bare in the utmost detail everything that
you had done or said or thought; but the inner heart, whose
workings were mysterious even to yourself, remained
impregnable.
x x x
They had done it, they had done it at last!
The room they were standing in was long-shaped and softly
lit. The telescreen was dimmed to a low murmur; the richness of
the dark-blue carpet gave one the impression of treading on
velvet. At the far end of the room O'Brien was sitting at a
table under a green-shaded lamp, with a mass of papers on
either side of him. He had not bothered to look up when the
servant showed Julia and Winston in.
Winston's heart was thumping so hard that he doubted
whether he would be able to speak. They had done it, they had
done it at last, was all he could think. It had been a rash act
to come here at all, and sheer folly to arrive together; though
it was true that they had come by different routes and only met
on O'Brien's doorstep. But merely to walk into such a place
needed an effort of the nerve. It was only on very rare
occasions that one saw inside the dwelling-places of the Inner
Party, or even penetrated into the quarter of the town where
they lived. The whole atmosphere of the huge block of flats,
the richness and spaciousness of everything, the unfamiliar
smells of good food and good tobacco, the silent and incredibly
rapid lifts sliding up and down, the white-jacketed servants
hurrying to and fro -- everything was intimidating. Although he
had a good pretext for coming here, he was haunted at every
step by the fear that a black-uniformed guard would suddenly
appear from round the corner, demand his papers, and order him
to get out. O'Brien's servant, however, had admitted the two of
them without demur. He was a small, dark-haired man in a white
jacket, with a diamond-shaped, completely expressionless face
which might have been that of a Chinese. The passage down which
he led them was softly carpeted, with cream-papered walls and
white wainscoting, all exquisitely clean. That too was
intimidating. Winston could not remember ever to have seen a
passageway whose walls were not grimy from the contact of human
bodies.
O'Brien had a slip of paper between his fingers and seemed
to be studying it intently. His heavy face, bent down so that
one could see the line of the nose, looked both formidable and
intelligent. For perhaps twenty seconds he sat without
stirring. Then he pulled the speakwrite towards him and rapped
out a message in the hybrid jargon of the Ministries:
'Items one comma five comma seven approved fullwise stop
suggestion contained item six doubleplus ridiculous verging
crimethink cancel stop unproceed constructionwise antegetting
plusfull estimates machinery overheads stop end message.'
He rose deliberately from his chair and came towards them
across the soundless carpet. A little of the official
atmosphere seemed to have fallen away from him with the
Newspeak words, but his expression was grimmer than usual, as
though he were not pleased at being disturbed. The terror that
Winston already felt was suddenly shot through by a streak of
ordinary embarrassment. It seemed to him quite possible that he
had simply made a stupid mistake. For what evidence had he in
reality that O'Brien was any kind of political conspirator?
Nothing but a flash of the eyes and a single equivocal remark:
beyond that, only his own secret imaginings, founded on a
dream. He could not even fall back on the pretence that he had
come to borrow the dictionary, because in that case Julia's
presence was impossible to explain. As O'Brien passed the
telescreen a thought seemed to strike him. He stopped, turned
aside and pressed a switch on the wall. There was a sharp snap.
The voice had stopped.
Julia uttered a tiny sound, a sort of squeak of surprise.
Even in the midst of his panic, Winston was too much taken
aback to be able to hold his tongue.
'You can turn it off!' he said.
'Yes,' said O'Brien, 'we can turn it off. We have that
privilege.'
He was opposite them now. His solid form towered over the
pair of them, and the expression on his face was still
indecipherable. He was waiting, somewhat sternly, for Winston
to speak, but about what? Even now it was quite conceivabIe
that he was simply a busy man wondering irritably why he had
been interrupted. Nobody spoke. After the stopping of the
telescreen the room seemed deadly silent. The seconds marched
past, enormous. With difficulty Winston continued to keep his
eyes fixed on O'Brien's. Then suddenly the grim face broke down
into what might have been the beginnings of a smile. With his
characteristic gesture O'Brien resettled his spectacles on his
nose.
'Shall I say it, or will you?' he said.
'I will say it,' said Winston promptly. 'That thing is
really turned off?'
'Yes, everything is turned off. We are alone.'
'We have come here because-'
He paused, realizing for the first time the vagueness of
his own motives. Since he did not in fact know what kind of
help he expected from O'Brien, it was not easy to say why he
had come here. He went on, conscious that what he was saying
must sound both feeble and pretentious:
'We believe that there is some kind of conspiracy, some
kind of secret organization working against the Party, and that
you are involved in it. We want to join it and work for it. We
are enemies of the Party. We disbelieve in the principles of
Ingsoc. We are thought-criminals. We are also adulterers. I
tell you this because we want to put ourselves at your mercy.
If you want us to incriminate ourselves in any other way, we
are ready.'
He stopped and glanced over his shoulder, with the feeling
that the door had opened. Sure enough, the little yellow-faced
servant had come in without knocking. Winston saw that he was
carrying a tray with a decanter and glasses.
'Martin is one of us,' said O'Brien impassively. 'Bring
the drinks over here, Martin. Put them on the round table. Have
we enough chairs? Then we may as well sit down and talk in
comfort. Bring a chair for yourself, Martin. This is business.
You can stop being a servant for the next ten minutes.'
The little man sat down, quite at his ease, and yet still
with a servant-like air, the air of a valet enjoying a
privilege. Winston regarded him out of the corner of his eye.
It struck him that the man's whole life was playing a part, and
that he felt it to be dangerous to drop his assumed personality
even for a moment. O'Brien took the decanter by the neck and
filled up the glasses with a dark- red liquid. It aroused in
Winston dim memories of something seen long ago on a wall or a
hoarding -- a vast bottle composed of electric lights which
seemed to move up and down and pour its contents into a glass.
Seen from the top the stuff looked almost black, but in the
decanter it gleamed like a ruby. It had a sour-sweet smell. He
saw Julia pick up her glass and sniff at it with frank
curiosity.
'It is called wine,' said O'Brien with a faint smile. 'You
will have read about it in books, no doubt. Not much of it gets
to the Outer Party, I am afraid.' His face grew solemn again,
and he raised his glass: 'I think it is fitting that we should
begin by drinking a health. To our Leader: To Emmanuel
Goldstein.'
Winston took up his glass with a certain eagerness. Wine
was a thing he had read and dreamed about. Like the glass
paperweight or Mr Charrington's half-remembered rhymes, it
belonged to the vanished, romantic past, the olden time as he
liked to call it in his secret thoughts. For some reason he had
always thought of wine as having an intensely sweet taste, like
that of blackberry jam and an immediate intoxicating effect.
Actually, when he came to swallow it, the stuff was distinctly
disappointing. The truth was that after years of gin-drinking
he could barely taste it. He set down the empty glass.
'Then there is such a person as Goldstein?' he said.
'Yes, there is such a person, and he is alive. Where, I do
not know.'
'And the conspiracy -- the organization? Is it real? It is
not simply an invention of the Thought Police?'
'No, it is real. The Brotherhood, we call it. You will
never learn much more about the Brotherhood than that it exists
and that you belong to it. I will come back to that presently.'
He looked at his wrist-watch. 'It is unwise even for members of
the Inner Party to turn off the telescreen for more than half
an hour. You ought not to have come here together, and you will
have to leave separately. You, comrade' -- he bowed his head to
Julia -- 'will leave first. We have about twenty minutes at our
disposal. You will understand that I must start by asking you
certain questions. In general terms, what are you prepared to
do?'
'Anything that we are capable of,' said Winston.
O'Brien had turned himself a little in his chair so that
he was facing Winston. He almost ignored Julia, seeming to take
it for granted that Winston could speak for her. For a moment
the lids flitted down over his eyes. He began asking his
questions in a low, expressionless voice, as though this were a
routine, a sort of catechism, most of whose answers were known
to him already.
'You are prepared to give your lives?'
'Yes.'
'You are prepared to commit murder?'
'Yes.'
'To commit acts of sabotage which may cause the death of
hundreds of innocent people?'
'Yes.'
'To betray your country to foreign powers?'
'Yes.'
'You are prepared to cheat, to forge, to blackmail, to
corrupt the minds of children, to distribute habit-forming
drugs, to encourage prostitution, to disseminate venereal
diseases -- to do anything which is likely to cause
demoralization and weaken the power of the Party?'
'Yes.'
'If, for example, it would somehow serve our interests to
throw sulphuric acid in a child's face -- are you prepared to
do that?'
'Yes.'
'You are prepared to lose your identity and live out the
rest of your life as a waiter or a dock-worker?'
'Yes.'
'You are prepared to commit suicide, if and when we order
you to do so?'
'Yes.'
'You are prepared, the two of you, to separate and never
see one another again?'
'No!' broke in Julia.
It appeared to Winston that a long time passed before he
answered. For a moment he seemed even to have been deprived of
the power of speech. His tongue worked soundlessly, forming the
opening syllables first of one word, then of the other, over
and over again. Until he had said it, he did not know which
word he was going to say. 'No,' he said finally.
'You did well to tell me,' said O'Brien. 'It is necessary
for us to know everything.'
He turned himself toward Julia and added in a voice with
somewhat more expression in it:
'Do you understand that even if he survives, it may be as
a different person? We may be obliged to give him a new
identity. His face, his movements, the shape of his hands, the
colour of his hair -- even his voice would be different. And
you yourself might have become a different person. Our surgeons
can alter people beyond recognition. Sometimes it is necessary.
Sometimes we even amputate a limb.'
Winston could not help snatching another sidelong glance
at Martin's Mongolian face. There were no scars that he could
see. Julia had turned a shade paler, so that her freckles were
showing, but she faced O'Brien boldly. She murmured something
that seemed to be assent.
'Good. Then that is settled.'
There was a silver box of cigarettes on the table. With a
rather absent-minded air O'Brien pushed them towards the
others, took one himself, then stood up and began to pace
slowly to and fro, as though he could think better standing.
They were very good cigarettes, very thick and well-packed,
with an unfamiliar silkiness in the paper. O'Brien looked at
his wrist-watch again.
'You had better go back to your Pantry, Martin,' he said.
'I shall switch on in a quarter of an hour. Take a good look at
these comrades' faces before you go. You will be seeing them
again. I may not.
Exactly as they had done at the front door, the little
man's dark eyes flickered over their faces. There was not a
trace of friendliness in his manner. He was memorizing their
appearance, but he felt no interest in them, or appeared to
feel none. It occurred to Winston that a synthetic face was
perhaps incapable of changing its expression. Without speaking
or giving any kind of salutation, Martin went out, closing the
door silently behind him. O'Brien was strolling up and down,
one hand in the pocket of his black overalls, the other holding
his cigarette.
'You understand,' he said, 'that you will be fighting in
the dark. You will always be in the dark. You will receive
orders and you will obey them, without knowing why. Later I
shall send you a book from which you will learn the true nature
of the society we live in, and the strategy by which we shall
destroy it. When you have read the book, you will be full
members of the Brotherhood. But between the general aims that
we are fighting for and the immedi ate tasks of the moment, you
will never know anything. I tell you that the Brotherhood
exists, but I cannot tell you whether it numbers a hundred
members, or ten million. From your personal knowledge you will
never be able to say that it numbers even as many as a dozen.
You will have three or four contacts, who will be renewed from
time to time as they disappear. As this was your first contact,
it will be preserved. When you receive orders, they will come
from me. If we find it necessary to communicate with you, it
will be through Martin. When you are finally caught, you will
confess. That is unavoidable. But you will have very little to
confess, other than your own actions. You will not be able to
betray more than a handful of unimportant people. Probably you
will not even betray me. By that time I may be dead, or I shall
have become a different person, with a different face.'
He continued to move to and fro over the soft carpet. In
spite of the bulkiness of his body there was a remarkable grace
in his movements. It came out even in the gesture with which he
thrust a hand into his pocket, or manipulated a cigarette. More
even than of strength, he gave an impression of confidence and
of an understanding tinged by irony. However much in earnest he
might be, he had nothing of the single-mindedness that belongs
to a fanatic. When he spoke of murder, suicide, venereal
disease, amputated limbs, and altered faces, it was with a
faint air of persiflage. 'This is unavoidable,' his voice
seemed to say; 'this is what we have got to do, unflinchingly.
But this is not what we shall be doing when life is worth
living again.' A wave of admiration, almost of worship, flowed
out from Winston towards O'Brien. For the moment he had
forgotten the shadowy figure of Goldstein. When you looked at
O'Brien's powerful shoulders and his blunt-featured face, so
ugly and yet so civilized, it was impossible to believe that he
could be defeated. There was no stratagem that he was not equal
to, no danger that he could not foresee. Even Julia seemed to
be impressed. She had let her cigarette go out and was
listening intently. O'Brien went on:
'You will have heard rumours of the existence of the
Brotherhood. No doubt you have formed your own picture of it.
You have imagined, probably, a huge underworld of conspirators,
meeting secretly in cellars, scribbling messages on walls,
recognizing one another by codewords or by special movements of
the hand. Nothing of the kind exists. The members of the
Brotherhood have no way of recognizing one another, and it is
impossible for any one member to be aware of the identity of
more than a few others. Goldstein himself, if he fell into the
hands of the Thought Police, could not give them a complete
list of members, or any information that would lead them to a
complete list. No such list exists. The Brotherhood cannot be
wiped out because it is not an organization in the ordinary
sense. Nothing holds it together except an idea which is
indestructible. You will never have anything to sustain you,
except the idea. You will get no comradeship and no
encouragement. When finally you are caught, you will get no
help. We never help our members. At most, when it is absolutely
necessary that someone should be silenced, we are occasionally
able to smuggle a razor blade into a prisoner's cell. You will
have to get used to living without results and without hope.
You will work for a while, you will be caught, you will
confess, and then you will die. Those are the only results that
you will ever see. There is no possibility that any perceptible
change will happen within our own lifetime. We are the dead.
Our only true life is in the future. We shall take part in it
as handfuls of dust and splinters of bone. But how far away
that future may be, there is no knowing. It might be a thousand
years. At present nothing is possible except to extend the area
of sanity little by little. We cannot act collectively. We can
only spread our knowledge outwards from individual to
individual, generation after generation. In the face of the
Thought Police there is no other way.'
He halted and looked for the third time at his wrist-
watch.
'It is almost time for you to leave, comrade,' he said to
Julia. 'Wait. The decanter is still half full.'
He filled the glasses and raised his own glass by the
stem.
'What shall it be this time?' he said, still with the same
faint suggestion of irony. 'To the confusion of the Thought
Police? To the death of Big Brother? To humanity? To the
future?'
'To the past,' said Winston.
'The past is more important,' agreed O'Brien gravely.
They emptied their glasses, and a moment later Julia stood
up to go. O'Brien took a small box from the top of a cabinet
and handed her a flat white tablet which he told her to place
on her tongue. It was important, he said, not to go out
smelling of wine: the lift attendants were very observant. As
soon as the door had shut behind her he appeared to forget her
existence. He took another pace or two up and down, then
stopped.
'There are details to be settled,' he said. 'I assume that
you have a hiding-place of some kind?'
Winston explained about the room over Mr Charrington's
shop.
'That will do for the moment. Later we will arrange
something else for you. It is important to change one's
hiding-place frequently. Meanwhile I shall send you a copy of
the book' -- even O'Brien, Winston noticed, seemed to
pronounce the words as though they were in italics-
'Goldstein's book, you understand, as soon as possible. It may
be some days before I can get hold of one. There are not many
in existence, as you can imagine. The Thought Police hunt them
down and destroy them almost as fast as we can produce them. It
makes very little difference. The book is indestructible. If
the last copy were gone, we could reproduce it almost word for
word. Do you carry a brief-case to work with you?' he added.
'As a rule, yes.'
'What is it like?'
'Black, very shabby. With two straps.'
'Black, two straps, very shabby -- good. One day in the
fairly near future-I cannot give a date -- one of the messages
among your morning's work will contain a misprinted word, and
you will have to ask for a repeat. On the following day you
will go to work without your brief-case. At some time during
the day, in the street, a man will touch you on the arm and say
"I think you have dropped your brief-case." The one he gives
you will contain a copy of Goldstein's book. You will return it
within fourteen days.'
They were silent for a moment.
'There are a couple of minutes before you need go,' said
O'Brien. 'We shall meet again -- if we do meet again-'
Winston looked up at him. 'In the place where there is no
darkness?' he said hesitantly.
O'Brien nodded without appearance of surprise. 'In the
place where there is no darkness,' he said, as though he had
recognized the allusion. 'And in the meantime, is there
anything that you wish to say before you leave? Any message?
Any question?.'
Winston thought. There did not seem to be any further
question that he wanted to ask: still less did he feel any
impulse to utter high-sounding generalities. Instead of
anything directly connected with O'Brien or the Brotherhood,
there came into his mind a sort of composite picture of the
dark bedroom where his mother had spent her last days, and the
little room over Mr Charrington's shop, and the glass
paperweight, and the steel engraving in its rosewood frame.
Almost at random he said:
'Did you ever happen to hear an old rhyme that begins
"Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St Clement's"?'
Again O'Brien nodded. With a sort of grave courtesy he
completed the stanza:
'Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St Clement's,
You owe me three farthings, say the bells of St Martin's,
When will you pay me? say the bells of Old Bailey
When I grow rich, say the bells of Shoreditch.'
'You knew the last line!' said Winston.
'Yes, I knew the last line. And now, I am afraid, it is
time for you to go. But wait. You had better let me give you
one of these tablets.'
As Winston stood up O'Brien held out a hand. His powerful
grip crushed the bones of Winston's palm. At the door Winston
looked back, but O'Brien seemed already to be in process of
putting him out of mind. He was waiting with his hand on the
switch that controlled the telescreen. Beyond him Winston could
see the writing-table with its green- shaded lamp and the
speakwrite and the wire baskets deep- laden with papers. The
incident was closed. Within thirty seconds, it occurred to him,
O'Brien would be back at his interrupted and important work on
behalf of the Party.
x x x
Winston was gelatinous with fatigue. Gelatinous was the
right word. It had come into his head spontaneously. His body
seemed to have not only the weakness of a jelly, but its
translucency. He felt that if he held up his hand he would be
able to see the light through it. All the blood and lymph had
been drained out of him by an enormous debauch of work, leaving
only a frail structure of nerves, bones, and skin. All
sensations seemed to be magnified. His overalls fretted his
shoulders, the pavement tickled his feet, even the opening and
closing of a hand was an effort that made his joints creak.
He had worked more than ninety hours in five days. So had
everyone else in the Ministry. Now it was all over, and he had
literally nothing to do, no Party work of any description,
until tomorrow morning. He could spend six hours in the
hiding-place and another nine in his own bed. Slowly, in mild
afternoon sunshine, he walked up a dingy street in the
direction of Mr Charrington's shop, keeping one eye open for
the patrols, but irrationally convinced that this afternoon
there was no danger of anyone interfering with him. The heavy
brief-case that he was carrying bumped against his knee at each
step, sending a tingling sensation up and down the skin of his
leg. Inside it was the book, which he had now had in his
possession for six days and had not yet opened, nor even looked
at.
On the sixth day of Hate Week, after the processions, the
speeches, the shouting, the singing, the banners, the posters,
the films, the waxworks, the rolling of drums and squealing of
trumpets, the tramp of marching feet, the grinding of the
caterpillars of tanks, the roar of massed planes, the booming
of guns -- after six days of this, when the great orgasm was
quivering to its climax and the general hatred of Eurasia had
boiled up into such delirium that if the crowd could have got
their hands on the 2,000 Eurasian war-criminals who were to be
publicly hanged on the last day of the proceedings, they would
unquestionably have torn them to pieces -- at just this moment
it had been announced that Oceania was not after all at war
with Eurasia. Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Eurasia was an
ally.
There was, of course, no admission that any change had
taken place. Merely it became known, with extreme suddenness
and everywhere at once, that Eastasia and not Eurasia was the
enemy. Winston was taking part in a demonstration in one of the
central London squares at the moment when it happened. It was
night, and the white faces and the scarlet banners were luridly
floodlit. The square was packed with several thousand people,
including a block of about a thousand schoolchildren in the
uniform of the Spies. On a scarlet-draped platform an orator of
the Inner Party, a small lean man with disproportionately long
arms and a large bald skull over which a few lank locks
straggled, was haranguing the crowd. A little Rumpelstiltskin
figure, contorted with hatred, he gripped the neck of the
microphone with one hand while the other, enormous at the end
of a bony arm, clawed the air menacingly above his head. His
voice, made metallic by the amplifiers, boomed forth an endless
catalogue of atrocities, massacres, deportations, lootings,
rapings, torture of prisoners, bombing of civilians, lying
propaganda, unjust aggressions, broken treaties. It was almost
impossible to listen to him without being first convinced and
then maddened. At every few moments the fury of the crowd
boiled over and the voice of the speaker was drowned by a wild
beast-like roaring that rose uncontrollably from thousands of
throats. The most savage yells of all came from the
schoolchildren. The speech had been proceeding for perhaps
twenty minutes when a messenger hurried on to the platform and
a scrap of paper was slipped into the speaker's hand. He
unrolled and read it without pausing in his speech. Nothing
altered in his voice or manner, or in the content of what he
was saying, but suddenly the names were different. Without
words said, a wave of understanding rippled through the crowd.
Oceania was at war with Eastasia! The next moment there was a
tremendous commotion. The banners and posters with which the
square was decorated were all wrong! Quite half of them had the
wrong faces on them. It was sabotage! The agents of Goldstein
had been at work! There was a riotous interlude while posters
were ripped from the walls, banners torn to shreds and trampled
underfoot. The Spies performed prodigies of activity in
clambering over the rooftops and cutting the streamers that
fluttered from the chimneys. But within two or three minutes it
was all over. The orator, still gripping the neck of the
microphone, his shoulders hunched forward, his free hand
clawing at the air, had gone straight on with his speech. One
minute more, and the feral roars of rage were again bursting
from the crowd. The Hate continued exactly as before, except
that the target had been changed.
The thing that impressed Winston in looking back was that
the speaker had switched from one line to the other actually in
midsentence, not only without a pause, but without even
breaking the syntax. But at the moment he had other things to
preoccupy him. It was during the moment of disorder while the
posters were being torn down that a man whose face he did not
see had tapped him on the shoulder and said, 'Excuse me, I
think you've dropped your brief-case.' He took the brief-case
abstractedly, without speaking. He knew that it would be days
before he had an opportunity to look inside it. The instant
that the demonstration was over he went straight to the
Ministry of Truth, though the time was now nearly twenty-three
hours. The entire staff of the Ministry had done likewise. The
orders already issuing from the telescreen, recalling them to
their posts, were hardly necessary.
Oceania was at war with Eastasia: Oceania had always been
at war with Eastasia. A large part of the political literature
of five years was now completely obsolete. Reports and records
of all kinds, newspapers, books, pamphlets, films,
sound-tracks, photographs -- all had to be rectified at
lightning speed. Although no directive was ever issued, it was
known that the chiefs of the Department intended that within
one week no reference to the war with Eurasia, or the alliance
with Eastasia, should remain in existence anywhere. The work
was overwhelming, all the more so because the processes that it
involved could not be called by their true names. Everyone in
the Records Department worked eighteen hours in the
twenty-four, with two three-hour snatches of sleep. Mattresses
were brought up from the cellars and pitched all over the
corridors: meals consisted of sandwiches and Victory Coffee
wheeled round on trolleys by attendants from the canteen. Each
time that Winston broke off for one of his spells of sleep he
tried to leave his desk clear of work, and each time that he
crawled back sticky-eyed and aching, it was to find that
another shower of paper cylinders had covered the desk like a
snowdrift, halfburying the speakwrite and overflowing on to the
floor, so that the first job was always to stack them into a
neat enough pile to give him room to work. What was worst of
all was that the work was by no means purely mechanical. Often
it was enough merely to substitute one name for another, but
any detailed report of events demanded care and imagination.
Even the geographical knowledge that one needed in transferring
the war from one part of the world to another was considerable.
By the third day his eyes ached unbearably and his
spectacles needed wiping every few minutes. It was like
struggling with some crushing physical task, something which
one had the right to refuse and which one was nevertheless
neurotically anxious to accomplish. In so far as he had time to
remember it, he was not troubled by the fact that every word he
murmured into the speakwrite, every stroke of his ink-pencil,
was a deliberate lie. He was as anxious as anyone else in the
Department that the forgery should be perfect. On the morning
of the sixth day the dribble of cylinders slowed down. For as
much as half an hour nothing came out of the tube; then one
more cylinder, then nothing. Everywhere at about the same time
the work was easing off. A deep and as it were secret sigh went
through the Department. A mighty deed, which could never be
mentioned, had been achieved. It was now impossible for any
human being to prove by documentary evidence that the war with
Eurasia had ever happened. At twelve hundred it was
unexpectedly announced that all workers in the Ministry were
free till tomorrow morning. Winston, still carrying the
brief-case containing the book, which had remained
between his feet while he worked and under his body while he
slept, went home, shaved himself, and almost fell asleep in his
bath, although the water was barely more than tepid.
With a sort of voluptuous creaking in his joints he
climbed the stair above Mr Charrington's shop. He was tired,
but not sleepy any longer. He opened the window, lit the dirty
little oilstove and put on a pan of water for coffee. Julia
would arrive presently: meanwhile there was the book. He
sat down in the sluttish armchair and undid the straps of the
brief-case.
A heavy black volume, amateurishly bound, with no name or
title on the cover. The print also looked slightly irregular.
The pages were worn at the edges, and fell apart, easily, as
though the book had passed through many hands. The inscription
on the title-page ran:
THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF
OLIGARCHICAL COLLECTIVISMbyEmmanuel Goldstein
Winston began reading:
Chapter IIgnorance is Strength
Throughout recorded time, and probably since the end of
the Neolithic Age, there have been three kinds of people in the
world, the High, the Middle, and the Low. They have been
subdivided in many ways, they have borne countless different
names, and their relative numbers, as well as their attitude
towards one another, have varied from age to age: but the
essential structure of society has never altered. Even after
enormous upheavals and seemingly irrevocable changes, the same
pattern has always reasserted itself, just as a gyroscope will
always return to equilibrium, however far it is pushed one way
or the other.
The aims of these groups are entirely irreconcilable. . .
Winston stopped reading, chiefly in order to appreciate
the fact that he was reading, in comfort and safety. He
was alone: no telescreen, no ear at the keyhole, no nervous
impulse to glance over his shoulder or cover the page with his
hand. The sweet summer air played against his cheek. From
somewhere far away there floated the faint shouts of children:
in the room itself there was no sound except the insect voice
of the clock. He settled deeper into the arm-chair and put his
feet up on the fender. It was bliss, it was etemity. Suddenly,
as one sometimes does with a book of which one knows that one
will ultimately read and re-read every word, he opened it at a
different place and found himself at Chapter III. He went on
reading:
Chapter IIIWar is Peace
The splitting up of the world into three great
super-states was an event which could be and indeed was
foreseen before the middle of the twentieth century. With the
absorption of Europe by Russia and of the British Empire by the
United States, two of the three existing powers, Eurasia and
Oceania, were already effectively in being. The third,
Eastasia, only emerged as a distinct unit after another decade
of confused fighting. The frontiers between the three
super-states are in some places arbitrary, and in others they
fluctuate according to the fortunes of war, but in general they
follow geographical lines. Eurasia comprises the whole of the
northern part of the European and Asiatic land-mass, from
Portugal to the Bering Strait. Oceania comprises the Americas,
the Atlantic islands including the British Isles, Australasia,
and the southern portion of Africa. Eastasia, smaller than the
others and with a less definite western frontier, comprises
China and the countries to the south of it, the Japanese
islands and a large but fluctuating portion of Manchuria,
Mongolia, and Tibet.
In one combination or another, these three super-states
are permanently at war, and have been so for the past
twenty-five years. War, however, is no longer the desperate,
annihilating struggle that it was in the early decades of the
twentieth centary. It is a warfare of limited aims between
combatants who are unable to destroy one another, have no
material cause for fighting and are not divided by any genuine
ideological difference. This is not to say that either the
conduct of war, or the prevailing attitude towards it, has
become less bloodthirsty or more chivalrous. On the contrary,
war hysteria is continuous and universal in all countries, and
such acts as raping, looting, the slaughter of children, the
reduction of whole populations to slavery, and reprisals
against prisoners which extend even to boiling and burying
alive, are looked upon as normal, and, when they are committed
by one's own side and not by the enemy, meritorious. But in a
physical sense war involves very small numbers of people,
mostly highly-trained specialists, and causes comparatively few
casualties. The fighting, when there is any, takes place on the
vague frontiers whose whereabouts the average man can only
guess at, or round the Floating Fortresses which guard
strategic spots on the sea lanes. In the centres of
civilization war means no more than a continuous shortage of
consumption goods, and the occasional crash of a rocket bomb
which may cause a few scores of deaths. War has in fact changed
its character. More exactly, the reasons for which war is waged
have changed in their order of importance. Motives which were
already present to some small extent in the great wars of the
early twentieth centuary have now become dominant and are
consciously recognized and acted upon.
To understand the nature of the present war -- for in
spite of the regrouping which occurs every few years, it is
always the same war -- one must realize in the first place that
it is impossible for it to be decisive. None of the three
super-states could be definitively conquered even by the other
two in combination. They are too evenly matched, and their
natural defences are too formidable. Eurasia is protected by
its vast land spaces. Oceania by the width of the Atlantic and
the Pacific, Eastasia by the fecundity and indus triousness of
its inhabitants. Secondly, there is no longer, in a material
sense, anything to fight about. With the establishment of
self-contained economies, in which production and consumption
are geared to one another, the scramble for markets which was a
main cause of previous wars has come to an end, while the
competition for raw materials is no longer a matter of life and
death. In any case each of the three super-states is so vast
that it can obtain almost all the materials that it needs
within its own boundaries. In so far as the war has a direct
economic purpose, it is a war for labour power. Between the
frontiers of the super- states, and not permanently in the
possession of any of them, there lies a rough quadrilateral
with its corners at Tangier, Brazzaville, Darwin, and Hong
Kong, containing within it about a fifth of the population of
the earth. It is for the possession of these thickly-populated
regions, and of the northern ice-cap, that the three powers are
constantly struggling. In practice no one power ever controls
the whole of the disputed area. Portions of it are constantly
changing hands, and it is the chance of seizing this or that
fragment by a sudden stroke of treachery that dictates the
endless changes of alignment.
All of the disputed territories contain valuable minerals,
and some of them yield important vegetable products such as
rubber which in colder climates it is necessary to synthesize
by comparatively expensive methods. But above all they contain
a bottomless reserve of cheap labour. Whichever power controls
equatorial Africa, or the countries of the Middle East, or
Southern India, or the Indonesian Archipelago, disposes also of
the bodies of scores or hundreds of millions of ill-paid and
hard-working coolies. The inhabitants of these areas, reduced
more or less openly to the status of slaves, pass continually
from conqueror to conqueror, and are expended like so much coal
or oil in the race to turn out more armaments, to capture more
territory, to control more labour power, to turn out more
armaments, to capture more territory, and so on indefinitely.
It should be noted that the fighting never really moves beyond
the edges of the disputed areas. The frontiers of Eurasia flow
back and forth between the basin of the Congo and the northern
shore of the Mediterranean; the islands of the Indian Ocean and
the Pacific are constantly being captured and recaptured by
Oceania or by Eastasia; in Mongolia the dividing line between
Eurasia and Eastasia is never stable; round the Pole all three
powers lay claim to enormous territories which in fact are
largely unihabited and unexplored: but the balance of power
always remains roughly even, and the territory which forms the
heartland of each super-state always remains inviolate.
Moreover, the labour of the exploited peoples round the Equator
is not really necessary to the world's economy. They add
nothing to the wealth of the world, since whatever they produce
is used for purposes of war, and the object of waging a war is
always to be in a better position in which to wage another war.
By their labour the slave populations allow the tempo of
continuous warfare to be speeded up. But if they did not exist,
the structure of world society, and the process by which it
maintains itself, would not be essentially different.
The primary aim of modern warfare (in accordance with the
principles of doublethink, this aim is simultaneously
recognized and not recognized by the directing brains of the
Inner Party) is to use up the products of the machine without
raising the general standard of living. Ever since the end of
the nineteenth century, the problem of what to do with the
surplus of consumption goods has been latent in industrial
society. At present, when few human beings even have enough to
eat, this problem is obviously not urgent, and it might not
have become so, even if no artificial processes of destruction
had been at work. The world of today is a bare, hungry,
dilapidated place compared with the world that existed before
1914, and still more so if compared with the imaginary future
to which the people of that period looked forward. In the early
twentieth century, the vision of a future society unbelievably
rich, leisured, orderly, and efficient -- a glittering
antiseptic world of glass and steel and snow-white concrete --
was part of the consciousness of nearly every literate person.
Science and technology were developing at a prodigious speed,
and it seemed natural to assume that they would go on
developing. This failed to happen, partly because of the
impoverishment caused by a long series of wars and revolutions,
partly because scientific and technical progress depended on
the empirical habit of thought, which could not survive in a
strictly regimented society. As a whole the world is more
primitive today than it was fifty years ago. Certain backward
areas have advanced, and various devices, always in some way
connected with warfare and police espionage, have been
developed, but experiment and invention have largely stopped,
and the ravages of the atomic war of the nineteen- fifties have
never been fully repaired. Nevertheless the dangers inherent in
the machine are still there. From the moment when the machine
first made its appearance it was clear to all thinking people
that the need for human drudgery, and therefore to a great
extent for human inequality, had disappeared. If the machine
were used deliberately for that end, hunger, overwork, dirt,
illiteracy, and disease could be eliminated within a few
generations. And in fact, without being used for any such
purpose, but by a sort of automatic process -- by producing
wealth which it was sometimes impossible not to distribute --
the machine did raise the living standards of the average
humand being very greatly over a period of about fifty years at
the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth
centuries.
But it was also clear that an all-round increase in wealth
threatened the destruction -- indeed, in some sense was the
destruction -- of a hierarchical society. In a world in which
everyone worked short hours, had enough to eat, lived in a
house with a bathroom and a refrigerator, and possessed a
motor-car or even an aeroplane, the most obvious and perhaps
the most important form of inequality would already have
disappeared. If it once became general, wealth would confer no
distinction. It was possible, no doubt, to imagine a society in
which wealth, in the sense of personal possessions and
luxuries, should be evenly distributed, while power
remained in the hands of a small privileged caste. But in
practice such a society could not long remain stable. For if
leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass
of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would
become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and
when once they had done this, they would sooner or later
realize that the privileged minority had no function, and they
would sweep it away. In the long run, a hierarchical society
was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance. To
return to the agricultural past, as some thinkers about the
beginning of the twentieth century dreamed of doing, was not a
practicable solution. It conflicted with the tendency towards
mechanization which had become quasi-instinctive throughout
almost the whole world, and moreover, any country which
remained industrially backward was helpless in a military sense
and was bound to be dominated, directly or indirectly, by its
more advanced rivals.
Nor was it a satisfactory solution to keep the masses in
poverty by restricting the output of goods. This happened to a
great extent during the final phase of capitalism, roughly
between 1920 and 1940. The economy of many countries was
allowed to stagnate, land went out of cultivation, capital
equipment was not added to, great blocks of the population were
prevented from working and kept half alive by State charity.
But this, too, entailed military weakness, and since the
privations it inflicted were obviously unnecessary, it made
opposition inevitable. The problem was how to keep the wheels
of industry turning without increasing the real wealth of the
world. Goods must be produced, but they must not be
distributed. And in practice the only way of achieving this was
by continuous warfare.
The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily
of human lives, but of the products of human labour. War is a
way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere,
or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might
otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and
hence, in the long run, too intelligent. Even when weapons of
war are not actually destroyed, their manufacture is still a
convenient way of expending labour power without producing
anything that can be consumed. A Floating Fortress, for
example, has locked up in it the labour that would build
several hundred cargo-ships. Ultimately it is scrapped as
obsolete, never having brought any material benefit to anybody,
and with further enormous labours another Floating Fortress is
built. In principle the war effort is always so planned as to
eat up any surplus that might exist after meeting the bare
needs of the population. In practice the needs of the
population are always underestimated, with the result that
there is a chronic shortage of half the necessities of life;
but this is looked on as an advantage. It is deliberate policy
to keep even the favoured groups somewhere near the brink of
hardship, because a general state of scarcity increases the
importance of small privileges and thus magnifies the
distinction between one group and another. By the standards of
the early twentieth century, even a member of the Inner Party
lives an austere, laborious kind of life. Nevertheless, the few
luxuries that he does enjoy his large, well-appointed flat, the
better texture of his clothes, the better quality of his food
and drink and tobacco, his two or three servants, his private
motor-car or helicopter -- set him in a different world from a
member of the Outer Party, and the members of the Outer Party
have a similar advantage in comparison with the submerged
masses whom we call 'the proles'. The social atmosphere is that
of a besieged city, where the possession of a lump of
horseflesh makes the difference between wealth and poverty. And
at the same time the consciousness of being at war, and
therefore in danger, makes the handing-over of all power to a
small caste seem the natural, unavoidable condition of
survival.
War, it will be seen, accomplishes the necessary
destruction, but accomplishes it in a psychologically
acceptable way. In principle it would be quite simple to waste
the surplus labour of the world by building temples and
pyramids, by digging holes and filling them up again, or even
by producing vast quantities of goods and then setting fire to
them. But this would provide only the economic and not the
emotional basis for a hierarchical society. What is concerned
here is not the morale of masses, whose attitude is unimportant
so long as they are kept steadily at work, but the morale of
the Party itself. Even the humblest Party member is expected to
be competent, industrious, and even intelligent within narrow
limits, but it is also necessary that he should be a credulous
and ignorant fanatic whose prevailing moods are fear, hatred,
adulation, and orgiastic triumph. In other words it is
necessary that he should have the mentality appropriate to a
state of war. It does not matter whether the war is actually
happening, and, since no decisive victory is possible, it does
not matter whether the war is going well or badly. All that is
needed is that a state of war should exist. The splitting of
the intelligence which the Party requires of its members, and
which is more easily achieved in an atmosphere of war, is now
almost universal, but the higher up the ranks one goes, the
more marked it becomes. It is precisely in the Inner Party that
war hysteria and hatred of the enemy are strongest. In his
capacity as an administrator, it is often necessary for a
member of the Inner Party to know that this or that item of war
news is untruthful, and he may often be aware that the entire
war is spurious and is either not happening or is being waged
for purposes quite other than the declared ones: but such
knowledge is easily neutralized by the technique of
doublethink. Meanwhile no Inner Party member wavers for
an instant in his mystical belief that the war is real,
and that it is bound to end victoriously, with Oceania the
undisputed master of the entire world.
All members of the Inner Party believe in this coming
conquest as an article of faith. It is to be achieved either by
gradually acquiring more and more territory and so building up
an overwhelming preponderance of power, or by the discovery of
some new and unanswerable weapon. The search for new weapons
continues unceasingly, and is one of the very few remaining
activities in which the inventive or speculative type of mind
can find any outlet. In Oceania at the present day, Science, in
the old sense, has almost ceased to exist. In Newspeak there is
no word for 'Science'. The empirical method of thought, on
which all the scientific achievements of the past were founded,
is opposed to the most fundamental principles of Ingsoc. And
even technological progress only happens when its products can
in some way be used for the diminution of human liberty. In all
the useful arts the world is either standing still or going
backwards. The fields are cultivated with horse-ploughs while
books are written by machinery. But in matters of vital
importance -- meaning, in effect, war and police espionage --
the empirical approach is still encouraged, or at least
tolerated. The two aims of the Party are to conquer the whole
surface of the earth and to extinguish once and for all the
possibility of independent thought. There are therefore two
great problems which the Party is concerned to solve. One is
how to discover, against his will, what another human being is
thinking, and the other is how to kill several hundred million
people in a few seconds without giving warning beforehand. In
so far as scientific research still continues, this is its
subject matter. The scientist of today is either a mixture of
psychologist and inquisitor, studying with real ordinary
minuteness the meaning of facial expressions, gestures, and
tones of voice, and testing the truth-producing effects of
drugs, shock therapy, hypnosis, and physical torture; or he is
chemist, physicist, or biologist concerned only with such
branches of his special subject as are relevant to the taking
of life. In the vast laboratories of the Ministry of Peace, and
in the experimental stations hidden in the Brazilian forests,
or in the Australian desert, or on lost islands of the
Antarctic, the teams of experts are indefatigably at work. Some
are concerned simply with planning the logistics of future
wars; others devise larger and larger rocket bombs, more and
more powerful explosives, and more and more impenetrable
armour- plating; others search for new and deadlier gases, or
for soluble poisons capable of being produced in such
quantities as to destroy the vegetation of whole continents, or
for breeds of disease germs immunized against all possible
antibodies; others strive to produce a vehicle that shall bore
its way under the soil like a submarine under the water, or an
aeroplane as independent of its base as a sailing-ship; others
explore even remoter possibilities such as focusing the sun's
rays through lenses suspended thousands of kilometres away in
space, or producing artificial earthquakes and tidal waves by
tapping the heat at the earth's centre.
But none of these projects ever comes anywhere near
realization, and none of the three super-states ever gains a
significant lead on the others. What is more remarkable is that
all three powers already possess, in the atomic bomb, a weapon
far more powerful than any that their present researches are
likely to discover. Although the Party, according to its habit,
claims the invention for itself, atomic bombs first appeared as
early as the nineteen- forties, and were first used on a large
scale about ten years later. At that time some hundreds of
bombs were dropped on industrial centres, chiefly in European
Russia, Western Europe, and North America. The effect was to
convince the ruling groups of all countries that a few more
atomic bombs would mean the end of organized society, and hence
of their own power. Thereafter, although no formal agreement
was ever made or hinted at, no more bombs were dropped. All
three powers merely continue to produce atomic bombs and store
them up against the decisive opportunity which they all believe
will come sooner or later. And meanwhile the art of war has
remained almost stationary for thirty or forty years.
Helicopters are more used than they were formerly, bombing
planes have been largely superseded by self-propelled
projectiles, and the fragile movable battleship has given way
to the almost unsinkable Floating Fortress; but otherwise there
has been little development. The tank, the submarine, the
torpedo, the machine gun, even the rifle and the hand grenade
are still in use. And in spite of the endless slaughters
reported in the Press and on the telescreens, the desperate
battles of earlier wars, in which hundreds of thousands or even
millions of men were often killed in a few weeks, have never
been repeated.
None of the three super-states ever attempts any manoeuvre
which involves the risk of serious defeat. When any large
operation is undertaken, it is usually a surprise attack
against an ally. The strategy that all three powers are
following, or pretend to themselves that they are following, is
the same. The plan is, by a combination of fighting,
bargaining, and well-timed strokes of treachery, to acquire a
ring of bases completely encircling one or other of the rival
states, and then to sign a pact of friendship with that rival
and remain on peaceful terms for so many years as to lull
suspicion to sleep. During this time rockets loaded with atomic
bombs can be assembled at all the strategic spots; finally they
will all be fired simultaneously, with effects so devastating
as to make retaliation impossible. It will then be time to sign
a pact of friendship with the remaining world-power, in
preparation for another attack. This scheme, it is hardly
necessary to say, is a mere daydream, impossible of
realization. Moreover, no fighting ever occurs except in the
disputed areas round the Equator and the Pole: no invasion of
enemy territory is ever undertaken. This explains the fact that
in some places the frontiers between the superstates are
arbitrary. Eurasia, for example, could easily conquer the
British Isles, which are geographically part of Europe, or on
the other hand it would be possible for Oceania to push its
frontiers to the Rhine or even to the Vistula. But this would
violate the principle, followed on all sides though never
formulated, of cultural integrity. If Oceania were to conquer
the areas that used once to be known as France and Germany, it
would be necessary either to exterminate the inhabitants, a
task of great physical difficulty, or to assimilate a
population of about a hundred million people, who, so far as
technical development goes, are roughly on the Oceanic level.
The problem is the same for all three super-states. It is
absolutely necessary to their structure that there should be no
contact with foreigners, except, to a limited extent, with war
prisoners and coloured slaves. Even the official ally of the
moment is always regarded with the darkest suspicion. War
prisoners apart, the average citizen of Oceania never sets eyes
on a citizen of either Eurasia or Eastasia, and he is forbidden
the knowledge of foreign languages. If he were allowed contact
with foreigners he would discover that they are creatures
similar to himself and that most of what he has been told about
them is lies. The sealed world in which he lives would be
broken, and the fear, hatred, and self-righteousness on which
his morale depends might evaporate. It is therefore realized on
all sides that however often Persia, or Egypt, or Java, or
Ceylon may change hands, the main frontiers must never be
crossed by anything except bombs.
Under this lies a fact never mentioned aloud, but tacitly
understood and acted upon: namely, that the conditions of life
in all three super-states are very much the same. In Oceania
the prevailing philosophy is called Ingsoc, in Eurasia it is
called Neo-Bolshevism, and in Eastasia it is called by a
Chinese name usually translated as Death- Worship, but perhaps
better rendered as Obliteration of the Self. The citizen of
Oceania is not allowed to know anything of the tenets of the
other two philosophies, but he is taught to execrate them as
barbarous outrages upon morality and common sense. Actually the
three philosophies are barely distinguishable, and the social
systems which they support are not distinguishable at all.
Everywhere there is the same pyramidal structure, the same
worship of semi-divine leader, the same economy existing by and
for continuous warfare. It follows that the three super-states
not only cannot conquer one another, but would gain no
advantage by doing so. On the contrary, so long as they remain
in conflict they prop one another up, like three sheaves of
corn. And, as usual, the ruling groups of all three powers are
simultaneously aware and unaware of what they are doing. Their
lives are dedicated to world conquest, but they also know that
it is necessary that the war should continue everlastingly and
without victory. Meanwhile the fact that there is no
danger of conquest makes possible the denial of reality which
is the special feature of Ingsoc and its rival systems of
thought. Here it is necessary to repeat what has been said
earlier, that by becoming continuous war has fundamentally
changed its character.
In past ages, a war, almost by definition, was something
that sooner or later came to an end, usually in unmistakable
victory or defeat. In the past, also, war was one of the main
instruments by which human societies were kept in touch with
physical reality. All rulers in all ages have tried to impose a
false view of the world upon their followers, but they could
not afford to encourage any illusion that tended to impair
military efficiency. So long as defeat meant the loss of
independence, or some other result generally held to be
undesirable, the precautions against defeat had to be serious.
Physical facts could not be ignored. In philosophy, or
religion, or ethics, or politics, two and two might make five,
but when one was designing a gun or an aeroplane they had to
make four. Inefficient nations were always conquered sooner or
later, and the struggle for efficiency was inimical to
illusions. Moreover, to be efficient it was necessary to be
able to learn from the past, which meant having a fairly
accurate idea of what had happened in the past. Newspapers and
history books were, of course, always coloured and biased, but
falsification of the kind that is practised today would have
been impossible. War was a sure safeguard of sanity, and so far
as the ruling classes were concerned it was probably the most
important of all safeguards. While wars could be won or lost,
no ruling class could be completely irresponsible.
But when war becomes literally continuous, it also ceases
to be dangerous. When war is continuous there is no such thing
as military necessity. Technical progress can cease and the
most palpable facts can be denied or disregarded. As we have
seen, researches that could be called scientific are still
carried out for the purposes of war, but they are essentially a
kind of daydreaming, and their failure to show results is not
important. Efficiency, even military efficiency, is no longer
needed. Nothing is efficient in Oceania except the Thought
Police. Since each of the three super-states is unconquerable,
each is in effect a separate universe within which almost any
perversion of thought can be safely practised. Reality only
exerts its pressure through the needs of everyday life -- the
need to eat and drink, to get shelter and clothing, to avoid
swallowing poison or stepping out of top-storey windows, and
the like. Between life and death, and between physical pleasure
and physical pain, there is still a distinction, but that is
all. Cut off from contact with the outer world, and with the
past, the citizen of Oceania is like a man in interstellar
space, who has no way of knowing which direction is up and
which is down. The rulers of such a state are absolute, as the
Pharaohs or the Caesars could not be. They are obliged to
prevent their followers from starving to death in numbers large
enough to be inconvenient, and they are obliged to remain at
the same low level of military technique as their rivals; but
once that minimum is achieved, they can twist reality into
whatever shape they choose.
The war, therefore, if we judge it by the standards of
previous wars, is merely an imposture. It is like the battles
between certain ruminant animals whose horns are set at such an
angle that they are incapable of hurting one another. But
though it is unreal it is not meaningless. It eats up the
surplus of consumable goods, and it helps to preserve the
special mental atmosphere that a hierarchical society needs.
War, it will be seen, is now a purely internal affair. In the
past, the ruling groups of all countries, although they might
recognize their common interest and therefore limit the
destructiveness of war, did fight against one another, and the
victor always plundered the vanquished. In our own day they are
not fighting against one another at all. The war is waged by
each ruling group against its own subjects, and the object of
the war is not to make or prevent conquests of territory, but
to keep the structure of society intact. The very word 'war',
therefore, has become misleading. It would probably be accurate
to say that by becoming continuous war has ceased to exist. The
peculiar pressure that it exerted on human beings between the
Neolithic Age and the early twentieth century has disappeared
and been replaced by something quite different. The effect
would be much the same if the three super-states, instead of
fighting one another, should agree to live in perpetual peace,
each inviolate within its own boundaries. For in that case each
would still be a self-contained universe, freed for ever from
the sobering influence of external danger. A peace that was
truly permanent would be the same as a permanent war. This --
although the vast majority of Party members understand it only
in a shallower sense -- is the inner meaning of the Party
slogan: War is Peace.
Winston stopped reading for a moment. Somewhere in remote
distance a rocket bomb thundered. The blissful feeling of being
alone with the forbidden book, in a room with no telescreen,
had not worn off. Solitude and safety were physical sensations,
mixed up somehow with the tiredness of his body, the softness
of the chair, the touch of the faint breeze from the window
that played upon his cheek. The book fascinated him, or more
exactly it reassured him. In a sense it told him nothing that
was new, but that was part of the attraction. It said what he
would have said, if it had been possible for him to set his
scattered thoughts in order. It was the product of a mind
similar to his own, but enormously more powerful, more
systematic, less fear-ridden. The best books, he perceived, are
those that tell you what you know already. He had just turned
back to Chapter I when he heard Julia's footstep on the stair
and started out of his chair to meet her. She dumped her brown
tool-bag on the floor and flung herself into his arms. It was
more than a week since they had seen one another.
'I've got the book,' he said as they disentangled
themselves.
'Oh, you've got it? Good,' she said without much interest,
and almost immediately knelt down beside the oilstove to make
the coffee.
They did not return to the subject until they had been in
bed for half an hour. The evening was just cool enough to make
it worth while to pull up the counterpane. From below came the
familiar sound of singing and the scrape of boots on the
flagstones. The brawny red-armed woman whom Winston had seen
there on his first visit was almost a fixture in the yard.
There seemed to be no hour of daylight when she was not
marching to and fro between the washtub and the line,
alternately gagging herself with clothes pegs and breaking
forth into lusty song. Julia had settled down on her side and
seemed to be already on the point of falling asleep. He reached
out for the book, which was lying on the floor, and sat up
against the bedhead.
'We must read it,' he said. 'You too. All members of the
Brotherhood have to read it.'
'You read it,' she said with her eyes shut. 'Read it
aloud. That's the best way. Then you can explain it to me as
you go.'
The clock's hands said six, meaning eighteen. They had
three or four hours ahead of them. He propped the book against
his knees and began reading:
Chapter IIgnorance is Strength
Throughout recorded time, and probably since the end of
the Neolithic Age, there have been three kinds of people in the
world, the High, the Middle, and the Low. They have been
subdivided in many ways, they have borne countless different
names, and their relative numbers, as well as their attitude
towards one another, have varied from age to age: but the
essential structure of society has never altered. Even after
enormous upheavals and seemingly irrevocable changes, the same
pattern has always reasserted itself, just as a gyroscope will
always return to equilibnum, however far it is pushed one way
or the other
'Julia, are you awake?' said Winston.
'Yes, my love, I'm listening. Go on. It's marvellous.'
He continued reading:
The aims of these three groups are entirely
irreconcilable. The aim of the High is to remain where they
are. The aim of the Middle is to change places with the High.
The aim of the Low, when they have an aim -- for it is an
abiding characteristic of the Low that they are too much
crushed by drudgery to be more than intermittently conscious of
anything outside their daily lives -- is to abolish all
distinctions and create a society in which all men shall be
equal. Thus throughout history a struggle which is the same in
its main outlines recurs over and over again. For long periods
the High seem to be securely in power, but sooner or later
there always comes a moment when they lose either their belief
in themselves or their capacity to govern efficiently, or both.
They are then overthrown by the Middle, who enlist the Low on
their side by pretending to them that they are fighting for
liberty and justice. As soon as they have reached their
objective, the Middle thrust the Low back into their old
position of servitude, and themselves become the High.
Presently a new Middle group splits off from one of the other
groups, or from both of them, and the struggle begins over
again. Of the three groups, only the Low are never even
temporarily successful in achieving their aims. It would be an
exaggeration to say that throughout history there has been no
progress of a material kind. Even today, in a period of
decline, the average human being is physically better off than
he was a few centuries ago. But no advance in wealth, no
softening of manners, no reform or revolution has ever brought
human equality a millimetre nearer. From the point of view of
the Low, no historic change has ever meant much more than a
change in the name of their masters.
By the late nineteenth century the recurrence of this
pattern had become obvious to many observers. There then rose
schools of thinkers who interpreted history as a cyclical
process and claimed to show that inequality was the unalterable
law of human life. This doctrine, of course, had always had its
adherents, but in the manner in which it was now put forward
there was a significant change. In the past the need for a
hierarchical form of society had been the doctrine specifically
of the High. It had been preached by kings and aristocrats and
by the priests, lawyers, and the like who were parasitical upon
them, and it had generally been softened by promises of
compensation in an imaginary world beyond the grave. The
Middle, so long as it was struggling for power, had always made
use of such terms as freedom, justice, and fraternity. Now,
however, the concept of human brotherhood began to be assailed
by people who were not yet in positions of command, but merely
hoped to be so before long. In the past the Middle had made
revolutions under the banner of equality, and then had estab
lished a fresh tyranny as soon as the old one was overthrown.
The new Middle groups in effect proclaimed their tyranny
beforehand. Socialism, a theory which appeared in the early
nineteenth century and was the last link in a chain of thought
stretching back to the slave rebellions of antiquity, was still
deeply infected by the Utopianism of past ages. But in each
variant of Socialism that appeared from about 1900 onwards the
aim of establishing liberty and equality was more and more
openly abandoned. The new movements which appeared in the
middle years of the century, Ingsoc in Oceania, Neo-Bolshevism
in Eurasia, Death-Worship, as it is commonly called, in
Eastasia, had the conscious aim of perpetuating unfreedom and
inequality. These new movements, of course, grew out of the old
ones and tended to keep their names and pay lip-service to
their ideology. But the purpose of all of them was to arrest
progress and freeze history at a chosen moment. The familiar
pendulum swing was to happen once more, and then stop. As
usual, the High were to be turned out by the Middle, who would
then become the High; but this time, by conscious strategy, the
High would be able to maintain their position permanently.
The new doctrines arose partly because of the accumulation
of historical knowledge, and the growth of the historical
sense, which had hardly existed before the nineteenth century.
The cyclical movement of history was now intelligible, or
appeared to be so; and if it was intelligible, then it was
alterable. But the principal, underlying cause was that, as
early as the beginning of the twentieth century, human equality
had become technically possible. It was still true that men
were not equal in their native talents and that functions had
to be specialized in ways that favoured some individuals
against others; but there was no longer any real need for class
distinctions or for large differences of wealth. In earlier
ages, class distinctions had been not only inevitable but
desirable. Inequality was the price of civilization. With the
development of machine production, however, the case was
altered. Even if it was still necessary for human beings to do
different kinds of work, it was no longer necessary for them to
live at different social or economic levels. Therefore, from
the point of view of the new groups who were on the point of
seizing power, human equality was no longer an ideal to be
striven after, but a danger to be averted. In more primitive
ages, when a just and peaceful society was in fact not
possible, it had been fairly easy to believe it. The idea of an
earthly paradise in which men should live together in a state
of brotherhood, without laws and without brute labour, had
haunted the human imagination for thousands of years. And this
vision had had a certain hold even on the groups who actually
profited by each historical change. The heirs of the French,
English, and American revolutions had partly believed in their
own phrases about the rights of man, freedom of speech,
equality before the law, and the like, and have even allowed
their conduct to be influenced by them to some extent. But by
the fourth decade of the twentieth century all the main
currents of political thought were authoritarian. The earthly
paradise had been discredited at exactly the moment when it
became realizable. Every new political theory, by whatever name
it called itself, led back to hierarchy and regimentation. And
in the general hardening of outlook that set in round about
1930, practices which had been long abandoned, in some cases
for hundreds of years -- imprisonment without trial, the use of
war prisoners as slaves, public executions, torture to extract
confessions, the use of hostages, and the deportation of whole
populations-not only became common again, but were tolerated
and even defended by people who considered themselves
enlightened and progressive.
It was only after a decade of national wars, civil wars,
revolutions, and counter-revolutions in all parts of the world
that Ingsoc and its rivals emerged as fully worked-out
political theories. But they had been foreshadowed by the
various systems, generally called totalitarian, which had
appeared earlier in the century, and the main outlines of the
world which would emerge from the prevailing chaos had long
been obvious. What kind of people would control this world had
been equally obvious. The new aristocracy was made up for the
most part of bureaucrats, scientists, technicians, trade-union
organizers, publicity experts, sociologists, teachers,
journalists, and professional politicians. These people, whose
origins lay in the salaried middle class and the upper grades
of the working class, had been shaped and brought together by
the barren world of monopoly industry and centralized
government. As compared with their opposite numbers in past
ages, they were less avaricious, less tempted by luxury,
hungrier for pure power, and, above all, more conscious of what
they were doing and more intent on crushing opposition. This
last difference was cardinal. By comparison with that existing
today, all the tyrannies of the past were half-hearted and
inefficient. The ruling groups were always infected to some
extent by liberal ideas, and were content to leave loose ends
everywhere, to regard only the overt act and to be uninterested
in what their subjects were thinking. Even the Catholic Church
of the Middle Ages was tolerant by modern standards. Part of
the reason for this was that in the past no government had the
power to keep its citizens under constant surveillance. The
invention of print, however, made it easier to manipulate
public opinion, and the film and the radio carried the process
further. With the development of television, and the technical
advance which made it possible to receive and transmit
simultaneously on the same instrument, private life came to an
end. Every citizen, or at least every citizen important enough
to be worth watching, could be kept for twentyfour hours a day
under the eyes of the police and in the sound of official
propaganda, with all other channels of communication closed.
The possibility of enforcing not only complete obedience to the
will of the State, but complete uniformity of opinion on all
subjects, now existed for the first time.
After the revolutionary period of the fifties and sixties,
society regrouped itself, as always, into High, Middle, and
Low. But the new High group, unlike all its forerunners, did
not act upon instinct but knew what was needed to safeguard its
position. It had long been realized that the only secure basis
for oligarchy is collectivism. Wealth and privilege are most
easily defended when they are possessed jointly. The so-called
'abolition of private property' which took place in the middle
years of the century meant, in effect, the concentration of
property in far fewer hands than before: but with this
difference, that the new owners were a group instead of a mass
of individuals. Individually, no member of the Party owns
anything, except petty personal belongings. Collectively, the
Party owns everything in Oceania, because it controls
everything, and disposes of the products as it thinks fit. In
the years following the Revolution it was able to step into
this commanding position almost unopposed, because the whole
process was represented as an act of collectivization. It had
always been assumed that if the capitalist class were
expropriated, Socialism must follow: and unquestionably the
capitalists had been expropriated. Factories, mines, land,
houses, transport -- everything had been taken away from them:
and since these things were no longer private property, it
followed that they must be public property. Ingsoc, which grew
out of the earlier Socialist movement and inherited its
phraseology, has in fact carried out the main item in the
Socialist programme; with the result, foreseen and intended
beforehand, that economic inequality has been made permanent.
But the problems of perpetuating a hierarchical society go
deeper than this. There are only four ways in which a ruling
group can fall from power. Either it is conquered from without,
or it governs so inefficiently that the masses are stirred to
revolt, or it allows a strong and discontented Middle group to
come into being, or it loses its own self-confidence and
willingness to govern. These causes do not operate singly, and
as a rule all four of them are present in some degree. A ruling
class which could guard against all of them would remain in
power permanently. Ultimately the determining factor is the
mental attitude of the ruling class itself.
After the middle of the present century, the first danger
had in reality disappeared. Each of the three powers which now
divide the world is in fact unconquerable, and could only
become conquerable through slow demographic changes which a
government with wide powers can easily avert. The second
danger, also, is only a theoretical one. The masses never
revolt of their own accord, and they never revolt merely
because they are oppressed. Indeed, so long as they are not
permitted to have standards of comparison, they never even
become aware that they are oppressed. The recurrent economic
crises of past times were totally unnecessary and are not now
permitted to happen, but other and equally large dislocations
can and do happen without having political results, because
there is no way in which discontent can become articulate. As
fcr the problem of overproduction, which has been latent in our
society since the development of machine technique, it is
solved by the device of continuous warfare (see Chapter III),
which is also useful in keying up public morale to the
necessary pitch. From the point of view of our present rulers,
therefore, the only genuine dangers are the splitting-off of a
new group of able, underemployed, power-hungry people, and the
growth of liberalism and scepticism in their own ranks. The
problem, that is to say, is educational. It is a problem of
continuously moulding the consciousness both of the directing
group and of the larger executive group that lies immediately
below it. The consciousness of the masses needs only to be
influenced in a negative way.
Given this background, one could infer, if one did not
know it already, the general structure of Oceanic society. At
the apex of the pyramid comes Big Brother. Big Brother is
infallible and all-powerful. Every success, every achievement,
every victory, every scientific discovery, all knowledge, all
wisdom, all happiness, all virtue, are held to issue directly
from his leadership and inspiration. Nobody has ever seen Big
Brother. He is a face on the hoardings, a voice on the
telescreen. We may be reasonably sure that he will never die,
and there is already considerable uncertainty as to when he was
born. Big Brother is the guise in which the Party chooses to
exhibit itself to the world. His function is to act as a
focusing point for love, fear, and reverence, emotions which
are more easily felt towards an individual than towards an
organization. Below Big Brother comes the Inner Party. its
numbers limited to six millions, or something less than 2 per
cent of the population of Oceania. Below the Inner Party comes
the Outer Party, which, if the Inner Party is described as the
brain of the State, may be justly likened to the hands. Below
that come the dumb masses whom we habitually refer to as 'the
proles', numbering perhaps 85 per cent of the population. In
the terms of our earlier classification, the proles are the
Low: for the slave population of the equatorial lands who pass
constantly from conqueror to conqueror, are not a permanent or
necessary part of the structure.
In principle, membership of these three groups is not
hereditary. The child of Inner Party parents is in theory not
born into the Inner Party. Admission to either branch of the
Party is by examination, taken at the age of sixteen. Nor is
there any racial discrimination, or any marked domination of
one province by another. Jews, Negroes, South Americans of pure
Indian blood are to be found in the highest ranks of the Party,
and the administrators of any area are always drawn from the
inhabitants of that area. In no part of Oceania do the
inhabitants have the feeling that they are a colonial
population ruled from a distant capital. Oceania has no
capital, and its titular head is a person whose whereabouts
nobody knows. Except that English is its chief lingua
franca and Newspeak its official language, it is not
centralized in any way. Its rulers are not held together by
blood-ties but by adherence to a common doctrine. It is true
that our society is stratified, and very rigidly stratified, on
what at first sight appear to be hereditary lines. There is far
less to- and-fro movement between the different groups than
happened under capitalism or even in the pre-industrial age.
Between the two branches of the Party there is a certain amount
of interchange, but only so much as will ensure that weaklings
are excluded from the Inner Party and that ambitious members of
the Outer Party are made harmless by allowing them to rise.
Proletarians, in practice, are not allowed to graduate into the
Party. The most gifted among them, who might possibly become
nuclei of discontent, are simply marked down by the Thought
Police and eliminated. But this state of affairs is not
necessarily permanent, nor is it a matter of principle. The
Party is not a class in the old sense of the word. It does not
aim at transmitting power to its own children, as such; and if
there were no other way of keeping the ablest people at the
top, it would be perfectly prepared to recruit an entire new
generation from the ranks of the proletariat. In the crucial
years, the fact that the Party was not a hereditary body did a
great deal to neutralize opposition. The older kind of
Socialist, who had been trained to fight against something
called 'class privilege' assumed that what is not hereditary
cannot be permanent. He did not see that the continuity of an
oligarchy need not be physical, nor did he pause to reflect
that hereditary aristocracies have always been shortlived,
whereas adoptive organizations such as the Catholic Church have
sometimes lasted for hundreds or thousands of years. The
essence of oligarchical rule is not father-to-son inheritance,
but the persistence of a certain world-view and a certain way
of life, imposed by the dead upon the living. A ruling group is
a ruling group so long as it can nominate its successors. The
Party is not concerned with perpetuating its blood but with
perpetuating itself. Who wields power is not important,
provided that the hierarchical structure remains always the
same.
All the beliefs, habits, tastes, emotions, mental
attitudes that characterize our time are really designed to
sustain the mystique of the Party and prevent the true nature
of present-day society from being perceived. Physical
rebellion, or any preliminary move towards rebellion, is at
present not possible. From the proletarians nothing is to be
feared. Left to themselves, they will continue from generation
to generation and from century to century, working, breeding,
and dying, not only without any impulse to rebel, but without
the power of grasping that the world could be other than it is.
They could only become dangerous if the advance of industrial
technique made it necessary to educate them more highly; but,
since military and commercial rivalry are no longer important,
the level of popu lar education is actually declining. What
opinions the masses hold, or do not hold, is looked on as a
matter of indifference. They can be granted intellectual
liberty because they have no intellect. In a Party member, on
the other hand, not even the smallest deviation of opinion on
the most unimportant subject can be tolerated.
A Party member lives from birth to death under the eye of
the Thought Police. Even when he is alone he can never be sure
that he is alone. Wherever he may be, asleep or awake, working
or resting, in his bath or in bed, he can be inspected without
warning and without knowing that he is being inspected. Nothing
that he does is indifferent. His friendships, his relaxations,
his behaviour towards his wife and children, the expression of
his face when he is alone, the words he mutters in sleep, even
the characteristic movements of his body, are all jealously
scrutinized. Not only any actual misdemeanour, but any
eccentricity, however small, any change of habits, any nervous
mannerism that could possibly be the symptom of an inner
struggle, is certain to be detected. He has no freedom of
choice in any direction whatever. On the other hand his actions
are not regulated by law or by any clearly formulated code of
behaviour. In Oceania there is no law. Thoughts and actions
which, when detected, mean certain death are not formally
forbidden, and the endless purges, arrests, tortures,
imprisonments, and vaporizations are not inflicted as
punishment for crimes which have actually been committed, but
are merely the wiping-out of persons who might perhaps commit a
crime at some time in the future. A Party member is required to
have not only the right opinions, but the right instincts. Many
of the beliefs and attitudes demanded of him are never plainly
stated, and could not be stated without laying bare the
contradictions inherent in Ingsoc. If he is a person naturally
orthodox (in Newspeak a goodthinker), he will in all
circumstances know, without taking thought, what is the true
belief or the desirable emotion. But in any case an elaborate
mental training, undergone in childhood and grouping itself
round the Newspeak words crimestop, blackwhite, and
doublethink, makes him unwilling and unable to think too
deeply on any subject whatever.
A Party member is expected to have no private emotions and
no respites from enthusiasm. He is supposed to live in a
continuous frenzy of hatred of foreign enemies and internal
traitors, triumph over victories, and selfabasement before the
power and wisdom of the Party. The discontents produced by his
bare, unsatisfying life are deliberately turned outwards and
dissipated by such devices as the Two Minutes Hate, and the
speculations which might possibly induce a sceptical or
rebellious attitude are killed in advance by his early acquired
inner discipline. The first and simplest stage in the
discipline, which can be taught even to young children, is
called, in Newspeak, crimestop. Crimestop means the
faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the
threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of
not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors,
of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical
to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of
thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction.
Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity. But
stupidity is not enough. On the contrary, orthodoxy in the full
sense demands a control over one's own mental processes as
complete as that of a contortionist over his body. Oceanic
society rests ultimately on the belief that Big Brother is
omnipotent and that the Party is infallible. But since in
reality Big Brother is not omnipotent and the party is not
infallible, there is need for an unwearying, moment-to-moment
flexibility in the treatment of facts. The keyword here is
blackwhite. Like so many Newspeak words, this word has
two mutually contradictory meanings. Applied to an opponent, it
means the habit of impudently claiming that black is white, in
contradiction of the plain facts. Applied to a Party member, it
means a loyal willingness to say that black is white when Party
discipline demands this. But it means also the ability to
believe that black is white, and more, to know
that black is white, and to forget that one has ever believed
the contrary. This demands a continuous alteration of the past,
made possible by the system of thought which really embraces
all the rest, and which is known in Newspeak as
doublethink.
The alteration of the past is necessary for two reasons,
one of which is subsidiary and, so to speak, precautionary. The
subsidiary reason is that the Party member, like the
proletarian, tolerates present-day conditions partly because he
has no standards of comparison. He must be cut off from the
past, just as he must be cut off from foreign countries,
because it is necessary for him to believe that he is better
off than his ancestors and that the average level of material
comfort is constantly rising. But by far the more important
reason for the readjustment of the past is the need to
safeguard the infallibility of the Party. It is not merely that
speeches, statistics, and records of every kind must be
constantly brought up to date in order to show that the
predictions of the Party were in all cases right. It is also
that no change in doctrine or in political alignment can ever
be admitted. For to change one's mind, or even one's policy, is
a confession of weakness. If, for example, Eurasia or Eastasia
(whichever it may be) is the enemy today, then that country
must always have been the enemy. And if the facts say otherwise
then the facts must be altered. Thus history is continuously
rewritten. This day- to-day falsification of the past, carried
out by the Ministry of Truth, is as necessary to the stability
of the re/gime as the work of repression and espionage carried
out by the Ministry of Love.
The mutability of the past is the central tenet of Ingsoc.
Past events, it is argued, have no objective existence, but
survive only in written records and in human memories. The past
is whatever the records and the memories agree upon. And since
the Party is in full control of all records and in equally full
control of the minds of its members, it follows that the past
is whatever the Party chooses to make it. It also follows that
though the past is alterable, it never has been altered in any
specific instance. For when it has been recreated in whatever
shape is needed at the moment, then this new version is
the past, and no different past can ever have existed. This
holds good even when, as often happens, the same event has to
be altered out of recognition several times in the course of a
year. At all times the Party is in possession of absolute
truth, and clearly the absolute can never have been different
from what it is now. It will be seen that the control of the
past depends above all on the training of memory. To make sure
that all written records agree with the orthodoxy of the moment
is merely a mechanical act. But it is also necessary to
remember that events happened in the desired manner. And
if it is necessary to rearrange one's memories or to tamper
with written records, then it is necessary to forget
that one has done so. The trick of doing this can be learned
like any other mental technique. It is learned by the
majority of Party members, and certainly by all who are
intelligent as well as orthodox. In Oldspeak it is called,
quite frankly, 'reality control'. In Newspeak it is called
doublethink, though doublethink comprises much
else as well.
Doublethink means the power of holding two
contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and
accepting both of them. The Party intellectual knows in which
direction his memories must be altered; he therefore knows that
he is playing tricks with reality; but by the exercise of
doublethink he also satisfies himself that reality is
not violated. The process has to be conscious, or it would not
be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to be
unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and
hence of guilt. Doublethink lies at the very heart of
Ingsoc, since the essential act of the Party is to use
conscious deception while retaining the firmness of purpose
that goes with complete honesty. To tell deliberate lies while
genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become
inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to
draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to
deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to
take account of the reality which one denies -- all this is
indispensably necessary. Even in using the word
doublethink it is necessary to exercise
doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one
is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink
one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie
always one leap ahead of the truth. Ultimately it is by means
of doublethink that the Party has been able -- and may,
for all we know, continue to be able for thousands of years --
to arrest the course of history.
All past oligarchies have fallen from power either because
they ossified or because they grew soft. Either they became
stupid and arrogant, failed to adjust themselves to changing
circumstances, and were overthrown; or they became liberal and
cowardly, made concessions when they should have used force,
and once again were overthrown. They fell, that is to say,
either through consciousness or through unconsciousness. It is
the achievement of the Party to have produced a system of
thought in which both conditions can exist simultaneously. And
upon no other intellectual basis could the dominion of the
Party be made permanent. If one is to rule, and to continue
ruling, one must be able to dislocate the sense of reality. For
the secret of rulership is to combine a belief in one's own
infallibility with the Power to learn from past mistakes.
It need hardly be said that the subtlest practitioners of
doublethink are those who invented doublethink
and know that it is a vast system of mental cheating. In our
society, those who have the best knowledge of what is happening
are also those who are furthest from seeing the world as it is.
In general, the greater the understanding, the greater the
delusion; the more intelligent, the less sane. One clear
illustration of this is the fact that war hysteria increases in
intensity as one rises in the social scale. Those whose
attitude towards the war is most nearly rational are the
subject peoples of the disputed territories. To these people
the war is simply a continuous calamity which sweeps to and fro
over their bodies like a tidal wave. Which side is winning is a
matter of complete indifference to them. They are aware that a
change of overlordship means simply that they will be doing the
same work as before for new masters who treat them in the same
manner as the old ones. The slightly more favoured workers whom
we call 'the proles' are only intermittently conscious of the
war. When it is necessary they can be prodded into frenzies of
fear and hatred, but when left to themselves they are capable
of forgetting for long periods that the war is happening. It is
in the ranks of the Party, and above all of the Inner Party,
that the true war enthusiasm is found. World-conquest is
believed in most firmly by those who know it to be impossible.
This peculiar linking-together of opposites -- knowledge with
ignorance, cynicism with fanaticism-is one of the chief
distinguishing marks of Oceanic society. The official ideology
abounds with contradictions even when there is no practical
reason for them. Thus, the Party rejects and vilifies every
principle for which the Socialist movement originally stood,
and it chooses to do this in the name of Socialism. It preaches
a contempt for the working class unexampled for centuries past,
and it dresses its members in a uniform which was at one time
peculiar to manual workers and was adopted for that reason. It
systematically undermines the solidarity of the family, and it
calls its leader by a name which is a direct appeal to the
sentiment of family loyalty. Even the names of the four
Ministries by which we are governed exhibit a sort of impudence
in their deliberate reversal of the facts. The Ministry of
Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with
lies, the Ministry of Love with torture and the Ministry of
Plenty with starvation. These contradictions are not
accidental, nor do they result from ordinary hypocrisy; they
are deliberate exercises in doublethink. For it is only
by reconciling contradictions that power can be retained
indefinitely. In no other way could the ancient cycle be
broken. If human equality is to be for ever averted -- if the
High, as we have called them, are to keep their places
permanently -- then the prevailing mental condition must be
controlled insanity.
But there is one question which until this moment we have
almost ignored. It is; why should human equality be
averted? Supposing that the mechanics of the process have been
rightly described, what is the motive for this huge, accurately
planned effort to freeze history at a particular moment of
time?
Here we reach the central secret. As we have seen. the
mystique of the Party, and above all of the Inner Party,
depends upon doublethink. But deeper than this lies the
original motive, the never-questioned instinct that first led
to the seizure of power and brought doublethink, the
Thought Police, continuous warfare, and all the other necessary
paraphernalia into existence afterwards. This motive really
consists . . . Winston became aware of silence, as one becomes
aware of a new sound. It seemed to him that Julia had been very
still for some time past. She was lying on her side, naked from
the waist upwards, with her cheek pillowed on her hand and one
dark lock tumbling across her eyes. Her breast rose and fell
slowly and regularly.
'Julia.
No answer.
'Julia, are you awake?'
No answer. She was asleep. He shut the book, put it
carefully on the floor, lay down, and pulled the coverlet over
both of them.
He had still, he reflected, not learned the ultimate
secret. He understood how; he did not understand
why. Chapter I, like Chapter III, had not actually told
him anything that he did not know, it had merely systematized
the knowledge that he possessed already. But after reading it
he knew better than before that he was not mad. Being in a
minority, even a minority of one, did not make you mad. There
was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth
even against the whole world, you were not mad. A yellow beam
from the sinking sun slanted in through the window and fell
across the pillow. He shut his eyes. The sun on his face and
the girl's smooth body touching his own gave him a strong,
sleepy, confident feeling. He was safe, everything was all
right. He fell asleep murmuring 'Sanity is not statistical,'
with the feeling that this remark contained in it a profound
wisdom. When he woke it was with the sensation of having slept
for a long time, but a glance at the old-fashioned clock told
him that it was only twenty- thirty. He lay dozing for a while;
then the usual deep- lunged singing struck up from the yard
below;
'It was only an 'opeless fancy,
It passed like an Ipril dye,
But a look an' a word an' the dreams they stirred
They 'ave stolen my 'eart awye!'
The driveling song seemed to have kept its popularity. You
still heard it all over the place. It had outlived the Hate
Song. Julia woke at the sound, stretched herself luxuriously,
and got out of bed.
'I'm hungry,' she said. 'Let's make some more coffee.
Damn! The stove's gone out and the water's cold.' She picked
the stove up and shook it. 'There's no oil in it.'
'We can get some from old Charrington, I expect.'
'The funny thing is I made sure it was full. I'm going to
put my clothes on,' she added. 'It seems to have got colder.'
Winston also got up and dressed himself. The indefatigable
voice sang on:
'They sye that time 'eals all things,
They sye you can always forget;
But the smiles an' the tears acrorss the years
They twist my 'eart-strings yet!'
As he fastened the belt of his overalls he strolled across
to the window. The sun must have gone down behind the houses;
it was not shining into the yard any longer. The flagstones
were wet as though they had just been washed, and he had the
feeling that the sky had been washed too, so fresh and pale was
the blue between the chimney-pots. Tirelessly the woman marched
to and fro, corking and uncorking herself, singing and falling
silent, and pegging out more diapers, and more and yet more. He
wondered whether she took in washing for a living or was merely
the slave of twenty or thirty grandchildren. Julia had come
across to his side; together they gazed down with a sort of
fascination at the sturdy figure below. As he looked at the
woman in her characteristic attitude, her thick arms reaching
up for the line, her powerful mare-like buttocks protruded, it
struck him for the first time that she was beautiful. It had
never before occurred to him that the body of a woman of fifty,
blown up to monstrous dimensions by childbearing, then
hardened, roughened by work till it was coarse in the grain
like an over-ripe turnip, could be beautiful. But it was so,
and after all, he thought, why not? The solid, contourless
body, like a block of granite, and the rasping red skin, bore
the same relation to the body of a girl as the rose-hip to the
rose. Why should the fruit be held inferior to the flower?
'She's beautiful,' he murmured.
'She's a metre across the hips, easily,' said Julia.
'That is her style of beauty,' said Winston.
He held Julia's supple waist easily encircled by his arm.
From the hip to the knee her flank was against his. Out of
their bodies no child would ever come. That was the one thing
they could never do. Only by word of mouth, from mind to mind,
could they pass on the secret. The woman down there had no
mind, she had only strong arms, a warm heart, and a fertile
belly. He wondered how many children she had given birth to. It
might easily be fifteen. She had had her momentary flowering, a
year, perhaps, of wild-rose beauty and then she had suddenly
swollen like a fertilized fruit and grown hard and red and
coarse, and then her life had been laundering, scrubbing,
darning, cooking, sweeping, polishing, mending, scrubbing,
laundering, first for children, then for grandchildren, over
thirty unbroken years. At the end of it she was still singing.
The mystical reverence that he felt for her was somehow mixed
up with the aspect of the pale, cloudless sky, stretching away
behind the chimney-pots into interminable distance. It was
curious to think that the sky was the same for everybody, in
Eurasia or Eastasia as well as here. And the people under the
sky were also very much the same -- everywhere, all over the
world, hundreds of thousands of millions of people just like
this, people ignorant of one another's existence, held apart by
walls of hatred and lies, and yet almost exactly the same --
people who had never learned to think but who were storing up
in their hearts and bellies and muscles the power that would
one day overturn the world. If there was hope, it lay in the
proles ! Without having read to the end of the book, he
knew that that must be Goldstein's final message. The future
belonged to the proles. And could he be sure that when their
time came the world they constructed would not be just as alien
to him, Winston Smith, as the world of the Party? Yes, because
at the least it would be a world of sanity. Where there is
equality there can be sanity. Sooner or later it would happen,
strength would change into consciousness. The proles were
immortal, you could not doubt it when you looked at that
valiant figure in the yard. In the end their awakening would
come. And until that happened, though it might be a thousand
years, they would stay alive against all the odds, like birds,
passing on from body to body the vitality which the Party did
not share and could not kill.
'Do you remember,' he said, 'the thrush that sang to us,
that first day, at the edge of the wood?'
'He wasn't singing to us,' said Julia. 'He was singing to
please himself. Not even that. He was just singing.'
The birds sang, the proles sang. the Party did not sing.
All round the world, in London and New York, in Africa and
Brazil, and in the mysterious, forbidden lands beyond the
frontiers, in the streets of Paris and Berlin, in the villages
of the endless Russian plain, in the bazaars of China and Japan
-- everywhere stood the same solid unconquerable figure, made
monstrous by work and childbearing, toiling from birth to death
and still singing. Out of those mighty loins a race of
conscious beings must one day come. You were the dead, theirs
was the future. But you could share in that future if you kept
alive the mind as they kept alive the body, and passed on the
secret doctrine that two plus two make four.
'We are the dead,' he said.
'We are the dead,' echoed Julia dutifully.
'You are the dead,' said an iron voice behind them.
They sprang apart. Winston's entrails seemed to have
turned into ice. He could see the white all round the irises of
Julia's eyes. Her face had turned a milky yellow. The smear of
rouge that was still on each cheekbone stood out sharply,
almost as though unconnected with the skin beneath.
'You are the dead,' repeated the iron voice.
'It was behind the picture,' breathed Julia.
'It was behind the picture,' said the voice. 'Remain
exactly where you are. Make no movement until you are ordered.'
It was starting, it was starting at last! They could do
nothing except stand gazing into one another's eyes. To run for
life, to get out of the house before it was too late -- no such
thought occurred to them. Unthinkable to disobey the iron voice
from the wall. There was a snap as though a catch had been
turned back, and a crash of breaking glass. The picture had
fallen to the floor uncovering the telescreen behind it.
'Now they can see us,' said Julia.
' Now we can see you,' said the voice. ' Stand out in the
middle of the room. Stand back to back. Clasp your hands behind
your heads. Do not touch one another.'
They were not touching, but it seemed to him that he could
feel Julia's body shaking. Or perhaps it was merely the shaking
of his own. He could just stop his teeth from chattering, but
his knees were beyond his control. There was a sound of
trampling boots below, inside the house and outside. The yard
seemed to be full of men. Something was being dragged across
the stones. The woman's singing had stopped abruptly. There was
a long, rolling clang, as though the washtub had been flung
across the yard, and then a confusion of angry shouts which
ended in a yell of pain.
'The house is surrounded,' said Winston.
'The house is surrounded,' said the voice.
He heard Julia snap her teeth together. 'I suppose we may
as well say good-bye,' she said.
'You may as well say good-bye,' said the voice. And then
another quite different voice, a thin, cultivated voice which
Winston had the impression of having heard before, struck in;
'And by the way, while we are on the subject, "Here comes a
candle to light you to bed, here comes a chopper to chop off
your head"!'
Something crashed on to the bed behind Winston's back. The
head of a ladder had been thrust through the window and had
burst in the frame. Someone was climbing through the window.
There was a stampede of boots up the stairs. The room was full
of solid men in black uniforms, with iron-shod boots on their
feet and truncheons in their hands.
Winston was not trembling any longer. Even his eyes he
barely moved. One thing alone mattered; to keep still, to keep
still and not give them an excuse to hit you ! A man with a
smooth prizefighter's jowl in which the mouth was only a slit
paused opposite him balancing his truncheon meditatively
between thumb and forefinger. Winston met his eyes. The feeling
of nakedness, with one's hands behind one's head and one's face
and body all exposed, was almost unbearable. The man protruded
the tip of a white tongue, licked the place where his lips
should have been, and then passed on. There was another crash.
Someone had picked up the glass paperweight from the table and
smashed it to pieces on the hearth-stone.
The fragment of coral, a tiny crinkle of pink like a sugar
rosebud from a cake, rolled across the mat. How small, thought
Winston, how small it always was! There was a gasp and a thump
behind him, and he received a violent kick on the ankle which
nearly flung him off his balance. One of the men had smashed
his fist into Julia's solar plexus, doubling her up like a
pocket ruler. She was thrashing about on the floor, fighting
for breath. Winston dared not turn his head even by a
millimetre, but sometimes her livid, gasping face came within
the angle of his vision. Even in his terror it was as though he
could feel the pain in his own body, the deadly pain which
nevertheless was less urgent than the struggle to get back her
breath. He knew what it was like; the terrible, agonizing pain
which was there all the while but could not be suffered yet,
because before all else it was necessary to be able to breathe.
Then two of the men hoisted her up by knees and shoulders, and
carried her out of the room like a sack. Winston had a glimpse
of her face, upside down, yellow and contorted, with the eyes
shut, and still with a smear of rouge on either cheek; and that
was the last he saw of her.
He stood dead still. No one had hit him yet. Thoughts
which came of their own accord but seemed totally uninteresting
began to flit through his mind. He wondered whether they had
got Mr Charrington. He wondered what they had done to the woman
in the yard. He noticed that he badly wanted to urinate, and
felt a faint surprise, because he had done so only two or three
hours ago. He noticed that the clock on the mantelpiece said
nine, meaning twenty-one. But the light seemed too strong.
Would not the light be fading at twenty-one hours on an August
evening? He wondered whether after all he and Julia had
mistaken the time -- had slept the clock round and thought it
was twenty-thirty when really it was nought eight-thirty on the
following morning. But he did not pursue the thought further.
It was not interesting.
There ws another, lighter step in the passage. Mr
Charrington came into the room. The demeanour of the black-
uniformed men suddenly became more subdued. Something had also
changed in Mr Charrington's appearance. His eye fell on the
fragments of the glass paperweight.
'Pick up those pieces,' he said sharply.
A man stooped to obey. The cockney accent had disappeared;
Winston suddenly realized whose voice it was that he had heard
a few moments ago on the telescreen. Mr Charrington was still
wearing his old velvet jacket, but his hair, which had been
almost white, had turned black. Also he was not wearing his
spectacles. He gave Winston a single sharp glance, as though
verifying his identity, and then paid no more attention to him.
He was still recognizable, but he was not the same person any
longer. His body had straightened, and seemed to have grown
bigger. His face had undergone only tiny changes that had
nevertheless worked a complete transformation. The black
eyebrows were less bushy, the wrinkles were gone, the whole
lines of the face seemed to have altered; even the nose seemed
shorter. It was the alert, cold face of a man of about
five-and-thirty. It occurred to Winston that for the first time
in his life he was looking, with knowledge, at a member of the
Thought Police.
