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 al-most forgotten after years of saccharine.With one hand in her pock-et 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 armchair 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 his-tory 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' s Dane its name was."The fragment of rhyme that Mr.Charrington had taught him came back into his head,and he added half-nostalgical-ly:'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 re-member 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 disap-peared.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 cleaning 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 toward 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,enclo-sing 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.
Chapter 5
S yme had vanished.A morning came,and he was missingfrom work;a few thoughtless people commented on hisabsence.On the next day nobody mentioned him.On thethird day Winston went into the vestibule of the Records Depart-ment 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 programs 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 addi-tion 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 curious-ly 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 ru-mors.
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,bar-king 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 ev-er.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 meters 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,push-ing, 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 meters high,striding forward with expression-less 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 Broth-er.The proles,normally apathetic about the war,were being lashed into one of their periodical frenzies of patriotism.As though to har-monize with the general mood,the rocket bombs had been killing larger numbers of people than usual.One fell on a crowded film the-ater in Stepney,burying several hundred victims among the ruins. The whole population of the neighborhood turned out for a long, trailing funeral which went on for hours and was in effect an indig-nation 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 rumor 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 counterattack.
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 im-pulse 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 j unk shop should exist.To know that it was there,in-violate,was almost the same as being in it.The room was a world,a pocket of the past where extinct animals could walk.Mr.Char-rington,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 ghost-like 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 enor-mous horn.He seemed glad of the opportunity to talk.Wandering a-bout among his worthless stock,with his long nose and thick spec-tacles 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 wornout 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 de-spairing 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 Win-ston 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 maneuver-ings 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 ac-cents,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 j udging 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 eve-ryone,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 Gold-stein and his underground army,she said,were simply a lot of rub-bish which the Party had invented for its own purposes and which you had to pretend to believe in.Times beyond number,at Party ral-lies 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 trai-tors!"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 repre-sent.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 imagi-nation;and in any case the Party was invincible.It would always ex-ist,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 connecion to mention the war against Eurasia,she startled him by saying casually that in her opinion the war was not happen-ing.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 be-lieved,for instance,having learnt it at school,that the Party had in-vented airplanes.(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 airplane;one generation more,and it would be claiming the steam engine.) And when he told her that airplanes had been in existence before he was born, and long before the Rev-olution,the fact struck her as totally uninteresting.After all,what did it matter who had invented airplanes? 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 regar-ded the whole war as a sham;but apparently she had not even no-ticed that the name of the enemy had changed."I thought we'd al-ways been at war with Eurasia,"she said vaguely.It frightened him a little.The invention of airplanes dated from long before her birth, but the switch-over in the war had happened only four years ago, well after she was grown up.He argued with her about it for per-haps 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 any-way."
Sometimes he talked to her of the Records Department and the impudent forgeries that he committed there.Such things did not ap-pear 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.Be-sides,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 real-ize that the past,starting from yesterday,has been actually abol-ished? If it survives anywhere,it's in a few solid obj ects 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,ev-ery 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 ev-idence 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 life-time.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 generation 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,dou-blethink,the mutability of the past and the denial of obj ective real-ity,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 nee-ded.If he persisted in talking of such subj ects,she had a disconcer-ting 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 incapa-ble of understanding it.They could be made to accept the most fla-grant 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 every-thing,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.
Chapter 6
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 im-pulse was to run away.His heart bounded violently.He would have been incapable of speaking.O'Brien,however,had continued for-ward 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 differ-entiated 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 *******.It's not my subj ect.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 mo-ment."
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 code word. 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 into the gesture he re-settled 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 reduc-tion 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 absent-mindedly 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 care-fully memorized what was written on it,and some hours later dropped it into the memory hole along with a mass of other papers.
