PART Two

[b][size=+2]IT WAS[/b] 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 thelong, brightly-lit corridor. It was the girl with dark hair. Four dayshad gone past since the evening when he had run into her outside thejunk-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 heroveralls. Probably she had crushed her hand while swinging round one ofthe 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 fellalmost flat on her face. A sharp cry of pain was wrung out of her. Shemust have fallen right on the injured arm. Winston stopped short. Thegirl had risen to her knees. Her face had turned a milky yellow colouragainst which her mouth stood out redder than ever. Her eyes were fixedon his, with an appealing expression that looked more like fear thanpain.
A curious emotion stirred in Winston’s heart. In front of him was anenemy who was trying to kill him: in front of him, also, was a humancreature, in pain and perhaps with a broken bone. Already he hadinstinctively started forward to help her. In the moment when he hadseen her fall on the bandaged arm, it had been as though he felt thepain 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 beengoing, as briskly as though it had really been nothing. The wholeincident could not have taken as much as half a minute. Not to letone’s feelings appear in one’s face was a habit that had acquired thestatus of an instinct, and in any case they had been standing straightin front of a telescreen when the thing happened. Nevertheless it hadbeen very difficult not to betray a momentary surprise, for in the twoor three seconds while he was helping her up the girl had slippedsomething into his hand. There was no question that she had done itintentionally. It was something small and flat. As he passed throughthe lavatory door he transferred it to his pocket and felt it with thetips 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 kindwritten on it. For a moment he was tempted to take it into one of thewater-closets and read it at once. But that would be shocking folly, ashe well knew. There was no place where you could be more certain thatthe telescreens were watched continuously.
He went back to his cubicle, sat down, threw the fragment of papercasually among the other papers on the desk, put on his spectacles andhitched the speakwrite towards him. ‘five minutes,’ he told himself,‘five minutes at the very least!’ His heart bumped in his breast withfrightening loudness. Fortunately the piece of work he was engaged onwas mere routine, the rectification of a long list of figures, notneeding close attention.
Whatever was written on the paper, it must have some kind of politicalmeaning. So far as he could see there were two possibilities. One, muchthe 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 shouldchoose to deliver their messages in such a fashion, but perhaps theyhad their reasons. The thing that was written on the paper might be athreat, a summons, an order to commit suicide, a trap of somedescription. But there was another, wilder possibility that keptraising its head, though he tried vainly to suppress it. This was, thatthe message did not come from the Thought Police at all, but from somekind of underground organization. Perhaps the Brotherhood existed afterall! Perhaps the girl was part of it! No doubt the idea was absurd, butit had sprung into his mind in the very instant of feeling the scrap ofpaper in his hand. It was not till a couple of minutes later that theother, more probable explanation had occurred to him. And even now,though his intellect told him that the message probably meantdeath—still, that was not what he believed, and the unreasonable hopepersisted, and his heart banged, and it was with difficulty that hekept his voice from trembling as he murmured his figures into thespeakwrite.
He rolled up the completed bundle of work and slid it into thepneumatic tube. Eight minutes had gone by. He re- adjusted hisspectacles on his nose, sighed, and drew the next batch of work towardshim, with the scrap of paper on top of it. He flattened it out. On itwas written, in a large unformed handwriting:

I love you.

For several seconds he was too stunned even to throw the incriminatingthing into the memory hole. When he did so, although he knew very wellthe danger of showing too much interest, he could not resist reading itonce again, just to make sure that the words were really there.
For the rest of the morning it was very difficult to work. What waseven worse than having to focus his mind on a series of niggling jobswas the need to conceal his agitation from the telescreen. He felt asthough a fire were burning in his belly. Lunch in the hot, crowded,noise- filled canteen was torment. He had hoped to be alone for alittle while during the lunch hour, but as bad luck would have it theimbecile Parsons flopped down beside him, the tang of his sweat almostdefeating the tinny smell of stew, and kept up a stream of talk aboutthe preparations for Hate Week. He was particularly enthusiastic abouta papier-m=o=ché model of Big Brother’s head, two metres wide, which wasbeing made for the occasion by his daughter’s troop of Spies. Theirritating thing was that in the racket of voices Winston could hardlyhear what Parsons was saying, and was constantly having to ask for somefatuous remark to be repeated. Just once he caught a glimpse of thegirl, at a table with two other girls at the far end of the room. Sheappeared not to have seen him, and he did not look in that directionagain.
The afternoon was more bearable. Immediately after lunch there arriveda delicate, difficult piece of work which would take several hours andnecessitated putting everything else aside. It consisted in falsifyinga series of production reports of two years ago, in such a way as tocast discredit on a prominent member of the Inner Party, who was nowunder a cloud. This was the kind of thing that Winston was good at, andfor more than two hours he succeeded in shutting the girl out of hismind altogether. Then the memory of her face came back, and with it araging, intolerable desire to be alone. Until he could be alone it wasimpossible to think this new development out. Tonight was one of hisnights at the Community Centre. He wolfed another tasteless meal in thecanteen, hurried off to the Centre, took part in the solemn foolery ofa ‘discussion group’, played two games of table tennis, swallowedseveral glasses of gin, and sat for half an hour through a lectureentitled ‘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 youthe desire to stay alive had welled up in him, and the taking of minorrisks suddenly seemed stupid. It was not till twenty-three hours, whenhe was home and in bed—in the darkness, where you were safe even fromthe telescreen so long as you kept silent—that he was able to thinkcontinuously.
It was a physical problem that had to be solved: how to get in touchwith the girl and arrange a meeting. He did not consider any longer thepossibility that she might be laying some kind of trap for him. He knewthat it was not so, because of her unmistakable agitation when shehanded 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 evencross his mind. Only five nights ago he had contemplated smashing herskull in with a cobblestone, but that was of no importance. He thoughtof her naked, youthful body, as he had seen it in his dream. He hadimagined her a fool like all the rest of them, her head stuffed withlies and hatred, her belly full of ice. A kind of fever seized him atthe thought that he might lose her, the white youthful body might slipaway from him! What he feared more than anything else was that shewould simply change her mind if he did not get in touch with herquickly. But the physical difficulty of meeting was enormous. It waslike trying to make a move at chess when you were already mated.Whichever way you turned, the telescreen faced you. Actually, all thepossible ways of communicating with her had occurred to him within fiveminutes of reading the note; but now, with time to think, he went overthem one by one, as though laying out a row of instruments on a table.
Obviously the kind of encounter that had happened this morning couldnot be repeated. If she had worked in the Records Department it mighthave been comparatively simple, but he had only a very dim ideawhereabouts in the building the Fiction Departrnent lay, and he had nopretext for going there. If he had known where she lived, and at whattime she left work, he could have contrived to meet her somewhere onher way home; but to try to follow her home was not safe, because itwould mean loitering about outside the Ministry, which was bound to benoticed. As for sending a letter through the mails, it was out of thequestion. By a routine that was not even secret, all letters wereopened in transit. Actually, few people ever wrote letters. For themessages that it was occasionally necessary to send, there were printedpostcards with long lists of phrases, and you struck out the ones thatwere inapplicable. In any case he did not know the girl’s name, letalone her address. Finally he decided that the safest place was thecanteen. If he could get her at a table by herself, somewhere in themiddle of the room, not too near the telescreens, and with a sufficientbuzz 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 dayshe did not appear in the canteen until he was leaving it, the whistlehaving already blown. Presumably she had been changed on to a latershift. They passed each other without a glance. On the day after thatshe was in the canteen at the usual time, but with three other girlsand immediately under a telescreen. Then for three dreadful days shedid not appear at all. His whole mind and body seemed to be afflictedwith an unbearable sensitivity, a sort of transparency, which madeevery movement, every sound, every contact, every word that he had tospeak or listen to, an agony. Even in sleep he could not altogetherescape from her image. He did not touch the diary during those days. Ifthere was any relief, it was in his work, in which he could sometimesforget himself for ten minutes at a stretch. He had absolutely no clueas to what had happened to her. There was no enquiry he could make. Shemight have been vaporized, she might have committed suicide, she mighthave been transferred to the other end of Oceania: worst and likeliestof all, she might simply have changed her mind and decided to avoidhim.
The next day she reappeared. Her arm was out of the sling and she had aband of sticking-plaster round her wrist. The relief of seeing her wasso great that he could not resist staring directly at her for severalseconds. On the following day he very nearly succeeded in speaking toher. When he came into the canteen she was sitting at a table well outfrom the wall, and was quite alone. It was early, and the place was notvery full. The queue edged forward till Winston was almost at thecounter, then was held up for two minutes because someone in front wascomplaining that he had not received his tablet of saccharine. But thegirl was still alone when Winston secured his tray and began to makefor her table. He walked casually towards her, his eyes searching for aplace at some table beyond her. She was perhaps three metres away fromhim. Another two seconds would do it. Then a voice behind him called,‘Smith!’ He pretended not to hear. ‘Smith!’ repeated the voice, moreloudly. It was no use. He turned round. A blond-headed, silly-facedyoung man named Wilsher, whom he barely knew, was inviting him with asmile to a vacant place at his table. It was not safe to refuse. Afterhaving been recognized, he could not go and sit at a table with anunattended girl. It was too noticeable. He sat down with a friendlysmile. The silly blond face beamed into his. Winston had ahallucination of himself smashing a pick-axe right into the middle ofit. The girl’s table filled up a few minutes later.
But she must have seen him coming towards her, and perhaps she wouldtake 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 personimmediately ahead of him in the queue was a small, swiftly-moving,beetle-like man with a flat face and tiny, suspicious eyes. As Winstonturned away from the counter with his tray, he saw that the little manwas making straight for the girl’s table. His hopes sank again. Therewas a vacant place at a table further away, but something in the littleman’s appearance suggested that he would be sufficiently attentive tohis own comfort to choose the emptiest table. With ice at his heartWinston followed. It was no use unless he could get the girl alone. Atthis moment there was a tremendous crash. The little man was sprawlingon all fours, his tray had gone flying, two streams of soup and coffeewere flowing across the floor. He started to his feet with a malignantglance at Winston, whom he evidently suspected of having tripped himup. 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 nowa terrible fear had taken possession of him. A week had gone by sinceshe had first approached him. She would have changed her mind, she musthave changed her mind! It was impossible that this affair should endsuccessfully; such things did not happen in real life. He might haveflinched altogether from speaking if at this moment he had not seenAmpleforth, the hairy-eared poet, wandering limply round the room witha tray, looking for a place to sit down. In his vague way Ampleforthwas attached to Winston, and would certainly sit down at his table ifhe caught sight of him. There was perhaps a minute in which to act.Both Winston and the girl were eating steadily. The stuff they wereeating was a thin stew, actually a soup, of haricot beans. In a lowmurmur Winston began speaking. Neither of them looked up; steadily theyspooned the watery stuff into their mouths, and between spoonfulsexchanged 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. Theydid not speak again, and, so far as it was possible for two peoplesitting on opposite sides of the same table, they did not look at oneanother. The girl finished her lunch quickly and made off, whileWinston stayed to smoke a cigarette.
Winston was in Victory Square before the appointed time. He wanderedround the base of the enormous fluted column, at the top of which BigBrother’s statue gazed southward towards the skies where he hadvanquished the Eurasian aeroplanes (the Eastasian aeroplanes, it hadbeen, a few years ago) in the Battle of Airstrip One. In the street infront of it there was a statue of a man on horseback which was supposedto represent Oliver Cromwell. At five minutes past the hour the girlhad still not appeared. Again the terrible fear seized upon Winston.She was not coming, she had changed her mind! He walked slowly up tothe north side of the square and got a sort of pale-coloured pleasurefrom identifying St Martin’s Church, whose bells, when it had bells,had chimed ‘You owe me three farthings.’ Then he saw the girl standingat the base of the monument, reading or pretending to read a posterwhich ran spirally up the column. It was not safe to go near her untilsome more people had accumulated. There were telescreens all round thepediment. But at this moment there was a din of shouting and a zoom ofheavy vehicles from somewhere to the left. Suddenly everyone seemed tobe running across the square. The girl nipped nimbly round the lions atthe base of the monument and joined in the rush. Winston followed. Ashe ran, he gathered from some shouted remarks that a convoy of Eurasianprisoners was passing.
Already a dense mass of people was blocking the south side of thesquare. Winston, at normal times the kind of person who gravitates tothe outer edge of any kind of scrimmage, shoved, butted, squirmed hisway forward into the heart of the crowd. Soon he was within arm’slength of the girl, but the way was blocked by an enormous prole and analmost equally enormous woman, presumably his wife, who seemed to forman impenetrable wall of flesh. Winston wriggled himself sideways, andwith a violent lunge managed to drive his shoulder between them. For amoment it felt as though his entrails were being ground to pulp betweenthe two muscular hips, then he had broken through, sweating a little.He was next to the girl. They were shoulder to shoulder, both staringfixedly in front of them.
A long line of trucks, with wooden-faced guards armed with sub-machineguns standing upright in each corner, was passing slowly down thestreet. In the trucks little yellow men in shabby greenish uniformswere squatting, jammed close together. Their sad, Mongolian faces gazedout over the sides of the trucks utterly incurious. Occasionally when atruck jolted there was a clankclank of metal: all the prisoners werewearing leg-irons. Truckload after truck-load of the sad faces passed.Winston knew they were there but he saw them only intermittently. Thegirl’s shoulder, and her arm right down to the elbow, were pressedagainst his. Her cheek was almost near enough for him to feel itswarmth. She had immediately taken charge of the situation, just as shehad done in the canteen. She began speaking in the same expressionlessvoice as before, with lips barely moving, a mere murmur easily drownedby 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 theroute that he was to follow. A half-hour railway journey; turn leftoutside the station; two kilometres along the road: a gate with the topbar missing; a path across a field; a grass-grown lane; a track betweenbushes; a dead tree with moss on it. It was as though she had a mapinside 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 notextricate themselves from the crowd. The trucks were still filing post,the people still insatiably gaping. At the start there had been a fewboos and hisses, but it came only from the Party members among thecrowd, and had soon stopped. The prevailing emotion was simplycuriosity. Foreigners, whether from Eurasia or from Eastasia, were akind of strange animal. One literally never saw them except in theguise of prisoners, and even as prisoners one never got more than amomentary glimpse of them. Nor did one know what became of them, apartfrom the few who were hanged as war-criminals: te others simplyvanished, presumably into forced-labour camps. The round Mogol faceshad given way to faces of a more European type, dirty, bearded andexhausted. From over scrubby cheekbones eyes looked into Winston’s,sometimes with strange intensity, and flashed away again. The convoywas drawing to an end. In the last truck he could see an aged man, hisface a mass of grizzled hair, standing upright with wrists crossed infront of him, as though he were used to having them bound together. Itwas almost time for Winston and the girl to part. But at the lastmoment, while the crowd still hemmed them in, her hand felt for his andgave it a fleeting squeeze.
It could not have been ten seconds, and yet it seemed a long time thattheir hands were clasped together. He had time to learn every detail ofher hand. He explored the long fingers, the shapely nails, thework-hardened palm with its row of callouses, the smooth flesh underthe wrist. Merely from feeling it he would have known it by sight. Inthe same instant it occurred to him that he did not know what colourthe girl’s eyes were. They were probably brown, but people with darkhair sometimes had blue eyes. To turn his head and look at her wouldhave been inconceivable folly. With hands locked together, invisibleamong the press of bodies, they stared steadily in front of them, andinstead of the eyes of the girl, the eyes of the aged prisoner gazedmournfully at Winston out of nests of hair.

[b][size=+2]WINSTON[/b] picked his way up the lanethrough dappled light and shade, stepping out into pools of goldwherever the boughs parted. Under the trees to the left of him theground was misty with bluebells. The air seemed to kiss one’s skin. Itwas the second of May. From somewhere deeper in the heart of the woodcame 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 frightenedthan he would normally have been. Presumably she could be trusted tofind a safe place. In general you could not assume that you were muchsafer in the country than in London. There were no telescreens, ofcourse, but there was always the danger of concealed microphones bywhich your voice might be picked up and recognized; besides, it was noteasy to make a journey by yourself without attracting attention. Fordistances of less than 100 kilometres it was not necessary to get yourpassport endorsed, but sometimes there were patrols hanging about therailway stations, who examined the papers of any Party member theyfound there and asked awkward questions. However, no patrols hadappeared, and on the walk from the station he had made sure by cautiousbackward glances that he was not being followed. The train was full ofproles, in holiday mood because of the summery weather. The wooden-seated carriage in which he travelled was filled to overflowing by asingle enormous family. ranging from a toothless great-grandmother to amonth-old baby, going out to spend an afternoon with ‘in-laws’ in thecountry, and, as they freely explained to Winston, to get hold of alittle blackmarket butter.
The lane widened, and in a minute he came to the footpath she had toldhim of, a mere cattle-track which plunged between the bushes. He had nowatch, but it could not be fifteen yet. The bluebells were so thickunderfoot that it was impossible not to tread on them. He knelt downand began picking some partly to pass the time away, but also from avague idea that he would like to have a bunch of flowers to offer tothe girl when they met. He had got together a big bunch and wassmelling their faint sickly scent when a sound at his back froze him,the unmistakable crackle of a foot on twigs. He went on pickingbluebells. It was the best thing to do. It might be the girl, or hemight have been followed after all. To look round was to show guilt. Hepicked another and another. A hand fell lightly on his shoulder.
He looked up. It was the girl. She shook her head, evidently as awarning that he must keep silent, then parted the bushes and quicklyled the way along the narrow track into the wood. Obviously she hadbeen that way before, for she dodged the boggy bits as though by habit.Winston followed, still clasping his bunch of flowers. His firstfeeling was relief, but as he watched the strong slender body moving infront of him, with the scarlet sash that was just tight enough to bringout the curve of her hips, the sense of his own inferiority was heavyupon him. Even now it seemed quite likely that when she turned roundand looked at him she would draw back after all. The sweetness of theair and the greenness of the leaves daunted him. Already on the walkfrom the station the May sunshine had made him feel dirty andetiolated, a creature of indoors, with the sooty dust of London in thepores of his skin. It occurred to him that till now she had probablynever seen him in broad daylight in the open. They came to the fallentree that she had spoken of. The girl hopped over and forced apart thebushes, in which there did not seem to be an opening. When Winstonfollowed her, he found that they were in a natural clearing, a tinygrassy 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 casethere’s a mike hidden there. I don’t suppose there is, but there couldbe. There’s always the chance of one of those swine recognizing yourvoice. 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 hadbeen cut down and had sprouted up again into a forest of poles, none ofthem thicker than one’s wrist. ‘There’s nothing big enough to hide amike in. Besides, I’ve been here before.’
They were only making conversation. He had managed to move closer toher now. She stood before him very upright, with a smile on her facethat looked faintly ironical, as though she were wondering why he wasso slow to act. The bluebells had cascaded on to the ground. Theyseemed to have fallen of their own accord. He took her hand.
‘Would you believe,’ he said, ‘that till this moment I didn’t know whatcolour your eyes were?’ They were brown, he noted, a rather light shadeof 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 hisarms. At the beginning he had no feeling except sheer incredulity. Theyouthful body was strained against his own, the mass of dark hair wasagainst his face, and yes ! actually she had turned her face up and hewas kissing the wide red mouth. She had clasped her arms about hisneck, she was calling him darling, precious one, loved one. He hadpulled her down on to the ground, she was utterly unresisting, he coulddo what he liked with her. But the truth was that he had no physicalsensation, except that of mere contact. All he felt was incredulity andpride. He was glad that this was happening, but he had no physicaldesire. It was too soon, her youth and prettiness had frightened him,he was too much used to living without women—he did not know thereason. The girl picked herself up and pulled a bluebell out of herhair. 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 acommunity hike. If anyone was coming you could hear them a hundredmetres 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 thenmurder you afterwards. Two weeks ago I thought seriously of smashingyour head in with a cobblestone. If you really want to know, I imaginedthat 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 generalappearance—merely because you’re young and fresh and healthy, youunderstand—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 youthought that if I had a quarter of a chance I’d denounce you as athought-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 thescarlet sash of the Junior Anti-Sex League and flinging it on to abough. Then, as though touching her waist had reminded her ofsomething, she felt in the pocket of her overalls and produced a smallslab of chocolate. She broke it in half and gave one of the pieces toWinston. Even before he had taken it he knew by the smell that it wasvery unusual chocolate. It was dark and shiny, and was wrapped insilver paper. Chocolate normally was dullbrown crumbly stuff thattasted, as nearly as one could describe it, like the smoke of a rubbishfire. But at some time or another he had tasted chocolate like thepiece she had given him. The first whiff of its scent had stirred upsome memory which he could not pin down, but which was powerful andtroubling.
‘Where did you get this stuff?’ he said.
‘Black market,’ she said indifferently. ‘Actually I am that sort ofgirl, 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-SexLeague. Hours and hours I’ve spent pasting their bloody rot all overLondon. I always carry one end of a banner in the processions. I alwaysIook 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. Thetaste was delightful. But there was still that memory moving round theedges of his consciousness, something strongly felt but not reducibleto 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 someaction which he would have liked to undo but could not.
‘You are very young,’ he said. ‘You are ten or fifteen years youngerthan 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 goodat spotting people who don’t belong. As soon as I saw you I knew youwere against them.’
Them, it appeared, meant the Party, and above all the InnerParty, about whom she talked with an open jeering hatred which madeWinston feel uneasy, although he knew that they were safe here if theycould be safe anywhere. A thing that astonished him about her was thecoarseness 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 InnerParty, without using the kind of words that you saw chalked up indripping alley-ways. He did not dislike it. It was merely one symptomof her revolt against the Party and all its ways, and somehow it seemednatural and healthy, like the sneeze of a horse that smells bad hay.They had left the clearing and were wandering again through thechequered shade, with their arms round each other’s waists whenever itwas wide enough to walk two abreast. He noticed how much softer herwaist seemed to feel now that the sash was gone. They did not speakabove a whisper. Outside the clearing, Julia said, it was better to goquietly. Presently they had reached the edge of the little wood. Shestopped 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, slowshock of recognition. He knew it by sight. An old, closebitten pasture,with a footpath wandering across it and a molehill here and there. Inthe ragged hedge on the opposite side the boughs of the elm treesswayed just perceptibly in the breeze, and their leaves stirred faintlyin dense masses like women’s hair. Surely somewhere nearby, but out ofsight, there must be a stream with green pools where dace wereswimming?
‘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 themlying 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 thelevel 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 intoplace again, ducked its head for a moment, as though making a sort ofobeisance to the sun, and then began to pour forth a torrent of song.In the afternoon hush the volume of sound was startling. Winston andJulia clung together, fascinated. The music went on and on, minuteafter 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 itswings, 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 itsit at the edge of the lonely wood and pour its music into nothingness?He wondered whether after all there was a microphone hidden somewherenear. He and Julia had spoken only in low whispers, and it would notpick up what they had said, but it would pick up the thrush. Perhaps atthe other end of the instrument some small, beetle-like man waslistening intently—listening to that.But by degrees the flood of music drove all speculations out of hismind. It was as though it were a kind of liquid stuff that poured allover him and got mixed up with the sunlight that filtered through theleaves. He stopped thinking and merely felt. The girl’s waist in thebend of his arm was soft and warm. He pulled her round so that theywere breast to breast; her body seemed to melt into his. Wherever hishands moved it was all as yielding as water. Their mouths clungtogether; it was quite different from the hard kisses they hadexchanged earlier. When they moved their faces apart again both of themsighed 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 wayback to the clearing. When they were once inside the ring of saplingsshe turned and faced him. They were both breathing fast. but the smilehad reappeared round the corners of her mouth. She stood looking at himfor an instant, then felt at the zipper of her overalls. And, yes! itwas 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 withthat same magnificent gesture by which a whole civilization seemed tobe annihilated. Her body gleamed white in the sun. But for a moment hedid not look at her body; his eyes were anchored by the freckled facewith its faint, bold smile. He knelt down before her and took her handsin 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 beenhundreds—thousands. Anything that hinted at corruption always filledhim with a wild hope. Who knew, perhaps the Party was rotten under thesurface, its cult of strenuousness and selfdenial simply a shamconcealing iniquity. If he could have infected the whole lot of themwith leprosy or syphilis, how gladly he would have done so! Anything torot, to weaken, to undermine! He pulled her down so that they werekneeling 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 oneperson but the animal instinct, the simple undifferentiated desire:that was the force that would tear the Party to pieces. He pressed herdown upon the grass, among the fallen bluebells. This time there was nodifficulty. Presently the rising and falling of their breasts slowed tonormal speed, and in a sort of pleasant helplessness they fell apart.The sun seemed to have grown hotter. They were both sleepy. He reachedout for the discarded overalls and pulled them partly over her. Almostimmediately they fell asleep and slept for about half an hour.
Winston woke first. He sat up and watched the freckled face, stillpeacefully asleep, pillowed on the palm of her hand. Except for hermouth, you could not call her beautiful. There was a line or two roundthe eyes, if you looked closely. The short dark hair wasextraordinarily thick and soft. It occurred to him that he still didnot 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 underthe hazel tree, while the thrush was singing, had not quite come back.He pulled the overalls aside and studied her smooth white flank. In theold days, he thought, a man looked at a girl’s body and saw that it wasdesirable, and that was the end of the story. But you could not havepure love or pure lust nowadays. No emotion was pure, becauseeverything was mixed up with fear and hatred. Their embrace had been abattle, the climax a victory. It was a blow struck against the Party.It was a political act.

[b][size=+2]‘WE[/b] can come here once again,’ saidJulia. ‘It’s generally safe to use any hide-out twice. But not foranother month or two, of course.’
As soon as she woke up her demeanour had changed. She became alert andbusiness-like, put her clothes on, knotted the scarlet sash about herwaist, and began arranging the details of the journey home. It seemednatural to leave this to her. She obviously had a practical cunningwhich Winston lacked, and she seemed also to have an exhaustiveknowledge of the countryside round London, stored away from innumerablecommunity hikes. The route she gave him was quite different from theone by which he had come, and brought him out at a different railwaystation. ‘Never go home the same way as you went out,’ she said, asthough enunciating an important general principle. She would leavefirst, and Winston was to wait half an hour before following her.
She had named a place where they could meet after work, four eveningshence. It was a street in one of the poorer quarters, where there wasan open market which was generally crowded and noisy. She would behanging about among the stalls, pretending to be in search of shoelacesor sewing- thread. If she judged that the coast was clear she wouldblow her nose when he approached; otherwise he was to walk past herwithout recognition. But with luck, in the middle of the crowd, itwould be safe to talk for a quarter of an hour and arrange anothermeeting.
‘And now I must go,’ she said as soon as he had mastered hisinstructions. ‘I’m due back at nineteen-thirty. I’ve got to put in twohours for the Junior Anti-Sex League, handing out leaflets, orsomething. Isn’t it bloody? Give me a brush-down, would you? Have I gotany 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 amoment later pushed her way through the saplings and disappeared intothe wood with very little noise. Even now he had not found out hersurname or her address. However, it made no difference, for it wasinconceivable that they could ever meet indoors or exchange any kind ofwritten 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 whichthey actually succeeded in making love. That was in anotherhidlng-place known to Julia, the belfry of a ruinous church in analmost-deserted stretch of country where an atomic bomb had fallenthirty years earlier. It was a good hiding-place when once you gotthere, but the getting there was very dangerous. For the rest theycould meet only in the streets, in a different place every evening andnever for more than half an hour at a time. In the street it wasusually possible to talk, after a fashion. As they drifted down thecrowded pavements, not quite abreast and never looking at one another,they carried on a curious, intermittent conversation which flicked onand off like the beams of a lighthouse, suddenly nipped into silence bythe approach of a Party uniform or the proximity of a telescreen, thentaken up again minutes later in the middle of a sentence, then abruptlycut short as they parted at the agreed spot, then continued almostwithout introduction on the following day. Julia appeared to be quiteused to this kind of conversation, which she called ‘talking byinstalments’. She was also surprisingly adept at speaking withoutmoving her lips. Just once in almost a month of nightly meetings theymanaged to exchange a kiss. They were passing in silence down aside-street (Julia would never speak when they were away from the mainstreets) when there was a deafening roar, the earth heaved, and the airdarkened, and Winston found himself lying on his side, bruised andterrified. A rocket bomb must have dropped quite near at hand. Suddenlyhe became aware of Julia’s face a few centimetres from his own, deathlywhite, as white as chalk. Even her lips were white. She was dead! Heclasped 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. Bothof their faces were thickly coated with plaster.
There were evenings when they reached their rendezvous and then had towalk past one another without a sign, because a patrol had just comeround the corner or a helicopter was hovering overhead. Even if it hadbeen less dangerous, it would still have been difficult to find time tomeet. Winston’s working week was sixty hours, Julia’s was even longer,and their free days varied according to the pressure of work and didnot often coincide. Julia, in any case, seldom had an eveningcompletely free. She spent an astonishing amount of time in attendinglectures and demonstrations, distributing literature for the juniorAnti-Sex League, preparing banners for Hate Week, making collectionsfor the savings campaign, and such-like activities. It paid, she said,it was camouflage. If you kept the small rules, you could break the bigones. She even induced Winston to mortgage yet another of his eveningsby enrolling himself for the part-time munition work which was donevoluntarily by zealous Party members. So, one evening every week,Winston spent four hours of paralysing boredom, screwing together smallbits of metal which were probably parts of bomb fuses, in a draughty,ill-lit workshop where the knocking of hammers mingled drearily withthe music of the telescreens.
When they met in the church tower the gaps in their fragmentaryconversation were filled up. It was a blazing afternoon. The air in thelittle square chamber above the bells was hot and stagnant, and smeltoverpoweringly of pigeon dung. They sat talking for hours on the dusty,twig- littered floor, one or other of them getting up from time to timeto cast a glance through the arrowslits and make sure that no one wascoming.
Julia was twenty-six years old. She lived in a hostel with thirty othergirls (’Always in the stink of women! How I hate women!’ she saidparenthetically), and she worked, as he had guessed, on thenovel-writing machines in the Fiction Department. She enjoyed her work,which consisted chiefly in running and servicing a powerful but trickyelectric motor. She was ‘not clever’, but was fond of using her handsand felt at home with machinery. She could describe the whole processof composing a novel, from the general directive issued by the PlanningCommittee down to the final touching-up by the Rewrite Squad. But shewas not interested in the finished product. She ‘didn’t much care forreading,’ she said. Books were just a commodity that had to beproduced, like jam or bootlaces.
She had no memories of anything before the early sixties and the onlyperson she had ever known who talked frequently of the days before theRevolution was a grandfather who had disappeared when she was eight. Atschool she had been captain of the hockey team and had won thegymnastics trophy two years running. She had been a troop-leader in theSpies and a branch secretary in the Youth League before joining theJunior Anti-Sex League. She had always borne an excellent character.She had even (an infallibIe mark of good reputation) been picked out towork in Pornosec, the sub- section of the Fiction Department whichturned out cheap pornography for distribution among the proles. It wasnicknamed Muck House by the people who worked in it, she remarked.There she had remained for a year, helping to produce booklets insealed packets with titles like Spanking Stories or One Night 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 thekaleidoscopes. 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, exceptthe heads of the departments, were girls. The theory was that men,whose sex instincts were less controllable than those of women, were ingreater danger of being corrupted by the filth they handled.
‘They don’t even like having married women there,’ she added. Girls arealways 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 Partymember of sixty who later committed suicide to avoid arrest. ‘And agood job too,’ said Julia, ‘otherwise they’d have had my name out ofhim when he confessed.’ Since then there had been various others. Lifeas she saw it was quite simple. You wanted a good time; ‘they’, meaningthe Party, wanted to stop you having it; you broke the rules as bestyou couId. She seemed to think it just as natural that ‘they’ shouldwant to rob you of your pleasures as that you should want to avoidbeing caught. She hated the Party, and said so in the crudest words,but she made no general criticism of it. Except where it touched uponher own life she had no interest in Party doctrine. He noticed that shenever used Newspeak words except the ones that had passed into everydayuse. She had never heard of the Brotherhood, and refused to believe inits existence. Any kind of organized revolt against the Party, whichwas bound to be a failure, struck her as stupid. The clever thing wasto break the rules and stay alive all the same. He wondered vaguely howmany others like her there might be in the younger generation—peoplewho had grown up in the world of the Revolution, knowing nothing else,accepting the Party as something unalterable, like the sky, notrebelling against its authority but simply evading it, as a rabbitdodges a dog.
They did not discuss the possibility of getting married. It was tooremote to be worth thinking about. No imaginable committee would eversanction such a marriage even if Katharine, Winston’s wife, couldsomehow 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 curiousIyenough she appeared to know the essential parts of it already. Shedescribed to him, almost as though she had seen or felt it, thestiffening of Katharine’s body as soon as he touched her, the way inwhich she still seemed to be pushing him from her with all herstrength, even when her arms were clasped tightly round him. With Juliahe felt no difficulty in talking about such things: Katharine, in anycase, had long ceased to be a painful memory and became merely adistasteful one.
‘I could have stood it if it hadn’t been for one thing,’ he said. HetoId her about the frigid little ceremony that Katharine had forced himto go through on the same night every week. ‘She hated it, but nothingwould make her stop doing it. She used to call it—but you’ll neverguess.’
‘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 theover-sixteens. And in the Youth Movement. They rub it into you foryears. I dare say it works in a lot of cases. But of course you cannever tell; peopIe are such hypocrites.’
She began to enlarge upon the subject. With Julia, everything came backto her own sexuality. As soon as this was touched upon in any way shewas capable of great acuteness. Unlike Winston, she had grasped theinner meaning of the Party’s sexual puritanism. It was not merely thatthe sex instinct created a world of its own which was outside theParty’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 andleader-worship. The way she put it was:
‘When you make love you’re using up energy; and afterwards you feelhappy and don’t give a damn for anything. They can’t bear you to feellike that. They want you to be bursting with energy all the time. Allthis marching up and down and cheering and waving flags is simpIy sexgone sour. If you’re happy inside yourself, why should you get excitedabout Big Brother and the Three-Year Plans and the Two Minutes Hate andall the rest of their bloody rot?’
That was very true, he thought. There was a direct intimate connexionbetween chastity and political orthodoxy. For how could the fear, thehatred, and the lunatic credulity which the Party needed in its membersbe kept at the right pitch, except by bottling down some powerfulinstinct and using it as a driving force? The sex impulse was dangerousto the Party, and the Party had turned it to account. They had played asimilar trick with the instinct of parenthood. The family could notactually be abolished, and, indeed, people were encouraged to be fondof their children, in almost the old-fashioned way. The children, onthe other hand, were systematically turned against their parents andtaught to spy on them and report their deviations. The family hadbecome in effect an extension of the Thought Police. It was a device bymeans of which everyone could be surrounded night and day by informerswho knew him intimately.
Abruptly his mind went back to Katharine. Katharine wouldunquestionably have denounced him to the Thought Police if she had nothappened to be too stupid to detect the unorthodoxy of his opinions.But what really recalled her to him at this moment was the stiflingheat of the afternoon, which had brought the sweat out on his forehead.He began telling Julia of something that had happened, or rather hadfailed to happen, on another sweltering summer afternoon, eleven yearsago.
It was three or four months after they were married. They had losttheir way on a community hike somewhere in Kent. They had only laggedbehind the others for a couple of minutes, but they took a wrongturning, and presently found themselves pulled up short by the edge ofan old chalk quarry. It was a sheer drop of ten or twenty metres, withboulders at the bottom. There was nobody of whom they could ask theway. As soon as she realized that they were lost Katharine became veryuneasy. To be away from the noisy mob of hikers even for a moment gaveher a feeling of wrong- doing. She wanted to hurry back by the way theyhad come and start searching in the other direction. But at this momentWinston noticed some tufts of loosestrife growing in the cracks of thecliff beneath them. One tuft was of two colours, magenta and brick-red,apparently growing on the same root. He had never seen anything of thekind 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 backfor a moment. She even leaned out over the cliff face to see where hewas pointing. He was standing a little behind her, and he put his handon her waist to steady her. At this moment it suddenly occurred to himhow completely alone they were. There was not a human creatureanywhere, not a leaf stirring, not even a bird awake. In a place likethis 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 wasthe hottest sleepiest hour of the afternoon. The sun blazed down uponthem, 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 closeragainst him. Her head rested on his shoulder, the pleasant smell of herhair conquering the pigeon dung. She was very young, he thought, shestill expected something from life, she did not understand that to pushan 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 thatwe’re playing, we can’t win. Some kinds of failure are better thanother kinds, that’s all.’
He felt her shoulders give a wriggle of dissent. She alwayscontradicted him when he said anything of this kind. She would notaccept it as a law of nature that the individual is always defeated. Ina way she realized that she herself was doomed, that sooner or laterthe Thought Police would catch her and kill her, but with another partof her mind she believed that it was somehow possible to construct asecret world in which you could live as you chose. All you needed wasluck and cunning and boldness. She did not understand that there was nosuch 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 theParty 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 amafraid of death. You are young, so presumably you’re more afraid of itthan I am. Obviously we shall put it off as long as we can. But itmakes very little difference. So long as human beings stay human, deathand 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, thisis my hand, this is my leg, I’m real, I’m solid, I’m alive! Don’t youlike this?’
She twisted herself round and pressed her bosom against him. He couldfeel her breasts, ripe yet firm, through her overalls. Her body seemedto 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 fixup about the next time we meet. We may as well go back to the place inthe wood. We’ve given it a good long rest. But you must get there by adifferent way this time. I’ve got it all planned out. You take thetrain—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.

[b][size=+2]WINSTON[/b] looked round the shabby littleroom above Mr Charrington’s shop. Beside the window the enormous bedwas made up, with ragged blankets and a coverless bolster. Theold-fashioned clock with the twelve-hour face was ticking away on themantelpiece. In the corner, on the gateleg table, the glass paperweightwhich he had bought on his last visit gleamed softly out of thehalf-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 ofwater to boil. He had brought an envelope full of Victory Coffee andsome saccharine tablets. The clock’s hands said seventeen-twenty: itwas nineteen- twenty really. She was coming at nineteen-thirty.
Folly, folly, his heart kept saying: conscious, gratuitous, suicidalfolly. Of all the crimes that a Party member could commit, this one wasthe least possible to conceal. Actually the idea had first floated intohis head in the form of a vision, of the glass paperweight mirrored bythe surface of the gateleg table. As he had foreseen, Mr Charringtonhad made no difficulty about letting the room. He was obviously glad ofthe few dollars that it would bring him. Nor did he seem shocked orbecome offensively knowing when it was made clear that Winston wantedthe room for the purpose of a love-affair. Instead he looked into themiddle distance and spoke in generalities, with so delicate an air asto give the impression that he had become partly invisible. Privacy, hesaid, was a very valuable thing. Everyone wanted a place where theycould be alone occasionally. And when they had such a place, it wasonly common courtesy in anyone else who knew of it to keep hisknowledge to himself. He even, seeming almost to fade out of existenceas he did so, added that there were two entries to the house, one ofthem through the back yard, which gave on an alley.
Under the window somebody was singing. Winston peeped out, secure inthe protection of the muslin curtain. The June sun was still high inthe sky, and in the sun-filled court below, a monstrous woman, solid asa Norman pillar, with brawny red forearms and a sacking apron strappedabout her middle, was stumping to and fro between a washtub and aclothes line, pegging out a series of square white things which Winstonrecognized as babies’ diapers. Whenever her mouth was not corked withclothes 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 ofcountless similar songs published for the benefit of the proles by asub-section of the Music Department. The words of these songs werecomposed without any human intervention whatever on an instrument knownas a versificator. But the woman sang so tunefully as to turn thedreadful rubbish into an almost pleasant sound. He could hear the womansinging and the scrape of her shoes on the flagstones, and the cries ofthe children in the street, and somewhere in the far distance a faintroar of traffic, and yet the room seemed curiously silent, thanks tothe absence of a telescreen.
Folly, folly, folly! he thought again. It was inconceivable that theycould frequent this place for more than a few weeks without beingcaught. But the temptation of having a hiding-place that was trulytheir own, indoors and near at hand, had been too much for both ofthem. For some time after their visit to the church belfry it had beenimpossible to arrange meetings. Working hours had been drasticallyincreased in anticipation of Hate Week. It was more than a monthdistant, but the enormous, complex preparations that it entailed werethrowing extra work on to everybody. Finally both of them managed tosecure a free afternoon on the same day. They had agreed to go back tothe clearing in the wood. On the evening beforehand they met briefly inthe street. As usual, Winston hardly looked at Julia as they driftedtowards one another in the crowd, but from the short glance he gave herit 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 knownher the nature of his desire for her had changed. At the beginningthere had been little true sensuality in it. Their first love-makinghad been simply an act of the will. But after the second time it wasdifferent. The smell of her hair, the taste of her mouth, the feelingof her skin seemed to have got inside him, or into the air all roundhim. She had become a physical necessity, something that he not onlywanted but felt that he had a right to. When she said that she couldnot come, he had the feeling that she was cheating him. But just atthis moment the crowd pressed them together and their handsaccidentally met. She gave the tips of his fingers a quick squeeze thatseemed to invite not desire but affection. It struck him that when onelived with a woman this particular disappointment must be a normal,recurring event; and a deep tenderness, such as he had not felt for herbefore, suddenly took hold of him. He wished that they were a marriedcouple of ten years’ standing. He wished that he were walking throughthe streets with her just as they were doing now but openly and withoutfear, talking of trivialities and buying odds and ends for thehousehold. He wished above all that they had some place where theycould be alone together without feeling the obligation to make loveevery time they met. It was not actually at that moment, but at sometime on the following day, that the idea of renting Mr Charrington’sroom had occurred to him. When he suggested it to Julia she had agreedwith unexpected readiness. Both of them knew that it was lunacy. It wasas though they were intentionally stepping nearer to their graves. Ashe sat waiting on the edge of the bed he thought again of the cellarsof the Ministry of Love. It was curious how that predestined horrormoved in and out of one’s consciousness. There it lay, fixed in futuretimes, preceding death as surely as 99 precedes 100. One could notavoid it, but one could perhaps postpone it: and yet instead, every nowand again, by a conscious, wilful act, one chose to shorten theinterval before it happened.
At this moment there was a quick step on the stairs. Julia burst intothe room. She was carrying a tool-bag of coarse brown canvas, such ashe had sometimes seen her carrying to and fro at the Ministry. Hestarted forward to take her in his arms, but she disengaged herselfrather hurriedly, partly because she was still holding the tool-bag.
‘Half a second,’ she said. ‘Just let me show you what I’ve brought. Didyou bring some of that filthy Victory Coffee? I thought you would. Youcan 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 somespanners and a screwdriver that filled the top part of it. Underneathwere a number of neat paper packets. The first packet that she passedto Winston had a strange and yet vaguely familiar feeling. It wasfilled with some kind of heavy, sand-like stuff which yielded whereveryou touched it.
‘It isn’t sugar?’ he said.
‘Real sugar. Not saccharine, sugar. And here’s a loaf of bread—properwhite bread, not our bloody stuff—and a little pot of jam. And here’s atin of milk—but look! This is the one I’m really proud of. I had towrap a bit of sacking round it, because—’
But she did not need to tell him why she had wrapped it up. The smellwas already filling the room, a rich hot smell which seemed like anemanation from his early childhood, but which one did occasionally meetwith even now, blowing down a passage-way before a door slammed, ordiffusing itself mysteriously in a crowded street, sniffed for aninstant 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, orsomething,’ she said vaguely. ‘But listen, dear. I want you to turnyour back on me for three minutes. Go and sit on the other side of thebed. Don’t go too near the window. And don’t turn round till I tellyou.’
Winston gazed abstractedly through the muslin curtain. Down in the yardthe red-armed woman was still marching to and fro between the washtuband the line. She took two more pegs out of her mouth and sang withdeep 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 voicefloated upward with the sweet summer air, very tuneful, charged with asort of happy melancholy. One had the feeling that she would have beenperfectly content, if the June evening had been endless and the supplyof clothes inexhaustible, to remain there for a thousand years, peggingout diapers and singing rubbish. It struck him as a curious fact thathe had never heard a member of the Party singing alone andspontaneously. It would even have seemed slightly unorthodox, adangerous eccentricity, like talking to oneself. Perhaps it was onlywhen people were somewhere near the starvation level that they hadanything to sing about.
‘You can turn round now,’ said Julia.
He turned round, and for a second almost failed to recognize her. Whathe had actually expected was to see her naked. But she was not naked.The transformation that had happened was much more surprising thanthat. She had painted her face.
She must have slipped into some shop in the proletarian quarters andbought herself a complete set of make-up materials. Her lips weredeeply reddened, her cheeks rouged, her nose powdered; there was even atouch of something under the eyes to make them brighter. It was notvery skilfully done, but Winston’s standards in such matters were nothigh. He had never before seen or imagined a woman of the Party withcosmetics on her face. The improvement in her appearance was startling.With just a few dabs of colour in the right places she had become notonly very much prettier, but, above all, far more feminine. Her shorthair and boyish overalls merely added to the effect. As he took her inhis arms a wave of synthetic violets flooded his nostrils. He remembered the half-darkness of a basement kitchen, and a woman’s cavernousmouth. It was the very same scent that she had used; but at the momentit 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’mgoing to get hold of a real woman’s frock from somewhere and wear itinstead of these bloody trousers. I’ll wear silk stockings andhigh-heeled shoes! In this room I’m going to be a woman, not a Partycomrade.’
They flung their clothes off and climbed into the huge mahogany bed. Itwas 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 discolouredpatch over his ankle. There were no sheets, but the blanket they lay onwas threadbare and smooth, and the size and springiness of the bedastonished 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 ofthe proles. Winston had occasionally slept in one in his boyhood: Juliahad never been in one before, so far as she could remember.
Presently they fell asleep for a little while. When Winston woke up thehands 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. Mostof 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 hercheekbone. A yellow ray from the sinking sun fell across the foot ofthe bed and lighted up the fireplace, where the water in the pan wasboiling fast. Down in the yard the woman had stopped singing, but thefaint shouts of children floated in from the street. He wonderedvaguely whether in the abolished past it had been a normal experienceto lie in bed like this, in the cool of a summer evening, a man and awoman with no clothes on, making love when they chose, talking of whatthey chose, not feeling any compulsion to get up, simply lying thereand listening to peaceful sounds outside. Surely there could never havebeen 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 somecoffee in another moment. We’ve got an hour. What time do they cut thelights 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 thefloor, and sent it hurtling into the corner with a boyish jerk of herarm, exactly as he had seen her fling the dictionary at Goldstein, thatmorning 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 downagain. ‘We’ve even got them in the kitchen at the hostel. Some parts ofLondon 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 alonefor two minutes. It’s the great huge brown ones that do it. And thenasty 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, asthough to reassure him with the warmth of her body. He did not reopenhis eyes immediately. For several moments he had had the feeling ofbeing back in a nightmare which had recurred from time to timethroughout his life. It was always very much the same. He was standingin front of a wall of darkness, and on the other side of it there wassomething unendurable, something too dreadful to be faced. In the dreamhis deepest feeling was always one of self- deception, because he didin fact know what was behind the wall of darkness. With a deadlyeffort, like wrenching a piece out of his own brain, he could even havedragged the thing into the open. He always woke up without discoveringwhat it was: but somehow it was connected with what Julia had beensaying 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 timewe come here I’ll bring some plaster and bung it up properly.’
Already the black instant of panic was half-forgotten. Feeling slightlyashamed of himself, he sat up against the bedhead. Julia got out ofbed, pulled on her overalls, and made the coffee. The smell that rosefrom the saucepan was so powerful and exciting that they shut thewindow lest anybody outside should notice it and become inquisitive.What was even better than the taste of the coffee was the silky texturegiven to it by the sugar, a thing Winston had almost forgotten afteryears of saccharine. With one hand in her pocket and a piece of breadand jam in the other, Julia wandered about the room, glancingindifferently at the bookcase, pointing out the best way of repairingthe gateleg table, plumping herself down in the ragged arm-chair to seeif it was comfortable, and examining the absurd twelve-hour clock witha sort of tolerant amusement. She brought the glass paperweight over tothe bed to have a look at it in a better light. He took it out of herhand, fascinated, as always, by the soft, rainwatery appearance of theglass.
‘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 toany use. That’s what I like about it. It’s a little chunk of historythat they’ve forgotten to alter. It’s a message from a hundred yearsago, 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 noseout,’ 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 namewas.’ The fragment of rhyme that Mr Charrington had taught him cameback into his head, and he added half-nostalgically: ‘“Oranges andlemons”, 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 itends up, “Here comes a candle to light you to bed, here comes a chopperto chop off your head!”
It was like the two halves of a countersign. But there must be anotherline after ‘the bells of Old Bailey’. Perhaps it could be dug out of MrCharrington’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. Hewas vaporized when I was eight—at any rate, he disappeared. I wonderwhat 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 thefifties. They were so sour that it set your teeth on edge even to smellthem.’
‘I bet that picture’s got bugs behind it,’ said Julia. ‘I’ll take itdown and give it a good clean some day. I suppose it’s almost time wewere leaving. I must start washing this paint off. What a bore! I’llget 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 glasspaperweight. The inexhaustibly interesting thing was not the fragmentof coral but the interior of the glass itself. There was such a depthof it, and yet it was almost as transparent as air. It was as thoughthe surface of the glass had been the arch of the sky, enclosing a tinyworld with its atmosphere complete. He had the feeling that he couldget inside it, and that in fact he was inside it, along with themahogany bed and the gateleg table, and the clock and the steelengraving and the paperweight itself. The paperweight was the room hewas in, and the coral was Julia’s life and his own, fixed in a sort ofeternity at the heart of the crystal.

[b][size=+2]SYME[/b] had vanished. A morning came, andhe was missing from work: a few thoughtless people commented on hisabsence. On the next day nobody mentioned him. On the third day Winstonwent into the vestibule of the Records Department to look at thenotice-board. One of the notices carried a printed list of the membersof the Chess Committee, of whom Syme had been one. It looked almostexactly as it had looked before—nothing had been crossed out—but it wasone name shorter. It was enough. Syme had ceased to exist: he had neverexisted. The weather was baking hot. In the labyrinthine Ministry thewindowless, air-conditioned rooms kept their normal temperature, butoutside the pavements scorched one’s feet and the stench of the Tubesat the rush hours was a horror. The preparations for Hate Week were infull 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 hadto be erected, effigies built, slogans coined, songs written, rumourscirculated, photographs faked. Julia’s unit in the Fiction Departmenthad been taken off the production of novels and was rushing out aseries of atrocity pamphlets. Winston, in addition to his regular work,spent long periods every day in going through back files of the Timesand altering and embellishing news items which were to be quoted inspeeches. Late at night, when crowds of rowdy proles roamed thestreets, the town had a curiously febrile air. The rocket bombs crashedoftener than ever, and sometimes in the far distance there wereenormous explosions which no one could explain and about which therewere wild rumours.
The new tune which was to be the theme-song of Hate Week (the HateSong, it was called) had already been composed and was being endlesslyplugged on the telescreens. It had a savage, barking rhythm which couldnot exactly be called music, but resembled the beating of a drum.Roared out by hundreds of voices to the tramp of marching feet, it wasterrifying. The proles had taken a fancy to it, and in the midnightstreets it competed with the still- popular ‘It was only a hopelessfancy’. The Parsons children played it at all hours of the night andday, unbearably, on a comb and a piece of toilet paper. Winston’sevenings were fuller than ever. Squads of volunteers, organized byParsons, were preparing the street for Hate Week, stitching banners,painting posters, erecting flagstaffs on the roofs, and perilouslyslinging wires across the street for the reception of streamers.Parsons boasted that Victory Mansions alone would display four hundredmetres 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 revertingto shorts and an open shirt in the evenings. He was everywhere at once,pushing, pulling, sawing, hammering, improvising, jollying everyonealong with comradely exhortations and giving out from every fold of hisbody 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 expressionlessMongolian face and enormous boots, a submachine gun pointed from hiship. From whatever angle you looked at the poster, the muzzle of thegun, magnified by the foreshortening, seemed to be pointed straight atyou. The thing had been plastered on every blank space on every wall,even outnumbering the portraits of Big Brother. The proles, normallyapathetic about the war, were being lashed into one of their periodicalfrenzies 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 hundredvictims among the ruins. The whole population of the neighbourhoodturned out for a long, trailing funeral which went on for hours and wasin effect an indignation meeting. Another bomb fell on a piece of wasteground which was used as a playground and several dozen children wereblown to pieces. There were further angry demonstrations, Goldstein wasburned in effigy, hundreds of copies of the poster of the Eurasiansoldier were torn down and added to the flames, and a number of shopswere looted in the turmoil; then a rumour flew round that spies weredirecting the rocket bombs by means of wireless waves, and an oldcouple who were suspected of being of foreign extraction had theirhouse 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 openwindow, 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 tomatter. Dirty or clean, the room was paradise. As soon as they arrivedthey would sprinkle everything with pepper bought on the black market,tear off their clothes, and make love with sweating bodies, then fallasleep and wake to find that the bugs had rallied and were massing forthe counter-attack.
Four, five, six—seven times they met during the month of June. Winstonhad dropped his habit of drinking gin at all hours. He seemed to havelost the need for it. He had grown fatter, his varicose ulcer hadsubsided, leaving only a brown stain on the skin above his ankle, hisfits of coughing in the early morning had stopped. The process of lifehad ceased to be intolerable, he had no longer any impulse to makefaces at the telescreen or shout curses at the top of his voice. Nowthat they had a secure hiding- place, almost a home, it did not evenseem a hardship that they could only meet infrequently and for a coupleof hours at a time. What mattered was that the room over the junk- shopshould exist. To know that it was there, inviolate, was almost the sameas being in it. The room was a world, a pocket of the past whereextinct animals could walk. Mr Charrington, thought Winston, wasanother extinct animal. He usually stopped to talk with Mr Charringtonfor a few minutes on his way upstairs. The old man seemed seldom ornever to go out of doors, and on the other hand to have almost nocustomers. He led a ghostlike existence between the tiny, dark shop,and an even tinier back kitchen where he prepared his meals and whichcontained, among other things, an unbelievably ancient gramophone withan enormous horn. He seemed glad of the opportunity to talk. Wanderingabout among his worthless stock, with his long nose and thickspectacles and his bowed shoulders in the velvet jacket, he had alwaysvaguely the air of being a collector rather than a tradesman. With asort of faded enthusiasm he would finger this scrap of rubbish orthat—a china bottle-stopper, the painted lid of a broken snuffbox, apinchbeck locket containing a strand of some long-dead baby’shair—never asking that Winston should buy it, merely that he shouldadmire it. To talk to him was like listening to the tinkling of aworn-out musical-box. He had dragged out from the corners of his memorysome more fragments of forgotten rhymes. There was one about four andtwenty blackbirds, and another about a cow with a crumpled horn, andanother about the death of poor Cock Robin. ‘It just occurred to me youmight be interested,’ he would say with a deprecating little laughwhenever he produced a new fragment. But he could never recall morethan a few lines of any one rhyme.
Both of them knew—in a way, it was never out of their minds that whatwas now happening could not last long. There were times when the factof impending death seemed as palpable as the bed they lay on, and theywould cling together with a sort of despairing sensuality, like adamned soul grasping at his last morsel of pleasure when the clock iswithin five minutes of striking. But there were also times when theyhad the illusion not only of safety but of permanence. So long as theywere actually in this room, they both felt, no harm could come to them.Getting there was difficult and dangerous, but the room itself wassanctuary. It was as when Winston had gazed into the heart of thepaperweight, with the feeling that it would be possible to get insidethat glassy world, and that once inside it time could be arrested.Often they gave themselves up to daydreams of escape. Their luck wouldhold indefinitely, and they would carry on their intrigue, just likethis, for the remainder of their natural lives. Or Katharine would die,and by subtle manoeuvrings Winston and Julia would succeed in gettingmarried. Or they would commit suicide together. Or they woulddisappear, alter themselves out of recognition, learn to speak withproletarian accents, get jobs in a factory and live out their livesundetected in a back-street. It was all nonsense, as they both knew. Inreality there was no escape. Even the one plan that was practicable,suicide, they had no intention of carrying out. To hang on from day today and from week to week, spinning out a present that had no future,seemed an unconquerable instinct, just as one’s lungs will always drawthe next breath so long as there is air available.
Sometimes, too, they talked of engaging in active rebellion against theParty, but with no notion of how to take the first step. Even if thefabulous Brotherhood was a reality, there still remained the difficultyof finding one’s way into it. He told her of the strange intimacy thatexisted, or seemed to exist, between himself and O’Brien, and of theimpulse 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 thingto do. She was used to judging people by their faces, and it seemednatural to her that Winston should believe O’Brien to be trustworthy onthe strength of a single flash of the eyes. Moreover she took it forgranted that everyone, or nearly everyone, secretly hated the Party andwould break the rules if he thought it safe to do so. But she refusedto believe that widespread, organized opposition existed or couldexist. The tales about Goldstein and his underground army, she said,were simply a lot of rubbish which the Party had invented for its ownpurposes and which you had to pretend to believe in. Times beyondnumber, at Party rallies and spontaneous demonstrations, she hadshouted at the top of her voice for the execution of people whose namesshe had never heard and in whose supposed crimes she had not thefaintest belief. When public trials were happening she had taken herplace in the detachments from the Youth League who surrounded thecourts from morning to night, chanting at intervals ‘Death to thetraitors!’ During the Two Minutes Hate she always excelled all othersin shouting insults at Goldstein. Yet she had only the dimmest idea ofwho Goldstein was and what doctrines he was supposed to represent. Shehad grown up since the Revolution and was too young to remember theideological battles of the fifties and sixties. Such a thing as anindependent political movement was outside her imagination: and in anycase the Party was invincible. It would always exist, and it wouldalways be the same. You could only rebel against it by secretdisobedience or, at most, by isolated acts of violence such as killingsomebody or blowing something up.
In some ways she was far more acute than Winston, and far lesssusceptible to Party propaganda. Once when he happened in someconnexion to mention the war against Eurasia, she startled him bysaying casually that in her opinion the war was not happening. Therocket bombs which fell daily on London were probably fired by theGovernment of Oceania itself, ‘just to keep people frightened’. Thiswas an idea that had literally never occurred to him. She also stirreda sort of envy in him by telling him that during the Two Minutes Hateher great difficulty was to avoid bursting out laughing. But she onlyquestioned the teachings of the Party when they in some way touchedupon her own life. Often she was ready to accept the officialmythology, simply because the difference between truth and falsehooddid not seem important to her. She believed, for instance, havinglearnt it at school, that the Party had invented aeroplanes. (In hisown schooldays, Winston remembered, in the late fifties, it was onlythe helicopter that the Party claimed to have invented; a dozen yearslater, when Julia was at school, it was already claiming the aeroplane;one generation more, and it would be claiming the steam engine.) Andwhen he told her that aeroplanes had been in existence before he wasborn and long before the Revolution, the fact struck her as totallyuninteresting. After all, what did it matter who had inventedaeroplanes? It was rather more of a shock to him when he discoveredfrom some chance remark that she did not remember that Oceania, fouryears ago, had been at war with Eastasia and at peace with Eurasia. Itwas true that she regarded the whole war as a sham: but apparently shehad not even noticed that the name of the enemy had changed. ‘I thoughtwe’d always been at war with Eurasia,’ she said vaguely. It frightenedhim a little. The invention of aeroplanes dated from long before herbirth, 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 aquarter of an hour. In the end he succeeded in forcing her memory backuntil she did dimly recall that at one time Eastasia and not Eurasiahad been the enemy. But the issue still struck her as unimportant. ‘Whocares?’ she said impatiently. ‘It’s always one bloody war afteranother, and one knows the news is all lies anyway.
Sometimes he talked to her of the Records Department and the impudentforgeries that he committed there. Such things did not appear tohorrify her. She did not feel the abyss opening beneath her feet at thethought of lies becoming truths. He told her the story of Jones,Aaronson, and Rutherford and the momentous slip of paper which he hadonce 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, theywere far older men than I was. They belonged to the old days, beforethe 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. Itwasn’t just a question of somebody being killed. Do you realize thatthe past, starting from yesterday, has been actually abolished? If itsurvives anywhere, it’s in a few solid objects with no words attachedto them, like that lump of glass there. Already we know almostliterally nothing about the Revolution and the years before theRevolution. Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every bookhas been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue andstreet and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. Andthat process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History hasstopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party isalways right. I know,of course, that the past is falsified, but it would never be possiblefor me to prove it, even when I did the falsification myself. After thething is done, no evidence ever remains. The only evidence is inside myown mind, and I don’t know with any certainty that any other humanbeing 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, butonly for something worth while, not for bits of old newspaper. Whatcould you have done with it even if you had kept it?’
‘Not much, perhaps. But it was evidence. It might have planted a fewdoubts 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 onecan imagine little knots of resistance springing up here andthere—small groups of people banding themselves together, and graduallygrowing, and even leaving a few records behind, so that the nextgenerations 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 faintestinterest. Whenever he began to talk of the principles of Ingsoc,doublethink, the mutability of the past, and the denial of objectivereality, and to use Newspeak words, she became bored and confused andsaid that she never paid any attention to that kind of thing. One knewthat it was all rubbish, so why let oneself be worried by it? She knewwhen to cheer and when to boo, and that was all one needed. If hepersisted in talking of such subjects, she had a disconcerting habit offalling asleep. She was one of those people who can go to sleep at anyhour and in any position. Talking to her, he realized how easy it wasto present an appearance of orthodoxy while having no grasp whatever ofwhat orthodoxy meant. In a way, the world-view of the Party imposeditself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it. Theycould be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality,because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded ofthem, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to noticewhat was happening. By lack of understanding they remained sane. Theysimply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm,because it left no residue behind, just as a grain of corn will passundigested through the body of a bird.

[b][size=+2]IT HAD[/b] 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 almostat the spot where Julia had slipped the note into his hand when hebecame aware that someone larger than himself was walking just behindhim. The person, whoever it was, gave a small cough, evidently as aprelude to speaking. Winston stopped abruptly and turned. It wasO’Brien.
At last they were face to face, and it seemed that his only impulse wasto run away. His heart bounded violently. He would have been incapableof speaking. O’Brien, however, had continued forward in the samemovement, laying a friendly hand for a moment on Winston’s arm, so thatthe two of them were walking side by side. He began speaking with thepeculiar grave courtesy that differentiated him from the majority ofInner 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 hadanything to do with the actual construction of the language.’
‘But you write it very elegantly,’ said O’Brien. ‘That is not only myown opinion. I was talking recently to a friend of yours who iscertainly an expert. His name has slipped my memory for the moment.’
Again Winston’s heart stirred painfully. It was inconceivable that thiswas anything other than a reference to Syme. But Syme was not onlydead, 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, acodeword. By sharing a small act of thoughtcrime he had turned the twoof them into accomplices. They had continued to stroll slowly down thecorridor, but now O’Brien halted. With the curious, disarmingfriendliness that he always managed to put in to the gesture heresettled his spectacles on his nose. Then he went on:
‘What I had really intended to say was that in your article I noticedyou had used two words which have become obsolete. But they have onlybecome so very recently. Have you seen the tenth edition of theNewspeak 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. Buta few advance copies have been circulated. I have one myself. It mightinterest 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 thenumber of verbs—that is the point that will appeal to you, I think. Letme see, shall I send a messenger to you with the dictionary? But I amafraid I invariably forget anything of that kind. Perhaps you couldpick it up at my flat at some time that suited you? Wait. Let me giveyou my address.’
They were standing in front of a telescreen. Somewhat absentmindedlyO’Brien felt two of his pockets and then produced a smallleather-covered notebook and a gold ink- pencil. Immediately beneaththe telescreen, in such a position that anyone who was watching at theother end of the instrument could read what he was writing, hescribbled 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 thistime there was no need to conceal. Nevertheless he carefully memorizedwhat was written on it, and some hours later dropped it into the memoryhole along with a mass of other papers.
They had been talking to one another for a couple of minutes at themost. There was only one meaning that the episode could possibly have.It had been contrived as a way of letting Winston know O’Brien’saddress. This was necessary, because except by direct enquiry it wasnever possible to discover where anyone lived. There were nodirectories of any kind. ‘If you ever want to see me, this is where Ican be found,’ was what O’Brien had been saying to him. Perhaps therewould even be a message concealed somewhere in the dictionary. But atany rate, one thing was certain. The conspiracy that he had dreamed ofdid exist, and he had reached the outer edges of it.
He knew that sooner or later he would obey O’Brien’s summons. Perhapstomorrow, perhaps after a long delay—he was not certain. What washappening was only the working-out of a process that had started yearsago. The first step had been a secret, involuntary thought, the secondhad 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 wouldhappen in the Ministry of Love. He had accepted it. The end wascontained in the beginning. But it was frightening: or, more exactly,it was like a foretaste of death, like being a little less alive. EvenwhiIe he was speaking to O’Brien, when the meaning of the words hadsunk in, a chilly shuddering feeling had taken possession of his body.He had the sensation of stepping into the dampness of a grave, and itwas not much better because he had always known that the grave wasthere and waiting for him.

[b][size=+2]WINSTON[/b] had woken up with his eyes fullof tears. Julia rolled sleepily against him, murmuring something thatmight have been ‘What’s the matter?’
‘I dreamt—’ he began, and stopped short. It was too complex to be putinto words. There was the dream itself, and there was a memoryconnected with it that had swum into his mind in the few seconds afterwaking.
He lay back with his eyes shut, still sodden in the atmosphere of thedream. It was a vast, luminous dream in which his whole life seemed tostretch out before him like a landscape on a summer evening after rain.It had all occurred inside the glass paperweight, but the surface ofthe glass was the dome of the sky, and inside the dome everything wasflooded with clear soft light in which one could see into interminabledistances. The dream had also been comprehended by—indeed, in somesense it had consisted in—a gesture of the arm made by his mother, andmade again thirty years later by the Jewish woman he had seen on thenews film, trying to shelter the small boy from the bullets, before thehelicopter 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, andwithin a few moments of waking the cluster of small events surroundingit had all come back. It was a memory that he must have deliberatelypushed out of his consciousness over many years. He was not certain ofthe date, but he could not have been less than ten years old, possiblytwelve, when it had happened.
His father had disappeared some time earlier, how much earlier he couldnot remember. He remembered better the rackety, uneasy circumstances ofthe time: the periodical panics about air-raids and the sheltering inTube stations, the piles of rubble everywhere, the unintelligibleproclamations posted at street corners, the gangs of youths in shirtsall the same colour, the enormous queues outside the bakeries, theintermittent machine-gun fire in the distance—above all, the fact thatthere was never enough to eat. He remembered long afternoons spent withother boys in scrounging round dustbins and rubbish heaps, picking outthe ribs of cabbage leaves, potato peelings, sometimes even scraps ofstale breadcrust from which they carefully scraped away the cinders;and also in waiting for the passing of trucks which travelled over acertain route and were known to carry cattle feed, and which, when theyjolted over the bad patches in the road, sometimes spilt a fewfragments of oil-cake.
When his father disappeared, his mother did not show any surprise orany violent grief, but a sudden change came over her. She seemed tohave become completely spiritless. It was evident even to Winston thatshe was waiting for something that she knew must happen. She dideverything that was needed—cooked, washed, mended, made the bed, sweptthe floor, dusted the mantelpiece—always very slowly and with a curiouslack of superfluous motion, like an artist’s lay- figure moving of itsown accord. Her large shapely body seemed to relapse naturally intostillness. For hours at a time she would sit almost immobile on thebed, nursing his young sister, a tiny, ailing, very silent child of twoor three, with a face made simian by thinness. Very occasionally shewould take Winston in her arms and press him against her for a longtime without saying anything. He was aware, in spite of hisyouthfulness and selfishness, that this was somehow connected with thenever-mentioned thing that was about to happen.
He remembered the room where they lived, a dark, closesmelling roomthat seemed half filled by a bed with a white counterpane. There was agas ring in the fender, and a shelf where food was kept, and on thelanding outside there was a brown earthenware sink, common to severalrooms. He remembered his mother’s statuesque body bending over the gasring to stir at something in a saucepan. Above all he remembered hiscontinuous hunger, and the fierce sordid battles at mealtimes. He wouldask his mother naggingly, over and over again, why there was not morefood, he would shout and storm at her (he even remembered the tones ofhis voice, which was beginning to break prematurely and sometimesboomed in a peculiar way), or he would attempt a snivelling note ofpathos in his efforts to get more than his share. His mother was quiteready 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 gavehim he invariably demanded more. At every meal she would beseech himnot to be selfish and to remember that his little sister was sick andalso needed food, but it was no use. He would cry out with rage whenshe stopped ladling, he would try to wrench the saucepan and spoon outof her hands, he would grab bits from his sister’s plate. He knew thathe was starving the other two, but he could not help it; he even feltthat he had a right to do it. The clamorous hunger in his belly seemedto justify him. Between meals, if his mother did not stand guard, hewas constantly pilfering at the wretched store of food on the shelf.
One day a chocolate-ration was issued. There had been no such issue forweeks or months past. He remembered quite clearly that precious littlemorsel of chocolate. It was a two-ounce slab (they still talked aboutounces in those days) between the three of them. It was obvious that itought to be divided into three equal parts. Suddenly, as though he werelistening to somebody else, Winston heard himself demanding in a loudbooming voice that he should be given the whole piece. His mother toldhim not to be greedy. There was a long, nagging argument that wentround 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 withlarge, mournful eyes. In the end his mother broke off three-quarters ofthe chocolate and gave it to Winston, giving the other quarter to hissister. The little girl took hold of it and looked at it dully, perhapsnot knowing what it was. Winston stood watching her for a moment. Thenwith a sudden swift spring he had snatched the piece of chocolate outof 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 fixedon his face. Even now he was thinking about the thing, he did not knowwhat it was that was on the point of happening. His sister, consciousof having been robbed of something, had set up a feeble wail. Hismother drew her arm round the child and pressed its face against herbreast. Something in the gesture told him that his sister was dying. Heturned and fled down the stairs. with the chocolate growing sticky inhis hand.
He never saw his mother again. After he had devoured the chocolate hefelt somewhat ashamed of himself and hung about in the streets forseveral hours, until hunger drove him home. When he came back hismother had disappeared. This was already becoming normal at that time.Nothing was gone from the room except his mother and his sister. Theyhad not taken any clothes, not even his mother’s overcoat. To this dayhe did not know with any certainty that his mother was dead. It wasperfectly possible that she had merely been sent to a forced-labourcamp. As for his sister, she might have been removed, like Winstonhimself, to one of the colonies for homeless children (ReclamationCentres, they were called) which had grown up as a result of the civilwar, or she might have been sent to the labour camp along with hismother, or simply left somewhere or other to die.
The dream was still vivid in his mind, especially the envelopingprotecting gesture of the arm in which its whole meaning seemed to becontained. His mind went back to another dream of two months ago.Exactly as his mother had sat on the dingy whitequilted bed, with thechild clinging to her, so she had sat in the sunken ship, farunderneath him, and drowning deeper every minute, but still looking upat him through the darkening water.
He told Julia the story of his mother’s disappearance. Without openingher eyes she rolled over and settled herself into a more comfortableposition.
‘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 sleepagain. He would have liked to continue talking about his mother. He didnot suppose, from what he could remember of her, that she had been anunusual woman, still less an intelligent one; and yet she had possesseda kind of nobility, a kind of purity, simply because the standards thatshe obeyed were private ones. Her feelings were her own, and could notbe altered from outside. It would not have occurred to her that anaction which is ineffectual thereby becomes meaningless. If you lovedsomeone, you loved him, and when you had nothing else to give, youstill gave him love. When the last of the chocolate was gone, hismother had clasped the child in her arms. It was no use, it changednothing, it did not produce more chocolate, it did not avert thechild’s death or her own; but it seemed natural to her to do it. Therefugee 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. Theterrible thing that the Party had done was to persuade you that mereimpulses, mere feelings, were of no account, while at the same timerobbing you of all power over the material world. When once you were inthe grip of the Party, what you felt or did not feel, what you did orrefrained from doing, made literally no difference. Whatever happenedyou vanished, and neither you nor your actions were ever heard ofagain. You were lifted clean out of the stream of history. And yet tothe people of only two generations ago this would not have seemedall-important, because they were not attempting to alter history. Theywere governed by private loyalties which they did not question. Whatmattered were individual relationships, and a completely helplessgesture, an embrace, a tear, a word spoken to a dying man, could havevalue in itself. The proles, it suddenly occurred to him, had remainedin this condition. They were not loyal to a party or a country or anidea, they were loyal to one another. For the first time in his life hedid not despise the proles or think of them merely as an inert forcewhich would one day spring to life and regenerate the world. The proleshad stayed human. They had not become hardened inside. They had held onto the primitive emotions which he himself had to re-learn by consciouseffort. And in thinking this he remembered, without apparent relevance,how a few weeks ago he had seen a severed hand lying on the pavementand had kicked it into the gutter as though it had been acabbage-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 herebefore 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’reyoung. You look normal and innocent. If you keep clear of people likeme, 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 alonewe 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 Iconfess, they’ll shoot you, and if I refuse to confess, they’ll shootyou just the same. Nothing that I can do or say, or stop myself fromsaying, will put off your death for as much as five minutes. Neither ofus will even know whether the other is alive or dead. We shall beutterly without power of any kind. The one thing that matters is thatwe shouldn’t betray one another, although even that can’t make theslightest 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 ordo doesn’t matter: only feelings matter. If they could make me stoploving 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—anything—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 couldspy upon you night and day, but if you kept your head you could stilloutwit them. With all their cleverness they had never mastered thesecret of finding out what another human being was thinking. Perhapsthat was less true when you were actually in their hands. One did notknow what happened inside the Ministry of Love, but it was possible toguess: tortures, drugs, delicate instruments that registered yournervous reactions, gradual wearing-down by sleeplessness and solitudeand persistent questioning. Facts, at any rate, could not be kepthidden. They could be tracked down by enquiry, they could be squeezedout of you by torture. But if the object was not to stay alive but tostay human, what difference did it ultimately make? They could notalter your feelings: for that matter you could not alter them yourself,even if you wanted to. They could lay bare in the utmost detaileverything that you had done or said or thought; but the inner heart,whose workings were mysterious even to yourself, remained impregnable.

[b][size=+2]THEY[/b] had done it, they had done it at last!
The room they were standing in was long-shaped and softly lit. Thetelescreen was dimmed to a low murmur; the richness of the dark-bluecarpet gave one the impression of treading on velvet. At the far end ofthe room O’Brien was sitting at a table under a green-shaded lamp, witha mass of papers on either side of him. He had not bothered to look upwhen the servant showed Julia and Winston in.
Winston’s heart was thumping so hard that he doubted whether he wouldbe able to speak. They had done it, they had done it at last, was allhe could think. It had been a rash act to come here at all, and sheerfolly to arrive together; though it was true that they had come bydifferent routes and only met on O’Brien’s doorstep. But merely to walkinto such a place needed an effort of the nerve. It was only on veryrare occasions that one saw inside the dwelling-places of the InnerParty, or even penetrated into the quarter of the town where theylived. The whole atmosphere of the huge block of flats, the richnessand spaciousness of everything, the unfamiliar smells of good food andgood tobacco, the silent and incredibly rapid lifts sliding up anddown, the white-jacketed servants hurrying to and fro—everything wasintimidating. Although he had a good pretext for coming here, he washaunted at every step by the fear that a black-uniformed guard wouldsuddenly appear from round the corner, demand his papers, and order himto get out. O’Brien’s servant, however, had admitted the two of themwithout demur. He was a small, dark-haired man in a white jacket, witha diamond-shaped, completely expressionless face which might have beenthat of a Chinese. The passage down which he led them was softlycarpeted, with cream-papered walls and white wainscoting, allexquisitely clean. That too was intimidating. Winston could notremember ever to have seen a passageway whose walls were not grimy fromthe contact of human bodies.
O’Brien had a slip of paper between his fingers and seemed to bestudying it intently. His heavy face, bent down so that one could seethe line of the nose, looked both formidable and intelligent. Forperhaps twenty seconds he sat without stirring. Then he pulled thespeakwrite towards him and rapped out a message in the hybrid jargon ofthe Ministries:

Items one comma five comma seven approved fullwise stop suggestioncontained item six doubleplus ridiculous verging crimethink cancel stopunproceed constructionwise antegetting plusfull estimates machineryoverheads stop end message.

He rose deliberately from his chair and came towards them across thesoundless carpet. A little of the official atmosphere seemed to havefallen away from him with the Newspeak words, but his expression wasgrimmer than usual, as though he were not pleased at being disturbed.The terror that Winston already felt was suddenly shot through by astreak of ordinary embarrassment. It seemed to him quite possible thathe had simply made a stupid mistake. For what evidence had he inreality that O’Brien was any kind of political conspirator? Nothing buta flash of the eyes and a single equivocal remark: beyond that, onlyhis own secret imaginings, founded on a dream. He could not even fallback on the pretence that he had come to borrow the dictionary, becausein that case Julia’s presence was impossible to explain. As O’Brienpassed 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 themidst of his panic, Winston was too much taken aback to be able to holdhis 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 waswaiting, somewhat sternly, for Winston to speak, but about what? Evennow it was quite conceivabIe that he was simply a busy man wonderingirritably why he had been interrupted. Nobody spoke. After the stoppingof the telescreen the room seemed deadly silent. The seconds marchedpast, enormous. With difficulty Winston continued to keep his eyesfixed on O’Brien’s. Then suddenly the grim face broke down into whatmight have been the beginnings of a smile. With his characteristicgesture 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 ownmotives. Since he did not in fact know what kind of help he expectedfrom 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 andpretentious:
‘We believe that there is some kind of conspiracy, some kind of secretorganization working against the Party, and that you are involved init. We want to join it and work for it. We are enemies of the Party. Wedisbelieve in the principles of Ingsoc. We are thought-criminals. Weare also adulterers. I tell you this because we want to put ourselvesat your mercy. If you want us to incriminate ourselves in any otherway, we are ready.’
He stopped and glanced over his shoulder, with the feeling that thedoor had opened. Sure enough, the little yellow-faced servant had comein without knocking. Winston saw that he was carrying a tray with adecanter and glasses.
‘Martin is one of us,’ said O’Brien impassively. ‘Bring the drinks overhere, Martin. Put them on the round table. Have we enough chairs? Thenwe may as well sit down and talk in comfort. Bring a chair foryourself, Martin. This is business. You can stop being a servant forthe next ten minutes.’
The little man sat down, quite at his ease, and yet still with aservant-like air, the air of a valet enjoying a privilege. Winstonregarded him out of the corner of his eye. It struck him that the man’swhole life was playing a part, and that he felt it to be dangerous todrop his assumed personality even for a moment. O’Brien took thedecanter 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 wallor a hoarding—a vast bottle composed of electric lights which seemed tomove up and down and pour its contents into a glass. Seen from the topthe stuff looked almost black, but in the decanter it gleamed like aruby. It had a sour-sweet smell. He saw Julia pick up her glass andsniff at it with frank curiosity.
‘It is called wine,’ said O’Brien with a faint smile. ‘You will haveread about it in books, no doubt. Not much of it gets to the OuterParty, I am afraid.’ His face grew solemn again, and he raised hisglass: ‘I think it is fitting that we should begin by drinking ahealth. To our Leader: To Emmanuel Goldstein.’
Winston took up his glass with a certain eagerness. Wine was a thing hehad read and dreamed about. Like the glass paperweight or MrCharrington’s half-remembered rhymes, it belonged to the vanished,romantic past, the olden time as he liked to call it in his secretthoughts. For some reason he had always thought of wine as having anintensely sweet taste, like that of blackberry jam and an immediateintoxicating effect. Actually, when he came to swallow it, the stuffwas distinctly disappointing. The truth was that after years ofgin-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 muchmore about the Brotherhood than that it exists and that you belong toit. 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 thetelescreen for more than half an hour. You ought not to have come heretogether, and you will have to leave separately. You, comrade’—he bowedhis head to Julia—‘will leave first. We have about twenty minutes atour disposal. You will understand that I must start by asking youcertain 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 facingWinston. He almost ignored Julia, seeming to take it for granted thatWinston could speak for her. For a moment the lids flitted down overhis eyes. He began asking his questions in a low, expressionless voice,as though this were a routine, a sort of catechism, most of whoseanswers 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 theminds of children, to distribute habit-forming drugs, to encourageprostitution, to disseminate venereal diseases — to do anything whichis 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. Fora moment he seemed even to have been deprived of the power of speech.His tongue worked soundlessly, forming the opening syllables first ofone 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 differentperson? We may be obliged to give him a new identity. His face, hismovements, the shape of his hands, the colour of his hair—even hisvoice would be different. And you yourself might have become adifferent 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’sMongolian face. There were no scars that he could see. Julia had turneda shade paler, so that her freckles were showing, but she faced O’Brienboldly. 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 ratherabsent-minded air O’Brien pushed them towards the others, took onehimself, then stood up and began to pace slowly to and fro, as thoughhe could think better standing. They were very good cigarettes, verythick 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 shallswitch 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 eyesflickered over their faces. There was not a trace of friendliness inhis manner. He was memorizing their appearance, but he felt no interestin them, or appeared to feel none. It occurred to Winston that asynthetic 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 anddown, one hand in the pocket of his black overalls, the other holdinghis cigarette.
‘You understand,’ he said, ‘that you will be fighting in the dark. Youwill always be in the dark. You will receive orders and you will obeythem, without knowing why. Later I shall send you a book from which youwill learn the true nature of the society we live in, and the strategyby which we shall destroy it. When you have read the book, you will befull members of the Brotherhood. But between the general aims that weare fighting for and the immedi ate tasks of the moment, you will neverknow anything. I tell you that the Brotherhood exists, but I cannottell you whether it numbers a hundred members, or ten million. Fromyour personal knowledge you will never be able to say that it numberseven as many as a dozen. You will have three or four contacts, who willbe renewed from time to time as they disappear. As this was your firstcontact, it will be preserved. When you receive orders, they will comefrom me. If we find it necessary to communicate with you, it will bethrough Martin. When you are finally caught, you will confess. That isunavoidable. But you will have very little to confess, other than yourown actions. You will not be able to betray more than a handful ofunimportant people. Probably you will not even betray me. By that timeI may be dead, or I shall have become a different person, with adifferent face.’
He continued to move to and fro over the soft carpet. In spite of thebulkiness of his body there was a remarkable grace in his movements. Itcame out even in the gesture with which he thrust a hand into hispocket, or manipulated a cigarette. More even than of strength, he gavean impression of confidence and of an understanding tinged by irony.However much in earnest he might be, he had nothing of thesingle-mindedness that belongs to a fanatic. When he spoke of murder,suicide, venereal disease, amputated limbs, and altered faces, it waswith a faint air of persiflage. ‘This is unavoidable,’ his voice seemedto say; ‘this is what we have got to do, unflinchingly. But this is notwhat we shall be doing when life is worth living again.’ A wave ofadmiration, almost of worship, flowed out from Winston towards O’Brien.For the moment he had forgotten the shadowy figure of Goldstein. Whenyou looked at O’Brien’s powerful shoulders and his blunt-featured face,so ugly and yet so civilized, it was impossible to believe that hecould be defeated. There was no stratagem that he was not equal to, nodanger that he could not foresee. Even Julia seemed to be impressed.She had let her cigarette go out and was listening intently. O’Brienwent on:
‘You will have heard rumours of the existence of the Brotherhood. Nodoubt you have formed your own picture of it. You have imagined,probably, a huge underworld of conspirators, meeting secretly incellars, scribbling messages on walls, recognizing one another bycodewords or by special movements of the hand. Nothing of the kindexists. The members of the Brotherhood have no way of recognizing oneanother, and it is impossible for any one member to be aware of theidentity of more than a few others. Goldstein himself, if he fell intothe hands of the Thought Police, could not give them a complete list ofmembers, or any information that would lead them to a complete list. Nosuch list exists. The Brotherhood cannot be wiped out because it is notan organization in the ordinary sense. Nothing holds it together exceptan idea which is indestructible. You will never have anything tosustain you, except the idea. You will get no comradeship and noencouragement. When finally you are caught, you will get no help. Wenever help our members. At most, when it is absolutely necessary thatsomeone should be silenced, we are occasionally able to smuggle a razorblade into a prisoner’s cell. You will have to get used to livingwithout results and without hope. You will work for a while, you willbe caught, you will confess, and then you will die. Those are the onlyresults that you will ever see. There is no possibility that anyperceptible change will happen within our own lifetime. We are thedead. Our only true life is in the future. We shall take part in it ashandfuls of dust and splinters of bone. But how far away that futuremay be, there is no knowing. It might be a thousand years. At presentnothing is possible except to extend the area of sanity little bylittle. We cannot act collectively. We can only spread our knowledgeoutwards from individual to individual, generation after generation. Inthe 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 faintsuggestion of irony. ‘To the confusion of the Thought Police? To thedeath 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 aflat white tablet which he told her to place on her tongue. It wasimportant, he said, not to go out smelling of wine: the lift attendantswere very observant. As soon as the door had shut behind her heappeared to forget her existence. He took another pace or two up anddown, 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 foryou. It is important to change one’s hiding-place frequently. MeanwhileI shall send you a copy of the book’—evenO’Brien, Winston noticed, seemed to pronounce the words as though theywere 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 inexistence, as you can imagine. The Thought Police hunt them down anddestroy them almost as fast as we can produce them. It makes verylittle difference. The book is indestructible. If the last copy weregone, we could reproduce it almost word for word. Do you carry abrief-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 nearfuture—I cannot give a date—one of the messages among your morning’swork will contain a misprinted word, and you will have to ask for arepeat. On the following day you will go to work without yourbrief-case. At some time during the day, in the street, a man willtouch you on the arm and say “I think you have dropped yourbrief-case.” The one he gives you will contain a copy of Goldstein’sbook. 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 wherethere is no darkness,’ he said, as though he had recognized theallusion. ‘And in the meantime, is there anything that you wish to saybefore you leave? Any message? Any question?.’
Winston thought. There did not seem to be any further question that hewanted to ask: still less did he feel any impulse to utterhigh-sounding generalities. Instead of anything directly connected withO’Brien or the Brotherhood, there came into his mind a sort ofcomposite picture of the dark bedroom where his mother had spent herlast days, and the little room over Mr Charrington’s shop, and theglass 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:

[i][size=-1]‘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.’[/i]

‘You knew the last line!’ said Winston.
‘Yes, I knew the last line. And now, I am afraid, it is time for you togo. 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 crushedthe bones of Winston’s palm. At the door Winston looked back, butO’Brien seemed already to be in process of putting him out of mind. Hewas waiting with his hand on the switch that controlled the telescreen.Beyond him Winston could see the writing-table with its green- shadedlamp 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 behalfof the Party.

[b][size=+2]WINSTON[/b] 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 itstranslucency. He felt that if he held up his hand he would be able tosee the light through it. All the blood and lymph had been drained outof him by an enormous debauch of work, leaving only a frail structureof nerves, bones, and skin. All sensations seemed to be magnified. Hisoveralls fretted his shoulders, the pavement tickled his feet, even theopening 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 elsein the Ministry. Now it was all over, and he had literally nothing todo, no Party work of any description, until tomorrow morning. He couldspend 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 thedirection of Mr Charrington’s shop, keeping one eye open for thepatrols, but irrationally convinced that this afternoon there was nodanger of anyone interfering with him. The heavy brief-case that he wascarrying bumped against his knee at each step, sending a tinglingsensation 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, theshouting, the singing, the banners, the posters, the films, thewaxworks, the rolling of drums and squealing of trumpets, the tramp ofmarching feet, the grinding of the caterpillars of tanks, the roar ofmassed planes, the booming of guns—after six days of this, when thegreat orgasm was quivering to its climax and the general hatred ofEurasia had boiled up into such delirium that if the crowd could havegot their hands on the 2,000 Eurasian war-criminals who were to bepublicly hanged on the last day of the proceedings, they wouldunquestionably have torn them to pieces—at just this moment it had beenannounced that Oceania was not after all at war with Eurasia. Oceaniawas 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 ina demonstration in one of the central London squares at the moment whenit happened. It was night, and the white faces and the scarlet bannerswere luridly floodlit. The square was packed with several thousandpeople, including a block of about a thousand schoolchildren in theuniform of the Spies. On a scarlet-draped platform an orator of theInner Party, a small lean man with disproportionately long arms and alarge bald skull over which a few lank locks straggled, was haranguingthe crowd. A little Rumpelstiltskin figure, contorted with hatred, hegripped the neck of the microphone with one hand while the other,enormous at the end of a bony arm, clawed the air menacingly above hishead. His voice, made metallic by the amplifiers, boomed forth anendless catalogue of atrocities, massacres, deportations, lootings,rapings, torture of prisoners, bombing of civilians, lying propaganda,unjust aggressions, broken treaties. It was almost impossible to listento him without being first convinced and then maddened. At every fewmoments the fury of the crowd boiled over and the voice of the speakerwas drowned by a wild beast-like roaring that rose uncontrollably fromthousands of throats. The most savage yells of all came from theschoolchildren. The speech had been proceeding for perhaps twentyminutes when a messenger hurried on to the platform and a scrap ofpaper was slipped into the speaker’s hand. He unrolled and read itwithout pausing in his speech. Nothing altered in his voice or manner,or in the content of what he was saying, but suddenly the names weredifferent. Without words said, a wave of understanding rippled throughthe crowd. Oceania was at war with Eastasia! The next moment there wasa tremendous commotion. The banners and posters with which the squarewas decorated were all wrong! Quite half of them had the wrong faces onthem. It was sabotage! The agents of Goldstein had been at work! Therewas a riotous interlude while posters were ripped from the walls,banners torn to shreds and trampled underfoot. The Spies performedprodigies of activity in clambering over the rooftops and cutting thestreamers that fluttered from the chimneys. But within two or threeminutes it was all over. The orator, still gripping the neck of themicrophone, his shoulders hunched forward, his free hand clawing at theair, had gone straight on with his speech. One minute more, and theferal roars of rage were again bursting from the crowd. The Hatecontinued exactly as before, except that the target had been changed.
The thing that impressed Winston in looking back was that the speakerhad switched from one line to the other actually in midsentence, notonly without a pause, but without even breaking the syntax. But at themoment he had other things to preoccupy him. It was during the momentof disorder while the posters were being torn down that a man whoseface he did not see had tapped him on the shoulder and said, ‘Excuseme, I think you’ve dropped your brief-case.’ He took the brief-caseabstractedly, without speaking. He knew that it would be days before hehad an opportunity to look inside it. The instant that thedemonstration was over he went straight to the Ministry of Truth,though the time was now nearly twenty-three hours. The entire staff ofthe Ministry had done likewise. The orders already issuing from thetelescreen, recalling them to their posts, were hardly necessary.
Oceania was at war with Eastasia: Oceania had always been at war withEastasia. A large part of the political literature of five years wasnow completely obsolete. Reports and records of all kinds, newspapers,books, pamphlets, films, sound-tracks, photographs—all had to berectified at lightning speed. Although no directive was ever issued, itwas known that the chiefs of the Department intended that within oneweek no reference to the war with Eurasia, or the alliance withEastasia, should remain in existence anywhere. The work wasoverwhelming, all the more so because the processes that it involvedcould not be called by their true names. Everyone in the RecordsDepartment worked eighteen hours in the twenty-four, with twothree-hour snatches of sleep. Mattresses were brought up from thecellars and pitched all over the corridors: meals consisted ofsandwiches and Victory Coffee wheeled round on trolleys by attendantsfrom the canteen. Each time that Winston broke off for one of hisspells of sleep he tried to leave his desk clear of work, and each timethat he crawled back sticky-eyed and aching, it was to find thatanother shower of paper cylinders had covered the desk like asnowdrift, halfburying the speakwrite and overflowing on to the floor,so that the first job was always to stack them into a neat enough pileto give him room to work. What was worst of all was that the work wasby no means purely mechanical. Often it was enough merely to substituteone name for another, but any detailed report of events demanded careand imagination. Even the geographical knowledge that one needed intransferring the war from one part of the world to another wasconsiderable.
By the third day his eyes ached unbearably and his spectacles neededwiping every few minutes. It was like struggling with some crushingphysical task, something which one had the right to refuse and whichone was nevertheless neurotically anxious to accomplish. In so far ashe had time to remember it, he was not troubled by the fact that everyword he murmured into the speakwrite, every stroke of his ink-pencil,was a deliberate lie. He was as anxious as anyone else in theDepartment that the forgery should be perfect. On the morning of thesixth day the dribble of cylinders slowed down. For as much as half anhour nothing came out of the tube; then one more cylinder, thennothing. Everywhere at about the same time the work was easing off. Adeep and as it were secret sigh went through the Department. A mightydeed, which could never be mentioned, had been achieved. It was nowimpossible for any human being to prove by documentary evidence thatthe war with Eurasia had ever happened. At twelve hundred it wasunexpectedly announced that all workers in the Ministry were free tilltomorrow morning. Winston, still carrying the brief-case containing thebook, which had remained between his feet while he worked and under hisbody while he slept, went home, shaved himself, and almost fell asleepin his bath, although the water was barely more than tepid.
With a sort of voluptuous creaking in his joints he climbed the stairabove 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 ofwater for coffee. Julia would arrive presently: meanwhile there was thebook. He sat down in the sluttish armchair and undid the straps of thebrief-case.
A heavy black volume, amateurishly bound, with no name or title on thecover. The print also looked slightly irregular. The pages were worn atthe edges, and fell apart, easily, as though the book had passedthrough many hands. The inscription on the title-page ran:

Winston began reading:


Throughout recorded time, and probably since the end of the NeolithicAge, there have been three kinds of people in the world, the High, theMiddle, and the Low. They have been subdivided in many ways, they haveborne countless different names, and their relative numbers, as well astheir attitude towards one another, have varied from age to age: butthe essential structure of society has never altered. Even afterenormous upheavals and seemingly irrevocable changes, the same patternhas always reasserted itself, just as a gyroscope will always return toequilibrium, 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 wasreading, in comfort and safety. He was alone: no telescreen, no ear atthe keyhole, no nervous impulse to glance over his shoulder or coverthe page with his hand. The sweet summer air played against his cheek.From somewhere far away there floated the faint shouts of children: inthe room itself there was no sound except the insect voice of theclock. He settled deeper into the arm-chair and put his feet up on thefender. It was bliss, it was etemity. Suddenly, as one sometimes doeswith a book of which one knows that one will ultimately read andre-read every word, he opened it at a different place and found himselfat Chapter III. He went on reading:


The splitting up of the world into three great super-states was anevent which could be and indeed was foreseen before the middle of thetwentieth century. With the absorption of Europe by Russia and of theBritish 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 ofconfused fighting. The frontiers between the three super-states are insome places arbitrary, and in others they fluctuate according to thefortunes of war, but in general they follow geographical lines. Eurasiacomprises the whole of the northern part of the European and Asiaticland-mass, from Portugal to the Bering Strait. Oceania comprises theAmericas, the Atlantic islands including the British Isles,Australasia, and the southern portion of Africa. Eastasia, smaller thanthe others and with a less definite western frontier, comprises Chinaand the countries to the south of it, the Japanese islands and a largebut fluctuating portion of Manchuria, Mongolia, and Tibet. In one combination or another, these three super-states are permanentlyat war, and have been so for the past twenty-five years. War, however,is no longer the desperate, annihilating struggle that it was in theearly decades of the twentieth centary. It is a warfare of limited aimsbetween combatants who are unable to destroy one another, have nomaterial cause for fighting and are not divided by any genuineideological difference. This is not to say that either the conduct ofwar, or the prevailing attitude towards it, has become lessbloodthirsty or more chivalrous. On the contrary, war hysteria iscontinuous and universal in all countries, and such acts as raping,looting, the slaughter of children, the reduction of whole populationsto slavery, and reprisals against prisoners which extend even toboiling and burying alive, are looked upon as normal, and, when theyare committed by one’s own side and not by the enemy, meritorious. Butin a physical sense war involves very small numbers of people, mostlyhighly-trained specialists, and causes comparatively few casualties.The fighting, when there is any, takes place on the vague frontierswhose whereabouts the average man can only guess at, or round theFloating Fortresses which guard strategic spots on the sea lanes. Inthe centres of civilization war means no more than a continuousshortage of consumption goods, and the occasional crash of a rocketbomb which may cause a few scores of deaths. War has in fact changedits character. More exactly, the reasons for which war is waged havechanged in their order of importance. Motives which were alreadypresent to some small extent in the great wars of the early twentiethcentuary have now become dominant and are consciously recognized andacted upon.
To understand the nature of the present war—for in spite of theregrouping which occurs every few years, it is always the same war—onemust realize in the first place that it is impossible for it to bedecisive. None of the three super-states could be definitivelyconquered even by the other two in combination. They are too evenlymatched, and their natural defences are too formidable. Eurasia isprotected by its vast land spaces. Oceania by the width of the Atlanticand the Pacific, Eastasia by the fecundity and indus triousness of itsinhabitants. Secondly, there is no longer, in a material sense,anything to fight about. With the establishment of self-containedeconomies, in which production and consumption are geared to oneanother, the scramble for markets which was a main cause of previouswars has come to an end, while the competition for raw materials is nolonger a matter of life and death. In any case each of the threesuper-states is so vast that it can obtain almost all the materialsthat it needs within its own boundaries. In so far as the war has adirect economic purpose, it is a war for labour power. Between thefrontiers of the super- states, and not permanently in the possessionof any of them, there lies a rough quadrilateral with its corners atTangier, Brazzaville, Darwin, and Hong Kong, containing within it abouta fifth of the population of the earth. It is for the possession ofthese thickly-populated regions, and of the northern ice-cap, that thethree powers are constantly struggling. In practice no one power evercontrols the whole of the disputed area. Portions of it are constantlychanging hands, and it is the chance of seizing this or that fragmentby a sudden stroke of treachery that dictates the endless changes ofalignment.
All of the disputed territories contain valuable minerals, and some ofthem yield important vegetable products such as rubber which in colderclimates it is necessary to synthesize by comparatively expensivemethods. But above all they contain a bottomless reserve of cheaplabour. Whichever power controls equatorial Africa, or the countries ofthe Middle East, or Southern India, or the Indonesian Archipelago,disposes also of the bodies of scores or hundreds of millions ofill-paid and hard-working coolies. The inhabitants of these areas,reduced more or less openly to the status of slaves, pass continuallyfrom conqueror to conqueror, and are expended like so much coal or oilin the race to turn out more armaments, to capture more territory, tocontrol more labour power, to turn out more armaments, to capture moreterritory, and so on indefinitely. It should be noted that the fightingnever really moves beyond the edges of the disputed areas. Thefrontiers of Eurasia flow back and forth between the basin of the Congoand the northern shore of the Mediterranean; the islands of the IndianOcean and the Pacific are constantly being captured and recaptured byOceania or by Eastasia; in Mongolia the dividing line between Eurasiaand Eastasia is never stable; round the Pole all three powers lay claimto enormous territories which in fact are largely unihabited andunexplored: but the balance of power always remains roughly even, andthe territory which forms the heartland of each super-state alwaysremains inviolate. Moreover, the labour of the exploited peoples roundthe Equator is not really necessary to the world’s economy. They addnothing to the wealth of the world, since whatever they produce is usedfor purposes of war, and the object of waging a war is always to be ina better position in which to wage another war. By their labour theslave populations allow the tempo of continuous warfare to be speededup. But if they did not exist, the structure of world society, and theprocess by which it maintains itself, would not be essentiallydifferent.
The primary aim of modern warfare (in accordance with the principles of doublethink,this aim is simultaneously recognized and not recognized by thedirecting brains of the Inner Party) is to use up the products of themachine without raising the general standard of living. Ever since theend of the nineteenth century, the problem of what to do with thesurplus of consumption goods has been latent in industrial society. Atpresent, when few human beings even have enough to eat, this problem isobviously not urgent, and it might not have become so, even if noartificial processes of destruction had been at work. The world oftoday is a bare, hungry, dilapidated place compared with the world thatexisted before 1914, and still more so if compared with the imaginaryfuture to which the people of that period looked forward. In the earlytwentieth century, the vision of a future society unbelievably rich,leisured, orderly, and efficient—a glittering antiseptic world of glassand steel and snow-white concrete—was part of the consciousness ofnearly every literate person. Science and technology were developing ata prodigious speed, and it seemed natural to assume that they would goon developing. This failed to happen, partly because of theimpoverishment caused by a long series of wars and revolutions, partlybecause scientific and technical progress depended on the empiricalhabit of thought, which could not survive in a strictly regimentedsociety. As a whole the world is more primitive today than it was fiftyyears ago. Certain backward areas have advanced, and various devices,always in some way connected with warfare and police espionage, havebeen developed, but experiment and invention have largely stopped, andthe ravages of the atomic war of the nineteen- fifties have never beenfully repaired. Nevertheless the dangers inherent in the machine arestill there. From the moment when the machine first made its appearanceit 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 fewgenerations. And in fact, without being used for any such purpose, butby a sort of automatic process—by producing wealth which it wassometimes impossible not to distribute—the machine did raise the livingstandards of the average humand being very greatly over a period ofabout fifty years at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of thetwentieth centuries.
But it was also clear that an all-round increase in wealth threatenedthe destruction—indeed, in some sense was the destruction—of ahierarchical 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 andperhaps the most important form of inequality would already havedisappeared. If it once became general, wealth would confer nodistinction. 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 powerremained in the hands of a small privileged caste. But in practice sucha society could not long remain stable. For if leisure and securitywere enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who arenormally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn tothink for themselves; and when once they had done this, they wouldsooner or later realize that the privileged minority had no function,and they would sweep it away. In the long run, a hierarchical societywas only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance. To return to theagricultural past, as some thinkers about the beginning of thetwentieth century dreamed of doing, was not a practicable solution. Itconflicted with the tendency towards mechanization which had becomequasi-instinctive throughout almost the whole world, and moreover, anycountry which remained industrially backward was helpless in a militarysense and was bound to be dominated, directly or indirectly, by itsmore advanced rivals.
Nor was it a satisfactory solution to keep the masses in poverty byrestricting the output of goods. This happened to a great extent duringthe final phase of capitalism, roughly between 1920 and 1940. Theeconomy of many countries was allowed to stagnate, land went out ofcultivation, capital equipment was not added to, great blocks of thepopulation were prevented from working and kept half alive by Statecharity. But this, too, entailed military weakness, and since theprivations it inflicted were obviously unnecessary, it made oppositioninevitable. The problem was how to keep the wheels of industry turningwithout increasing the real wealth of the world. Goods must beproduced, but they must not be distributed. And in practice the onlyway of achieving this was by continuous warfare.
The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of humanlives, but of the products of human labour. War is a way of shatteringto pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depthsof the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the massestoo comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent. Even whenweapons of war are not actually destroyed, their manufacture is still aconvenient way of expending labour power without producing anythingthat can be consumed. A Floating Fortress, for example, has locked upin it the labour that would build several hundred cargo-ships.Ultimately it is scrapped as obsolete, never having brought anymaterial benefit to anybody, and with further enormous labours anotherFloating Fortress is built. In principle the war effort is always soplanned as to eat up any surplus that might exist after meeting thebare needs of the population. In practice the needs of the populationare always underestimated, with the result that there is a chronicshortage of half the necessities of life; but this is looked on as anadvantage. It is deliberate policy to keep even the favoured groupssomewhere near the brink of hardship, because a general state ofscarcity increases the importance of small privileges and thusmagnifies the distinction between one group and another. By thestandards of the early twentieth century, even a member of the InnerParty lives an austere, laborious kind of life. Nevertheless, the fewluxuries that he does enjoy his large, well-appointed flat, the bettertexture of his clothes, the better quality of his food and drink andtobacco, his two or three servants, his private motor-car orhelicopter—set him in a different world from a member of the OuterParty, and the members of the Outer Party have a similar advantage incomparison with the submerged masses whom we call ‘the proles’. Thesocial atmosphere is that of a besieged city, where the possession of alump of horseflesh makes the difference between wealth and poverty. Andat the same time the consciousness of being at war, and therefore indanger, makes the handing-over of all power to a small caste seem thenatural, unavoidable condition of survival.
War, it will be seen, accomplishes the necessary destruction, butaccomplishes it in a psychologically acceptable way. In principle itwould be quite simple to waste the surplus labour of the world bybuilding temples and pyramids, by digging holes and filling them upagain, or even by producing vast quantities of goods and then settingfire to them. But this would provide only the economic and not theemotional basis for a hierarchical society. What is concerned here isnot the morale of masses, whose attitude is unimportant so long as theyare kept steadily at work, but the morale of the Party itself. Even thehumblest Party member is expected to be competent, industrious, andeven intelligent within narrow limits, but it is also necessary that heshould be a credulous and ignorant fanatic whose prevailing moods arefear, hatred, adulation, and orgiastic triumph. In other words it isnecessary that he should have the mentality appropriate to a state ofwar. It does not matter whether the war is actually happening, and,since no decisive victory is possible, it does not matter whether thewar is going well or badly. All that is needed is that a state of warshould exist. The splitting of the intelligence which the Partyrequires of its members, and which is more easily achieved in anatmosphere of war, is now almost universal, but the higher up the ranksone goes, the more marked it becomes. It is precisely in the InnerParty that war hysteria and hatred of the enemy are strongest. In hiscapacity as an administrator, it is often necessary for a member of theInner 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 eithernot happening or is being waged for purposes quite other than thedeclared ones: but such knowledge is easily neutralized by thetechnique of doublethink.Meanwhile no Inner Party member wavers for an instant in his mysticalbelief 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 anarticle of faith. It is to be achieved either by gradually acquiringmore and more territory and so building up an overwhelmingpreponderance of power, or by the discovery of some new andunanswerable weapon. The search for new weapons continues unceasingly,and is one of the very few remaining activities in which the inventiveor speculative type of mind can find any outlet. In Oceania at thepresent day, Science, in the old sense, has almost ceased to exist. InNewspeak there is no word for ‘Science’. The empirical method ofthought, on which all the scientific achievements of the past werefounded, is opposed to the most fundamental principles of Ingsoc. Andeven technological progress only happens when its products can in someway be used for the diminution of human liberty. In all the useful artsthe world is either standing still or going backwards. The fields arecultivated with horse-ploughs while books are written by machinery. Butin matters of vital importance—meaning, in effect, war and policeespionage—the empirical approach is still encouraged, or at leasttolerated. The two aims of the Party are to conquer the whole surfaceof the earth and to extinguish once and for all the possibility ofindependent thought. There are therefore two great problems which theParty is concerned to solve. One is how to discover, against his will,what another human being is thinking, and the other is how to killseveral hundred million people in a few seconds without giving warningbeforehand. In so far as scientific research still continues, this isits subject matter. The scientist of today is either a mixture ofpsychologist and inquisitor, studying with real ordinary minuteness themeaning of facial expressions, gestures, and tones of voice, andtesting the truth-producing effects of drugs, shock therapy, hypnosis,and physical torture; or he is chemist, physicist, or biologistconcerned only with such branches of his special subject as arerelevant to the taking of life. In the vast laboratories of theMinistry of Peace, and in the experimental stations hidden in theBrazilian forests, or in the Australian desert, or on lost islands ofthe Antarctic, the teams of experts are indefatigably at work. Some areconcerned simply with planning the logistics of future wars; othersdevise larger and larger rocket bombs, more and more powerfulexplosives, and more and more impenetrable armour- plating; otherssearch for new and deadlier gases, or for soluble poisons capable ofbeing produced in such quantities as to destroy the vegetation of wholecontinents, or for breeds of disease germs immunized against allpossible antibodies; others strive to produce a vehicle that shall boreits way under the soil like a submarine under the water, or anaeroplane as independent of its base as a sailing-ship; others exploreeven remoter possibilities such as focusing the sun’s rays throughlenses suspended thousands of kilometres away in space, or producingartificial earthquakes and tidal waves by tapping the heat at theearth’s centre.
But none of these projects ever comes anywhere near realization, andnone of the three super-states ever gains a significant lead on theothers. What is more remarkable is that all three powers alreadypossess, in the atomic bomb, a weapon far more powerful than any thattheir present researches are likely to discover. Although the Party,according to its habit, claims the invention for itself, atomic bombsfirst appeared as early as the nineteen- forties, and were first usedon a large scale about ten years later. At that time some hundreds ofbombs were dropped on industrial centres, chiefly in European Russia,Western Europe, and North America. The effect was to convince theruling groups of all countries that a few more atomic bombs would meanthe end of organized society, and hence of their own power. Thereafter,although no formal agreement was ever made or hinted at, no more bombswere dropped. All three powers merely continue to produce atomic bombsand store them up against the decisive opportunity which they allbelieve will come sooner or later. And meanwhile the art of war hasremained almost stationary for thirty or forty years. Helicopters aremore used than they were formerly, bombing planes have been largelysuperseded by self-propelled projectiles, and the fragile movablebattleship has given way to the almost unsinkable Floating Fortress;but otherwise there has been little development. The tank, thesubmarine, the torpedo, the machine gun, even the rifle and the handgrenade are still in use. And in spite of the endless slaughtersreported in the Press and on the telescreens, the desperate battles ofearlier wars, in which hundreds of thousands or even millions of menwere often killed in a few weeks, have never been repeated.
None of the three super-states ever attempts any manoeuvre whichinvolves the risk of serious defeat. When any large operation isundertaken, it is usually a surprise attack against an ally. Thestrategy that all three powers are following, or pretend to themselvesthat they are following, is the same. The plan is, by a combination offighting, bargaining, and well-timed strokes of treachery, to acquire aring of bases completely encircling one or other of the rival states,and then to sign a pact of friendship with that rival and remain onpeaceful terms for so many years as to lull suspicion to sleep. Duringthis time rockets loaded with atomic bombs can be assembled at all thestrategic spots; finally they will all be fired simultaneously, witheffects so devastating as to make retaliation impossible. It will thenbe time to sign a pact of friendship with the remaining world-power, inpreparation for another attack. This scheme, it is hardly necessary tosay, is a mere daydream, impossible of realization. Moreover, nofighting ever occurs except in the disputed areas round the Equator andthe Pole: no invasion of enemy territory is ever undertaken. Thisexplains the fact that in some places the frontiers between thesuperstates are arbitrary. Eurasia, for example, could easily conquerthe British Isles, which are geographically part of Europe, or on theother hand it would be possible for Oceania to push its frontiers tothe 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 asFrance and Germany, it would be necessary either to exterminate theinhabitants, a task of great physical difficulty, or to assimilate apopulation of about a hundred million people, who, so far as technicaldevelopment goes, are roughly on the Oceanic level. The problem is thesame for all three super-states. It is absolutely necessary to theirstructure that there should be no contact with foreigners, except, to alimited extent, with war prisoners and coloured slaves. Even theofficial ally of the moment is always regarded with the darkestsuspicion. War prisoners apart, the average citizen of Oceania neversets eyes on a citizen of either Eurasia or Eastasia, and he isforbidden the knowledge of foreign languages. If he were allowedcontact with foreigners he would discover that they are creaturessimilar to himself and that most of what he has been told about them islies. The sealed world in which he lives would be broken, and the fear,hatred, and self-righteousness on which his morale depends mightevaporate. It is therefore realized on all sides that however oftenPersia, or Egypt, or Java, or Ceylon may change hands, the mainfrontiers must never be crossed by anything except bombs.
Under this lies a fact never mentioned aloud, but tacitly understoodand acted upon: namely, that the conditions of life in all threesuper-states are very much the same. In Oceania the prevailingphilosophy is called Ingsoc, in Eurasia it is called Neo-Bolshevism,and in Eastasia it is called by a Chinese name usually translated asDeath- Worship, but perhaps better rendered as Obliteration of theSelf. The citizen of Oceania is not allowed to know anything of thetenets of the other two philosophies, but he is taught to execrate themas barbarous outrages upon morality and common sense. Actually thethree philosophies are barely distinguishable, and the social systemswhich they support are not distinguishable at all. Everywhere there isthe same pyramidal structure, the same worship of semi-divine leader,the same economy existing by and for continuous warfare. It followsthat the three super-states not only cannot conquer one another, butwould gain no advantage by doing so. On the contrary, so long as theyremain in conflict they prop one another up, like three sheaves ofcorn. And, as usual, the ruling groups of all three powers aresimultaneously aware and unaware of what they are doing. Their livesare dedicated to world conquest, but they also know that it isnecessary that the war should continue everlastingly and withoutvictory. Meanwhile the fact that there is no danger of conquest makespossible the denial of reality which is the special feature of Ingsocand its rival systems of thought. Here it is necessary to repeat whathas been said earlier, that by becoming continuous war hasfundamentally changed its character.
In past ages, a war, almost by definition, was something that sooner orlater came to an end, usually in unmistakable victory or defeat. In thepast, also, war was one of the main instruments by which humansocieties were kept in touch with physical reality. All rulers in allages have tried to impose a false view of the world upon theirfollowers, but they could not afford to encourage any illusion thattended to impair military efficiency. So long as defeat meant the lossof independence, or some other result generally held to be undesirable,the precautions against defeat had to be serious. Physical facts couldnot be ignored. In philosophy, or religion, or ethics, or politics, twoand two might make five, but when one was designing a gun or anaeroplane they had to make four. Inefficient nations were alwaysconquered sooner or later, and the struggle for efficiency was inimicalto illusions. Moreover, to be efficient it was necessary to be able tolearn from the past, which meant having a fairly accurate idea of whathad happened in the past. Newspapers and history books were, of course,always coloured and biased, but falsification of the kind that ispractised today would have been impossible. War was a sure safeguard ofsanity, and so far as the ruling classes were concerned it was probablythe 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 bedangerous. When war is continuous there is no such thing as militarynecessity. Technical progress can cease and the most palpable facts canbe denied or disregarded. As we have seen, researches that could becalled scientific are still carried out for the purposes of war, butthey are essentially a kind of daydreaming, and their failure to showresults is not important. Efficiency, even military efficiency, is nolonger needed. Nothing is efficient in Oceania except the ThoughtPolice. Since each of the three super-states is unconquerable, each isin effect a separate universe within which almost any perversion ofthought can be safely practised. Reality only exerts its pressurethrough the needs of everyday life—the need to eat and drink, to getshelter and clothing, to avoid swallowing poison or stepping out oftop-storey windows, and the like. Between life and death, and betweenphysical pleasure and physical pain, there is still a distinction, butthat is all. Cut off from contact with the outer world, and with thepast, the citizen of Oceania is like a man in interstellar space, whohas no way of knowing which direction is up and which is down. Therulers of such a state are absolute, as the Pharaohs or the Caesarscould not be. They are obliged to prevent their followers from starvingto death in numbers large enough to be inconvenient, and they areobliged to remain at the same low level of military technique as theirrivals; but once that minimum is achieved, they can twist reality intowhatever 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 ruminantanimals whose horns are set at such an angle that they are incapable ofhurting one another. But though it is unreal it is not meaningless. Iteats up the surplus of consumable goods, and it helps to preserve thespecial mental atmosphere that a hierarchical society needs. War, itwill be seen, is now a purely internal affair. In the past, the rulinggroups of all countries, although they might recognize their commoninterest and therefore limit the destructiveness of war, did fightagainst one another, and the victor always plundered the vanquished. Inour own day they are not fighting against one another at all. The waris waged by each ruling group against its own subjects, and the objectof the war is not to make or prevent conquests of territory, but tokeep the structure of society intact. The very word ‘war’, therefore,has become misleading. It would probably be accurate to say that bybecoming continuous war has ceased to exist. The peculiar pressure thatit exerted on human beings between the Neolithic Age and the earlytwentieth century has disappeared and been replaced by something quitedifferent. The effect would be much the same if the three super-states,instead of fighting one another, should agree to live in perpetualpeace, each inviolate within its own boundaries. For in that case eachwould still be a self-contained universe, freed for ever from thesobering influence of external danger. A peace that was truly permanentwould be the same as a permanent war. This—although the vast majorityof Party members understand it only in a shallower sense—is the innermeaning of the Party slogan: War is Peace.
Winston stopped reading for a moment. Somewhere in remote distance arocket bomb thundered. The blissful feeling of being alone with theforbidden book, in a room with no telescreen, had not worn off.Solitude and safety were physical sensations, mixed up somehow with thetiredness of his body, the softness of the chair, the touch of thefaint breeze from the window that played upon his cheek. The bookfascinated him, or more exactly it reassured him. In a sense it toldhim nothing that was new, but that was part of the attraction. It saidwhat he would have said, if it had been possible for him to set hisscattered thoughts in order. It was the product of a mind similar tohis own, but enormously more powerful, more systematic, lessfear-ridden. The best books, he perceived, are those that tell you whatyou know already. He had just turned back to Chapter I when he heardJulia’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 hisarms. 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 almostimmediately knelt down beside the oilstove to make the coffee.
They did not return to the subject until they had been in bed for halfan hour. The evening was just cool enough to make it worth while topull up the counterpane. From below came the familiar sound of singingand the scrape of boots on the flagstones. The brawny red-armed womanwhom Winston had seen there on his first visit was almost a fixture inthe yard. There seemed to be no hour of daylight when she was notmarching to and fro between the washtub and the line, alternatelygagging herself with clothes pegs and breaking forth into lusty song.Julia had settled down on her side and seemed to be already on thepoint of falling asleep. He reached out for the book, which was lyingon 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 fourhours ahead of them. He propped the book against his knees and beganreading:


Throughout recorded time, and probably since the end of the NeolithicAge, there have been three kinds of people in the world, the High, theMiddle, and the Low. They have been subdivided in many ways, they haveborne countless different names, and their relative numbers, as well astheir attitude towards one another, have varied from age to age: butthe essential structure of society has never altered. Even afterenormous upheavals and seemingly irrevocable changes, the same patternhas always reasserted itself, just as a gyroscope will always return toequilibnum, 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 ofthe High is to remain where they are. The aim of the Middle is tochange places with the High. The aim of the Low, when they have anaim—for it is an abiding characteristic of the Low that they are toomuch crushed by drudgery to be more than intermittently conscious ofanything outside their daily lives—is to abolish all distinctions andcreate a society in which all men shall be equal. Thus throughouthistory a struggle which is the same in its main outlines recurs overand 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 eithertheir belief in themselves or their capacity to govern efficiently, orboth. They are then overthrown by the Middle, who enlist the Low ontheir side by pretending to them that they are fighting for liberty andjustice. As soon as they have reached their objective, the Middlethrust the Low back into their old position of servitude, andthemselves become the High. Presently a new Middle group splits offfrom one of the other groups, or from both of them, and the strugglebegins over again. Of the three groups, only the Low are never eventemporarily successful in achieving their aims. It would be anexaggeration to say that throughout history there has been no progressof a material kind. Even today, in a period of decline, the averagehuman being is physically better off than he was a few centuries ago.But no advance in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform orrevolution has ever brought human equality a millimetre nearer. Fromthe point of view of the Low, no historic change has ever meant muchmore than a change in the name of their masters. By the late nineteenth century the recurrence of this pattern hadbecome obvious to many observers. There then rose schools of thinkerswho interpreted history as a cyclical process and claimed to show thatinequality was the unalterable law of human life. This doctrine, ofcourse, had always had its adherents, but in the manner in which it wasnow put forward there was a significant change. In the past the needfor a hierarchical form of society had been the doctrine specificallyof the High. It had been preached by kings and aristocrats and by thepriests, lawyers, and the like who were parasitical upon them, and ithad generally been softened by promises of compensation in an imaginaryworld beyond the grave. The Middle, so long as it was struggling forpower, had always made use of such terms as freedom, justice, andfraternity. Now, however, the concept of human brotherhood began to beassailed by people who were not yet in positions of command, but merelyhoped to be so before long. In the past the Middle had made revolutionsunder the banner of equality, and then had estab lished a fresh tyrannyas soon as the old one was overthrown. The new Middle groups in effectproclaimed their tyranny beforehand. Socialism, a theory which appearedin the early nineteenth century and was the last link in a chain ofthought stretching back to the slave rebellions of antiquity, was stilldeeply infected by the Utopianism of past ages. But in each variant ofSocialism that appeared from about 1900 onwards the aim of establishingliberty and equality was more and more openly abandoned. The newmovements which appeared in the middle years of the century, Ingsoc inOceania, Neo-Bolshevism in Eurasia, Death-Worship, as it is commonlycalled, in Eastasia, had the conscious aim of perpetuating unfreedom and
equality.These new movements, of course, grew out of the old ones and tended tokeep their names and pay lip-service to their ideology. But the purposeof all of them was to arrest progress and freeze history at a chosenmoment. The familiar pendulum swing was to happen once more, and thenstop. As usual, the High were to be turned out by the Middle, who wouldthen become the High; but this time, by conscious strategy, the Highwould be able to maintain their position permanently. The new doctrines arose partly because of the accumulation ofhistorical knowledge, and the growth of the historical sense, which hadhardly existed before the nineteenth century. The cyclical movement ofhistory was now intelligible, or appeared to be so; and if it wasintelligible, then it was alterable. But the principal, underlyingcause was that, as early as the beginning of the twentieth century,human equality had become technically possible. It was still true thatmen were not equal in their native talents and that functions had to bespecialized in ways that favoured some individuals against others; butthere was no longer any real need for class distinctions or for largedifferences of wealth. In earlier ages, class distinctions had been notonly inevitable but desirable. Inequality was the price ofcivilization. With the development of machine production, however, thecase was altered. Even if it was still necessary for human beings to dodifferent kinds of work, it was no longer necessary for them to live atdifferent social or economic levels. Therefore, from the point of viewof the new groups who were on the point of seizing power, humanequality was no longer an ideal to be striven after, but a danger to beaverted. In more primitive ages, when a just and peaceful society wasin fact not possible, it had been fairly easy to believe it. The ideaof an earthly paradise in which men should live together in a state ofbrotherhood, without laws and without brute labour, had haunted thehuman imagination for thousands of years. And this vision had had acertain hold even on the groups who actually profited by eachhistorical change. The heirs of the French, English, and Americanrevolutions had partly believed in their own phrases about the rightsof man, freedom of speech, equality before the law, and the like, andhave even allowed their conduct to be influenced by them to someextent. But by the fourth decade of the twentieth century all the maincurrents of political thought were authoritarian. The earthly paradisehad been discredited at exactly the moment when it became realizable.Every new political theory, by whatever name it called itself, led backto hierarchy and regimentation. And in the general hardening of outlookthat set in round about 1930, practices which had been long abandoned,in some cases for hundreds of years—imprisonment without trial, the useof war prisoners as slaves, public executions, torture to extractconfessions, the use of hostages, and the deportation of wholepopulations-not only became common again, but were tolerated and evendefended by people who considered themselves enlightened andprogressive.
It was only after a decade of national wars, civil wars, revolutions,and counter-revolutions in all parts of the world that Ingsoc and itsrivals emerged as fully worked-out political theories. But they hadbeen foreshadowed by the various systems, generally calledtotalitarian, which had appeared earlier in the century, and the mainoutlines of the world which would emerge from the prevailing chaos hadlong been obvious. What kind of people would control this world hadbeen equally obvious. The new aristocracy was made up for the most partof bureaucrats, scientists, technicians, trade-union organizers,publicity experts, sociologists, teachers, journalists, andprofessional politicians. These people, whose origins lay in thesalaried middle class and the upper grades of the working class, hadbeen shaped and brought together by the barren world of monopolyindustry and centralized government. As compared with their oppositenumbers in past ages, they were less avaricious, less tempted byluxury, hungrier for pure power, and, above all, more conscious of whatthey were doing and more intent on crushing opposition. This lastdifference was cardinal. By comparison with that existing today, allthe tyrannies of the past were half-hearted and inefficient. The rulinggroups were always infected to some extent by liberal ideas, and werecontent to leave loose ends everywhere, to regard only the overt actand to be uninterested in what their subjects were thinking. Even theCatholic Church of the Middle Ages was tolerant by modern standards.Part of the reason for this was that in the past no government had thepower to keep its citizens under constant surveillance. The inventionof print, however, made it easier to manipulate public opinion, and thefilm and the radio carried the process further. With the development oftelevision, and the technical advance which made it possible to receiveand transmit simultaneously on the same instrument, private life cameto an end. Every citizen, or at least every citizen important enough tobe worth watching, could be kept for twentyfour hours a day under theeyes of the police and in the sound of official propaganda, with allother channels of communication closed. The possibility of enforcingnot only complete obedience to the will of the State, but completeuniformity of opinion on all subjects, now existed for the first time.
After the revolutionary period of the fifties and sixties, societyregrouped itself, as always, into High, Middle, and Low. But the newHigh group, unlike all its forerunners, did not act upon instinct butknew what was needed to safeguard its position. It had long beenrealized that the only secure basis for oligarchy is collectivism.Wealth and privilege are most easily defended when they are possessedjointly. The so-called ‘abolition of private property’ which took placein the middle years of the century meant, in effect, the concentrationof 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 pettypersonal belongings. Collectively, the Party owns everything inOceania, because it controls everything, and disposes of the productsas it thinks fit. In the years following the Revolution it was able tostep into this commanding position almost unopposed, because the wholeprocess was represented as an act of collectivization. It had alwaysbeen assumed that if the capitalist class were expropriated, Socialismmust follow: and unquestionably the capitalists had been expropriated.Factories, mines, land, houses, transport—everything had been takenaway from them: and since these things were no longer private property,it followed that they must be public property. Ingsoc, which grew outof the earlier Socialist movement and inherited its phraseology, has infact carried out the main item in the Socialist programme; with theresult, foreseen and intended beforehand, that economic inequality hasbeen made permanent.
But the problems of perpetuating a hierarchical society go deeper thanthis. There are only four ways in which a ruling group can fall frompower. Either it is conquered from without, or it governs soinefficiently that the masses are stirred to revolt, or it allows astrong and discontented Middle group to come into being, or it losesits own self-confidence and willingness to govern. These causes do notoperate singly, and as a rule all four of them are present in somedegree. A ruling class which could guard against all of them wouldremain in power permanently. Ultimately the determining factor is themental attitude of the ruling class itself.
After the middle of the present century, the first danger had inreality disappeared. Each of the three powers which now divide theworld is in fact unconquerable, and could only become conquerablethrough slow demographic changes which a government with wide powerscan easily avert. The second danger, also, is only a theoretical one.The masses never revolt of their own accord, and they never revoltmerely because they are oppressed. Indeed, so long as they are notpermitted to have standards of comparison, they never even become awarethat they are oppressed. The recurrent economic crises of past timeswere totally unnecessary and are not now permitted to happen, but otherand equally large dislocations can and do happen without havingpolitical results, because there is no way in which discontent canbecome articulate. As fcr the problem of overproduction, which has beenlatent in our society since the development of machine technique, it issolved by the device of continuous warfare (see Chapter III), which isalso useful in keying up public morale to the necessary pitch. From thepoint of view of our present rulers, therefore, the only genuinedangers are the splitting-off of a new group of able, underemployed,power-hungry people, and the growth of liberalism and scepticism intheir own ranks. The problem, that is to say, is educational. It is aproblem of continuously moulding the consciousness both of thedirecting group and of the larger executive group that lies immediatelybelow it. The consciousness of the masses needs only to be influencedin 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 pyramidcomes Big Brother. Big Brother is infallible and all-powerful. Everysuccess, every achievement, every victory, every scientific discovery,all knowledge, all wisdom, all happiness, all virtue, are held to issuedirectly from his leadership and inspiration. Nobody has ever seen BigBrother. He is a face on the hoardings, a voice on the telescreen. Wemay be reasonably sure that he will never die, and there is alreadyconsiderable uncertainty as to when he was born. Big Brother is theguise in which the Party chooses to exhibit itself to the world. Hisfunction is to act as a focusing point for love, fear, and reverence,emotions which are more easily felt towards an individual than towardsan organization. Below Big Brother comes the Inner Party. its numberslimited to six millions, or something less than 2 per cent of thepopulation of Oceania. Below the Inner Party comes the Outer Party,which, if the Inner Party is described as the brain of the State, maybe justly likened to the hands. Below that come the dumb masses whom wehabitually refer to as ‘the proles’, numbering perhaps 85 per cent ofthe population. In the terms of our earlier classification, the prolesare the Low: for the slave population of the equatorial lands who passconstantly from conqueror to conqueror, are not a permanent ornecessary part of the structure.
In principle, membership of these three groups is not hereditary. Thechild of Inner Party parents is in theory not born into the InnerParty. Admission to either branch of the Party is by examination, takenat the age of sixteen. Nor is there any racial discrimination, or anymarked domination of one province by another. Jews, Negroes, SouthAmericans of pure Indian blood are to be found in the highest ranks ofthe Party, and the administrators of any area are always drawn from theinhabitants of that area. In no part of Oceania do the inhabitants havethe feeling that they are a colonial population ruled from a distantcapital. Oceania has no capital, and its titular head is a person whosewhereabouts nobody knows. Except that English is its chief linguafranca and Newspeak its official language, it is not centralized in anyway. Its rulers are not held together by blood-ties but by adherence toa common doctrine. It is true that our society is stratified, and veryrigidly stratified, on what at first sight appear to be hereditarylines. There is far less to- and-fro movement between the differentgroups than happened under capitalism or even in the pre-industrialage. Between the two branches of the Party there is a certain amount ofinterchange, but only so much as will ensure that weaklings areexcluded from the Inner Party and that ambitious members of the OuterParty are made harmless by allowing them to rise. Proletarians, inpractice, are not allowed to graduate into the Party. The most giftedamong them, who might possibly become nuclei of discontent, are simplymarked down by the Thought Police and eliminated. But this state ofaffairs 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 aimat transmitting power to its own children, as such; and if there wereno other way of keeping the ablest people at the top, it would beperfectly prepared to recruit an entire new generation from the ranksof the proletariat. In the crucial years, the fact that the Party wasnot a hereditary body did a great deal to neutralize opposition. Theolder kind of Socialist, who had been trained to fight againstsomething called ‘class privilege’ assumed that what is not hereditarycannot be permanent. He did not see that the continuity of an oligarchyneed not be physical, nor did he pause to reflect that hereditaryaristocracies have always been shortlived, whereas adoptiveorganizations such as the Catholic Church have sometimes lasted forhundreds or thousands of years. The essence of oligarchical rule is notfather-to-son inheritance, but the persistence of a certain world-viewand a certain way of life, imposed by the dead upon the living. Aruling group is a ruling group so long as it can nominate itssuccessors. The Party is not concerned with perpetuating its blood butwith 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 thatcharacterize our time are really designed to sustain the mystique ofthe Party and prevent the true nature of present-day society from beingperceived. Physical rebellion, or any preliminary move towardsrebellion, is at present not possible. From the proletarians nothing isto be feared. Left to themselves, they will continue from generation togeneration and from century to century, working, breeding, and dying,not only without any impulse to rebel, but without the power ofgrasping that the world could be other than it is. They could onlybecome dangerous if the advance of industrial technique made itnecessary to educate them more highly; but, since military andcommercial rivalry are no longer important, the level of popu lareducation is actually declining. What opinions the masses hold, or donot hold, is looked on as a matter of indifference. They can be grantedintellectual liberty because they have no intellect. In a Party member,on the other hand, not even the smallest deviation of opinion on themost unimportant subject can be tolerated.
A Party member lives from birth to death under the eye of the ThoughtPolice. 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 orin bed, he can be inspected without warning and without knowing that heis being inspected. Nothing that he does is indifferent. Hisfriendships, his relaxations, his behaviour towards his wife andchildren, the expression of his face when he is alone, the words hemutters in sleep, even the characteristic movements of his body, areall jealously scrutinized. Not only any actual misdemeanour, but anyeccentricity, however small, any change of habits, any nervousmannerism that could possibly be the symptom of an inner struggle, iscertain to be detected. He has no freedom of choice in any directionwhatever. On the other hand his actions are not regulated by law or byany clearly formulated code of behaviour. In Oceania there is no law.Thoughts and actions which, when detected, mean certain death are notformally forbidden, and the endless purges, arrests, tortures,imprisonments, and vaporizations are not inflicted as punishment forcrimes which have actually been committed, but are merely thewiping-out of persons who might perhaps commit a crime at some time inthe future. A Party member is required to have not only the rightopinions, but the right instincts. Many of the beliefs and attitudesdemanded of him are never plainly stated, and could not be statedwithout laying bare the contradictions inherent in Ingsoc. If he is aperson naturally orthodox (in Newspeak a goodthinker),he will in all circumstances know, without taking thought, what is thetrue belief or the desirable emotion. But in any case an elaboratemental training, undergone in childhood and grouping itself round theNewspeak 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 respitesfrom enthusiasm. He is supposed to live in a continuous frenzy ofhatred of foreign enemies and internal traitors, triumph overvictories, and selfabasement before the power and wisdom of the Party.The discontents produced by his bare, unsatisfying life aredeliberately turned outwards and dissipated by such devices as the TwoMinutes Hate, and the speculations which might possibly induce asceptical or rebellious attitude are killed in advance by his earlyacquired inner discipline. The first and simplest stage in thediscipline, which can be taught even to young children, is called, inNewspeak, crimestop. Crimestopmeans the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at thethreshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of notgrasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, ofmisunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc,and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capableof leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop, in short, meansprotective stupidity. But stupidity is not enough. On the contrary,orthodoxy in the full sense demands a control over one’s own mentalprocesses as complete as that of a contortionist over his body. Oceanicsociety rests ultimately on the belief that Big Brother is omnipotentand that the Party is infallible. But since in reality Big Brother isnot omnipotent and the party is not infallible, there is need for anunwearying, moment-to-moment flexibility in the treatment of facts. Thekeyword here is blackwhite. Like so many Newspeak words, thisword has two mutually contradictory meanings. Applied to an opponent,it means the habit of impudently claiming that black is white, incontradiction of the plain facts. Applied to a Party member, it means aloyal willingness to say that black is white when Party disciplinedemands this. But it means also the ability to believe that black is white, and more, to knowthat black is white, and to forget that one has ever believed thecontrary. This demands a continuous alteration of the past, madepossible 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 whichis subsidiary and, so to speak, precautionary. The subsidiary reason isthat the Party member, like the proletarian, tolerates present-dayconditions partly because he has no standards of comparison. He must becut off from the past, just as he must be cut off from foreigncountries, because it is necessary for him to believe that he is betteroff than his ancestors and that the average level of material comfortis constantly rising. But by far the more important reason for thereadjustment of the past is the need to safeguard the infallibility ofthe Party. It is not merely that speeches, statistics, and records ofevery kind must be constantly brought up to date in order to show thatthe predictions of the Party were in all cases right. It is also thatno 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 ofweakness. If, for example, Eurasia or Eastasia (whichever it may be) isthe enemy today, then that country must always have been the enemy. Andif the facts say otherwise then the facts must be altered. Thus historyis continuously rewritten. This day- to-day falsification of the past,carried out by the Ministry of Truth, is as necessary to the stabilityof the régime as the work of repression and espionage carried out bythe 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 writtenrecords and in human memories. The past is whatever the records and thememories agree upon. And since the Party is in full control of allrecords and in equally full control of the minds of its members, itfollows that the past is whatever the Party chooses to make it. It alsofollows that though the past is alterable, it never has been altered inany specific instance. For when it has been recreated in whatever shapeis needed at the moment, then this new version isthe past, and no different past can ever have existed. This holds goodeven when, as often happens, the same event has to be altered out ofrecognition several times in the course of a year. At all times theParty is in possession of absolute truth, and clearly the absolute cannever have been different from what it is now. It will be seen that thecontrol of the past depends above all on the training of memory. Tomake sure that all written records agree with the orthodoxy of themoment is merely a mechanical act. But it is also necessary to rememberthat events happened in the desired manner. And if it is necessary torearrange one’s memories or to tamper with written records, then it isnecessary to forget that one has done so. The trick of doingthis can be learned like any other mental technique. It is learned bythe majority of Party members, and certainly by all who are intelligentas well as orthodox. In Oldspeak it is called, quite frankly, ‘realitycontrol’. In Newspeak it is called doublethink, though doublethink comprises much else as well.
Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefsin one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. The Partyintellectual knows in which direction his memories must be altered; hetherefore knows that he is playing tricks with reality; but by theexercise of doublethink he also satisfies himself that realityis not violated. The process has to be conscious, or it would not becarried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to beunconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and henceof guilt. Doublethink lies at the very heart of Ingsoc, sincethe essential act of the Party is to use conscious deception whileretaining the firmness of purpose that goes with complete honesty. Totell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget anyfact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessaryagain, 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 takeaccount of the reality which one denies—all this is indispensablynecessary. 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 doublethinkone erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie alwaysone leap ahead of the truth. Ultimately it is by means of doublethinkthat the Party has been able—and may, for all we know, continue to beable for thousands of years—to arrest the course of history.
All past oligarchies have fallen from power either because theyossified or because they grew soft. Either they became stupid andarrogant, failed to adjust themselves to changing circumstances, andwere overthrown; or they became liberal and cowardly, made concessionswhen they should have used force, and once again were overthrown. Theyfell, that is to say, either through consciousness or throughunconsciousness. It is the achievement of the Party to have produced asystem of thought in which both conditions can exist simultaneously.And upon no other intellectual basis could the dominion of the Party bemade permanent. If one is to rule, and to continue ruling, one must beable to dislocate the sense of reality. For the secret of rulership isto combine a belief in one’s own infallibility with the Power to learnfrom past mistakes.
It need hardly be said that the subtlest practitioners of doublethink are those who invented doublethinkand 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 thosewho are furthest from seeing the world as it is. In general, thegreater the understanding, the greater the delusion; the moreintelligent, the less sane. One clear illustration of this is the factthat war hysteria increases in intensity as one rises in the socialscale. Those whose attitude towards the war is most nearly rational arethe subject peoples of the disputed territories. To these people thewar is simply a continuous calamity which sweeps to and fro over theirbodies like a tidal wave. Which side is winning is a matter of completeindifference to them. They are aware that a change of overlordshipmeans simply that they will be doing the same work as before for newmasters who treat them in the same manner as the old ones. The slightlymore favoured workers whom we call ‘the proles’ are only intermittentlyconscious of the war. When it is necessary they can be prodded intofrenzies of fear and hatred, but when left to themselves they arecapable of forgetting for long periods that the war is happening. It isin the ranks of the Party, and above all of the Inner Party, that thetrue war enthusiasm is found. World-conquest is believed in most firmlyby those who know it to be impossible. This peculiar linking-togetherof opposites—knowledge with ignorance, cynicism with fanaticism-is oneof the chief distinguishing marks of Oceanic society. The officialideology abounds with contradictions even when there is no practicalreason for them. Thus, the Party rejects and vilifies every principlefor which the Socialist movement originally stood, and it chooses to dothis in the name of Socialism. It preaches a contempt for the workingclass unexampled for centuries past, and it dresses its members in auniform which was at one time peculiar to manual workers and wasadopted for that reason. It systematically undermines the solidarity ofthe family, and it calls its leader by a name which is a direct appealto the sentiment of family loyalty. Even the names of the fourMinistries by which we are governed exhibit a sort of impudence intheir deliberate reversal of the facts. The Ministry of Peace concernsitself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Lovewith torture and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation. Thesecontradictions are not accidental, nor do they result from ordinaryhypocrisy; they are deliberate exercises in doublethink. For itis only by reconciling contradictions that power can be retainedindefinitely. In no other way could the ancient cycle be broken. Ifhuman equality is to be for ever averted—if the High, as we have calledthem, are to keep their places permanently—then the prevailing mentalcondition must be controlled insanity.
But there is one question which until this moment we have almost ignored. It is; whyshould human equality be averted? Supposing that the mechanics of theprocess have been rightly described, what is the motive for this huge,accurately planned effort to freeze history at a particular moment oftime?
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-questionedinstinct that first led to the seizure of power and brought doublethink,the Thought Police, continuous warfare, and all the other necessaryparaphernalia into existence afterwards. This motive really consists .. .
Winston became aware of silence, as one becomes aware of a newsound. It seemed to him that Julia had been very still for some timepast. She was lying on her side, naked from the waist upwards, with hercheek 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 thefloor, 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 hedid not know, it had merely systematized the knowledge that hepossessed already. But after reading it he knew better than before thathe was not mad. Being in a minority, even a minority of one, did notmake you mad. There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clungto the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad. A yellowbeam from the sinking sun slanted in through the window and fell acrossthe pillow. He shut his eyes. The sun on his face and the girl’s smoothbody touching his own gave him a strong, sleepy, confident feeling. Hewas safe, everything was all right. He fell asleep murmuring ‘Sanity isnot statistical,’ with the feeling that this remark contained in it aprofound wisdom.

[b][size=+2]WHEN[/b] he woke it was with the sensationof having slept for a long time, but a glance at the old-fashionedclock told him that it was only twenty- thirty. He lay dozing for awhile; then the usual deep- lunged singing struck up from the yardbelow;

[i][size=-1]‘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!’[/i]

The driveling song seemed to have kept its popularity. You still heardit all over the place. It had outlived the Hate Song. Julia woke at thesound, stretched herself luxuriously, and got out of bed.
‘I’m hungry,’ she said. ‘Let’s make some more coffee. Damn! The stove’sgone 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:

[i][size=-1]‘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!’[/i]

As he fastened the belt of his overalls he strolled across to thewindow. The sun must have gone down behind the houses; it was notshining into the yard any longer. The flagstones were wet as thoughthey had just been washed, and he had the feeling that the sky had beenwashed 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 andyet more. He wondered whether she took in washing for a living or wasmerely the slave of twenty or thirty grandchildren. Julia had comeacross to his side; together they gazed down with a sort of fascinationat the sturdy figure below. As he looked at the woman in hercharacteristic attitude, her thick arms reaching up for the line, herpowerful mare-like buttocks protruded, it struck him for the first timethat she was beautiful. It had never before occurred to him that thebody of a woman of fifty, blown up to monstrous dimensions bychildbearing, then hardened, roughened by work till it was coarse inthe 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 ablock of granite, and the rasping red skin, bore the same relation tothe body of a girl as the rose-hip to the rose. Why should the fruit beheld 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 hipto the knee her flank was against his. Out of their bodies no childwould ever come. That was the one thing they could never do. Only byword of mouth, from mind to mind, could they pass on the secret. Thewoman 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 birthto. It might easily be fifteen. She had had her momentary flowering, ayear, perhaps, of wild-rose beauty and then she had suddenly swollenlike a fertilized fruit and grown hard and red and coarse, and then herlife had been laundering, scrubbing, darning, cooking, sweeping,polishing, mending, scrubbing, laundering, first for children, then forgrandchildren, over thirty unbroken years. At the end of it she wasstill singing. The mystical reverence that he felt for her was somehowmixed up with the aspect of the pale, cloudless sky, stretching awaybehind the chimney-pots into interminable distance. It was curious tothink that the sky was the same for everybody, in Eurasia or Eastasiaas well as here. And the people under the sky were also very much thesame—everywhere, all over the world, hundreds of thousands of millionsof people just like this, people ignorant of one another’s existence,held apart by walls of hatred and lies, and yet almost exactly thesame—people who had never learned to think but who were storing up intheir hearts and bellies and muscles the power that would one dayoverturn the world. If there was hope, it lay in the proles! Withouthaving read to the end of the book,he knew that that must be Goldstein’s final message. The futurebelonged to the proles. And could he be sure that when their time camethe world they constructed would not be just as alien to him, WinstonSmith, as the world of the Party? Yes, because at the least it would bea world of sanity. Where there is equality there can be sanity. Sooneror later it would happen, strength would change into consciousness. Theproles were immortal, you could not doubt it when you looked at thatvaliant figure in the yard. In the end their awakening would come. Anduntil that happened, though it might be a thousand years, they wouldstay alive against all the odds, like birds, passing on from body tobody 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 theworld, in London and New York, in Africa and Brazil, and in themysterious, forbidden lands beyond the frontiers, in the streets ofParis and Berlin, in the villages of the endless Russian plain, in thebazaars of China and Japan—everywhere stood the same solidunconquerable figure, made monstrous by work and childbearing, toilingfrom birth to death and still singing. Out of those mighty loins a raceof conscious beings must one day come. You were the dead, theirs wasthe future. But you could share in that future if you kept alive themind as they kept alive the body, and passed on the secret doctrinethat 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 facehad turned a milky yellow. The smear of rouge that was still on eachcheekbone stood out sharply, almost as though unconnected with the skinbeneath.
‘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 exceptstand gazing into one another’s eyes. To run for life, to get out ofthe house before it was too late—no such thought occurred to them.Unthinkable to disobey the iron voice from the wall. There was a snapas though a catch had been turned back, and a crash of breaking glass.The picture had fallen to the floor uncovering the telescreen behindit.
‘Now they can see us,’ said Julia.
‘ Now we can see you,’ said the voice. ‘ Stand out in the middle of theroom. Stand back to back. Clasp your hands behind your heads. Do nottouch one another.’
They were not touching, but it seemed to him that he could feel Julia’sbody shaking. Or perhaps it was merely the shaking of his own. He couldjust stop his teeth from chattering, but his knees were beyond hiscontrol. There was a sound of trampling boots below, inside the houseand outside. The yard seemed to be full of men. Something was beingdragged across the stones. The woman’s singing had stopped abruptly.There was a long, rolling clang, as though the washtub had been flungacross the yard, and then a confusion of angry shouts which ended in ayell 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 quitedifferent voice, a thin, cultivated voice which Winston had theimpression of having heard before, struck in; ‘And by the way, while weare on the subject, “Here comes a candle to light you to bed, herecomes a chopper to chop off your head”!’
Something crashed on to the bed behind Winston’s back. The head of aladder had been thrust through the window and had burst in the frame.Someone was climbing through the window. There was a stampede of bootsup the stairs. The room was full of solid men in black uniforms, withiron-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 givethem an excuse to hit you ! A man with a smooth prizefighter’s jowl inwhich the mouth was only a slit paused opposite him balancing histruncheon meditatively between thumb and forefinger. Winston met hiseyes. The feeling of nakedness, with one’s hands behind one’s head andone’s face and body all exposed, was almost unbearable. The manprotruded the tip of a white tongue, licked the place where his lipsshould have been, and then passed on. There was another crash. Someonehad picked up the glass paperweight from the table and smashed it topieces on the hearth-stone.
The fragment of coral, a tiny crinkle of pink like a sugar rosebud froma cake, rolled across the mat. How small, thought Winston, how small italways was! There was a gasp and a thump behind him, and he received aviolent kick on the ankle which nearly flung him off his balance. Oneof the men had smashed his fist into Julia’s solar plexus, doubling herup like a pocket ruler. She was thrashing about on the floor, fightingfor breath. Winston dared not turn his head even by a millimetre, butsometimes 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 ownbody, the deadly pain which nevertheless was less urgent than thestruggle to get back her breath. He knew what it was like; theterrible, agonizing pain which was there all the while but could not besuffered yet, because before all else it was necessary to be able tobreathe. Then two of the men hoisted her up by knees and shoulders, andcarried her out of the room like a sack. Winston had a glimpse of herface, upside down, yellow and contorted, with the eyes shut, and stillwith a smear of rouge on either cheek; and that was the last he saw ofher.
He stood dead still. No one had hit him yet. Thoughts which came oftheir own accord but seemed totally uninteresting began to flit throughhis mind. He wondered whether they had got Mr Charrington. He wonderedwhat they had done to the woman in the yard. He noticed that he badlywanted to urinate, and felt a faint surprise, because he had done soonly two or three hours ago. He noticed that the clock on themantelpiece said nine, meaning twenty-one. But the light seemed toostrong. Would not the light be fading at twenty-one hours on an Augustevening? He wondered whether after all he and Julia had mistaken thetime—had slept the clock round and thought it was twenty-thirty whenreally it was nought eight-thirty on the following morning. But he didnot pursue the thought further. It was not interesting.
There ws another, lighter step in the passage. Mr Charrington came intothe room. The demeanour of the black- uniformed men suddenly becamemore subdued. Something had also changed in Mr Charrington’sappearance. 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; Winstonsuddenly realized whose voice it was that he had heard a few momentsago on the telescreen. Mr Charrington was still wearing his old velvetjacket, but his hair, which had been almost white, had turned black.Also he was not wearing his spectacles. He gave Winston a single sharpglance, as though verifying his identity, and then paid no moreattention to him. He was still recognizable, but he was not the sameperson any longer. His body had straightened, and seemed to have grownbigger. His face had undergone only tiny changes that had neverthelessworked a complete transformation. The black eyebrows were less bushy,the wrinkles were gone, the whole lines of the face seemed to havealtered; even the nose seemed shorter. It was the alert, cold face of aman of about five-and-thirty. It occurred to Winston that for the firsttime in his life he was looking, with knowledge, at a member of theThought Police.