回复: Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell

[size=+2]WINSTON was writing in his diary:

[size=+2]IF there is hope, wrote Winston, it lies in the proles. If there was hope, it must lie in the proles, because only there inthose swarming disregarded masses, 85 per cent of the population ofOceania, could the force to destroy the Party ever be generated. TheParty could not be overthrown from within. Its enemies, if it had anyenemies, had no way of coming together or even of identifying oneanother. Even if the legendary Brotherhood existed, as just possibly itmight, it was inconceivable that its members could ever assemble inlarger numbers than twos and threes. Rebellion meant a look in theeyes, an inflexion of the voice, at the most, an occasional whisperedword. But the proles, if only they could somehow become conscious oftheir own strength. would have no need to conspire. They needed only torise up and shake themselves like a horse shaking off flies. If theychose they could blow the Party to pieces tomorrow morning. Surelysooner or later it must occur to them to do it? And yet—!
He remembered how once he had been walking down a crowded street when atremendous shout of hundreds of voices women’s voices—had burst from aside-street a little way ahead. It was a great formidable cry of angerand despair, a deep, loud ‘Oh-o-o-o-oh!’ that went humming on like thereverberation of a bell. His heart had leapt. It’s started! he hadthought. A riot! The proles are breaking loose at last! When he hadreached the spot it was to see a mob of two or three hundred womencrowding round the stalls of a street market, with faces as tragic asthough they had been the doomed passengers on a sinking ship. But atthis moment the general despair broke down into a multitude ofindividual quarrels. It appeared that one of the stalls had beenselling tin saucepans. They were wretched, flimsy things, butcooking-pots of any kind were always difficult to get. Now the supplyhad unexpectedly given out. The successful women, bumped and jostled bythe rest, were trying to make off with their saucepans while dozens ofothers clamoured round the stall, accusing the stallkeeper offavouritism and of having more saucepans somewhere in reserve. Therewas a fresh outburst of yells. Two bloated women, one of them with herhair coming down, had got hold of the same saucepan and were trying totear it out of one another’s hands. For a moment they were bothtugging, and then the handle came off. Winston watched themdisgustedly. And yet, just for a moment, what almost frightening powerhad sounded in that cry from only a few hundred throats! Why was itthat they could never shout like that about anything that mattered?
He wrote:

[size=+2]FROM somewhere at the bottom of apassage the smell of roasting coffee—real coffee, not VictoryCoffee—came floating out into the street. Winston paused involuntarily.For perhaps two seconds he was back in the half-forgotten world of hischildhood. Then a door banged, seeming to cut off the smell as abruptlyas though it had been a sound. He had walked several kilometres over pavements, and his varicose ulcerwas throbbing. This was the second time in three weeks that he hadmissed an evening at the Community Centre: a rash act, since you couldbe certain that the number of your attendances at the Centre wascarefully checked. In principle a Party member had no spare time, andwas never alone except in bed. It was assumed that when he was notworking, eating, or sleeping he would be taking part in some kind ofcommunal recreation: to do anything that suggested a taste forsolitude, even to go for a walk by yourself, was always slightlydangerous. There was a word for it in Newspeak: ownlife,it was called, meaning individualism and eccentricity. But this eveningas he came out of the Ministry the balminess of the April air hadtempted him. The sky was a warmer blue than he had seen it that year,and suddenly the long, noisy evening at the Centre, the boring,exhausting games, the lectures, the creaking camaraderie oiled by gin,had seemed intolerable. On impulse he had turned away from the bus-stopand wandered off into the labyrinth of London, first south, then east,then north again, losing himself among unknown streets and hardlybothering in which direction he was going.
‘If there is hope,’ he had written in the diary, ‘it lies in theproles.’ The words kept coming back to him, statement of a mysticaltruth and a palpable absurdity. He was somewhere in the vague,brown-coloured slums to the north and east of what had once been SaintPancras Station. He was walking up a cobbled street of littletwo-storey houses with battered doorways which gave straight on thepavement and which were somehow curiously suggestive of ratholes. Therewere puddles of filthy water here and there among the cobbles. In andout of the dark doorways, and down narrow alley-ways that branched offon either side, people swarmed in astonishing numbers—girls in fullbloom, with crudely lipsticked mouths, and youths who chased the girls,and swollen waddling women who showed you what the girls would be likein ten years’ time, and old bent creatures shuffling along on splayedfeet, and ragged barefooted children who played in the puddles and thenscattered at angry yells from their mothers. Perhaps a quarter of thewindows in the street were broken and boarded up. Most of the peoplepaid no attention to Winston; a few eyed him with a sort of guardedcuriosity. Two monstrous women with brick-red forearms folded acrossthelr aprons were talking outside a doorway. Winston caught scraps ofconversation as he approached.
‘ “Yes,” I says to ’er, “that’s all very well,” I says. “But if you’dof been in my place you’d of done the same as what I done. It’s easy tocriticize,” I says, “but you ain’t got the same problems as what Igot.” ‘
‘Ah,’ said the other, ‘that’s jest it. That’s jest where it is.’
The strident voices stopped abruptly. The women studied him in hostilesilence as he went past. But it was not hostility, exactly; merely akind of wariness, a momentary stiffening, as at the passing of someunfamiliar animal. The blue overalls of the Party could not be a commonsight in a street like this. Indeed, it was unwise to be seen in suchplaces, unless you had definite business there. The patrols might stopyou if you happened to run into them. ‘May I see your papers, comrade?What are you doing here? What time did you leave work? Is this yourusual way home?’—and so on and so forth. Not that there was any ruleagainst walking home by an unusual route: but it was enough to drawattention to you if the Thought Police heard about it.
Suddenly the whole street was in commotion. There were yells of warningfrom all sides. People were shooting into the doorways like rabbits. Ayoung woman leapt out of a doorway a little ahead of Winston, grabbedup a tiny child playing in a puddle, whipped her apron round it, andleapt back again, all in one movement. At the same instant a man in aconcertina-like black suit, who had emerged from a side alley, rantowards Winston, pointing excitedly to the sky.
‘Steamer!’ he yelled. ‘Look out, guv’nor! Bang over’ead! Lay down quick!’
‘Steamer’ was a nickname which, for some reason, the proles applied torocket bombs. Winston promptly flung himself on his face. The proleswere nearly always right when they gave you a warning of this kind.They seemed to possess some kind of instinct which told them severalseconds in advance when a rocket was coming, although the rocketssupposedly travelled faster than sound. Winston clasped his forearmsabove his head. There was a roar that seemed to make the pavementheave; a shower of light objects pattered on to his back. When he stoodup he found that he was covered with fragments of glass from thenearest window.
He walked on. The bomb had demolished a group of houses 200 metres upthe street. A black plume of smoke hung in the sky, and below it acloud of plaster dust in which a crowd was already forming around theruins. There was a little pile of plaster lying on the pavement aheadof him, and in the middle of it he could see a bright red streak. Whenhe got up to it he saw that it was a human hand severed at the wrist.Apart from the bloody stump, the hand was so completely whitened as toresemble a plaster cast.
He kicked the thing into the gutter, and then, to avoid the crowd,turned down a side-street to the right. Within three or four minutes hewas out of the area which the bomb had affected, and the sordidswarming life of the streets was going on as though nothing hadhappened. It was nearly twenty hours, and the drinking-shops which theproles frequented (’pubs’, they called them) were choked withcustomers. From their grimy swing doors, endlessly opening andshutting, there came forth a smell of urine, sawdust, and sour beer. Inan angle formed by a projecting house- front three men were standingvery close together, the middle one of them holding a folded-upnewspaper which the other two were studying over his shoulder. Evenbefore he was near enough to make out the expression on their faces,Winston could see absorption in every line of their bodies. It wasobviously some serious piece of news that they were reading. He was afew paces away from them when suddenly the group broke up and two ofthe men were in violent altercation. For a moment they seemed almost onthe point of blows.
‘Can’t you bleeding well listen to what I say? I tell you no number ending in seven ain’t won for over fourteen months!’
‘Yes, it ‘as, then!’
‘No, it ‘as not! Back ‘ome I got the ‘ole lot of ’em for over two yearswrote down on a piece of paper. I takes ’em down reg’lar as the clock.An’ I tell you, no number ending in seven—’
‘Yes, a seven ‘as won! I could pretty near tell you the bleedingnumber. Four oh seven, it ended in. It were in February—second week inFebruary.’
‘February your grandmother! I got it all down in black and white. An’ I tell you, no number—’
‘Oh, pack it in!’ said the third man.
They were talking about the Lottery. Winston looked back when he hadgone thirty metres. They were still arguing, with vivid, passionatefaces. The Lottery, with its weekly pay-out of enormous prizes, was theone public event to which the proles paid serious attention. It wasprobable that there were some millions of proles for whom the Lotterywas the principal if not the only reason for remaining alive. It wastheir delight, their folly, their anodyne, their intellectualstimulant. Where the Lottery was concerned, even people who couldbarely read and write seemed capable of intricate calculations andstaggering feats of memory. There was a whole tribe of men who made aliving simply by selling systems, forecasts, and lucky amulets. Winstonhad nothing to do with the running of the Lottery, which was managed bythe Ministry of Plenty, but he was aware (indeed everyone in the partywas aware) that the prizes were largely imaginary. Only small sums wereactually paid out, the winners of the big prizes being non-existentpersons. In the absence of any real intercommunication between one partof Oceania and another, this was not difficult to arrange.
But if there was hope, it lay in the proles. You had to cling on tothat. When you put it in words it sounded reasonable: it was when youlooked at the human beings passing you on the pavement that it becamean act of faith. The street into which he had turned ran downhill. Hehad a feeling that he had been in this neighbourhood before, and thatthere was a main thoroughfare not far away. From somewhere ahead therecame a din of shouting voices. The street took a sharp turn and thenended in a flight of steps which led down into a sunken alley where afew stallkeepers were selling tired-looking vegetables. At this momentWinston remembered where he was. The alley led out into the mainstreet, and down the next turning, not five minutes away, was thejunk-shop where he had bought the blank book which was now his diary.And in a small stationer’s shop not far away he had bought hispenholder and his bottle of ink.
He paused for a moment at the top of the steps. On the opposite side ofthe alley there was a dingy little pub whose windows appeared to befrosted over but in reality were merely coated with dust. A very oldman, bent but active, with white moustaches that bristled forward likethose of a prawn, pushed open the swing door and went in. As Winstonstood watching, it occurred to him that the old man, who must be eightyat the least, had already been middle- aged when the Revolutionhappened. He and a few others like him were the last links that nowexisted with the vanished world of capitalism. In the Party itselfthere were not many people left whose ideas had been formed before theRevolution. The older generation had mostly been wiped out in the greatpurges of the fifties and sixties, and the few who survived had longago been terrified into complete intellectual surrender. If there wasany one still alive who could give you a truthful account of conditionsin the early part of the century, it could only be a prole. Suddenlythe passage from the history book that he had copied into his diarycame back into Winston’s mind, and a lunatic impulse took hold of him.He would go into the pub, he would scrape acquaintance with that oldman and question him. He would say to him: ‘Tell me about your lifewhen you were a boy. What was it like in those days? Were things betterthan they are now, or were they worse?’
Hurriedly, lest he should have time to become frightened, he descendedthe steps and crossed the narrow street. It was madness of course. Asusual, there was no definite rule against talking to proles andfrequenting their pubs, but it was far too unusual an action to passunnoticed. If the patrols appeared he might plead an attack offaintness, but it was not likely that they would believe him. He pushedopen the door, and a hideous cheesy smell of sour beer hit him in theface. As he entered the din of voices dropped to about half its volume.Behind his back he could feel everyone eyeing his blue overalls. A gameof darts which was going on at the other end of the room interrupteditself for perhaps as much as thirty seconds. The old man whom he hadfollowed was standing at the bar, having some kind of altercation withthe barman, a large, stout, hook-nosed young man with enormousforearms. A knot of others, standing round with glasses in their hands,were watching the scene.
‘I arst you civil enough, didn’t I?’ said the old man, straighteninghis shoulders pugnaciously. ‘You telling me you ain’t got a pint mug inthe ’ole bleeding boozer?’
‘And what in hell’s name is a pint?’ said the barman, leaning forward with the tips of his fingers on the counter.
‘Ark at ’im! Calls ’isself a barman and don’t know what a pint is! Why,a pint’s the ’alf of a quart, and there’s four quarts to the gallon.’ave to teach you the A, B, C next.’
‘Never heard of ’em,’ said the barman shortly. ‘Litre and halflitre—that’s all we serve. There’s the glasses on the shelf in front ofyou.
‘I likes a pint,’ persisted the old man. ‘You could ‘a drawed me off apint easy enough. We didn’t ’ave these bleeding litres when I was ayoung man.’
‘When you were a young man we were all living in the treetops,’ said the barman, with a glance at the other customers.
There was a shout of laughter, and the uneasiness caused by Winston’sentry seemed to disappear. The old man’s whitestubbled face had flushedpink. He turned away, muttering to himself, and bumped into Winston.Winston caught him gently by the arm.
‘May I offer you a drink?’ he said.
‘You’re a gent,’ said the other, straightening his shoulders again. Heappeared not to have noticed Winston’s blue overalls. ‘Pint!’ he addedaggressively to the barman. ‘Pint of wallop.’
The barman swished two half-litres of dark-brown beer into thickglasses which he had rinsed in a bucket under the counter. Beer was theonly drink you could get in prole pubs. The proles were supposed not todrink gin, though in practice they could get hold of it easily enough.The game of darts was in full swing again, and the knot of men at thebar had begun talking about lottery tickets. Winston’s presence wasforgotten for a moment. There was a deal table under the window wherehe and the old man could talk without fear of being overheard. It washorribly dangerous, but at any rate there was no telescreen in theroom, a point he had made sure of as soon as he came in.
‘’;E could ‘a drawed me off a pint,’ grumbled the old man as he settleddown behind a glass. ‘A ’alf litre ain’t enough. It don’t satisfy. Anda ’ole litre’s too much. It starts my bladder running. Let alone theprice.’
‘You must have seen great changes since you were a young man,’ said Winston tentatively.
The old man’s pale blue eyes moved from the darts board to the bar, andfrom the bar to the door of the Gents, as though it were in thebar-room that he expected the changes to have occurred.
‘The beer was better,’ he said finally. ‘And cheaper! When I was ayoung man, mild beer—wallop we used to call it—was fourpence a pint.That was before the war, of course.’
‘Which war was that?’ said Winston.
‘It’s all wars,’ said the old man vaguely. He took up his glass, andhis shoulders straightened again. ‘’Ere’s wishing you the very best of’ealth!’
In his lean throat the sharp-pointed Adam’s apple made a surprisinglyrapid up-and-down movement, and the beer vanished. Winston went to thebar and came back with two more half-litres. The old man appeared tohave forgotten his prejudice against drinking a full litre.
‘You are very much older than I am,’ said Winston. ‘You must have beena grown man before I was born. You can remember what it was like in theold days, before the Revolution. People of my age don’t really knowanything about those times. We can only read about them in books, andwhat it says in the books may not be true. I should like your opinionon that. The history books say that life before the Revolution wascompletely different from what it is now. There was the most terribleoppression, injustice, poverty worse than anything we can imagine. Herein London, the great mass of the people never had enough to eat frombirth to death. Half of them hadn’t even boots on their feet. Theyworked twelve hours a day, they left school at nine, they slept ten ina room. And at the same time there were a very few people, only a fewthousands—the capitalists, they were called—who were rich and powerful.They owned everything that there was to own. They lived in greatgorgeous houses with thirty servants, they rode about in motor-cars andfour-horse carriages, they drank champagne, they wore top hats—’
The old man brightened suddenly.
‘Top ’ats!’ he said. ‘Funny you should mention ’em. The same thing comeinto my ’ead only yesterday, I dono why. I was jest thinking, I ain’tseen a top ’at in years. Gorn right out, they ’ave. The last time Iwore one was at my sister-in-law’s funeral. And that was—well, Icouldn’t give you the date, but it must’a been fifty years ago. Ofcourse it was only ’ired for the occasion, you understand.’
‘It isn’t very important about the top hats,’ said Winston patiently.‘The point is, these capitalists—they and a few lawyers and priests andso forth who lived on them—were the lords of the earth. Everythingexisted for their benefit. You—the ordinary people, the workers—weretheir slaves. They could do what they liked with you. They could shipyou off to Canada like cattle. They could sleep with your daughters ifthey chose. They could order you to be flogged with something called acat-o’-nine tails. You had to take your cap off when you passed them.Every capitalist went about with a gang of lackeys who—’
The old man brightened again.
‘Lackeys!’ he said. ‘Now there’s a word I ain’t ’eard since ever solong. Lackeys! That reg’lar takes me back, that does. I recollect oh,donkey’s years ago—I used to sometimes go to ’Yde Park of a Sundayafternoon to ’ear the blokes making speeches. Salvation Army, RomanCatholics, Jews, Indians—all sorts there was. And there was onebloke—well, I couldn’t give you ’is name, but a real powerful speaker’e was. ’E didn’t ’alf give it ’em! “Lackeys!” ’e says, “lackeys of thebourgeoisie! Flunkies of the ruling class!” Parasites—that was anotherof them. And ‘yenas—’e definitely called ’em ’yenas. Of course ’e wasreferring to the Labour Party, you understand.’
Winston had the feeling that they were talking at crosspurposes.
‘What I really wanted to know was this,’ he said. ‘Do you feel that youhave more freedom now than you had in those days? Are you treated morelike a human being? In the old days, the rich people, the people at thetop—’
‘The ’Ouse of Lords,’ put in the old man reminiscently.
‘The House of Lords, if you like. What I am asking is, were thesepeople able to treat you as an inferior, simply because they were richand you were poor? Is it a fact, for instance, that you had to callthem “Sir” and take off your cap when you passed them?’
The old man appeared to think deeply. He drank off about a quarter of his beer before answering.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘They liked you to touch your cap to ’em. It showedrespect, like. I didn’t agree with it, myself, but I done it oftenenough. Had to, as you might say.’
‘And was it usual—I’m only quoting what I’ve read in history books—wasit usual for these people and their servants to push you off thepavement into the gutter?’
‘One of ’em pushed me once,’ said the old man. ‘I recollect it as if itwas yesterday. It was Boat Race night—terribly rowdy they used to geton Boat Race night—and I bumps into a young bloke on ShaftesburyAvenue. Quite a gent, ’e was—dress shirt, top ’at, black overcoat. ’Ewas kind of zig-zagging across the pavement, and I bumps into ’imaccidental-like. ’E says, “Why can’t you look where you’re going?” ’esays. I say, “Ju think you’ve bought the bleeding pavement?” ’E says,“I’ll twist your bloody ’ead off if you get fresh with me.” I says,“You’re drunk. I’ll give you in charge in ’alf a minute,” I says. An’if you’ll believe me, ’e puts ’is ’and on my chest and gives me a shoveas pretty near sent me under the wheels of a bus. Well, I was young inthem days, and I was going to ’ave fetched ’im one, only—’
A sense of helplessness took hold of Winston. The old man’s memory wasnothing but a rubbish-heap of details. One could question him all daywithout getting any real information. The party histories might stillbe true, after a fashion: they might even be completely true. He made alast attempt.
‘Perhaps I have not made myself clear,’ he said. ‘What I’m trying tosay is this. You have been alive a very long time; you lived half yourlife before the Revolution. In 1925, for instance, you were alreadygrown up. Would you say from what you can remember, that life in 1925was better than it is now, or worse? If you could choose, would youprefer to live then or now?’
The old man looked meditatively at the darts board. He finished up hisbeer, more slowly than before. When he spoke it was with a tolerantphilosophical air, as though the beer had mellowed him.
‘I know what you expect me to say,’ he said. ‘You expect me to say asI’d sooner be young again. Most people’d say they’d sooner be young, ifyou arst’ ’em. You got your ’ealth and strength when you’re young. Whenyou get to my time of life you ain’t never well. I suffer somethingwicked from my feet, and my bladder’s jest terrible. Six and seventimes a night it ’as me out of bed. On the other ’and, there’s greatadvantages in being a old man. You ain’t got the same worries. No truckwith women, and that’s a great thing. I ain’t ’ad a woman for near onthirty year, if you’d credit it. Nor wanted to, what’s more.’
Winston sat back against the window-sill. It was no use going on. Hewas about to buy some more beer when the old man suddenly got up andshuffled rapidly into the stinking urinal at the side of the room. Theextra half-litre was already working on him. Winston sat for a minuteor two gazing at his empty glass, and hardly noticed when his feetcarried him out into the street again. Within twenty years at the most,he reflected, the huge and simple question, ‘Was life better before theRevolution than it is now?’ would have ceased once and for all to beanswerable. But in effect it was unanswerable even now, since the fewscattered survivors from the ancient world were incapable of comparingone age with another. They remembered a million useless things, aquarrel with a workmate, a hunt for a lost bicycle pump, the expressionon a long-dead sister’s face, the swirls of dust on a windy morningseventy years ago: but all the relevant facts were outside the range oftheir vision. They were like the ant, which can see small objects butnot large ones. And when memory failed and written records werefalsified—when that happened, the claim of the Party to have improvedthe conditions of human life had got to be accepted, because there didnot exist, and never again could exist, any standard against which itcould be tested.
At this moment his train of thought stopped abruptly. He halted andlooked up. He was in a narrow street, with a few dark little shops,interspersed among dwelling-houses. Immediately above his head therehung three discoloured metal balls which looked as if they had oncebeen gilded. He seemed to know the place. Of course! He was standingoutside the junk-shop where he had bought the diary.
A twinge of fear went through him. It had been a sufficiently rash actto buy the book in the beginning, and he had sworn never to come nearthe place again. And yet the instant that he allowed his thoughts towander, his feet had brought him back here of their own accord. It wasprecisely against suicidal impulses of this kind that he had hoped toguard himself by opening the diary. At the same time he noticed thatalthough it was nearly twenty-one hours the shop was still open. Withthe feeling that he would be less conspicuous inside than hanging abouton the pavement, he stepped through the doorway. If questioned, hecould plausibly say that he was trying to buy razor blades.
The proprietor had just lighted a hanging oil lamp which gave off anunclean but friendly smell. He was a man of perhaps sixty, frail andbowed, with a long, benevolent nose, and mild eyes distorted by thickspectacles. His hair was almost white, but his eyebrows were bushy andstill black. His spectacles, his gentle, fussy movements, and the factthat he was wearing an aged jacket of black velvet, gave him a vagueair of intellectuality, as though he had been some kind of literaryman, or perhaps a musician. His voice was soft, as though faded, andhis accent less debased than that of the majority of proles.
‘I recognized you on the pavement,’ he said immediately. ‘You’re thegentleman that bought the young lady’s keepsake album. That was abeautiful bit of paper, that was. Cream-laid, it used to be called.There’s been no paper like that made for—oh, I dare say fifty years.’He peered at Winston over the top of his spectacles. ‘Is there anythingspecial I can do for you? Or did you just want to look round?’
‘I was passing,’ said Winston vaguely. ‘I just looked in. I don’t want anything in particular.’
‘It’s just as well,’ said the other, ‘because I don’t suppose I couldhave satisfied you.’ He made an apologetic gesture with his softpalmedhand. ‘You see how it is; an empty shop, you might say. Between you andme, the antique trade’s just about finished. No demand any longer, andno stock either. Furniture, china, glass—it’s all been broken up bydegrees. And of course the metal stuff’s mostly been melted down. Ihaven’t seen a brass candlestick in years.’
The tiny interior of the shop was in fact uncomfortably full, but therewas almost nothing in it of the slightest value. The floorspace wasvery restricted, because all round the walls were stacked innumerabledusty picture-frames. In the window there were trays of nuts and bolts,worn-out chisels, penknives with broken blades, tarnished watches thatdid not even pretend to be in going order, and other miscellaneousrubbish. Only on a small table in the corner was there a litter of oddsand ends—lacquered snuffboxes, agate brooches, and the like—whichlooked as though they might include something interesting. As Winstonwandered towards the table his eye was caught by a round, smooth thingthat gleamed softly in the lamplight, and he picked it up.
It was a heavy lump of glass, curved on one side, flat on the other,making almost a hemisphere. There was a peculiar softness, as ofrainwater, in both the colour and the texture of the glass. At theheart of it, magnified by the curved surface, there was a strange,pink, convoluted object that recalled a rose or a sea anemone.
‘What is it?’ said Winston, fascinated.
‘That’s coral, that is,’ said the old man. ‘It must have come from theIndian Ocean. They used to kind of embed it in the glass. That wasn’tmade less than a hundred years ago. More, by the look of it.’
‘It’s a beautiful thing,’ said Winston.
‘It is a beautiful thing,’ said the other appreciatively. ‘But there’snot many that’d say so nowadays.’ He coughed. ‘Now, if it so happenedthat you wanted to buy it, that’d cost you four dollars. I can rememberwhen a thing like that would have fetched eight pounds, and eightpounds was—well, I can’t work it out, but it was a lot of money. Butwho cares about genuine antiques nowadays even the few that’s left?’
Winston immediately paid over the four dollars and slid the covetedthing into his pocket. What appealed to him about it was not so muchits beauty as the air it seemed to possess of belonging to an age quitedifferent from the present one. The soft, rainwatery glass was not likeany glass that he had ever seen. The thing was doubly attractivebecause of its apparent uselessness, though he could guess that it mustonce have been intended as a paperweight. It was very heavy in hispocket, but fortunately it did not make much of a bulge. It was a queerthing, even a compromising thing, for a Party member to have in hispossession. Anything old, and for that matter anything beautiful, wasalways vaguely suspect. The old man had grown noticeably more cheerfulafter receiving the four dollars. Winston realized that he would haveaccepted three or even two.
‘There’s another room upstairs that you might care to take a look at,’he said. ‘There’s not much in it. Just a few pieces. We’ll do with alight if we’re going upstairs.’
He lit another lamp, and, with bowed back, led the way slowly up thesteep and worn stairs and along a tiny passage, into a room which didnot give on the street but looked out on a cobbled yard and a forest ofchimney-pots. Winston noticed that the furniture was still arranged asthough the room were meant to be lived in. There was a strip of carpeton the floor, a picture or two on the walls, and a deep, slatternlyarm-chair drawn up to the fireplace. An old-fashioned glass clock witha twelve-hour face was ticking away on the mantelpiece. Under thewindow, and occupying nearly a quarter of the room, was an enormous bedwith the mattress still on it.
‘We lived here till my wife died,’ said the old man halfapologetically. ‘I’m selling the furniture off by little and little.Now that’s a beautiful mahogany bed, or at least it would be if youcould get the bugs out of it. But I dare say you’d find it a little bitcumbersome.
He was holdlng the lamp high up, so as to illuminate the whole room,and in the warm dim light the place looked curiously inviting. Thethought flitted through Winston’s mind that it would probably be quiteeasy to rent the room for a few dollars a week, if he dared to take therisk. It was a wild, impossible notion, to be abandoned as soon asthought of; but the room had awakened in him a sort of nostalgia, asort of ancestral memory. It seemed to him that he knew exactly what itfelt like to sit in a room like this, in an arm-chair beside an openfire with your feet in the fender and a kettle on the hob; utterlyalone, utterly secure, with nobody watching you, no voice pursuing you,no sound except the singing of the kettle and the friendly ticking ofthe clock.
‘There’s no telescreen!’ he could not help murmuring.
‘Ah,’ said the old man, ‘I never had one of those things. Tooexpensive. And I never seemed to feel the need of it, somehow. Nowthat’s a nice gateleg table in the corner there. Though of course you’dhave to put new hinges on it if you wanted to use the flaps.’
There was a small bookcase in the other corner, and Winston had alreadygravitated towards it. It contained nothing but rubbish. Thehunting-down and destruction of books had been done with the samethoroughness in the prole quarters as everywhere else. It was veryunlikely that there existed anywhere in Oceania a copy of a bookprinted earlier than 1960. The old man, still carrying the lamp, wasstanding in front of a picture in a rosewood frame which hung on theother side of the fireplace, opposite the bed.
‘Now, if you happen to be interested in old prints at all—’ he began delicately.
Winston came across to examine the picture. It was a steel engraving ofan oval building with rectangular windows, and a small tower in front.There was a railing running round the building, and at the rear endthere was what appeared to be a statue. Winston gazed at it for somemoments. It seemed vaguely familiar, though he did not remember thestatue.
‘The frame’s fixed to the wall,’ said the old man, ‘but I could unscrew it for you, I dare say.’
‘I know that building,’ said Winston finally. ‘It’s a ruin now. It’s in the middle of the street outside the Palace of Justice.’
‘That’s right. Outside the Law Courts. It was bombed in—oh, many yearsago. It was a church at one time, St Clement Danes, its name was.’ Hesmiled apologetically, as though conscious of saying something slightlyridiculous, and added: ‘“Oranges and lemons,” say the bells of StClement’s!’
‘What’s that?’ said Winston.
‘Oh—”‘Oranges and lemons’, say the bells of St Clement’s.” That was arhyme we had when I was a little boy. How it goes on I don’t remember,but I do know it ended up, “Here comes a candle to light you to bed,Here comes a chopper to chop off your head.” It was a kind of a dance.They held out their arms for you to pass under, and when they came to“Here comes a chopper to chop off your head” they brought their armsdown and caught you. It was just names of churches. All the Londonchurches were in it—all the principal ones, that is.’
Winston wondered vaguely to what century the church belonged. It wasalways difficult to determine the age of a London building. Anythinglarge and impressive, if it was reasonably new in appearance, wasautomatically claimed as having been built since the Revolution, whileanything that was obviously of earlier date was ascribed to some dimperiod called the Middle Ages. The centuries of capitalism were held tohave produced nothing of any value. One could not learn history fromarchitecture any more than one could learn it from books. Statues,inscriptions, memorial stones, the names of streets—anything that mightthrow light upon the past had been systematically altered.
‘I never knew it had been a church,’ he said.
‘There’s a lot of them left, really,’ said the old man, ‘though they’vebeen put to other uses. Now, how did that rhyme go? Ah! I’ve got it!

您在干啥

PART Two
[size=+2]IT WAS the middle of the morning, and Winston had left the cubicle to go to the lavatory. A solitary figure was coming towards him from the other end of 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: