回复: Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell

[size=+2]WINSTON 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.

[size=+2]‘WE 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.

[size=+2]WINSTON 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:

[size=+2]SYME 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.

[size=+2]IT HAD happened at last. The expected message had come. All his life, it seemed to him, he had been waiting for this to happen. He was walking down the long corridor at the Ministry and he was 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.