回复: Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell

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

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

[size=+2]WINSTON was gelatinous with fatigue.Gelatinous was the right word. It had come into his head spontaneously.His body seemed to have not only the weakness of a jelly, but itstranslucency. He felt that if he held up his hand he would be able tosee the light through it. All the blood and lymph had been drained outof him by an enormous debauch of work, leaving only a frail structureof nerves, bones, and skin. All sensations seemed to be magnified. Hisoveralls fretted his shoulders, the pavement tickled his feet, even theopening and closing of a hand was an effort that made his joints creak.
He had worked more than ninety hours in five days. So had everyone elsein the Ministry. Now it was all over, and he had literally nothing todo, no Party work of any description, until tomorrow morning. He couldspend six hours in the hiding-place and another nine in his own bed.Slowly, in mild afternoon sunshine, he walked up a dingy street in thedirection of Mr Charrington’s shop, keeping one eye open for thepatrols, but irrationally convinced that this afternoon there was nodanger of anyone interfering with him. The heavy brief-case that he wascarrying bumped against his knee at each step, sending a tinglingsensation up and down the skin of his leg. Inside it was the book, which he had now had in his possession for six days and had not yet opened, nor even looked at.
On the sixth day of Hate Week, after the processions, the speeches, theshouting, the singing, the banners, the posters, the films, thewaxworks, the rolling of drums and squealing of trumpets, the tramp ofmarching feet, the grinding of the caterpillars of tanks, the roar ofmassed planes, the booming of guns—after six days of this, when thegreat orgasm was quivering to its climax and the general hatred ofEurasia had boiled up into such delirium that if the crowd could havegot their hands on the 2,000 Eurasian war-criminals who were to bepublicly hanged on the last day of the proceedings, they wouldunquestionably have torn them to pieces—at just this moment it had beenannounced that Oceania was not after all at war with Eurasia. Oceaniawas at war with Eastasia. Eurasia was an ally.
There was, of course, no admission that any change had taken place.Merely it became known, with extreme suddenness and everywhere at once,that Eastasia and not Eurasia was the enemy. Winston was taking part ina demonstration in one of the central London squares at the moment whenit happened. It was night, and the white faces and the scarlet bannerswere luridly floodlit. The square was packed with several thousandpeople, including a block of about a thousand schoolchildren in theuniform of the Spies. On a scarlet-draped platform an orator of theInner Party, a small lean man with disproportionately long arms and alarge bald skull over which a few lank locks straggled, was haranguingthe crowd. A little Rumpelstiltskin figure, contorted with hatred, hegripped the neck of the microphone with one hand while the other,enormous at the end of a bony arm, clawed the air menacingly above hishead. His voice, made metallic by the amplifiers, boomed forth anendless catalogue of atrocities, massacres, deportations, lootings,rapings, torture of prisoners, bombing of civilians, lying propaganda,unjust aggressions, broken treaties. It was almost impossible to listento him without being first convinced and then maddened. At every fewmoments the fury of the crowd boiled over and the voice of the speakerwas drowned by a wild beast-like roaring that rose uncontrollably fromthousands of throats. The most savage yells of all came from theschoolchildren. The speech had been proceeding for perhaps twentyminutes when a messenger hurried on to the platform and a scrap ofpaper was slipped into the speaker’s hand. He unrolled and read itwithout pausing in his speech. Nothing altered in his voice or manner,or in the content of what he was saying, but suddenly the names weredifferent. Without words said, a wave of understanding rippled throughthe crowd. Oceania was at war with Eastasia! The next moment there wasa tremendous commotion. The banners and posters with which the squarewas decorated were all wrong! Quite half of them had the wrong faces onthem. It was sabotage! The agents of Goldstein had been at work! Therewas a riotous interlude while posters were ripped from the walls,banners torn to shreds and trampled underfoot. The Spies performedprodigies of activity in clambering over the rooftops and cutting thestreamers that fluttered from the chimneys. But within two or threeminutes it was all over. The orator, still gripping the neck of themicrophone, his shoulders hunched forward, his free hand clawing at theair, had gone straight on with his speech. One minute more, and theferal roars of rage were again bursting from the crowd. The Hatecontinued exactly as before, except that the target had been changed.
The thing that impressed Winston in looking back was that the speakerhad switched from one line to the other actually in midsentence, notonly without a pause, but without even breaking the syntax. But at themoment he had other things to preoccupy him. It was during the momentof disorder while the posters were being torn down that a man whoseface he did not see had tapped him on the shoulder and said, ‘Excuseme, I think you’ve dropped your brief-case.’ He took the brief-caseabstractedly, without speaking. He knew that it would be days before hehad an opportunity to look inside it. The instant that thedemonstration was over he went straight to the Ministry of Truth,though the time was now nearly twenty-three hours. The entire staff ofthe Ministry had done likewise. The orders already issuing from thetelescreen, recalling them to their posts, were hardly necessary.
Oceania was at war with Eastasia: Oceania had always been at war withEastasia. A large part of the political literature of five years wasnow completely obsolete. Reports and records of all kinds, newspapers,books, pamphlets, films, sound-tracks, photographs—all had to berectified at lightning speed. Although no directive was ever issued, itwas known that the chiefs of the Department intended that within oneweek no reference to the war with Eurasia, or the alliance withEastasia, should remain in existence anywhere. The work wasoverwhelming, all the more so because the processes that it involvedcould not be called by their true names. Everyone in the RecordsDepartment worked eighteen hours in the twenty-four, with twothree-hour snatches of sleep. Mattresses were brought up from thecellars and pitched all over the corridors: meals consisted ofsandwiches and Victory Coffee wheeled round on trolleys by attendantsfrom the canteen. Each time that Winston broke off for one of hisspells of sleep he tried to leave his desk clear of work, and each timethat he crawled back sticky-eyed and aching, it was to find thatanother shower of paper cylinders had covered the desk like asnowdrift, halfburying the speakwrite and overflowing on to the floor,so that the first job was always to stack them into a neat enough pileto give him room to work. What was worst of all was that the work wasby no means purely mechanical. Often it was enough merely to substituteone name for another, but any detailed report of events demanded careand imagination. Even the geographical knowledge that one needed intransferring the war from one part of the world to another wasconsiderable.
By the third day his eyes ached unbearably and his spectacles neededwiping every few minutes. It was like struggling with some crushingphysical task, something which one had the right to refuse and whichone was nevertheless neurotically anxious to accomplish. In so far ashe had time to remember it, he was not troubled by the fact that everyword he murmured into the speakwrite, every stroke of his ink-pencil,was a deliberate lie. He was as anxious as anyone else in theDepartment that the forgery should be perfect. On the morning of thesixth day the dribble of cylinders slowed down. For as much as half anhour nothing came out of the tube; then one more cylinder, thennothing. Everywhere at about the same time the work was easing off. Adeep and as it were secret sigh went through the Department. A mightydeed, which could never be mentioned, had been achieved. It was nowimpossible for any human being to prove by documentary evidence thatthe war with Eurasia had ever happened. At twelve hundred it wasunexpectedly announced that all workers in the Ministry were free tilltomorrow morning. Winston, still carrying the brief-case containing thebook, which had remained between his feet while he worked and under hisbody while he slept, went home, shaved himself, and almost fell asleepin his bath, although the water was barely more than tepid.
With a sort of voluptuous creaking in his joints he climbed the stairabove Mr Charrington’s shop. He was tired, but not sleepy any longer.He opened the window, lit the dirty little oilstove and put on a pan ofwater for coffee. Julia would arrive presently: meanwhile there was thebook. He sat down in the sluttish armchair and undid the straps of thebrief-case.
A heavy black volume, amateurishly bound, with no name or title on thecover. The print also looked slightly irregular. The pages were worn atthe edges, and fell apart, easily, as though the book had passedthrough many hands. The inscription on the title-page ran:

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

PART Three
[size=+2]HE DID not know where he was. Presumably he was in the Ministry of Love, but there was no way of making certain.He was in a high-ceilinged windowless cell with walls of glitteringwhite porcelain. Concealed lamps flooded it with cold light, and therewas a low, steady humming sound which he supposed had something to dowith the air supply. A bench, or shelf, just wide enough to sit on ranround the wall, broken only by the door and, at the end opposite thedoor, a lavatory pan with no wooden seat. There were four telescreens,one in each wall.
There was a dull aching in his belly. It had been there eversince they had bundled him into the closed van and driven him away. Buthe was also hungry, with a gnawing, unwholesome kind of hunger. Itmight be twenty-four hours since he had eaten, it might be thirty-six.He still did not know, probably never would know, whether it had beenmorning or evening when they arrested him. Since he was arrested he hadnot been fed.
He sat as still as he could on the narrow bench, with his handscrossed on his knee. He had already learned to sit still. If you madeunexpected movements they yelled at you from the telescreen. But thecraving for food was growing upon him. What he longed for above all wasa piece of bread. He had an idea that there were a few breadcrumbs inthe pocket of his overalls. It was even possible—he thought thisbecause from time to time something seemed to tickle his leg—that theremight be a sizeable bit of crust there. In the end the temptation tofind out overcame his fear; he slipped a hand into his pocket.
‘Smith!’ yelled a voice from the telescreen. ‘6079 Smith W.! Hands out of pockets in the cells!’
He sat still again, his hands crossed on his knee. Before beingbrought here he had been taken to another place which must have been anordinary prison or a temporary lock-up used by the patrols. He did notknow how long he had been there; some hours at any rate; with no clocksand no daylight it was hard to gauge the time. It was a noisy,evil-smelling place. They had put him into a cell similar to the one hewas now in, but filthily dirty and at all times crowded by ten orfifteen people. The majority of them were common criminals, but therewere a few political prisoners among them. He had sat silent againstthe wall, jostled by dirty bodies, too preoccupied by fear and the painin his belly to take much interest in his surroundings, but stillnoticing the astonishing difference in demeanour between the Partyprisoners and the others. The Party prisoners were always silent andterrified, but the ordinary criminals seemed to care nothing foranybody. They yelled insults at the guards, fought back fiercely whentheir belongings were impounded, wrote obscene words on the floor, atesmuggled food which they produced from mysterious hiding-places intheir clothes, and even shouted down the telescreen when it tried torestore order. On the other hand some of them seemed to be on goodterms with the guards, called them by nicknames, and tried to wheedlecigarettes through the spyhole in the door. The guards, too, treatedthe common criminals with a certain forbearance, even when they had tohandle them roughly. There was much talk about the forced-labour campsto which most of the prisoners expected to be sent. It was ‘all right’in the camps, he gathered, so long as you had good contacts and knewthe ropes. There was bribery, favouritism, and racketeering of everykind, there was homosexuality and prostitution, there was even illicitalcohol distilled from potatoes. The positions of trust were given onlyto the common criminals, especially the gangsters and the murderers,who formed a sort of aristocracy. All the dirty jobs were done by thepoliticals.
There was a constant come-and-go of prisoners of everydescription: drug-peddlers, thieves, bandits, black- marketeers,drunks, prostitutes. Some of the drunks were so violent that the otherprisoners had to combine to suppress them. An enormous wreck of awoman, aged about sixty, with great tumbling breasts and thick coils ofwhite hair which had come down in her struggles, was carried in,kicking and shouting, by four guards, who had hold of her one at eachcorner. They wrenched off the boots with which she had been trying tokick them, and dumped her down across Winston’s lap, almost breakinghis thigh-bones. The woman hoisted herself upright and followed themout with a yell of ‘F—— bastards!’ Then, noticing that she was sittingon something uneven, she slid off Winston’s knees on to the bench.
‘Beg pardon, dearie,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t ’a sat on you, onlythe buggers put me there. They dono ’ow to treat a lady, do they?’ Shepaused, patted her breast, and belched. ‘Pardon,’ she said, ‘I ain’tmeself, quite.’
She leant forward and vomited copiously on the floor.
‘Thass better,’ she said, leaning back with closed eyes. ‘Neverkeep it down, thass what I say. Get it up while it’s fresh on yourstomach, like.’
She revived, turned to have another look at Winston and seemedimmediately to take a fancy to him. She put a vast arm round hisshoulder and drew him towards her, breathing beer and vomit into hisface.
‘Wass your name, dearie?’ she said.
‘Smith,’ said Winston.
‘Smith?’ said the woman. ‘Thass funny. My name’s Smith too. Why,’ she added sentimentally, ‘I might be your mother!’
She might, thought Winston, be his mother. She was about theright age and physique, and it was probable that people changedsomewhat after twenty years in a forced-labour camp.
No one else had spoken to him. To a surprising extent the ordinary criminals ignored the Party prisoners. ‘The polits,’they called them, with a sort of uninterested contempt. The Partyprisoners seemed terrified of speaking to anybody, and above all ofspeaking to one another. Only once, when two Party members, both women,were pressed close together on the bench, he overheard amid the din ofvoices a few hurriedly-whispered words; and in particular a referenceto something called ‘room one-ohone’, which he did not understand.
It might be two or three hours ago that they had brought himhere. The dull pain in his belly never went away, but sometimes it grewbetter and sometimes worse, and his thoughts expanded or contractedaccordingly. When it grew worse he thought only of the pain itself, andof his desire for food. When it grew better, panic took hold of him.There were moments when he foresaw the things that would happen to himwith such actuality that his heart galloped and his breath stopped. Hefelt the smash of truncheons on his elbows and iron-shod boots on hisshins; he saw himself grovelling on the floor, screaming for mercythrough broken teeth. He hardly thought of Julia. He could not fix hismind on her. He loved her and would not betray her; but that was only afact, known as he knew the rules of arithmetic. He felt no love forher, and he hardly even wondered what was happening to her. He thoughtoftener of O’Brien, with a flickering hope. O’Brien might know that hehad been arrested. The Brotherhood, he had said, never tried to saveits members. But there was the razor blade; they would send the razorblade if they could. There would be perhaps five seconds before theguard could rush into the cell. The blade would bite into him with asort of burning coldness, and even the fingers that held it would becut to the bone. Everything came back to his sick body, which shranktrembling from the smallest pain. He was not certain that he would usethe razor blade even if he got the chance. It was more natural to existfrom moment to moment, accepting another ten minutes’ life even withthe certainty that there was torture at the end of it.
Sometimes he tried to calculate the number of porcelain bricksin the walls of the cell. It should have been easy, but he always lostcount at some point or another. More often he wondered where he was,and what time of day it was. At one moment he felt certain that it wasbroad daylight outside, and at the next equally certain that it waspitch darkness. In this place, he knew instinctively, the lights wouldnever be turned out. It was the place with no darkness: he saw now whyO’Brien had seemed to recognize the allusion. In the Ministry of Lovethere were no windows. His cell might be at the heart of the buildingor against its outer wall; it might be ten floors below ground, orthirty above it. He moved himself mentally from place to place, andtried to determine by the feeling of his body whether he was perchedhigh in the air or buried deep underground.
There was a sound of marching boots outside. The steel dooropened with a clang. A young officer, a trim black- uniformed figurewho seemed to glitter all over with polished leather, and whose pale,straight-featured face was like a wax mask, stepped smartly through thedoorway. He motioned to the guards outside to bring in the prisonerthey were leading. The poet Ampleforth shambled into the cell. The doorclanged shut again.
Ampleforth made one or two uncertain movements from side toside, as though having some idea that there was another door to go outof, and then began to wander up and down the cell. He had not yetnoticed Winston’s presence. His troubled eyes were gazing at the wallabout a metre above the level of Winston’s head. He was shoeless;large, dirty toes were sticking out of the holes in his socks. He wasalso several days away from a shave. A scrubby beard covered his faceto the cheekbones, giving him an air of ruffianism that went oddly withhis large weak frame and nervous movements.
Winston roused hirnself a little from his lethargy. He mustspeak to Ampleforth, and risk the yell from the telescreen. It was evenconceivable that Ampleforth was the bearer of the razor blade.
‘Ampleforth,’ he said.
There was no yell from the telescreen. Ampleforth paused, mildly startled. His eyes focused themselves slowly on Winston.
‘Ah, Smith!’ he said. ‘You too!’
‘What are you in for?’
‘To tell you the truth—‘ He sat down awkwardly on the benchopposite Winston. ‘There is only one offence, is there not?’ he said.
‘And have you committed it?’
‘Apparently I have.’
He put a hand to his forehead and pressed his temples for a moment, as though trying to remember something.
‘These things happen,’ he began vaguely. ‘I have been able torecall one instance—a possible instance. It was an indiscretion,undoubtedly. We were producing a definitive edition of the poems ofKipling. I allowed the word “God” to remain at the end of a line. Icould not help it!’ he added almost indignantly, raising his face tolook at Winston. ‘It was impossible to change the line. The rhyme was“rod”. Do you realize that there are only twelve rhymes to “rod” in theentire language? For days I had racked my brains. There was no other rhyme.’
The expression on his face changed. The annoyance passed out of it andfor a moment he looked almost pleased. A sort of intellectual warmth,the joy of the pedant who has found out some useless fact, shonethrough the dirt and scrubby hair.
‘Has it ever occurred to you,’ he said, ‘that the whole historyof English poetry has been determined by the fact that the Englishlanguage lacks rhymes?’
No, that particular thought had never occurred to Winston. Nor,in the circumstances, did it strike him as very important orinteresting.
‘Do you know what time of day it is?’ he said.
Ampleforth looked startled again. ‘I had hardly thought aboutit. They arrested me—it could be two days ago—perhaps three.’ His eyesflitted round the walls, as though he half expected to find a windowsomewhere. ‘There is no difference between night and day in this place.I do not see how one can calculate the time.’
They talked desultorily for some minutes, then, withoutapparent reason, a yell from the telescreen bade them be silent.Winston sat quietly, his hands crossed. Ampleforth, too large to sit incomfort on the narrow bench, fidgeted from side to side, clasping hislank hands first round one knee, then round the other. The telescreenbarked at him to keep still. Time passed. Twenty minutes, an hour—itwas difficult to judge. Once more there was a sound of boots outside.Winston’s entrails contracted. Soon, very soon, perhaps in fiveminutes, perhaps now, the tramp of boots would mean that his own turnhad come.
The door opened. The cold-faced young officer stepped into the cell. With a brief movement of the hand he indicated Ampleforth.
‘Room 101,’ he said.
Ampleforth marched clumsily out between the guards, his face vaguely perturbed, but uncomprehending.
What seemed like a long time passed. The pain in Winston’s bellyhad revived. His mind sagged round and round on the same trick, like aball falling again and again into the same series of slots. He had onlysix thoughts. The pain in his belly; a piece of bread; the blood andthe screaming; O’Brien ; Julia; the razor blade. There was anotherspasm in his entrails, the heavy boots were approaching. As the dooropened, the wave of air that it created brought in a powerful smell ofcold sweat. Parsons walked into the cell. He was wearing khaki shortsand a sports-shirt.
This time Winston was startled into self-forgetfulness.
‘You here!’ he said.
Parsons gave Winston a glance in which there was neitherinterest nor surprise, but only misery. He began walking jerkily up anddown, evidently unable to keep still. Each time he straightened hispudgy knees it was apparent that they were trembling. His eyes had awide-open, staring look, as though he could not prevent himself fromgazing at something in the middle distance.
‘What are you in for?’ said Winston.
‘Thoughtcrime!’ said Parsons, almost blubbering. The tone of hisvoice implied at once a complete admission of his guilt and a sort ofincredulous horror that such a word could be applied to himself. Hepaused opposite Winston and began eagerly appealing to him: ‘You don’tthink they’ll shoot me, do you, old chap? They don’t shoot you if youhaven’t actually done anything—only thoughts, which you can’t help? Iknow they give you a fair hearing. Oh, I trust them for that! They’llknow my record, won’t they? You know what kind of chap I was. Not a badchap in my way. Not brainy, of course, but keen. I tried to do my bestfor the Party, didn’t I? I’ll get off with five years, don’t you think?Or even ten years? A chap like me could make himself pretty useful in alabour-camp. They wouldn’t shoot me for going off the rails just once?’
‘Are you guilty?’ said Winston.
‘Of course I’m guilty !’ cried Parsons with a servile glance atthe telescreen. ‘You don’t think the Party would arrest an innocentman, do you?’ His frog-like face grew calmer, and even took on aslightly sanctimonious expression. ‘Thoughtcrime is a dreadful thing,old man,’ he said sententiously. ‘It’s insidious. It can get hold ofyou without your even knowing it. Do you know how it got hold of me? Inmy sleep! Yes, that’s a fact. There I was, working away, trying to domy bit—never knew I had any bad stuff in my mind at all. And then Istarted talking in my sleep. Do you know what they heard me saying?’
He sank his voice, like someone who is obliged for medical reasons to utter an obscenity.
‘“Down with Big Brother!” Yes, I said that! Said it over andover again, it seems. Between you and me, old man, I’m glad they got mebefore it went any further. Do you know what I’m going to say to themwhen I go up before the tribunal? “Thank you,” I’m going to say, “thankyou for saving me before it was too late.”’
‘Who denounced you?’ said Winston.
‘It was my little daughter,’ said Parsons with a sort of dolefulpride. ‘She listened at the keyhole. Heard what I was saying, andnipped off to the patrols the very next day. Pretty smart for a nipperof seven, eh? I don’t bear her any grudge for it. In fact I’m proud ofher. It shows I brought her up in the right spirit, anyway.’
He made a few more jerky movements up and down, several times,casting a longing glance at the lavatory pan. Then he suddenly rippeddown his shorts.
‘Excuse me, old man,’ he said. ‘I can’t help it. It’s the waiting.’
He plumped his large posterior into the lavatory pan. Winston covered his face with his hands.
‘Smith!’ yelled the voice from the telescreen. ‘6079 Smith W! Uncover your face. No faces covered in the cells.’
Winston uncovered his face. Parsons used the lavatory, loudlyand abundantly. It then turned out that the plug was defective and thecell stank abominably for hours afterwards.
Parsons was removed. More prisoners came and went,mysteriously. One, a woman, was consigned to ‘Room 101’, and, Winstonnoticed, seemed to shrivel and turn a different colour when she heardthe words. A time came when, if it had been morning when he was broughthere, it would be afternoon; or if it had been afternoon, then it wouldbe midnight. There were six prisoners in the cell, men and women. Allsat very still. Opposite Winston there sat a man with a chinless,toothy face exactly like that of some large, harmless rodent. His fat,mottled cheeks were so pouched at the bottom that it was difficult notto believe that he had little stores of food tucked away there. Hispale-grey eyes flitted timorously from face to face and turned quicklyaway again when he caught anyone’s eye.
The door opened, and another prisoner was brought in whoseappearance sent a momentary chill through Winston. He was acommonplace, mean-looking man who might have been an engineer ortechnician of some kind. But what was startling was the emaciation ofhis face. It was like a skull. Because of its thinness the mouth andeyes looked disproportionately large, and the eyes seemed filled with amurderous, unappeasable hatred of somebody or something.
The man sat down on the bench at a little distance fromWinston. Winston did not look at him again, but the tormented,skull-like face was as vivid in his mind as though it had been straightin front of his eyes. Suddenly he realized what was the matter. The manwas dying of starvation. The same thought seemed to occur almostsimultaneously to everyone in the cell. There was a very faint stirringall the way round the bench. The eyes of the chinless man kept flittingtowards the skull-faced man, then turning guiltily away, then beingdragged back by an irresistible attraction. Presently he began tofidget on his seat. At last he stood up, waddled clumsily across thecell, dug down into the pocket of his overalls, and, with an abashedair, held out a grimy piece of bread to the skull-faced man.
There was a furious, deafening roar from the telescreen. Thechinless man jumped in his tracks. The skull-faced man had quicklythrust his hands behind his back, as though demonstrating to all theworld that he refused the gift.
‘Bumstead!’ roared the voice. ‘2713 Bumstead J.! Let fall that piece of bread!’
The chinless man dropped the piece of bread on the floor.
‘Remain standing where you are,’ said the voice. ‘Face the door. Make no movement.’
The chinless man obeyed. His large pouchy cheeks were quiveringuncontrollably. The door clanged open. As the young officer entered andstepped aside, there emerged from behind him a short stumpy guard withenormous arms and shoulders. He took his stand opposite the chinlessman, and then, at a signal from the officer, let free a frightful blow,with all the weight of his body behind it, full in the chinless man’smouth. The force of it seemed almost to knock him clear of the floor.His body was flung across the cell and fetched up against the base ofthe lavatory seat. For a moment he lay as though stunned, with darkblood oozing from his mouth and nose. A very faint whimpering orsqueaking, which seemed unconscious, came out of him. Then he rolledover and raised himself unsteadily on hands and knees. Amid a stream ofblood and saliva, the two halves of a dental plate fell out of hismouth.
The prisoners sat very still, their hands crossed on theirknees. The chinless man climbed back into his place. Down one side ofhis face the flesh was darkening. His mouth had swollen into ashapeless cherry-coloured mass with a black hole in the middle of it.
From time to time a little blood dripped on to the breast of hisoveralls. His grey eyes still flitted from face to face, more guiltilythan ever, as though he were trying to discover how much the othersdespised him for his humiliation.
The door opened. With a small gesture the officer indicated the skull-faced man.
‘Room 101,’ he said.
There was a gasp and a flurry at Winston’s side. The man had actuallyflung himself on his knees on the floor, with his hand claspedtogether.
‘Comrade! Officer!’ he cried. ‘You don’t have to take me tothat place! Haven’t I told you everything already? What else is it youwant to know? There’s nothing I wouldn’t confess, nothing! Just tell mewhat it is and I’ll confess straight off. Write it down and I’ll signit—anything! Not room 101 !’
‘Room 101,’ said the officer.
The man’s face, already very pale, turned a colour Winston wouldnot have believed possible. It was definitely, unmistakably, a shade ofgreen.
‘Do anything to me!’ he yelled. ‘You’ve been starving me forweeks. Finish it off and let me die. Shoot me. Hang me. Sentence me totwenty-five years. Is there somebody else you want me to give away?Just say who it is and I’ll tell you anything you want. I don’t carewho it is or what you do to them. I’ve got a wife and three children.The biggest of them isn’t six years old. You can take the whole lot ofthem and cut their throats in front of my eyes, and I’ll stand by andwatch it. But not Room 101!’
‘Room 101,’ said the officer.
The man looked frantically round at the other prisoners, asthough with some idea that he could put another victim in his ownplace. His eyes settled on the smashed face of the chinless man. Heflung out a lean arm.
‘That’s the one you ought to be taking, not me!’ he shouted.‘You didn’t hear what he was saying after they bashed his face. Give mea chance and I’ll tell you every word of it. He’sthe one that’s against the Party, not me.’ The guards stepped forward.The man’s voice rose to a shriek. ‘You didn’t hear him!’ he repeated.‘Something went wrong with the telescreen. He’s the one you want. Take him, not me!’
The two sturdy guards had stooped to take him by the arms. But just atthis moment he flung himself across the floor of the cell and grabbedone of the iron legs that supported the bench. He had set up a wordlesshowling, like an animal. The guards took hold of him to wrench himloose, but he clung on with astonishing strength. For perhaps twentyseconds they were hauling at him. The prisoners sat quiet, their handscrossed on their knees, looking straight in front of them. The howlingstopped; the man had no breath left for anything except hanging on.Then there was a different kind of cry. A kick from a guard’s boot hadbroken the fingers of one of his hands. They dragged him to his feet.
‘Room 101,’ said the officer.
The man was led out, walking unsteadily, with head sunken, nursing his crushed hand, all the fight had gone out of him.
A long time passed. If it had been midnight when the skull-facedman was taken away, it was morning: if morning, it was afternoon.Winston was alone, and had been alone for hours. The pain of sitting onthe narrow bench was such that often he got up and walked about,unreproved by the telescreen. The piece of bread still lay where thechinless man had dropped it. At the beginning it needed a hard effortnot to look at it, but presently hunger gave way to thirst. His mouthwas sticky and evil-tasting. The humming sound and the unvarying whitelight induced a sort of faintness, an empty feeling inside his head. Hewould get up because the ache in his bones was no longer bearable, andthen would sit down again almost at once because he was too dizzy tomake sure of staying on his feet. Whenever his physical sensations werea little under control the terror returned. Sometimes with a fadinghope he thought of O’Brien and the razor blade. It was thinkable thatthe razor blade might arrive concealed in his food, if he were everfed. More dimly he thought of Julia. Somewhere or other she wassuffering perhaps far worse than he. She might be screaming with painat this moment. He thought: ‘If I could save Julia by doubling my ownpain, would I do it? Yes, I would.’ But that was merely an intellectualdecision, taken because he knew that he ought to take it. He did notfeel it. In this place you could not feel anything, except pain andforeknowledge of pain. Besides, was it possible, when you were actuallysuffering it, to wish for any reason that your own pain shouldincrease? But that question was not answerable yet.
The boots were approaching again. The door opened. O’Brien came in.
Winston started to his feet. The shock of the sight had drivenall caution out of him. For the first time in many years he forgot thepresence of the telescreen.
‘They’ve got you too!’ he cried.
‘They got me a long time ago,’ said O’Brien with a mild, almostregretful irony. He stepped aside. from behind him there emerged abroad-chested guard with a long black truncheon in his hand.
‘You know him, Winston,’ said O’Brien. ‘Don’t deceive yourself. You did know it—you have always known it.’
Yes, he saw now, he had always known it. But there was no timeto think of that. All he had eyes for was the truncheon in the guard’shand. It might fall anywhere; on the crown, on the tip of the ear, onthe upper arm, on the elbow——
The elbow! He had slumped to his knees, almost paralysed,clasping the stricken elbow with his other hand. Everything hadexploded into yellow light. Inconceivable, inconceivable that one blowcould cause such pain! The light cleared and he could see the other twolooking down at him. The guard was laughing at his contortions. Onequestion at any rate was answered. Never, for any reason on earth,could you wish for an increase of pain. Of pain you could wish only onething: that it should stop. Nothing in the world was so bad as physicalpain. In the face of pain there are no heroes, no heroes, he thoughtover and over as he writhed on the floor, clutching uselessly at hisdisabled left arm.