From somewhere at the bottom of a passage the smell of
roasting coffee -- real coffee, not Victory Coffee -- came
floating out into the street. Winston paused involuntarily. For
perhaps two seconds he was back in the half-forgotten world of
his childhood. Then a door banged, seeming to cut off the smell
as abruptly as though it had been a sound.
He had walked several kilometres over pavements, and his
varicose ulcer was throbbing. This was the second time in three
weeks that he had missed an evening at the Community Centre: a
rash act, since you could be certain that the number of your
attendances at the Centre was carefully checked. In principle a
Party member had no spare time, and was never alone except in
bed. It was assumed that when he was not working, eating, or
sleeping he would be taking part in some kind of communal
recreation: to do anything that suggested a taste for solitude,
even to go for a walk by yourself, was always slightly
dangerous. There was a word for it in Newspeak: ownlife,
it was called, meaning individualism and eccentricity. But this
evening as he came out of the Ministry the balminess of the
April air had tempted him. The sky was a warmer blue than he
had seen it that year, and suddenly the long, noisy evening at
the Centre, the boring, exhausting games, the lectures, the
creaking camaraderie oiled by gin, had seemed intolerable. On
impulse he had turned away from the bus-stop and wandered off
into the labyrinth of London, first south, then east, then
north again, losing himself among unknown streets and hardly
bothering in which direction he was going.
'If there is hope,' he had written in the diary, 'it lies
in the proles.' The words kept coming back to him, statement of
a mystical truth and a palpable absurdity. He was somewhere in
the vague, brown-coloured slums to the north and east of what
had once been Saint Pancras Station. He was walking up a
cobbled street of little two-storey houses with battered
doorways which gave straight on the pavement and which were
somehow curiously suggestive of ratholes. There were puddles of
filthy water here and there among the cobbles. In and out of
the dark doorways, and down narrow alley-ways that branched off
on either side, people swarmed in astonishing numbers -- girls
in full bloom, with crudely lipsticked mouths, and youths who
chased the girls, and swollen waddling women who showed you
what the girls would be like in ten years' time, and old bent
creatures shuffling along on splayed feet, and ragged
barefooted children who played in the puddles and then
scattered at angry yells from their mothers. Perhaps a quarter
of the windows in the street were broken and boarded up. Most
of the people paid no attention to Winston; a few eyed him with
a sort of guarded curiosity. Two monstrous women with brick-red
forearms folded across thelr aprons were talking outside a
doorway. Winston caught scraps of conversation as he
approached.
' "Yes," I says to 'er, "that's all very well," I says.
"But if you'd of been in my place you'd of done the same as
what I done. It's easy to criticize," I says, "but you ain't
got the same problems as what I got." '
'Ah,' said the other, 'that's jest it. That's jest where
it is.'
The strident voices stopped abruptly. The women studied
him in hostile silence as he went past. But it was not
hostility, exactly; merely a kind of wariness, a momentary
stiffening, as at the passing of some unfamiliar animal. The
blue overalls of the Party could not be a common sight in a
street like this. Indeed, it was unwise to be seen in such
places, unless you had definite business there. The patrols
might stop you if you happened to run into them. 'May I see
your papers, comrade? What are you doing here? What time did
you leave work? Is this your usual way home?' -- and so on and
so forth. Not that there was any rule against walking home by
an unusual route: but it was enough to draw attention to you if
the Thought Police heard about it.
Suddenly the whole street was in commotion. There were
yells of warning from all sides. People were shooting into the
doorways like rabbits. A young woman leapt out of a doorway a
little ahead of Winston, grabbed up a tiny child playing in a
puddle, whipped her apron round it, and leapt back again, all
in one movement. At the same instant a man in a concertina-like
black suit, who had emerged from a side alley, ran towards
Winston, pointing excitedly to the sky.
'Steamer!' he yelled. 'Look out, guv'nor! Bang over'ead!
Lay down quick!'
'Steamer' was a nickname which, for some reason, the
proles applied to rocket bombs. Winston promptly flung himself
on his face. The proles were nearly always right when they gave
you a warning of this kind. They seemed to possess some kind of
instinct which told them several seconds in advance when a
rocket was coming, although the rockets supposedly travelled
faster than sound. Winston clasped his forearms above his head.
There was a roar that seemed to make the pavement heave; a
shower of light objects pattered on to his back. When he stood
up he found that he was covered with fragments of glass from
the nearest window.
He walked on. The bomb had demolished a group of houses
200 metres up the street. A black plume of smoke hung in the
sky, and below it a cloud of plaster dust in which a crowd was
already forming around the ruins. There was a little pile of
plaster lying on the pavement ahead of him, and in the middle
of it he could see a bright red streak. When he got up to it he
saw that it was a human hand severed at the wrist. Apart from
the bloody stump, the hand was so completely whitened as to
resemble a plaster cast.
He kicked the thing into the gutter, and then, to avoid
the crowd, turned down a side-street to the right. Within three
or four minutes he was out of the area which the bomb had
affected, and the sordid swarming life of the streets was going
on as though nothing had happened. It was nearly twenty hours,
and the drinking-shops which the proles frequented ('pubs',
they called them) were choked with customers. From their grimy
swing doors, endlessly opening and shutting, there came forth a
smell of urine, sawdust, and sour beer. In an angle formed by a
projecting house- front three men were standing very close
together, the middle one of them holding a folded-up newspaper
which the other two were studying over his shoulder. Even
before he was near enough to make out the expression on their
faces, Winston could see absorption in every line of their
bodies. It was obviously some serious piece of news that they
were reading. He was a few paces away from them when suddenly
the group broke up and two of the men were in violent
altercation. For a moment they seemed almost on the point of
blows.
'Can't you bleeding well listen to what I say? I tell you
no number ending in seven ain't won for over fourteen months!'
'Yes, it 'as, then!'
'No, it 'as not! Back 'ome I got the 'ole lot of 'em for
over two years wrote down on a piece of paper. I takes 'em down
reg'lar as the clock. An' I tell you, no number ending in
seven-'
'Yes, a seven 'as won! I could pretty near tell you
the bleeding number. Four oh seven, it ended in. It were in
February -- second week in February.'
'February your grandmother! I got it all down in black and
white. An' I tell you, no number-'
'Oh, pack it in!' said the third man.
They were talking about the Lottery. Winston looked back
when he had gone thirty metres. They were still arguing, with
vivid, passionate faces. The Lottery, with its weekly pay-out
of enormous prizes, was the one public event to which the
proles paid serious attention. It was probable that there were
some millions of proles for whom the Lottery was the principal
if not the only reason for remaining alive. It was their
delight, their folly, their anodyne, their intellectual
stimulant. Where the Lottery was concerned, even people who
could barely read and write seemed capable of intricate
calculations and staggering feats of memory. There was a whole
tribe of men who made a living simply by selling systems,
forecasts, and lucky amulets. Winston had nothing to do with
the running of the Lottery, which was managed by the Ministry
of Plenty, but he was aware (indeed everyone in the party was
aware) that the prizes were largely imaginary. Only small sums
were actually paid out, the winners of the big prizes being
non-existent persons. In the absence of any real
intercommunication between one part of Oceania and another,
this was not difficult to arrange.
But if there was hope, it lay in the proles. You had to
cling on to that. When you put it in words it sounded
reasonable: it was when you looked at the human beings passing
you on the pavement that it became an act of faith. The street
into which he had turned ran downhill. He had a feeling that he
had been in this neighbourhood before, and that there was a
main thoroughfare not far away. From somewhere ahead there came
a din of shouting voices. The street took a sharp turn and then
ended in a flight of steps which led down into a sunken alley
where a few stallkeepers were selling tired-looking vegetables.
At this moment Winston remembered where he was. The alley led
out into the main street, and down the next turning, not five
minutes away, was the junk-shop where he had bought the blank
book which was now his diary. And in a small stationer's shop
not far away he had bought his penholder and his bottle of ink.
He paused for a moment at the top of the steps. On the
opposite side of the alley there was a dingy little pub whose
windows appeared to be frosted over but in reality were merely
coated with dust. A very old man, bent but active, with white
moustaches that bristled forward like those of a prawn, pushed
open the swing door and went in. As Winston stood watching, it
occurred to him that the old man, who must be eighty at the
least, had already been middle- aged when the Revolution
happened. He and a few others like him were the last links that
now existed with the vanished world of capitalism. In the Party
itself there were not many people left whose ideas had been
formed before the Revolution. The older generation had mostly
been wiped out in the great purges of the fifties and sixties,
and the few who survived had long ago been terrified into
complete intellectual surrender. If there was any one still
alive who could give you a truthful account of conditions in
the early part of the century, it could only be a prole.
Suddenly the passage from the history book that he had copied
into his diary came back into Winston's mind, and a lunatic
impulse took hold of him. He would go into the pub, he would
scrape acquaintance with that old man and question him. He
would say to him: 'Tell me about your life when you were a boy.
What was it like in those days? Were things better than they
are now, or were they worse?'
Hurriedly, lest he should have time to become frightened,
he descended the steps and crossed the narrow street. It was
madness of course. As usual, there was no definite rule against
talking to proles and frequenting their pubs, but it was far
too unusual an action to pass unnoticed. If the patrols
appeared he might plead an attack of faintness, but it was not
likely that they would believe him. He pushed open the door,
and a hideous cheesy smell of sour beer hit him in the face. As
he entered the din of voices dropped to about half its volume.
Behind his back he could feel everyone eyeing his blue
overalls. A game of darts which was going on at the other end
of the room interrupted itself for perhaps as much as thirty
seconds. The old man whom he had followed was standing at the
bar, having some kind of altercation with the barman, a large,
stout, hook-nosed young man with enormous forearms. A knot of
others, standing round with glasses in their hands, were
watching the scene.
'I arst you civil enough, didn't I?' said the old man,
straightening his shoulders pugnaciously. 'You telling me you
ain't got a pint mug in the 'ole bleeding boozer?'
'And what in hell's name is a pint?' said the barman,
leaning forward with the tips of his fingers on the counter.
'Ark at 'im ! Calls 'isself a barman and don't know what a
pint is! Why, a pint's the 'alf of a quart, and there's four
quarts to the gallon. 'Ave to teach you the A, B, C next.'
'Never heard of 'em,' said the barman shortly. 'Litre and
half litre -- that's all we serve. There's the glasses on the
shelf in front of you.
'I likes a pint,' persisted the old man. 'You could 'a
drawed me off a pint easy enough. We didn't 'ave these bleeding
litres when I was a young man.'
'When you were a young man we were all living in the
treetops,' said the barman, with a glance at the other
customers.
There was a shout of laughter, and the uneasiness caused
by Winston's entry seemed to disappear. The old man's
whitestubbled face had flushed pink. He turned away, muttering
to himself, and bumped into Winston. Winston caught him gently
by the arm.
'May I offer you a drink?' he said.
'You're a gent,' said the other, straightening his
shoulders again. He appeared not to have noticed Winston's blue
overalls. 'Pint!' he added aggressively to the barman. 'Pint of
wallop.'
The barman swished two half-litres of dark-brown beer into
thick glasses which he had rinsed in a bucket under the
counter. Beer was the only drink you could get in prole pubs.
The proles were supposed not to drink gin, though in practice
they could get hold of it easily enough. The game of darts was
in full swing again, and the knot of men at the bar had begun
talking about lottery tickets. Winston's presence was forgotten
for a moment. There was a deal table under the window where he
and the old man could talk without fear of being overheard. It
was horribly dangerous, but at any rate there was no telescreen
in the room, a point he had made sure of as soon as he came in.
"E could 'a drawed me off a pint,' grumbled the old man as
he settled down behind a glass. 'A 'alf litre ain't enough. It
don't satisfy. And a 'ole litre's too much. It starts my
bladder running. Let alone the price.'
'You must have seen great changes since you were a young
man,' said Winston tentatively.
The old man's pale blue eyes moved from the darts board to
the bar, and from the bar to the door of the Gents, as though
it were in the bar-room that he expected the changes to have
occurred.
'The beer was better,' he said finally. 'And cheaper! When
I was a young man, mild beer -- wallop we used to call it --
was fourpence a pint. That was before the war, of course.'
'Which war was that?' said Winston.
'It's all wars,' said the old man vaguely. He took up his
glass, and his shoulders straightened again. "Ere's wishing you
the very best of 'ealth!'
In his lean throat the sharp-pointed Adam's apple made a
surprisingly rapid up-and-down movement, and the beer vanished.
Winston went to the bar and came back with two more
half-litres. The old man appeared to have forgotten his
prejudice against drinking a full litre.
'You are very much older than I am,' said Winston. 'You
must have been a grown man before I was born. You can remember
what it was like in the old days, before the Revolution. People
of my age don't really know anything about those times. We can
only read about them in books, and what it says in the books
may not be true. I should like your opinion on that. The
history books say that life before the Revolution was
completely different from what it is now. There was the most
terrible oppression, injustice, poverty worse than anything we
can imagine. Here in London, the great mass of the people never
had enough to eat from birth to death. Half of them hadn't even
boots on their feet. They worked twelve hours a day, they left
school at nine, they slept ten in a room. And at the same time
there were a very few people, only a few thousands -- the
capitalists, they were called -- who were rich and powerful.
They owned everything that there was to own. They lived in
great gorgeous houses with thirty servants, they rode about in
motor-cars and four-horse carriages, they drank champagne, they
wore top hats-'
The old man brightened suddenly.
'Top 'ats!' he said. 'Funny you should mention 'em. The
same thing come into my 'ead only yesterday, I dono why. I was
jest thinking, I ain't seen a top 'at in years. Gorn right out,
they 'ave. The last time I wore one was at my sister-in-law's
funeral. And that was -- well, I couldn't give you the date,
but it must'a been fifty years ago. Of course it was only 'ired
for the occasion, you understand.'
'It isn't very important about the top hats,' said Winston
patiently. 'The point is, these capitalists -- they and a few
lawyers and priests and so forth who lived on them -- were the
lords of the earth. Everything existed for their benefit. You
-- the ordinary people, the workers -- were their slaves. They
could do what they liked with you. They could ship you off to
Canada like cattle. They could sleep with your daughters if
they chose. They could order you to be flogged with something
called a cat-o'-nine tails. You had to take your cap off when
you passed them. Every capitalist went about with a gang of
lackeys who-'
The old man brightened again.
'Lackeys !' he said. 'Now there's a word I ain't 'eard
since ever so long. Lackeys! That reg'lar takes me back, that
does. I recollect oh, donkey's years ago -- I used to sometimes
go to 'Yde Park of a Sunday afternoon to 'ear the blokes making
speeches. Salvation Army, Roman Catholics, Jews, Indians -- all
sorts there was. And there was one bloke -- well, I couldn't
give you 'is name, but a real powerful speaker 'e was. 'E
didn't 'alf give it 'em! "Lackeys!" 'e says, "lackeys of the
bourgeoisie! Flunkies of the ruling class!" Parasites -- that
was another of them. And 'yenas -- 'e definitely called 'em
'yenas. Of course 'e was referring to the Labour Party, you
understand.'
Winston had the feeling that they were talking at
crosspurposes.
'What I really wanted to know was this,' he said. 'Do you
feel that you have more freedom now than you had in those days?
Are you treated more like a human being? In the old days, the
rich people, the people at the top-'
'The 'Ouse of Lords,' put in the old man reminiscently.
'The House of Lords, if you like. What I am asking is,
were these people able to treat you as an inferior, simply
because they were rich and you were poor? Is it a fact, for
instance, that you had to call them "Sir" and take off your cap
when you passed them?'
The old man appeared to think deeply. He drank off about a
quarter of his beer before answering.
'Yes,' he said. 'They liked you to touch your cap to 'em.
It showed respect, like. I didn't agree with it, myself, but I
done it often enough. Had to, as you might say.'
'And was it usual -- I'm only quoting what I've read in
history books -- was it usual for these people and their
servants to push you off the pavement into the gutter?'
'One of 'em pushed me once,' said the old man. 'I
recollect it as if it was yesterday. It was Boat Race night --
terribly rowdy they used to get on Boat Race night -- and I
bumps into a young bloke on Shaftesbury Avenue. Quite a gent,
'e was -- dress shirt, top 'at, black overcoat. 'E was kind of
zig-zagging across the pavement, and I bumps into 'im
accidental-like. 'E says, "Why can't you look where you're
going?" 'e says. I say, "Ju think you've bought the bleeding
pavement?" 'E says, "I'll twist your bloody 'ead off if you get
fresh with me." I says, "You're drunk. I'll give you in charge
in 'alf a minute," I says. An' if you'll believe me, 'e puts
'is 'and on my chest and gives me a shove as pretty near sent
me under the wheels of a bus. Well, I was young in them days,
and I was going to 'ave fetched 'im one, only-'
A sense of helplessness took hold of Winston. The old
man's memory was nothing but a rubbish-heap of details. One
could question him all day without getting any real
information. The party histories might still be true, after a
fashion: they might even be completely true. He made a last
attempt.
'Perhaps I have not made myself clear,' he said. 'What I'm
trying to say is this. You have been alive a very long time;
you lived half your life before the Revolution. In 1925, for
instance, you were already grown up. Would you say from what
you can remember, that life in 1925 was better than it is now,
or worse? If you could choose, would you prefer to live then or
now?'
The old man looked meditatively at the darts board. He
finished up his beer, more slowly than before. When he spoke it
was with a tolerant philosophical air, as though the beer had
mellowed him.
'I know what you expect me to say,' he said. 'You expect
me to say as I'd sooner be young again. Most people'd say
they'd sooner be young, if you arst' 'em. You got your 'ealth
and strength when you're young. When you get to my time of life
you ain't never well. I suffer something wicked from my feet,
and my bladder's jest terrible. Six and seven times a night it
'as me out of bed. On the other 'and, there's great advantages
in being a old man. You ain't got the same worries. No truck
with women, and that's a great thing. I ain't 'ad a woman for
near on thirty year, if you'd credit it. Nor wanted to, what's
more.'
Winston sat back against the window-sill. It was no use
going on. He was about to buy some more beer when the old man
suddenly got up and shuffled rapidly into the stinking urinal
at the side of the room. The extra half-litre was already
working on him. Winston sat for a minute or two gazing at his
empty glass, and hardly noticed when his feet carried him out
into the street again. Within twenty years at the most, he
reflected, the huge and simple question, 'Was life better
before the Revolution than it is now?' would have ceased once
and for all to be answerable. But in effect it was unanswerable
even now, since the few scattered survivors from the ancient
world were incapable of comparing one age with another. They
remembered a million useless things, a quarrel with a workmate,
a hunt for a lost bicycle pump, the expression on a long-dead
sister's face, the swirls of dust on a windy morning seventy
years ago: but all the relevant facts were outside the range of
their vision. They were like the ant, which can see small
objects but not large ones. And when memory failed and written
records were falsified -- when that happened, the claim of the
Party to have improved the conditions of human life had got to
be accepted, because there did not exist, and never again could
exist, any standard against which it could be tested.
At this moment his train of thought stopped abruptly. He
halted and looked up. He was in a narrow street, with a few
dark little shops, interspersed among dwelling-houses.
Immediately above his head there hung three discoloured metal
balls which looked as if they had once been gilded. He seemed
to know the place. Of course! He was standing outside the
junk-shop where he had bought the diary.
A twinge of fear went through him. It had been a
sufficiently rash act to buy the book in the beginning, and he
had sworn never to come near the place again. And yet the
instant that he allowed his thoughts to wander, his feet had
brought him back here of their own accord. It was precisely
against suicidal impulses of this kind that he had hoped to
guard himself by opening the diary. At the same time he noticed
that although it was nearly twenty-one hours the shop was still
open. With the feeling that he would be less conspicuous inside
than hanging about on the pavement, he stepped through the
doorway. If questioned, he could plausibly say that he was
trying to buy razor blades.
The proprietor had just lighted a hanging oil lamp which
gave off an unclean but friendly smell. He was a man of perhaps
sixty, frail and bowed, with a long, benevolent nose, and mild
eyes distorted by thick spectacles. His hair was almost white,
but his eyebrows were bushy and still black. His spectacles,
his gentle, fussy movements, and the fact that he was wearing
an aged jacket of black velvet, gave him a vague air of
intellectuality, as though he had been some kind of literary
man, or perhaps a musician. His voice was soft, as though
faded, and his accent less debased than that of the majority of
proles.
'I recognized you on the pavement,' he said immediately.
'You're the gentleman that bought the young lady's keepsake
album. That was a beautiful bit of paper, that was. Cream-
laid, it used to be called. There's been no paper like that
made for -- oh, I dare say fifty years.' He peered at Winston
over the top of his spectacles. 'Is there anything special I
can do for you? Or did you just want to look round?'
'I was passing,' said Winston vaguely. 'I just looked in.
I don't want anything in particular.'
'It's just as well,' said the other, 'because I don't
suppose I could have satisfied you.' He made an apologetic
gesture with his softpalmed hand. 'You see how it is; an empty
shop, you might say. Between you and me, the antique trade's
just about finished. No demand any longer, and no stock either.
Furniture, china, glass it's all been broken up by degrees. And
of course the metal stuff's mostly been melted down. I haven't
seen a brass candlestick in years.'
The tiny interior of the shop was in fact uncomfortably
full, but there was almost nothing in it of the slightest
value. The floorspace was very restricted, because all round
the walls were stacked innumerable dusty picture-frames. In the
window there were trays of nuts and bolts, worn-out chisels,
penknives with broken blades, tarnished watches that did not
even pretend to be in going order, and other miscellaneous
rubbish. Only on a small table in the corner was there a litter
of odds and ends -- lacquered snuffboxes, agate brooches, and
the like -- which looked as though they might include something
interesting. As Winston wandered towards the table his eye was
caught by a round, smooth thing that gleamed softly in the
lamplight, and he picked it up.
It was a heavy lump of glass, curved on one side, flat on
the other, making almost a hemisphere. There was a peculiar
softness, as of rainwater, in both the colour and the texture
of the glass. At the heart of it, magnified by the curved
surface, there was a strange, pink, convoluted object that
recalled a rose or a sea anemone.
'What is it?' said Winston, fascinated.
'That's coral, that is,' said the old man. 'It must have
come from the Indian Ocean. They used to kind of embed it in
the glass. That wasn't made less than a hundred years ago.
More, by the look of it.'
'It's a beautiful thing,' said Winston.
'It is a beautiful thing,' said the other appreciatively.
'But there's not many that'd say so nowadays.' He coughed.
'Now, if it so happened that you wanted to buy it, that'd cost
you four dollars. I can remember when a thing like that would
have fetched eight pounds, and eight pounds was -- well, I
can't work it out, but it was a lot of money. But who cares
about genuine antiques nowadays even the few that's left?'
Winston immediately paid over the four dollars and slid
the coveted thing into his pocket. What appealed to him about
it was not so much its beauty as the air it seemed to possess
of belonging to an age quite different from the present one.
The soft, rainwatery glass was not like any glass that he had
ever seen. The thing was doubly attractive because of its
apparent uselessness, though he could guess that it must once
have been intended as a paperweight. It was very heavy in his
pocket, but fortunately it did not make much of a bulge. It was
a queer thing, even a compromising thing, for a Party member to
have in his possession. Anything old, and for that matter
anything beautiful, was always vaguely suspect. The old man had
grown noticeably more cheerful after receiving the four
dollars. Winston realized that he would have accepted three or
even two.
'There's another room upstairs that you might care to take
a look at,' he said. 'There's not much in it. Just a few
pieces. We'll do with a light if we're going upstairs.'
He lit another lamp, and, with bowed back, led the way
slowly up the steep and worn stairs and along a tiny passage,
into a room which did not give on the street but looked out on
a cobbled yard and a forest of chimney-pots. Winston noticed
that the furniture was still arranged as though the room were
meant to be lived in. There was a strip of carpet on the floor,
a picture or two on the walls, and a deep, slatternly arm-chair
drawn up to the fireplace. An old-fashioned glass clock with a
twelve-hour face was ticking away on the mantelpiece. Under the
window, and occupying nearly a quarter of the room, was an
enormous bed with the mattress still on it.
'We lived here till my wife died,' said the old man half
apologetically. 'I'm selling the furniture off by little and
little. Now that's a beautiful mahogany bed, or at least it
would be if you could get the bugs out of it. But I dare say
you'd find it a little bit cumbersome.
He was holdlng the lamp high up, so as to illuminate the
whole room, and in the warm dim light the place looked
curiously inviting. The thought flitted through Winston's mind
that it would probably be quite easy to rent the room for a few
dollars a week, if he dared to take the risk. It was a wild,
impossible notion, to be abandoned as soon as thought of; but
the room had awakened in him a sort of nostalgia, a sort of
ancestral memory. It seemed to him that he knew exactly what it
felt like to sit in a room like this, in an arm-chair beside an
open fire with your feet in the fender and a kettle on the hob;
utterly alone, utterly secure, with nobody watching you, no
voice pursuing you, no sound except the singing of the kettle
and the friendly ticking of the clock.
'There's no telescreen!' he could not help murmuring.
'Ah,' said the old man, 'I never had one of those things.
Too expensive. And I never seemed to feel the need of it,
somehow. Now that's a nice gateleg table in the corner there.
Though of course you'd have to put new hinges on it if you
wanted to use the flaps.'
There was a small bookcase in the other corner, and
Winston had already gravitated towards it. It contained nothing
but rubbish. The hunting-down and destruction of books had been
done with the same thoroughness in the prole quarters as
everywhere else. It was very unlikely that there existed
anywhere in Oceania a copy of a book printed earlier than 1960.
The old man, still carrying the lamp, was standing in front of
a picture in a rosewood frame which hung on the other side of
the fireplace, opposite the bed.
'Now, if you happen to be interested in old prints at all
-' he began delicately.
Winston came across to examine the picture. It was a steel
engraving of an oval building with rectangular windows, and a
small tower in front. There was a railing running round the
building, and at the rear end there was what appeared to be a
statue. Winston gazed at it for some moments. It seemed vaguely
familiar, though he did not remember the statue.
'The frame's fixed to the wall,' said the old man, 'but I
could unscrew it for you, I dare say.'
'I know that building,' said Winston finally. 'It's a ruin
now. It's in the middle of the street outside the Palace of
Justice.'
'That's right. Outside the Law Courts. It was bombed in --
oh, many years ago. It was a church at one time, St Clement
Danes, its name was.' He smiled apologetically, as though
conscious of saying something slightly ridiculous, and added:
'Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St Clement's!'
'What's that?' said Winston.
'Oh-"Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St Clement's."
That was a rhyme we had when I was a little boy. How it goes on
I don't remember, but I do know it ended up, "Here comes a
candle to light you to bed, Here comes a chopper to chop off
your head." It was a kind of a dance. They held out their arms
for you to pass under, and when they came to "Here comes a
chopper to chop off your head" they brought their arms down and
caught you. It was just names of churches. All the London
churches were in it -- all the principal ones, that is.'
Winston wondered vaguely to what century the church
belonged. It was always difficult to determine the age of a
London building. Anything large and impressive, if it was
reasonably new in appearance, was automatically claimed as
having been built since the Revolution, while anything that was
obviously of earlier date was ascribed to some dim period
called the Middle Ages. The centuries of capitalism were held
to have produced nothing of any value. One could not learn
history from architecture any more than one could learn it from
books. Statues, inscriptions, memorial stones, the names of
streets -- anything that might throw light upon the past had
been systematically altered.
'I never knew it had been a church,' he said.
'There's a lot of them left, really,' said the old man,
'though they've been put to other uses. Now, how did that rhyme
go? Ah! I've got it!
"Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St Clement's,
You owe me three farthings, say the bells of St Martin's
-- "there, now, that's as far as I can get.
A farthing, thatwas a small copper coin,
looked something like a cent.'
'Where was St Martin's?' said Winston.
'St Martin's ? That's still standing. It's in Victory
Square, alongside the picture gallery. A building with a kind
of a triangular porch and pillars in front, and a big flight of
steps.'
Winston knew the place well. It was a museum used for
propaganda displays of various kinds -- scale models of rocket
bombs and Floating Fortresses, waxwork tableaux illustrating
enemy atrocities, and the like.
'St Martin's-in-the-Fields it used to be called,'
supplemented the old man, 'though I don't recollect any fields
anywhere in those parts.'
Winston did not buy the picture. It would have been an
even more incongruous possession than the glass paperweight,
and impossible to carry home, unless it were taken out of its
frame. But he lingered for some minutes more, talking to the
old man, whose name, he discovered, was not Weeks-as one might
have gathered from the inscription over the shop- front -- but
Charrington. Mr Charrington, it seemed, was a widower aged
sixty-three and had inhabited this shop for thirty years.
Throughout that time he had been intending to alter the name
over the window, but had never quite got to the point of doing
it. All the while that they were talking the half-remembered
rhyme kept running through Winston's head. Oranges and lemons
say the bells of St Clement's, You owe me three farthings, say
the bells of St Martin's ! It was curious, but when you said it
to yourself you had the illusion of actually hearing bells, the
bells of a lost London that still existed somewhere or other,
disguised and forgotten. From one ghostly steeple after another
he seemed to hear them pealing forth. Yet so far as he could
remember he had never in real life heard church bells ringing.
He got away from Mr Charrington and went down the stairs
alone, so as not to let the old man see him reconnoitring the
street before stepping out of the door. He had already made up
his mind that after a suitable interval -- a month, say -- he
would take the risk of visiting the shop again. It was perhaps
not more dangerous than shirking an evening at the Centre. The
serious piece of folly had been to come back here in the first
place, after buying the diary and without knowing whether the
proprietor of the shop could be trusted. However-!
Yes, he thought again, he would come back. He would buy
further scraps of beautiful rubbish. He would buy the engraving
of St Clement Danes, take it out of its frame, and carry it
home concealed under the jacket of his overalls. He would drag
the rest of that poem out of Mr Charrington's memory. Even the
lunatic project of renting the room upstairs flashed
momentarily through his mind again. For perhaps five seconds
exaltation made him careless, and he stepped out on to the
pavement without so much as a preliminary glance through the
window. He had even started humming to an improvised tune
Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St Clement's,
You owe me three farthings, say the
Suddenly his heart seemed to turn to ice and his bowels
to water. A figure in blue overalls was coming down the
pavement, not ten metres away. It was the girl from the Fiction
Department, the girl with dark hair. The light was failing, but
there was no difficulty in recognizing her. She looked him
straight in the face, then walked quickly on as though she had
not seen him.
For a few seconds Winston was too paralysed to move. Then
he turned to the right and walked heavily away, not noticing
for the moment that he was going in the wrong direction. At any
rate, one question was settled. There was no doubting any
longer that the girl was spying on him. She must have followed
him here, because it was not credible that by pure chance she
should have happened to be walking on the same evening up the
same obscure backstreet, kilometres distant from any quarter
where Party members lived. It was too great a coincidence.
Whether she was really an agent of the Thought Police, or
simply an amateur spy actuated by officiousness, hardly
mattered. It was enough that she was watching him. Probably she
had seen him go into the pub as well.
It was an effort to walk. The lump of glass in his pocket
banged against his thigh at each step, and he was half minded
to take it out and throw it away. The worst thing was the pain
in his belly. For a couple of minutes he had the feeling that
he would die if he did not reach a lavatory soon. But there
would be no public lavatories in a quarter like this. Then the
spasm passed, leaving a dull ache behind.
The street was a blind alley. Winston halted, stood for
several seconds wondering vaguely what to do, then turned round
and began to retrace his steps. As he turned it occurred to him
that the girl had only passed him three minutes ago and that by
running he could probably catch up with her. He could keep on
her track till they were in some quiet place, and then smash
her skull in with a cobblestone. The piece of glass in his
pocket would be heavy enough for the job. But he abandoned the
idea immediately, because even the thought of making any
physical effort was unbearable. He could not run, he could not
strike a blow. Besides, she was young and lusty and would
defend herself. He thought also of hurrying to the Community
Centre and staying there till the place closed, so as to
establish a partial alibi for the evening. But that too was
impossible. A deadly lassitude had taken hold of him. All he
wanted was to get home quickly and then sit down and be quiet.
It was after twenty-two hours when he got back to the
flat. The lights would be switched off at the main at
twenty-three thirty. He went into the kitchen and swallowed
nearly a teacupful of Victory Gin. Then he went to the table in
the alcove, sat down, and took the diary out of the drawer. But
he did not open it at once. From the telescreen a brassy female
voice was squalling a patriotic song. He sat staring at the
marbled cover of the book, trying without success to shut the
voice out of his consciousness.
It was at night that they came for you, always at night.
The proper thing was to kill yourself before they got you.
Undoubtedly some people did so. Many of the disappearances were
actually suicides. But it needed desperate courage to kill
yourself in a world where firearms, or any quick and certain
poison, were completely unprocurable. He thought with a kind of
astonishment of the biological uselessness of pain and fear,
the treachery of the human body which always freezes into
inertia at exactly the moment when a special effort is needed.
He might have silenced the dark-haired girl if only he had
acted quickly enough: but precisely because of the extremity of
his danger he had lost the power to act. It struck him that in
moments of crisis one is never fighting against an external
enemy, but always against one's own body. Even now, in spite of
the gin, the dull ache in his belly made consecutive thought
impossible. And it is the same, he perceived, in all seemingly
heroic or tragic situations. On the battlefield, in the torture
chamber, on a sinking ship, the issues that you are fighting
for are always forgotten, because the body swells up until it
fills the universe, and even when you are not paralysed by
fright or screaming with pain, life is a moment-to-moment
struggle against hunger or cold or sleeplessness, against a
sour stomach or an aching tooth.
He opened the diary. It was important to write something
down. The woman on the telescreen had started a new song. Her
voice seemed to stick into his brain like jagged splinters of
glass. He tried to think of O'Brien, for whom, or to whom, the
diary was written, but instead he began thinking of the things
that would happen to him after the Thought Police took him
away. It would not matter if they killed you at once. To be
killed was what you expected. But before death (nobody spoke of
such things, yet everybody knew of them) there was the routine
of confession that had to be gone through: the grovelling on
the floor and screaming for mercy, the crack of broken bones,
the smashed teeth, and bloody clots of hair.
Why did you have to endure it, since the end was always
the same? Why was it not possible to cut a few days or weeks
out of your life? Nobody ever escaped detection, and nobody
ever failed to confess. When once you had succumbed to
thoughtcrime it was certain that by a given date you would be
dead. Why then did that horror, which altered nothing, have to
lie embedded in future time?
He tried with a little more success than before to summon
up the image of O'Brien. 'We shall meet in the place where
there is no darkness,' O'Brien had said to him. He knew what it
meant, or thought he knew. The place where there is no darkness
was the imagined future, which one would never see, but which,
by foreknowledge, one could mystically share in. But with the
voice from the telescreen nagging at his ears he could not
follow the train of thought further. He put a cigarette in his
mouth. Half the tobacco promptly fell out on to his tongue, a
bitter dust which was difficult to spit out again. The face of
Big Brother swam into his mind, displacing that of O'Brien.
Just as he had done a few days earlier, he slid a coin out of
his pocket and looked at it. The face gazed up at him, heavy,
calm, protecting: but what kind of smile was hidden beneath the
dark moustache? Like a leaden knell the words came back at him:
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
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