ちうぃき

Chapter 7



Winston had woken up with his eyes full of tears. Julia rolled sleepily
against him, murmuring something that might have been 'What's the matter?'

'I dreamt--' he began, and stopped short. It was too complex to be put
into words. There was the dream itself, and there was a memory connected
with it that had swum into his mind in the few seconds after waking.

He lay back with his eyes shut, still sodden in the atmosphere of the
dream. It was a vast, luminous dream in which his whole life seemed to
stretch out before him like a landscape on a summer evening after rain.
It had all occurred inside the glass paperweight, but the surface of the
glass was the dome of the sky, and inside the dome everything was flooded
with clear soft light in which one could see into interminable distances.
The dream had also been comprehended by--indeed, in some sense it had
consisted in--a gesture of the arm made by his mother, and made again
thirty years later by the Jewish woman he had seen on the news film,
trying to shelter the small boy from the bullets, before the helicopter
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, and within
a few moments of waking the cluster of small events surrounding it had all
come back. It was a memory that he must have deliberately pushed out of
his consciousness over many years. He was not certain of the date, but he
could not have been less than ten years old, possibly twelve, when it had
happened.

His father had disappeared some time earlier, how much earlier he could
not remember. He remembered better the rackety, uneasy circumstances of
the time: the periodical panics about air-raids and the sheltering in Tube
stations, the piles of rubble everywhere, the unintelligible proclamations
posted at street corners, the gangs of youths in shirts all the same
colour, the enormous queues outside the bakeries, the intermittent
machine-gun fire in the distance--above all, the fact that there was
never enough to eat. He remembered long afternoons spent with other boys
in scrounging round dustbins and rubbish heaps, picking out the ribs of
cabbage leaves, potato peelings, sometimes even scraps of stale breadcrust
from which they carefully scraped away the cinders; and also in waiting
for the passing of trucks which travelled over a certain route and were
known to carry cattle feed, and which, when they jolted over the bad
patches in the road, sometimes spilt a few fragments of oil-cake.

When his father disappeared, his mother did not show any surprise or any
violent grief, but a sudden change came over her. She seemed to have
become completely spiritless. It was evident even to Winston that she was
waiting for something that she knew must happen. She did everything that
was needed--cooked, washed, mended, made the bed, swept the floor, dusted
the mantelpiece--always very slowly and with a curious lack of superfluous
motion, like an artist's lay-figure moving of its own accord. Her large
shapely body seemed to relapse naturally into stillness. For hours at a
time she would sit almost immobile on the bed, nursing his young sister,
a tiny, ailing, very silent child of two or three, with a face made simian
by thinness. Very occasionally she would take Winston in her arms and
press him against her for a long time without saying anything. He was
aware, in spite of his youthfulness and selfishness, that this was somehow
connected with the never-mentioned thing that was about to happen.

He remembered the room where they lived, a dark, close-smelling room that
seemed half filled by a bed with a white counterpane. There was a gas ring
in the fender, and a shelf where food was kept, and on the landing outside
there was a brown earthenware sink, common to several rooms. He remembered
his mother's statuesque body bending over the gas ring to stir at something
in a saucepan. Above all he remembered his continuous hunger, and the
fierce sordid battles at mealtimes. He would ask his mother naggingly,
over and over again, why there was not more food, he would shout and storm
at her (he even remembered the tones of his voice, which was beginning to
break prematurely and sometimes boomed in a peculiar way), or he would
attempt a snivelling note of pathos in his efforts to get more than his
share. His mother was quite ready 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 gave him he invariably demanded more. At every meal
she would beseech him not to be selfish and to remember that his little
sister was sick and also needed food, but it was no use. He would cry out
with rage when she stopped ladling, he would try to wrench the saucepan
and spoon out of her hands, he would grab bits from his sister's plate.
He knew that he was starving the other two, but he could not help it; he
even felt that he had a right to do it. The clamorous hunger in his belly
seemed to justify him. Between meals, if his mother did not stand guard,
he was constantly pilfering at the wretched store of food on the shelf.

One day a chocolate ration was issued. There had been no such issue for
weeks or months past. He remembered quite clearly that precious little
morsel of chocolate. It was a two-ounce slab (they still talked about
ounces in those days) between the three of them. It was obvious that it
ought to be divided into three equal parts. Suddenly, as though he were
listening to somebody else, Winston heard himself demanding in a loud
booming voice that he should be given the whole piece. His mother told him
not to be greedy. There was a long, nagging argument that went round 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 with large, mournful eyes. In the
end his mother broke off three-quarters of the chocolate and gave it to
Winston, giving the other quarter to his sister. The little girl took hold
of it and looked at it dully, perhaps not knowing what it was. Winston
stood watching her for a moment. Then with a sudden swift spring he had
snatched the piece of chocolate out of 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 fixed on
his face. Even now he was thinking about the thing, he did not know what
it was that was on the point of happening. His sister, conscious of having
been robbed of something, had set up a feeble wail. His mother drew her
arm round the child and pressed its face against her breast. Something in
the gesture told him that his sister was dying. He turned and fled down
the stairs, with the chocolate growing sticky in his hand.

He never saw his mother again. After he had devoured the chocolate he felt
somewhat ashamed of himself and hung about in the streets for several
hours, until hunger drove him home. When he came back his mother had
disappeared. This was already becoming normal at that time. Nothing was
gone from the room except his mother and his sister. They had not taken
any clothes, not even his mother's overcoat. To this day he did not know
with any certainty that his mother was dead. It was perfectly possible
that she had merely been sent to a forced-labour camp. As for his sister,
she might have been removed, like Winston himself, to one of the colonies
for homeless children (Reclamation Centres, they were called) which had
grown up as a result of the civil war, or she might have been sent to the
labour camp along with his mother, or simply left somewhere or other
to die.

The dream was still vivid in his mind, especially the enveloping protecting
gesture of the arm in which its whole meaning seemed to be contained. His
mind went back to another dream of two months ago. Exactly as his mother
had sat on the dingy white-quilted bed, with the child clinging to her, so
she had sat in the sunken ship, far underneath him, and drowning deeper
every minute, but still looking up at him through the darkening water.

He told Julia the story of his mother's disappearance. Without opening her
eyes she rolled over and settled herself into a more comfortable position.

'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 sleep again.
He would have liked to continue talking about his mother. He did not
suppose, from what he could remember of her, that she had been an unusual
woman, still less an intelligent one; and yet she had possessed a kind of
nobility, a kind of purity, simply because the standards that she obeyed
were private ones. Her feelings were her own, and could not be altered
from outside. It would not have occurred to her that an action which is
ineffectual thereby becomes meaningless. If you loved someone, you loved
him, and when you had nothing else to give, you still gave him love. When
the last of the chocolate was gone, his mother had clasped the child in
her arms. It was no use, it changed nothing, it did not produce more
chocolate, it did not avert the child's death or her own; but it seemed
natural to her to do it. The refugee 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. The terrible thing that the Party had done was to
persuade you that mere impulses, mere feelings, were of no account, while
at the same time robbing you of all power over the material world. When
once you were in the grip of the Party, what you felt or did not feel,
what you did or refrained from doing, made literally no difference.
Whatever happened you vanished, and neither you nor your actions were ever
heard of again. You were lifted clean out of the stream of history. And
yet to the people of only two generations ago this would not have seemed
all-important, because they were not attempting to alter history. They
were governed by private loyalties which they did not question. What
mattered were individual relationships, and a completely helpless gesture,
an embrace, a tear, a word spoken to a dying man, could have value in
itself. The proles, it suddenly occurred to him, had remained in this
condition. They were not loyal to a party or a country or an idea, they
were loyal to one another. For the first time in his life he did not
despise the proles or think of them merely as an inert force which would
one day spring to life and regenerate the world. The proles had stayed
human. They had not become hardened inside. They had held on to the
primitive emotions which he himself had to re-learn by conscious effort.
And in thinking this he remembered, without apparent relevance, how a few
weeks ago he had seen a severed hand lying on the pavement and had kicked
it into the gutter as though it had been a cabbage-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 here
before 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're young.
You look normal and innocent. If you keep clear of people like me, 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 alone we
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 I confess, they'll
shoot you, and if I refuse to confess, they'll shoot you just the same.
Nothing that I can do or say, or stop myself from saying, will put off
your death for as much as five minutes. Neither of us will even know
whether the other is alive or dead. We shall be utterly without power of
any kind. The one thing that matters is that we shouldn't betray one
another, although even that can't make the slightest 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 or do
doesn't matter: only feelings matter. If they could make me stop loving
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 could spy
upon you night and day, but if you kept your head you could still outwit
them. With all their cleverness they had never mastered the secret of
finding out what another human being was thinking. Perhaps that was less
true when you were actually in their hands. One did not know what happened
inside the Ministry of Love, but it was possible to guess: tortures, drugs,
delicate instruments that registered your nervous reactions, gradual
wearing-down by sleeplessness and solitude and persistent questioning.
Facts, at any rate, could not be kept hidden. They could be tracked down
by enquiry, they could be squeezed out of you by torture. But if the object
was not to stay alive but to stay human, what difference did it ultimately
make? They could not alter your feelings: for that matter you could not
alter them yourself, even if you wanted to. They could lay bare in the
utmost detail everything that you had done or said or thought; but the
inner heart, whose workings were mysterious even to yourself, remained
impregnable.




Chapter 8



They had done it, they had done it at last!

The room they were standing in was long-shaped and softly lit. The
telescreen was dimmed to a low murmur; the richness of the dark-blue carpet
gave one the impression of treading on velvet. At the far end of the room
O'Brien was sitting at a table under a green-shaded lamp, with a mass of
papers on either side of him. He had not bothered to look up when the
servant showed Julia and Winston in.

Winston's heart was thumping so hard that he doubted whether he would be
able to speak. They had done it, they had done it at last, was all he
could think. It had been a rash act to come here at all, and sheer folly
to arrive together; though it was true that they had come by different
routes and only met on O'Brien's doorstep. But merely to walk into such a
place needed an effort of the nerve. It was only on very rare occasions
that one saw inside the dwelling-places of the Inner Party, or even
penetrated into the quarter of the town where they lived. The whole
atmosphere of the huge block of flats, the richness and spaciousness of
everything, the unfamiliar smells of good food and good tobacco, the
silent and incredibly rapid lifts sliding up and down, the white-jacketed
servants hurrying to and fro--everything was intimidating. Although he had
a good pretext for coming here, he was haunted at every step by the fear
that a black-uniformed guard would suddenly appear from round the corner,
demand his papers, and order him to get out. O'Brien's servant, however,
had admitted the two of them without demur. He was a small, dark-haired
man in a white jacket, with a diamond-shaped, completely expressionless
face which might have been that of a Chinese. The passage down which he
led them was softly carpeted, with cream-papered walls and white
wainscoting, all exquisitely clean. That too was intimidating. Winston
could not remember ever to have seen a passageway whose walls were not
grimy from the contact of human bodies.

O'Brien had a slip of paper between his fingers and seemed to be studying
it intently. His heavy face, bent down so that one could see the line of
the nose, looked both formidable and intelligent. For perhaps twenty
seconds he sat without stirring. Then he pulled the speakwrite towards
him and rapped out a message in the hybrid jargon of the Ministries:

'Items one comma five comma seven approved fullwise stop suggestion
contained item six doubleplus ridiculous verging crimethink cancel stop
unproceed constructionwise antegetting plusfull estimates machinery
overheads stop end message.'

He rose deliberately from his chair and came towards them across the
soundless carpet. A little of the official atmosphere seemed to have fallen
away from him with the Newspeak words, but his expression was grimmer than
usual, as though he were not pleased at being disturbed. The terror that
Winston already felt was suddenly shot through by a streak of ordinary
embarrassment. It seemed to him quite possible that he had simply made a
stupid mistake. For what evidence had he in reality that O'Brien was any
kind of political conspirator? Nothing but a flash of the eyes and a single
equivocal remark: beyond that, only his own secret imaginings, founded on
a dream. He could not even fall back on the pretence that he had come to
borrow the dictionary, because in that case Julia's presence was impossible
to explain. As O'Brien passed the telescreen a thought seemed to strike
him. He stopped, turned aside and pressed a switch on the wall. There was
a sharp snap. The voice had stopped.

Julia uttered a tiny sound, a sort of squeak of surprise. Even in the midst
of his panic, Winston was too much taken aback to be able to hold his
tongue.

'You can turn it off!' he said.

'Yes,' said O'Brien, 'we can turn it off. We have that privilege.'

He was opposite them now. His solid form towered over the pair of them,
and the expression on his face was still indecipherable. He was waiting,
somewhat sternly, for Winston to speak, but about what? Even now it was
quite conceivable that he was simply a busy man wondering irritably why he
had been interrupted. Nobody spoke. After the stopping of the telescreen
the room seemed deadly silent. The seconds marched past, enormous. With
difficulty Winston continued to keep his eyes fixed on O'Brien's. Then
suddenly the grim face broke down into what might have been the beginnings
of a smile. With his characteristic gesture O'Brien resettled his
spectacles on his nose.

'Shall I say it, or will you?' he said.

'I will say it,' said Winston promptly. 'That thing is really turned off?'

'Yes, everything is turned off. We are alone.'

'We have come here because----'

He paused, realizing for the first time the vagueness of
his own motives. Since he did not in fact know what kind of
help he expected from O'Brien, it was not easy to say why he
had come here. He went on, conscious that what he was saying
must sound both feeble and pretentious:

'We believe that there is some kind of conspiracy, some kind of secret
organization working against the Party, and that you are involved in it.
We want to join it and work for it. We are enemies of the Party. We
disbelieve in the principles of Ingsoc. We are thought-criminals. We are
also adulterers. I tell you this because we want to put ourselves at your
mercy. If you want us to incriminate ourselves in any other way, we are
ready.'

He stopped and glanced over his shoulder, with the feeling that the door
had opened. Sure enough, the little yellow-faced servant had come in
without knocking. Winston saw that he was carrying a tray with a decanter
and glasses.

'Martin is one of us,' said O'Brien impassively. 'Bring the drinks over
here, Martin. Put them on the round table. Have we enough chairs? Then
we may as well sit down and talk in comfort. Bring a chair for yourself,
Martin. This is business. You can stop being a servant for the next ten
minutes.'

The little man sat down, quite at his ease, and yet still with a
servant-like air, the air of a valet enjoying a privilege. Winston
regarded him out of the corner of his eye. It struck him that the man's
whole life was playing a part, and that he felt it to be dangerous to
drop his assumed personality even for a moment. O'Brien took the decanter
by the neck and filled up the glasses with a dark-red liquid. It aroused
in Winston dim memories of something seen long ago on a wall or a
hoarding--a vast bottle composed of electric lights which seemed to move
up and down and pour its contents into a glass. Seen from the top the
stuff looked almost black, but in the decanter it gleamed like a ruby.
It had a sour-sweet smell. He saw Julia pick up her glass and sniff at
it with frank curiosity.

'It is called wine,' said O'Brien with a faint smile. 'You will have read
about it in books, no doubt. Not much of it gets to the Outer Party, I am
afraid.' His face grew solemn again, and he raised his glass: 'I think it
is fitting that we should begin by drinking a health. To our Leader: To
Emmanuel Goldstein.'

Winston took up his glass with a certain eagerness. Wine was a thing he
had read and dreamed about. Like the glass paperweight or Mr Charrington's
half-remembered rhymes, it belonged to the vanished, romantic past, the
olden time as he liked to call it in his secret thoughts. For some reason
he had always thought of wine as having an intensely sweet taste, like
that of blackberry jam and an immediate intoxicating effect. Actually,
when he came to swallow it, the stuff was distinctly disappointing. The
truth was that after years of gin-drinking he could barely taste it. He
set down the empty glass.

'Then there is such a person as Goldstein?' he said.

'Yes, there is such a person, and he is alive. Where, I do not know.'

'And the conspiracy--the organization? Is it real? It is not simply an
invention of the Thought Police?'

'No, it is real. The Brotherhood, we call it. You will never learn much
more about the Brotherhood than that it exists and that you belong to it.
I will come back to that presently.' He looked at his wrist-watch. 'It is
unwise even for members of the Inner Party to turn off the telescreen for
more than half an hour. You ought not to have come here together, and
you will have to leave separately. You, comrade'--he bowed his head to
Julia--'will leave first. We have about twenty minutes at our disposal.
You will understand that I must start by asking you certain questions.
In general terms, what are you prepared to do?'

'Anything that we are capable of,' said Winston.

O'Brien had turned himself a little in his chair so that he was facing
Winston. He almost ignored Julia, seeming to take it for granted that
Winston could speak for her. For a moment the lids flitted down over his
eyes. He began asking his questions in a low, expressionless voice, as
though this were a routine, a sort of catechism, most of whose answers
were known to him already.

'You are prepared to give your lives?'

'Yes.'

'You are prepared to commit murder?'

'Yes.'

'To commit acts of sabotage which may cause the death of hundreds of
innocent people?'

'Yes.'

'To betray your country to foreign powers?'

'Yes.'

'You are prepared to cheat, to forge, to blackmail, to corrupt the minds
of children, to distribute habit-forming drugs, to encourage prostitution,
to disseminate venereal diseases--to do anything which is likely to cause
demoralization and weaken the power of the Party?'

'Yes.'

'If, for example, it would somehow serve our interests to throw sulphuric
acid in a child's face--are you prepared to do that?'

'Yes.'

'You are prepared to lose your identity and live out the rest of your life
as a waiter or a dock-worker?'

'Yes.'

'You are prepared to commit suicide, if and when we order you to do so?'

'Yes.'

'You are prepared, the two of you, to separate and never see one another
again?'

'No!' broke in Julia.

It appeared to Winston that a long time passed before he answered. For a
moment he seemed even to have been deprived of the power of speech. His
tongue worked soundlessly, forming the opening syllables first of one word,
then of the other, over and over again. Until he had said it, he did not
know which word he was going to say. 'No,' he said finally.

'You did well to tell me,' said O'Brien. 'It is necessary for us to know
everything.'

He turned himself toward Julia and added in a voice with somewhat more
expression in it:

'Do you understand that even if he survives, it may be as a different
person? We may be obliged to give him a new identity. His face, his
movements, the shape of his hands, the colour of his hair--even his voice
would be different. And you yourself might have become a different person.
Our surgeons can alter people beyond recognition. Sometimes it is
necessary. Sometimes we even amputate a limb.'

Winston could not help snatching another sidelong glance at Martin's
Mongolian face. There were no scars that he could see. Julia had turned a
shade paler, so that her freckles were showing, but she faced O'Brien
boldly. She murmured something that seemed to be assent.

'Good. Then that is settled.'

There was a silver box of cigarettes on the table. With a rather
absent-minded air O'Brien pushed them towards the others, took one himself,
then stood up and began to pace slowly to and fro, as though he could think
better standing. They were very good cigarettes, very thick and
well-packed, with an unfamiliar silkiness in the paper. O'Brien looked at
his wrist-watch again.

'You had better go back to your Pantry, Martin,' he said. 'I shall switch
on in a quarter of an hour. Take a good look at these comrades' faces
before you go. You will be seeing them again. I may not.'

Exactly as they had done at the front door, the little man's dark eyes
flickered over their faces. There was not a trace of friendliness in his
manner. He was memorizing their appearance, but he felt no interest in
them, or appeared to feel none. It occurred to Winston that a synthetic
face was perhaps incapable of changing its expression. Without speaking
or giving any kind of salutation, Martin went out, closing the door
silently behind him. O'Brien was strolling up and down, one hand in the
pocket of his black overalls, the other holding his cigarette.

'You understand,' he said, 'that you will be fighting in the dark. You
will always be in the dark. You will receive orders and you will obey them,
without knowing why. Later I shall send you a book from which you will
learn the true nature of the society we live in, and the strategy by which
we shall destroy it. When you have read the book, you will be full members
of the Brotherhood. But between the general aims that we are fighting for
and the immediate tasks of the moment, you will never know anything. I
tell you that the Brotherhood exists, but I cannot tell you whether it
numbers a hundred members, or ten million. From your personal knowledge
you will never be able to say that it numbers even as many as a dozen. You
will have three or four contacts, who will be renewed from time to time as
they disappear. As this was your first contact, it will be preserved. When
you receive orders, they will come from me. If we find it necessary to
communicate with you, it will be through Martin. When you are finally
caught, you will confess. That is unavoidable. But you will have very
little to confess, other than your own actions. You will not be able to
betray more than a handful of unimportant people. Probably you will not
even betray me. By that time I may be dead, or I shall have become a
different person, with a different face.'

He continued to move to and fro over the soft carpet. In spite of the
bulkiness of his body there was a remarkable grace in his movements. It
came out even in the gesture with which he thrust a hand into his pocket,
or manipulated a cigarette. More even than of strength, he gave an
impression of confidence and of an understanding tinged by irony. However
much in earnest he might be, he had nothing of the single-mindedness that
belongs to a fanatic. When he spoke of murder, suicide, venereal disease,
amputated limbs, and altered faces, it was with a faint air of persiflage.
'This is unavoidable,' his voice seemed to say; 'this is what we have got
to do, unflinchingly. But this is not what we shall be doing when life is
worth living again.' A wave of admiration, almost of worship, flowed out
from Winston towards O'Brien. For the moment he had forgotten the shadowy
figure of Goldstein. When you looked at O'Brien's powerful shoulders and
his blunt-featured face, so ugly and yet so civilized, it was impossible
to believe that he could be defeated. There was no stratagem that he was
not equal to, no danger that he could not foresee. Even Julia seemed to
be impressed. She had let her cigarette go out and was listening intently.
O'Brien went on:

'You will have heard rumours of the existence of the Brotherhood. No doubt
you have formed your own picture of it. You have imagined, probably, a
huge underworld of conspirators, meeting secretly in cellars, scribbling
messages on walls, recognizing one another by codewords or by special
movements of the hand. Nothing of the kind exists. The members of the
Brotherhood have no way of recognizing one another, and it is impossible
for any one member to be aware of the identity of more than a few others.
Goldstein himself, if he fell into the hands of the Thought Police, could
not give them a complete list of members, or any information that would
lead them to a complete list. No such list exists. The Brotherhood cannot
be wiped out because it is not an organization in the ordinary sense.
Nothing holds it together except an idea which is indestructible. You
will never have anything to sustain you, except the idea. You will get no
comradeship and no encouragement. When finally you are caught, you will
get no help. We never help our members. At most, when it is absolutely
necessary that someone should be silenced, we are occasionally able to
smuggle a razor blade into a prisoner's cell. You will have to get used
to living without results and without hope. You will work for a while,
you will be caught, you will confess, and then you will die. Those are
the only results that you will ever see. There is no possibility that any
perceptible change will happen within our own lifetime. We are the dead.
Our only true life is in the future. We shall take part in it as handfuls
of dust and splinters of bone. But how far away that future may be, there
is no knowing. It might be a thousand years. At present nothing is possible
except to extend the area of sanity little by little. We cannot act
collectively. We can only spread our knowledge outwards from individual to
individual, generation after generation. In the face of the Thought Police
there is no other way.'

He halted and looked for the third time at his wrist-watch.

'It is almost time for you to leave, comrade,' he said to Julia. 'Wait.
The decanter is still half full.'

He filled the glasses and raised his own glass by the stem.

'What shall it be this time?' he said, still with the same faint
suggestion of irony. 'To the confusion of the Thought Police? To the
death of Big Brother? To humanity? To the future?'

'To the past,' said Winston.

'The past is more important,' agreed O'Brien gravely.

They emptied their glasses, and a moment later Julia stood up to go.
O'Brien took a small box from the top of a cabinet and handed her a flat
white tablet which he told her to place on her tongue. It was important,
he said, not to go out smelling of wine: the lift attendants were very
observant. As soon as the door had shut behind her he appeared to forget
her existence. He took another pace or two up and down, then stopped.

'There are details to be settled,' he said. 'I assume that you have a
hiding-place of some kind?'

Winston explained about the room over Mr Charrington's shop.

'That will do for the moment. Later we will arrange something else for you.
It is important to change one's hiding-place frequently. Meanwhile I shall
send you a copy of THE BOOK'--even O'Brien, Winston noticed, seemed to
pronounce the words as though they were in italics--'Goldstein's book, you
understand, as soon as possible. It may be some days before I can get hold
of one. There are not many in existence, as you can imagine. The Thought
Police hunt them down and destroy them almost as fast as we can produce
them. It makes very little difference. The book is indestructible. If
the last copy were gone, we could reproduce it almost word for word. Do
you carry a brief-case to work with you?' he added.

'As a rule, yes.'

'What is it like?'

'Black, very shabby. With two straps.'

'Black, two straps, very shabby--good. One day in the fairly near
future--I cannot give a date--one of the messages among your morning's
work will contain a misprinted word, and you will have to ask for a
repeat. On the following day you will go to work without your brief-case.
At some time during the day, in the street, a man will touch you on the
arm and say "I think you have dropped your brief-case." The one he gives
you will contain a copy of Goldstein's book. You will return it within
fourteen days.'

They were silent for a moment.

'There are a couple of minutes before you need go,' said O'Brien. 'We
shall meet again--if we do meet again----'

Winston looked up at him. 'In the place where there is no darkness?'
he said hesitantly.

O'Brien nodded without appearance of surprise. 'In the place where there
is no darkness,' he said, as though he had recognized the allusion. 'And
in the meantime, is there anything that you wish to say before you leave?
Any message? Any question?.'

Winston thought. There did not seem to be any further question that he
wanted to ask: still less did he feel any impulse to utter high-sounding
generalities. Instead of anything directly connected with O'Brien or the
Brotherhood, there came into his mind a sort of composite picture of the
dark bedroom where his mother had spent her last days, and the little room
over Mr Charrington's shop, and the glass paperweight, and the steel
engraving in its rosewood frame. Almost at random he said:

'Did you ever happen to hear an old rhyme that begins "Oranges and lemons,
say the bells of St Clement's"?'

Again O'Brien nodded. With a sort of grave courtesy he completed the
stanza:


  'Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St Clement's,
  You owe me three farthings, say the bells of St Martin's,
  When will you pay me? say the bells of Old Bailey,
  When I grow rich, say the bells of Shoreditch.'


'You knew the last line!' said Winston.

'Yes, I knew the last line. And now, I am afraid, it is time for you to go.
But wait. You had better let me give you one of these tablets.'

As Winston stood up O'Brien held out a hand. His powerful grip crushed
the bones of Winston's palm. At the door Winston looked back, but O'Brien
seemed already to be in process of putting him out of mind. He was waiting
with his hand on the switch that controlled the telescreen. Beyond him
Winston could see the writing-table with its green-shaded lamp and the
speakwrite and the wire baskets deep-laden with papers. The incident was
closed. Within thirty seconds, it occurred to him, O'Brien would be back
at his interrupted and important work on behalf of the Party.