"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 an-swered.For a moment he seemed even to have been deprived of the power of speech.His tongue worked soundlessly,forming the open-ing syllables first of one word,then of the other,over and over a-gain.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 dif ferent person? We may be obliged to give him a new identity.His face,his movements,the shape of his hands,the color of his hair—even his voice would be different.And you yourself might have be-come a different person.Our surgeons can alter people beyond rec-ognition.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.Jul-ia 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 toward 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 ciga-rettes,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 friend-liness in his manner.He was memorizing their appearance,but he felt no interest in them,or appeared to feel none.It occurred to Win-ston that a synthetic face was perhaps incapable of changing its ex-pression.Without speaking or giving any kind of salutation,Martin went out,closing the door silently behind him.O'Brien was stroll ing 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 hun-dred 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 una-voidable.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 move-ments.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 understand-ing 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 al-tered faces,it was with a faint air of persiflage."This is unavoida-ble,"his voice seemed to say;"this is what we have got to do,un-flinchingly.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 Brother-hood.No doubt you have formed your own picture of it.You have i-magined,probably,a huge underworld of conspirators,meeting se-cretly in cellars,scribbling messages on walls,recognizing one an-other by code words 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 very 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 Brother-hood cannot be wiped out because it is not an organization in the or-dinary sense.Nothing holds it together except an idea which is inde-structible.You will never have anything to sustain you except the i-dea.You will get no comradeship and no encouragement.When fi-nally you are caught,you will get no help.We never help our mem-bers.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 possi-ble except to extend the area of sanity little by little.We cannot act collectively.We can only spread our knowledge outwards from indi-vidual 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 im-portant,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 ap-peared 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 pos-sible.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 with-out 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 Gold-stein'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 dark-ness?"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 ques-tion 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.r 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 Oran-ges and lemons,say the bells of St.Clement's?"
Again O'Brien nodded.With a sort of grave courtesy he com-pleted 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 tab-lets."
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 in-terrupted and important work on behalf of the Party.
Chapter 9
W inston was Igelatinous with fatigue.Gelatinous was theright word.t had come into his head spontaneously.Hisbody seemed to have not only the weakness of a j elly,but its translucency.He felt that if he held up his hand he would be able to see the light through it.All the blood and lymph had been drained out of him by an enormous debauch of work,leaving only a frail structure of nerves,bones,and skin.All sensations seemed to be magnified.His overalls fretted his shoulders,the pavement tick-led his feet,even the opening and closing of a hand was an effort that made his j oints creak.
He had worked more than ninety hours in five days.So had everyone else in the Ministry.Now it was all over,and he had liter-ally nothing to do,no Party work of any deion,until tomorrow morning.He could spend 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 the direction of Mr.Charrington's shop,keep-ing one eye open for the patrols,but irrationally convinced that this afternoon there was no danger of anyone interfering with him.The heavy brief case that he was carrying bumped against his knee at each step,sending a tingling sensation 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 spee-ches,the shouting,the singing,the banners,the posters,the films, the waxworks,the rolling of drums and squealing of trumpets,the tramp of marching feet,the grinding of the caterpillars of tanks,the roar of massed planes,the booming of guns—after six days of this, when the great orgasm was quivering to its climax and the general hatred of Eurasia had boiled up into such delirium that if the crowd could have got their hands on the two thousand Eurasian war crimi-nals who were to be publicly hanged on the last day of the proceed-ings,they would unquestionably have torn them to pieces—at just this moment it had been announced that Oceania was not after all at war with Eurasia.Oceania was 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 every-where at once,that Eastasia and not Eurasia was the enemy.Win-ston was taking part in a demonstration in one of the central Lon-don squares at the moment when it happened.It was night,and the white faces and the scarlet banners were luridly floodlit.The square was packed with several thousand people,including a block of about a thousand schoolchildren in the uniform of the Spies.On a scarlet-draped platform an orator of the Inner Party,a small lean man with disproportionately long arms and a large bald skull over which a few lank locks straggled, was haranguing the crowd.A little Rumpelstiltskin figure,contorted with hatred,he gripped the neck of the microphone with one hand while the other,enormous at the end of a bony arm,clawed the air menacingly above his head.His voice,made metallic by the amplifiers,boomed forth an endless cat-alogue of atrocities,massacres,deportations,lootings,rapings,tor-ture of prisoners,bombing of civilians,lying propaganda,unjust ag-gressions,broken treaties.It was almost impossible to listen to him without being first convinced and then maddened.At every few mo-ments the fury of the crowd boiled over and the voice of the speaker was drowned by a wild beast like roaring that rose uncontrollably from thousands of throats.The most savage yells of all came from the schoolchildren.The speech had been proceeding for perhaps twenty minutes when a messenger hurried onto the platform and a scrap of paper was slipped into the speaker's hand.He unrolled and read it without pausing in his speech.Nothing altered in his voice or manner,or in the content of what he was saying,but suddenly the names were different.Without words said,a wave of understanding rippled through the crowd.Oceania was at war with Eastasia! The next moment there was a tremendous commotion.The banners and posters with which the square was decorated were all wrong! Quite half of them had the wrong faces on them.It was sabotage! The a-gents of Goldstein had been at work! There was a riotous interlude while posters were ripped from the walls,banners torn to shreds and trampled underfoot.The Spies performed prodigies of activity in clambering over the rooftops and cutting the streamers that flut-tered from the chimneys.But within two or three minutes it was all over.The orator,still gripping the neck of the microphone,his shoulders hunched forward,his free hand clawing at the air,had gone straight on with his speech.One minute more,and the feral roars of rage were again bursting from the crowd.The Hate contin-ued exactly as before,except that the target had been changed.
The thing that impressed Winston in looking back was that the speaker had switched from one line to the other actually in mid-sen-tence,not only without a pause,but without even breaking the syn-tax.But at the moment he had other things to preoccupy him.It was during the moment of disorder while the posters were being torn down that a man whose face he did not see had tapped him on the shoulder and said,"Excuse me,I think you've dropped your brief case."He took the brief case abstractedly,without speaking.He knew that it would be days before he had an opportunity to look in-side it.The instant that the demonstration was over he went straight to the Ministry of Truth,though the time was now nearly twenty-three hours.The entire staff of the Ministry had done like-wise.The orders already issuing from the telescreen,recalling them to their posts,were hardly necessary.
Oceania was at war with Eastasia:Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.A large part of the political literature of five years was now completely obsolete.Reports and records of all kinds,newspapers,books, pamphlets,films,sound tracks,photographs—all had to be rectified at lightning speed.Although no directive was ever issued,it was known that the chiefs of the Department intended that within one week no reference to the war with Eurasia,or the alliance with Eastasia,should remain in existence anywhere.The work was overwhelming,all the more so be-cause the processes that it involved could not be called by their true names.Everyone in the Records Department worked eighteen hours in the twenty-four,with two three-hour snatches of sleep.Mattresses were brought up from the cellars and pitched all over the corridors;meals consisted of sandwiches and Victory Coffee wheeled round on trolleys by attendants from the canteen.Each time that Winston broke off for one of his spells of sleep he tried to leave his desk clear of work,and each time that he crawled back, sticky-eyed and aching,it was to find that another shower of paper cylinders had covered the desk like a snowdrift,half-burying the speakwrite and overflowing onto the floor,so that the first j ob was always to stack them into a neat-enough pile to give him room to work.What was worst of all was that the work was by no means purely mechanical. Often it was enough merely to substitute one name for another,but any detailed report of events demanded care and imagination.Even the geographical knowledge that one needed in transferring the war from one part of the world to another was considerable.
By the third day his eyes ached unbearably and his spectacles needed wiping every few minutes.It was like struggling with some crushing physical task,something which one had the right to refuse and which one was nevertheless neurotically anxious to accomplish. In so far as he had time to remember it,he was not troubled by the fact that every word he murmured into the speakwrite,every stroke of his inkpencil,was a deliberate lie.He was as anxious as anyone else in the Department that the forgery should be perfect.On the morning of the sixth day the dribble of cylinders slowed down.For as much as half an hour nothing came out of the tube;then one more cylinder,then nothing.Everywhere at about the same time the work was easing off.A deep and as it were secret sigh went through the Department.A mighty deed,which could never be mentioned, had been achieved.It was now impossible for any human being to prove by documentary evidence that the war with Eurasia had ever happened.At twelve hundred it was unexpectedly announced that all workers in the Ministry were free till tomorrow morning.Winston, still carrying the brief case containing the book,which had remained between his feet while he worked and under his body while he slept,went home,shaved himself,and almost fell asleep in his bath, although the water was barely more than tepid.
With a sort of voluptuous creaking in his joints he climbed the stair above 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 of water for coffee.Julia would arrive presently; mean-while there was the book.He sat down in the sluttish armchair and undid the straps of the brief case.
A heavy black volume,amateurishly bound,with no name or title on the cover.The print also looked slightly irregular.The pages were worn at the edges,and fell apart,easily,as though the book had passed through many hands.The inion on the title page ran:
THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF OLIGARCHICAL COLLECTIVISM by EMMANUEL GOLDSTEIN
[Winston began reading.]
Chapter ⅠIGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.
Throughout recorded time,and probably since the end of the Neolithic Age,there have been three kinds of people in the world, the High,the Middle,and the Low.They have been subdivided in many ways,they have borne countless different names,and their relative numbers,as well as their attitude toward one another,have varied from age to age; but the essential structure of society has never altered.Even after enormous upheavals and seemingly irrevo-cable changes,the same pattern has always reasserted itself,just as a gyroscope will always return to equilibrium,however far it is pushed one way or the other.
The aims of these three groups are entirely irreconcilable...
Winston stopped reading,chiefly in order to appreciate the fact that he was reading,in comfort and safety.He was alone:no tele-screen,no ear at the keyhole,no nervous impulse to glance over his shoulder or cover the page with his hand.The sweet summer air played against his cheek.From somewhere far away there floated the faint shouts of children; in the room itself there was no sound except the insect voice of the clock.He settled deeper into the arm chair and put his feet up on the fender.It was bliss,it was eternity. Suddenly,as one sometimes does with a book of which one knows that one will ultimately read and reread every word,he opened it at a different place and found himself at third chapter.He went on reading:
Chapter III WAR IS PEACE
The splitting-up of the world into three great superstates was an event which could be and indeed was foreseen before the middle of the twentieth century.With the absorption of Europe by Russia and the British Empire by the United States,two of the three existing powers,Eurasia and Oceania,were already effectively in being.The third,Eastasia,only emerged as a distinct unit after another decade of confused fighting.The frontiers between the three superstates are in some places arbitrary,and in others they fluctuate according to the fortunes of war,but in general they follow geographical lines. Eurasia comprises the whole of the northern part of the European and Asiatic land-mass,from Portugal to the Bering Strait.Oceania comprises the Americas,the Atlantic islands including the British Isles,Australasia,and the southern portion of Africa.Eastasia, smaller than the others and with a less definite western frontier, comprises China and the countries to the south of it,the Japanese islands and a large but fluctuating portion of Manchuria,Mongolia, and Tibet.
In one combination or another,these three superstates are per-manently at war,and have been so for the past twenty-five years. War,however,is no longer the desperate,annihilating struggle that it was in the early decades of the twentieth century.It is a warfare of limited aims between combatants who are unable to destroy one another,have no material cause for fighting, and are not divided by any genuine ideological difference.This is not to say that either the conduct of war,or the prevailing attitude toward it,has become less bloodthirsty or more chivalrous.On the contrary,war hysteria is continuous and universal in all countries,and such acts as raping, looting,the slaughter of children,the reduction of whole popula-tions to slavery,and reprisals against prisoners which extend even to boiling and burying alive,are looked upon as normal,and,when they are committed by one's own side and not by the enemy,meri-torious.But in a physical sense war involves very small numbers of people,mostly highly trained specialists,and causes comparatively few casualties.The fighting,when there is any,takes place on the vague frontiers whose whereabouts the average man can only guess at,or round the Floating Fortresses which guard strategic spots on the sea lanes.In the cenrtes of civilization war means no more than a continuous shortage of consumption goods,and the occasional crash of a rocket bomb which may cause a few scores of deaths.War has in fact changed its character.More exactly,the reasons for which war is waged have changed in their order of importance.Motives which were already present to some small extent in the great wars of the early twentieth century have now become dominant and are consciously recognized and acted upon.