"Ah,well—what I mean to say,shows the right spirit,doesn't it?Mischievous little beggars they are,both of them,but talk about keenness! All they think about is the Spies,and the war,of course.D'you know what that little girl of mine did last Saturday,when her troop was on a hike out Berkhamsted way? She got two other girls to go with her,slipped off from the hike,and spent the whole afternoon following a strange man.They kept on his tail for two hours,right through the woods,and then,when they got into Am-ersham,handed him over to the patrols."
"What did they do that for?"said Winston,somewhat taken aback.Parsons went on triumphantly:
"My kid made sure he was some kind of enemy agent—might have been dropped by parachute,for instance.But here's the point, old boy.What do you think put her onto him in the first place? She spotted he was wearing a funny kind of shoes—said she'd never seen anyone wearing shoes like that before.So the chances were he was a foreigner.Pretty smart for a nipper of seven,eh?"
"What happened to the man?"said Winston.
"Ah,that I couldn't say,of course.But I wouldn't be altogeth-er surprised if—"Parsons made the motion of aiming a rifle,and clicked his tongue for the explosion.
"Good,"said Syme abstractedly,without looking up from his strip of paper.
"Of course we can't afford to take chances,"agreed Winston dutifully.
"What I mean to say,there is a war on,"said Parsons.
As though in confirmation of this,a trumpet call floated from the telescreen just above their heads.However,it was not the proc-lamation of a military victory this time,but merely an announce-ment from the Ministry of Plenty.
"Comrades!"cried an eager youthful voice."Attention,com-rades! We have glorious news for you.We have won the battle for production! Returns now completed of the output of all classes of consumption goods show that the standard of living has risen by no less than twenty per cent over the past year.All over Oceania this morning there were irrepressible spontaneous demonstrations when workers marched out of factories and offices and paraded through the streets with banners voicing their gratitude to Big Brother for the new,happy life which his wise leadership has bestowed upon us. Here are some of the completed figures.Foodstuffs—"
The phrase"our new,happy life"recurred several times.It had been a favorite of late with the Ministry of Plenty.Parsons,his at-tention caught by the trumpet call,sat listening with a sort of ga-ping solemnity,a sort of edified boredom.He could not follow the figures,but he was aware that they were in some way a cause for satisfaction.He had lugged out a huge and filthy pipe which was al-ready half full of charred tobacco.With the tobacco ration at a hun-dred grams a week it was seldom possible to fill a pipe up to the top.Winston was smoking a Victory Cigarette which he held care-fully horizontal.The new ration did not start till tomorrow and he had only four cigarettes left.For the moment he had shut his ears to the remoter noises and was listening to the stuff that streamed out of the telescreen.It appeared that there had even been demonstra-tions to thank Big Brother for raising the chocolate ration to twenty grams a week.And only yesterday,he reflected,it had been an-nounced that the ration was to be reduced to twenty gramm a week.Was it possible that they could swallow that,after only twen-ty-four hours? Yes,they swallowed it.Parsons swallowed it easily, with the stupidity of an animal.The eyeless creature at the other ta-ble swallowed it fanatically,passionately,with a furious desire to track down,denounce,and vaporize anyone who should suggest that last week the ration had been thirty grams.Syme,too—in some more complex way,involving doublethink—Syme swallowed it.Was he,then,alone in the possession of a memory?
The fabulous statistics continued to pour out of the telescreen. As compared with last year there was more food,more clothes, more houses,more furniture,more cooking pots,more fuel,more ships,more helicopters,more books,more babies—more of every-thing except disease,crime,and insanity.Year by year and minute by minute,everybody and everything was whizzing rapidly up-wards.As Syme had done earlier, Winston had taken up his spoon and was dabbling in the pale-coloured gravy that dribbled across the table,drawing a long streak of it out into a pattern.He meditated resentfully on the physical texture of life.Had it always been like this? Had food always tasted like this? He looked a round the can-teen.A low-ceilinged,crowded room,its walls grimy from the con-tact of innumerable bodies;battered metal tables and chairs,placed so close together that you sat with elbows touching;bent spoons, dented trays,coarse white mugs;all surfaces greasy,grime in every crack;and a sourish,composite smell of bad gin and bad coffee and metallic stew and dirty clothes.Always in your stomach and in your skin there was a sort of protest,a feeling that you had been cheated of something that you had a right to.It was true that he had no memories of anything greatly different.In any time that he could ac-curately remember,there had never been quite enough to eat,one had never had socks or underclothes that were not full of holes,fur-niture had always been battered and rickety,rooms underheated, Tube trains crowded,houses falling to pieces,bread dark-colored, tea a rarity,coffee filthy-tasting,cigarettes insufficient—nothing cheap and plentiful except synthetic gin.And though,of course,it grew worse as one's body aged,was it not a sign that this was not the natural order of things,if one's heart sickened at the discomfort and dirt and scarcity,the interminable winters,the stickiness of one's socks,the lifts that never worked,the cold water,the gritty soap,the cigarettes that came to pieces,the food with its strange e-vil tastes? Why should one feel it to be intolerable unless one had some kind of ancestral memory that things had once been different?
He looked round the canteen again.Nearly everyone was ugly, and would still have been ugly even if dressed otherwise than in the uniform blue overalls.On the far side of the room,sitting at a table alone,a small,curiously beetlelike man was drinking a cup of cof-fee,his little eyes darting suspicious glances from side to side.How easy it was,thought Winston,if you did not look about you,to be-lieve that the physical type set up by the Party as an ideal—tall muscular youths and deep-bosomed maidens,blond-haired,vital, sunburnt,carefree—existed and even predominated.Actually,so far as he could judge,the majority of people in Airstrip One were small,dark,and ill-favoured.It was curious how that beetlelike type proliferated in the Ministries:little dumpy men,growing stout very early in life,with short legs,swift scuttling movements,and fat in-scrutable faces with very small eyes.It was the type that seemed to flourish best under the dominion of the Party.
The announcement from the Ministry of Plenty ended on an-other trumpet call and gave way to tinny music.Parsons,stirred to vague enthusiasm by the bombardment of figures,took his pipe out of his mouth.
"The Ministry of Plenty's certainly done a good job this year,"he said with a knowing shake of his head."By the way, Smith old boy,I suppose you haven't got any razor blades you can let me have?"
"Not one,"said Winston."I've been using the same blade for six weeks myself."
"Ah,well—just thought I'd ask you,old boy."
"Sorry,"said Winston.
The quacking voice from the next table,temporarily silenced during the Ministry's announcement,had started up again,as loud as ever.For some reason Winston suddenly found himself thinking of Mrs.Parsons,with her wispy hair and the dust in the creases of her face.Within two years those children would be denouncing her to the Thought Police.Mrs.Parsons would be vaporized.Syme would be vaporized.Winston would be vaporized.O'Brien would be vaporized.Parsons,on the other hand,would never be vaporized.The eyeless creature with the quacking voice would never be vaporized. The little beetlelike men who scuttled so nimbly through the laby-rinthine corridors of Ministries—they,too,would never be vapor-ized.And the girl with dark hair,the girl from the Fiction Depart-ment—she would never be vaporized either.It seemed to him that he knew instinctively who would survive and who would perish, though just what it was that made for survival,it was not easy to say.
At this moment he was dragged out of his reverie with a vio-lent j erk.The girl at the next table had turned partly round and was looking at him.It was the girl with dark hair.She was looking at him in a sidelong way,but with curious intensity.The instant that she caught his eye she looked away again.
The sweat started out on Winston's backbone.A horrible pang of terror went through him.It was gone almost at once,but it left a sort of nagging uneasiness behind.Why was she watching him? Why did she keep following him about? Unfortunately he could not remember whether she had already been at the table when he ar-rived,or had come there afterwards.But yesterday,at any rate,dur-ing the Two Minutes Hate,she had sat immediately behind him when there was no apparent need to do so.Quite likely her real ob-j ect had been to listen to him and make sure whether he was shou-ting loudly enough.
His earlier thought returned to him:probably she was not ac-tually a member of the Thought Police,but then it was precisely the amateur spy who was the greatest danger of all.He did not know how long she had been looking at him,but perhaps for as much as five minutes,and it was possible that his features had not been perfectly under control.It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen.The smallest thing could give you away.A nervous tic,an unconscious look of anxiety,a habit of muttering to your-self—anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality,of having something to hide.In any case,to wear an improper expres-sion on your face (to look incredulous when a victory was an-nounced,for example) was itself a punishable offence.There was even a word for it in Newspeak:facecrime,it was called.
The girl had turned her back on him again.Perhaps after all she was not really following him about,perhaps it was coincidence that she had sat so close to him two days running.His cigarette had gone out,and he laid it carefully on the edge of the table.He would finish smoking it after work,if he could keep the tobacco in it.Quite likely the person at the next table was a spy of the Thought Police,and quite likely he would be in the cellars of the Ministry of Love with-in three days,but a cigarette end must not be wasted.Syme had fol-ded up his strip of paper and stowed it away in his pocket.Parsons had begun talking again.
"Did I ever tell you,old boy,"he said,chuckling round the stem of his pipe,"about the time when those two nippers of mine set fire to the old market-woman's skirt because they saw her wrapping up sausages in a poster of B.B.? Sneaked up behind her and set fire to it with a box of matches.Burned her quite badly,I be-lieve.Little beggars,eh? But keen as mustard! That's a first-rate training they give them in the Spies nowadays—better than in my day,even.What d'you think's the latest thing they've served them out with? Ear trumpets for listening through keyholes! My little girl brought one home the other night—tried it out on our sitting room door,and reckoned she could hear twice as much as with her ear to the hole.Of course it's only a toy,mind you.Still,gives 'em the right idea,eh?"
At this moment the telescreen let out a piercing whistle.It was the signal to return to work.All three men sprang to their feet to join in the struggle round the lifts,and the remaining tobacco fell out of Winston's cigarette.
Chapter 6
Winston was writing in his diaIry:
It was three years ago.t was on a dark evening,ina narrow side street near one of the big railway sta-tions.She was standing near a doorway in the wall,under a street lamp that hardly gave any light.She had a young face,painted very thick.It was really the paint that appealed to me,the white-ness of it,like a mask,and the bright red lips.Party women never paint their faces.There was nobody else in the street,and notele-screens.She said two dollars.I—
For the moment it was too difficult to go on.He shut his eyes and pressed his fingers against them,trying to squeeze out the vi-sion that kept recurring.He had an almost overwhelming tempta-tion to shout a string of filthy words at the top of his voice.Or to bang his head against the wall,to kick over the table,and hurl the inkpot through the window—to do any violent or noisy or painful thing that might black out the memory that was tormenting him.
Your worst enemy,he reflected,was your own nervous system. At any moment the tension inside you was liable to translate itself into some visible symptom.He thought of a man whom he had pas-sed in the street a few weeks back:a quite ordinary-looking man,a Party member,aged thirty-five to forty,tallish and thin,carrying a brief case.They were a few metres apart when the left side of the man's face was suddenly contorted by a sort of spasm.It happened again just as they were passing one another:it was only a twitch,a quiver,rapid as the clicking of a camera shutter,but obviously ha-bitual.He remembered thinking at the time:That poor devil is done for.And what was frightening was that the action was quite possi-bly unconscious.The most deadly danger of all was talking in your sleep.There was no way of guarding against that,so far as he could see.
He drew in his breath and went on writing:
I went with her through the doorway and across a backyard into a basement kitchen.There was a bed against the wall,and a lamp on the table,turned down very low.She—
His teeth were set on edge.He would have liked to spit.Simul-taneously with the woman in the basement kitchen he thought of Katharine,his wife.Winston was married—had been married,at any rate;probably he still was married,for so far as he knew his wife was not dead.He seemed to breathe again the warm stuffy odor of the basement kitchen, an odor compounded of bugs and dirty clothes and villainous cheap scent,but nevertheless alluring,be-cause no woman of the Party ever used scent,or could be imagined as doing so.Only the proles used scent.In his mind the smell of it was inextricably mixed up with fornication.
When he had gone with that woman it had been his first lapse in two years or thereabouts.Consorting with prostitutes was forbid-den,of course,but it was one of those rules that you could occasion-ally nerve yourself to break.It was dangerous,but it was not a life-and-death matter.To be caught with a prostitute might mean five years in a forced-labour camp:not more,if you had committed no other offence.And it was easy enough,provided that you could avoid being caught in the act.The poorer quarters swarmed with women who were ready to sell themselves.Some could even be purchased for a bottle of gin,which the proles were not supposed to drink. Tacitly the Party was even inclined to encourage prostitution,as an outlet for instincts which could not be altogether suppressed.Mere debauchery did not matter very much,so long as it was furtive and joyless, and only involved the women of a submerged and despised class.The unforgivable crime was promiscuity between Party mem-bers.But—though this was one of the crimes that the accused in the great purges invariably confessed to—it was difficult to imagine any such thing actually happening.
The aim of the Party was not merely to prevent men and women from forming loyalties which it might not be able to con-trol.Its real,undeclared purpose was to remove all pleasure from the sexual act.Not love so much as eroticism was the enemy,inside marriage as well as outside it.All marriages between Party mem-bers had to be approved by a committee appointed for the purpose, and—though the principle was never clearly stated—permission was always refused if the couple concerned gave the impression of being physically attracted to one another.The only recognized pur-pose of marriage was to beget children for the service of the Party. Sexual intercourse was to be looked on as a slightly disgusting mi-nor operation,like having an enema.This again was never put into plain words,but in an indirect way it was rubbed into every Party member from childhood onwards.There were even organizations such as the Junior Anti-Sex League which advocated complete celi-bacy for both sexes.All children were to be begotten by artificial in-semination (artsem,it was called in Newspeak) and brought up in public institutions.This,Winston was aware,was not meant alto-gether seriously,but somehow it fitted in with the general ideology of the Party.The Party was trying to kill the sex instinct,or,if it could not be killed,then to distort it and dirty it.He did not know why this was so,but it seemed natural that it should be so.And as far as the women were concerned,the Party's efforts were largely successful.
He thought again of Katharine.It must be nine,ten—nearly e-leven years since they had parted.It was curious how seldom he thought of her.For days at a time he was capable of forgetting that he had ever been married.They had only been together for about fif-teen months.The Party did not permit divorce,but it rather encour-aged separation in cases where there were no children.
Katharine was a tall,fair-haired girl,very straight,with splen-did movements.She had a bold,aquiline face,a face that one might have called noble until one discovered that there was as nearly as possible nothing behind it.Very early in their married life he had decided—though perhaps it was only that he knew her more inti-mately than he knew most people—that she had without exception the most stupid,vulgar,empty mind that he had ever encountered. She had not a thought in her head that was not a slogan,and there was no imbecility,absolutely none that she was not capable of swal-lowing if the Party handed it out to her."The human sound track"he nicknamed her in his own mind.Yet he could have endured living with her if it had not been for just one thing—sex.
As soon as he touched her she seemed to wince and stiffen.To embrace her was like embracing a jointed wooden image.And what was strange was that even when she was clasping him against her he had the feeling that she was simultaneously pushing him away with all her strength.The rigidity of her muscles managed to convey that impression.She would lie there with shut eyes,neither resisting nor co-operating but submitting.It was extraordinarily embarrass-ing and,after a while,horrible.But even then he could have borne living with her if it had been agreed that they should remain celi-bate.But curiously enough it was Katharine who refused this.They must,she said,produce a child if they could.So the performance continued to happen,once a week quite regularly,whenever it was not impossible.She used even to remind him of it in the morning,as something which had to be done that evening and which must not be forgotten.She had two names for it.One was"making a baby", and the other was"our duty to the Party"(yes,she had actually used that phrase).Quite soon he grew to have a feeling of positive dread when the appointed day came round.But luckily no child ap-peared,and in the end she agreed to give up trying,and soon after-wards they parted.
Winston sighed inaudibly.He picked up his pen again and wrote:
She threw herself down on the bed,and at once,without any kind of preliminary in the most coarse,horrible way you can i-magine,pulled up her skirt.I—
He saw himself standing there in the dim lamplight,with the smell of bugs and cheap scent in his nostrils,and in his heart a feel-ing of defeat and resentment which even at that moment was mixed up with the thought of Katharine's white body,frozen forever by the hypnotic power of the Party.Why did it always have to be like this? Why could he not have a woman of his own instead of these filthy scuffles at intervals of years? But a real love affair was an al-most unthinkable event.The women of the Party were all alike. Chastity was as deep ingrained in them as Party loyalty.By careful early conditioning,by games and cold water,by the rubbish that was dinned into them at school and in the Spies and the Youth League,by lectures,parades,songs,slogans,and martial music,the natural feeling had been driven out of them.His reason told him that there must be exceptions,but his heart did not believe it.They were all impregnable,as the Party intended that they should be.And what he wanted,more even than to be loved,was to break down that wall of virtue,even if it were only once in his whole life.The sexual act, successfully performed, was rebellion.Desire was thoughtcrime.Even to have awakened Katharine,if he could have a-chieved it,would have been like a seduction,although she was his wife.
But the rest of the story had got to be written down.He wrote:
I turned up the lamp.When I saw her in the light—
After the darkness, the feeble light of the paraffin lamp had seemed very bright.For the first time he could see the woman prop-erly.He had taken a step toward her and then halted,full of lust and terror.He was painfully conscious of the risk he had taken in coming here.It was perfectly possible that the patrols would catch him on the way out; for that matter they might be waiting outside the door at this moment.If he went away without even doing what he had come here to do—!
It had got to be written down,it had got to be confessed.What he had suddenly seen in the lamplight was that the woman was old. The paint was plastered so thick on her face that it looked as though it might crack like a cardboard mask.There were streaks of white in her hair, but the truly dreadful detail was that her mouth had fallen a little open,revealing nothing except a cavernous black-ness.She had no teeth at all.
He wrote hurriedly,in scrabbling handwriting:
When I saw her in the light she was quite an old woman,fif-ty years old at least.But I went ahead and did it just the same.
He pressed his fingers against his eyelids again.He had written it down at last,but it made no difference.The therapy had not worked.The urge to shout filthy words at the top of his voice was as strong as ever.
Chapter 7
If there is hope [ wrote Winston]"it lies in the proles."
If there was hope,it must lie in the proles,because on-ly there, in those swarming disregarded masses, eighty-five per cent of the population of Oceania,could the force to destroy the Party ever be generated.The Party could not be overthrown from within.Its enemies,if it had any enemies,had no way of coming together or even of identifying one another.Even if the leg-endary Brotherhood existed,as just possibly it might,it was incon-ceivable that its members could ever assemble in larger numbers than twos and threes.Rebellion meant a look in the eyes,an inflex-ion of the voice,at the most,an occasional whispered word.But the proles,if only they could somehow become conscious of their own strength.would have no need to conspire.They needed only to rise up and shake themselves like a horse shaking off flies.If they chose they could blow the Party to pieces tomorrow morning.Surely soon-er or later it must occur to them to do it? And yet—!
He remembered how once he had been walking down a crowd-ed street when a tremendous shout of hundreds of voices —women's voices—had burst from a side street a little way ahead.It was a great formidable cry of anger and despair,a deep,loud"Oh-o-o-o-oh!"that went humming on like the reverberation of a bell.His heart had leapt.It's started! he had thought.A riot! The proles are breaking loose at last! When he had reached the spot it was to see a mob of two or three hundred women crowding a round the stalls of a street market,with faces as tragic as though they had been the doomed passengers on a sinking ship.But at this moment the gener-al despair broke down into a multitude of individual quarrels.It ap-peared that one of the stalls had been selling tin saucepans.They were wretched,flimsy things,but cooking pots of any kind were al-ways difficult to get.Now the supply had unexpectedly given out. The successful women,bumped and jostled by the rest,were trying to make off with their saucepans while dozens of others clamored round the stall,accusing the stall keeper of favoritism and of having more saucepans somewhere in reserve.There was a fresh outburst of yells.Two bloated women,one of them with her hair coming down,had got hold of the same saucepan and were trying to tear it out of one another's hands.For a moment they were both tugging, and then the handle came off.Winston watched them disgustedly. And yet,just for a moment,what almost frightening power had sounded in that cry from only a few hundred throats! Why was it that they could never shout like that about anything that mattered?
Until they become conscious they will never rebel,and until af-ter they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.