No More Learning

A farthing, that was
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 tri-
angular 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 il-
lustrating enemy atrocities, and the like.

'St Martin's-in-the-Fields it used to be called,' supple-
mented 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 paper-
weight, 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 inhabit-
ed 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 run-
ning 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



Free eBooks at Planet eBook. com



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 an-
other 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 recon-
noitring 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 up-
stairs 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 pre-
liminary 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



1984



Suddenly his heart seemed to turn to ice and his bow-
els 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 walk-
ing 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 mind-
ed 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



Free eBooks at Planet eBook. com



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 cob-
blestone. 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 teacup ful 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 fe-
male 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. Un-
doubtedly some people did so. Many of the disappearances
were actually suicides. But it needed desperate courage to



1984



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 nev-
er 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 trag-
ic situations. On the battlefield, in the torture chamber, on
a sinking ship, the issues that you are fighting for are al-
ways 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 stom-
ach or an aching tooth.

He opened the diary. It was important to write some-
thing 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



Free eBooks at Planet eBook. com



knew of them) there was the routine of confession that had
to be gone through: the grovelling on the floor and scream-
ing 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 al-
ways 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 suc-
cumbed 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 sum-
mon 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

130 1984



FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH



Free eBooks at Planet eBook. com



Part Two



1984



Chapter i



It was the middle of the morning, and Winston had left
the cubicle to go to the lavatory.

A solitary figure was coming towards him from the oth-
er end of the long, brightly- lit corridor. It was the girl with
dark hair. Four days had gone past since the evening when
he had run into her outside the junk-shop. As she came
nearer he saw that her right arm was in a sling, not notice-
able at a distance because it was of the same colour as her
overalls. Probably she had crushed her hand while swing-
ing round one of the big kaleidoscopes on which the plots
of novels were 'roughed in'. It was a common accident in the
Fiction Department.

They were perhaps four metres apart when the girl stum-
bled and fell almost flat on her face. A sharp cry of pain was
wrung out of her. She must have fallen right on the injured
arm. Winston stopped short. The girl had risen to her knees.
Her face had turned a milky yellow colour against which
her mouth stood out redder than ever. Her eyes were fixed
on his, with an appealing expression that looked more like
fear than pain.

A curious emotion stirred in Winston's heart. In front of
him was an enemy who was trying to kill him: in front of
him, also, was a human creature, in pain and perhaps with
a broken bone. Already he had instinctively started forward

FreeeBooksatPlaneteBook. com 133



to help her. In the moment when he had seen her fall on the
bandaged arm, it had been as though he felt the pain in his
own body.

'You're hurt? ' he said.

'It's nothing. My arm. It'll be all right in a second. '

She spoke as though her heart were fluttering. She had
certainly turned very pale.

'You haven't broken anything? '

'No, I'm all right. It hurt for a moment, that's all. '

She held out her free hand to him, and he helped her up.
She had regained some of her colour, and appeared very
much better.

'It's nothing,' she repeated shortly. 'I only gave my wrist a
bit of a bang. Thanks, comrade! '

And with that she walked on in the direction in which
she had been going, as briskly as though it had really been
nothing. The whole incident could not have taken as much
as half a minute. Not to let one's feelings appear in one's
face was a habit that had acquired the status of an instinct,
and in any case they had been standing straight in front of
a telescreen when the thing happened. Nevertheless it had
been very difficult not to betray a momentary surprise, for
in the two or three seconds while he was helping her up
the girl had slipped something into his hand. There was no
question that she had done it intentionally. It was some-
thing small and flat. As he passed through the lavatory door
he transferred it to his pocket and felt it with the tips of his
fingers. It was a scrap of paper folded into a square.

While he stood at the urinal he managed, with a little



1984



more fingering, to get it unfolded. Obviously there must be
a message of some kind written on it. For a moment he was
tempted to take it into one of the water-closets and read it
at once. But that would be shocking folly, as he well knew.
There was no place where you could be more certain that
the telescreens were watched continuously

He went back to his cubicle, sat down, threw the frag-
ment of paper casually among the other papers on the desk,
put on his spectacles and hitched the speakwrite towards
him. 'Five minutes,' he told himself, 'five minutes at the
very least! ' His heart bumped in his breast with frightening
loudness. Fortunately the piece of work he was engaged on
was mere routine, the rectification of a long list of figures,
not needing close attention.

Whatever was written on the paper, it must have some
kind of political meaning. So far as he could see there were
two possibilities. One, much the more likely, was that the
girl was an agent of the Thought Police, just as he had feared.
He did not know why the Thought Police should choose to
deliver their messages in such a fashion, but perhaps they
had their reasons. The thing that was written on the paper
might be a threat, a summons, an order to commit suicide,
a trap of some description. But there was another, wilder
possibility that kept raising its head, though he tried vain-
ly to suppress it. This was, that the message did not come
from the Thought Police at all, but from some kind of un-
derground organization. Perhaps the Brotherhood existed
after all! Perhaps the girl was part of it! No doubt the idea
was absurd, but it had sprung into his mind in the very in-



Free eBooks at Planet eBook. com



stant of feeling the scrap of paper in his hand. It was not till
a couple of minutes later that the other, more probable ex-
planation had occurred to him. And even now, though his
intellect told him that the message probably meant death —
still, that was not what he believed, and the unreasonable
hope persisted, and his heart banged, and it was with diffi-
culty that he kept his voice from trembling as he murmured
his figures into the speakwrite.

He rolled up the completed bundle of work and slid it
into the pneumatic tube. Eight minutes had gone by. He re-
adjusted his spectacles on his nose, sighed, and drew the
next batch of work towards him, with the scrap of paper on
top of it. He flattened it out. On it was written, in a large un-
formed handwriting:

I LOVE YOU.

For several seconds he was too stunned even to throw
the incriminating thing into the memory hole. When he
did so, although he knew very well the danger of showing
too much interest, he could not resist reading it once again,
just to make sure that the words were really there.

For the rest of the morning it was very difficult to work.
What was even worse than having to focus his mind on a
series of niggling jobs was the need to conceal his agitation
from the telescreen. He felt as though a fire were burning
in his belly. Lunch in the hot, crowded, noise-filled canteen
was torment. He had hoped to be alone for a little while
during the lunch hour, but as bad luck would have it the

136 1984



imbecile Parsons flopped down beside him, the tang of his
sweat almost defeating the tinny smell of stew, and kept up
a stream of talk about the preparations for Hate Week. He
was particularly enthusiastic about a papier-mache model of
Big Brother's head, two metres wide, which was being made
for the occasion by his daughter's troop of Spies. The irri-
tating thing was that in the racket of voices Winston could
hardly hear what Parsons was saying, and was constantly
having to ask for some fatuous remark to be repeated. Just
once he caught a glimpse of the girl, at a table with two oth-
er girls at the far end of the room. She appeared not to have
seen him, and he did not look in that direction again.

The afternoon was morebearable. Immediately after lunch
there arrived a delicate, difficult piece of work which would
take several hours and necessitated putting everything else
aside. It consisted in falsifying a series of production re-
ports of two years ago, in such a way as to cast discredit on a
prominent member of the Inner Party, who was now under
a cloud. This was the kind of thing that Winston was good
at, and for more than two hours he succeeded in shutting
the girl out of his mind altogether. Then the memory of her
face came back, and with it a raging, intolerable desire to
be alone. Until he could be alone it was impossible to think
this new development out. Tonight was one of his nights at
the Community Centre. He wolfed another tasteless meal
in the canteen, hurried off to the Centre, took part in the
solemn foolery of a 'discussion group', played two games
of table tennis, swallowed several glasses of gin, and sat for
half an hour through a lecture entitled Tngsoc in relation to



Free eBooks at Planet eBook. com



chess'. His soul writhed with boredom, but for once he had
had no impulse to shirk his evening at the Centre. At the
sight of the words I LOVE YOU the desire to stay alive had
welled up in him, and the taking of minor risks suddenly
seemed stupid. It was not till twenty-three hours, when he
was home and in bed — in the darkness, where you were safe
even from the telescreen so long as you kept silent — that he
was able to think continuously.

It was a physical problem that had to be solved: how to
get in touch with the girl and arrange a meeting.
He did
not consider any longer the possibility that she might be
laying some kind of trap for him. He knew that it was not
so, because of her unmistakable agitation when she handed
him the note. Obviously she had been frightened out of her
wits, as well she might be. Nor did the idea of refusing her
advances even cross his mind. Only five nights ago he had
contemplated smashing her skull in with a cobblestone, but
that was of no importance. He thought of her naked, youth-
ful body, as he had seen it in his dream. He had imagined
her a fool like all the rest of them, her head stuffed with lies
and hatred, her belly full of ice. A kind of fever seized him at
the thought that he might lose her, the white youthful body
might slip away from him! What he feared more than any-
thing else was that she would simply change her mind if he
did not get in touch with her quickly. But the physical dif-
ficulty of meeting was enormous. It was like trying to make
a move at chess when you were already mated. Whichever
way you turned, the telescreen faced you. Actually, all the
possible ways of communicating with her had occurred to

138 1984



him within five minutes of reading the note; but now, with
time to think, he went over them one by one, as though lay-
ing out a row of instruments on a table.

Obviously the kind of encounter that had happened this
morning could not be repeated. If she had worked in the Re-
cords Department it might have been comparatively simple,
but he had only a very dim idea whereabouts in the building
the Fiction Department lay, and he had no pretext for going
there. If he had known where she lived, and at what time
she left work, he could have contrived to meet her some-
where on her way home; but to try to follow her home was
not safe, because it would mean loitering about outside the
Ministry, which was bound to be noticed. As for sending
a letter through the mails, it was out of the question. By
a routine that was not even secret, all letters were opened
in transit. Actually, few people ever wrote letters. For the
messages that it was occasionally necessary to send, there
were printed postcards with long lists of phrases, and you
struck out the ones that were inapplicable. In any case he
did not know the girl's name, let alone her address. Final-
ly he decided that the safest place was the canteen. If he
could get her at a table by herself, somewhere in the middle
of the room, not too near the telescreens, and with a suf-
ficient buzz of conversation all round — if these conditions
endured for, say, thirty seconds, it might be possible to ex-
change a few words.

For a week after this, life was like a restless dream. On
the next day she did not appear in the canteen until he
was leaving it, the whistle having already blown. Presum-



Free eBooks at Planet eBook. com



ably she had been changed on to a later shift. They passed
each other without a glance. On the day after that she was
in the canteen at the usual time, but with three other girls
and immediately under a telescreen. Then for three dread-
ful days she did not appear at all. His whole mind and body
seemed to be afflicted with an unbearable sensitivity, a sort
of transparency, which made every movement, every sound,
every contact, every word that he had to speak or listen
to, an agony. Even in sleep he could not altogether escape
from her image. He did not touch the diary during those
days. If there was any relief, it was in his work, in which he
could sometimes forget himself for ten minutes at a stretch.
He had absolutely no clue as to what had happened to her.
There was no enquiry he could make. She might have been
vaporized, she might have committed suicide, she might
have been transferred to the other end of Oceania: worst
and likeliest of all, she might simply have changed her mind
and decided to avoid him.

The next day she reappeared. Her arm was out of the sling
and she had a band of sticking-plaster round her wrist. The
relief of seeing her was so great that he could not resist star-
ing directly at her for several seconds. On the following day
he very nearly succeeded in speaking to her. When he came
into the canteen she was sitting at a table well out from the
wall, and was quite alone. It was early, and the place was
not very full. The queue edged forward till Winston was
almost at the counter, then was held up for two minutes
because someone in front was complaining that he had not
received his tablet of saccharine. But the girl was still alone



1984



when Winston secured his tray and began to make for her
table. He walked casually towards her, his eyes searching
for a place at some table beyond her. She was perhaps three
metres away from him. Another two seconds would do it.
Then a voice behind him called, 'Smith! ' He pretended not
to hear. 'Smith! ' repeated the voice, more loudly. It was no
use. He turned round. A blond-headed, silly-faced young
man named Wilsher, whom he barely knew, was inviting
him with a smile to a vacant place at his table. It was not
safe to refuse. After having been recognized, he could not
go and sit at a table with an unattended girl. It was too no-
ticeable. He sat down with a friendly smile. The silly blond
face beamed into his. Winston had a hallucination of him-
self smashing a pick-axe right into the middle of it. The
girl's table filled up a few minutes later.

But she must have seen him coming towards her, and
perhaps she would take the hint. Next day he took care to
arrive early. Surely enough, she was at a table in about the
same place, and again alone. The person immediately ahead
of him in the queue was a small, swiftly-moving, beetle-like
man with a flat face and tiny, suspicious eyes. As Winston
turned away from the counter with his tray, he saw that the
little man was making straight for the girl's table. His hopes
sank again. There was a vacant place at a table further away,
but something in the little man's appearance suggested
that he would be sufficiently attentive to his own comfort
to choose the emptiest table. With ice at his heart Winston
followed. It was no use unless he could get the girl alone.
At this moment there was a tremendous crash. The little



Free eBooks at Planet eBook. com



man was sprawling on all fours, his tray had gone flying,
two streams of soup and coffee were flowing across the floor.
He started to his feet with a malignant glance at Winston,
whom he evidently suspected of having tripped him up. But
it was all right. Five seconds later, with a thundering heart,
Winston was sitting at the girl's table.

He did not look at her. He unpacked his tray and prompt-
ly began eating. It was all-important to speak at once,
before anyone else came, but now a terrible fear had taken
possession of him. A week had gone by since she had first
approached him. She would have changed her mind, she
must have changed her mind! It was impossible that this af-
fair should end successfully; such things did not happen in
real life. He might have flinched altogether from speaking if
at this moment he had not seen Ampleforth, the hairy-eared
poet, wandering limply round the room with a tray, look-
ing for a place to sit down. In his vague way Ampleforth
was attached to Winston, and would certainly sit down at
his table if he caught sight of him. There was perhaps a min-
ute in which to act. Both Winston and the girl were eating
steadily. The stuff they were eating was a thin stew, actually
a soup, of haricot beans. In a low murmur Winston began
speaking. Neither of them looked up; steadily they spooned
the watery stuff into their mouths, and between spoonfuls
exchanged the few necessary words in low expressionless
voices.

'What time do you leave work? '

'Eighteen-thirty'

'Where can we meet? '



1984



'Victory Square, near the monument. '

'It's full of telescreens. '

'It doesn't matter if there's a crowd. '

'Any signal? '

'No. Don't come up to me until you see me among a lot
of people. And don't look at me. Just keep somewhere near
me. '

'What time? '

'Nineteen hours. '

All right. '

Ampleforth failed to see Winston and sat down at an-
other table. They did not speak again, and, so far as it was
possible for two people sitting on opposite sides of the same
table, they did not look at one another. The girl finished her
lunch quickly and made off, while Winston stayed to smoke
a cigarette.

Winston was in Victory Square before the appointed
time. He wandered round the base of the enormous flut-
ed column, at the top of which Big Brother's statue gazed
southward towards the skies where he had vanquished the
Eurasian aeroplanes (the Eastasian aeroplanes, it had been,
a few years ago) in the Battle of Airstrip One. In the street
in front of it there was a statue of a man on horseback which
was supposed to represent Oliver Cromwell. At five minutes
past the hour the girl had still not appeared. Again the ter-
rible fear seized upon Winston. She was not coming, she
had changed her mind! He walked slowly up to the north
side of the square and got a sort of pale- coloured pleasure
from identifying St Martin's Church, whose bells, when it

FreeeBooksatPlaneteBook. com 143



had bells, had chimed 'You owe me three farthings. ' Then
he saw the girl standing at the base of the monument, read-
ing or pretending to read a poster which ran spirally up the
column. It was not safe to go near her until some more peo-
ple had accumulated. There were telescreens all round the
pediment. But at this moment there was a din of shouting
and a zoom of heavy vehicles from somewhere to the left.
Suddenly everyone seemed to be running across the square.
The girl nipped nimbly round the lions at the base of the
monument and joined in the rush. Winston followed. As he
ran, he gathered from some shouted remarks that a convoy
of Eurasian prisoners was passing.

Already a dense mass of people was blocking the south
side of the square. Winston, at normal times the kind of
person who gravitates to the outer edge of any kind of
scrimmage, shoved, butted, squirmed his way forward into
the heart of the crowd. Soon he was within arm's length of
the girl, but the way was blocked by an enormous prole and
an almost equally enormous woman, presumably his wife,
who seemed to form an impenetrable wall of flesh. Winston
wriggled himself sideways, and with a violent lunge man-
aged to drive his shoulder between them. For a moment it
felt as though his entrails were being ground to pulp be-
tween the two muscular hips, then he had broken through,
sweating a little. He was next to the girl. They were shoulder
to shoulder, both staring fixedly in front of them.

A long line of trucks, with wooden-faced guards armed
with sub -machine guns standing upright in each corner, was
passing slowly down the street. In the trucks little yellow



1984



men in shabby greenish uniforms were squatting, jammed
close together. Their sad, Mongolian faces gazed out over
the sides of the trucks utterly incurious. Occasionally when
a truck jolted there was a clank-clank of metal: all the pris-
oners were wearing leg-irons. Truck-load after truck-load of
the sad faces passed. Winston knew they were there but he
saw them only intermittently. The girl's shoulder, and her
arm right down to the elbow, were pressed against his. Her
cheek was almost near enough for him to feel its warmth.
She had immediately taken charge of the situation, just as
she had done in the canteen. She began speaking in the
same expressionless voice as before, with lips barely mov-
ing, a mere murmur easily drowned by the din of voices and
the rumbling of the trucks.

'Can you hear me? '

'Yes. '

'Can you get Sunday afternoon off? '

'Yes. '

'Then listen carefully. You'll have to remember this. Go
to Paddington Station '

With a sort of military precision that astonished him, she
outlined the route that he was to follow. A half-hour railway
journey; turn left outside the station; two kilometres along
the road; a gate with the top bar missing; a path across a
field; a grass-grown lane; a track between bushes; a dead
tree with moss on it. It was as though she had a map inside
her head. 'Can you remember all that? ' she murmured fi-
nally

'Yes. '



Free eBooks at Planet eBook. com



'You turn left, then right, then left again. And the gate's
got no top bar. '

'Yes. What time? '

'About fifteen. You may have to wait. I'll get there by an-
other way. Are you sure you remember everything? '

'Yes. '

"Then get away from me as quick as you can. '

She need not have told him that. But for the moment
they could not extricate themselves from the crowd. The
trucks were still filing past, the people still insatiably gap-
ing. At the start there had been a few boos and hisses, but
it came only from the Party members among the crowd,
and had soon stopped. The prevailing emotion was simply
curiosity. Foreigners, whether from Eurasia or from Easta-
sia, were a kind of strange animal. One literally never saw
them except in the guise of prisoners, and even as prison-
ers one never got more than a momentary glimpse of them.
Nor did one know what became of them, apart from the
few who were hanged as war- criminals: the others simply
vanished, presumably into forced-labour camps. The round
Mogol faces had given way to faces of a more European type,
dirty, bearded and exhausted. From over scrubby cheek-
bones eyes looked into Winston's, sometimes with strange
intensity, and flashed away again. The convoy was drawing
to an end. In the last truck he could see an aged man, his
face a mass of grizzled hair, standing upright with wrists
crossed in front of him, as though he were used to having
them bound together. It was almost time for Winston and
the girl to part. But at the last moment, while the crowd still

146 1984



hemmed them in, her hand felt for his and gave it a fleeting
squeeze.

It could not have been ten seconds, and yet it seemed a
long time that their hands were clasped together. He had
time to learn every detail of her hand. He explored the long
fingers, the shapely nails, the work-hardened palm with its
row of callouses, the smooth flesh under the wrist. Merely
from feeling it he would have known it by sight. In the same
instant it occurred to him that he did not know what colour
the girl's eyes were. They were probably brown, but people
with dark hair sometimes had blue eyes. To turn his head
and look at her would have been inconceivable folly. With
hands locked together, invisible among the press of bodies,
they stared steadily in front of them, and instead of the eyes
of the girl, the eyes of the aged prisoner gazed mournfully
at Winston out of nests of hair.



Free eBooks at Planet eBook. com



Chapter 2



Winston picked his way up the lane through dappled
light and shade, stepping out into pools of gold wher-
ever the boughs parted. Under the trees to the left of him
the ground was misty with bluebells. The air seemed to kiss
one's skin. It was the second of May. From somewhere deep-
er in the heart of the wood came the droning of ring doves.
He was a bit early. There had been no difficulties about
the journey, and the girl was so evidently experienced that
he was less frightened than he would normally have been.
Presumably she could be trusted to find a safe place. In
general you could not assume that you were much safer in
the country than in London. There were no telescreens, of
course, but there was always the danger of concealed mi-
crophones by which your voice might be picked up and
recognized; besides, it was not easy to make a journey by
yourself without attracting attention. For distances of less
than 100 kilometres it was not necessary to get your pass-
port endorsed, but sometimes there were patrols hanging
about the railway stations, who examined the papers of any
Party member they found there and asked awkward ques-
tions. However, no patrols had appeared, and on the walk
from the station he had made sure by cautious backward
glances that he was not being followed. The train was full
of proles, in holiday mood because of the summery weather.

148 1984



The wooden-seated carriage in which he travelled was filled
to overflowing by a single enormous family, ranging from
a toothless great-grandmother to a month-old baby, going
out to spend an afternoon with 'in-laws' in the country, and,
as they freely explained to Winston, to get hold of a little
blackmarket butter.

The lane widened, and in a minute he came to the foot-
path she had told him of, a mere cattle-track which plunged
between the bushes. He had no watch, but it could not be
fifteen yet. The bluebells were so thick underfoot that it was
impossible not to tread on them.