Winston had finished his bread and cheese. He turned
a
little sideways in his chair to drink his mug of coffee. At the
table on his left the man with the strident voice was still
talking remorselessly away. A young woman who was perhaps his
secretary, and who was sitting with her back to Winston, was
listening to him and seemed to be eagerly agreeing with
everything that he said. From time to time Winston caught some
such remark as 'I think you're so right, I do so
agree with you', uttered in a youthful and rather silly
feminine voice. But the other voice never stopped for an
instant, even when the girl was speaking. Winston knew the man
by sight, though he knew no more about him than that he held
some important post in the Fiction Department. He was a man of
about thirty, with a muscular throat and a large, mobile mouth.
His head was thrown back a little, and because of the angle at
which he was sitting, his spectacles caught the light and
presented to Winston two blank discs instead of eyes. What was
slightly horrible, was that from the stream of sound that
poured out of his mouth it was almost impossible to distinguish
a single word. Just once Winston caught a phrase-'complete and
final elimination of Goldsteinism'- jerked out very rapidly
and, as it seemed, all in one piece, like a line of type cast
solid. For the rest it was just a noise, a quackquack-quacking.
And yet, though you could not actually hear what the man was
saying, you could not be in any doubt about its general nature.
He might be denouncing Goldstein and demanding sterner measures
against thought- criminals and saboteurs, he might be
fulminating against the atrocities of the Eurasian army, he
might be praising Big Brother or the heroes on the Malabar
front-it made no difference. Whatever it was, you could be
certain that every word of it was pure orthodoxy, pure Ingsoc.
As he watched the eyeless face with the jaw moving rapidly up
and down, Winston had a curious feeling that this was not a
real human being but some kind of dummy. It was not the man's
brain that was speaking, it was his larynx. The stuff that was
coming out of him consisted of words, but it was not speech in
the true sense: it was a noise uttered in unconsciousness, like
the quacking of a duck.
Syme had fallen silent for a moment, and with the handle
of his spoon was tracing patterns in the puddle of stew. The
voice from the other table quacked rapidly on, easily audible
in spite of the surrounding din.
'There is a word in Newspeak,' said Syme, 'I don't know
whether you know it: duckspeak, to quack like a duck. It
is one of those interesting words that have two contradictory
meanings. Applied to an opponent, it is abuse, applied to
someone you agree with, it is praise.'
Unquestionably Syme will be vaporized, Winston thought
again. He thought it with a kind of sadness, although well
knowing that Syme despised him and slightly disliked him, and
was fully capable of denouncing him as a thought- criminal if
he saw any reason for doing so. There was something subtly
wrong with Syme. There was something that he lacked:
discretion, aloofness, a sort of saving stupidity. You could
not say that he was unorthodox. He believed in the principles
of Ingsoc, he venerated Big Brother, he rejoiced over
victories, he hated heretics, not merely with sincerity but
with a sort of restless zeal, an up-to-dateness of information,
which the ordinary Party member did not approach. Yet a faint
air of disreputability always clung to him. He said things that
would have been better unsaid, he had read too many books, he
frequented the Chestnut Tree Cafe/, haunt of painters and
musicians. There was no law, not even an unwritten law, against
frequenting the Chestnut Tree Cafe/, yet the place was somehow
ill-omened. The old, discredited leaders of the Party had been
used to gather there before they were finally purged. Goldstein
himself, it was said, had sometimes been seen there, years and
decades ago. Syme's fate was not difficult to foresee. And yet
it was a fact that if Syme grasped, even for three seconds, the
nature of his, Winston's, secret opinions, he would betray him
instantly to the Thought police. So would anybody else, for
that matter: but Syme more than most. Zeal was not enough.
Orthodoxy was unconsciousness.
Syme looked up. 'Here comes Parsons,' he said.
Something in the tone of his voice seemed to add, 'that
bloody fool'. Parsons, Winston's fellow-tenant at Victory
Mansions, was in fact threading his way across the room -- a
tubby, middle-sized man with fair hair and a froglike face. At
thirty-five he was already putting on rolls of fat at neck and
waistline, but his movements were brisk and boyish. His whole
appearance was that of a little boy grown large, so much so
that although he was wearing the regulation overalls, it was
almost impossible not to think of him as being dressed in the
blue shorts, grey shirt, and red neckerchief of the Spies. In
visualizing him one saw always a picture of dimpled knees and
sleeves rolled back from pudgy forearms. Parsons did, indeed,
invariably revert to shorts when a community hike or any other
physical activity gave him an excuse for doing so. He greeted
them both with a cheery 'Hullo, hullo!' and sat down at the
table, giving off an intense smell of sweat. Beads of moisture
stood out all over his pink face. His powers of sweating were
extraordinary. At the Community Centre you could always tell
when he had been playing table-tennis by the dampness of the
bat handle. Syme had produced a strip of paper on which there
was a long column of words, and was studying it with an
ink-pencil between his fingers.
'Look at him working away in the lunch hour,' said
Parsons, nudging Winston. 'Keenness, eh? What's that you've got
there, old boy? Something a bit too brainy for me, I expect.
Smith, old boy, I'll tell you why I'm chasing you. It's that
sub you forgot to give me.'
'Which sub is that? said Winston, automatically feeling
for money. About a quarter of one's salary had to be earmarked
for voluntary subscriptions, which were so numerous that it was
difficult to keep track of them.
'For Hate Week. You know -- the house-by-house fund. I'm
treasurer for our block. We're making an all-out effort --
going to put on a tremendous show. I tell you, it won't be my
fault if old Victory Mansions doesn't have the biggest outfit
of flags in the whole street. Two dollars you promised me.'
Winston found and handed over two creased and filthy
notes, which Parsons entered in a small notebook, in the neat
handwriting of the illiterate.
'By the way, old boy,' he said. 'I hear that little beggar
of mine let fly at you with his catapult yesterday. I gave him
a good dressingdown for it. In fact I told him I'd take the
catapult away if he does it again.
'I think he was a little upset at not going to the
execution,' said Winston.
' 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 Amersham, 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 on to 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
altogether 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 proclamation of a military victory this time, but merely an
announcement from the Ministry of Plenty.
'Comrades!' cried an eager youthful voice. 'Attention,
comrades! 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 20 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 favourite of late with the Ministry of Plenty.
Parsons, his attention caught by the trumpet call, sat
listening with a sort of gaping 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 already half full of
charred tobacco. With the tobacco ration at 100 grammes a week
it was seldom possible to fill a pipe to the top. Winston was
smoking a Victory Cigarette which he held carefully 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
demonstrations to thank Big Brother for raising the chocolate
ration to twenty grammes a week. And only yesterday, he
reflected, it had been announced that the ration was to be
reduced to twenty grammes a week. Was it possible that
they could swallow that, after only twenty-four hours? Yes,
they swallowed it. Parsons swallowed it easily, with the
stupidity of an animal. The eyeless creature at the other table
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 grammes. 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 everything except disease, crime, and
insanity. Year by year and minute by minute, everybody and
everything was whizzing rapidly upwards. 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 round the canteen.
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