A sense of helplessness took hold of Winston. The old
man's memory was nothing but a rubbish-heap of details. One
could question him all day without getting any real
information. The party histories might still be true, after a
fashion: they might even be completely true. He made a last
attempt.
'Perhaps I have not made myself clear,' he said. 'What I'm
trying to say is this. You have been alive a very long time;
you lived half your life before the Revolution. In 1925, for
instance, you were already grown up. Would you say from what
you can remember, that life in 1925 was better than it is now,
or worse? If you could choose, would you prefer to live then or
now?'
The old man looked meditatively at the darts board. He
finished up his beer, more slowly than before. When he spoke it
was with a tolerant philosophical air, as though the beer had
mellowed him.
'I know what you expect me to say,' he said. 'You expect
me to say as I'd sooner be young again. Most people'd say
they'd sooner be young, if you arst' 'em. You got your 'ealth
and strength when you're young. When you get to my time of life
you ain't never well. I suffer something wicked from my feet,
and my bladder's jest terrible. Six and seven times a night it
'as me out of bed. On the other 'and, there's great advantages
in being a old man. You ain't got the same worries. No truck
with women, and that's a great thing. I ain't 'ad a woman for
near on thirty year, if you'd credit it. Nor wanted to, what's
more.'
Winston sat back against the window-sill. It was no use
going on. He was about to buy some more beer when the old man
suddenly got up and shuffled rapidly into the stinking urinal
at the side of the room. The extra half-litre was already
working on him. Winston sat for a minute or two gazing at his
empty glass, and hardly noticed when his feet carried him out
into the street again. Within twenty years at the most, he
reflected, the huge and simple question, 'Was life better
before the Revolution than it is now?' would have ceased once
and for all to be answerable. But in effect it was unanswerable
even now, since the few scattered survivors from the ancient
world were incapable of comparing one age with another. They
remembered a million useless things, a quarrel with a workmate,
a hunt for a lost bicycle pump, the expression on a long-dead
sister's face, the swirls of dust on a windy morning seventy
years ago: but all the relevant facts were outside the range of
their vision. They were like the ant, which can see small
objects but not large ones. And when memory failed and written
records were falsified -- when that happened, the claim of the
Party to have improved the conditions of human life had got to
be accepted, because there did not exist, and never again could
exist, any standard against which it could be tested.
At this moment his train of thought stopped abruptly. He
halted and looked up. He was in a narrow street, with a few
dark little shops, interspersed among dwelling-houses.
Immediately above his head there hung three discoloured metal
balls which looked as if they had once been gilded. He seemed
to know the place. Of course! He was standing outside the
junk-shop where he had bought the diary.
A twinge of fear went through him. It had been a
sufficiently rash act to buy the book in the beginning, and he
had sworn never to come near the place again. And yet the
instant that he allowed his thoughts to wander, his feet had
brought him back here of their own accord. It was precisely
against suicidal impulses of this kind that he had hoped to
guard himself by opening the diary. At the same time he noticed
that although it was nearly twenty-one hours the shop was still
open. With the feeling that he would be less conspicuous inside
than hanging about on the pavement, he stepped through the
doorway. If questioned, he could plausibly say that he was
trying to buy razor blades.
The proprietor had just lighted a hanging oil lamp which
gave off an unclean but friendly smell. He was a man of perhaps
sixty, frail and bowed, with a long, benevolent nose, and mild
eyes distorted by thick spectacles. His hair was almost white,
but his eyebrows were bushy and still black. His spectacles,
his gentle, fussy movements, and the fact that he was wearing
an aged jacket of black velvet, gave him a vague air of
intellectuality, as though he had been some kind of literary
man, or perhaps a musician. His voice was soft, as though
faded, and his accent less debased than that of the majority of
proles.
'I recognized you on the pavement,' he said immediately.
'You're the gentleman that bought the young lady's keepsake
album. That was a beautiful bit of paper, that was. Cream-
laid, it used to be called. There's been no paper like that
made for -- oh, I dare say fifty years.' He peered at Winston
over the top of his spectacles. 'Is there anything special I
can do for you? Or did you just want to look round?'
'I was passing,' said Winston vaguely. 'I just looked in.
I don't want anything in particular.'
'It's just as well,' said the other, 'because I don't
suppose I could have satisfied you.' He made an apologetic
gesture with his softpalmed hand. 'You see how it is; an empty
shop, you might say. Between you and me, the antique trade's
just about finished. No demand any longer, and no stock either.
Furniture, china, glass it's all been broken up by degrees. And
of course the metal stuff's mostly been melted down. I haven't
seen a brass candlestick in years.'
The tiny interior of the shop was in fact uncomfortably
full, but there was almost nothing in it of the slightest
value. The floorspace was very restricted, because all round
the walls were stacked innumerable dusty picture-frames. In the
window there were trays of nuts and bolts, worn-out chisels,
penknives with broken blades, tarnished watches that did not
even pretend to be in going order, and other miscellaneous
rubbish. Only on a small table in the corner was there a litter
of odds and ends -- lacquered snuffboxes, agate brooches, and
the like -- which looked as though they might include something
interesting. As Winston wandered towards the table his eye was
caught by a round, smooth thing that gleamed softly in the
lamplight, and he picked it up.
It was a heavy lump of glass, curved on one side, flat on
the other, making almost a hemisphere. There was a peculiar
softness, as of rainwater, in both the colour and the texture
of the glass. At the heart of it, magnified by the curved
surface, there was a strange, pink, convoluted object that
recalled a rose or a sea anemone.
'What is it?' said Winston, fascinated.
'That's coral, that is,' said the old man. 'It must have
come from the Indian Ocean. They used to kind of embed it in
the glass. That wasn't made less than a hundred years ago.
More, by the look of it.'
'It's a beautiful thing,' said Winston.
'It is a beautiful thing,' said the other appreciatively.
'But there's not many that'd say so nowadays.' He coughed.
'Now, if it so happened that you wanted to buy it, that'd cost
you four dollars. I can remember when a thing like that would
have fetched eight pounds, and eight pounds was -- well, I
can't work it out, but it was a lot of money. But who cares
about genuine antiques nowadays even the few that's left?'
Winston immediately paid over the four dollars and slid
the coveted thing into his pocket. What appealed to him about
it was not so much its beauty as the air it seemed to possess
of belonging to an age quite different from the present one.
The soft, rainwatery glass was not like any glass that he had
ever seen. The thing was doubly attractive because of its
apparent uselessness, though he could guess that it must once
have been intended as a paperweight. It was very heavy in his
pocket, but fortunately it did not make much of a bulge. It was
a queer thing, even a compromising thing, for a Party member to
have in his possession. Anything old, and for that matter
anything beautiful, was always vaguely suspect. The old man had
grown noticeably more cheerful after receiving the four
dollars. Winston realized that he would have accepted three or
even two.
'There's another room upstairs that you might care to take
a look at,' he said. 'There's not much in it. Just a few
pieces. We'll do with a light if we're going upstairs.'
He lit another lamp, and, with bowed back, led the way
slowly up the steep and worn stairs and along a tiny passage,
into a room which did not give on the street but looked out on
a cobbled yard and a forest of chimney-pots. Winston noticed
that the furniture was still arranged as though the room were
meant to be lived in. There was a strip of carpet on the floor,
a picture or two on the walls, and a deep, slatternly arm-chair
drawn up to the fireplace. An old-fashioned glass clock with a
twelve-hour face was ticking away on the mantelpiece. Under the
window, and occupying nearly a quarter of the room, was an
enormous bed with the mattress still on it.
'We lived here till my wife died,' said the old man half
apologetically. 'I'm selling the furniture off by little and
little. Now that's a beautiful mahogany bed, or at least it
would be if you could get the bugs out of it. But I dare say
you'd find it a little bit cumbersome.
He was holdlng the lamp high up, so as to illuminate the
whole room, and in the warm dim light the place looked
curiously inviting. The thought flitted through Winston's mind
that it would probably be quite easy to rent the room for a few
dollars a week, if he dared to take the risk. It was a wild,
impossible notion, to be abandoned as soon as thought of; but
the room had awakened in him a sort of nostalgia, a sort of
ancestral memory. It seemed to him that he knew exactly what it
felt like to sit in a room like this, in an arm-chair beside an
open fire with your feet in the fender and a kettle on the hob;
utterly alone, utterly secure, with nobody watching you, no
voice pursuing you, no sound except the singing of the kettle
and the friendly ticking of the clock.
'There's no telescreen!' he could not help murmuring.
'Ah,' said the old man, 'I never had one of those things.
Too expensive. And I never seemed to feel the need of it,
somehow. Now that's a nice gateleg table in the corner there.
Though of course you'd have to put new hinges on it if you
wanted to use the flaps.'
There was a small bookcase in the other corner, and
Winston had already gravitated towards it. It contained nothing
but rubbish. The hunting-down and destruction of books had been
done with the same thoroughness in the prole quarters as
everywhere else. It was very unlikely that there existed
anywhere in Oceania a copy of a book printed earlier than 1960.
The old man, still carrying the lamp, was standing in front of
a picture in a rosewood frame which hung on the other side of
the fireplace, opposite the bed.
'Now, if you happen to be interested in old prints at all
-' he began delicately.
Winston came across to examine the picture. It was a steel
engraving of an oval building with rectangular windows, and a
small tower in front. There was a railing running round the
building, and at the rear end there was what appeared to be a
statue. Winston gazed at it for some moments. It seemed vaguely
familiar, though he did not remember the statue.
'The frame's fixed to the wall,' said the old man, 'but I
could unscrew it for you, I dare say.'
'I know that building,' said Winston finally. 'It's a ruin
now. It's in the middle of the street outside the Palace of
Justice.'
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