'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 other
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 noticeable at a
distance because it was of the same colour as her overalls.
Probably she had crushed her hand while swinging 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 stumbled
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 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 something 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
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 fragment
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 vainly to suppress it.
This was, that the message did not come from the Thought Police
at all, but from some kind of underground 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 instant of feeling the scrap of paper in his
hand. It was not till a couple of minutes later that the other,
more probable explanation 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 difficulty 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 unformed
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 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- ma^che/ model of Big Brother's head, two metres
wide, which was being made for the occasion by his daughter's
troop of Spies. The irritating 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 other 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 more bearable. 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
reports 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 'Ingsoc in relation to 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, youthful 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 anything else was that she would simply change
her mind if he did not get in touch with her quickly. But the
physical difficulty 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 him
within five minutes of reading the note; but now, with time to
think, he went over them one by one, as though laying 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 Records
Department it might have been comparatively simple, but he had
only a very dim idea whereabouts in the building the Fiction
Departrnent 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 somewhere 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. Finally
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 sufficient buzz
of conversation all round -- if these conditions endured for,
say, thirty seconds, it might be possible to exchange 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. Presumably 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 dreadful 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.
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