'No. I've thought it all out. What you do, I'm going to
do. And don't be too downhearted. I'm rather good at staying
alive.'
'We may be together for another six months -- a year --
there's no knowing. At the end we're certain to be apart. Do
you realize how utterly alone we shall be? When once they get
hold of us there will be nothing, literally nothing, that
either of us can do for the other. If I confess, they'll shoot
you, and if I refuse to confess, they'll shoot you just the
same. Nothing that I can do or say, or stop myself from saying,
will put off your death for as much as five minutes. Neither of
us will even know whether the other is alive or dead. We shall
be utterly without power of any kind. The one thing that
matters is that we shouldn't betray one another, although even
that can't make the slightest difference.'
'If you mean confessing,' she said, 'we shall do that,
right enough. Everybody always confesses. You can't help it.
They torture you.'
'I don't mean confessing. Confession is not betrayal. What
you say or do doesn't matter: only feelings matter. If they
could make me stop loving you -- that would be the real
betrayal.'
She thought it over. 'They can't do that,' she said
finally. 'It's the one thing they can't do. They can make you
say anything -- any- thing -- but they can't make
you believe it. They can't get inside you.'
'No,' he said a little more hopefully, 'no; that's quite
true. They can't get inside you. If you can feel that
staying human is worth while, even when it can't have any
result whatever, you've beaten them.'
He thought of the telescreen with its never-sleeping ear.
They could spy upon you night and day, but if you kept your
head you could still outwit them. With all their cleverness
they had never mastered the secret of finding out what another
human being was thinking. Perhaps that was less true when you
were actually in their hands. One did not know what happened
inside the Ministry of Love, but it was possible to guess:
tortures, drugs, delicate instruments that registered your
nervous reactions, gradual wearing-down by sleeplessness and
solitude and persistent questioning. Facts, at any rate, could
not be kept hidden. They could be tracked down by enquiry, they
could be squeezed out of you by torture. But if the object was
not to stay alive but to stay human, what difference did it
ultimately make? They could not alter your feelings: for that
matter you could not alter them yourself, even if you wanted
to. They could lay bare in the utmost detail everything that
you had done or said or thought; but the inner heart, whose
workings were mysterious even to yourself, remained
impregnable.
x x x
They had done it, they had done it at last!
The room they were standing in was long-shaped and softly
lit. The telescreen was dimmed to a low murmur; the richness of
the dark-blue carpet gave one the impression of treading on
velvet. At the far end of the room O'Brien was sitting at a
table under a green-shaded lamp, with a mass of papers on
either side of him. He had not bothered to look up when the
servant showed Julia and Winston in.
Winston's heart was thumping so hard that he doubted
whether he would be able to speak. They had done it, they had
done it at last, was all he could think. It had been a rash act
to come here at all, and sheer folly to arrive together; though
it was true that they had come by different routes and only met
on O'Brien's doorstep. But merely to walk into such a place
needed an effort of the nerve. It was only on very rare
occasions that one saw inside the dwelling-places of the Inner
Party, or even penetrated into the quarter of the town where
they lived. The whole atmosphere of the huge block of flats,
the richness and spaciousness of everything, the unfamiliar
smells of good food and good tobacco, the silent and incredibly
rapid lifts sliding up and down, the white-jacketed servants
hurrying to and fro -- everything was intimidating. Although he
had a good pretext for coming here, he was haunted at every
step by the fear that a black-uniformed guard would suddenly
appear from round the corner, demand his papers, and order him
to get out. O'Brien's servant, however, had admitted the two of
them without demur. He was a small, dark-haired man in a white
jacket, with a diamond-shaped, completely expressionless face
which might have been that of a Chinese. The passage down which
he led them was softly carpeted, with cream-papered walls and
white wainscoting, all exquisitely clean. That too was
intimidating. Winston could not remember ever to have seen a
passageway whose walls were not grimy from the contact of human
bodies.
O'Brien had a slip of paper between his fingers and seemed
to be studying it intently. His heavy face, bent down so that
one could see the line of the nose, looked both formidable and
intelligent. For perhaps twenty seconds he sat without
stirring. Then he pulled the speakwrite towards him and rapped
out a message in the hybrid jargon of the Ministries:
'Items one comma five comma seven approved fullwise stop
suggestion contained item six doubleplus ridiculous verging
crimethink cancel stop unproceed constructionwise antegetting
plusfull estimates machinery overheads stop end message.'
He rose deliberately from his chair and came towards them
across the soundless carpet. A little of the official
atmosphere seemed to have fallen away from him with the
Newspeak words, but his expression was grimmer than usual, as
though he were not pleased at being disturbed. The terror that
Winston already felt was suddenly shot through by a streak of
ordinary embarrassment. It seemed to him quite possible that he
had simply made a stupid mistake. For what evidence had he in
reality that O'Brien was any kind of political conspirator?
Nothing but a flash of the eyes and a single equivocal remark:
beyond that, only his own secret imaginings, founded on a
dream. He could not even fall back on the pretence that he had
come to borrow the dictionary, because in that case Julia's
presence was impossible to explain. As O'Brien passed the
telescreen a thought seemed to strike him. He stopped, turned
aside and pressed a switch on the wall. There was a sharp snap.
The voice had stopped.
Julia uttered a tiny sound, a sort of squeak of surprise.
Even in the midst of his panic, Winston was too much taken
aback to be able to hold his tongue.
'You can turn it off!' he said.
'Yes,' said O'Brien, 'we can turn it off. We have that
privilege.'
He was opposite them now. His solid form towered over the
pair of them, and the expression on his face was still
indecipherable. He was waiting, somewhat sternly, for Winston
to speak, but about what? Even now it was quite conceivabIe
that he was simply a busy man wondering irritably why he had
been interrupted. Nobody spoke. After the stopping of the
telescreen the room seemed deadly silent. The seconds marched
past, enormous. With difficulty Winston continued to keep his
eyes fixed on O'Brien's. Then suddenly the grim face broke down
into what might have been the beginnings of a smile. With his
characteristic gesture O'Brien resettled his spectacles on his
nose.
'Shall I say it, or will you?' he said.
'I will say it,' said Winston promptly. 'That thing is
really turned off?'
'Yes, everything is turned off. We are alone.'
'We have come here because-'
He paused, realizing for the first time the vagueness of
his own motives. Since he did not in fact know what kind of
help he expected from O'Brien, it was not easy to say why he
had come here. He went on, conscious that what he was saying
must sound both feeble and pretentious:
'We believe that there is some kind of conspiracy, some
kind of secret organization working against the Party, and that
you are involved in it. We want to join it and work for it. We
are enemies of the Party. We disbelieve in the principles of
Ingsoc. We are thought-criminals. We are also adulterers. I
tell you this because we want to put ourselves at your mercy.
If you want us to incriminate ourselves in any other way, we
are ready.'
He stopped and glanced over his shoulder, with the feeling
that the door had opened. Sure enough, the little yellow-faced
servant had come in without knocking. Winston saw that he was
carrying a tray with a decanter and glasses.
'Martin is one of us,' said O'Brien impassively. 'Bring
the drinks over here, Martin. Put them on the round table. Have
we enough chairs? Then we may as well sit down and talk in
comfort. Bring a chair for yourself, Martin. This is business.
You can stop being a servant for the next ten minutes.'
The little man sat down, quite at his ease, and yet still
with a servant-like air, the air of a valet enjoying a
privilege. Winston regarded him out of the corner of his eye.
It struck him that the man's whole life was playing a part, and
that he felt it to be dangerous to drop his assumed personality
even for a moment. O'Brien took the decanter by the neck and
filled up the glasses with a dark- red liquid. It aroused in
Winston dim memories of something seen long ago on a wall or a
hoarding -- a vast bottle composed of electric lights which
seemed to move up and down and pour its contents into a glass.
Seen from the top the stuff looked almost black, but in the
decanter it gleamed like a ruby. It had a sour-sweet smell. He
saw Julia pick up her glass and sniff at it with frank
curiosity.
'It is called wine,' said O'Brien with a faint smile. 'You
will have read about it in books, no doubt. Not much of it gets
to the Outer Party, I am afraid.' His face grew solemn again,
and he raised his glass: 'I think it is fitting that we should
begin by drinking a health. To our Leader: To Emmanuel
Goldstein.'
Winston took up his glass with a certain eagerness. Wine
was a thing he had read and dreamed about. Like the glass
paperweight or Mr Charrington's half-remembered rhymes, it
belonged to the vanished, romantic past, the olden time as he
liked to call it in his secret thoughts. For some reason he had
always thought of wine as having an intensely sweet taste, like
that of blackberry jam and an immediate intoxicating effect.
Actually, when he came to swallow it, the stuff was distinctly
disappointing. The truth was that after years of gin-drinking
he could barely taste it. He set down the empty glass.
'Then there is such a person as Goldstein?' he said.
'Yes, there is such a person, and he is alive. Where, I do
not know.'
'And the conspiracy -- the organization? Is it real? It is
not simply an invention of the Thought Police?'
'No, it is real. The Brotherhood, we call it. You will
never learn much more about the Brotherhood than that it exists
and that you belong to it. I will come back to that presently.'
He looked at his wrist-watch. 'It is unwise even for members of
the Inner Party to turn off the telescreen for more than half
an hour. You ought not to have come here together, and you will
have to leave separately. You, comrade' -- he bowed his head to
Julia -- 'will leave first. We have about twenty minutes at our
disposal. You will understand that I must start by asking you
certain questions. In general terms, what are you prepared to
do?'
next