Winston thought. There did not seem to be any
further
question that he wanted to ask: still less did he feel any
impulse to utter high-sounding generalities. Instead of
anything directly connected with O'Brien or the Brotherhood,
there came into his mind a sort of composite picture of the
dark bedroom where his mother had spent her last days, and the
little room over Mr Charrington's shop, and the glass
paperweight, and the steel engraving in its rosewood frame.
Almost at random he said:
'Did you ever happen to hear an old rhyme that begins
"Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St Clement's"?'
Again O'Brien nodded. With a sort of grave courtesy he
completed the stanza:
'Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St Clement's,
You owe me three farthings, say the bells of St Martin's,
When will you pay me? say the bells of Old Bailey
When I grow rich, say the bells of Shoreditch.'
'You knew the last line!' said Winston.
'Yes, I knew the last line. And now, I am afraid, it is
time for you to go. But wait. You had better let me give you
one of these tablets.'
As Winston stood up O'Brien held out a hand. His powerful
grip crushed the bones of Winston's palm. At the door Winston
looked back, but O'Brien seemed already to be in process of
putting him out of mind. He was waiting with his hand on the
switch that controlled the telescreen. Beyond him Winston could
see the writing-table with its green- shaded lamp and the
speakwrite and the wire baskets deep- laden with papers. The
incident was closed. Within thirty seconds, it occurred to him,
O'Brien would be back at his interrupted and important work on
behalf of the Party.
x x x
Winston was gelatinous with fatigue. Gelatinous was the
right word. It had come into his head spontaneously. His body
seemed to have not only the weakness of a jelly, but its
translucency. He felt that if he held up his hand he would be
able to see the light through it. All the blood and lymph had
been drained out of him by an enormous debauch of work, leaving
only a frail structure of nerves, bones, and skin. All
sensations seemed to be magnified. His overalls fretted his
shoulders, the pavement tickled his feet, even the opening and
closing of a hand was an effort that made his joints creak.
He had worked more than ninety hours in five days. So had
everyone else in the Ministry. Now it was all over, and he had
literally nothing to do, no Party work of any description,
until tomorrow morning. He could spend six hours in the
hiding-place and another nine in his own bed. Slowly, in mild
afternoon sunshine, he walked up a dingy street in the
direction of Mr Charrington's shop, keeping one eye open for
the patrols, but irrationally convinced that this afternoon
there was no danger of anyone interfering with him. The heavy
brief-case that he was carrying bumped against his knee at each
step, sending a tingling sensation up and down the skin of his
leg. Inside it was the book, which he had now had in his
possession for six days and had not yet opened, nor even looked
at.
On the sixth day of Hate Week, after the processions, the
speeches, the shouting, the singing, the banners, the posters,
the films, the waxworks, the rolling of drums and squealing of
trumpets, the tramp of marching feet, the grinding of the
caterpillars of tanks, the roar of massed planes, the booming
of guns -- after six days of this, when the great orgasm was
quivering to its climax and the general hatred of Eurasia had
boiled up into such delirium that if the crowd could have got
their hands on the 2,000 Eurasian war-criminals who were to be
publicly hanged on the last day of the proceedings, they would
unquestionably have torn them to pieces -- at just this moment
it had been announced that Oceania was not after all at war
with Eurasia. Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Eurasia was an
ally.
There was, of course, no admission that any change had
taken place. Merely it became known, with extreme suddenness
and everywhere at once, that Eastasia and not Eurasia was the
enemy. Winston was taking part in a demonstration in one of the
central London squares at the moment when it happened. It was
night, and the white faces and the scarlet banners were luridly
floodlit. The square was packed with several thousand people,
including a block of about a thousand schoolchildren in the
uniform of the Spies. On a scarlet-draped platform an orator of
the Inner Party, a small lean man with disproportionately long
arms and a large bald skull over which a few lank locks
straggled, was haranguing the crowd. A little Rumpelstiltskin
figure, contorted with hatred, he gripped the neck of the
microphone with one hand while the other, enormous at the end
of a bony arm, clawed the air menacingly above his head. His
voice, made metallic by the amplifiers, boomed forth an endless
catalogue of atrocities, massacres, deportations, lootings,
rapings, torture of prisoners, bombing of civilians, lying
propaganda, unjust aggressions, broken treaties. It was almost
impossible to listen to him without being first convinced and
then maddened. At every few moments the fury of the crowd
boiled over and the voice of the speaker was drowned by a wild
beast-like roaring that rose uncontrollably from thousands of
throats. The most savage yells of all came from the
schoolchildren. The speech had been proceeding for perhaps
twenty minutes when a messenger hurried on to the platform and
a scrap of paper was slipped into the speaker's hand. He
unrolled and read it without pausing in his speech. Nothing
altered in his voice or manner, or in the content of what he
was saying, but suddenly the names were different. Without
words said, a wave of understanding rippled through the crowd.
Oceania was at war with Eastasia! The next moment there was a
tremendous commotion. The banners and posters with which the
square was decorated were all wrong! Quite half of them had the
wrong faces on them. It was sabotage! The agents of Goldstein
had been at work! There was a riotous interlude while posters
were ripped from the walls, banners torn to shreds and trampled
underfoot. The Spies performed prodigies of activity in
clambering over the rooftops and cutting the streamers that
fluttered from the chimneys. But within two or three minutes it
was all over. The orator, still gripping the neck of the
microphone, his shoulders hunched forward, his free hand
clawing at the air, had gone straight on with his speech. One
minute more, and the feral roars of rage were again bursting
from the crowd. The Hate continued exactly as before, except
that the target had been changed.
The thing that impressed Winston in looking back was that
the speaker had switched from one line to the other actually in
midsentence, not only without a pause, but without even
breaking the syntax. But at the moment he had other things to
preoccupy him. It was during the moment of disorder while the
posters were being torn down that a man whose face he did not
see had tapped him on the shoulder and said, 'Excuse me, I
think you've dropped your brief-case.' He took the brief-case
abstractedly, without speaking. He knew that it would be days
before he had an opportunity to look inside it. The instant
that the demonstration was over he went straight to the
Ministry of Truth, though the time was now nearly twenty-three
hours. The entire staff of the Ministry had done likewise. The
orders already issuing from the telescreen, recalling them to
their posts, were hardly necessary.
Oceania was at war with Eastasia: Oceania had always been
at war with Eastasia. A large part of the political literature
of five years was now completely obsolete. Reports and records
of all kinds, newspapers, books, pamphlets, films,
sound-tracks, photographs -- all had to be rectified at
lightning speed. Although no directive was ever issued, it was
known that the chiefs of the Department intended that within
one week no reference to the war with Eurasia, or the alliance
with Eastasia, should remain in existence anywhere. The work
was overwhelming, all the more so because the processes that it
involved could not be called by their true names. Everyone in
the Records Department worked eighteen hours in the
twenty-four, with two three-hour snatches of sleep. Mattresses
were brought up from the cellars and pitched all over the
corridors: meals consisted of sandwiches and Victory Coffee
wheeled round on trolleys by attendants from the canteen. Each
time that Winston broke off for one of his spells of sleep he
tried to leave his desk clear of work, and each time that he
crawled back sticky-eyed and aching, it was to find that
another shower of paper cylinders had covered the desk like a
snowdrift, halfburying the speakwrite and overflowing on to the
floor, so that the first job was always to stack them into a
neat enough pile to give him room to work. What was worst of
all was that the work was by no means purely mechanical. Often
it was enough merely to substitute one name for another, but
any detailed report of events demanded care and imagination.
Even the geographical knowledge that one needed in transferring
the war from one part of the world to another was considerable.
By the third day his eyes ached unbearably and his
spectacles needed wiping every few minutes. It was like
struggling with some crushing physical task, something which
one had the right to refuse and which one was nevertheless
neurotically anxious to accomplish. In so far as he had time to
remember it, he was not troubled by the fact that every word he
murmured into the speakwrite, every stroke of his ink-pencil,
was a deliberate lie. He was as anxious as anyone else in the
Department that the forgery should be perfect. On the morning
of the sixth day the dribble of cylinders slowed down. For as
much as half an hour nothing came out of the tube; then one
more cylinder, then nothing. Everywhere at about the same time
the work was easing off. A deep and as it were secret sigh went
through the Department. A mighty deed, which could never be
mentioned, had been achieved. It was now impossible for any
human being to prove by documentary evidence that the war with
Eurasia had ever happened. At twelve hundred it was
unexpectedly announced that all workers in the Ministry were
free till tomorrow morning. Winston, still carrying the
brief-case containing the book, which had remained
between his feet while he worked and under his body while he
slept, went home, shaved himself, and almost fell asleep in his
bath, although the water was barely more than tepid.
With a sort of voluptuous creaking in his joints he
climbed the stair above Mr Charrington's shop. He was tired,
but not sleepy any longer. He opened the window, lit the dirty
little oilstove and put on a pan of water for coffee. Julia
would arrive presently: meanwhile there was the book. He
sat down in the sluttish armchair and undid the straps of the
brief-case.
A heavy black volume, amateurishly bound, with no name or
title on the cover. The print also looked slightly irregular.
The pages were worn at the edges, and fell apart, easily, as
though the book had passed through many hands. The inscription
on the title-page ran:
next