But the face of Big Brother seemed to persist for
several
seconds on the screen, as though the impact that it had made on
everyone's eyeballs was too vivid to wear off immediately. The
little sandyhaired woman had flung herself forward over the
back of the chair in front of her. With a tremulous murmur that
sounded like 'My Saviour!' she extended her arms towards the
screen. Then she buried her face in her hands. It was apparent
that she was uttering a prayer.
At this moment the entire group of people broke into a
deep, slow, rhythmical chant of 'B-B! . . . B-B!' -- over and
over again, very slowly, with a long pause between the first
'B' and the second-a heavy, murmurous sound, somehow curiously
savage, in the background of which one seemed to hear the stamp
of naked feet and the throbbing of tom-toms. For perhaps as
much as thirty seconds they kept it up. It was a refrain that
was often heard in moments of overwhelming emotion. Partly it
was a sort of hymn to the wisdom and majesty of Big Brother,
but still more it was an act of self-hypnosis, a deliberate
drowning of consciousness by means of rhythmic noise. Winston's
entrails seemed to grow cold. In the Two Minutes Hate he could
not help sharing in the general delirium, but this sub-human
chanting of 'B- B! . . . B-B !' always filled him with horror.
Of course he chanted with the rest: it was impossible to do
otherwise. To dissemble your feelings, to control your face, to
do what everyone else was doing, was an instinctive reaction.
But there was a space of a couple of seconds during which the
expression of his eyes might conceivably have betrayed him. And
it was exactly at this moment that the significant thing
happened -- if, indeed, it did happen.
Momentarily he caught O'Brien's eye. O'Brien had stood up.
He had taken off his spectacles and was in the act of
resettling them on his nose with his characteristic gesture.
But there was a fraction of a second when their eyes met, and
for as long as it took to happen Winston knew-yes, he
knew !-that O'Brien was thinking the same thing as
himself. An unmistakable message had passed. It was as though
their two minds had opened and the thoughts were flowing from
one into the other through their eyes. 'I am with you,' O'Brien
seemed to be saying to him. 'I know precisely what you are
feeling. I know all about your contempt, your hatred, your
disgust. But don't worry, I am on your side!' And then the
flash of intelligence was gone, and O'Brien's face was as
inscrutable as everybody else's.
That was all, and he was already uncertain whether it had
happened. Such incidents never had any sequel. All that they
did was to keep alive in him the belief, or hope, that others
besides himself were the enemies of the Party. Perhaps the
rumours of vast underground conspiracies were true after all --
perhaps the Brotherhood really existed ! It was impossible, in
spite of the endless arrests and confessions and executions, to
be sure that the Brotherhood was not simply a myth. Some days
he believed in it, some days not. There was no evidence, only
fleeting glimpses that might mean anything or nothing: snatches
of overheard conversation, faint scribbles on lavatory walls --
once, even, when two strangers met, a small movement of the
hand which had looked as though it might be a signal of
recognition. It was all guesswork: very likely he had imagined
everything. He had gone back to his cubicle without looking at
O'Brien again. The idea of following up their momentary contact
hardly crossed his mind. It would have been inconceivably
dangerous even if he had known how to set about doing it. For a
second, two seconds, they had exchanged an equivocal glance,
and that was the end of the story. But even that was a
memorable event, in the locked loneliness in which one had to
live.
Winston roused himself and sat up straighter. He let out a
belch. The gin was rising from his stomach.
His eyes re-focused on the page. He discovered that while
he sat helplessly musing he had also been writing, as though by
automatic action. And it was no longer the same cramped,
awkward handwriting as before. His pen had slid voluptuously
over the smooth paper, printing in large neat capitals
DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER
DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER
DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER
DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER
DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER
over and over again, filling half a page.
He could not help feeling a twinge of panic. It was
absurd, since the writing of those particular words was not
more dangerous than the initial act of opening the diary, but
for a moment he was tempted to tear out the spoiled pages and
abandon the enterprise altogether.
He did not do so, however, because he knew that it was
useless. Whether he wrote DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER, or whether he
refrained from writing it, made no difference. Whether he went
on with the diary, or whether he did not go on with it, made no
difference. The Thought Police would get him just the same. He
had committed -- would still have committed, even if he had
never set pen to paper -- the essential crime that contained
all others in itself. Thoughtcrime, they called it.
Thoughtcrime was not a thing that could be concealed for ever.
You might dodge successfully for a while, even for years, but
sooner or later they were bound to get you.
It was always at night -- the arrests invariably happened
at night. The sudden jerk out of sleep, the rough hand shaking
your shoulder, the lights glaring in your eyes, the ring of
hard faces round the bed. In the vast majority of cases there
was no trial, no report of the arrest. People simply
disappeared, always during the night. Your name was removed
from the registers, every record of everything you had ever
done was wiped out, your one-time existence was denied and then
forgotten. You were abolished, annihilated: vaporized
was the usual word.
For a moment he was seized by a kind of hysteria. He began
writing in a hurried untidy scrawl:
theyll shoot me i don't care theyll shoot me in the
back of the neck i dont care down with big brother they always
shoot you in the back of the neck i dont care down with big
brother
He sat back in his chair, slightly ashamed of himself, and
laid down the pen. The next moment he started violently. There
was a knocking at the door.
Already! He sat as still as a mouse, in the futile hope
that whoever it was might go away after a single attempt. But
no, the knocking was repeated. The worst thing of all would be
to delay. His heart was thumping like a drum, but his face,
from long habit, was probably expressionless. He got up and
moved heavily towards the door.
x x x
As he put his hand to the door-knob Winston saw that he
had left the diary open on the table. DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER was
written all over it, in letters almost big enough to be legible
across the room. It was an inconceivably stupid thing to have
done. But, he realized, even in his panic he had not wanted to
smudge the creamy paper by shutting the book while the ink was
wet.
He drew in his breath and opened the door. Instantly a
warm wave of relief flowed through him. A colourless,
crushed-looking woman, with wispy hair and a lined face, was
standing outside.
'Oh, comrade,' she began in a dreary, whining sort of
voice, 'I thought I heard you come in. Do you think you could
come across and have a look at our kitchen sink? It's got
blocked up and-'
It was Mrs Parsons, the wife of a neighbour on the same
floor. ('Mrs' was a word somewhat discountenanced by the Party
-- you were supposed to call everyone 'comrade' -- but with
some women one used it instinctively.) She was a woman of about
thirty, but looking much older. One had the impression that
there was dust in the creases of her face. Winston followed her
down the passage. These amateur repair jobs were an almost
daily irritation. Victory Mansions were old flats, built in
1930 or thereabouts, and were falling to pieces. The plaster
flaked constantly from ceilings and walls, the pipes burst in
every hard frost, the roof leaked whenever there was snow, the
heating system was usually running at half steam when it was
not closed down altogether from motives of economy. Repairs,
except what you could do for yourself, had to be sanctioned by
remote committees which were liable to hold up even the mending
of a window- pane for two years.
'Of course it's only because Tom isn't home,' said Mrs
Parsons vaguely.
The Parsons' flat was bigger than Winston's, and dingy in
a different way. Everything had a battered, trampled-on look,
as though the place had just been visited by some large violent
animal. Games impedimenta -- hockey-sticks, boxing-gloves. a
burst football, a pair of sweaty shorts turned inside out --
lay all over the floor, and on the table there was a litter of
dirty dishes and dog-eared exercise-books. On the walls were
scarlet banners of the Youth League and the Spies, and a
full-sized poster of Big Brother. There was the usual
boiled-cabbage smell, common to the whole building, but it was
shot through by a sharper reek of sweat, which-one knew this at
the first sniff, though it was hard to say how was the sweat of
some person not present at the moment. In another room someone
with a comb and a piece of toilet paper was trying to keep tune
with the military music which was still issuing from the
telescreen.
'It's the children,' said Mrs Parsons, casting a half-
apprehensive glance at the door. 'They haven't been out today.
And of course-'
She had a habit of breaking off her sentences in the
middle. The kitchen sink was full nearly to the brim with
filthy greenish water which smelt worse than ever of cabbage.
Winston knelt down and examined the angle-joint of the pipe. He
hated using his hands, and he hated bending down, which was
always liable to start him coughing. Mrs Parsons looked on
helplessly.
'Of course if Tom was home he'd put it right in a moment,'
she said. 'He loves anything like that. He's ever so good with
his hands, Tom is.'
Parsons was Winston's fellow-employee at the Ministry of
Truth. He was a fattish but active man of paralysing stupidity,
a mass of imbecile enthusiasms -- one of those completely
unquestioning, devoted drudges on whom, more even than on the
Thought Police, the stability of the Party depended. At
thirty-five he had just been unwillingly evicted from the Youth
League, and before graduating into the Youth League he had
managed to stay on in the Spies for a year beyond the statutory
age. At the Ministry he was employed in some subordinate post
for which intelligence was not required, but on the other hand
he was a leading figure on the Sports Committee and all the
other committees engaged in organizing community hikes,
spontaneous demonstrations, savings campaigns, and voluntary
activities generally. He would inform you with quiet pride,
between whiffs of his pipe, that he had put in an appearance at
the Community Centre every evening for the past four years. An
overpowering smell of sweat, a sort of unconscious testimony to
the strenuousness of his life, followed him about wherever he
went, and even remained behind him after he had gone.
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