'We are the dead,' he said.
'We are the dead,' echoed Julia dutifully.
'You are the dead,' said an iron voice behind them.
They sprang apart. Winston's entrails seemed to have
turned into ice. He could see the white all round the irises of
Julia's eyes. Her face had turned a milky yellow. The smear of
rouge that was still on each cheekbone stood out sharply,
almost as though unconnected with the skin beneath.
'You are the dead,' repeated the iron voice.
'It was behind the picture,' breathed Julia.
'It was behind the picture,' said the voice. 'Remain
exactly where you are. Make no movement until you are ordered.'
It was starting, it was starting at last! They could do
nothing except stand gazing into one another's eyes. To run for
life, to get out of the house before it was too late -- no such
thought occurred to them. Unthinkable to disobey the iron voice
from the wall. There was a snap as though a catch had been
turned back, and a crash of breaking glass. The picture had
fallen to the floor uncovering the telescreen behind it.
'Now they can see us,' said Julia.
' Now we can see you,' said the voice. ' Stand out in the
middle of the room. Stand back to back. Clasp your hands behind
your heads. Do not touch one another.'
They were not touching, but it seemed to him that he could
feel Julia's body shaking. Or perhaps it was merely the shaking
of his own. He could just stop his teeth from chattering, but
his knees were beyond his control. There was a sound of
trampling boots below, inside the house and outside. The yard
seemed to be full of men. Something was being dragged across
the stones. The woman's singing had stopped abruptly. There was
a long, rolling clang, as though the washtub had been flung
across the yard, and then a confusion of angry shouts which
ended in a yell of pain.
'The house is surrounded,' said Winston.
'The house is surrounded,' said the voice.
He heard Julia snap her teeth together. 'I suppose we may
as well say good-bye,' she said.
'You may as well say good-bye,' said the voice. And then
another quite different voice, a thin, cultivated voice which
Winston had the impression of having heard before, struck in;
'And by the way, while we are on the subject, "Here comes a
candle to light you to bed, here comes a chopper to chop off
your head"!'
Something crashed on to the bed behind Winston's back. The
head of a ladder had been thrust through the window and had
burst in the frame. Someone was climbing through the window.
There was a stampede of boots up the stairs. The room was full
of solid men in black uniforms, with iron-shod boots on their
feet and truncheons in their hands.
Winston was not trembling any longer. Even his eyes he
barely moved. One thing alone mattered; to keep still, to keep
still and not give them an excuse to hit you ! A man with a
smooth prizefighter's jowl in which the mouth was only a slit
paused opposite him balancing his truncheon meditatively
between thumb and forefinger. Winston met his eyes. The feeling
of nakedness, with one's hands behind one's head and one's face
and body all exposed, was almost unbearable. The man protruded
the tip of a white tongue, licked the place where his lips
should have been, and then passed on. There was another crash.
Someone had picked up the glass paperweight from the table and
smashed it to pieces on the hearth-stone.
The fragment of coral, a tiny crinkle of pink like a sugar
rosebud from a cake, rolled across the mat. How small, thought
Winston, how small it always was! There was a gasp and a thump
behind him, and he received a violent kick on the ankle which
nearly flung him off his balance. One of the men had smashed
his fist into Julia's solar plexus, doubling her up like a
pocket ruler. She was thrashing about on the floor, fighting
for breath. Winston dared not turn his head even by a
millimetre, but sometimes her livid, gasping face came within
the angle of his vision. Even in his terror it was as though he
could feel the pain in his own body, the deadly pain which
nevertheless was less urgent than the struggle to get back her
breath. He knew what it was like; the terrible, agonizing pain
which was there all the while but could not be suffered yet,
because before all else it was necessary to be able to breathe.
Then two of the men hoisted her up by knees and shoulders, and
carried her out of the room like a sack. Winston had a glimpse
of her face, upside down, yellow and contorted, with the eyes
shut, and still with a smear of rouge on either cheek; and that
was the last he saw of her.
He stood dead still. No one had hit him yet. Thoughts
which came of their own accord but seemed totally uninteresting
began to flit through his mind. He wondered whether they had
got Mr Charrington. He wondered what they had done to the woman
in the yard. He noticed that he badly wanted to urinate, and
felt a faint surprise, because he had done so only two or three
hours ago. He noticed that the clock on the mantelpiece said
nine, meaning twenty-one. But the light seemed too strong.
Would not the light be fading at twenty-one hours on an August
evening? He wondered whether after all he and Julia had
mistaken the time -- had slept the clock round and thought it
was twenty-thirty when really it was nought eight-thirty on the
following morning. But he did not pursue the thought further.
It was not interesting.
There ws another, lighter step in the passage. Mr
Charrington came into the room. The demeanour of the black-
uniformed men suddenly became more subdued. Something had also
changed in Mr Charrington's appearance. His eye fell on the
fragments of the glass paperweight.
'Pick up those pieces,' he said sharply.
A man stooped to obey. The cockney accent had disappeared;
Winston suddenly realized whose voice it was that he had heard
a few moments ago on the telescreen. Mr Charrington was still
wearing his old velvet jacket, but his hair, which had been
almost white, had turned black. Also he was not wearing his
spectacles. He gave Winston a single sharp glance, as though
verifying his identity, and then paid no more attention to him.
He was still recognizable, but he was not the same person any
longer. His body had straightened, and seemed to have grown
bigger. His face had undergone only tiny changes that had
nevertheless worked a complete transformation. The black
eyebrows were less bushy, the wrinkles were gone, the whole
lines of the face seemed to have altered; even the nose seemed
shorter. It was the alert, cold face of a man of about
five-and-thirty. It occurred to Winston that for the first time
in his life he was looking, with knowledge, at a member of the
Thought Police.
* Chapter Three *
x x x
He did not know where he was. Presumably he was in the
Ministry of Love, but there was no way of making certain. He
was in a high-ceilinged windowless cell with walls of
glittering white porcelain. Concealed lamps flooded it with
cold light, and there was a low, steady humming sound which he
supposed had something to do with the air supply. A bench, or
shelf, just wide enough to sit on ran round the wall, broken
only by the door and, at the end opposite the door, a lavatory
pan with no wooden seat. There were four telescreens, one in
each wall.
There was a dull aching in his belly. It had been there
ever since they had bundled him into the closed van and driven
him away. But he was also hungry, with a gnawing, unwholesome
kind of hunger. It might be twenty-four hours since he had
eaten, it might be thirty-six. He still did not know, probably
never would know, whether it had been morning or evening when
they arrested him. Since he was arrested he had not been fed.
He sat as still as he could on the narrow bench, with his
hands crossed on his knee. He had already learned to sit still.
If you made unexpected movements they yelled at you from the
telescreen. But the craving for food was growing upon him. What
he longed for above all was a piece of bread. He had an idea
that there were a few breadcrumbs in the pocket of his
overalls. It was even possible -- he thought this because from
time to time something seemed to tickle his leg -- that there
might be a sizeable bit of crust there. In the end the
temptation to find out overcame his fear; he slipped a hand
into his pocket.
'Smith!' yelled a voice from the telescreen. '6079 Smith
W.! Hands out of pockets in the cells!'
He sat still again, his hands crossed on his knee. Before
being brought here he had been taken to another place which
must have been an ordinary prison or a temporary lock-up used
by the patrols. He did not know how long he had been there;
some hours at any rate; with no clocks and no daylight it was
hard to gauge the time. It was a noisy, evil-smelling place.
They had put him into a cell similar to the one he was now in,
but filthily dirty and at all times crowded by ten or fifteen
people. The majority of them were common criminals, but there
were a few political prisoners among them. He had sat silent
against the wall, jostled by dirty bodies, too preoccupied by
fear and the pain in his belly to take much interest in his
surroundings, but still noticing the astonishing difference in
demeanour between the Party prisoners and the others. The Party
prisoners were always silent and terrified, but the ordinary
criminals seemed to care nothing for anybody. They yelled
insults at the guards, fought back fiercely when their
belongings were impounded, wrote obscene words on the floor,
ate smuggled food which they produced from mysterious
hiding-places in their clothes, and even shouted down the
telescreen when it tried to restore order. On the other hand
some of them seemed to be on good terms with the guards, called
them by nicknames, and tried to wheedle cigarettes through the
spyhole in the door. The guards, too, treated the common
criminals with a certain forbearance, even when they had to
handle them roughly. There was much talk about the
forced-labour camps to which most of the prisoners expected to
be sent. It was 'all right' in the camps, he gathered, so long
as you had good contacts and knew the ropes. There was bribery,
favouritism, and racketeering of every kind, there was
homosexuality and prostitution, there was even illicit alcohol
distilled from potatoes. The positions of trust were given only
to the common criminals, especially the gangsters and the
murderers, who formed a sort of aristocracy. All the dirty jobs
were done by the politicals.
There was a constant come-and-go of prisoners of every
description: drug-peddlers, thieves, bandits, black-
marketeers, drunks, prostitutes. Some of the drunks were so
violent that the other prisoners had to combine to suppress
them. An enormous wreck of a woman, aged about sixty, with
great tumbling breasts and thick coils of white hair which had
come down in her struggles, was carried in, kicking and
shouting, by four guards, who had hold of her one at each
corner. They wrenched off the boots with which she had been
trying to kick them, and dumped her down across Winston's lap,
almost breaking his thigh-bones. The woman hoisted herself
upright and followed them out with a yell of 'F -- bastards!'
Then, noticing that she was sitting on something uneven, she
slid off Winston's knees on to the bench.
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