Chapter 8, part two.
Winston sat back against the window-sill.
It was no use going on.
He was about to buy some more beer when the
old man suddenly got up and shuffled rapidly
into the stinking urinal at the side of the
room.
The extra half-litre was already working on
him.
Winston sat for a minute or two gazing at
his empty glass, and hardly noticed when his
feet carried him out into the street again.
Within twenty years at the most, he reflected,
the huge and simple question, ‘Was life
better before the Revolution than it is now?’
would have ceased once and for all to be answerable.
But in effect it was unanswerable even now,
since the few scattered survivors from the
ancient world were incapable of comparing
one age with another.
They remembered a million useless things,
a quarrel with a workmate, a hunt for a lost
bicycle pump, the expression on a long-dead
sister’s face, the swirls of dust on a windy
morning seventy years ago: but all the relevant
facts were outside the range of their vision.
They were like the ant, which can see small
objects but not large ones.
And when memory failed and written records
were falsified — when that happened, the
claim of the Party to have improved the conditions
of human life had got to be accepted, because
there did not exist, and never again could
exist, any standard against which it could
be tested.
At this moment his train of thought stopped
abruptly.
He halted and looked up.
He was in a narrow street, with a few dark
little shops, interspersed among dwelling-houses.
Immediately above his head there hung three
discoloured metal balls which looked as if
they had once been gilded.
He seemed to know the place.
Of course!
He was standing outside the junk-shop where
he had bought the diary.
A twinge of fear went through him.
It had been a sufficiently rash act to buy
the book in the beginning, and he had sworn
never to come near the place again.
And yet the instant that he allowed his thoughts
to wander, his feet had brought him back here
of their own accord.
It was precisely against suicidal impulses
of this kind that he had hoped to guard himself
by opening the diary.
At the same time he noticed that although
it was nearly twenty-one hours the shop was
still open.
With the feeling that he would be less conspicuous
inside than hanging about on the pavement,
he stepped through the doorway.
If questioned, he could plausibly say that
he was trying to buy razor blades.
The proprietor had just lighted a hanging
oil lamp which gave off an unclean but friendly
smell.
He was a man of perhaps sixty, frail and bowed,
with a long, benevolent nose, and mild eyes
distorted by thick spectacles.
His hair was almost white, but his eyebrows
were bushy and still black.
His spectacles, his gentle, fussy movements,
and the fact that he was wearing an aged jacket
of black velvet, gave him a vague air of intellectuality,
as though he had been some kind of literary
man, or perhaps a musician.
His voice was soft, as though faded, and his
accent less debased than that of the majority
of proles.
‘I recognized you on the pavement,’ he
said immediately.
‘You’re the gentleman that bought the
young lady’s keepsake album.
That was a beautiful bit of paper, that was.
Cream-laid, it used to be called.
There’s been no paper like that made for
— oh, I dare say fifty years.’
He peered at Winston over the top of his spectacles.
‘Is there anything special I can do for
you?
Or did you just want to look round?’
‘I was passing,’ said Winston vaguely.
‘I just looked in.
I don’t want anything in particular.’
‘It’s just as well,’ said the other,
‘because I don’t suppose I could have
satisfied you.’
He made an apologetic gesture with his softpalmed
hand.
‘You see how it is; an empty shop, you might
say.
Between you and me, the antique trade’s
just about finished.
No demand any longer, and no stock either.
Furniture, china, glass it’s all been broken
up by degrees.
And of course the metal stuff’s mostly been
melted down.
I haven’t seen a brass candlestick in years.’
The tiny interior of the shop was in fact
uncomfortably full, but there was almost nothing
in it of the slightest value.
The floorspace was very restricted, because
all round the walls were stacked innumerable
dusty picture-frames.
In the window there were trays of nuts and
bolts, worn-out chisels, penknives with broken
blades, tarnished watches that did not even
pretend to be in going order, and other miscellaneous
rubbish.
Only on a small table in the corner was there
a litter of odds and ends — lacquered snuffboxes,
agate brooches, and the like — which looked
as though they might include something interesting.
As Winston wandered towards the table his
eye was caught by a round, smooth thing that
gleamed softly in the lamplight, and he picked
it up.
It was a heavy lump of glass, curved on one
side, flat on the other, making almost a hemisphere.
There was a peculiar softness, as of rainwater,
in both the colour and the texture of the
glass.
At the heart of it, magnified by the curved
surface, there was a strange, pink, convoluted
object that recalled a rose or a sea anemone.
‘What is it?’ said Winston, fascinated.
‘That’s coral, that is,’ said the old
man.
‘It must have come from the Indian Ocean.
They used to kind of embed it in the glass.
That wasn’t made less than a hundred years
ago.
More, by the look of it.’
‘It’s a beautiful thing,’ said Winston.
‘It is a beautiful thing,’ said the other
appreciatively.
‘But there’s not many that’d say so
nowadays.’
He coughed.
‘Now, if it so happened that you wanted
to buy it, that’d cost you four dollars.
I can remember when a thing like that would
have fetched eight pounds, and eight pounds
was — well, I can’t work it out, but it
was a lot of money.
But who cares about genuine antiques nowadays
— even the few that’s left?’
Winston immediately paid over the four dollars
and slid the coveted thing into his pocket.
What appealed to him about it was not so much
its beauty as the air it seemed to possess
of belonging to an age quite different from
the present one.
The soft, rainwatery glass was not like any
glass that he had ever seen.
The thing was doubly attractive because of
its apparent uselessness, though he could
guess that it must once have been intended
as a paperweight.
It was very heavy in his pocket, but fortunately
it did not make much of a bulge.
It was a queer thing, even a compromising
thing, for a Party member to have in his possession.
Anything old, and for that matter anything
beautiful, was always vaguely suspect.
The old man had grown noticeably more cheerful
after receiving the four dollars.
Winston realized that he would have accepted
three or even two.
‘There’s another room upstairs that you
might care to take a look at,’ he said.
‘There’s not much in it.
Just a few pieces.
We’ll do with a light if we’re going upstairs.’
He lit another lamp, and, with bowed back,
led the way slowly up the steep and worn stairs
and along a tiny passage, into a room which
did not give on the street but looked out
on a cobbled yard and a forest of chimney-pots.
Winston noticed that the furniture was still
arranged as though the room were meant to
be lived in.
There was a strip of carpet on the floor,
a picture or two on the walls, and a deep,
slatternly arm-chair drawn up to the fireplace.
An old-fashioned glass clock with a twelve-hour
face was ticking away on the mantelpiece.
Under the window, and occupying nearly a quarter
of the room, was an enormous bed with the
mattress still on it.
‘We lived here till my wife died,’ said
the old man half apologetically.
‘I’m selling the furniture off by little
and little.
Now that’s a beautiful mahogany bed, or
at least it would be if you could get the
bugs out of it.
But I dare say you’d find it a little bit
cumbersome.’
He was holding the lamp high up, so as to
illuminate the whole room, and in the warm
dim light the place looked curiously inviting.
The thought flitted through Winston’s mind
that it would probably be quite easy to rent
the room for a few dollars a week, if he dared
to take the risk.
It was a wild, impossible notion, to be abandoned
as soon as thought of; but the room had awakened
in him a sort of nostalgia, a sort of ancestral
memory.
It seemed to him that he knew exactly what
it felt like to sit in a room like this, in
an arm-chair beside an open fire with your
feet in the fender and a kettle on the hob;
utterly alone, utterly secure, with nobody
watching you, no voice pursuing you, no sound
except the singing of the kettle and the friendly
ticking of the clock.
‘There’s no telescreen!’ he could not
help murmuring.
‘Ah,’ said the old man, ‘I never had
one of those things.
Too expensive.
And I never seemed to feel the need of it,
somehow.
Now that’s a nice gateleg table in the corner
there.
Though of course you’d have to put new hinges
on it if you wanted to use the flaps.’
There was a small bookcase in the other corner,
and Winston had already gravitated towards
it.
It contained nothing but rubbish.
The hunting-down and destruction of books
had been done with the same thoroughness in
the prole quarters as everywhere else.
It was very unlikely that there existed anywhere
in Oceania a copy of a book printed earlier
than 1960.
The old man, still carrying the lamp, was
standing in front of a picture in a rosewood
frame which hung on the other side of the
fireplace, opposite the bed.
‘Now, if you happen to be interested in
old prints at all ——’ he began delicately.
Winston came across to examine the picture.
It was a steel engraving of an oval building
with rectangular windows, and a small tower
in front.
There was a railing running round the building,
and at the rear end there was what appeared
to be a statue.
Winston gazed at it for some moments.
It seemed vaguely familiar, though he did
not remember the statue.
‘The frame’s fixed to the wall,’ said
the old man, ‘but I could unscrew it for
you, I dare say.’
‘I know that building,’ said Winston finally.
‘It’s a ruin now.
It’s in the middle of the street outside
the Palace of Justice.’
‘That’s right.
Outside the Law Courts.
It was bombed in — oh, many years ago.
It was a church at one time, St Clement Danes,
its name was.’
He smiled apologetically, as though conscious
of saying something slightly ridiculous, and
added: ‘Oranges and lemons, say the bells
of St Clement’s!’
‘What’s that?’ said Winston.
‘Oh —“Oranges and lemons, say the bells
of St Clement’s.”
That was a rhyme we had when I was a little
boy.
How it goes on I don’t remember, but I do
know it ended up, “Here comes a candle to
light you to bed, Here comes a chopper to
chop off your head.”
It was a kind of a dance.
They held out their arms for you to pass under,
and when they came to “Here comes a chopper
to chop off your head” they brought their
arms down and caught you.
It was just names of churches.
All the London churches were in it — all
the principal ones, that is.’
Winston wondered vaguely to what century the
church belonged.
It was always difficult to determine the age
of a London building.
Anything large and impressive, if it was reasonably
new in appearance, was automatically claimed
as having been built since the Revolution,
while anything that was obviously of earlier
date was ascribed to some dim period called
the Middle Ages.
The centuries of capitalism were held to have
produced nothing of any value.
One could not learn history from architecture
any more than one could learn it from books.
Statues, inscriptions, memorial stones, the
names of streets — anything that might throw
light upon the past had been systematically
altered.
‘I never knew it had been a church,’ he
said.
‘There’s a lot of them left, really,’
said the old man, ‘though they’ve been
put to other uses.
Now, how did that rhyme go?
Ah!
I’ve got it!
“Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St
Clement’s,
You owe me three farthings, say the bells
of St Martin’s ——”
there, now, that’s as far as I can get.
A farthing, that was a small copper coin,
looked something like a cent.’
‘Where was St Martin’s?’ said Winston.
‘St Martin’s?
That’s still standing.
It’s in Victory Square, alongside the picture
gallery.
A building with a kind of a triangular porch
and pillars in front, and a big flight of
steps.’
Winston knew the place well.
It was a museum used for propaganda displays
of various kinds — scale models of rocket
bombs and Floating Fortresses, waxwork tableaux
illustrating enemy atrocities, and the like.
‘St Martin’s-in-the-Fields it used to
be called,’ supplemented the old man, ‘though
I don’t recollect any fields anywhere in
those parts.’
Winston did not buy the picture.
It would have been an even more incongruous
possession than the glass paperweight, and
impossible to carry home, unless it were taken
out of its frame.
But he lingered for some minutes more, talking
to the old man, whose name, he discovered,
was not Weeks — as one might have gathered
from the inscription over the shop-front — but
Charrington.
Mr Charrington, it seemed, was a widower aged
sixty-three and had inhabited this shop for
thirty years.
Throughout that time he had been intending
to alter the name over the window, but had
never quite got to the point of doing it.
All the while that they were talking the half-remembered
rhyme kept running through Winston’s head.
Oranges and lemons say the bells of St Clement’s,
You owe me three farthings, say the bells
of St Martin’s!
It was curious, but when you said it to yourself
you had the illusion of actually hearing bells,
the bells of a lost London that still existed
somewhere or other, disguised and forgotten.
From one ghostly steeple after another he
seemed to hear them pealing forth.
Yet so far as he could remember he had never
in real life heard church bells ringing.
He got away from Mr Charrington and went down
the stairs alone, so as not to let the old
man see him reconnoitring the street before
stepping out of the door.
He had already made up his mind that after
a suitable interval — a month, say — he
would take the risk of visiting the shop again.
It was perhaps not more dangerous than shirking
an evening at the Centre.
The serious piece of folly had been to come
back here in the first place, after buying
the diary and without knowing whether the
proprietor of the shop could be trusted.
However ——!
Yes, he thought again, he would come back.
He would buy further scraps of beautiful rubbish.
He would buy the engraving of St Clement Danes,
take it out of its frame, and carry it home
concealed under the jacket of his overalls.
He would drag the rest of that poem out of
Mr Charrington’s memory.
Even the lunatic project of renting the room
upstairs flashed momentarily through his mind
again.
For perhaps five seconds exaltation made him
careless, and he stepped out on to the pavement
without so much as a preliminary glance through
the window.
He had even started humming to an improvised
tune
Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St Clement’s,
You owe me three farthings, say the ——
Suddenly his heart seemed to turn to ice and
his bowels to water.
A figure in blue overalls was coming down
the pavement, not ten metres away.
It was the girl from the Fiction Department,
the girl with dark hair.
The light was failing, but there was no difficulty
in recognizing her.
She looked him straight in the face, then
walked quickly on as though she had not seen
him.
For a few seconds Winston was too paralysed
to move.
Then he turned to the right and walked heavily
away, not noticing for the moment that he
was going in the wrong direction.
At any rate, one question was settled.
There was no doubting any longer that the
girl was spying on him.
She must have followed him here, because it
was not credible that by pure chance she should
have happened to be walking on the same evening
up the same obscure backstreet, kilometres
distant from any quarter where Party members
lived.
It was too great a coincidence.
Whether she was really an agent of the Thought
Police, or simply an amateur spy actuated
by officiousness, hardly mattered.
It was enough that she was watching him.
Probably she had seen him go into the pub
as well.
It was an effort to walk.
The lump of glass in his pocket banged against
his thigh at each step, and he was half minded
to take it out and throw it away.
The worst thing was the pain in his belly.
For a couple of minutes he had the feeling
that he would die if he did not reach a lavatory
soon.
But there would be no public lavatories in
a quarter like this.
Then the spasm passed, leaving a dull ache
behind.
The street was a blind alley.
Winston halted, stood for several seconds
wondering vaguely what to do, then turned
round and began to retrace his steps.
As he turned it occurred to him that the girl
had only passed him three minutes ago and
that by running he could probably catch up
with her.
He could keep on her track till they were
in some quiet place, and then smash her skull
in with a cobblestone.
The piece of glass in his pocket would be
heavy enough for the job.
But he abandoned the idea immediately, because
even the thought of making any physical effort
was unbearable.
He could not run, he could not strike a blow.
Besides, she was young and lusty and would
defend herself.
He thought also of hurrying to the Community
Centre and staying there till the place closed,
so as to establish a partial alibi for the
evening.
But that too was impossible.
A deadly lassitude had taken hold of him.
All he wanted was to get home quickly and
then sit down and be quiet.
It was after twenty-two hours when he got
back to the flat.
The lights would be switched off at the main
at twenty-three thirty.
He went into the kitchen and swallowed nearly
a teacupful of Victory Gin.
Then he went to the table in the alcove, sat
down, and took the diary out of the drawer.
But he did not open it at once.
From the telescreen a brassy female voice
was squalling a patriotic song.
He sat staring at the marbled cover of the
book, trying without success to shut the voice
out of his consciousness.
It was at night that they came for you, always
at night.
The proper thing was to kill yourself before
they got you.
Undoubtedly some people did so.
Many of the disappearances were actually suicides.
But it needed desperate courage to kill yourself
in a world where firearms, or any quick and
certain poison, were completely unprocurable.
He thought with a kind of astonishment of
the biological uselessness of pain and fear,
the treachery of the human body which always
freezes into inertia at exactly the moment
when a special effort is needed.
He might have silenced the dark-haired girl
if only he had acted quickly enough: but precisely
because of the extremity of his danger he
had lost the power to act.
It struck him that in moments of crisis one
is never fighting against an external enemy,
but always against one’s own body.
Even now, in spite of the gin, the dull ache
in his belly made consecutive thought impossible.
And it is the same, he perceived, in all seemingly
heroic or tragic situations.
On the battlefield, in the torture chamber,
on a sinking ship, the issues that you are
fighting for are always forgotten, because
the body swells up until it fills the universe,
and even when you are not paralysed by fright
or screaming with pain, life is a moment-to-moment
struggle against hunger or cold or sleeplessness,
against a sour stomach or an aching tooth.
He opened the diary.
It was important to write something down.
The woman on the telescreen had started a
new song.
Her voice seemed to stick into his brain like
jagged splinters of glass.
He tried to think of O’Brien, for whom,
or to whom, the diary was written, but instead
he began thinking of the things that would
happen to him after the Thought Police took
him away.
It would not matter if they killed you at
once.
To be killed was what you expected.
But before death (nobody spoke of such things,
yet everybody knew of them) there was the
routine of confession that had to be gone
through: the grovelling on the floor and screaming
for mercy, the crack of broken bones, the
smashed teeth and bloody clots of hair.
Why did you have to endure it, since the end
was always the same?
Why was it not possible to cut a few days
or weeks out of your life?
Nobody ever escaped detection, and nobody
ever failed to confess.
When once you had succumbed to thoughtcrime
it was certain that by a given date you would
be dead.
Why then did that horror, which altered nothing,
have to lie embedded in future time?
He tried with a little more success than before
to summon up the image of O’Brien.
‘We shall meet in the place where there
is no darkness,’ O’Brien had said to him.
He knew what it meant, or thought he knew.
The place where there is no darkness was the
imagined future, which one would never see,
but which, by foreknowledge, one could mystically
share in.
But with the voice from the telescreen nagging
at his ears he could not follow the train
of thought further.
He put a cigarette in his mouth.
Half the tobacco promptly fell out on to his
tongue, a bitter dust which was difficult
to spit out again.
The face of Big Brother swam into his mind,
displacing that of O’Brien.
Just as he had done a few days earlier, he
slid a coin out of his pocket and looked at
it.
The face gazed up at him, heavy, calm, protecting:
but what kind of smile was hidden beneath
the dark moustache?
Like a leaden knell the words came back at
him:
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
