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immediately paid over the four dollars and put the thing into his pocket. It was very heavy, but fortunately it did not make much of a bulge.
“There’s another room upstairs that you might care to take a look at,” said the owner. “There’s not much in it. Just a few pieces.”
He lit another lamp, and, led the way slowly up the stairs, into a room. 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 an arm-chair next to the fireplace. An old-fashioned glass clock was ticking away on the mantelpiece. Under the window, and occupying 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. “I’m selling the furniture off by little and little.”
He was holding the lamp high up, so as to illuminate the whole room, and in the warm dim light the place looked inviting. The thought came to Winston 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 idea; but the room had awakened in him a sort of nostalgia. It seemed to him that he knew exactly what it felt like to sit in a room like this.
“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.”
There was a small bookcase in the other corner, and Winston went towards it. It contained nothing but rubbish. The destruction of books had been done with the same thoroughness in the prole quarters as everywhere else.
“Now, if you happen to be interested in old prints at all—” began the old man.
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 looked at it for some moments. It seemed familiar.
“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 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 important ones, that is.”
“I never knew it had been a church,” said Winston.
“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.
Winston did not buy the picture.He stayed for some minutes more, talking to the old man, whose name, he discovered, was Charrington. Mr Charrington, it seemed, was a widower aged sixty-three and had inhabited this shop for thirty years.
He got away went down the stairs alone. He had already made up his mind that after a while he would take the risk of visiting the shop again. He would buy scraps of beautiful rubbish. He would buy the engraving of St Clement Danes, take it out of its frame, and carry it home under the jacket of his overalls.
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. 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. There was no doubting any longer that the girl was spying on him. She must have followed him here. It was too great a coincidence. Whether she was really an agent of the Thought Police, or simply an amateur spy, hardly mattered. It was enough that she was watching him.
It was after twenty-two hours when he got back to the flat. 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 female voice was singing a patriotic song. He sat staring at the 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 not available.
He opened the diary. It was important to write something down. The woman on the telescreen had started a new song. 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 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.
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?
He tried 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 with the voice from the telescreen he could not follow the train of thought. He put a cigarette in his mouth. Half the tobacco fell out on to his tongue. The face of Big Brother swam into his mind. It looked up at him, heavy, calm, protecting: but what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache? The words came back at him:
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
Part Two
Chapter 1
It was the middle of the morning, and Winston had left the cubicle to go to the lavatory.
A figure was coming towards him from the other end of the corridor. It was the girl with dark hair. Four days had gone past since the evening when he had run into her outside the junk-shop. As she came nearer he saw that her right arm was in a sling, not noticeable at a distance because it was of the same colour as her overalls.
They were perhaps four metres apart when the girl stumbled and fell almost flat on her face with a sharp cry of pain. She must have fallen right on the injured arm. Winston stopped short. The girl had risen to her knees. Her face had turned a milky yellow colour against which her mouth stood out redder than ever. Her eyes were fixed on his.
A curious emotion stirred in Winston’s