第10章 PART TWO(2)

He looked up.It was the girl.She shook her head,evidently as a warning that he must keep silent,then parted the bushes and quick-ly led the way along the narrow track into the wood.Obviously she had been that way before,for she dodged the boggy pits as though by habit.Winston followed,still clasping his bunch of flowers.His first feeling was relief,but as he watched the strong slender body moving in front of him,with the scarlet sash that was just tight enough to bring out the curve of her hips,the sense of his own infe-riority was heavy upon him.Even now it seemed quite likely that when she turned round and looked at him she would draw back af-ter all.The sweetness of the air and the greenness of the leaves daunted him.Already, on the walk from the station, the May sun-shine had made him feel dirty and etiolated,a creature of indoors, with the sooty dust of London in the pores of his skin.It occurred to him that till now she had probably never seen him in broad daylight in the open.They came to the fallen tree that she had spoken of.The girl hopped over and forced apart the bushes,in which there did not seem to be an opening.When Winston followed her,he found that they were in a natural clearing,a tiny grassy knoll surrounded by tall saplings that shut it in completely.The girl stopped and turned.

"Here we are,"she said.

He was facing her at several paces' distance.As yet he did not dare move nearer to her.

"I didn't want to say anything in the lane,"she went on,"in case there's a mike hidden there.I don't suppose there is,but there could be.There's always the chance of one of those swine recogniz-ing your voice.We're all right here."

He still had not the courage to approach her."We're all right here?"he repeated stupidly.

"Yes.Look at the trees."They were small ashes,which at some time had been cut down and had sprouted up again into a for-est of poles,none of them thicker than one's wrist."There's noth-ing big enough to hide a mike in.Besides,I've been here before."

They were only making conversation.He had managed to move closer to her now.She stood before him very upright,with a smile on her face that looked faintly ironical,as though she were wonder-ing why he was so slow to act.The bluebells had cascaded onto the ground.They seemed to have fallen of their own accord.He took her hand.

"Would you believe,"he said,"that till this moment I didn't know what color your eyes were?"They were brown,he noted,a rather light shade of brown,with dark lashes.

"Now that you've seen what I'm really like,can you still bear to look at me?"

"Yes,easily."

"I'm thirty-nine years old.I've got a wife that I can't get rid of.I've got varicose veins.I've got five false teeth."

"I couldn't care less,"said the girl.

The next moment,it was hard to say by whose act,she was in his arms.At the beginning he had no feeling except sheer increduli-ty.The youthful body was strained against his own,the mass of dark hair was against his face,and yes! actually she had turned her face up and he was kissing the wide red mouth.She had clasped her arms about his neck,she was calling him darling,precious one, loved one.He had pulled her down onto the ground,she was utterly unresisting,he could do what he liked with her.But the truth was that he had no physical sensation except that of mere contact.All he felt was incredulity and pride.He was glad that this was happening, but he had no physical desire.It was too soon,her youth and pretti-ness had frightened him,he was too much used to living without women—he did not know the reason.The girl picked herself up and pulled a bluebell out of her hair.She sat against him,putting her arm round his waist.

"Never mind,dear.There's no hurry.We've got the whole af-ternoon.Isn't this a splendid hide-out? I found it when I got lost once on a community hike.If anyone was coming you could hear them a hundred meters away."

"What is your name?"said Winston.

"Julia.I know yours.It's Winston—Winston Smith."

"How did you find that out?"

"I expect I'm better at finding things out than you are,dear. Tell me,what did you think of me before that day I gave you the note?"

He did not feel any temptation to tell lies to her.It was even a sort of love offering to start off by telling the worst.

"I hated the sight of you,"he said."I wanted to rape you and then murder you afterwards.Two weeks ago I thought seriously of smashing your head in with a cobblestone.If you really want to know,I imagined that you had something to do with the Thought Police."

The girl laughed delightedly,evidently taking this as a tribute to the excellence of her disguise.

"Not the Thought Police! You didn't honestly think that?"

"Well,perhaps not exactly that.But from your general appear-ance—merely because you're young and fresh and healthy,you un-derstand—I thought that probably—"

"You thought I was a good Party member.Pure in word and deed.Banners,processions,slogans,games,community hikes—all that stuff.And you thought that if I had a quarter of a chance I'd denounce you as a thought-criminal and get you killed off?"

"Yes,something of that kind.A great many young girls are like that,you know."

"It's this bloody thing that does it,"she said,ripping off the scarlet sash of the Junior Anti-Sex League and flinging it onto a bough.Then,as though touching her waist had reminded her of something,she felt in the pocket of her overalls and produced a small slab of chocolate.She broke it in half and gave one of the pieces to Winston.Even before he had taken it he knew by the smell that it was very unusual chocolate.It was dark and shiny,and was wrapped in silver paper.Chocolate normally was dull-brown crum-bly stuff that tasted,as nearly as one could describe it,like the smoke of a rubbish fire.But at some time or another he had tasted chocolate like the piece she had given him.The first whiff of its scent had stirred up some memory which he could not pin down, but which was powerful and troubling.

"Where did you get this stuff?"he said.

"Black market,"she said indifferently."Actually I am that sort of girl,to look at.I'm good at games.I was a troop leader in the Spies.I do voluntary work three evenings a week for the Junior An-ti-Sex League.Hours and hours I've spent pasting their bloody rot all over London.I always carry one end of a banner in the proces-sions.I always look cheerful and I never shirk anything.Always yell with the crowd,that's what I say.It's the only way to be safe."

The first fragment of chocolate had melted on Winston's tongue.The taste was delightful.But there was still that memory moving round the edges of his consciousness,something strongly felt but not reducible to definite shape,like an obj ect seen out of the corner of one's eye.He pushed it away from him,aware only that it was the memory of some action which he would have liked to undo but could not.

"You are very young,"he said."You are ten or fifteen years younger than I am.What could you see to attract you in a man like me?"

"It was something in your face.I thought I'd take a chance.I'm good at spotting people who don't belong.As soon as I saw you I knew you were against them."

Them,it appeared,meant the Party,and above all the Inner Party,about whom she talked with an open j eering hatred which made Winston feel uneasy,although he knew that they were safe here if they could be safe anywhere.A thing that astonished him a-bout her was the coarseness of her language.Party members were supposed not to swear,and Winston himself very seldom did swear, aloud,at any rate.Julia,however,seemed unable to mention the Par-ty,and especially the Inner Party,without using the kind of words that you saw chalked up in dripping alleyways.He did not dislike it. It was merely one symptom of her revolt against the Party and all its ways,and somehow it seemed natural and healthy,like the sneeze of a horse that smells bad hay They had left the clearing and were wandering again through the checkered shade,with their arms round each other's waists whenever it was wide enough to walk two abreast.He noticed how much softer her waist seemed to feel now that the sash was gone.They did not speak above a whisper. Outside the clearing,Julia said,it was better to go quietly.Presently they had reached the edge of the little wood.She stopped him.

"Don't go out into the open.There might be someone watc-hing.We're all right if we keep behind the boughs."

They were standing in the shade of hazel bushes.The sunlight, filtering through innumerable leaves,was still hot on their faces. Winston looked out into the field beyond,and underwent a curious, slow shock of recognition.He knew it by sight.An old,close-bitten pasture,with a footpath wandering across it and a molehill here and there.In the ragged hedge on the opposite side the boughs of the elm trees swayed just perceptibly in the breeze,and their leaves stirred faintly in dense masses like women's hair.Surely somewhere near by,but out of sight,there must be a stream with green pools where dace were swimming.

"Isn't there a stream somewhere near here?"he whispered.

"That's right,there is a stream.It's at the edge of the next field,actually.There are fish in it,great big ones.You can watch them lying in the pools under the willow trees,waving their tails."

"It's the Golden Country—almost,"he murmured.

"The Golden Country?"

"It's nothing,really.A landscape I've seen sometimes in a dream."

"Look!"whispered Julia.

A thrush had alighted on a bough not five metres away,almost at the level of their faces.Perhaps it had not seen them.It was in the sun,they in the shade.It spread out its wings,fitted them carefully into place again,ducked its head for a moment,as though making a sort of obeisance to the sun,and then began to pour forth a torrent of song.In the afternoon hush the volume of sound was startling. Winston and Julia clung together,fascinated.The music went on and on,minute after minute,with astonishing variations,never once re-peating itself,almost as though the bird were deliberately showing off its virtuosity.Sometimes it stopped for a few seconds,spread out and resettled its wings,then swelled its speckled breast and again burst into song.Winston watched it with a sort of vague reverence. For whom,for what,was that bird singing? No mate,no rival was watching it.What made it sit at the edge of the lonely wood and pour its music into nothingness? He wondered whether after all there was a microphone hidden somewhere near.He and Julia had only spoken in low whispers,and it would not pick up what they had said,but it would pick up the thrush.Perhaps at the other end of the instrument some small,beetle like man was listening intent-ly—listening to that.But by degrees the flood of music drove all speculations out of his mind.It was as though it were a kind of liq-uid stuff that poured all over him and got mixed up with the sun-light that filtered through the leaves.He stopped thinking and merely felt.The girl's waist in the bend of his arm was soft and warm.He pulled her round so that they were breast to breast;her body seemed to melt into his.Wherever his hands moved it was all as yielding as water.Their mouths clung together;it was quite dif-ferent from the hard kisses they had exchanged earlier.When they moved their faces apart again both of them sighed deeply.The bird took fright and fled with a clatter of wings.

Winston put his lips against her ear."N ow,"he whispered.

"Not here,"she whispered back."Come back to the hideout. It's safer."

Quickly,with an occasional crackle of twigs,they threaded their way back to the clearing.When they were once inside the ring of saplings she turned and faced him.They were both breathing fast,but the smile had reappeared round the corners of her mouth. She stood looking at him for an instant,then felt at the zipper of her overalls.And,yes! it was almost as in his dream.Almost as swiftly as he had imagined it,she had torn her clothes off,and when she flung them aside it was with that same magnificent gesture by which a whole civilization seemed to be annihilated.Her body gleamed white in the sun.But for a moment he did not look at her body;his eyes were anchored by the freckled face with its faint,bold smile.He knelt down before her and took her hands in his.

"Have you done this before?"

"Of course.Hundreds of times—well,scores of times,anyway."

"With Party members?"

"Yes,always with Party members."

"With members of the Inner Party?"

"Not with those swine,no.But there's plenty that would if they got half a chance.They're not so holy as they make out."

His heart leapt.Scores of times she had done it;he wished it had been hundreds—thousands.Anything that hinted at corruption always filled him with a wild hope.Who knew? Perhaps the Party was rotten under the surface,its cult of strenuousness and self-deni-al simply a sham concealing iniquity.If he could have infected the whole lot of them with leprosy or syphilis,how gladly he would have done so!Anything to rot,to weaken,to undermine! He pulled her down so that they were kneeling face to face.

"Listen.The more men you've had,the more I love you.Do you understand that?"

"Yes,perfectly."

"I hate purity,I hate goodness.I don't want any virtue to exist anywhere.I want everyone to be corrupt to the bones."

"Well then,I ought to suit you,dear.I'm corrupt to the bones."

"You like doing this? I don't mean simply me;I mean the thing in itself?"

"I adore it."

That was above all what he wanted to hear.Not merely the love of one person but the animal instinct,the simple undifferentiated desire:that was the force that would tear the Party to pieces.He pressed her down upon the grass,among the fallen bluebells.This time there was no difficulty.Presently the rising and falling of their breasts slowed to normal speed,and in a sort of pleasant helpless-ness they fell apart.The sun seemed to have grown hotter.They were both sleepy.He reached out for the discarded overalls and pulled them partly over her.Almost immediately they fell asleep and slept for about half an hour.

Winston woke first.He sat and watched the freckled face,still peacefully asleep,pillowed on the palm of her hand.Except for her mouth,you could not call her beautiful.There was a line or two round the eyes,if you looked closely.The short dark hair was ex-traordinarily thick and soft.It occurred to him that he still did not know her surname or where she lived.

The young,strong body,now helpless in sleep,awoke in him a pitying,protecting feeling.But the mindless tenderness that he had felt under the hazel tree,while the thrush was singing,had not quite come back.He pulled the overalls aside and studied her smooth white flank.In the old days,he thought,a man looked at a girl's body and saw that it was desirable,and that was the end of the sto-ry.But you could not have pure love or pure lust nowadays.No emo-tion was pure,because everything was mixed up with fear and ha-tred.Their embrace had been a battle,the climax a victory.It was a blow struck against the Party.It was a political act.

Chapter 3

"W e can come here once again,"said"Julia."It'sgenerally safe to use any hide-out twice.But notfor another month or two,of course.

As soon as she woke up her demeanor had changed.She became alert and businesslike,put her clothes on,knotted the scarlet sash about her waist,and began arranging the details of the journey home.It seemed natural to leave this to her.She obviously had a practical cunning which Winston lacked,and she seemed also to have an exhaustive knowledge of the countryside round London, stored away from innumerable community hikes.The route she gave him was quite different from the one by which he had come,and brought him out at a different railway station."Never go home the same way as you went out,"she said,as though enunciating an im-portant general principle.She would leave first,and Winston was to wait half an hour before following her.

She had named a place where they could meet after work,four evenings hence.It was a street in one of the poorer quarters,where there was an open market which was generally crowded and noisy. She would be hanging about among the stalls,pretending to be in search of shoelaces or sewingthread.If she j udged that the coast was clear she would blow her nose when he approached;otherwise he was to walk past her without recognition.But with luck,in the mid-dle of the crowd,it would be safe to talk for a quarter of an hour and arrange another meeting.

"And now I must go,"she said as soon as he had mastered his instructions."I'm due back at nineteen-thirty.I've got to put in two hours for the Junior Anti-Sex League,handing out leaflets,or some-thing.Isn't it bloody? Give me a brush-down,would you.Have I got any twigs in my hair? Are you sure? Then good-by,my love, good-by!"

She flung herself into his arms,kissed him almost violently, and a moment later pushed her way through the saplings and disap-peared into the wood with very little noise.Even now he had not found out her surname or her address.However,it made no differ-ence,for it was inconceivable that they could ever meet indoors or exchange any kind of written communication.

As it happened they never went back to the clearing in the wood.During the month of May there was only one further occasion on which they actually succeeded in making love.That was in anoth-er hiding place known to Julia,the belfry of a ruined church in an almost-deserted stretch of country where an atomic bomb had fallen thirty years earlier.It was a good hiding place when once you got there,but the getting there was very dangerous.For the rest they could meet only in the streets,in a different place every evening and never for more than half an hour at a time.In the street it was usu-ally possible to talk,after a fashion.As they drifted down the crowded pavements,not quite abreast and never looking at one an-other,they carried on a curious,intermittent conversation which flicked on and off like the beams of a lighthouse,suddenly nipped into silence by the approach of a Party uniform or the proximity of a telescreen,then taken up again minutes later in the middle of a sentence,then abruptly cut short as they parted at the agreed spot, then continued almost without introduction on the following day. Julia appeared to be quite used to this kind of conversation,which she called"talking by instalments".She was also surprisingly adept at speaking without moving her lips.Just once in almost a month of nightly meetings they managed to exchange a kiss.They were pass-ing in silence down a sidestreet (Julia would never speak when they were away from the main streets)when there was a deafening roar, the earth heaved,and the air darkened,and Winston found himself lying on his side,bruised and terrified.A rocket bomb must have dropped quite near at hand.Suddenly he became aware of Julia's face a few centimeters from his own,deathly white,as white as chalk.Even her lips were white.She was dead! He clasped her against him and found that he was kissing a live warm face.But there was some powdery stuff that got in the way of his lips.Both of their faces were thickly coated with plaster.

There were evenings when they reached their rendezvous and then had to walk past one another without a sign,because a patrol had just come round the corner or a helicopter was hovering over-head.Even if it had been less dangerous,it would still have been dif-ficult to find time to meet.Winston's working week was sixty hours,Julia's was even longer,and their free days varied according to the pressure of work and did not often coincide.Julia,in any case, seldom had an evening completely free.She spent an astonishing amount of time in attending lectures and demonstrations,distribu-ting literature for the Junior Anti-Sex League,preparing banners for Hate Week,making collections for the savings campaign,and suchlike activities.It paid,she said;it was camouflage.If you kept the small rules,you could break the big ones.She even induced Win-ston to mortgage yet another of his evenings by enrolling himself for the part-time munition work which was done voluntarily by zealous Party members.So,one evening every week,Winston spent four hours of paralysing boredom,screwing together small bits of metal which were probably parts of bomb fuses,in a draughty ill-lit workshop where the knocking of hammers mingled drearily with the music of the telescreens.

When they met in the church tower the gaps in their fragmen-tary conversation were filled up.It was a blazing afternoon.The air in the little square chamber above the bells was hot and stagnant, and smelt overpoweringly of pigeon dung.They sat talking for hours on the dusty,twig-littered floor,one or other of them getting up from time to time to cast a glance through the narrowslits and make sure that no one was coming.

Julia was twenty-six years old.She lived in a hostel with thirty other girls ("Always in the stink of women! How I hate women!"she said parenthetically),and she worked,as he had guessed,on the novel-writing machines in the Fiction Department.She enjoyed her work,which consisted chiefly in running and servicing a powerful but tricky electric motor.She was"not clever",but was fond of using her hands and felt at home with machinery.She could describe the whole process of composing a novel,from the general directive issued by the Planning Committee down to the final touching-up by the Rewrite Squad.But she was not interested in the finished pro-duct.She"didn't much care for reading,"she said.Books were just a commodity that had to be produced,like jam or bootlaces.

She had no memories of anything before the early Sixties, and the only person she had ever known who talked frequently of the days before the Revolution was a grandfather who had disappeared when she was eight.At school she had been captain of the hockey team and had won the gymnastics trophy two years running.She had been a troop leader in the Spies and a branch secretary in the Youth League before joining the Junior Anti-Sex League.She had always borne an excellent character.She had even (an infallible mark of good reputation) been picked out to work in Pornosec,the sub-section of the Fiction Department which turned out cheap por-nography for distribution among the proles.It was nicknamed Muck House by the people who worked in it,she remarked.There she had remained for a year,helping to produce booklets in sealed packets with titles like Spanking Stories or One Night in a Girls'School, to be bought furtively by proletarian youths who were under the impression that they were buying something illegal.

"What are these books like?"said Winston curiously.

"Oh,ghastly rubbish.They're boring,really.They only have six plots,but they swap them round a bit.Of course I was only on the kaleidoscopes.I was never in the Rewrite Squad.I' m not literary,dear—not even enough for that."

He learned with astonishment that all the workers in Por-nosec,except the head of the department,were girls.The theory was that men,whose sex instincts were less controllable than those of women,were in greater danger of being corrupted by the filth they handled.

"They don't even like having married women there,"she add-ed."Girls are always supposed to be so pure.Here's one who isn't, anyway."

She had had her first love affair when she was sixteen,with a Party member of sixty who later committed suicide to avoid arrest."And a good job too,"said Julia,"Otherwise they'd have had my name out of him when he confessed."Since then there had been va-rious others.Life as she saw it was quite simple.You wanted a good time;"they",meaning the Party,wanted to stop you having it;you broke the rules as best you could.She seemed to think it just as nat-ural that"they"should want to rob you of your pleasures as that you should want to avoid being caught.She hated the Party,and said so in the crudest words,but she made no general criticism of it.Ex-cept where it touched upon her own life she had no interest in Party doctrine.He noticed that she never used Newspeak words, except the ones that had passed into everyday use.She had never heard of the Brotherhood,and refused to believe in its existence.Any kind of organized revolt against the Party,which was bound to be a failure, struck her as stupid.The clever thing was to break the rules and stay alive all the same.He wondered vaguely how many others like her there might be in the younger generation—people who had grown up in the world of the Revolution,knowing nothing else,ac-cepting the Party as something unalterable,like the sky,not rebel-ling against its authority but simply evading it,as a rabbit dodges a dog.