1984第2部1-4

Part Two
Chapter 1
It was the middle of the morning, and Winston had left
the cubicle to go to the lavatory.
A solitary figure was coming towards him from the other
end of the long, brightly-lit 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. Probably she had crushed her hand while swinging
round one of the big kaleidoscopes on which the plots
of novels were ‘roughed in’. It was a common accident in the
Fiction Department.
They were perhaps four metres apart when the girl stumbled
and fell almost flat on her face. A sharp cry of pain was
wrung out of her. 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, with an appealing expression that looked more like
fear than pain.
A curious emotion stirred in Winston’s heart. In front of
him was an enemy who was trying to kill him: in front of
him, also, was a human creature, in pain and perhaps with
a broken bone. Already he had instinctively started forward
to help her. In the moment when he had seen her fall on the
bandaged arm, it had been as though he felt the pain in his
own body.
‘You’re hurt?’ he said.
‘It’s nothing. My arm. It’ll be all right in a second.’
She spoke as though her heart were fluttering. She had
certainly turned very pale.
‘You haven’t broken anything?’
‘No, I’m all right. It hurt for a moment, that’s all.’
She held out her free hand to him, and he helped her up.
She had regained some of her colour, and appeared very
much better.
‘It’s nothing,’ she repeated shortly. ‘I only gave my wrist a
bit of a bang. Thanks, comrade!’
And with that she walked on in the direction in which
she had been going, as briskly as though it had really been
nothing. The whole incident could not have taken as much
as half a minute. Not to let one’s feelings appear in one’s
face was a habit that had acquired the status of an instinct,
and in any case they had been standing straight in front of
a telescreen when the thing happened. Nevertheless it had
been very difficult not to betray a momentary surprise, for
in the two or three seconds while he was helping her up
the girl had slipped something into his hand. There was no
question that she had done it intentionally. It was something
small and flat. As he passed through the lavatory door
he transferred it to his pocket and felt it with the tips of his
fingers. It was a scrap of paper folded into a square.
While he stood at the urinal he managed, with a little
more fingering, to get it unfolded. Obviously there must be
a message of some kind written on it. For a moment he was
tempted to take it into one of the water-closets and read it
at once. But that would be shocking folly, as he well knew.
There was no place where you could be more certain that
the telescreens were watched continuously.
He went back to his cubicle, sat down, threw the fragment
of paper casually among the other papers on the desk,
put on his spectacles and hitched the speakwrite towards
him. ‘Five minutes,’ he told himself, ‘five minutes at the
very least!’ His heart bumped in his breast with frightening
loudness. Fortunately the piece of work he was engaged on
was mere routine, the rectification of a long list of figures,
not needing close attention.
Whatever was written on the paper, it must have some
kind of political meaning. So far as he could see there were
two possibilities. One, much the more likely, was that the
girl was an agent of the Thought Police, just as he had feared.
He did not know why the Thought Police should choose to
deliver their messages in such a fashion, but perhaps they
had their reasons. The thing that was written on the paper
might be a threat, a summons, an order to commit suicide,
a trap of some description. But there was another, wilder
possibility that kept raising its head, though he tried vainly
to suppress it. This was, that the message did not come
from the Thought Police at all, but from some kind of underground
organization. Perhaps the Brotherhood existed
after all! Perhaps the girl was part of it! No doubt the idea
was absurd, but it had sprung into his mind in the very in
a couple of minutes later that the other, more probable explanation
had occurred to him. And even now, though his
intellect told him that the message probably meant death—
still, that was not what he believed, and the unreasonable
hope persisted, and his heart banged, and it was with difficulty
that he kept his voice from trembling as he murmured
his figures into the speakwrite.
He rolled up the completed bundle of work and slid it
into the pneumatic tube. Eight minutes had gone by. He readjusted
his spectacles on his nose, sighed, and drew the
next batch of work towards him, with the scrap of paper on
top of it. He flattened it out. On it was written, in a large unformed
handwriting:
I LOVE YOU.
For several seconds he was too stunned even to throw
the incriminating thing into the memory hole. When he
did so, although he knew very well the danger of showing
too much interest, he could not resist reading it once again,
just to make sure that the words were really there.
For the rest of the morning it was very difficult to work.
What was even worse than having to focus his mind on a
series of niggling jobs was the need to conceal his agitation
from the telescreen. He felt as though a fire were burning
in his belly. Lunch in the hot, crowded, noise-filled canteen
was torment. He had hoped to be alone for a little while
during the lunch hour, but as bad luck would have it the

imbecile Parsons flopped down beside him, the tang of his
sweat almost defeating the tinny smell of stew, and kept up
a stream of talk about the preparations for Hate Week. He
was particularly enthusiastic about a papier-mache model of
Big Brother’s head, two metres wide, which was being made
for the occasion by his daughter’s troop of Spies. The irritating
thing was that in the racket of voices Winston could
hardly hear what Parsons was saying, and was constantly
having to ask for some fatuous remark to be repeated. Just
once he caught a glimpse of the girl, at a table with two other
girls at the far end of the room. She appeared not to have
seen him, and he did not look in that direction again.
The afternoon was more bearable. Immediately after lunch
there arrived a delicate, difficult piece of work which would
take several hours and necessitated putting everything else
aside. It consisted in falsifying a series of production reports
of two years ago, in such a way as to cast discredit on a
prominent member of the Inner Party, who was now under
a cloud. This was the kind of thing that Winston was good
at, and for more than two hours he succeeded in shutting
the girl out of his mind altogether. Then the memory of her
face came back, and with it a raging, intolerable desire to
be alone. Until he could be alone it was impossible to think
this new development out. Tonight was one of his nights at
the Community Centre. He wolfed another tasteless meal
in the canteen, hurried off to the Centre, took part in the
solemn foolery of a ‘discussion group’, played two games
of table tennis, swallowed several glasses of gin, and sat for
half an hour through a lecture entitled ‘Ingsoc in relation to
chess’. His soul writhed with boredom, but for once he had
had no impulse to shirk his evening at the Centre. At the
sight of the words I LOVE YOU the desire to stay alive had
welled up in him, and the taking of minor risks suddenly
seemed stupid. It was not till twenty-three hours, when he
was home and in bed—in the darkness, where you were safe
even from the telescreen so long as you kept silent—that he
was able to think continuously.
It was a physical problem that had to be solved: how to
get in touch with the girl and arrange a meeting. He did
not consider any longer the possibility that she might be
laying some kind of trap for him. He knew that it was not
so, because of her unmistakable agitation when she handed
him the note. Obviously she had been frightened out of her
wits, as well she might be. Nor did the idea of refusing her
advances even cross his mind. Only five nights ago he had
contemplated smashing her skull in with a cobblestone, but
that was of no importance. He thought of her naked, youthful
body, as he had seen it in his dream. He had imagined
her a fool like all the rest of them, her head stuffed with lies
and hatred, her belly full of ice. A kind of fever seized him at
the thought that he might lose her, the white youthful body
might slip away from him! What he feared more than anything
else was that she would simply change her mind if he
did not get in touch with her quickly. But the physical difficulty
of meeting was enormous. It was like trying to make
a move at chess when you were already mated. Whichever
way you turned, the telescreen faced you. Actually, all the
possible ways of communicating with her had occurred to
him within five minutes of reading the note; but now, with
time to think, he went over them one by one, as though laying
out a row of instruments on a table.
Obviously the kind of encounter that had happened this
morning could not be repeated. If she had worked in the Records
Department it might have been comparatively simple,
but he had only a very dim idea whereabouts in the building
the Fiction Department lay, and he had no pretext for going
there. If he had known where she lived, and at what time
she left work, he could have contrived to meet her somewhere
on her way home; but to try to follow her home was
not safe, because it would mean loitering about outside the
Ministry, which was bound to be noticed. As for sending
a letter through the mails, it was out of the question. By
a routine that was not even secret, all letters were opened
in transit. Actually, few people ever wrote letters. For the
messages that it was occasionally necessary to send, there
were printed postcards with long lists of phrases, and you
struck out the ones that were inapplicable. In any case he
did not know the girl’s name, let alone her address. Finally
he decided that the safest place was the canteen. If he
could get her at a table by herself, somewhere in the middle
of the room, not too near the telescreens, and with a sufficient
buzz of conversation all round—if these conditions
endured for, say, thirty seconds, it might be possible to exchange
a few words.