1984第3部5-6章（全书完）

Chapter 5
At each stage of his imprisonment he had known, or
seemed to know, whereabouts he was in the windowless
building. Possibly there were slight differences in the air
pressure. The cells where the guards had beaten him were
below ground level. The room where he had been interrogated
by O’Brien was high up near the roof. This place was
many metres underground, as deep down as it was possible
to go.
It was bigger than most of the cells he had been in. But
he hardly noticed his surroundings. All he noticed was that
there were two small tables straight in front of him, each
covered with green baize. One was only a metre or two
from him, the other was further away, near the door. He
was strapped upright in a chair, so tightly that he could
move nothing, not even his head. A sort of pad gripped his
head from behind, forcing him to look straight in front of
him.
For a moment he was alone, then the door opened and
O’Brien came in.
‘You asked me once,’ said O’Brien, ‘what was in Room
101. I told you that you knew the answer already. Everyone
knows it. The thing that is in Room 101 is the worst thing
in the world.’
The door opened again. A guard came in, carrying some
thing made of wire, a box or basket of some kind. He set
it down on the further table. Because of the position in
which O’Brien was standing. Winston could not see what
the thing was.
‘The worst thing in the world,’ said O’Brien, ‘varies from
individual to individual. It may be burial alive, or death by
fire, or by drowning, or by impalement, or fifty other deaths.
There are cases where it is some quite trivial thing, not even
fatal.’
He had moved a little to one side, so that Winston had a
better view of the thing on the table. It was an oblong wire
cage with a handle on top for carrying it by. Fixed to the
front of it was something that looked like a fencing mask,
with the concave side outwards. Although it was three or
four metres away from him, he could see that the cage was
divided lengthways into two compartments, and that there
was some kind of creature in each. They were rats.
‘In your case,’ said O’Brien, ‘the worst thing in the world
happens to be rats.’
A sort of premonitory tremor, a fear of he was not certain
what, had passed through Winston as soon as he caught his
first glimpse of the cage. But at this moment the meaning of
the mask-like attachment in front of it suddenly sank into
him. His bowels seemed to turn to water.
‘You can’t do that!’ he cried out in a high cracked voice.
‘You couldn’t, you couldn’t! It’s impossible.’
‘Do you remember,’ said O’Brien, ‘the moment of panic
that used to occur in your dreams? There was a wall of
blackness in front of you, and a roaring sound in your ears.
There was something terrible on the other side of the wall.
You knew that you knew what it was, but you dared not drag
it into the open. It was the rats that were on the other side
of the wall.’
‘O’Brien!’ said Winston, making an effort to control his
voice. ‘You know this is not necessary. What is it that you
want me to do?’
O’Brien made no direct answer. When he spoke it was
in the schoolmasterish manner that he sometimes affected.
He looked thoughtfully into the distance, as though he were
addressing an audience somewhere behind Winston’s back.
‘By itself,’ he said, ‘pain is not always enough. There
are occasions when a human being will stand out against
pain, even to the point of death. But for everyone there is
something unendurable—something that cannot be contemplated.
Courage and cowardice are not involved. If you
are falling from a height it is not cowardly to clutch at a
rope. If you have come up from deep water it is not cowardly
to fill your lungs with air. It is merely an instinct which
cannot be destroyed. It is the same with the rats. For you,
they are unendurable. They are a form of pressure that you
cannot withstand, even if you wished to. You will do what
is required of you.’
‘But what is it, what is it? How can I do it if I don’t know
what it is?’
O’Brien picked up the cage and brought it across to the
nearer table. He set it down carefully on the baize cloth.
Winston could hear the blood singing in his ears. He had the
feeling of sitting in utter loneliness. He was in the middle
of a great empty plain, a flat desert drenched with sunlight,
across which all sounds came to him out of immense distances.
Yet the cage with the rats was not two metres away
from him. They were enormous rats. They were at the age
when a rat’s muzzle grows blunt and fierce and his fur brown
instead of grey.
‘The rat,’ said O’Brien, still addressing his invisible audience,
‘although a rodent, is carnivorous. You are aware of
that. You will have heard of the things that happen in the
poor quarters of this town. In some streets a woman dare
not leave her baby alone in the house, even for five minutes.
The rats are certain to attack it. Within quite a small time
they will strip it to the bones. They also attack sick or dying
people. They show astonishing intelligence in knowing
when a human being is helpless.’
There was an outburst of squeals from the cage. It seemed
to reach Winston from far away. The rats were fighting; they
were trying to get at each other through the partition. He
heard also a deep groan of despair. That, too, seemed to
come from outside himself.
O’Brien picked up the cage, and, as he did so, pressed
something in it. There was a sharp click. Winston made
a frantic effort to tear himself loose from the chair. It was
hopeless; every part of him, even his head, was held immovably.
O’Brien moved the cage nearer. It was less than a
metre from Winston’s face.

‘I have pressed the first lever,’ said O’Brien. ‘You understand
the construction of this cage. The mask will fit over
your head, leaving no exit. When I press this other lever,
the door of the cage will slide up. These starving brutes will
shoot out of it like bullets. Have you ever seen a rat leap
through the air? They will leap on to your face and bore
straight into it. Sometimes they attack the eyes first. Sometimes
they burrow through the cheeks and devour the
tongue.’
The cage was nearer; it was closing in. Winston heard a
succession of shrill cries which appeared to be occurring in
the air above his head. But he fought furiously against his
panic. To think, to think, even with a split second left—to
think was the only hope. Suddenly the foul musty odour of
the brutes struck his nostrils. There was a violent convulsion
of nausea inside him, and he almost lost consciousness.
Everything had gone black. For an instant he was insane, a
screaming animal. Yet he came out of the blackness clutching
an idea. There was one and only one way to save himself.
He must interpose another human being, the BODY of another
human being, between himself and the rats.
The circle of the mask was large enough now to shut out
the vision of anything else. The wire door was a couple of
hand-spans from his face. The rats knew what was coming
now. One of them was leaping up and down, the other, an
old scaly grandfather of the sewers, stood up, with his pink
hands against the bars, and fiercely sniffed the air. Winston
could see the whiskers and the yellow teeth. Again the black
panic took hold of him. He was blind, helpless, mindless.
‘It was a common punishment in Imperial China,’ said
O’Brien as didactically as ever.
The mask was closing on his face. The wire brushed his
cheek. And then—no, it was not relief, only hope, a tiny
fragment of hope. Too late, perhaps too late. But he had
suddenly understood that in the whole world there was just
ONE person to whom he could transfer his punishment—
ONE body that he could thrust between himself and the
rats. And he was shouting frantically, over and over.
‘Do it to Julia! Do it to Julia! Not me! Julia! I don’t care
what you do to her. Tear her face off, strip her to the bones.
Not me! Julia! Not me!’
He was falling backwards, into enormous depths, away
from the rats. He was still strapped in the chair, but he had
fallen through the floor, through the walls of the building,
through the earth, through the oceans, through the
atmosphere, into outer space, into the gulfs between the
stars—always away, away, away from the rats. He was light
years distant, but O’Brien was still standing at his side.
There was still the cold touch of wire against his cheek. But
through the darkness that enveloped him he heard another
metallic click, and knew that the cage door had clicked shut
and not open.

Chapter 6

The Chestnut Tree was almost empty. A ray of sunlight
slanting through a window fell on dusty table-tops. It
was the lonely hour of fifteen. A tinny music trickled from
the telescreens.
Winston sat in his usual corner, gazing into an empty
glass. Now and again he glanced up at a vast face which eyed
him from the opposite wall. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING
YOU, the caption said. Unbidden, a waiter came and
filled his glass up with Victory Gin, shaking into it a few
drops from another bottle with a quill through the cork. It
was saccharine flavoured with cloves, the speciality of the
cafe.

Winston was listening to the telescreen. At present only
music was coming out of it, but there was a possibility that
at any moment there might be a special bulletin from the
Ministry of Peace. The news from the African front was disquieting
in the extreme. On and off he had been worrying
about it all day. A Eurasian army (Oceania was at war with
Eurasia: Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia) was
moving southward at terrifying speed. The mid-day bulletin
had not mentioned any definite area, but it was probable
that already the mouth of the Congo was a battlefield. Brazzaville
and Leopoldville were in danger. One did not have
to look at the map to see what it meant. It was not merely
a question of losing Central Africa: for the first time in the
whole war, the territory of Oceania itself was menaced.
A violent emotion, not fear exactly but a sort of undifferentiated
excitement, flared up in him, then faded again.
He stopped thinking about the war. In these days he could
never fix his mind on any one subject for more than a few
moments at a time. He picked up his glass and drained it
at a gulp. As always, the gin made him shudder and even
retch slightly. The stuff was horrible. The cloves and saccharine,
themselves disgusting enough in their sickly way,
could not disguise the flat oily smell; and what was worst
of all was that the smell of gin, which dwelt with him night
and day, was inextricably mixed up in his mind with the
smell of those——
He never named them, even in his thoughts, and so
far as it was possible he never visualized them. They were
something that he was half-aware of, hovering close to his
face, a smell that clung to his nostrils. As the gin rose in
him he belched through purple lips. He had grown fatter
since they released him, and had regained his old colour—
indeed, more than regained it. His features had thickened,
the skin on nose and cheekbones was coarsely red, even
the bald scalp was too deep a pink. A waiter, again unbidden,
brought the chessboard and the current issue of ‘The
Times’, with the page turned down at the chess problem.
Then, seeing that Winston’s glass was empty, he brought the
gin bottle and filled it. There was no need to give orders.
They knew his habits. The chessboard was always waiting
for him, his corner table was always reserved; even when
the place was full he had it to himself, since nobody cared
to be seen sitting too close to him. He never even bothered
to count his drinks. At irregular intervals they presented
him with a dirty slip of paper which they said was the bill,
but he had the impression that they always undercharged
him. It would have made no difference if it had been the
other way about. He had always plenty of money nowadays.
He even had a job, a sinecure, more highly-paid than his old
job had been.
The music from the telescreen stopped and a voice took
over. Winston raised his head to listen. No bulletins from
the front, however. It was merely a brief announcement
from the Ministry of Plenty. In the preceding quarter, it appeared,
the Tenth Three-Year Plan’s quota for bootlaces had
been overfulfilled by 98 per cent.
He examined the chess problem and set out the pieces. It
was a tricky ending, involving a couple of knights. ‘White to
play and mate in two moves.’ Winston looked up at the portrait
of Big Brother. White always mates, he thought with a
sort of cloudy mysticism. Always, without exception, it is so
arranged. In no chess problem since the beginning of the
world has black ever won. Did it not symbolize the eternal,
unvarying triumph of Good over Evil? The huge face gazed
back at him, full of calm power. White always mates.
......

Under the table Winston’s feet made convulsive movements.
He had not stirred from his seat, but in his mind
he was running, swiftly running, he was with the crowds
outside, cheering himself deaf. He looked up again at the
portrait of Big Brother. The colossus that bestrode the
world! The rock against which the hordes of Asia dashed
themselves in vain! He thought how ten minutes ago—yes,
only ten minutes—there had still been equivocation in
his heart as he wondered whether the news from the front
would be of victory or defeat. Ah, it was more than a Eurasian
army that had perished! Much had changed in him
since that first day in the Ministry of Love, but the final, indispensable,
healing change had never happened, until this
moment.
The voice from the telescreen was still pouring forth its
tale of prisoners and booty and slaughter, but the shouting
outside had died down a little. The waiters were turning
back to their work. One of them approached with the gin
bottle. Winston, sitting in a blissful dream, paid no attention
as his glass was filled up. He was not running or
cheering any longer. He was back in the Ministry of Love,
with everything forgiven, his soul white as snow. He was in
the public dock, confessing everything, implicating everybody.
He was walking down the white-tiled corridor, with
the feeling of walking in sunlight, and an armed guard at
his back. The long-hoped-for bullet was entering his brain.
He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken 

him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the
dark moustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O
stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two ginscented
tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was
all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished.
He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.
THE END