George Orwell's 1984 -- Chapter 11
Nineteen
Eighty-Four is a rare work that grows more haunting as its
futuristic purgatory becomes more real. Published in 1949, the book
offers political satirist George Orwell's nightmare vision of a
totalitarian, bureaucratic world and one poor stiff's attempt to find
individuality. The brilliance of the novel is Orwell's prescience of
modern life--the ubiquity of television, the distortion of the
language--and his ability to construct such a thorough version of
hell. Required reading for students since it was published, it ranks
among the most terrifying novels ever written.
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
'We can come
here once again,' said Julia. 'It's generally safe to use any hide-out twice.
But not for another month or two, of course.'
As
soon as she woke up her demeanour had changed. She became alert and
business-like, 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 important 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 sewing-thread. If she judged 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 middle 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 something. Isn't it bloody? Give me a
brush-down, would you? Have I got any twigs in my hair? Are you sure? Then
good-bye, my love, good-bye!'
She
flung herself into his arms, kissed him almost violently, and a moment later
pushed her way through the saplings and disappeared into the wood with very
little noise. Even now he had not found out her surname or her address.
However, it made no difference, 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 another hidlng-place known to Julia, the belfry of a
ruinous 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 usually possible to talk, after a
fashion. As they drifted down the crowded pavements, not quite abreast and
never looking at one another, 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
passing in silence down a side-street (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 centimetres 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 overhead. Even if it had been less dangerous, it would
still have been difficult 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, distributing literature for the junior
Anti-Sex League, preparing banners for Hate Week, making collections for the
savings campaign, and such-like activities. It paid, she said, it was
camouflage. If you kept the small rules, you could break the big ones. She even
induced Winston 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 fragmentary 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 arrowslits 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.
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 pornography 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 Pornosec, except the heads of
the departments, 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 added. 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 various 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 couId. She seemed to think it just as natural
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. Except 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, accepting the Party as something unalterable, like the sky, not
rebelling against its authority but simply evading it, as a rabbit dodges a
dog.
They
did not discuss the possibility of getting married. It was too remote to be
worth thinking about. No imaginable committee would ever sanction such a
marriage even if Katharine, Winston's wife, could somehow have been got rid of.
It was hopeless even as a daydream.
'What
was she like, your wife?' said Julia.
'She
was — do you know the Newspeak word goodthinkful? Meaning naturally orthodox,
incapable of thinking a bad thought?'
'No,
I didn't know the word, but I know the kind of person, right enough.'
He
began telling her the story of his married life, but curiously enough she
appeared to know the essential parts of it already. She described to him,
almost as though she had seen or felt it, the stiffening of Katharine's body as
soon as he touched her, the way in which she still seemed to be pushing him
from her with all her strength, even when her arms were clasped tightly round
him. With Julia he felt no difficulty in talking about such things: Katharine,
in any case, had long ceased to be a painful memory and became merely a
distasteful one.
'I
could have stood it if it hadn't been for one thing,' he said. He toId her
about the frigid little ceremony that Katharine had forced him to go through on
the same night every week. 'She hated it, but nothing would make her stop doing
it. She used to call it — but you'll never guess.'
'Our
duty to the Party,' said Julia promptly.
'How
did you know that?'
'I've
been at school too, dear. Sex talks once a month for the over-sixteens. And in
the Youth Movement. They rub it into you for years. I dare say it works in a
lot of cases. But of course you can never tell; people are such hypocrites.'
She
began to enlarge upon the subject. With Julia, everything came back to her own
sexuality. As soon as this was touched upon in any way she was capable of great
acuteness. Unlike Winston, she had grasped the inner meaning of the Party's
sexual puritanism. It was not merely that the sex instinct created a world of
its own which was outside the Party's control and which therefore had to be
destroyed if possible. What was more important was that sexual privation
induced hysteria, which was desirable because it could be transformed into
war-fever and leader-worship. The way she put it was:
'When
you make love you're using up energy; and afterwards you feel happy and don't
give a damn for anything. They can't bear you to feel like that. They want you
to be bursting with energy all the time. All this marching up and down and
cheering and waving flags is simply sex gone sour. If you're happy inside
yourself, why should you get excited about Big Brother and the Three-Year Plans
and the Two Minutes Hate and all the rest of their bloody rot?'
That
was very true, he thought. There was a direct intimate connexion between
chastity and political orthodoxy. For how could the fear, the hatred, and the
lunatic credulity which the Party needed in its members be kept at the right pitch,
except by bottling down some powerful instinct and using it as a driving force?
The sex impulse was dangerous to the Party, and the Party had turned it to
account. They had played a similar trick with the instinct of parenthood. The
family could not actually be abolished, and, indeed, people were encouraged to
be fond of their children, in almost the old-fashioned way. The children, on
the other hand, were systematically turned against their parents and taught to
spy on them and report their deviations. The family had become in effect an
extension of the Thought Police. It was a device by means of which everyone
could be surrounded night and day by informers who knew him intimately.
Abruptly
his mind went back to Katharine. Katharine would unquestionably have denounced
him to the Thought Police if she had not happened to be too stupid to detect
the unorthodoxy of his opinions. But what really recalled her to him at this
moment was the stifling heat of the afternoon, which had brought the sweat out
on his forehead. He began telling Julia of something that had happened, or
rather had failed to happen, on another sweltering summer afternoon, eleven
years ago.
It
was three or four months after they were married. They had lost their way on a
community hike somewhere in Kent. They had only lagged behind the others for a
couple of minutes, but they took a wrong turning, and presently found
themselves pulled up short by the edge of an old chalk quarry. It was a sheer
drop of ten or twenty metres, with boulders at the bottom. There was nobody of
whom they could ask the way. As soon as she realized that they were lost
Katharine became very uneasy. To be away from the noisy mob of hikers even for
a moment gave her a feeling of wrong-doing. She wanted to hurry back by the way
they had come and start searching in the other direction. But at this moment
Winston noticed some tufts of loosestrife growing in the cracks of the cliff
beneath them. One tuft was of two colours, magenta and brick-red, apparently
growing on the same root. He had never seen anything of the kind before, and he
called to Katharine to come and look at it.
'Look,
Katharine! Look at those flowers. That clump down near the bottom. Do you see
they're two different colours?'
She had already
turned to go, but she did rather fretfully come back for a moment. She even
leaned out over the cliff face to see where he was pointing. He was standing a
little behind her, and he put his hand on her waist to steady her. At this
moment it suddenly occurred to him how completely alone they were. There was
not a human creature anywhere, not a leaf stirring, not even a bird awake. In a
place like this the danger that there would be a hidden microphone was very
small, and even if there was a microphone it would only pick up sounds. It was
the hottest sleepiest hour of the afternoon. The sun blazed down upon them, the
sweat tickled his face. And the thought struck him
'Why
didn't you give her a good shove?' said Julia. 'I would have.'
'Yes,
dear, you would have. I would, if I'd been the same person then as I am now. Or
perhaps I would — I'm not certain.'
'Are
you sorry you didn't?'
'Yes.
On the whole I'm sorry I didn't.'
They
were sitting side by side on the dusty floor. He pulled her closer against him.
Her head rested on his shoulder, the pleasant smell of her hair conquering the
pigeon dung. She was very young, he thought, she still expected something from
life, she did not understand that to push an inconvenient person over a cliff
solves nothing.
'Actually
it would have made no difference,' he said.
'Then
why are you sorry you didn't do it?'
'Only
because I prefer a positive to a negative. In this game that we're playing, we
can't win. Some kinds of failure are better than other kinds, that's all.'
He
felt her shoulders give a wriggle of dissent. She always contradicted him when
he said anything of this kind. She would not accept it as a law of nature that
the individual is always defeated. In a way she realized that she herself was
doomed, that sooner or later the Thought Police would catch her and kill her,
but with another part of her mind she believed that it was somehow possible to
construct a secret world in which you could live as you chose. All you needed
was luck and cunning and boldness. She did not understand that there was no
such thing as happiness, that the only victory lay in the far future, long
after you were dead, that from the moment of declaring war on the Party it was
better to think of yourself as a corpse.
'We
are the dead,' he said.
'We're
not dead yet,' said Julia prosaically.
'Not
physically. Six months, a year — five years, conceivably. I am afraid of death.
You are young, so presumably you're more afraid of it than I am. Obviously we
shall put it off as long as we can. But it makes very little difference. So
long as human beings stay human, death and life are the same thing.'
'Oh,
rubbish! Which would you sooner sleep with, me or a skeleton? Don't you enjoy
being alive? Don't you like feeling: This is me, this is my hand, this is my
leg, I'm real, I'm solid, I'm alive! Don't you like this?'
She
twisted herself round and pressed her bosom against him. He could feel her
breasts, ripe yet firm, through her overalls. Her body seemed to be pouring
some of its youth and vigour into his.
'Yes,
I like that,' he said.
'Then
stop talking about dying. And now listen, dear, we've got to fix up about the
next time we meet. We may as well go back to the place in the wood. We've given
it a good long rest. But you must get there by a different way this time. I've
got it all planned out. You take the train — but look, I'll draw it out for
you.'
And
in her practical way she scraped together a small square of dust, and with a
twig from a pigeon's nest began drawing a map on the floor.
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