Chapter
5
In the low-ceilinged canteen, deep
underground, the lunch queue jerked slowly forward. The room was already very
full and deafeningly noisy. From the grille at the counter the steam of stew
came pouring forth, with a sour metallic smell which did not quite overcome the
fumes of Victory Gin. On the far side of the room there was a small bar, a mere
hole in the wall, where gin could be bought at ten cents the large nip.
'Just the
man I was looking for,' said a voice at Winston's back.
He turned
round. It was his friend Syme, who worked in the Research Department. Perhaps
'friend' was not exactly the right word. You did not have friends nowadays, you
had comrades: but there were some comrades whose society was pleasanter than
that of others. Syme was a philologist, a specialist in Newspeak. Indeed, he
was one of the enormous team of experts now engaged in compiling the Eleventh
Edition of the Newspeak Dictionary. He was a tiny creature, smaller than
Winston, with dark hair and large, protuberant eyes, at once mournful and
derisive, which seemed to search your face closely while he was speaking to
you.
'I wanted
to ask you whether you'd got any razor blades,' he said.
'Not one!'
said Winston with a sort of guilty haste. 'I've tried all over the place. They
don't exist any longer.'
Everyone
kept asking you for razor blades. Actually he had two unused ones which he was
hoarding up. There had been a famine of them for months past. At any given
moment there was some necessary article which the Party shops were unable to
supply. Sometimes it was buttons, sometimes it was darning wool, sometimes it
was shoelaces; at present it was razor blades. You could only get hold of them,
if at all, by scrounging more or less furtively on the 'free' market.
'I've been
using the same blade for six weeks,' he added untruthfully.
The queue
gave another jerk forward. As they halted he turned and faced Syme again. Each
of them took a greasy metal tray from a pile at the end of the counter.
'Did you
go and see the prisoners hanged yesterday?' said Syme.
'I was
working,' said Winston indifferently. 'I shall see it on the flicks, I
suppose.'
'A very
inadequate substitute,' said Syme.
His
mocking eyes roved over Winston's face. 'I know you,' the eyes seemed to say,
'I see through you. I know very well why you didn't go to see those prisoners
hanged.' In an intellectual way, Syme was venomously orthodox. He would talk
with a disagreeable gloating satisfaction of helicopter raids on enemy
villages, and trials and confessions of thought-criminals, the executions in
the cellars of the Ministry of Love. Talking to him was largely a matter of
getting him away from such subjects and entangling him, if possible, in the
technicalities of Newspeak, on which he was authoritative and interesting.
Winston turned his head a little aside to avoid the scrutiny of the large dark
eyes.
'It was a
good hanging,' said Syme reminiscently. 'I think it spoils it when they tie
their feet together. I like to see them kicking. And above all, at the end, the
tongue sticking right out, and blue a quite bright blue. That's the detail that
appeals to me.'
'Nex',
please!' yelled the white-aproned prole with the ladle.
Winston
and Syme pushed their trays beneath the grille. On to each was dumped swiftly
the regulation lunch — a metal pannikin of pinkish-grey stew, a hunk of bread,
a cube of cheese, a mug of milkless Victory Coffee, and one saccharine tablet.
'There's a
table over there, under that telescreen,' said Syme. 'Let's pick up a gin on
the way.'
The gin
was served out to them in handleless china mugs. They threaded their way across
the crowded room and unpacked their trays on to the metal- topped table, on one
corner of which someone had left a pool of stew, a filthy liquid mess that had
the appearance of vomit. Winston took up his mug of gin, paused for an instant
to collect his nerve, and gulped the oily-tasting stuff down. When he had
winked the tears out of his eyes he suddenly discovered that he was hungry. He
began swallowing spoonfuls of the stew, which, in among its general sloppiness,
had cubes of spongy pinkish stuff which was probably a preparation of meat.
Neither of them spoke again till they had emptied their pannikins. From the
table at Winston's left, a little behind his back, someone was talking rapidly
and continuously, a harsh gabble almost like the quacking of a duck, which
pierced the general uproar of the room.
'How is
the Dictionary getting on?' said Winston, raising his voice to overcome the
noise.
'Slowly,'
said Syme. 'I'm on the adjectives. It's fascinating.'
He had
brightened up immediately at the mention of Newspeak. He pushed his pannikin
aside, took up his hunk of bread in one delicate hand and his cheese in the
other, and leaned across the table so as to be able to speak without shouting.
'The
Eleventh Edition is the definitive edition,' he said. 'We're getting the
language into its final shape — the shape it's going to have when nobody speaks
anything else. When we've finished with it, people like you will have to learn
it all over again. You think, I dare say, that our chief job is inventing new
words. But not a bit of it! We're destroying words — scores of them, hundreds
of them, every day. We're cutting the language down to the bone. The Eleventh
Edition won't contain a single word that will become obsolete before the year
2050.'
He bit
hungrily into his bread and swallowed a couple of mouthfuls, then continued
speaking, with a sort of pedant's passion. His thin dark face had become
animated, his eyes had lost their mocking expression and grown almost dreamy.
'It's a
beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of course the great wastage is in
the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid
of as well. It isn't only the synonyms; there are also the antonyms. After all,
what justification is there for a word which is simply the opposite of some
other word? A word contains its opposite in itself. Take "good", for
instance. If you have a word like "good", what need is there for a
word like "bad"? "Ungood" will do just as well — better,
because it's an exact opposite, which the other is not. Or again, if you want a
stronger version of "good", what sense is there in having a whole
string of vague useless words like "excellent" and
"splendid" and all the rest of them? "Plusgood" covers the
meaning, or " doubleplusgood" if you want something stronger still.
Of course we use those forms already. but in the final version of Newspeak
there'll be nothing else. In the end the whole notion of goodness and badness
will be covered by only six words — in reality, only one word. Don't you see
the beauty of that, Winston? It was B.B.'s idea originally, of course,' he
added as an afterthought.
A sort of
vapid eagerness flitted across Winston's face at the mention of Big Brother.
Nevertheless Syme immediately detected a certain lack of enthusiasm.
'You
haven't a real appreciation of Newspeak, Winston,' he said almost sadly. 'Even
when you write it you're still thinking in Oldspeak. I've read some of those
pieces that you write in The Times occasionally. They're good enough, but
they're translations. In your heart you'd prefer to stick to Oldspeak, with all
its vagueness and its useless shades of meaning. You don't grasp the beauty of
the destruction of words. Do you know that Newspeak is the only language in the
world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year?'
Winston
did know that, of course. He smiled, sympathetically he hoped, not trusting
himself to speak. Syme bit off another fragment of the dark-coloured bread,
chewed it briefly, and went on:
'Don't you
see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the
end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no
words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed, will be
expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its
subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten. Already, in the Eleventh Edition,
we're not far from that point. But the process will still be continuing long
after you and I are dead. Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of
consciousness always a little smaller. Even now, of course, there's no reason
or excuse for committing thoughtcrime. It's merely a question of
self-discipline, reality-control. But in the end there won't be any need even
for that. The Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect.
Newspeak is Ingsoc and Ingsoc is Newspeak,' he added with a sort of mystical
satisfaction. 'Has it ever occurred to you, Winston, that by the year 2050, at
the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand
such a conversation as we are having now?'
'Except-'
began Winston doubtfully, and he stopped.
It had
been on the tip of his tongue to say 'Except the proles,' but he checked
himself, not feeling fully certain that this remark was not in some way
unorthodox. Syme, however, had divined what he was about to say.
'The
proles are not human beings,' he said carelessly. ' By 2050 earlier, probably —
all real knowledge of Oldspeak will have disappeared. The whole literature of
the past will have been destroyed. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron —
they'll exist only in Newspeak versions, not merely changed into something different,
but actually changed into something contradictory of what they used to be. Even
the literature of the Party will change. Even the slogans will change. How
could you have a slogan like "freedom is slavery" when the concept of
freedom has been abolished? The whole climate of thought will be different. In
fact there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not
thinking — not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.'
One of
these days, thought Winston with sudden deep conviction, Syme will be
vaporized. He is too intelligent. He sees too clearly and speaks too plainly.
The Party does not like such people. One day he will disappear. It is written
in his face.
Winston
had finished his bread and cheese. He turned a little sideways in his chair to
drink his mug of coffee. At the table on his left the man with the strident
voice was still talking remorselessly away. A young woman who was perhaps his
secretary, and who was sitting with her back to Winston, was listening to him
and seemed to be eagerly agreeing with everything that he said. From time to
time Winston caught some such remark as 'I think you're so right, I do so agree
with you', uttered in a youthful and rather silly feminine voice. But the other
voice never stopped for an instant, even when the girl was speaking. Winston
knew the man by sight, though he knew no more about him than that he held some
important post in the Fiction Department. He was a man of about thirty, with a
muscular throat and a large, mobile mouth. His head was thrown back a little,
and because of the angle at which he was sitting, his spectacles caught the
light and presented to Winston two blank discs instead of eyes. What was
slightly horrible, was that from the stream of sound that poured out of his
mouth it was almost impossible to distinguish a single word. Just once Winston
caught a phrase-'complete and final elimination of Goldsteinism'- jerked out
very rapidly and, as it seemed, all in one piece, like a line of type cast
solid. For the rest it was just a noise, a quack-quack-quacking. And yet,
though you could not actually hear what the man was saying, you could not be in
any doubt about its general nature. He might be denouncing Goldstein and
demanding sterner measures against thought-criminals and saboteurs, he might be
fulminating against the atrocities of the Eurasian army, he might be praising
Big Brother or the heroes on the Malabar front-it made no difference. Whatever
it was, you could be certain that every word of it was pure orthodoxy, pure
Ingsoc. As he watched the eyeless face with the jaw moving rapidly up and down,
Winston had a curious feeling that this was not a real human being but some
kind of dummy. It was not the man's brain that was speaking, it was his larynx.
The stuff that was coming out of him consisted of words, but it was not speech
in the true sense: it was a noise uttered in unconsciousness, like the quacking
of a duck.
Syme had
fallen silent for a moment, and with the handle of his spoon was tracing
patterns in the puddle of stew. The voice from the other table quacked rapidly
on, easily audible in spite of the surrounding din.
'There is
a word in Newspeak,' said Syme, 'I don't know whether you know it: duckspeak,
to quack like a duck. It is one of those interesting words that have two
contradictory meanings. Applied to an opponent, it is abuse, applied to someone
you agree with, it is praise.'
Unquestionably
Syme will be vaporized, Winston thought again. He thought it with a kind of
sadness, although well knowing that Syme despised him and slightly disliked
him, and was fully capable of denouncing him as a thought- criminal if he saw
any reason for doing so. There was something subtly wrong with Syme. There was
something that he lacked: discretion, aloofness, a sort of saving stupidity.
You could not say that he was unorthodox. He believed in the principles of
Ingsoc, he venerated Big Brother, he rejoiced over victories, he hated
heretics, not merely with sincerity but with a sort of restless zeal, an
up-to-dateness of information, which the ordinary Party member did not
approach. Yet a faint air of disreputability always clung to him. He said
things that would have been better unsaid, he had read too many books, he
frequented the Chestnut Tree Cafe, haunt of painters and musicians. There was
no law, not even an unwritten law, against frequenting the Chestnut Tree Cafe,
yet the place was somehow ill-omened. The old, discredited leaders of the Party
had been used to gather there before they were finally purged. Goldstein
himself, it was said, had sometimes been seen there, years and decades ago.
Syme's fate was not difficult to foresee. And yet it was a fact that if Syme
grasped, even for three seconds, the nature of his, Winston's, secret opinions,
he would betray him instantly to the Thought police. So would anybody else, for
that matter: but Syme more than most. Zeal was not enough. Orthodoxy was
unconsciousness.
Syme
looked up. 'Here comes Parsons,' he said.
Something
in the tone of his voice seemed to add, 'that bloody fool'. Parsons, Winston's
fellow-tenant at Victory Mansions, was in fact threading his way across the
room — a tubby, middle-sized man with fair hair and a froglike face. At
thirty-five he was already putting on rolls of fat at neck and waistline, but his
movements were brisk and boyish. His whole appearance was that of a little boy
grown large, so much so that although he was wearing the regulation overalls,
it was almost impossible not to think of him as being dressed in the blue
shorts, grey shirt, and red neckerchief of the Spies. In visualizing him one
saw always a picture of dimpled knees and sleeves rolled back from pudgy
forearms. Parsons did, indeed, invariably revert to shorts when a community
hike or any other physical activity gave him an excuse for doing so. He greeted
them both with a cheery 'Hullo, hullo!' and sat down at the table, giving off
an intense smell of sweat. Beads of moisture stood out all over his pink face.
His powers of sweating were extraordinary. At the Community Centre you could
always tell when he had been playing table-tennis by the dampness of the bat
handle. Syme had produced a strip of paper on which there was a long column of
words, and was studying it with an ink-pencil between his fingers.
'Look at
him working away in the lunch hour,' said Parsons, nudging Winston. 'Keenness,
eh? What's that you've got there, old boy? Something a bit too brainy for me, I
expect. Smith, old boy, I'll tell you why I'm chasing you. It's that sub you
forgot to give me.'
'Which sub
is that? said Winston, automatically feeling for money. About a quarter of
one's salary had to be earmarked for voluntary subscriptions, which were so
numerous that it was difficult to keep track of them.
'For Hate
Week. You know — the house-by-house fund. I'm treasurer for our block. We're
making an all-out effort — going to put on a tremendous show. I tell you, it
won't be my fault if old Victory Mansions doesn't have the biggest outfit of
flags in the whole street. Two dollars you promised me.'
Winston
found and handed over two creased and filthy notes, which Parsons entered in a
small notebook, in the neat handwriting of the illiterate.
'By the
way, old boy,' he said. 'I hear that little beggar of mine let fly at you with
his catapult yesterday. I gave him a good dressing-down for it. In fact I told
him I'd take the catapult away if he does it again.
'I think
he was a little upset at not going to the execution,' said Winston.
' Ah, well
— what I mean to say, shows the right spirit, doesn't it? Mischievous little
beggars they are, both of them, but talk about keenness! All they think about
is the Spies, and the war, of course. D'you know what that little girl of mine
did last Saturday, when her troop was on a hike out Berkhamsted way? She got
two other girls to go with her, slipped off from the hike, and spent the whole
afternoon following a strange man. They kept on his tail for two hours, right
through the woods, and then, when they got into Amersham, handed him over to
the patrols.'
'What did
they do that for?' said Winston, somewhat taken aback. Parsons went on
triumphantly:
'My kid
made sure he was some kind of enemy agent — might have been dropped by
parachute, for instance. But here's the point, old boy. What do you think put
her on to him in the first place? She spotted he was wearing a funny kind of
shoes — said she'd never seen anyone wearing shoes like that before. So the
chances were he was a foreigner. Pretty smart for a nipper of seven, eh?'
'What
happened to the man?' said Winston.
'Ah, that
I couldn't say, of course. But I wouldn't be altogether surprised if-' Parsons
made the motion of aiming a rifle, and clicked his tongue for the explosion.
'Good,'
said Syme abstractedly, without looking up from his strip of paper.
'Of course
we can't afford to take chances,' agreed Winston dutifully.
'What I
mean to say, there is a war on,' said Parsons.
As though
in confirmation of this, a trumpet call floated from the telescreen just above
their heads. However, it was not the proclamation of a military victory this
time, but merely an announcement from the Ministry of Plenty.
'Comrades!'
cried an eager youthful voice. 'Attention, comrades! We have glorious news for
you. We have won the battle for production! Returns now completed of the output
of all classes of consumption goods show that the standard of living has risen
by no less than 20 per cent over the past year. All over Oceania this morning
there were irrepressible spontaneous demonstrations when workers marched out of
factories and offices and paraded through the streets with banners voicing
their gratitude to Big Brother for the new, happy life which his wise
leadership has bestowed upon us. Here are some of the completed figures.
Foodstuffs-'
The phrase
'our new, happy life' recurred several times. It had been a favourite of late
with the Ministry of Plenty. Parsons, his attention caught by the trumpet call,
sat listening with a sort of gaping solemnity, a sort of edified boredom. He
could not follow the figures, but he was aware that they were in some way a
cause for satisfaction. He had lugged out a huge and filthy pipe which was
already half full of charred tobacco. With the tobacco ration at 100 grammes a
week it was seldom possible to fill a pipe to the top. Winston was smoking a
Victory Cigarette which he held carefully horizontal. The new ration did not
start till tomorrow and he had only four cigarettes left. For the moment he had
shut his ears to the remoter noises and was listening to the stuff that
streamed out of the telescreen. It appeared that there had even been
demonstrations to thank Big Brother for raising the chocolate ration to twenty
grammes a week. And only yesterday, he reflected, it had been announced that
the ration was to be reduced to twenty grammes a week. Was it possible that
they could swallow that, after only twenty-four hours? Yes, they swallowed it.
Parsons swallowed it easily, with the stupidity of an animal. The eyeless
creature at the other table swallowed it fanatically, passionately, with a
furious desire to track down, denounce, and vaporize anyone who should suggest
that last week the ration had been thirty grammes. Syme, too-in some more
complex way, involving doublethink, Syme swallowed it. Was he, then, alone in
the possession of a memory?
The
fabulous statistics continued to pour out of the telescreen. As compared with
last year there was more food, more clothes, more houses, more furniture, more
cooking-pots, more fuel, more ships, more helicopters, more books, more babies
— more of everything except disease, crime, and insanity. Year by year and
minute by minute, everybody and everything was whizzing rapidly upwards. As
Syme had done earlier Winston had taken up his spoon and was dabbling in the
pale-coloured gravy that dribbled across the table, drawing a long streak of it
out into a pattern. He meditated resentfully on the physical texture of life.
Had it always been like this? Had food always tasted like this? He looked round
the canteen. A low-ceilinged, crowded room, its walls grimy from the contact of
innumerable bodies; battered metal tables and chairs, placed so close together
that you sat with elbows touching; bent spoons, dented trays, coarse white
mugs; all surfaces greasy, grime in every crack; and a sourish, composite smell
of bad gin and bad coffee and metallic stew and dirty clothes. Always in your
stomach and in your skin there was a sort of protest, a feeling that you had
been cheated of something that you had a right to. It was true that he had no
memories of anything greatly different. In any time that he could accurately
remember, there had never been quite enough to eat, one had never had socks or
underclothes that were not full of holes, furniture had always been battered
and rickety, rooms underheated, tube trains crowded, houses falling to pieces,
bread dark-coloured, tea a rarity, coffee filthy-tasting, cigarettes
insufficient — nothing cheap and plentiful except synthetic gin. And though, of
course, it grew worse as one's body aged, was it not a sign that this was not
the natural order of things, if one's heart sickened at the discomfort and dirt
and scarcity, the interminable winters, the stickiness of one's socks, the
lifts that never worked, the cold water, the gritty soap, the cigarettes that
came to pieces, the food with its strange evil tastes? Why should one feel it
to be intolerable unless one had some kind of ancestral memory that things had
once been different?
He looked
round the canteen again. Nearly everyone was ugly, and would still have been
ugly even if dressed otherwise than in the uniform blue overalls. On the far
side of the room, sitting at a table alone, a small, curiously beetle-like man
was drinking a cup of coffee, his little eyes darting suspicious glances from
side to side. How easy it was, thought Winston, if you did not look about you,
to believe that the physical type set up by the Party as an ideal-tall muscular
youths and deep-bosomed maidens, blond-haired, vital, sunburnt, carefree —
existed and even predominated. Actually, so far as he could judge, the majority
of people in Airstrip One were small, dark, and ill-favoured. It was curious
how that beetle-like type proliferated in the Ministries: little dumpy men,
growing stout very early in life, with short legs, swift scuttling movements,
and fat inscrutable faces with very small eyes. It was the type that seemed to
flourish best under the dominion of the Party.
The
announcement from the Ministry of Plenty ended on another trumpet call and gave
way to tinny music. Parsons, stirred to vague enthusiasm by the bombardment of
figures, took his pipe out of his mouth.
'The Ministry of Plenty's
certainly done a good job this year,' he said with a knowing shake of his head.
'By the way, Smith old boy, I suppose you haven't got any razor blades you can
let me have?'
'Not one,'
said Winston. 'I've been using the same blade for six weeks myself.'
'Ah, well
— just thought I'd ask you, old boy.'
'Sorry,'
said Winston.
The
quacking voice from the next table, temporarily silenced during the Ministry's
announcement, had started up again, as loud as ever. For some reason Winston
suddenly found himself thinking of Mrs Parsons, with her wispy hair and the
dust in the creases of her face. Within two years those children would be
denouncing her to the Thought Police. Mrs Parsons would be vaporized. Syme
would be vaporized. Winston would be vaporized. O'Brien would be vaporized.
Parsons, on the other hand, would never be vaporized. The eyeless creature with
the quacking voice would never be vaporized. The little beetle-like men who
scuttle so nimbly through the labyrinthine corridors of Ministries they, too,
would never be vaporized. And the girl with dark hair, the girl from the
Fiction Department — she would never be vaporized either. It seemed to him that
he knew instinctively who would survive and who would perish: though just what
it was that made for survival, it was not easy to say.
At this
moment he was dragged out of his reverie with a violent jerk. The girl at the
next table had turned partly round and was looking at him. It was the girl with
dark hair. She was looking at him in a sidelong way, but with curious
intensity. The instant she caught his eye she looked away again.
The sweat
started out on Winston's backbone. A horrible pang of terror went through him.
It was gone almost at once, but it left a sort of nagging uneasiness behind.
Why was she watching him? Why did she keep following him about? Unfortunately
he could not remember whether she had already been at the table when he
arrived, or had come there afterwards. But yesterday, at any rate, during the
Two Minutes Hate, she had sat immediately behind him when there was no apparent
need to do so. Quite likely her real object had been to listen to him and make
sure whether he was shouting loudly enough.
His earlier
thought returned to him: probably she was not actually a member of the Thought
Police, but then it was precisely the amateur spy who was the greatest danger
of all. He did not know how long she had been looking at him, but perhaps for
as much as five minutes, and it was possible that his features had not been
perfectly under control. It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander
when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest
thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a
habit of muttering to yourself — anything that carried with it the suggestion
of abnormality, of having something to hide. In any case, to wear an improper
expression on your face (to look incredulous when a victory was announced, for
example) was itself a punishable offence. There was even a word for it in
Newspeak: facecrime, it was called.
The girl
had turned her back on him again. Perhaps after all she was not really
following him about, perhaps it was coincidence that she had sat so close to
him two days running. His cigarette had gone out, and he laid it carefully on
the edge of the table. He would finish smoking it after work, if he could keep
the tobacco in it. Quite likely the person at the next table was a spy of the
Thought Police, and quite likely he would be in the cellars of the Ministry of
Love within three days, but a cigarette end must not be wasted. Syme had folded
up his strip of paper and stowed it away in his pocket. Parsons had begun
talking
again.
'Did I
ever tell you, old boy,' he said, chuckling round the stem of his pipe, 'about
the time when those two nippers of mine set fire to the old market- woman's
skirt because they saw her wrapping up sausages in a poster of B.B.? Sneaked up
behind her and set fire to it with a box of matches. Burned her quite badly, I
believe. Little beggars, eh? But keen as mustard! That's a first- rate training
they give them in the Spies nowadays — better than in my day, even. What d'you
think's the latest thing they've served them out with? Ear trumpets for
listening through keyholes! My little girl brought one home the other night —
tried it out on our sitting-room door, and reckoned she could hear twice as
much as with her ear to the hole. Of course it's only a toy, mind you. Still,
gives 'em the right idea, eh?'
At this
moment the telescreen let out a piercing whistle. It was the signal to return
to work. All three men sprang to their feet to join in the struggle round the
lifts, and the remaining tobacco fell out of Winston's cigarette.
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