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.Whenonce you had succumbed to thoughtcrime it was certain that by a given date you would be dead.Why thendid that horror, which altered nothing, have to lie embedded in future time?He tried with a little more success than before to summon up the image of O Brien. We shall meet inthe place where there is no darkness, O Brien had said to him.He knew what it meant, or thought he knew.The place where there is no darkness was the imagined future, which one would never see, but which, byforeknowledge, one could mystically share in.But with the voice from the telescreen nagging at his ears hecould not follow the train of thought further.He put a cigarette in his mouth.Half the tobacco promptly fellout on to his tongue, a bitter dust which was difficult to spit out again.The face of Big Brother swam intohis mind, displacing that of O Brien.Just as he had done a few days earlier, he slid a coin out of his pocketand looked at it.The face gazed up at him, heavy, calm, protecting: but what kind of smile was hiddenbeneath the dark moustache? Like a leaden knell the words came back at him:WAR IS PEACEFREEDOM IS SLAVERYIGNORANCE IS STRENGTHChapter TwoIt 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 thegirl 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 itwas of the same colour as her overalls.Probably she had crushed her hand while swinging round one of thebig kaleidoscopes on which the plots of novels were  roughed in.It was a common accident in the FictionDepartment.They were perhaps four metres apart when the girl stumbled and fell almost flat on her face.A sharp cryof pain was wrung out of her.She must have fallen right on the injured arm.Winston stopped short.Thegirl had risen to her knees.Her face had turned a milky yellow colour against which her mouth stood outredder than ever.Her eyes were fixed on his, with an appealing expression that looked more like fear thanpain.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 hadinstinctively started forward to help her.In the moment when he had seen her fall on the bandaged arm, ithad 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 hadreally been nothing.The whole incident could not have taken as much as half a minute.Not to let one sfeelings appear in one s face was a habit that had acquired the status of an instinct, and in any case they hadbeen standing straight in front of a telescreen when the thing happened.Nevertheless it had been verydifficult not to betray a momentary surprise, for in the two or three seconds while he was helping her up thegirl had slipped something into his hand.There was no question that she had done it intentionally.It wassomething small and flat.As he passed through the lavatory door he transferred it to his pocket and felt itwith 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 theremust 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 whereyou 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 onthe desk, put on his spectacles and hitched the speakwrite towards him. five minutes, he told himself,  fiveminutes at the very least! His heart bumped in his breast with frightening loudness.Fortunately the pieceof work he was engaged on was mere routine, the rectification of a long list of figures, not needing closeattention.Whatever was written on the paper, it must have some kind of political meaning.So far as he could seethere were two possibilities.One, much the more likely, was that the girl was an agent of the ThoughtPolice, just as he had feared.He did not know why the Thought Police should choose to deliver theirmessages in such a fashion, but perhaps they had their reasons [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]