CHAPTER 10

When he woke it was with the sensation of having slept
for a long time, but a glance at the old-fashioned clock
told him that it was only twenty-thirty. He lay dozing
for a while; then the usual deep-lunged singing struck up from the
yard below:

‘It was only an ’opeless fancy,
It passed like an Ipril dye,
But a look an’ a word an’ the dreams they
stirred
They ’ave stolen my ’eart awye!’

The drivelling song seemed to have kept its popularity. You still
heard it all over the place. It had outlived the Hate Song. Julia
woke at the sound, stretched herself luxuriously, and got out of
bed.
‘I’m hungry,’ she said. ‘Let’s make some more coffee. Damn!
The stove’s gone out and the water’s cold.’ She picked the stove up
and shook it. ‘There’s no oil in it.’
‘We can get some from old Charrington, I expect.’
‘The funny thing is I made sure it was full. I’m going to put my
clothes on,’ she added. ‘It seems to have got colder.’
Winston also got up and dressed himself. The indefatigable
voice sang on:

‘They sye that time ’eals all things, They sye you can always forget;
But the smiles an’ the tears acrorss the years
They twist my ’eart-strings yet!’

As he fastened the belt of his overalls he strolled across to the
window. The sun must have gone down behind the houses; it was
not shining into the yard any longer. The flagstones were wet as
though they had just been washed, and he had the feeling that the
sky had been washed too, so fresh and pale was the blue between
the chimney-pots. Tirelessly the woman marched to and fro,
corking and uncorking herself, singing and falling silent, and
pegging out more diapers, and more and yet more. He wondered
whether she took in washing for a living or was merely the slave of
twenty or thirty grandchildren. Julia had come across to his side;
together they gazed down with a sort of fascination at the sturdy
figure below. As he looked at the woman in her characteristic
attitude, her thick arms reaching up for the line, her powerful
mare-like buttocks protruded, it struck him for the first time that
she was beautiful. It had never before occurred to him that the
body of a woman of fifty, blown up to monstrous dimensions by
childbearing, then hardened, roughened by work till it was coarse
in the grain like an over-ripe turnip, could be beautiful. But it was
so, and after all, he thought, why not? The solid, contourless body,
like a block of granite, and the rasping red skin, bore the same
relation to the body of a girl as the rose-hip to the rose. Why
should the fruit be held inferior to the flower?
‘She’s beautiful,’ he murmured.
‘She’s a metre across the hips, easily,’ said Julia.
‘That is her style of beauty,’ said Winston.
He held Julia’s supple waist easily encircled by his arm. From the hip to the knee her flank was against his. Out of their bodies no
child would ever come. That was the one thing they could never do.
Only by word of mouth, from mind to mind, could they pass on the
secret. The woman down there had no mind, she had only strong
arms, a warm heart, and a fertile belly. He wondered how many
children she had given birth to. It might easily be fifteen. She had
had her momentary flowering, a year, perhaps, of wild-rose beauty
and then she had suddenly swollen like a fertilized fruit and grown
hard and red and coarse, and then her life had been laundering,
scrubbing, darning, cooking, sweeping, polishing, mending,
scrubbing, laundering, first for children, then for grandchildren,
over thirty unbroken years. At the end of it she was still singing.
The mystical reverence that he felt for her was somehow mixed up
with the aspect of the pale, cloudless sky, stretching away behind
the chimney-pots into interminable distance. It was curious to
think that the sky was the same for everybody, in Eurasia or
Eastasia as well as here. And the people under the sky were also
very much the same — everywhere, all over the world, hundreds of
thousands of millions of people just like this, people ignorant of
one another’s existence, held apart by walls of hatred and lies, and
yet almost exactly the same — people who had never learned to
think but who were storing up in their hearts and bellies and
muscles the power that would one day overturn the world. If there
was hope, it lay in the proles! Without having read to the end of
THE BOOK, he knew that that must be Goldstein’s final message.
The future belonged to the proles. And could he be sure that when
their time came the world they constructed would not be just as
alien to him, Winston Smith, as the world of the Party? Yes,
because at the least it would be a world of sanity. Where there is
equality there can be sanity. Sooner or later it would happen,
strength would change into consciousness. The proles were immortal, you could not doubt it when you looked at that valiant
figure in the yard. In the end their awakening would come. And
until that happened, though it might be a thousand years, they
would stay alive against all the odds, like birds, passing on from
body to body the vitality which the Party did not share and could
not kill.
‘Do you remember,’ he said, ‘the thrush that sang to us, that
first day, at the edge of the wood?’
‘He wasn’t singing to us,’ said Julia. ‘He was singing to please
himself. Not even that. He was just singing.’
The birds sang, the proles sang. the Party did not sing. All
round the world, in London and New York, in Africa and Brazil, and
in the mysterious, forbidden lands beyond the frontiers, in the
streets of Paris and Berlin, in the villages of the endless Russian
plain, in the bazaars of China and Japan — everywhere stood the
same solid unconquerable figure, made monstrous by work and
childbearing, toiling from birth to death and still singing. Out of
those mighty loins a race of conscious beings must one day come.
You were the dead, theirs was the future. But you could share in
that future if you kept alive the mind as they kept alive the body,
and passed on the secret doctrine that two plus two make four.
‘We are the dead,’ he said.
‘We are the dead,’ echoed Julia dutifully.
‘You are the dead,’ said an iron voice behind them.
They sprang apart. Winston’s entrails seemed to have turned
into ice. He could see the white all round the irises of Julia’s eyes.
Her face had turned a milky yellow. The smear of rouge that was
still on each cheekbone stood out sharply, almost as though
unconnected with the skin beneath. ‘You are the dead,’ repeated the iron voice.
‘It was behind the picture,’ breathed Julia.
‘It was behind the picture,’ said the voice. ‘Remain exactly
where you are. Make no movement until you are ordered.’
It was starting, it was starting at last! They could do nothing
except stand gazing into one another’s eyes. To run for life, to get
out of the house before it was too late — no such thought occurred
to them. Unthinkable to disobey the iron voice from the wall. There
was a snap as though a catch had been turned back, and a crash of
breaking glass. The picture had fallen to the floor uncovering the
telescreen behind it.
‘Now they can see us,’ said Julia.
‘Now we can see you,’ said the voice. ‘Stand out in the middle
of the room. Stand back to back. Clasp your hands behind your
heads. Do not touch one another.’
They were not touching, but it seemed to him that he could
feel Julia’s body shaking. Or perhaps it was merely the shaking of
his own. He could just stop his teeth from chattering, but his knees
were beyond his control. There was a sound of trampling boots
below, inside the house and outside. The yard seemed to be full of
men. Something was being dragged across the stones. The woman’s
singing had stopped abruptly. There was a long, rolling clang, as
though the washtub had been flung across the yard, and then a
confusion of angry shouts which ended in a yell of pain.
‘The house is surrounded,’ said Winston.
‘The house is surrounded,’ said the voice.
He heard Julia snap her teeth together. ‘I suppose we may as
well say good-bye,’ she said.
‘You may as well say good-bye,’ said the voice. And then another quite different voice, a thin, cultivated voice which
Winston had the impression of having heard before, struck in; ‘And
by the way, while we are on the subject, “Here comes a candle to
light you to bed, here comes a chopper to chop off your head”!’
Something crashed on to the bed behind Winston’s back. The
head of a ladder had been thrust through the window and had burst
in the frame. Someone was climbing through the window. There
was a stampede of boots up the stairs. The room was full of solid
men in black uniforms, with iron-shod boots on their feet and
truncheons in their hands.
Winston was not trembling any longer. Even his eyes he barely
moved. One thing alone mattered; to keep still, to keep still and not
give them an excuse to hit you! A man with a smooth prizefighter’s jowl in which the mouth was only a slit paused opposite
him balancing his truncheon meditatively between thumb and
forefinger. Winston met his eyes. The feeling of nakedness, with
one’s hands behind one’s head and one’s face and body all exposed,
was almost unbearable. The man protruded the tip of a white
tongue, licked the place where his lips should have been, and then
passed on. There was another crash. Someone had picked up the
glass paperweight from the table and smashed it to pieces on the
hearth-stone.
The fragment of coral, a tiny crinkle of pink like a sugar
rosebud from a cake, rolled across the mat. How small, thought
Winston, how small it always was! There was a gasp and a thump
behind him, and he received a violent kick on the ankle which
nearly flung him off his balance. One of the men had smashed his
fist into Julia’s solar plexus, doubling her up like a pocket ruler.
She was thrashing about on the floor, fighting for breath. Winston
dared not turn his head even by a millimetre, but sometimes her livid, gasping face came within the angle of his vision. Even in his
terror it was as though he could feel the pain in his own body, the
deadly pain which nevertheless was less urgent than the struggle to
get back her breath. He knew what it was like; the terrible,
agonizing pain which was there all the while but could not be
suffered yet, because before all else it was necessary to be able to
breathe. Then two of the men hoisted her up by knees and
shoulders, and carried her out of the room like a sack. Winston had
a glimpse of her face, upside down, yellow and contorted, with the
eyes shut, and still with a smear of rouge on either cheek; and that
was the last he saw of her.
He stood dead still. No one had hit him yet. Thoughts which
came of their own accord but seemed totally uninteresting began to
flit through his mind. He wondered whether they had got Mr
Charrington. He wondered what they had done to the woman in
the yard. He noticed that he badly wanted to urinate, and felt a
faint surprise, because he had done so only two or three hours ago.
He noticed that the clock on the mantelpiece said nine, meaning
twenty-one. But the light seemed too strong. Would not the light
be fading at twenty-one hours on an August evening? He wondered
whether after all he and Julia had mistaken the time — had slept
the clock round and thought it was twenty-thirty when really it was
nought eight-thirty on the following morning. But he did not
pursue the thought further. It was not interesting.
There was another, lighter step in the passage. Mr Charrington
came into the room. The demeanour of the black-uniformed men
suddenly became more subdued. Something had also changed in
Mr Charrington’s appearance. His eye fell on the fragments of the
glass paperweight.
‘Pick up those pieces,’ he said sharply. A man stooped to obey. The cockney accent had disappeared;
Winston suddenly realized whose voice it was that he had heard a
few moments ago on the telescreen. Mr Charrington was still
wearing his old velvet jacket, but his hair, which had been almost
white, had turned black. Also he was not wearing his spectacles. He
gave Winston a single sharp glance, as though verifying his
identity, and then paid no more attention to him. He was still
recognizable, but he was not the same person any longer. His body
had straightened, and seemed to have grown bigger. His face had
undergone only tiny changes that had nevertheless worked a
complete transformation. The black eyebrows were less bushy, the
wrinkles were gone, the whole lines of the face seemed to have
altered; even the nose seemed shorter. It was the alert, cold face of
a man of about five-and-thirty. It occurred to Winston that for the
first time in his life he was looking, with knowledge, at a member
of the Thought Police.