[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.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.Claspyour 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 wasmerely the shaking of his own.He could just stop his teeth from chattering, but his knees were beyond hiscontrol.There was a sound of trampling boots below, inside the house and outside.The yard seemed to befull 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 confusionof 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, cultivatedvoice which Winston had the impression of having heard before, struck in; And by the way, while we areon 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 thewindow and had burst in the frame.Someone was climbing through the window.There was a stampede ofboots up the stairs.The room was full of solid men in black uniforms, with iron-shod boots on their feet andtruncheons in their hands.Winston was not trembling any longer.Even his eyes he barely moved.One thing alone mattered; tokeep still, to keep still and not give them an excuse to hit you! A man with a smooth prizefighter s jowl inwhich the mouth was only a slit paused opposite him balancing his truncheon meditatively between thumband forefinger.Winston met his eyes.The feeling of nakedness, with one s hands behind one s head andone 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.Someonehad 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 hereceived a violent kick on the ankle which nearly flung him off his balance.One of the men had smashedhis 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, gaspingface came within the angle of his vision.Even in his terror it was as though he could feel the pain in his ownbody, the deadly pain which nevertheless was less urgent than the struggle to get back her breath.He knewwhat 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 kneesand 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 thelast he saw of her.He stood dead still.No one had hit him yet.Thoughts which came of their own accord but seemedtotally uninteresting began to flit through his mind.He wondered whether they had got Mr Charrington.Hewondered what they had done to the woman in the yard.He noticed that he badly wanted to urinate, and felta faint surprise, because he had done so only two or three hours ago.He noticed that the clock on themantelpiece said nine, meaning twenty-one.But the light seemed too strong.Would not the light be fadingat twenty-one hours on an August evening? He wondered whether after all he and Julia had mistaken thetime had slept the clock round and thought it was twenty-thirty when really it was nought eight-thirty onthe 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 ofthe black-uniformed men suddenly became more subdued.Something had also changed in MrCharrington 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 turnedblack.Also he was not wearing his spectacles.He gave Winston a single sharp glance, as though verifyinghis identity, and then paid no more attention to him [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]