LITMIR.BIZ

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solid world exists, its laws do not change. Stones are hard, water is wet, objects unsupported fall toward the earth's center. With the feeling that he was speaking to O'Brien, and also that he was setting forth an important axiom, he wrote:

       Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.

      VIII

      From somewhere at the bottom of a passage the smell of roasting coffee—real coffee, not Victory Coffee—came floating out into the street. Winston paused involuntarily. For perhaps two seconds he was back in the half-forgotten world of his childhood. Then a door banged, seeming to cut off the smell as abruptly as though it had been a sound.

      He had walked several kilometers over pavements, and his varicose ulcer was throbbing. This was the second time in three weeks that he had missed an evening at the Community Center: a rash act, since you could be certain that the number of your attendances at the Center were carefully checked. In principle a Party member had no spare time, and was never alone except in bed. It was assumed that when he was not working, eating, or sleeping he would be taking part in some kind of communal recreations; to do anything that suggested a taste for solitude, even to go for a walk by yourself, was always slightly dangerous. There was a word for it in Newspeak: ownlife, it was called, meaning individualism and eccentricity. But this evening as he came out of the Ministry the balminess of the April air had tempted him. The sky was a warmer blue than he had seen it that year, and suddenly the long, noisy evening at the Center, the boring, exhausting games, the lectures, the creaking camaraderie oiled by gin, had seemed intolerable. On impulse he had turned away from the bus stop and wandered off into the labyrinth of London, first south, then east, then north again, losing himself along unknown streets and hardly bothering in which direction he was going.

      "If there is hope," he had written in the diary, "it lies in the proles." The words kept coming back to him, statement of a mystical truth and a palpable absurdity. He was somewhere in the vague, brown-colored slums to the north and east of what had once been Saint Pancras Station. He was walking up a cobbled street of little two-story houses with battered doorways which gave straight on the pavement and which were somehow curiously suggestive of rat holes. There were puddles of filthy water here and there among the cobbles. In and out of the dark doorways, and down narrow alleyways that branched off on either side, people swarmed in astonishing numbers—girls in full bloom, with crudely lipsticked mouths, and youths who chased the girls, and swollen waddling women who showed you what the girls would be like in ten years time, and old bent creatures shuffling along on splayed feet, and ragged barefooted children who played in the puddles and then scattered at angry yells from their mothers. Perhaps a quarter of the windows in the street were broken and boarded up. Most of the people paid no attention to Winston; a few eyed him with a sort of guarded curiosity. Two monstrous women with brick-red forearms folded across their aprons were talking outside a doorway. Winston caught scraps of conversation as he approached.

      "'Yes,' I says to 'er, 'that's all very well,' I says. 'But if you'd of been in my place you'd of done the same as what I done. It's easy to criticize,' I says, 'but you ain't got the same problems as what I got.'"

      "Ah," said the other, "that's jest it. That's jest where it is."

      The strident voices stopped abruptly. The women studied him in hostile silence as he went past. But it was not hostility, exactly; merely a kind of wariness, a momentary stiffening, as at the passing of some unfamiliar animal. The blue overalls of the Party could not be a common sight in a street like this. Indeed, it was unwise to be seen in such places, unless you had definite business there. The patrols might stop you if you happened to run into them. "May I see your papers, comrade? What are you doing here? What time did you leave work? Is this your usual way home?"—and so on and so forth. Not that there was any rule against walking home by an unusual route, but it was enough to draw attention to you if the Thought Police heard about it.

      Suddenly the whole street was in commotion. There were yells of warning from all sides. People were shooting into the doorways like rabbits. A young woman leapt out of a doorway a little ahead of Winston, grabbed up a tiny child playing in a puddle, whipped her apron round it, and leapt back again, all in one movement. At the same instant a man in a concertina-like black suit, who had emerged from a side alley, ran toward Winston, pointing excitedly to the sky.

      "Steamer!" he yelled. "Look out, guv'nor! Bang over'ead! Lay down quick!"

      "Steamer" was a nickname which, for some reason, the proles applied to rocket bombs. Winston promptly flung himself on his face. The proles were nearly always right when they gave you a warning of this kind. They seemed to possess some kind of instinct which told them several seconds in advance when a rocket was coming, although the rockets supposedly traveled faster than sound. Winston clasped his forearms about his head. There was a roar that seemed to make the pavement heave; a shower of light objects pattered onto his back. When he stood up he found that he was covered with fragments of glass from the nearest window.

      He walked on. The bomb had demolished a group of houses two hundred meters up the street. A black plume of smoke hung in the sky, and below it a cloud of plaster dust in which a crowd was already forming round the ruins. There was a little pile of plaster lying on the pavement ahead of him, and in the middle of it he could see a bright red streak. When he got up to it he saw that it was a human hand severed at the wrist. Apart from the bloody stump, the hand was so completely whitened as to resemble a plaster cast.

      He kicked the thing into the gutter, and then, to avoid the crowd, turned down a side street to the right. Within three or four minutes he was out of the area which the bomb had affected, and the sordid swarming life of the streets was going on as though nothing had happened. It was nearly twenty hours, and the drinking shops which the proles frequented ("pubs," they called them) were choked with customers. From their grimy swing doors, endlessly opening and shutting, there came forth a smell of urine, sawdust, and sour beer. In an angle formed by a projecting house front three men were standing very close together, the middle one of them holding a folded-up newspaper which the other two were studying over his shoulders. Even before he was near enough to make out the expression on their faces, Winston could see absorption in every line of their bodies. It was obviously some serious piece of news that they were reading. He was a few paces away from them when suddenly the group broke up and two of the men were in violent altercation. For a moment they seemed almost on the point of blows.

      "Can't you bleeding well listen to what I say? I tell you no number ending in seven ain't won for over fourteen months!"

      "Yes it 'as, then!"

      "No, it 'as not! Back 'ome I got the 'ole lot of 'em for over two years wrote down on a piece of paper. I takes 'em down reg'lar as the clock. An' I tell you, no number ending in seven—"

      "Yes, a seven 'as won! I could pretty near tell you the bleeding number. Four oh seven, it ended in. It were in February—second week in February."

      "February your grandmother! I got it all down in black and white. An' I tell you, no number—"

      "Oh, pack it in!" said the third man.

      They were talking about the Lottery. Winston looked back when he had gone thirty meters. They were still arguing, with vivid, passionate faces. The Lottery, with its weekly pay-out of enormous prizes, was the one public event to which the proles paid serious attention. It was probable that there were some millions of proles for whom the Lottery was the principal if not the only reason for remaining alive. It was their delight, their folly, their anodyne, their intellectual stimulant. Where the Lottery was concerned, even people who could barely read and write seemed capable of intricate calculations and staggering feats of memory. There was a whole tribe of men who made a living simply by selling systems, forecasts, and lucky amulets. Winston had nothing to do with the running of the Lottery, which was managed by the Ministry of Plenty, but he was aware (indeed everyone in the Party was aware) that the prizes were largely imaginary. Only small sums were actually paid out, the winners of the big prizes being nonexistent persons. In the absence of any real intercommunication between one part of Oceania and another, this was not difficult to arrange.

      But

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