---
title: "Nineteen Eighty-Four"
author: "George Orwell"
languages: [en]
shelf: "Literature"
section: 5 of 25
url: https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-nineteen-eighty-four-fp20120511/5/
cite: "George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, section 5. Scriptura (scriptura.si), https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-nineteen-eighty-four-fp20120511/5/"
---

# Nineteen Eighty-Four

*George Orwell*

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> Title: 1984 [Nineteen Eighty-Four]
Date of first publication: 1949
Author: Eric Arthur Blair (as George Orwell) (1903-1950)
Date first posted: May 17, 2012
Date last updated: June 26, 2026
Faded Page eBook #20120511

> This eBook was produced by: David T. Jones, Mary Meehan, Al Haines
& the online Distributed Proofreaders Canada team at http://www.pgdpcanada.net

> NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR

> A NOVEL BY

> George Orwell

> SECKER & WARBURG                         LONDON

> S. J. REGINALD SAUNDERS & CO. LTD.      TORONTO

> COPYRIGHT, CANADA, 1949
    S. J. REGINALD SAUNDERS AND COMPANY LIMITED

> _All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce
    this book or portions thereof in any form._

> _first Canadian edition_

> PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
    BY THE HADDON CRAFTSMEN, SCRANTON, PA.

> *       *       *       *       *

> _Books by George Orwell_

> NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR
    ANIMAL FARM
    DICKENS, DALI AND OTHERS
    COMING UP FOR AIR
    BURMESE DAYS
    DOWN AND OUT IN PARIS AND LONDON
    HOMAGE TO CATALONIA
    THE ROAD TO WIGAN PIER

> [The end of _1984 [Nineteen Eighty-Four]_ by Eric Arthur Blair (as George Orwell)]

## 5. V

Source: https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-nineteen-eighty-four-fp20120511/5/ · cite a paragraph as https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-nineteen-eighty-four-fp20120511/5/#p-N

[¶0] In the low-ceilinged canteen, deep under ground, 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.

[¶1] "Just the man I was looking for," said a voice at Winston's back.

[¶2] 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.

[¶3] "I wanted to ask you whether you'd got any razor blades," he said.

[¶4] "Not one!" said Winston with a sort of guilty haste. "I've tried all
over the place. They don't exist any longer."

[¶5] 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.

[¶6] "I've been using the same blade for six weeks," he added untruthfully.

[¶7] 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
edge of the counter.

[¶8] "Did you go and see the prisoners hanged yesterday?" said Syme.

[¶9] "I was working," said Winston indifferently. "I shall see it on the
flicks, I suppose."

[¶10] "A very inadequate substitute," said Syme.

[¶11] 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, the 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.

[¶12] "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."

[¶13] "Nex', please!" yelled the white-aproned prole with the ladle.

[¶14] Winston and Syme pushed their trays beneath the grille. Onto each was
dumped swiftly the regulation lunch--a metal pannikin of pinkish-gray
stew, a hunk of bread, a cube of cheese, a mug of milkless Victory
Coffee, and one saccharine tablet.

[¶15] "There's a table over there, under that telescreen," said Syme. "Let's
pick up a gin on the way."

[¶16] The gin was served out to them in handleless china mugs. They threaded
their way across the crowded room and unpacked their trays onto 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.

[¶17] "How is the dictionary getting on?" said Winston, raising his voice to
overcome the noise.

[¶18] "Slowly," said Syme. "I'm on the adjectives. It's fascinating."

[¶19] 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.

[¶20] "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."

[¶21] 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.

[¶22] "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.

[¶23] 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.

[¶24] "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?"

[¶25] Winston did know that, of course. He smiled, sympathetically he hoped,
not trusting himself to speak. Syme bit off another fragment of the
dark-colored bread, chewed it briefly, and went on:

[¶26] "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?"

[¶27] "Except--" began Winston doubtfully, and then stopped.

[¶28] 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.

[¶29] "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."

[¶30] 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.

[¶31] 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.

[¶32] 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.

[¶33] "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."

[¶34] 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 Café, haunt of painters and musicians. There was no
law, not even an unwritten law, against frequenting the Chestnut Tree
Café, 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.

[¶35] Syme looked up. "Here comes Parsons," he said.

[¶36] 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, gray
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 Center 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.

[¶37] "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."

[¶38] "Which sub is that?" said Winston, automatically feeling for money.
About a quarter of one's salary had to be ear-marked for voluntary
subscriptions, which were so numerous that it was difficult to keep
track of them.

[¶39] "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."

[¶40] Winston found and handed over two creased and filthy notes, which
Parsons entered in a small notebook, in the neat handwriting of the
illiterate.

[¶41] "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."

[¶42] "I think he was a little upset at not going to the execution," said
Winston.

[¶43] "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 Berkhampstead 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."

[¶44] "What did they do that for?" said Winston, somewhat taken aback. Parsons
went on triumphantly:

[¶45] "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 onto 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?"

[¶46] "What happened to the man?" said Winston.

[¶47] "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.

[¶48] "Good," said Syme abstractedly, without looking up from his strip of
paper.

[¶49] "Of course we can't afford to take chances," agreed Winston dutifully.

[¶50] "What I mean to say, there is a war on," said Parsons.

[¶51] 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.

[¶52] "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 twenty 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--"

[¶53] The phrase "our new, happy life" recurred several times. It had been a
favorite 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 a hundred grams a week it
was seldom possible to fill a pipe up 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 grams a week. And only yesterday, he
reflected, it had been announced that the ration was to be reduced to
twenty grams 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 grams. Syme, too--in some more
complex way, involving doublethink--Syme swallowed it. Was he, then,
_alone_ in the possession of a memory?

[¶54] 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-colored
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-colored, 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?

[¶55] 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 beetlelike 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-favored. It was
curious how that beetlelike 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.

[¶56] 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.

[¶57] "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?"

[¶58] "Not one," said Winston. "I've been using the same blade for six weeks
myself."

[¶59] "Ah, well--just thought I'd ask you, old boy."

[¶60] "Sorry," said Winston.

[¶61] 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 beetlelike men who scuttled 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.

[¶62] 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 that she caught
his eye she looked away again.

[¶63] 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 that 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.

[¶64] 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 offense. There was even
a word for it in Newspeak: _facecrime_, it was called.

[¶65] 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.

[¶66] "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?"

[¶67] 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.