It had got to be written down, it had got to be confessed.
What he had suddenly seen in the lamplight was that the woman was OLD.
The paint was plastered so thick on her face that it looked as though it might crack like a cardboard mask.
There were streaks of white in her hair; but the truly dreadful detail was that her mouth had fallen a little open, revealing nothing except a cavernous blackness.
She had no teeth at all.
He wrote hurriedly, in scrabbling handwriting:
When I saw her in the light she was quite an old woman, fifty years old at least.
But I went ahead and did it just the same.
He pressed his fingers against his eyelids again.
He had written it down at last, but it made no difference.
The therapy had not worked.
The urge to shout filthy words at the top of his voice was as strong as ever.
Chapter 7
'If there is hope,' wrote Winston, 'it lies in the proles.'
If there was hope, it MUST lie in the proles, because only there in those swarming disregarded masses, 85 per cent of the population of Oceania, could the force to destroy the Party ever be generated.
The Party could not be overthrown from within.
Its enemies, if it had any enemies, had no way of coming together or even of identifying one another.
Even if the legendary Brotherhood existed, as just possibly it might, it was inconceivable that its members could ever assemble in larger numbers than twos and threes.
Rebellion meant a look in the eyes, an inflexion of the voice, at the most, an occasional whispered word.
But the proles, if only they could somehow become conscious of their own strength. would have no need to conspire.
They needed only to rise up and shake themselves like a horse shaking off flies.
If they chose they could blow the Party to pieces tomorrow morning.
Surely sooner or later it must occur to them to do it?
And yet----!
He remembered how once he had been walking down a crowded street when a tremendous shout of hundreds of voices women's voices--had burst from a side-street a little way ahead.
It was a great formidable cry of anger and despair, a deep, loud
'Oh-o-o-o-oh!' that went humming on like the reverberation of a bell.
His heart had leapt.
It's started! he had thought.
A riot!
The proles are breaking loose at last!
When he had reached the spot it was to see a mob of two or three hundred women crowding round the stalls of a street market, with faces as tragic as though they had been the doomed passengers on a sinking ship.
But at this moment the general despair broke down into a multitude of individual quarrels.
It appeared that one of the stalls had been selling tin saucepans.
They were wretched, flimsy things, but cooking-pots of any kind were always difficult to get.
Now the supply had unexpectedly given out.
The successful women, bumped and jostled by the rest, were trying to make off with their saucepans while dozens of others clamoured round the stall, accusing the stall-keeper of favouritism and of having more saucepans somewhere in reserve.
There was a fresh outburst of yells.
Two bloated women, one of them with her hair coming down, had got hold of the same saucepan and were trying to tear it out of one another's hands.
For a moment they were both tugging, and then the handle came off.
Winston watched them disgustedly.
And yet, just for a moment, what almost frightening power had sounded in that cry from only a few hundred throats!
Why was it that they could never shout like that about anything that mattered?
He wrote:
Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.
That, he reflected, might almost have been a transcription from one of the Party textbooks.
The Party claimed, of course, to have liberated the proles from bondage.
Before the Revolution they had been hideously oppressed by the capitalists, they had been starved and flogged, women had been forced to work in the coal mines (women still did work in the coal mines, as a matter of fact), children had been sold into the factories at the age of six.
But simultaneously, true to the Principles of doublethink, the Party taught that the proles were natural inferiors who must be kept in subjection, like animals, by the application of a few simple rules.
In reality very little was known about the proles.