He would drag the rest of that poem out of Mr Charrington's memory.
Even the lunatic project of renting the room upstairs flashed momentarily through his mind again.
For perhaps five seconds exaltation made him careless, and he stepped out on to the pavement without so much as a preliminary glance through the window.
He had even started humming to an improvised tune
Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St Clement's, You owe me three farthings, say the----
Suddenly his heart seemed to turn to ice and his bowels to water.
A figure in blue overalls was coming down the pavement, not ten metres away.
It was the girl from the Fiction Department, the girl with dark hair.
The light was failing, but there was no difficulty in recognizing her.
She looked him straight in the face, then walked quickly on as though she had not seen him.
For a few seconds Winston was too paralysed to move.
Then he turned to the right and walked heavily away, not noticing for the moment that he was going in the wrong direction.
At any rate, one question was settled.
There was no doubting any longer that the girl was spying on him.
She must have followed him here, because it was not credible that by pure chance she should have happened to be walking on the same evening up the same obscure backstreet, kilometres distant from any quarter where Party members lived.
It was too great a coincidence.
Whether she was really an agent of the Thought Police, or simply an amateur spy actuated by officiousness, hardly mattered.
It was enough that she was watching him.
Probably she had seen him go into the pub as well.
It was an effort to walk.
The lump of glass in his pocket banged against his thigh at each step, and he was half minded to take it out and throw it away.
The worst thing was the pain in his belly.
For a couple of minutes he had the feeling that he would die if he did not reach a lavatory soon.
But there would be no public lavatories in a quarter like this.
Then the spasm passed, leaving a dull ache behind.
The street was a blind alley.
Winston halted, stood for several seconds wondering vaguely what to do, then turned round and began to retrace his steps.
As he turned it occurred to him that the girl had only passed him three minutes ago and that by running he could probably catch up with her.
He could keep on her track till they were in some quiet place, and then smash her skull in with a cobblestone.
The piece of glass in his pocket would be heavy enough for the job.
But he abandoned the idea immediately, because even the thought of making any physical effort was unbearable.
He could not run, he could not strike a blow.
Besides, she was young and lusty and would defend herself.
He thought also of hurrying to the Community Centre and staying there till the place closed, so as to establish a partial alibi for the evening.
But that too was impossible.
A deadly lassitude had taken hold of him.
All he wanted was to get home quickly and then sit down and be quiet.
It was after twenty-two hours when he got back to the flat.
The lights would be switched off at the main at twenty-three thirty.
He went into the kitchen and swallowed nearly a teacupful of Victory Gin.
Then he went to the table in the alcove, sat down, and took the diary out of the drawer.
But he did not open it at once.
From the telescreen a brassy female voice was squalling a patriotic song.
He sat staring at the marbled cover of the book, trying without success to shut the voice out of his consciousness.
It was at night that they came for you, always at night.
The proper thing was to kill yourself before they got you.
Undoubtedly some people did so.
Many of the disappearances were actually suicides.
But it needed desperate courage to kill yourself in a world where firearms, or any quick and certain poison, were completely unprocurable.
He thought with a kind of astonishment of the biological uselessness of pain and fear, the treachery of the human body which always freezes into inertia at exactly the moment when a special effort is needed.