He might have silenced the dark-haired girl if only he had acted quickly enough: but precisely because of the extremity of his danger he had lost the power to act.
It struck him that in moments of crisis one is never fighting against an external enemy, but always against one's own body.
Even now, in spite of the gin, the dull ache in his belly made consecutive thought impossible.
And it is the same, he perceived, in all seemingly heroic or tragic situations.
On the battlefield, in the torture chamber, on a sinking ship, the issues that you are fighting for are always forgotten, because the body swells up until it fills the universe, and even when you are not paralysed by fright or screaming with pain, life is a moment-to-moment struggle against hunger or cold or sleeplessness, against a sour stomach or an aching tooth.
He opened the diary.
It was important to write something down.
The woman on the telescreen had started a new song.
Her voice seemed to stick into his brain like jagged splinters of glass.
He tried to think of O'Brien, for whom, or to whom, the diary was written, but instead he began thinking of the things that would happen to him after the Thought Police took him away.
It would not matter if they killed you at once.
To be killed was what you expected.
But before death (nobody spoke of such things, yet everybody knew of them) there was the routine of confession that had to be gone through: the grovelling on the floor and screaming for mercy, the crack of broken bones, the smashed teeth and bloody clots of hair.
Why did you have to endure it, since the end was always the same?
Why was it not possible to cut a few days or weeks out of your life?
Nobody ever escaped detection, and nobody ever failed to confess.
When once you had succumbed to thoughtcrime it was certain that by a given date you would be dead.
Why then did that horror, which altered nothing, have to lie embedded in future time?
He tried with a little more success than before to summon up the image of O'Brien.
'We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness,' O'Brien had said to him.
He knew what it meant, or thought he knew.
The place where there is no darkness was the imagined future, which one would never see, but which, by foreknowledge, one could mystically share in.
But with the voice from the telescreen nagging at his ears he could not follow the train of thought further.
He put a cigarette in his mouth.
Half the tobacco promptly fell out on to his tongue, a bitter dust which was difficult to spit out again.
The face of Big Brother swam into his mind, displacing that of O'Brien.
Just as he had done a few days earlier, he slid a coin out of his pocket and looked at it.
The face gazed up at him, heavy, calm, protecting: but what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache?
Like a leaden knell the words came back at him:
WAR IS PEACE FREEDOM IS SLAVERY IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
PART TWO
Chapter 1
It was the middle of the morning, and Winston had left the cubicle to go to the lavatory.
A solitary figure was coming towards him from the other end of the long, brightly-lit corridor.
It was the girl with dark hair.
Four days had gone past since the evening when he had run into her outside the junk-shop.
As she came nearer he saw that her right arm was in a sling, not noticeable at a distance because it was of the same colour as her overalls.
Probably she had crushed her hand while swinging round one of the big kaleidoscopes on which the plots of novels were 'roughed in'.
It was a common accident in the Fiction Department.
They were perhaps four metres apart when the girl stumbled and fell almost flat on her face.
A sharp cry of pain was wrung out of her.
She must have fallen right on the injured arm.
Winston stopped short.
The girl had risen to her knees.
Her face had turned a milky yellow colour against which her mouth stood out redder than ever.
Her eyes were fixed on his, with an appealing expression that looked more like fear than pain.
A curious emotion stirred in Winston's heart.
In front of him was an enemy who was trying to kill him: in front of him, also, was a human creature, in pain and perhaps with a broken bone.
Already he had instinctively started forward to help her.
In the moment when he had seen her fall on the bandaged arm, it had been as though he felt the pain in his own body.