I suppose it's almost time we were leaving.
I must start washing this paint off.
What a bore!
I'll get the lipstick off your face afterwards.'
Winston did not get up for a few minutes more.
The room was darkening.
He turned over towards the light and lay gazing into the glass paperweight.
The inexhaustibly interesting thing was not the fragment of coral but the interior of the glass itself.
There was such a depth of it, and yet it was almost as transparent as air.
It was as though the surface of the glass had been the arch of the sky, enclosing a tiny world with its atmosphere complete.
He had the feeling that he could get inside it, and that in fact he was inside it, along with the mahogany bed and the gateleg table, and the clock and the steel engraving and the paperweight itself.
The paperweight was the room he was in, and the coral was Julia's life and his own, fixed in a sort of eternity at the heart of the crystal.
Chapter 5
Syme had vanished.
A morning came, and he was missing from work: a few thoughtless people commented on his absence.
On the next day nobody mentioned him.
On the third day Winston went into the vestibule of the Records Department to look at the notice-board.
One of the notices carried a printed list of the members of the Chess Committee, of whom Syme had been one.
It looked almost exactly as it had looked before--nothing had been crossed out--but it was one name shorter.
It was enough.
Syme had ceased to exist: he had never existed.
The weather was baking hot.
In the labyrinthine Ministry the windowless, air-conditioned rooms kept their normal temperature, but outside the pavements scorched one's feet and the stench of the Tubes at the rush hours was a horror.
The preparations for Hate Week were in full swing, and the staffs of all the Ministries were working overtime.
Processions, meetings, military parades, lectures, waxworks, displays, film shows, telescreen programmes all had to be organized; stands had to be erected, effigies built, slogans coined, songs written, rumours circulated, photographs faked.
Julia's unit in the Fiction Department had been taken off the production of novels and was rushing out a series of atrocity pamphlets.
Winston, in addition to his regular work, spent long periods every day in going through back files of
'The Times' and altering and embellishing news items which were to be quoted in speeches.
Late at night, when crowds of rowdy proles roamed the streets, the town had a curiously febrile air.
The rocket bombs crashed oftener than ever, and sometimes in the far distance there were enormous explosions which no one could explain and about which there were wild rumours.
The new tune which was to be the theme-song of Hate Week (the Hate Song, it was called) had already been composed and was being endlessly plugged on the telescreens.
It had a savage, barking rhythm which could not exactly be called music, but resembled the beating of a drum.
Roared out by hundreds of voices to the tramp of marching feet, it was terrifying.
The proles had taken a fancy to it, and in the midnight streets it competed with the still-popular
'It was only a hopeless fancy'.
The Parsons children played it at all hours of the night and day, unbearably, on a comb and a piece of toilet paper.
Winston's evenings were fuller than ever.
Squads of volunteers, organized by Parsons, were preparing the street for Hate Week, stitching banners, painting posters, erecting flagstaffs on the roofs, and perilously slinging wires across the street for the reception of streamers.
Parsons boasted that Victory Mansions alone would display four hundred metres of bunting.
He was in his native element and as happy as a lark.
The heat and the manual work had even given him a pretext for reverting to shorts and an open shirt in the evenings.
He was everywhere at once, pushing, pulling, sawing, hammering, improvising, jollying everyone along with comradely exhortations and giving out from every fold of his body what seemed an inexhaustible supply of acrid-smelling sweat.
A new poster had suddenly appeared all over London.
It had no caption, and represented simply the monstrous figure of a Eurasian soldier, three or four metres high, striding forward with expressionless Mongolian face and enormous boots, a submachine gun pointed from his hip.
From whatever angle you looked at the poster, the muzzle of the gun, magnified by the foreshortening, seemed to be pointed straight at you.
The thing had been plastered on every blank space on every wall, even outnumbering the portraits of Big Brother.
The proles, normally apathetic about the war, were being lashed into one of their periodical frenzies of patriotism.
As though to harmonize with the general mood, the rocket bombs had been killing larger numbers of people than usual.
One fell on a crowded film theatre in Stepney, burying several hundred victims among the ruins.
The whole population of the neighbourhood turned out for a long, trailing funeral which went on for hours and was in effect an indignation meeting.