With difficulty Winston continued to keep his eyes fixed on O'Brien's.
Then suddenly the grim face broke down into what might have been the beginnings of a smile.
With his characteristic gesture O'Brien resettled his spectacles on his nose.
'Shall I say it, or will you?' he said.
'I will say it,' said Winston promptly. 'That thing is really turned off?'
'Yes, everything is turned off.
We are alone.'
'We have come here because----'
He paused, realizing for the first time the vagueness of his own motives.
Since he did not in fact know what kind of help he expected from O'Brien, it was not easy to say why he had come here.
He went on, conscious that what he was saying must sound both feeble and pretentious:
'We believe that there is some kind of conspiracy, some kind of secret organization working against the Party, and that you are involved in it.
We want to join it and work for it.
We are enemies of the Party.
We disbelieve in the principles of Ingsoc.
We are thought-criminals.
We are also adulterers.
I tell you this because we want to put ourselves at your mercy.
If you want us to incriminate ourselves in any other way, we are ready.'
He stopped and glanced over his shoulder, with the feeling that the door had opened.
Sure enough, the little yellow-faced servant had come in without knocking.
Winston saw that he was carrying a tray with a decanter and glasses.
'Martin is one of us,' said O'Brien impassively. 'Bring the drinks over here, Martin.
Put them on the round table.
Have we enough chairs?
Then we may as well sit down and talk in comfort.
Bring a chair for yourself, Martin.
This is business.
You can stop being a servant for the next ten minutes.'
The little man sat down, quite at his ease, and yet still with a servant-like air, the air of a valet enjoying a privilege.
Winston regarded him out of the corner of his eye.
It struck him that the man's whole life was playing a part, and that he felt it to be dangerous to drop his assumed personality even for a moment.
O'Brien took the decanter by the neck and filled up the glasses with a dark-red liquid.
It aroused in Winston dim memories of something seen long ago on a wall or a hoarding--a vast bottle composed of electric lights which seemed to move up and down and pour its contents into a glass.
Seen from the top the stuff looked almost black, but in the decanter it gleamed like a ruby.
It had a sour-sweet smell.
He saw Julia pick up her glass and sniff at it with frank curiosity.
'It is called wine,' said O'Brien with a faint smile. 'You will have read about it in books, no doubt.
Not much of it gets to the Outer Party, I am afraid.' His face grew solemn again, and he raised his glass: 'I think it is fitting that we should begin by drinking a health.
To our Leader: To Emmanuel Goldstein.'
Winston took up his glass with a certain eagerness.
Wine was a thing he had read and dreamed about.
Like the glass paperweight or Mr Charrington's half-remembered rhymes, it belonged to the vanished, romantic past, the olden time as he liked to call it in his secret thoughts.
For some reason he had always thought of wine as having an intensely sweet taste, like that of blackberry jam and an immediate intoxicating effect.
Actually, when he came to swallow it, the stuff was distinctly disappointing.
The truth was that after years of gin-drinking he could barely taste it.
He set down the empty glass.
'Then there is such a person as Goldstein?' he said.
'Yes, there is such a person, and he is alive.
Where, I do not know.'