As he looked at the woman in her characteristic attitude, her thick arms reaching up for the line, her powerful mare-like buttocks protruded, it struck him for the first time that she was beautiful.
It had never before occurred to him that the body of a woman of fifty, blown up to monstrous dimensions by childbearing, then hardened, roughened by work till it was coarse in the grain like an over-ripe turnip, could be beautiful.
But it was so, and after all, he thought, why not?
The solid, contourless body, like a block of granite, and the rasping red skin, bore the same relation to the body of a girl as the rose-hip to the rose.
Why should the fruit be held inferior to the flower?
'She's beautiful,' he murmured.
'She's a metre across the hips, easily,' said Julia.
'That is her style of beauty,' said Winston.
He held Julia's supple waist easily encircled by his arm.
From the hip to the knee her flank was against his.
Out of their bodies no child would ever come.
That was the one thing they could never do.
Only by word of mouth, from mind to mind, could they pass on the secret.
The woman down there had no mind, she had only strong arms, a warm heart, and a fertile belly.
He wondered how many children she had given birth to.
It might easily be fifteen.
She had had her momentary flowering, a year, perhaps, of wild-rose beauty and then she had suddenly swollen like a fertilized fruit and grown hard and red and coarse, and then her life had been laundering, scrubbing, darning, cooking, sweeping, polishing, mending, scrubbing, laundering, first for children, then for grandchildren, over thirty unbroken years.
At the end of it she was still singing.
The mystical reverence that he felt for her was somehow mixed up with the aspect of the pale, cloudless sky, stretching away behind the chimney-pots into interminable distance.
It was curious to think that the sky was the same for everybody, in Eurasia or Eastasia as well as here.
And the people under the sky were also very much the same--everywhere, all over the world, hundreds of thousands of millions of people just like this, people ignorant of one another's existence, held apart by walls of hatred and lies, and yet almost exactly the same--people who had never learned to think but who were storing up in their hearts and bellies and muscles the power that would one day overturn the world.
If there was hope, it lay in the proles!
Without having read to the end of THE BOOK, he knew that that must be Goldstein's final message.
The future belonged to the proles.
And could he be sure that when their time came the world they constructed would not be just as alien to him, Winston Smith, as the world of the Party?
Yes, because at the least it would be a world of sanity.
Where there is equality there can be sanity.
Sooner or later it would happen, strength would change into consciousness.
The proles were immortal, you could not doubt it when you looked at that valiant figure in the yard. In the end their awakening would come.
And until that happened, though it might be a thousand years, they would stay alive against all the odds, like birds, passing on from body to body the vitality which the Party did not share and could not kill.
'Do you remember,' he said, 'the thrush that sang to us, that first day, at the edge of the wood?'
'He wasn't singing to us,' said Julia. 'He was singing to please himself.
Not even that.
He was just singing.'
The birds sang, the proles sang. the Party did not sing.
All round the world, in London and New York, in Africa and Brazil, and in the mysterious, forbidden lands beyond the frontiers, in the streets of Paris and Berlin, in the villages of the endless Russian plain, in the bazaars of China and Japan--everywhere stood the same solid unconquerable figure, made monstrous by work and childbearing, toiling from birth to death and still singing.
Out of those mighty loins a race of conscious beings must one day come.
You were the dead, theirs was the future.
But you could share in that future if you kept alive the mind as they kept alive the body, and passed on the secret doctrine that two plus two make four.
'We are the dead,' he said.
'We are the dead,' echoed Julia dutifully.
'You are the dead,' said an iron voice behind them.
They sprang apart.
Winston's entrails seemed to have turned into ice.
He could see the white all round the irises of Julia's eyes.
Her face had turned a milky yellow.
The smear of rouge that was still on each cheekbone stood out sharply, almost as though unconnected with the skin beneath.
'You are the dead,' repeated the iron voice.
'It was behind the picture,' breathed Julia.
'It was behind the picture,' said the voice. 'Remain exactly where you are.