Tyranny is afoot; she has torn her veil, she carries her head high, she strides over our dead bodies.”
The words had burnt on his tongue.
But the temptation had only lasted a moment; then, when he started to pronounce his final speech, the bell of silence had sunk down over him.
He had recognized that it was too late.
Too late to go back again the same way, to step once more in the graves of his own footprints.
Words could undo nothing.
Too late for all of them.
When the hour came to make their last appearance before the world, none of them could turn the dock into a rostrum, none of them could unveil the truth to the world and hurl back the accusation at his judges, like Danton.
Some were silenced by physical fear, like Hare-lip; some hoped to save their heads; others at least to save their wives or sons from the clutches of the Gletkins.
The best of them kept silent in order to do a last service to the Party, by letting themselves be sacrificed as scapegoats—and, besides, even the best had each an Arlova on his conscience.
They were too deeply entangled in their own past, caught in the web they had spun themselves, according to the laws of their own twisted ethics and twisted logic; they were all guilty, although not of those deeds of which they accused themselves.
There was no way back for them.
Their exit from the stage happened strictly according to the rules of their strange game.
The public expected no swan-songs of them.
They had to act according to the text-book, and their part was the howling of wolves in the night. ...
So now it was over.
He had nothing more to do with it.
He no longer had to howl with the wolves.
He had paid, his account was settled.
He was a man who had lost his shadow, released from every bond.
He had followed every thought to its last conclusion and acted in accordance with it to the very end; the hours which remained to him belonged to that silent partner, whose realm started just where logical thought ended.
He had christened it the “grammatical fiction” with that shamefacedness about the first person singular which the Party had inculcated in its disciples.
Rubashov stopped by the wall which separated him from No. 406.
The cell was empty since the departure of Rip Van Winkle.
He took off his pince-nez, looked round furtively and tapped:
2—4 ...
He listened with a feeling of childlike shame and then knocked again:
2—4 ...
He listened, and again repeated the same sequence of signs.
The wall remained mute.
He had never yet consciously tapped the word “I”.
Probably never at all.
He listened.
The knocking died without resonance.
He continued pacing through his cell.
Since the bell of silence had sunk over him, he was puzzling over certain questions to which he would have like to find an answer before it was too late.
They were rather naive questions; they concerned the meaning of suffering, or, more exactly, the difference between suffering which made sense and senseless suffering.
Obviously only such suffering made sense as was inevitable; that is, as was rooted in biological fatality. On the other hand, all suffering with a social origin was accidental, hence pointless and senseless.
The sole object of revolution was the abolition of senseless suffering.
But it had turned out that the removal of this second kind of suffering was only possible at the price of a temporary enormous increase in the sum total of the first.
So the question now ran: Was such an operation justified?
Obviously it was, if one spoke in the abstract of “mankind”; but, applied to “man” in the singular, to the cipher 2—4, the real human being of bone and flesh and blood and skin, the principle led to absurdity.
As a boy, he had believed that in working for the Party he would find an answer to all questions of this sort.
The work had lasted forty years, and right at the start he had forgotten the question for whose sake he had embarked on it.
Now the forty years were over, and he returned to the boy’s original perplexity.
The Party had taken all he had to give and never supplied him with the answer.
And neither did the silent partner, whose magic name he had tapped on the wall of the empty cell. He was deaf to direct questions, however urgent and desperate they might be. And yet there were ways of approach to him.
Sometimes he would respond unexpectedly to a tune, or even the memory of a tune, or of the folded hands of the Pieta, or of certain scenes of his childhood.
As if a tuning-fork had been struck, there would be answering vibrations, and once this had started a state would be produced which the mystics called “ecstasy” and saints “contemplation”; the greatest and soberest of modern psychologists had recognized this state as a fact and called it the “oceanic sense”. And, indeed, one’s personality dissolved as a grain of salt in the sea; but at the same time the infinite sea seemed to be contained in the grain of salt.
The grain could no longer be localized in time and space.