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crack like a cardboard mask. There were streaks of white in her hair; but the truly dreadful detail was that
her mouth had fallen a little open, revealing nothing except a cavernous blackness. She had no teeth at all.
He wrote hurriedly, in scrabbling handwriting:
When I saw her in the light she was quite an old woman, fifty years old at least. But I went ahead and
did it just the same.
He pressed his fingers against his eyelids again. He had written it down at last, but it made no difference.
The therapy had not worked. The urge to shout filthy words at the top of his voice was as strong as ever.
If there is hope, wrote Winston, it lies in the proles.
If there was hope, it must lie in the proles, because only there in those swarming disregarded masses, 85
per cent of the population of Oceania, could the force to destroy the Party ever be generated. The Party
could not be overthrown from within. Its enemies, if it had any enemies, had no way of coming together or
even of identifying one another. Even if the legendary Brotherhood existed, as just possibly it might, it was
inconceivable that its members could ever assemble in larger numbers than twos and threes. Rebellion
meant a look in the eyes, an inflexion of the voice, at the most, an occasional whispered word. But the
proles, if only they could somehow become conscious of their own strength. would have no need to
conspire. They needed only to rise up and shake themselves like a horse shaking off flies. If they chose
they could blow the Party to pieces tomorrow morning. Surely sooner or later it must occur to them to do it?
And yet-!
He remembered how once he had been walking down a crowded street when a tremendous shout of
hundreds of voices, women s voices had burst from a side-street a little way ahead. It was a great
formidable cry of anger and despair, a deep, loud  Oh-o-o-o-oh! that went humming on like the
reverberation of a bell. His heart had leapt. It s started! he had thought. A riot! The proles are breaking
loose at last! When he had reached the spot it was to see a mob of two or three hundred women crowding
round the stalls of a street market, with faces as tragic as though they had been the doomed passengers on a
sinking ship. But at this moment the general despair broke down into a multitude of individual quarrels. It
appeared that one of the stalls had been selling tin saucepans. They were wretched, flimsy things, but
cooking-pots of any kind were always difficult to get. Now the supply had unexpectedly given out. The
successful women, bumped and jostled by the rest, were trying to make off with their saucepans while
dozens of others clamoured round the stall, accusing the stallkeeper of favouritism and of having more
saucepans somewhere in reserve. There was a fresh outburst of yells. Two bloated women, one of them
with her hair coming down, had got hold of the same saucepan and were trying to tear it out of one another s
hands. For a moment they were both tugging, and then the handle came off. Winston watched them
disgustedly. And yet, just for a moment, what almost frightening power had sounded in that cry from only a
few hundred throats! Why was it that they could never shout like that about anything that mattered?
He wrote:
Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become
conscious.
That, he reflected, might almost have been a transcription from one of the Party textbooks. The Party
claimed, of course, to have liberated the proles from bondage. Before the Revolution they had been
hideously oppressed by the capitalists, they had been starved and flogged, women had been forced to work
in the coal mines (women still did work in the coal mines, as a matter of fact), children had been sold into
the factories at the age of six. But simultaneously, true to the Principles of doublethink, the Party taught that
the proles were natural inferiors who must be kept in subjection, like animals, by the application of a few
simple rules. In reality very little was known about the proles. It was not necessary to know much. So long [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]