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(单词翻译:双击或拖选)
We can come here once again,’ said Julia. ‘It’s generally safe to use any hide-out twice. But not for another month or two, of course.’
As soon as she woke up her demeanour had changed. She became alert and business-like, put her clothes on, knotted the scarlet1 sash about her waist, and began arranging the details of the journey home. It seemed natural to leave this to her. She obviously had a practical cunning which Winston lacked, and she seemed also to have an exhaustive knowledge of the countryside round London, stored away from innumerable community hikes. The route she gave him was quite different from the one by which he had come, and brought him out at a different railway station. ‘Never go home the same way as you went out,’ she said, as though enunciating an important general principle. She would leave first, and Winston was to wait half an hour before following her.
She had named a place where they could meet after work, four evenings hence. It was a street in one of the poorer quarters, where there was an open market which was generally crowded and noisy. She would be hanging about among the stalls, pretending to be in search of shoelaces or sewing-thread. If she judged that the coast was clear she would blow her nose when he approached; otherwise he was to walk past her without recognition. But with luck, in the middle of the crowd, it would be safe to talk for a quarter of an hour and arrange another meeting.
‘And now I must go,’ she said as soon as he had mastered his instructions. ‘I’m due back at nineteen-thirty. I’ve got to put in two hours for the Junior Anti-Sex League, handing out leaflets, or something. Isn’t it bloody2? Give me a brush-down, would you? Have I got any twigs4 in my hair? Are you sure? Then good-bye, my love, good-bye!’
She flung herself into his arms, kissed him almost violently, and a moment later pushed her way through the saplings and disappeared into the wood with very little noise. Even now he had not found out her surname or her address. However, it made no difference, for it was inconceivable that they could ever meet indoors or exchange any kind of written communication.
As it happened, they never went back to the clearing in the wood. During the month of May there was only one further occasion on which they actually succeeded in making love. That was in another hiding-place known to Julia, the belfry of a ruinous church in an almost-deserted stretch of country where an atomic bomb had fallen thirty years earlier. It was a good hiding-place when once you got there, but the getting there was very dangerous. For the rest they could meet only in the streets, in a different place every evening and never for more than half an hour at a time. In the street it was usually possible to talk, after a fashion. As they drifted down the crowded pavements, not quite abreast5 and never looking at one another, they carried on a curious, intermittent6 conversation which flicked7 on and off like the beams of a lighthouse, suddenly nipped into silence by the approach of a Party uniform or the proximity8 of a telescreen, then taken up again minutes later in the middle of a sentence, then abruptly9 cut short as they parted at the agreed spot, then continued almost without introduction on the following day. Julia appeared to be quite used to this kind of conversation, which she called ‘talking by instalments’. She was also surprisingly adept10 at speaking without moving her lips. Just once in almost a month of nightly meetings they managed to exchange a kiss. They were passing in silence down a side-street (Julia would never speak when they were away from the main streets) when there was a deafening11 roar, the earth heaved, and the air darkened, and Winston found himself lying on his side, bruised12 and terrified. A rocket bomb must have dropped quite near at hand. Suddenly he became aware of Julia’s face a few centimetres from his own, deathly white, as white as chalk. Even her lips were white. She was dead! He clasped her against him and found that he was kissing a live warm face. But there was some powdery stuff that got in the way of his lips. Both of their faces were thickly coated with plaster.
There were evenings when they reached their rendezvous13 and then had to walk past one another without a sign, because a patrol had just come round the corner or a helicopter was hovering14 overhead. Even if it had been less dangerous, it would still have been difficult to find time to meet. Winston’s working week was sixty hours, Julia’s was even longer, and their free days varied15 according to the pressure of work and did not often coincide. Julia, in any case, seldom had an evening completely free. She spent an astonishing amount of time in attending lectures and demonstrations16, distributing literature for the junior Anti-Sex League, preparing banners for Hate Week, making collections for the savings17 campaign, and such-like activities. It paid, she said, it was camouflage18. If you kept the small rules, you could break the big ones. She even induced Winston to mortgage yet another of his evenings by enrolling19 himself for the part-time munition20 work which was done voluntarily by zealous21 Party members. So, one evening every week, Winston spent four hours of paralysing boredom22, screwing together small bits of metal which were probably parts of bomb fuses, in a draughty, ill-lit workshop where the knocking of hammers mingled23 drearily24 with the music of the telescreens.
When they met in the church tower the gaps in their fragmentary conversation were filled up. It was a blazing afternoon. The air in the little square chamber25 above the bells was hot and stagnant26, and smelt27 overpoweringly of pigeon dung. They sat talking for hours on the dusty, twig3-littered floor, one or other of them getting up from time to time to cast a glance through the arrowslits and make sure that no one was coming.
Julia was twenty-six years old. She lived in a hostel28 with thirty other girls (‘Always in the stink29 of women! How I hate women!’ she said parenthetically), and she worked, as he had guessed, on the novel-writing machines in the Fiction Department. She enjoyed her work, which consisted chiefly in running and servicing a powerful but tricky30 electric motor. She was ‘not clever’, but was fond of using her hands and felt at home with machinery31. She could describe the whole process of composing a novel, from the general directive issued by the Planning Committee down to the final touching-up by the Rewrite Squad32. But she was not interested in the finished product. She ‘didn’t much care for reading,’ she said. Books were just a commodity that had to be produced, like jam or bootlaces.
She had no memories of anything before the early sixties and the only person she had ever known who talked frequently of the days before the Revolution was a grandfather who had disappeared when she was eight. At school she had been captain of the hockey team and had won the gymnastics trophy33 two years running. She had been a troop-leader in the Spies and a branch secretary in the Youth League before joining the Junior Anti-Sex League. She had always borne an excellent character. She had even (an infallible mark of good reputation) been picked out to work in Pornosec, the sub-section of the Fiction Department which turned out cheap pornography for distribution among the proles. It was nicknamed Muck House by the people who worked in it, she remarked. There she had remained for a year, helping34 to produce booklets in sealed packets with titles like ‘Spanking Stories’ or ‘One Night in a Girls’ School’, to be bought furtively35 by proletarian youths who were under the impression that they were buying something illegal.
‘Oh, ghastly rubbish. They’re boring, really. They only have six plots, but they swap37 them round a bit. Of course I was only on the kaleidoscopes. I was never in the Rewrite Squad. I’m not literary, dear — not even enough for that.’
He learned with astonishment38 that all the workers in Pornosec, except the heads of the departments, were girls. The theory was that men, whose sex instincts were less controllable than those of women, were in greater danger of being corrupted39 by the filth40 they handled.
‘They don’t even like having married women there,’ she added. Girls are always supposed to be so pure. Here’s one who isn’t, anyway.
She had had her first love-affair when she was sixteen, with a Party member of sixty who later committed suicide to avoid arrest. ‘And a good job too,’ said Julia, ‘otherwise they’d have had my name out of him when he confessed.’ Since then there had been various others. Life as she saw it was quite simple. You wanted a good time; ‘they’, meaning the Party, wanted to stop you having it; you broke the rules as best you could. She seemed to think it just as natural that ‘they’ should want to rob you of your pleasures as that you should want to avoid being caught. She hated the Party, and said so in the crudest words, but she made no general criticism of it. Except where it touched upon her own life she had no interest in Party doctrine41. He noticed that she never used Newspeak words except the ones that had passed into everyday use. She had never heard of the Brotherhood42, and refused to believe in its existence. Any kind of organized revolt against the Party, which was bound to be a failure, struck her as stupid. The clever thing was to break the rules and stay alive all the same. He wondered vaguely43 how many others like her there might be in the younger generation people who had grown up in the world of the Revolution, knowing nothing else, accepting the Party as something unalterable, like the sky, not rebelling against its authority but simply evading44 it, as a rabbit dodges45 a dog.
They did not discuss the possibility of getting married. It was too remote to be worth thinking about. No imaginable committee would ever sanction such a marriage even if Katharine, Winston’s wife, could somehow have been got rid of. It was hopeless even as a daydream46.
‘What was she like, your wife?’ said Julia.
‘She was — do you know the Newspeak word GOODTHINKFUL? Meaning naturally orthodox, incapable47 of thinking a bad thought?’
‘No, I didn’t know the word, but I know the kind of person, right enough.’
He began telling her the story of his married life, but curiously enough she appeared to know the essential parts of it already. She described to him, almost as though she had seen or felt it, the stiffening48 of Katharine’s body as soon as he touched her, the way in which she still seemed to be pushing him from her with all her strength, even when her arms were clasped tightly round him. With Julia he felt no difficulty in talking about such things: Katharine, in any case, had long ceased to be a painful memory and became merely a distasteful one.
‘I could have stood it if it hadn’t been for one thing,’ he said. He told her about the frigid49 little ceremony that Katharine had forced him to go through on the same night every week. ‘She hated it, but nothing would make her stop doing it. She used to call it — but you’ll never guess.’
‘How did you know that?’
‘I’ve been at school too, dear. Sex talks once a month for the over-sixteens. And in the Youth Movement. They rub it into you for years. I dare say it works in a lot of cases. But of course you can never tell; people are such hypocrites.’
She began to enlarge upon the subject. With Julia, everything came back to her own sexuality. As soon as this was touched upon in any way she was capable of great acuteness. Unlike Winston, she had grasped the inner meaning of the Party’s sexual puritanism. It was not merely that the sex instinct created a world of its own which was outside the Party’s control and which therefore had to be destroyed if possible. What was more important was that sexual privation induced hysteria, which was desirable because it could be transformed into war-fever and leader-worship. The way she put it was:
‘When you make love you’re using up energy; and afterwards you feel happy and don’t give a damn for anything. They can’t bear you to feel like that. They want you to be bursting with energy all the time. All this marching up and down and cheering and waving flags is simply sex gone sour. If you’re happy inside yourself, why should you get excited about Big Brother and the Three-Year Plans and the Two Minutes Hate and all the rest of their bloody rot?’
That was very true, he thought. There was a direct intimate connexion between chastity and political orthodoxy. For how could the fear, the hatred51, and the lunatic credulity which the Party needed in its members be kept at the right pitch, except by bottling down some powerful instinct and using it as a driving force? The sex impulse was dangerous to the Party, and the Party had turned it to account. They had played a similar trick with the instinct of parenthood. The family could not actually be abolished, and, indeed, people were encouraged to be fond of their children, in almost the old-fashioned way. The children, on the other hand, were systematically52 turned against their parents and taught to spy on them and report their deviations53. The family had become in effect an extension of the Thought Police. It was a device by means of which everyone could be surrounded night and day by informers who knew him intimately.
Abruptly his mind went back to Katharine. Katharine would unquestionably have denounced him to the Thought Police if she had not happened to be too stupid to detect the unorthodoxy of his opinions. But what really recalled her to him at this moment was the stifling54 heat of the afternoon, which had brought the sweat out on his forehead. He began telling Julia of something that had happened, or rather had failed to happen, on another sweltering summer afternoon, eleven years ago.
It was three or four months after they were married. They had lost their way on a community hike somewhere in Kent. They had only lagged behind the others for a couple of minutes, but they took a wrong turning, and presently found themselves pulled up short by the edge of an old chalk quarry55. It was a sheer drop of ten or twenty metres, with boulders56 at the bottom. There was nobody of whom they could ask the way. As soon as she realized that they were lost Katharine became very uneasy. To be away from the noisy mob of hikers even for a moment gave her a feeling of wrong-doing. She wanted to hurry back by the way they had come and start searching in the other direction. But at this moment Winston noticed some tufts of loosestrife growing in the cracks of the cliff beneath them. One tuft was of two colours, magenta57 and brick-red, apparently58 growing on the same root. He had never seen anything of the kind before, and he called to Katharine to come and look at it.
‘Look, Katharine! Look at those flowers. That clump59 down near the bottom. Do you see they’re two different colours?’
She had already turned to go, but she did rather fretfully come back for a moment. She even leaned out over the cliff face to see where he was pointing. He was standing60 a little behind her, and he put his hand on her waist to steady her. At this moment it suddenly occurred to him how completely alone they were. There was not a human creature anywhere, not a leaf stirring, not even a bird awake. In a place like this the danger that there would be a hidden microphone was very small, and even if there was a microphone it would only pick up sounds. It was the hottest sleepiest hour of the afternoon. The sun blazed down upon them, the sweat tickled61 his face. And the thought struck him . . .
‘Why didn’t you give her a good shove?’ said Julia. ‘I would have.’
‘Yes, dear, you would have. I would, if I’d been the same person then as I am now. Or perhaps I would — I’m not certain.’
‘Are you sorry you didn’t?’
‘Yes. On the whole I’m sorry I didn’t.’
They were sitting side by side on the dusty floor. He pulled her closer against him. Her head rested on his shoulder, the pleasant smell of her hair conquering the pigeon dung. She was very young, he thought, she still expected something from life, she did not understand that to push an inconvenient62 person over a cliff solves nothing.
‘Actually it would have made no difference,’ he said.
‘Then why are you sorry you didn’t do it?’
‘Only because I prefer a positive to a negative. In this game that we’re playing, we can’t win. Some kinds of failure are better than other kinds, that’s all.’
He felt her shoulders give a wriggle63 of dissent64. She always contradicted him when he said anything of this kind. She would not accept it as a law of nature that the individual is always defeated. In a way she realized that she herself was doomed65, that sooner or later the Thought Police would catch her and kill her, but with another part of her mind she believed that it was somehow possible to construct a secret world in which you could live as you chose. All you needed was luck and cunning and boldness. She did not understand that there was no such thing as happiness, that the only victory lay in the far future, long after you were dead, that from the moment of declaring war on the Party it was better to think of yourself as a corpse66.
‘We are the dead,’ he said.
‘We’re not dead yet,’ said Julia prosaically67.
‘Not physically68. Six months, a year — five years, conceivably. I am afraid of death. You are young, so presumably you’re more afraid of it than I am. Obviously we shall put it off as long as we can. But it makes very little difference. So long as human beings stay human, death and life are the same thing.’
‘Oh, rubbish! Which would you sooner sleep with, me or a skeleton? Don’t you enjoy being alive? Don’t you like feeling: This is me, this is my hand, this is my leg, I’m real, I’m solid, I’m alive! Don’t you like THIS?’
She twisted herself round and pressed her bosom69 against him. He could feel her breasts, ripe yet firm, through her overalls70. Her body seemed to be pouring some of its youth and vigour71 into his.
‘Yes, I like that,’ he said.
‘Then stop talking about dying. And now listen, dear, we’ve got to fix up about the next time we meet. We may as well go back to the place in the wood. We’ve given it a good long rest. But you must get there by a different way this time. I’ve got it all planned out. You take the train — but look, I’ll draw it out for you.’
And in her practical way she scraped together a small square of dust, and with a twig from a pigeon’s nest began drawing a map on the floor.
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1
scarlet
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| n.深红色，绯红色，红衣；adj.绯红色的 | |
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bloody
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| adj.非常的的；流血的；残忍的；adv.很；vt.血染 | |
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twig
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| n.小树枝，嫩枝；v.理解 | |
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twigs
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| 细枝，嫩枝( twig的名词复数 ) | |
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abreast
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| adv.并排地；跟上(时代)的步伐，与…并进地 | |
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intermittent
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| adj.间歇的，断断续续的 | |
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flicked
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| （尤指用手指或手快速地）轻击( flick的过去式和过去分词 )； （用…）轻挥； （快速地）按开关； 向…笑了一下（或瞥了一眼等） | |
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proximity
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| n.接近，邻近 | |
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abruptly
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| adv.突然地，出其不意地 | |
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adept
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| adj.老练的，精通的 | |
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deafening
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| adj. 振耳欲聋的, 极喧闹的 动词deafen的现在分词形式 | |
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12
bruised
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| [医]青肿的，瘀紫的 | |
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rendezvous
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| n.约会，约会地点，汇合点；vi.汇合，集合；vt.使汇合，使在汇合地点相遇 | |
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14
hovering
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| 鸟( hover的现在分词 )； 靠近（某事物）； （人）徘徊； 犹豫 | |
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varied
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| adj.多样的，多变化的 | |
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demonstrations
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| 证明( demonstration的名词复数 )； 表明； 表达； 游行示威 | |
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savings
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| n.存款，储蓄 | |
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camouflage
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| n./v.掩饰，伪装 | |
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enrolling
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| v.招收( enrol的现在分词 )；吸收；入学；加入；[亦作enrol]( enroll的现在分词 )；登记，招收，使入伍（或入会、入学等），参加，成为成员；记入名册；卷起，包起 | |
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munition
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| n.军火；军需品；v.给某部门提供军火 | |
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zealous
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| adj.狂热的，热心的 | |
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boredom
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| n.厌烦，厌倦，乏味，无聊 | |
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23
mingled
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| 混合，混入( mingle的过去式和过去分词 )； 混进，与…交往[联系] | |
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drearily
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| 沉寂地，厌倦地，可怕地 | |
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chamber
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| n.房间，寝室；会议厅；议院；会所 | |
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stagnant
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| adj.不流动的，停滞的，不景气的 | |
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smelt
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| v.熔解，熔炼；n.银白鱼，胡瓜鱼 | |
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28
hostel
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| n.（学生）宿舍，招待所 | |
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stink
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| vi.发出恶臭；糟透，招人厌恶；n.恶臭 | |
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tricky
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| adj.狡猾的，奸诈的；(工作等)棘手的，微妙的 | |
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31
machinery
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| n.(总称)机械，机器；机构 | |
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squad
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| n.班，小队，小团体；vt.把…编成班或小组 | |
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33
trophy
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| n.优胜旗，奖品，奖杯，战胜品，纪念品 | |
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34
helping
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| n.食物的一份&adj.帮助人的，辅助的 | |
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furtively
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| adv. 偷偷地, 暗中地 | |
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curiously
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| adv.有求知欲地；好问地；奇特地 | |
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swap
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| n.交换；vt.交换，用...作交易 | |
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38
astonishment
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| n.惊奇，惊异 | |
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39
corrupted
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| （使）败坏( corrupt的过去式和过去分词 )； （使）腐化； 引起（计算机文件等的）错误； 破坏 | |
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40
filth
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| n.肮脏，污物，污秽；淫猥 | |
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41
doctrine
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| n.教义；主义；学说 | |
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42
brotherhood
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| n.兄弟般的关系，手中情谊 | |
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43
vaguely
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| adv.含糊地，暖昧地 | |
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44
evading
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| 逃避( evade的现在分词 )； 避开； 回避； 想不出 | |
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45
dodges
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| n.闪躲( dodge的名词复数 )；躲避；伎俩；妙计v.闪躲( dodge的第三人称单数 )；回避 | |
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46
daydream
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| v.做白日梦，幻想 | |
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47
incapable
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| adj.无能力的，不能做某事的 | |
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48
stiffening
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| n. (使衣服等)变硬的材料, 硬化 动词stiffen的现在分词形式 | |
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49
frigid
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| adj.寒冷的，凛冽的；冷淡的；拘禁的 | |
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50
promptly
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| adv.及时地，敏捷地 | |
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51
hatred
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| n.憎恶，憎恨，仇恨 | |
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52
systematically
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| adv.有系统地 | |
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53
deviations
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| 背离，偏离( deviation的名词复数 )； 离经叛道的行为 | |
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54
stifling
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| a.令人窒息的 | |
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55
quarry
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| n.采石场；v.采石；费力地找 | |
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56
boulders
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| n.卵石( boulder的名词复数 )；巨砾；（受水或天气侵蚀而成的）巨石；漂砾 | |
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57
magenta
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| n..紫红色（的染料）；adj.紫红色的 | |
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58
apparently
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| adv.显然地；表面上，似乎 | |
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59
clump
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| n.树丛，草丛；vi.用沉重的脚步行走 | |
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60
standing
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| n.持续，地位；adj.永久的，不动的，直立的，不流动的 | |
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61
tickled
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| （使）发痒( tickle的过去式和过去分词 )； （使）愉快，逗乐 | |
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62
inconvenient
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| adj.不方便的，令人感到麻烦的 | |
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63
wriggle
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| v./n.蠕动，扭动；蜿蜒 | |
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64
dissent
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| n./v.不同意，持异议 | |
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65
doomed
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| 命定的 | |
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66
corpse
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| n.尸体，死尸 | |
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67
prosaically
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| adv.无聊地；乏味地；散文式地；平凡地 | |
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68
physically
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| adj.物质上，体格上，身体上，按自然规律 | |
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69
bosom
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| n.胸，胸部；胸怀；内心；adj.亲密的 | |
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70
overalls
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| n.（复）工装裤；长罩衣 | |
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71
vigour
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| （=vigor）n.智力，体力，精力 | |
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