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ehind one's head and one's face and body all exposed, was almost unbearable. The man protruded
the tip of a white tongue, licked the place where his lips should have been, and then passed on. There
was another crash. Someone had picked up the glass paperweight from the table and smashed it to
pieces on the hearthstone.
The fragment of coral, a tiny crinkle of pink like a sugar rosebud from a cake, rolled across the
mat. How small, thought Winston, how small it always was! There was a gasp and a thump behind
him, and he received a violent kick on the ankle which nearly flung him off his balance. One of the
men had smashed his fist into Julia's solar plexus, doubling her up like a pocket ruler. She was
thrashing about on the floor, fighting for breath. Winston dared not turn his head even by a millimeter,
but sometimes her livid, gasping face came within the angle of his vision. Even in his terror it was as
though he could feel the pain in his own body, the deadly pain which nevertheless was less urgent
than the struggle to get back her breath. He knew what it was like: the terrible, agonizing pain which
was there all the while but could not be suffered yet, because before all else it was necessary to be
able to breathe. Then two of the men hoisted her up by knees and shoulders, and carried her out of the
room like a sack. Winston had a glimpse of her face, upside down, yellow and contorted, with the
eyes shut, and still with a smear of rouge on either cheek; and that was the last he saw of her.
He stood dead still. No one had hit him yet. Thoughts which came of their own accord but seemed
totally uninteresting began to flit through his mind. He wondered whether they had got Mr.
Charrington. He wondered what they had done to the woman in the yard. He noticed that he badly
wanted to urinate, and felt a faint surprise, because he had done so only two or three hours ago. He
noticed that the clock on the mantelpiece said nine, meaning twenty-one. But the light seemed too
strong. Would not the light be fading at twenty-one hours on an August evening? He wondered
whether after all he and Julia had mistaken the time—had slept the clock round and thought it was
twenty-thirty when really it was nought eight-thirty on the following morning. But he did not pursue
the thought further. It was not interesting.
There was another, lighter step in the passage. Mr. Charrington came into the room. The demeanor
of the black-uniformed men suddenly became more subdued. Something had also changed in Mr.
Charrington's appearance. His eye fell on the fragments of the glass paperweight.
"Pick up those pieces," he said sharply.
A man stooped to obey. The cockney accent had disappeared; Winston suddenly realized whose
voice it was that he had heard a few moments ago on the telescreen. Mr. Charrington was still
wearing his old velvet jacket, but his hair, which had been almost white, had turned black. Also he
was not wearing his spectacles. He gave Winston a single sharp glance, as though verifying his
identity, and then paid no more attention to him. He was still recognizable, but he was not the same
person any longer. His body had straightened, and seemed to have grown bigger. His face had
undergone only tiny changes that had nevertheless worked a complete transformation. The black
eyebrows were less bushy, the wrinkles were gone, the whole lines of the face seemed to have
altered; even the nose seemed shorter. It was the alert, cold face of a man of about five-and-thirty. It
occurred to Winston that for the first time in his life he was looking, with knowledge, at a member of