Orwell George

Junior Anti-Sex League, was wound several times round the waist
of her overalls, just tightly enough to bring out the
shapeliness of her hips. Winston had disliked her from the very
first moment of seeing her. He knew the reason. It was because
of the atmosphere of hockey-fields and cold baths and community
hikes and general clean- mindedness which she managed to carry
about with her. He disliked nearly all women, and especially
the young and pretty ones. It was always the women, and above
all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the
Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and
nosers-out of unorthodoxy. But this particular girl gave him
the impression of being more dangerous than most. Once when
they passed in the corridor she gave him a quick sidelong
glance which seemed to pierce right into him and for a moment
had filled him with black terror. The idea had even crossed his
mind that she might be an agent of the Thought Police. That, it
was true, was very unlikely. Still, he continued to feel a
peculiar uneasiness, which had fear mixed up in it as well as
hostility, whenever she was anywhere near him.
The other person was a man named O`Brien, a member of the
Inner Party and holder of some post so important and remote
that Winston had only a dim idea of its nature. A momentary
hush passed over the group of people round the chairs as they
saw the black overalls of an Inner Party member approaching.
O`Brien was a large, burly man with a thick neck and a coarse,
humorous, brutal face. In spite of his formidable appearance he
had a certain charm of manner. He had a trick of resettling his
spectacles on his nose which was curiously disarming -- in some
indefinable way, curiously civilized. It was a gesture which,
if anyone had still thought in such terms, might have recalled
an eighteenth-century nobleman offering his snuffbox. Winston
had seen O`Brien perhaps a dozen times in almost as many years.
He felt deeply drawn to him, and not solely because he was
intrigued by the contrast between O`Brien`s urbane manner and
his prize-fighter`s physique. Much more it was because of a
secretly held belief -- or perhaps not even a belief, merely a
hope -- that O`Brien`s political orthodoxy was not perfect.
Something in his face suggested it irresistibly. And again,
perhaps it was not even unorthodoxy that was written in his
face, but simply intelligence. But at any rate he had the
appearance of being a person that you could talk to if somehow
you could cheat the telescreen and get him alone. Winston had
never made the smallest effort to verify this guess: indeed,
there was no way of doing so. At this moment O`Brien glanced at
his wrist-watch, saw that it was nearly eleven hundred, and
evidently decided to stay in the Records Department until the
Two Minutes Hate was over. He took a chair in the same row as
Winston, a couple of places away. A small, sandy-haired woman
who worked in the next cubicle to Winston was between them. The
girl with dark hair was sitting immediately behind.
The next moment a hideous, grinding speech, as of some
monstrous machine running without oil, burst from the big
telescreen at the end of the room. It was a noise that set
one`s teeth on edge and bristled the hair at the back of one`s
neck. The Hate had started.
As usual, the face of Emmanuel Goldstein, the Enemy of the
People, had flashed on to the screen. There were hisses here
and there among the audience. The little sandy-haired woman
gave a squeak of mingled fear and disgust. Goldstein was the
renegade and backslider who once, long ago (how long ago,
nobody quite remembered), had been one of the leading figures
of the Party, almost on a level with Big Brother himself, and
then had engaged in counter-revolutionary activities, had been
condemned to death, and had mysteriously escaped and
disappeared. The programmes of the Two Minutes Hate varied from
day to day, but there was none in which Goldstein was not the
principal figure. He was the primal traitor, the earliest
defiler of the Party`s purity. All subsequent crimes against
the Party, all treacheries, acts of sabotage, heresies,
deviations, sprang directly out of his teaching. Somewhere or
other he was still alive and hatching his conspiracies: perhaps
somewhere beyond the sea, under the protection of his foreign
paymasters, perhaps even -- so it was occasionally rumoured --
in some hiding-place in Oceania itself.
Winston`s diaphragm was constricted. He could never see
the face of Goldstein without a painful mixture of emotions. It
was a lean Jewish face, with a great fuzzy aureole of white
hair and a small goatee beard -- a clever face, and yet somehow
inherently despicable, with a kind of senile silliness in the
long thin nose, near the end of which a pair of spectacles was
perched. It resembled the face of a sheep, and the voice, too,
had a sheep-like quality. Goldstein was delivering his usual
venomous attack upon the doctrines of the Party -- an attack so
exaggerated and perverse that a child should have been able to
see through it, and yet just plausible enough to fill one with
an alarmed feeling that other people, less level-headed than
oneself, might be taken in by it. He was abusing Big Brother,
he was denouncing the dictatorship of the Party, he was
demanding the immediate conclusion of peace with Eurasia, he
was advocating freedom of speech, freedom of the Press, freedom
of assembly, freedom of thought, he was crying hysterically
that the revolution had been betrayed -- and all this in rapid
polysyllabic speech which was a sort of parody of the habitual
style of the orators of the Party, and even contained Newspeak
words: more Newspeak words, indeed, than any Party member would
normally use in real life. And all the while, lest one should
be in any doubt as to the reality which Goldstein`s specious
claptrap covered, behind his head on the telescreen there
marched the endless columns of the Eurasian army -- row after
row of solid-looking men with expressionless Asiatic faces, who

Orwell George - 1984