Nineteen Eighty-Four 一九八四 Part 1, Chapter 8

From somewhere at the bottom of a passage the smell of roasting coffee -- real coffee, not Victory Coffee -- came floating out into the street. Winston paused involuntarily. For perhaps two seconds he was back in the half-forgotten world of his childhood. Then a door banged, seeming to cut off the smell as abruptly ¹ as though it had been a sound., ,He had walked several kilometres over pavements, and his varicose ulcer ² was throbbing ³. This was the second time in three weeks that he had missed an evening at the Community Centre: a rash act, since you could be certain that the number of your attendances at the Centre was carefully checked. In principle a Party member had no spare time, and was never alone except in bed. It was assumed that when he was not working, eating, or sleeping he would be taking part in some kind of communal ⁴ recreation: to do anything that suggested a taste for solitude ⁵, even to go for a walk by yourself, was always slightly dangerous. There was a word for it in Newspeak: ownlife, it was called, meaning individualism and eccentricity ⁶. But this evening as he came out of the Ministry ⁷ the balminess of the April air had tempted ⁸ him. The sky was a warmer blue than he had seen it that year, and suddenly the long, noisy evening at the Centre, the boring, exhausting games, the lectures, the creaking camaraderie ⁹ oiled by gin, had seemed intolerable. On impulse he had turned away from the bus-stop and wandered off into the labyrinth ¹⁰ of London, first south, then east, then north again, losing himself among unknown streets and hardly bothering in which direction he was going., ,'If there is hope,' he had written in the diary, 'it lies in the proles.' The words kept coming back to him, statement of a mystical truth and a palpable absurdity ¹¹. He was somewhere in the vague, brown-coloured slums to the north and east of what had once been Saint Pancras Station. He was walking up a cobbled street of little two-storey houses with battered ¹² doorways ¹⁴ which gave straight on the pavement and which were somehow curiously ¹⁵ suggestive of ratholes. There were puddles ¹⁷ of filthy ¹⁸ water here and there among the cobbles. In and out of the dark doorways, and down narrow alley ¹⁹-ways that branched off on either side, people swarmed ²⁰ in astonishing numbers -- girls in full bloom, with crudely lipsticked mouths, and youths who chased the girls, and swollen ²¹ waddling ²² women who showed you what the girls would be like in ten years' time, and old bent ²³ creatures shuffling ²⁴ along on splayed feet, and ragged ²⁵ barefooted children who played in the puddles and then scattered ²⁶ at angry yells from their mothers. Perhaps a quarter of the windows in the street were broken and boarded up. Most of the people paid no attention to Winston; a few eyed him with a sort of guarded curiosity. Two monstrous ²⁷ women with brick-red forearms folded across thelr aprons ²⁹ were talking outside a doorway ¹³. Winston caught scraps ³⁰ of conversation as he approached., , ,'Ah,' said the other, 'that's jest it. That's jest where it is.', ,The strident voices stopped abruptly. The women studied him in hostile silence as he went past. But it was not hostility ³¹, exactly; merely a kind of wariness ³², a momentary ³³ stiffening ³⁴, as at the passing of some unfamiliar ³⁵ animal. The blue overalls ³⁶ of the Party could not be a common sight in a street like this. Indeed, it was unwise to be seen in such places, unless you had definite business there. The patrols might stop you if you happened to run into them. 'May I see your papers, comrade? What are you doing here? What time did you leave work? Is this your usual way home?' -- and so on and so forth ³⁷. Not that there was any rule against walking home by an unusual route: but it was enough to draw attention to you if the Thought Police heard about it., ,I was abruptly notified that a half-hour speech was expected of me.我突然被通知要讲半个小时的话。,She had an ulcer in her mouth.她口腔出现溃疡 。