Nineteen Eighty-Four 一九八四 Part 2, Chapter 8

They had done it, they had done it at last!, ,The room they were standing ¹ in was long-shaped and softly lit. The telescreen was dimmed to a low murmur ²; the richness of the dark-blue carpet gave one the impression of treading on velvet ³. At the far end of the room O'Brien was sitting at a table under a green-shaded lamp, with a mass of papers on either side of him. He had not bothered to look up when the servant showed Julia and Winston in., ,Winston's heart was thumping ⁴ so hard that he doubted whether he would be able to speak. They had done it, they had done it at last, was all he could think. It had been a rash act to come here at all, and sheer folly ⁵ to arrive together; though it was true that they had come by different routes and only met on O'Brien's doorstep. But merely to walk into such a place needed an effort of the nerve. It was only on very rare occasions that one saw inside the dwelling-places of the Inner Party, or even penetrated ⁶ into the quarter of the town where they lived. The whole atmosphere of the huge block of flats, the richness and spaciousness ⁷ of everything, the unfamiliar ⁸ smells of good food and good tobacco, the silent and incredibly rapid lifts sliding up and down, the white-jacketed servants hurrying to and fro -- everything was intimidating ⁹. Although he had a good pretext ¹⁰ for coming here, he was haunted at every step by the fear that a black-uniformed guard would suddenly appear from round the corner, demand his papers, and order him to get out. O'Brien's servant, however, had admitted the two of them without demur ¹¹. He was a small, dark-haired man in a white jacket, with a diamond-shaped, completely expressionless face which might have been that of a Chinese. The passage down which he led them was softly carpeted, with cream-papered walls and white wainscoting, all exquisitely ¹² clean. That too was intimidating. Winston could not remember ever to have seen a passageway whose walls were not grimy from the contact of human bodies., , ,'Items one comma five comma seven approved fullwise stop suggestion contained item six doubleplus ridiculous verging ¹⁷ crimethink cancel stop unproceed constructionwise antegetting plusfull estimates machinery ¹⁸ overheads stop end message.', ,He rose deliberately ¹⁹ from his chair and came towards them across the soundless carpet. A little of the official atmosphere seemed to have fallen away from him with the Newspeak words, but his expression was grimmer than usual, as though he were not pleased at being disturbed. The terror that Winston already felt was suddenly shot through by a streak ²⁰ of ordinary embarrassment ²¹. It seemed to him quite possible that he had simply made a stupid mistake. For what evidence had he in reality that O'Brien was any kind of political conspirator ²²? Nothing but a flash of the eyes and a single equivocal remark: beyond that, only his own secret imaginings, founded on a dream. He could not even fall back on the pretence ²³ that he had come to borrow the dictionary, because in that case Julia's presence was impossible to explain. As O'Brien passed the telescreen a thought seemed to strike him. He stopped, turned aside and pressed a switch on the wall. There was a sharp snap. The voice had stopped., ,They're standing out against any change in the law.他们坚决反对对法律做任何修改。,They paid the extra taxes without a murmur.他们毫无怨言地交了附加税 。