The room they were standing in was long-shaped and softly lit. The telescreen was dimmed to a low murmur ; the richness of the dark-blue carpet gave one the impression of treading on velvet . 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 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 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 into the quarter of the town where they lived. The whole atmosphere of the huge block of flats, the richness and spaciousness of everything, the unfamiliar 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 . Although he had a good pretext 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 . 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 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.
O’Brien had a slip of paper between his fingers and seemed to be studying it intently. His heavy face, bent down so that one could see the line of the nose, looked both formidable and intelligent. For perhaps twenty seconds he sat without stirring.
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然后他拉过听写器来,用各部常用的混合行话,发了一个通知:
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Then he pulled the speakwrite towards him and rapped out a message in the hybrid jargon of the Ministries :
He rose deliberately 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 of ordinary embarrassment . 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 ? 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 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.
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裘莉亚轻轻惊叫了一声,即使在心情慌乱中,温斯顿也惊异得忍不住要说:
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Julia uttered a tiny sound, a sort of squeak of surprise. Even in the midst of his panic, Winston was too much taken aback to be able to hold his tongue.
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“原来你可以把它关掉!”
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’You can turn it off!’ he said.
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“是的,”奥勃良说,“我们可以把它关掉。我们有这个特权。”
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’Yes,’ said O’Brien, ’we can turn it off. We have that privilege.’
He was opposite them now. His solid form towered over the pair of them, and the expression on his face was still indecipherable. He was waiting, somewhat sternly, for Winston to speak, but about what? Even now it was quite conceivable that he was simply a busy man wondering irritably why he had been interrupted. Nobody spoke . After the stopping of the telescreen the room seemed deadly silent. The seconds marched past, enormous. With difficulty Winston continued to keep his eyes fixed on O’Brien’s. Then suddenly the grim face broke down into what might have been the beginnings of a smile. With his characteristic gesture O’Brien resettled his spectacles on his nose.
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“我来说,还是你来说?”他问道。
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’Shall I say it, or will you?’ he said.
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“我来说吧,”温斯顿马上说。“那玩意儿真的关掉了?”
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’I will say it,’ said Winston promptly . ’That thing is really turned off?’
He paused, realizing for the first time the vagueness of his own motives . Since he did not in fact know what kind of help he expected from O’Brien, it was not easy to say why he had come here. He went on, conscious that what he was saying must sound both feeble and pretentious :
’We believe that there is some kind of conspiracy , some kind of secret organization working against the Party, and that you are involved in it. We want to join it and work for it. We are enemies of the Party. We disbelieve in the principles of Ingsoc. We are thought-criminals. We are also adulterers. I tell you this because we want to put ourselves at your mercy. If you want us to incriminate ourselves in any other way, we are ready.’
He stopped and glanced over his shoulder, with the feeling that the door had opened. Sure enough, the little yellow-faced servant had come in without knocking. Winston saw that he was carrying a tray with a decanter and glasses.
’Martin is one of us,’ said O’Brien impassively. ’Bring the drinks over here, Martin. Put them on the round table. Have we enough chairs? Then we may as well sit down and talk in comfort. Bring a chair for yourself, Martin. This is business. You can stop being a servant for the next ten minutes.’
The little man sat down, quite at his ease, and yet still with a servant-like air, the air of a valet enjoying a privilege. Winston regarded him out of the corner of his eye. It struck him that the man’s whole life was playing a part, and that he felt it to be dangerous to drop his assumed personality even for a moment. O’Brien took the decanter by the neck and filled up the glasses with a dark-red liquid. It aroused in Winston dim memories of something seen long ago on a wall or a hoarding -- a vast bottle composed of electric lights which seemed to move up and down and pour its contents into a glass. Seen from the top the stuff looked almost black, but in the decanter it gleamed like a ruby . It had a sour-sweet smell. He saw Julia pick up her glass and sniff at it with frank curiosity.
’It is called wine,’ said O’Brien with a faint smile. ’You will have read about it in books, no doubt. Not much of it gets to the Outer Party, I am afraid.’ His face grew solemn again, and he raised his glass: ’I think it is fitting that we should begin by drinking a health. To our Leader: To Emmanuel Goldstein.’
Winston took up his glass with a certain eagerness. Wine was a thing he had read and dreamed about. Like the glass paperweight or Mr Charrington’s half-remembered rhymes, it belonged to the vanished, romantic past, the olden time as he liked to call it in his secret thoughts.
For some reason he had always thought of wine as having an intensely sweet taste, like that of blackberry jam and an immediate intoxicating effect. Actually, when he came to swallow it, the stuff was distinctly disappointing. The truth was that after years of gin-drinking he could barely taste it. He set down the empty glass.
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“那么真的有果尔德施坦因这样一个人?”他问道。
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’Then there is such a person as Goldstein?’ he said.
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“是啊,有这样一个人,他还活着。至于在哪里,我就不知道了。”
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’Yes, there is such a person, and he is alive. Where, I do not know.’
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“那么那个密谋——那个组织?这是真的吗?不是秘密警察的捏造吧?”
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’And the conspiracy -- the organization? Is it real? It is not simply an invention of the Thought Police?’
’No, it is real. The Brotherhood , we call it. You will never learn much more about the Brotherhood than that it exists and that you belong to it. I will come back to that presently.’ He looked at his wrist-watch. ’It is unwise even for members of the Inner Party to turn off the telescreen for more than half an hour. You ought not to have come here together, and you will have to leave separately. You, comrade’ -- he bowed his head to Julia -- ’will leave first. We have about twenty minutes at our disposal. You will understand that I must start by asking you certain questions. In general terms, what are you prepared to do?’
O’Brien had turned himself a little in his chair so that he was facing Winston. He almost ignored Julia, seeming to take it for granted that Winston could speak for her. For a moment the lids flitted down over his eyes. He began asking his questions in a low, expressionless voice, as though this were a routine, a sort of catechism, most of whose answers were known to him already.
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“你们准备献出生命吗?”
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’You are prepared to give your lives?’
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“是的。”
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’Yes.’
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“你们准备杀人吗?”
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’You are prepared to commit murder?’
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“是的。”
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’Yes.’
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“你们准备从事破坏活动,可能造成千百个无辜百姓的死亡吗?”
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’To commit acts of sabotage which may cause the death of hundreds of innocent people?’
’You are prepared to cheat, to forge, to blackmail , to corrupt the minds of children, to distribute habit-forming drugs, to encourage prostitution, to disseminate venereal diseases -- to do anything which is likely to cause demoralization and weaken the power of the Party?’
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“是的。”
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’Yes.’
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“比如,如果把硝锵水撒在一个孩子的脸上能够促进我们的事业,你们准备这么做吗?”
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’If, for example, it would somehow serve our interests to throw sulphuric acid in a child’s face -- are you prepared to do that?’
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“是的。”
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“你们准备隐姓埋名,一辈子改行去做服务员或码头工人吗?”
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“是的。”
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“如果我们要你们自杀,你们准备自杀吗?”
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’You are prepared to commit suicide, if and when we order you to do so?’