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1984, Part 2, Chapter 6:

It had happened at last. The expected message
had come. All his life, it seemed to him, he had
been waiting for this to happen.
He was walking down the long corridor at the
Ministry and he was almost at the spot where
Julia had slipped the note into his hand when he
became aware that someone larger than
himself was walking just behind him. The
person, whoever it was, gave a small cough,
evidently as a prelude to speaking. Winston
stopped abruptly and turned. It was O'Brien.
'I had been hoping for an opportunity of talking
to you,' he said. 'I was reading one of your
Newspeak articles in The Times the other day.
You take a scholarly interest in Newspeak, I
believe?'
Winston had recovered part of his selfpossession. 'Hardly scholarly,' he said. 'I'm only
an amateur. . . .
'But you write it very elegantly,' said O'Brien.
'That is not only my own opinion. I was talking
recently to a friend of yours who is certainly an
expert. His name has slipped my memory for
the moment.'
Again Winston's heart stirred painfully. It was
inconceivable that this was anything other than
a reference to Syme. But Syme was not only
dead, he was abolished, an unperson. Any
identifiable reference to him would have been
mortally dangerous. O'Brien's remark must
obviously have been intended as a signal, a
codeword . . .
'What I had really intended to say was that in
your article I noticed you had used two words
which have become obsolete. But they have
only become so very recently. Have you seen
the tenth edition of the Newspeak Dictionary?'
'No,' said Winston. 'I didn't think it had been
issued yet. We are still using the ninth in the
Records Department.'
'The tenth edition is not due to appear for some
months, I believe. But a few advance copies
have been circulated. I have one myself. It
might interest you to look at it, perhaps?'
'Very much so,' said Winston, immediately
seeing where this tended.
. . . Perhaps you could pick it up at my flat at
some time that suited you? Wait. Let me give
you my address.'

They were standing in front of a telescreen.

Somewhat absentmindedly O'Brien felt two of
his pockets and then produced a small leathercovered notebook and a gold ink-pencil.
Immediately beneath the telescreen, in such a
position that anyone who was watching at the
other end of the instrument could read what he
was writing, he scribbled an address, tore out
the page and handed it to Winston. . . .

1984, Part 2, Chapters 7 & 8

They had done it, they had done it at last!
The room they were standing in was longshaped 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 greenshaded 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.
. . . . 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 whitejacketed servants hurrying to and fro -everything was intimidating. . . . . 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.
. . . 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.
Julia uttered a tiny sound, a sort of squeak of
surprise . . .
'You can turn it off!' he said.
'Yes,' said O'Brien, 'we can turn it off. We have
that privilege. . . . Shall I say it, or will you?' he
said.
'I will say it,' said Winston promptly. 'That thing
is really turned off?'
'Yes, everything is turned off. We are alone.'

2
'We have come here because . . .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.
. . . 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.
'Then there is such a person as Goldstein?' he
said.

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?'
'Anything that we are capable of,' said Winston.
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 . . . most of whose
answers were known to him already.
'You are prepared to give your lives?'
'Yes.'
'You are prepared to commit murder?'
'Yes.'
'To commit acts of sabotage which may cause
the death of hundreds of innocent people?'
'Yes.'
'To betray your country to foreign powers?'
'Yes.'
'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?'
'Yes.'
'If, for example, it would somehow serve our
interests to throw sulphuric acid in a child's face
-- are you prepared to do that?'

'Yes, there is such a person, and he is alive.

Where, I do not know.'

'Yes.'

'And the conspiracy -- the organization? Is it

real? It is not simply an invention of the Thought
Police?'

'You are prepared to lose your identity and live

out the rest of your life as a waiter or a dockworker?'

'No, it is real. The Brotherhood, we call it. You

'Yes.'

3
'You are prepared to commit suicide, if and
when we order you to do so?'
'Yes.'
'You are prepared, the two of you, to separate
and never see one another again?'
'No!' broke in Julia.
'You did well to tell me,' said O'Brien. 'It is
necessary for us to know everything.'
He turned himself toward Julia and added in a
voice with somewhat more expression in it:
'Do you understand that even if he survives, it
may be as a different person? We may be
obliged to give him a new identity. His face, his
movements, the shape of his hands, the colour
of his hair -- even his voice would be different.
And you yourself might have become a different
person. Our surgeons can alter people beyond
recognition. Sometimes it is necessary.
Sometimes we even amputate a limb.'
. . . . Julia had turned a shade paler, so that her
freckles were showing, but she faced O'Brien
boldly. She murmured something that seemed
to be assent.
'Good. Then that is settled.'
There was a silver box of cigarettes on the
table. With a rather absent-minded air O'Brien
pushed them towards the others, took one
himself, then stood up and began to pace slowly
to and fro, as though he could think better
standing. They were very good cigarettes, very
thick and well-packed, with an unfamiliar
silkiness in the paper. O'Brien looked at his
wrist-watch again.
'You had better go back to your Pantry, Martin,'
he said. 'I shall switch on in a quarter of an
hour. Take a good look at these comrades' faces
before you go. You will be seeing them again. I
may not.'
Exactly as they had done at the front door, the
little man's dark eyes flickered over their faces.
There was not a trace of friendliness in his
manner. He was memorizing their appearance,
but he felt no interest in them, or appeared to
feel none. It occurred to Winston that a
synthetic face was perhaps incapable of
changing its expression. Without speaking or
giving any kind of salutation, Martin went out,
closing the door silently behind him. O'Brien
was strolling up and down, one hand in the
pocket of his black overalls, the other holding
his cigarette.

'You understand,' he said, 'that you will be

fighting in the dark. You will always be in the
dark. You will receive orders and you will obey
them, without knowing why. Later I shall send
you a book from which you will learn the true
nature of the society we live in, and the
strategy by which we shall destroy it. When you
have read the book, you will be full members of
the Brotherhood. But between the general aims
that we are fighting for and the immediate tasks
of the moment, you will never know anything. I
tell you that the Brotherhood exists, but I
cannot tell you whether it numbers a hundred
members, or ten million. From your personal
knowledge you will never be able to say that it
numbers even as many as a dozen. You will
have three or four contacts, who will be
renewed from time to time as they disappear.
As this was your first contact, it will be
preserved. When you receive orders, they will
come from me. If we find it necessary to
communicate with you, it will be through Martin.
When you are finally caught, you will confess.
That is unavoidable. But you will have very little
to confess, other than your own actions. You will
not be able to betray more than a handful of
unimportant people. Probably you will not even
betray me. By that time I may be dead, or I
shall have become a different person, with a
different face.'
. . . O'Brien went on: 'You will have heard
rumours of the existence of the Brotherhood. No
doubt you have formed your own picture of it.
You have imagined, probably, a huge
underworld of conspirators, meeting secretly in
cellars, scribbling messages on walls,
recognizing one another by codewords or by
special movements of the hand. Nothing of the
kind exists. The members of the Brotherhood
have no way of recognizing one another, and it
is impossible for any one member to be aware
of the identity of more than a few others.
Goldstein himself, if he fell into the hands of the
Thought Police, could not give them a complete
list of members, or any information that would
lead them to a complete list. No such list exists.
The Brotherhood cannot be wiped out because
it is not an organization in the ordinary sense.
Nothing holds it together except an idea which
is indestructible. You will never have anything to
sustain you, except the idea. You will get no
comradeship and no encouragement. When
finally you are caught, you will get no help. We
never help our members. At most, when it is
absolutely necessary that someone should be
silenced, we are occasionally able to smuggle a
razor blade into a prisoner's cell. You will have
to get used to living without results and without
hope. You will work for a while, you will be
caught, you will confess, and then you will die.
Those are the only results that you will ever

4
see. There is no possibility that any perceptible
change will happen within our own lifetime. We
are the dead. Our only true life is in the future.
We shall take part in it as handfuls of dust and
splinters of bone. But how far away that future
may be, there is no knowing. It might be a
thousand years. At present nothing is possible
except to extend the area of sanity little by
little. We cannot act collectively. We can only
spread our knowledge outwards from individual
to individual, generation after generation. In the
face of the Thought Police there is no other
way.'
He halted and looked for the third time at his
wrist-watch.
'There are details to be settled,' he said. 'I
assume that you have a hiding-place of some
kind?'
Winston explained about the room over Mr
Charrington's shop.
'That will do for the moment. Later we will
arrange something else for you. It is important
to change one's hiding-place frequently.
Meanwhile I shall send you a copy of the book'
-- even O'Brien, Winston noticed, seemed to
pronounce the words as though they were in
italics -- 'Goldstein's book, you understand, as
soon as possible. It may be some days before I
can get hold of one. There are not many in
existence, as you can imagine. The Thought
Police hunt them down and destroy them
almost as fast as we can produce them. It
makes very little difference. The book is

indestructible. If the last copy were gone, we

could reproduce it almost word for word. Do you
carry a brief-case to work with you?' he added.
'As a rule, yes.'
'What is it like?'
'Black, very shabby. With two straps.'
'Black, two straps, very shabby -- good. One day
in the fairly near future -- I cannot give a date -one of the messages among your morning's
work will contain a misprinted word, and you
will have to ask for a repeat. On the following
day you will go to work without your brief-case.
At some time during the day, in the street, a
man will touch you on the arm and say "I think
you have dropped your brief-case." The one he
gives you will contain a copy of Goldstein's
book. You will return it within fourteen days.'
They were silent for a moment.
'There are a couple of minutes before you need
go,' said O'Brien. 'We shall meet again -- if we
do meet again -'
Winston looked up at him. 'In the place where
there is no darkness?' he said hesitantly.
OBrien nodded without appearance of surprise.
In the place where there is no darkness . . .