1984. Книга для чтения на английском языке

“There’s another room upstairs that you might care to take a look at,” he said. “There’s not much in it. Just a few pieces. We’ll do with a light[68] if we’re going upstairs.”

He lit another lamp, and, with bowed back, led the way slowly up the steep and worn stairs and along a tiny passage, into a room which did not give on the street but looked out on a cobbled yard and a forest of chimneypots. Winston noticed that the furniture was still arranged as though the room were meant to be lived in. There was a strip of carpet on the floor, a picture or two on the walls, and a deep, slatternly arm-chair drawn up to the fireplace. An old-fashioned glass clock with a twelve-hour face was ticking away on the mantelpiece. Under the window, and occupying nearly a quarter of the room, was an enormous bed with the mattress still on it.

“We lived here till my wife died,” said the old man half apologetically. “I’m selling the furniture off by little and little. Now that’s a beautiful mahogany bed, or at least it would be if you could get the bugs out of it. But I dare say you’d find it a little bit cumbersome.”

He was holdlng the lamp high up, so as to illuminate the whole room, and in the warm dim light the place looked curiously inviting. The thought flitted through Winston’s mind that it would probably be quite easy to rent the room for a few dollars a week, if he dared to take the risk. It was a wild, impossible notion, to be abandoned as soon as thought of; but the room had awakened in him a sort of nostalgia, a sort of ancestral memory. It seemed to him that he knew exactly what it felt like to sit in a room like this, in an arm-chair beside an open fire with your feet in the fender and a kettle on the hob; utterly alone, utterly secure, with nobody watching you, no voice pursuing you, no sound except the singing of the kettle and the friendly ticking of the clock.

“There’s no telescreen!” he could not help murmuring.

“Ah,” said the old man, “I never had one of those things. Too expensive. And I never seemed to feel the need of it, somehow. Now that’s a nice gateleg table in the corner there. Though of course you’d have to put new hinges on it if you wanted to use the flaps.”

There was a small bookcase in the other corner, and Winston had already gravitated towards it. It contained nothing but rubbish. The hunting-down and destruction of books had been done with the same thoroughness in the prole quarters as everywhere else. It was very unlikely that there existed anywhere in Oceania a copy of a book printed earlier than 1960. The old man, still carrying the lamp, was standing in front of a picture in a rosewood frame which hung on the other side of the fireplace, opposite the bed.

“Now, if you happen to be interested in old prints at all —” he began delicately.

Winston came across to examine the picture. It was a steel engraving of an oval building with rectangular windows, and a small tower in front. There was a railing running round the building, and at the rear end there was what appeared to be a statue. Winston gazed at it for some moments. It seemed vaguely familiar, though he did not remember the statue.

“The frame’s fixed to the wall,” said the old man, “but I could unscrew it for you, I dare say.”

“I know that building,” said Winston finally. “It’s a ruin now. It’s in the middle of the street outside the Palace of Justice.”

“That’s right. Outside the Law Courts. It was bombed in – oh, many years ago. It was a church at one time, St. Clement’s Danes, its name was.” He smiled apologetically, as though conscious of saying something slightly ridiculous, and added: “Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St. Clement’s!”

“What’s that?” said Winston.

“Oh – ‘Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St. Clement’s.’ That was a rhyme we had when I was a little boy. How it goes on I don’t remember, but I do know it ended up, ‘Here comes a candle to light you to bed, Here comes a chopper to chop off your head.’ It was a kind of a dance. They held out their arms for you to pass under, and when they came to ‘Here comes a chopper to chop off your head’ they brought their arms down and caught you. It was just names of churches. All the London churches were in it – all the principal ones, that is.”