had done was to persuade you that
mere impulses, mere feelings, were of no account, while at the same time
robbing you of all power over the material world. When once you were in the
grip of the Party, what you felt or did not feel, what you did or refrained
from doing, made literally no difference. Whatever happened you vanished,
and neither you nor your actions were ever heard of again. You were lifted
clean out of the stream of history. And yet to the people of only two
generations ago this would not have seemed all-important, because they were
not attempting to alter history. They were governed by private loyalties
which they did not question. What mattered were individual relationships,
and a completely helpless gesture, an embrace, a tear, a word spoken to a
dying man, could have value in itself. The proles, it suddenly occurred to
him, had remained in this condition. They were notloyal to a party or a
country or an idea, they were loyal to one another. For the first time in
his life he did not despise the proles or think of them merely as an inert
force which would one day spring to life and regenerate the world. The
proles had stayed human. They had not become hardened inside. They had held
on to the primitive emotions which he himself had to re-learn by conscious
effort. And in thinking this he remembered, without apparent relevance, how
a few weeks ago he had seen a severed hand lying on the pavement and had
kicked it into the gutter as though it had been a cabbage-stalk.
'The proles are human beings,' he said aloud. 'We are not human.'
'Why not?' said Julia, who had woken up again.
He thought for a little while. 'Has it ever occurred to you,' he said,
'that the best thing for us to do would be simply to walk out of here
before it's too late, and never see each other again?'
'Yes, dear, it has occurred to me, several times. But I'm not going to
do it, all the same.'