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. Then he pulled the speakwrite
towards him and rapped out a message in the hybrid jargon of the
Ministries:
'Items one comma five comma seven approved fullwise stop suggestion
contained item six doubleplus ridiculous verg