never made the smallest effort to verify this
guess: indeed, there was no way of doing so. At this moment O'Brien glanced
at his wrist-watch, saw that it was nearly eleven hundred, and evidently
decided to stay in the Records Department until the Two Minutes Hate was
over. He took a chair in the same row as Winston, a couple of places away.
A small, sandy-haired woman who worked in the next cubicle to Winston was
between them. The girl with dark hair was sitting immediately behind.
The next moment a hideous, grinding speech, as of some monstrous
machine running without oil, burst from the big telescreen at the end of
the room. It was a noise that set one's teeth on edge and bristled the hair
at the back of one's neck. The Hate had started.
As usual, the face of Emmanuel Goldstein, the Enemy of the People, had
flashed on to the screen. There were hisses here and there among the
audience. The little sandy-haired woman gave a squeak of mingled fear and
disgust. Goldstein was the renegade and backslider who once, long ago (how
long ago, nobody quite remembered), had been one of the leading figures of
the Party, almost on a level with Big Brother himself, and then had engaged
in counter-revolutionary activities, had been condemned to death, and had
mysteriously escaped and disappeared. The programmes of the Two Minutes
Hate varied from day to day, but there was none in which Goldstein was not
the principal figure. He was the primal traitor, the earliest defiler of
the Party's purity. All subsequent crimes against the Party, all
treacheries, acts of sabotage, heresies, deviations, sprang directly out of
his teaching. Somewhere or other he was still alive and hatching his
conspiracies: perhaps somewhere beyond the sea, under the protection of his
foreign paymasters, perhaps even -- so it was occ