From: ohaya on
reverie. He was walking down the corridor, waiting for the bullet.
He knew that it was coming in another moment. Everything was settled,
smoothed out, reconciled. There were no more doubts, no more arguments, no
more pain, no more fear. His body was healthy and strong. He walked easily,
with a joy of movement and with a feeling of walking in sunlight. He was
not any longer in the narrow white corridors in the Ministry of Love, he
was in the enormous sunlit passage, a kilometre wide, down which he had
seemed to walk in the delirium induced by drugs. He was in the Golden
Country, following the foot-track across the old rabbit-cropped pasture. He
could feel the short springy turf under his feet and the gentle sunshine on
his face. At the edge of the field were the elm trees, faintly stirring,
and somewhere beyond that was the stream where the dace lay in the green
pools under the willows.
Suddenly he started up with a shock of horror. The sweat broke out on
his backbone. He had heard himself cry aloud:
'Julia! Julia! Julia, my love! Julia!'
For a moment he had had an overwhelming hallucination of her presence.
She had seemed to be not merely with him, but inside him. It was as though
she had got into the texture of his skin. In that moment he had loved her
far more than he had ever done when they were together and free. Also he
knew that somewhere or other she was still alive and needed his help.
He lay back on the bed and tried to compose himself. What had he done?
How many years had he added to his servitude by that moment of weakness?
In another moment he would hear the tramp of boots outside. They could
not let such an outburst go unpunished. They would know now, if they had
not known before, that he was breaking the agreement he had