to make faces at the
telescreen or shout curses at the top of his voice. Now that they had a
secure hiding-place, almost a home, it did not even seem a hardship that
they could only meet infrequently and for a couple of hours at a time. What
mattered was that the room over the junk-shop should exist. To know that it
was there, inviolate, was almost the same as being in it. The room was a
world, a pocket of the past where extinct animals could walk. Mr.
Charrington, thought Winston, was another extinct animal. He usually
stopped to talk with Mr. Charrington for a few minutes on his way upstairs.
The old man seemed seldom or never to go out of doors, and on the other
hand to have almost no customers. He led a ghostlike existence between the
tiny, dark shop, and an even tinier back kitchen where he prepared his
meals and which contained, among other things, an unbelievably ancient
gramophone with an enormous horn. He seemed glad of the opportunity to
talk. Wandering about among his worthless stock, with his long nose and
thick spectacles and his bowed shoulders in the velvet jacket, he had
always vaguely the air of being a collector rather than a tradesman. With a
sort of faded enthusiasm he would finger this scrap of rubbish or that -- a
china bottle-stopper, the painted lid of a broken snuffbox, a pinchbeck
locket containing a strand of some long-dead baby's hair -- never asking
that Winston should buy it, merely that he should admire it. To talk to him
was like listening to the tinkling of a worn-out musical-box. He had
dragged out from the corners of his memory some more fragments of forgotten
rhymes. There was one about four and twenty blackbirds, and another about a
cow with a crumpled horn, and another about the dea