been an even more
incongruous possession than the glass paperweight, and impossible to carry
home, unless it were taken out of its frame. But he lingered for some
minutes more, talking to the old man, whose name, he discovered, was not
Weeks -- as one might have gathered from the inscription over the shop-
front -- but Charrington. Mr. Charrington, it seemed, was a widower aged
sixty-three and had inhabited this shop for thirty years. Throughout that
time he had been intending to alter the name over the window, but had never
quite got to the point of doing it. All the while that they were talking
the half-remembered rhyme kept running through Winston's head. Oranges and
lemons say the bells of St. Clement's, You owe me three farthings, say the
bells of St. Martin's! It was curious, but when you said it to yourself you
had the illusion of actually hearing bells, the bells of a lost London that
still existed somewhere or other, disguised and forgotten. From one ghostly
steeple after another he seemed to hear them pealing forth. Yet so far as
he could remember he had never in real life heard church bells ringing.
He got away from Mr. Charrington and went down the stairs alone, so as
not to let the old man see him reconnoitring the street before stepping out
of the door. He had already made up his mind that after a suitable interval
-- a month, say -- he would take the risk of visiting the shop again. It
was perhaps not more dangerous than shirking an evening at the Centre. The
serious piece of folly had been to come back here in the first place, after
buying the diary and without knowing whether the proprietor of the shop
could be trusted. However--!
Yes, he thought again, he would come back. He would buy further scraps
of beautiful rubbish. He would buy the engraving of St. Clement's Danes,
take it out of its frame, and carry it home concealed under the jacket of
his overalls. He would drag the rest of that poem out of M