The spasm passed. He put the white knight back in its
place, but for the moment he could not settle down to serious
study of the chess problem. His thoughts wandered again. Almost
unconsciously he traced with his finger in the dust on the
table: 2+2=
'They can't get inside you,' she had said. But they could
get inside you. 'What happens to you here is for ever,'
O'Brien had said. That was a true word. There were things, your
own acts, from which you could never recover. Something was
killed in your breast: burnt out, cauterized out.
He had seen her; he had even spoken to her. There was no
danger in it. He knew as though instinctively that they now
took almost no interest in his doings. He could have arranged
to meet her a second time if either of them had wanted to.
Actually it was by chance that they had met. It was in the
Park, on a vile, biting day in March, when the earth was like
iron and all the grass seemed dead and there was not a bud
anywhere except a few crocuses which had pushed themselves up
to be dismembered by the wind. He was hurrying along with
frozen hands and watering eyes when he saw her not ten metres
away from him. It struck him at once that she had changed in
some ill-defined way. They almost passed one another without a
sign, then he turned and followed her, not very eagerly. He
knew that there was no danger, nobody would take any interest
in him. She did not speak. She walked obliquely away across the
grass as though trying to get rid of him, then seemed to resign
herself to having him at her side. Presently they were in among
a clump of ragged leafless shrubs, useless either for
concealment or as protection from the wind. They halted. It was
vilely cold. The wind whistled through the twigs and fretted
the occasional, dirty-looking crocuses. He put his arm round
her waist.
There was no telescreen, but there must be hidden
microphones: besides, they could be seen. It did not matter,
nothing mattered. They could have lain down on the ground and
done that if they had wanted to. His flesh froze with
horror at the thought of it. She made no response whatever to
the clasp of his arm ; she did not even try to disengage
herself. He knew now what had changed in her. Her face was
sallower, and there was a long scar, partly hidden by the hair,
across her forehead and temple; but that was not the change. It
was that her waist had grown thicker, and, in a surprising way,
had stiffened. He remembered how once, after the explosion of a
rocket bomb, he had helped to drag a corpse out of some ruins,
and had been astonished not only by the incredible weight of
the thing, but by its rigidity and awkwardness to handle, which
made it seem more like stone than flesh. Her body felt like
that. It occurred to him that the texture of her skin would be
quite different from what it had once been.
He did not attempt to kiss her, nor did they speak. As
they walked back across the grass, she looked directly at him
for the first time. It was only a momentary glance, full of
contempt and dislike. He wondered whether it was a dislike that
came purely out of the past or whether it was inspired also by
his bloated face and the water that the wind kept squeezing
from his eyes. They sat down on two iron chairs, side by side
but not too close together. He saw that she was about to speak.
She moved her clumsy shoe a few centimetres and deliberately
crushed a twig. Her feet seemed to have grown broader, he
noticed.
'I betrayed you,' she said baldly.
'I betrayed you,' he said.
She gave him another quick look of dislike.
'Sometimes,' she said, 'they threaten you with something
something you can't stand up to, can't even think about. And
then you say, "Don't do it to me, do it to somebody else, do it
to So-and-so." And perhaps you might pretend, afterwards, that
it was only a trick and that you just said it to make them stop
and didn't really mean it. But that isn't true. At the time
when it happens you do mean it. You think there's no other way
of saving yourself, and you're quite ready to save yourself
that way. You want it to happen to the other person. You
don't give a damn what they suffer. All you care about is
yourself.'
'All you care about is yourself,' he echoed.
'And after that, you don't feel the same towards the other
person any longer.'
'No,' he said, 'you don't feel the same.'
There did not seem to be anything more to say. The wind
plastered their thin overalls against their bodies. Almost at
once it became embarrassing to sit there in silence: besides,
it was too cold to keep still. She said something about
catching her Tube and stood up to go.
'We must meet again,' he said.
'Yes,' she said, 'we must meet again. '
He followed irresolutely for a little distance, half a
pace behind her. They did not speak again. She did not actually
try to shake him off, but walked at just such a speed as to
prevent his keeping abreast of her. He had made up his mind
that he would accompany her as far as the Tube station, but
suddenly this process of trailing along in the cold seemed
pointless and unbearable. He was overwhelmed by a desire not so
much to get away from Julia as to get back to the Chestnut Tree
Cafe/, which had never seemed so attractive as at this moment.
He had a nostalgic vision of his corner table, with the
newspaper and the chessboard and the everflowing gin. Above
all, it would be warm in there. The next moment, not altogether
by accident, he allowed himself to become separated from her by
a small knot of people. He made a halfhearted attempt to catch
up, then slowed down, turned, and made off in the opposite
direction. When he had gone fifty metres he looked back. The
street was not crowded, but already he could not distinguish
her. Any one of a dozen hurrying figures might have been hers.
Perhaps her thickened, stiffened body was no longer
recognizable from behind.
'At the time when it happens,' she had said, 'you do mean
it.' He had meant it. He had not merely said it, he had wished
it. He had wished that she and not he should be delivered over
to the-
Something changed in the music that trickled from the
telescreen. A cracked and jeering note, a yellow note, came
into it. And then -- perhaps it was not happening, perhaps it
was only a memory taking on the semblance of sound -- a voice
was singing:
'Under the spreading chestnut tree
I sold you and you sold me '
The tears welled up in his eyes. A passing waiter noticed
that his glass was empty and came back with the gin bottle.
He took up his glass and sniffed at it. The stuff grew not
less but more horrible with every mouthful he drank. But it had
become the element he swam in. It was his life, his death, and
his resurrection. It was gin that sank him into stupor every
night, and gin that revived him every morning. When he woke,
seldom before eleven hundred, with gummed-up eyelids and fiery
mouth and a back that seemed to be broken, it would have been
impossible even to rise from the horizontal if it had not been
for the bottle and teacup placed beside the bed overnight.
Through the midday hours he sat with glazed face, the bottle
handy, listening to the telescreen. From fifteen to
closing-time he was a fixture in the Chestnut Tree. No one
cared what he did any longer, no whistle woke him, no
telescreen admonished him. Occasionally, perhaps twice a week,
he went to a dusty, forgotten-looking office in the Ministry of
Truth and did a little work, or what was called work. He had
been appointed to a sub-committee of a sub-committee which had
sprouted from one of the innumerable committees dealing with
minor difficulties that arose in the compilation of the
Eleventh Edition of the Newspeak Dictionary. They were engaged
in producing something called an Interim Report, but what it
was that they were reporting on he had never definitely found
out. It was something to do with the question of whether commas
should be placed inside brackets, or outside. There were four
others on the committee, all of them persons similar to
himself. There were days when they assembled and then promptly
dispersed again, frankly admitting to one another that there
was not really anything to be done. But there were other days
when they settled down to their work almost eagerly, making a
tremendous show of entering up their minutes and drafting long
memoranda which were never finished -- when the argument as to
what they were supposedly arguing about grew extraordinarily
involved and abstruse, with subtle haggling over definitions,
enormous digressions, quarrels threats, even, to appeal to
higher authority. And then suddenly the life would go out of
them and they would sit round the table looking at one another
with extinct eyes, like ghosts fading at cock-crow.
The telescreen was silent for a moment. Winston raised his
head again. The bulletin! But no, they were merely changing the
music. He had the map of Africa behind his eyelids. The
movement of the armies was a diagram: a black arrow tearing
vertically southward, and a white arrow horizontally eastward,
across the tail of the first. As though for reassurance he
looked up at the imperturbable face in the portrait. Was it
conceivable that the second arrow did not even exist?
His interest flagged again. He drank another mouthful of
gin, picked up the white knight and made a tentative move.
Check. But it was evidently not the right move, because
Uncalled, a memory floated into his mind. He saw a
candle-lit room with a vast white-counterpaned bed, and
himself, a boy of nine or ten, sitting on the floor, shaking a
dice-box, and laughing excitedly. His mother was sitting
opposite him and also laughing.
It must have been about a month before she disappeared. It
was a moment of reconciliation, when the nagging hunger in his
belly was forgotten and his earlier affection for her had
temporarily revived. He remembered the day well, a pelting,
drenching day when the water streamed down the window-pane and
the light indoors was too dull to read by. The boredom of the
two children in the dark, cramped bedroom became unbearable.
Winston whined and grizzled, made futile demands for food,
fretted about the room pulling everything out of place and
kicking the wainscoting until the neighbours banged on the
wall, while the younger child wailed intermittently. In the end
his mother said, 'Now be good, and I'Il buy you a toy. A lovely
toy -- you'll love it'; and then she had gone out in the rain,
to a little general shop which was still sporadically open
nearby, and came back with a cardboard box containing an outfit
of Snakes and Ladders. He could still remember the smell of the
damp cardboard. It was a miserable outfit. The board was
cracked and the tiny wooden dice were so ill-cut that they
would hardly lie on their sides. Winston looked at the thing
sulkily and without interest. But then his mother lit a piece
of candle and they sat down on the floor to play. Soon he was
wildly excited and shouting with laughter as the tiddly-winks
climbed hopefully up the ladders and then came slithering down
the snakes again, almost to the starting- point. They played
eight games, winning four each. His tiny sister, too young to
understand what the game was about, had sat propped up against
a bolster, laughing because the others were laughing. For a
whole afternoon they had all been happy together, as in his
earlier childhood.
He pushed the picture out of his mind. It was a false
memory. He was troubled by false memories occasionally. They
did not matter so long as one knew them for what they were.
Some things had happened, others had not happened. He turned
back to the chessboard and picked up the white knight again.
Almost in the same instant it dropped on to the board with a
clatter. He had started as though a pin had run into him.
A shrill trumpet-call had pierced the air. It was the
bulletin! Victory! It always meant victory when a trumpet- call
preceded the news. A sort of electric drill ran through the
cafe/. Even the waiters had started and pricked up their ears.
The trumpet-call had let loose an enormous volume of
noise. Already an excited voice was gabbling from the
telescreen, but even as it started it was almost drowned by a
roar of cheering from outside. The news had run round the
streets like magic. He could hear just enough of what was
issuing from the telescreen to realize that it had all
happened, as he had foreseen; a vast seaborne armada had
secretly assembled a sudden blow in the enemy's rear, the white
arrow tearing across the tail of the black. Fragments of
triumphant phrases pushed themselves through the din: 'Vast
strategic manoeuvre -- perfect co-ordination -- utter rout --
half a million prisoners -- complete demoralization -- control
of the whole of Africa -- bring the war within measurable
distance of its end victory -- greatest victory in human
history -- victory, victory, victory !'
Under the table Winston's feet made convulsive movements.
He had not stirred from his seat, but in his mind he was
running, swiftly running, he was with the crowds outside,
cheering himself deaf. He looked up again at the portrait of
Big Brother. The colossus that bestrode the world ! The rock
against which the hordes of Asia dashed themselves in vain ! He
thought how ten minutes ago-yes, only ten minutes -- there had
still been equivocation in his heart as he wondered whether the
news from the front would be of victory or defeat. Ah, it was
more than a Eurasian army that had perished! Much had changed
in him since that first day in the Ministry of Love, but the
final, indispensable, healing change had never happened, until
this moment.
The voice from the telescreen was still pouring forth its
tale of prisoners and booty and slaughter, but the shouting
outside had died down a little. The waiters were turning back
to their work. One of them approached with the gin bottle.
Winston, sitting in a blissful dream, paid no attention as his
glass was filled up. He was not running or cheering any longer.
He was back in the Ministry of Love, with everything forgiven,
his soul white as snow. He was in the public dock, confessing
everything, implicating everybody. He was walking down the
white-tiled corridor, with the feeling of walking in sunlight,
and an armed guard at his back. The longhoped-for bullet was
entering his brain.
He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken
him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark
moustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn,
self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears
trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right,
everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won
the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.
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