George Orwell's 1984 -- Chapter 23
Chapter 23
The Chestnut Tree
was almost empty. A ray of sunlight slanting through a window fell on dusty
table-tops. It was the lonely hour of fifteen. A tinny music trickled from the
telescreens.
Winston
sat in his usual corner, gazing into an empty glass. Now and again he glanced
up at a vast face which eyed him from the opposite wall. BIG BROTHER IS
WATCHING YOU, the caption said. Unbidden, a waiter came and filled his glass up
with Victory Gin, shaking into it a few drops from another bottle with a quill
through the cork. It was saccharine flavoured with cloves, the speciality of
the cafe.
Winston
was listening to the telescreen. At present only music was coming out of it,
but there was a possibility that at any moment there might be a special
bulletin from the Ministry of Peace. The news from the African front was
disquieting in the extreme. On and off he had been worrying about it all day. A
Eurasian army (Oceania was at war with Eurasia: Oceania had always been at war
with Eurasia) was moving southward at terrifying speed. The mid-day bulletin
had not mentioned any definite area, but it was probable that already the mouth
of the Congo was a battlefield. Brazzaville and Leopoldville were in danger.
One did not have to look at the map to see what it meant. It was not merely a
question of losing Central Africa: for the first time in the whole war, the
territory of Oceania itself was menaced.
A
violent emotion, not fear exactly but a sort of undifferentiated excitement,
flared up in him, then faded again. He stopped thinking about the war. In these
days he could never fix his mind on any one subject for more than a few moments
at a time. He picked up his glass and drained it at a gulp. As always, the gin
made him shudder and even retch slightly. The stuff was horrible. The cloves
and saccharine, themselves disgusting enough in their sickly way, could not
disguise the flat oily smell; and what was worst of all was that the smell of
gin, which dwelt with him night and day, was inextricably mixed up in his mind
with the smell of those-
He
never named them, even in his thoughts, and so far as it was possible he never
visualized them. They were something that he was half-aware of, hovering close
to his face, a smell that clung to his nostrils. As the gin rose in him he
belched through purple lips. He had grown fatter since they released him, and
had regained his old colour — indeed, more than regained it. His features had
thickened, the skin on nose and cheekbones was coarsely red, even the bald
scalp was too deep a pink. A waiter, again unbidden, brought the chessboard and
the current issue of The Times, with the page turned down at the chess problem.
Then, seeing that
Winston's glass was empty, he brought the gin bottle and filled it. There was
no need to give orders. They knew his habits. The chessboard was always waiting
for him, his corner table was always reserved; even when the place was full he
had it to himself, since nobody cared to be seen sitting too close to him. He
never even bothered to count his drinks. At irregular intervals they presented
him with a dirty slip of paper which they said was the bill, but he had the
impression that they always undercharged him. It would have made no difference
if it had been the other way about. He had always plenty of money nowadays. He
even had a job, a sinecure, more highly-paid than his old job had been.
The
music from the telescreen stopped and a voice took over. Winston raised his
head to listen. No bulletins from the front, however. It was merely a brief
announcement from the Ministry of Plenty. In the preceding quarter, it
appeared, the Tenth Three-Year Plan's quota for bootlaces had been
overfulfilled by 98 per cent.
He
examined the chess problem and set out the pieces. It was a tricky ending,
involving a couple of knights. 'White to play and mate in two moves.' Winston
looked up at the portrait of Big Brother. White always mates, he thought with a
sort of cloudy mysticism. Always, without exception, it is so arranged. In no
chess problem since the beginning of the world has black ever won. Did it not
symbolize the eternal, unvarying triumph of Good over Evil? The huge face gazed
back at him, full of calm power. White always mates.
The
voice from the telescreen paused and added in a different and much graver tone:
'You are warned to stand by for an important announcement at fifteen-thirty.
Fifteen-thirty! This is news of the highest importance. Take care not to miss
it. Fifteen-thirty!' The tinking music struck up again.
Winston's
heart stirred. That was the bulletin from the front; instinct told him that it
was bad news that was coming. All day, with little spurts of excitement, the
thought of a smashing defeat in Africa had been in and out of his mind. He
seemed actually to see the Eurasian army swarming across the never- broken
frontier and pouring down into the tip of Africa like a column of ants. Why had
it not been possible to outflank them in some way? The outline of the West African
coast stood out vividly in his mind. He picked up the white knight and moved it
across the board. There was the proper spot. Even while he saw the black horde
racing southward he saw another force, mysteriously assembled, suddenly planted
in their rear, cutting their comunications by land and sea. He felt that by
willing it he was bringing that other force into existence. But it was
necessary to act quickly. If they could get control of the whole of Africa, if
they had airfields and submarine bases at the Cape, it would cut Oceania in
two. It might mean anything: defeat, breakdown, the redivision of the world,
the destruction of the Party! He drew a deep breath. An extraordinary medley of
feeling-but it was not a medley, exactly; rather it was successive layers of
feeling, in which one could not say which layer was undermost struggled inside
him.
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 ever-flowing 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 subcommittee 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 coordination —
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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