CHAPTER 6

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. Fifteenthirty!’ The tinkling 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 communications 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=5
‘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-andso.” 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 half-hearted 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 cockcrow.
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’ll
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, selfwilled 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.