[Music] He was much better. He was growing fatter and stronger every day if he was proper to speak of days. The white light and the humming sound were the same as ever, but the cell was a little more comfortable than the others he had been in. There was a pillow and a mattress on the plank bed and a stool to sit on. They had given him a bath and they allowed him to wash himself fairly frequently in a tin basin. They even gave him warm water to wash with. They had given him new underclothes and a clean suit of overalls. They had dressed his very close ulcer with soothing ointment. They had pulled out the remnants of his teeth and given him a new set of dentures. Weeks or months must have passed. It would have been possible now to keep count of the passage of time if he had felt any interest in doing so. Since he was being fed at what appeared to be regular intervals, he was getting, he judged, three meals in the 24 hours. Sometimes he wondered dimly whether he was getting them by night or by day. The food was surprisingly good with meat and every third meal. Once there was even a packet of cigarettes, he had no matches, but the nearest speaking guard who brought his food would give him a light. The first time he tried to smoke it made him sick, but he persevered and spun the packet out for a long time, smoking half a cigarette after each meal. They had given him a white slate with a stump of pencil tied to the corner. At first he made no use of it. Even when he was awake he was completely torqued. Often he would lie from one meal to the next, almost without stirring, sometimes asleep, sometimes waking into vague reveries in which it was too much trouble to open his eyes. He had long grown used to sleeping with a strong light on his face. It seemed to make no difference, except that one's dreams were more coherent. He dreamed a great deal all through this time, and they were always happy dreams. He was in a golden country, or he was sitting among enormous glorious sunlit ruins with his mother, with Julia, with O'Brien, not doing anything, merely sitting in the sun, talking of peaceful things. Such thoughts, as he had when he was awake, were mostly about his dreams. He seemed to have lost the power of intellectual effort, now that the stimulus of pain had been removed. He was not bored, he had no desire for conversation or distraction, merely to be alone, not to be beaten or questioned, to have enough to eat, and to be clean or over, was completely satisfying. By degrees he came to spend less time in sleep, but he still felt no impulse to get off the bed. All he cared for was to lie quiet and feel the strength gathering in his body. He would finger himself here and there, trying to make sure that it was not an illusion that his muscles were growing rounder and his skin taught him. Finally, it was established beyond a doubt that he was growing fatter. His thighs were now definitely thicker than his knees. After that, reluctantly at first, he began exercising himself regularly. In a little while he could walk three kilometers measured by pacing his cell and his both shoulders were growing straighter. He attempted more elaborate exercises and was astonished and humiliated to find what things he could not do. He could not move out of a walk. He could not move out of a walk. He could not hold his do-loud at arm's length. He could not stand on one leg without falling over. He spotted down on his heels and found that with agonizing pains in thigh and calf he could just lift himself to a standing position. He lay flat on his belly and tried to lift his weight by his hands. It was hopeless. He could not raise himself a centimeter, but after a few more days, a few more meal times, even that feet was accomplished. A time came when he could do it six times running. He began to grow actually proud of his body and to cherish and intermittent believe that his face also was growing back to normal only when he challenged to put his hand on his both scalp that he remembered the seemed ruined face that had looked back at him out of the mirror. His mind grew more active. He sat down on the plank bed, his back against the wall and the slate on his knees and set to work deliberately at the task of re-educating himself. He had capitulated. That was agreed. In reality, as he saw now, he had been ready to capitulate long before he had taken the decision. From the moment when he was inside the Ministry of Love and yes, even during those minutes when he and Julian had stood helpless while the iron foies from the telescreen told them what to do, he had grabbed the frivolity, the shallowness of his attempt to set himself up against the power of the party. He knew now that for seven years the thought police had watched him like beetle under a magnifying glass. There was no physical act, no words spoken aloud, that they had not noticed, no trainer thought that they had not been able to infer. Even the speck of whitish dust on the cover of his diary they had carefully replaced. They had played sound tracks to him, shunting photographs, some of them were photographs of Julian himself. Yes, even. He could not fight against the party any longer. Besides, the party was in the right. It must be so. How could the immortal, collective brain be mistaken? By what external standard could you check its judgments? Sanity was statistically. It was merely a question of learning the thing as they thought. Only. The pencil felt thick and awkward in his fingers. He began to write down the thoughts that came to his head. He wrote first in large clumsy capitals. Freedom is slavery. Then almost without reports he wrote beneath it. Two and two make five. But then there came a sort of check. His mind as though shying away from something seemed unable to concentrate. He knew that he knew what came next, but for the moment he could not recall it. When he did recall it, it was only by consciously reasoning out what it must be. It did not come of his own accord. He wrote, "God is power." He accepted everything. The past was alterable. The past never had been altered. Oceania was at war with East Asia. Oceania had always been at war with East Asia. Jones, Aronson and Rutherford were guilty of the crimes they were charged with. He had never seen a photograph that disproved their guilt. It had never existed. He had invented it. He remembered remembering contrary things, but those were false memories, products of self-deception. How easy it all was. Only surrender, and everything else followed. It was like swimming against a current that swept you backwards, however hard you struggle, and then suddenly deciding to turn round and go with the current instead of opposing it. Nothing had changed except your own attitude. The predestined thing happened in any case. He hardly knew why he had ever rebelled. Everything was easy. Except, anything could be true. The so-called laws of nature were nonsense. The law of gravity was nonsense. If I wished, O'Brien had said, "I could float off this floor like a soap bubble." Winston worked it out. If he thinks he floats off the floor, and if I simultaneously think I see him do it, then the thing happens. Suddenly, like a lump of submerged wreckage breaking the service of water, the thought burst into his mind. It doesn't really happen. We imagine it. It is hallucination. He pushed the thought under instantly. The fallacy was obvious. It presupposed that somewhere or other, outside oneself, there was a real world where real things happened. But how could there be such a world? What knowledge have we of anything, say through our own minds? All happenings are in the mind. Whatever happens in all minds, surely happens. He had no difficulty in disposing of the fallacy, and he was in no danger of succumbing to it. He realized, nevertheless, that it ought never to have occurred to him. The mind should develop a blind spot whenever a dangerous thought presented itself. The process should be automatic, instinctive. Crime stop, they called it newspeak. He said to work to exercise himself in crime stop. He presented himself with propositions. The party says the earth is flat. The party says that ice is heavier than water, and trained himself in not seeing or not understanding the argument, the step contradicted them. It was not easy. It needed great powers of reasoning and improvisation. The aromatical problems raised, for instance, for such a statement as two and two make five, were beyond his intellectual grasp. It needed also a sort of athletic system of mind, and ability at one moment to make the most delicate use of logic and at next to be unconscious of the true dislogical errors. Stability was as necessary as intelligence, and as difficult to attain. All the while, with one part of his mind, he wondered how soon they would shoot him. Everything depends on yourself, or Brian had said, but he knew that there was no conscious act by which he could bring it nearer. It might be ten minutes hence, or ten years. They might keep him for years in solitary confinement. They might send him to a labor camp. They might release him for a while, as they sometimes did. It was perfectly possible that before he was shot the whole drama of his arrest and interrogation would be enacted all over again. The one certain thing was that death never came at an expected moment. The tradition, the unspoken tradition, somehow you knew it, though you never heard it said, was that they shot you from behind, always in the back of the bed, without warning, as you walked down a corridor from cell to cell. One day, but one day was not the right expression. Just as probably it was in the middle of the night. Once, he fell into a strange blissful memory. He was walking down a corridor waiting for the boot. He knew that it was coming in another moment. Everything was settled, smoothed out, reconciled. There were no more doubts, no more arguments, no more pain, no more fear. His body was healthy and strong. He walked easily, with a joy of movement and with a feeling of walking in sunlight. He was not any longer in the narrow white corridors in the Ministry of Love. He was in the enormous sunlit passage, a kilometer wide, down which he had seemed to walk in the delirium induced by drugs. He was in the golden country following the foot track across the old rabbit crop pasture. He could feel the short springy turf under his feet and the gentle sunshine on his face. At the edge of the field were the antries, faintly staring, and somewhere beyond that was the stream where the days lay in the green pools under the windows. Suddenly he started up with a shock of horror. The sweat broke out on his backbone. He had hurt himself cry aloud. "Julia, Julia, Julia my love, Julia." For a moment he had had an overwhelming hallucination of a presence. She had seemed to be not merely with him, but inside him. He was as though she had got into the texture of his skin. In that moment he had loved her far more than he had ever done when they were together and free. Also he knew that somewhere or another she was still alive and needed his help. He laid back on the bed and tried to compose himself. What had he done? How many years had he added to his servitude by that moment of weakness? In another moment he would hear the tramp of boots outside. They could not let such an outburst go unpunished. They would know now, if they had not known before, that he was breaking the agreement he had made with them. He obeyed a party, but he still hated the party. In the old days he had hidden a hertical mind beneath an appearance of conformity. Now he had retreated a step further. In the mind he had surrendered, but he had hoped to keep the inner heart and violate. He knew that he was in the wrong, but he preferred to be in the wrong. They would understand that O'Brien would understand it. It was all confessed in that single foolish crime. He would have to start all over again. It might take years. He ran the hand over his face, trying to familiarize himself with the new shape. There were deep furrows in the cheeks. The cheekbones felt sharp, the nose flattened. Besides, since last seeing himself in the glass he had been given a complete new set of teeth, it was not easy to preserve inscrutability when you did not know what your face looked like. In any case, many control of the features were not enough. For the first time he perceived that if you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself. You must know all the while that it is there, but until it is needed you must never let it emerge into your consciousness in any shape that could be given the name. From now onwards he must not only think right, he must feel right, dream right, and all the while he must keep his hatred locked up inside him like a ball of matter which was part of himself and yet unconnected with the rest of him, a kind of cyst. One day they would decide to shoot him. You could not tell when it would happen, but a few seconds beforehand it should be possible to guess. It was always from behind walking down a corridor. Ten seconds would be enough. In that time the well inside him could turn over, and then suddenly without a word uttered, without a check in his step, without the changing of a line in his face, suddenly the camouflage would be down and back. We'd go the batteries of his hatred. Hatred would fill him like an enormous roaring flame, and almost in the same instant bang would go the bullet too late or too early. They would have blown his brain to pieces before they could reclaim it. The heretical thought would be unpunished, unrepented, out of their reach forever. They would have blown a whole in their own perfection to die hating them. That was freedom. He shut his eyes. It was more difficult than accepting an intellectual discipline. It was a question of degrading himself, mutilating himself. He had got to plunge into the filthiest of filth. What was the most horrible, sickening thing of all? He thought of Big Brother, the enormous face with its heavy black massage and the eyes that followed you to and fro seemed to float into his mind of his own accord. What were his true feelings towards Big Brother? There was a heavy tram of boots in the passage. The steel door swung open with a claim. O'Brien walked into the cell. Behind him were the waxing-faced officer and the black uniform guards. "Get up!" said O'Brien. "Coming!" Winston stood opposite him. O'Brien took Winston's shoulders between his strong hands and looked at him closely. "You have had thoughts of deceiving me," he said. "That was stupid. Stand up straight. Look me in the face." He paused and went on in a gentle tone. "You are intruding. Intellectually, there is very little wrong with you. It is only emotionally that you have failed to make progress. Tell me, Winston, and remember, no lies. You know that I'm always able to detect a lie. Tell me, what are your true feelings towards Big Brother? I hate him. You hate him. Good. Then the time has come for you to take the last thing. You must love, Big Brother. It is not enough to obey him. You must love him." He released Winston with a little push towards the guards. "Room 101," he said. 1984 by George Orwell. Part 3, Chapter 5. At each stage of his imprisonment he had known, or seemed to know, whereabouts he was in the windowless building. Possibly there were slight differences in the air pressure. The cells where the guards had beaten him were below ground level. The room where he had been interrogated by Orion was high up near the room. This place was many meters on the ground and steeped down as it was possible to go. It was bigger than most of the cells he had been in, but he hardly noticed his surroundings. All he noticed was that there were two small tables straight in front of him, each covered with green base. One was only a meter or two from him. The other was further away, near the door. He was strapped upright in the chair, so tightly that he could move nothing, not even his head. A sort of pad gripped his head from behind, forcing him to look straight in front of him. For a moment he was alone. Then the door opened and Orion came in. "You asked me once," said Orion. "What was in room 101? I told you that you knew the answer already. Everyone knows it. The thing that is in room 101 is the worst thing in the world." The door opened again. The guard came in, carrying something made of wire, a box, or basket of some type. He set it down on a further table. Because of the position in which Orion was standing, Winston could not see what the thing was. The worst thing in the world, said Orion, varies from individual to individual. It may be burial alive, or death by fire, or by drowning, or by impalement, or 50 other deaths. There are cases where it is some quite trivial thing, not even fatal. He had moved a little to one side, so that Winston had a better view of the thing on the table. It was an up-long wire cage with a handle on top for carrying it by. Fixed to the front of it was something that looked like a fencing mask, with the concave side outwards. Although it was three or four meters away from him, he could see that the cage was divided lengthways into two compartments, and that there was some kind of creature in each. They were rats. "In your case," said Orion, "the worst thing in the world happens to be rats." A sort of for monetary tremor, a fear of he was not certain what, had passed through Winston as soon as he caught his first glimpse of the cage. But at this moment the meaning of the mask-like attachment in front of it suddenly sang to him. His bow seemed to turn to water. You can't do that. He cried out in a high cracked voice. "You couldn't. You couldn't. It's impossible." "Do you remember," said Orion, "the moment of panic that used to occur in your dreams. There was a wall of blackness in front of you, and a roaring sound in your ears. There was something terrible on the other side of the wall. You knew that you knew what it was, but you dare not drag it into the open. It was the rats that were on the other side of the wall." "O'Brien," said Winston, making an effort to control his voice, "you know this is not necessary. What is it that you want me to do?" O'Brien made no direct answer. When he spoke it was in a schoolmaster-ish manner that he sometimes affected, he looked thoughtfully into the distance, as though he were dressing in an audience somewhere behind Winston's back. "By itself," he said, "pain is not always enough. There are occasions when a human being will stand up against pain, even to the point of death. But for everyone there is something unendurable, something that cannot be contemplated. Courage and cowardice are not involved. If you are falling from a height, it is not cowardly to clutch in a rope. If you have come up from deep water, it is not cowardly to fill your lungs with air. It is mainly an instant which cannot be destroyed. It is the same with the rats. For you, they are unendurable. They are a form of pressure that you cannot withstand. Even if you wish to, you will do what is required of you. "But what is it? What is it? How can I do it if I don't know what it is?" O'Brien picked up the cage and brought it across to the near table. He set it down carefully on the base cloth. Winston could hear the blood singing in his ears. He had the feeling of sitting in utter lungs. He was in the middle of a great empty plane, a flat desert drenched with sunlight, across which all sounds came to them out of immense distances. Yet the cage with the rats was not two meters away from it. They were enormous ones. They were at the age when the rats' muscle grows blood and fears in his fur brown instead of brain. The rat, said O'Brien, still addressing his invisible audience. Although a road dance is kind of for us. You are aware of that. You will have heard of the things that happened in the pork waters of his town. In some streets, a woman dare not leave her baby alone in house, even for five minutes. The rats are certain to attack it. Within quite a small time, they will strip it to the bones. They also attack sick or dying people. They show astonishing intelligence in knowing when a human being has helped us. There was an outburst of squeals from the cage. It seemed to reach Winston from far away. The rats were fighting. They were trying to get at each other through the partition. He heard also a deep rome of despair. That too seemed to come from outside himself. O'Brien picked up the cage, and as he did so, pressed something in it. There was a sharp click. Winston made a frantic effort to tear himself loose from the chair. It was hopeless. Every part of him, even his head, was held immovable. O'Brien moved the cage near me. It was less than a meter from Winston's face. "I have pressed the first lever," said O'Brien. "You understand the construction of this cage. The mask will fit over your head, leaving no exit. When I pressed this other lever, the door of the cage was slide up. These starving droughts will shoot out of it like bullets. Have you ever seen a rat leap through the air? They would leap onto your face and bore straight into it. Sometimes they attacked the eyes first. Sometimes they borrowed through the cheeks and devoured the tongue. The cage was nearer. It was closing in. Winston heard a secession of shrill cries which appeared to be occurring in the air above his head. But he fought furiously against his panic. To think, to think, even with a split second left, to think was the only hope. Suddenly the foul musty odor of the brute struck his nostrils. There was a violent confulsion of nausea inside him, and he almost lost consciousness. Everything had gone blank. For an instant he was insane, a screaming animal. Yet he came out of the blackness, clutching an idea. There was one and only one way to save himself. He must interpose another human being, the body of another human being, between himself and the rats. The circle of the mass was large enough now to shut out the fission of anything else. The wire door was a couple of hand spans from his face. The rats knew what was coming now. One of them was leaping up and down. The other, an old, scaly grandfather of the sewers, stood up with his pink hands against the bars and fiercely snipped the air. Winston could see the whiskers and the yellow teeth. Again, the black panic took hold of him. He was blind, helpless, mindless. It was a common punishment in Imperial China, settled Brian, and stylatically, as ever. The mass was closing on his face. The wire brushed his cheek, and then, now, it was not relieved. Only hope or a tiny fact would occur too late. Perhaps too late. But he had suddenly understood that in the whole world there was just one person to be able to transfer his punishment. One body, then, he would thrust between himself and the rats, and he would shout in front of it, over and over. Do it to Julia, do it to Julia, not me, Julia. I don't care what you do to her, tear her face off, strip her to the bounds, not me, Julia, not me. He was falling backwards into enormous depths away from the woods. He was still strapped in the chair, but he had fallen through the floor, through the walls of the building, through the earth, through the oceans, through the atmosphere, into outer space, into the gals between the stars, always away away from the woods. He was slightly as distant, but O'Brien was still standing at his side. There was still the coat touch of wire against his cheek, but through the darkness that enveloped him, he heard another metallic click, and noon at the cage door, a click shut and not open. "Didactically, Vidactically, ever, in a way that is intended to teach, especially in a way that is fixed and unwilling to change." The Chestnut Tree was almost empty. A ray of sunlight slanting through the window fell on dusty table tops. It was the lonely hour of fifteen, the tinny music trickled from the tennis-weets. Winston sat in his usual corner, gazing into an empty glass. Now and again he glanced up at a fast phase which eyed him from the opposite wall. "Big Brother is watching," the caption said. Unbidden, a waiter came and filled this 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 the specialty of the café. Winston was listening to the telescope, 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 on he had been worrying about it all day. A Eurasian army was moving southward at terrifying speed. The midday bulletin had not mentioned any definite area, but it was probable that already the mount of the Congo was a battlefield. Brazibil and Leopold film were in danger. One did not have to look at the map to see what it meant. It was not immediate question of losing central Africa. For the first time in the whole war, the territory of Oceania itself was commenced. A violent emotion, not fair 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 go. As always, a gin made him shudder and even wretch slightly. The stuff was horrible. The clothes 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 dealt 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 visualised 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 bowed 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 bold scalp was too deep a pain. 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 the strings. At irregular intervals they presented him with a dirty strip 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 cinecure, more highly paid than his old job had been. The music from the telescope stopped, and the voice took over. Winston raised his head to listen. No pollutants from the front, however. It was merely a brief announcement from the Ministry of Plenty. In the preceding quarter, it appeared that ten three-year plans quoted for bootlaces had been over-fulfilled by 98%. He examined the chessboard 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, in a sort of cloudy mysticism. Always, without exception, is so arranged. In no chess problem since the beginning of the world has black ever won. Did it not symbolize the eternal and varying triumph of good over evil? The huge phase gazed back at him, filled with calm power, by always mates. The voice from the telescreen paused and added in different and much graver tone. You are warned to stand by for an important announcement at 1530. 1530. This is news of the highest importance. Take care not to miss it. 1530. The tinkling news struck up again. Winston's heart stirred. There was the bulletin from the front. Instant 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 to actually see the Eurasian army swarming across the never broken frontier and pouring down into the tip of Africa like a column of ants. White had it not been possible to outflack 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 landing seat. 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 Oceana into. It might mean anything. Defeat, breakdown, the redefision of the world, the destruction of the party. He drew a deep breath, an extraordinary madly of feeling. But it was not madly exactly. Raude was successive layers of feeling, in which one could not say which layer was under most, struggled in sight. The spasm passed. He put the white knight back in its place. But for the moment, it could not settle down to serious study of the chance problem. His thoughts wandered again. Almost unconsciously, he traced with his finger in the dust on the table. Two plus two equals five. They can't get inside you, she had said, but they could get inside you. What happens to you here is forever, 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, caught a rise down. He had seen them. 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 a park, on a violin, biting day in March. When the earth was like iron, all the grass seemed dead, and there was not a bud anywhere except a view of crocuses, which had pushed themselves up to be dismembered by the wind. He was harrying along with frozen hands and watering eyes when he saw her, not ten meters away from him. It struck him at once that she had changed in some ill-divine way. They almost passed one another without a sign. Then he turned and followed him, 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 a mung a clump of ragged leadless shrumps, useless either for concealment or as protection from the wind. They halted. He was violently cold. The wind whistled through the twigs and threaded the occasional dirty looking crocuses. He put his arm around her waist. There was no telescope, but there must be hidden microphones. Besides, they could be seen. It did not matter. Nothing mattered. They could have laid down on the ground and done that if they had wanted to. His flesh froze with horror and a thought of it. She made no response whatever to the collapse of his arm. She did not even try to disengage herself. He knew now what had changed in her. Her face was saluer and there was a long scar, hardly 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 stoned and 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 a splotered face and a 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 boldly. "I betrayed you," she said. She gave him another quick look of the slack. Sometimes she said, "They threaten you with something, something you can't stand up to. You can't even think about it." 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 a sound 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 is ever. All you care about is yourself. All you care about is yourself. You have it. 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 didn't seem to be anything more to say. The wind plastered the thing 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 of rest 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 seen so attractive as at this moment. He had an nostalgic fission of his corner table, with the newspaper in the chessboard and the ever-flowing gym. About 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 to people. He made a half-hearted attempt to catch up, then slowed down, turned, and made up in the opposite direction. When he had gone 15 metres, he looked back. The street was not crowded, but already he could not distinguish her. Anyone of a dozen herring 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 made it. He had not said it. He had wished it. He had wished that she and not he should be delivered over to thee. Something changed in the music that trickled from the tennis-week. A cracked and jeering note, a yellow note, came into it. And then perhaps it was not happening. Perhaps it was only a memory ticking 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 way to notice that his glass was empty and came back with the gin bottle. He took up his glass and snipped 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 sent him into stupor every night. And gin that revived him every morning. When he woke, seldom before 1100, with gummed up eyelids and fiery mouth and the 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 said with glazed face, the bottle handy, listening to the tennis queen. From fifteen to closing time, he was a fixture in the chestnut tree. No one cared what he did any longer. No whistle woken. No tennis queen admonished him. Occasionally, perhaps twice a week, he went to a dusty forgotten looking office in the Ministry of Truth and did little work. All what was called work. He had been appointed to a subcomedy of a subcomedy which had sprouted from one of the innumerable comedies dealing with minor difficulties that arose in the compilation of the 11th edition of the New Speak 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 commerce should be placed inside brackets or outside. There were four others on a comedy. 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 with Groob, extraordinarily involved and abstruse, we've settled haggling over definitions, enormous digressions, quarrels, threats, even to appeal to higher authority. And then suddenly the light would go out of them and they would sit around the table looking at one another with extinct eyes like ghosts fading at prop-pro. The terescreen was silent for a moment. Winston raised his head again, the bulletin, but now 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 reassuring that he looked up at the imperturbable face in the portrait, was it conceivable that the second arrow did not even exist? His interests 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 candlelit room with a fast white counterpane bent and himself, a boy of 9 or 10 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 a spell he was forgotten and his earlier faction for her had temporarily run, 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, wine and drizzle, made a few towel demands for food, fretted about the room, pulling everything out of place and kicking the wind squatting until the neighbours fanged on the wall while the younger child wailed intermittently. In the young his mother said, "Now be good and I'll buy you a toy, a lovely toy, you 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 leathers. 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 things subtly 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 wings climbed hopefully up the ladders and then came slivering down the snakes again, almost to the starting point. They played eight games, winning for each. His tiny sister, too young to understand what the game was about, had set propped up against the bolster, laughing because the others were laughing. For a whole afternoon they had all been happy together, as in his earlier childhood. He pushed a 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 the board with a clatter. He had started as though a pin had run into him. A shrill trumpet call had pierced the end. It was the bulletin. Victory. It always meant victory when a trumpet call proceeded 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 scrabbling from the tennis screen. But even as it started it was almost drowned by a row of cheering from outside. The news had run round the streets like magic. He could hear just enough of what was issuing from the tennis screen to realize that it had all happened as he had foreseen. A fast sea-borne armada had secretly assembled sudden blow in the enemy's rear. The white arrow cheering across the tail of the black. Fragments of triumphant phrases pushed themselves through the den. Fast, strategic maneuver, perfect coordination, utter out. Half a million prisoners, complete memorization, control of the whole of Africa, bring the war within measurable distance of its end. Victory. Greatest victory in human history. Victory. Victory. Victory. Victory. Under the table Winston's feet made compulsive 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 daily. He looked up again at the portrait of Big Brother, the colossus that destroyed the world. The rock again switched the horde's ovation, 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 a victory or defeat. It was more than a Eurasian army that had perished. Much had changed in him since the 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 tail of prisoners in booty and sloughton. 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, he saw white the snow. He was in the public dock, confessing everything, imprecating everybody. He was walking down the white tiled corridor with a feeling of walking in the sun and an armed guard at his back. The long hope for bullet was entering his breath. He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years, it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark massage. Oh cruel, needless misunderstanding. Oh stubborn, self-willed itself from a loving breast. Two gin-centered tears triggered 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. The end. Quarter ice. Quarter ice. Verne. Burned the skin or flesh of a wound with a heated instrument or caustic substance in order to stop bleeding or to prevent infection. This tried. This tried. Verne. Sten astride over. Straggle. Dominate.
