Chestnut Tree Cafe

The Chestnut Tree was almost empty. A ray of sunlight slanting through a window fell on dusty table-tops… Winston sat in his usual corner… 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.

…His thoughts wandered again. ‘They can’t get inside you’, Julia 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.

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… 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.

…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… 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! 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.

© 1949 George Orwell: http://www.online-literature.com/orwell/1984/