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whether they were alive or dead, and then had suddenly been brought forth to incriminate themselves in the
usual way. They had confessed to intelligence with the enemy (at that date, too, the enemy was Eurasia),
embezzlement of public funds, the murder of various trusted Party members, intrigues against the leadership
of Big Brother which had started long before the Revolution happened, and acts of sabotage causing the
death of hundreds of thousands of people. After confessing to these things they had been pardoned,
reinstated in the Party, and given posts which were in fact sinecures but which sounded important. All three
had written long, abject articles in The Times, analysing the reasons for their defection and promising to
make amends.
Some time after their release Winston had actually seen all three of them in the Chestnut Tree Cafe/. He
remembered the sort of terrified fascination with which he had watched them out of the corner of his eye.
They were men far older than himself, relics of the ancient world, almost the last great figures left over from
the heroic days of the Party. The glamour of the underground struggle and the civil war still faintly clung to
them. He had the feeling, though already at that time facts and dates were growing blurry, that he had
known their names years earlier than he had known that of Big Brother. But also they were outlaws,
enemies, untouchables, doomed with absolute certainty to extinction within a year or two. No one who had
once fallen into the hands of the Thought Police ever escaped in the end. They were corpses waiting to be
sent back to the grave.
There was no one at any of the tables nearest to them. It was not wise even to be seen in the
neighbourhood of such people. They were sitting in silence before glasses of the gin flavoured with cloves
which was the speciality of the cafe/. Of the three, it was Rutherford whose appearance had most impressed
Winston. Rutherford had once been a famous caricaturist, whose brutal cartoons had helped to inflame
popular opinion before and during the Revolution. Even now, at long intervals, his cartoons were appearing
in The Times. They were simply an imitation of his earlier manner, and curiously lifeless and unconvincing.
Always they were a rehashing of the ancient themes -- slum tenements, starving children, street battles,
capitalists in top hats even on the barricades the capitalists still seemed to cling to their top hats an endless,
hopeless effort to get back into the past. He was a monstrous man, with a mane of greasy grey hair, his face
pouched and seamed, with thick negroid lips. At one time he must have been immensely strong; now his
great body was sagging, sloping, bulging, falling away in every direction. He seemed to be breaking up
before one s eyes, like a mountain crumbling.
It was the lonely hour of fifteen. Winston could not now remember how he had come to be in the cafe/ at
such a time. The place was almost empty. A tinny music was trickling from the telescreens. The three men
sat in their corner almost motionless, never speaking. Uncommanded, the waiter brought fresh glasses of
gin. There was a chessboard on the table beside them, with the pieces set out but no game started. And
then, for perhaps half a minute in all, something happened to the telescreens. The tune that they were
playing changed, and the tone of the music changed too. There came into it but it was something hard to
describe. It was a peculiar, cracked, braying, jeering note: in his mind Winston called it a yellow note. And
then a voice from the telescreen was singing:
Under the spreading chestnut tree
I sold you and you sold me:
There lie they, and here lie we
Under the spreading chestnut tree.
The three men never stirred. But when Winston glanced again at Rutherford s ruinous face, he saw that
his eyes were full of tears. And for the first time he noticed, with a kind of inward shudder, and yet not
knowing at what he shuddered, that both Aaronson and Rutherford had broken noses.
A little later all three were re-arrested. It appeared that they had engaged in fresh conspiracies from the [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]