Page 373 - 1984

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 ad-
mitting 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 hori-
zontally 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

1984