Witness

by Whittaker Chambers

  We kept our rooms on the Old Court Road, but started south at once. We traveled lightly and I drove as fast as possible. I knew that the Communist Party had undergrounds in the South. I knew that it had members in the least expected places (filling stations and tourist camps worried me most). I did not know how widely it had alerted its members to be on the lookout for me. I still had no weapon but a knife.

  Four days after we started, we crossed the upper bridge over the Halifax River and rolled into Daytona Beach between gardens of hibiscus and oleander that made my wife gasp with delight. We had told the children simply that we were going to a beach and all day each day my daughter had badgered me as I drove by asking: “Are we at the beach yet?” So I drove at once along the hard sand speedway at the surfs edge about a mile below the city. My family tumbled out on the sand. My daughter announced: “I’m not going in the car again.” The boy had been sick for the last day.

  Behind us on the high dune were two white bungalows, with blue shutters, facing the sea. They were the only houses anywhere around. They stood side by side in a little clearing. Around them was dense palmetto scrub. A dirt track, wide enough for one car, ran behind them. Cars constantly drove up and down the beach in front of them. A sign said that one of the bungalows was for rent.

  It would have been hard to find a location more dangerous for us. But my wife begged me to rent the house. She said that the boy could not travel any farther. I made one of those foolish decisions people make under pressure. In addition, the rent was more than I could afford. But with my family in mind I rented the bungalow.

  We resumed our security routine at once. While my wife and the children slept, I sat up all night, translating. The very first night, I heard a sound of footsteps under the window. I told myself that it was nothing, but I knew that I had not been mistaken. I heard the footsteps go around the house. My wife appeared in the bedroom door and said: “Are you all right? I think I heard footsteps outside.” I stopped work, put out the light and spent the rest of the night watching in the dark. This happened several nights in succession. I did not even know how to go about procuring a gun. I was desperate for one.

  On the third or fourth day, my neighbor in the next bungalow knocked at the door. He was holding a revolver. “There are people prowling around these bungalows at night,” he said. “Would you mind keeping this gun, and if you hear anybody, come out shooting and I’ll come out shooting?” He was a Government employe, a direct sort of man, who had once killed a rattlesnake by crushing its head with his Ford crank. As a result, the venom spurted in his eyes; he had nearly died. His hospital expenses were paid by the Government which, with a flash of unbureaucratic admiration, ruled that any man rugged enough to tackle a rattlesnake with a Ford crank deserved to have his expenses paid.

  I took the revolver with something more than gratitude to my neighbor. Thereafter, I worked with the heavy gun lying on the table beside my typewriter.

  The second night I had the weapon, I distinctly heard a hand fumbling with the back door. My neighbor ran out, firing his own gun. I followed. A car was parked, lights out, on the dirt track behind the houses. We heard someone crash through the palmetto and leap on the running board. The car started and tore, blind, down the road.

  That was the end of our peace for some time. But the prowlers were not the G.P.U. Many transients go to Florida with large sums of money in cash. A gang had been looting the houses near Daytona Beach. Several hundred dollars had been stolen from the tenants before us. But this we did not learn until later, and the awareness of people lurking in the scrub at night was part of our nerve pattern at the time. Yet the sense of security in having a revolver was worth the anxiety.

  Amidst these foolish alarms, the translation moved along. In nearby De Land, I found the library of Stetson College a friendly and helpful haven. The fugitive from the Communist Party often sat, of a sweltering afternoon, among the spooning coeds, doing his quiet research into the blood-and-iron policies of Bismarck and the gaudy follies of the man whom he called “the Sphinx without a secret”—Napoleon III.

  In Florida, I finished the translation. It was published as Dunant, The Story of the Red Cross. The author of the book was Dr. Martin Gumpert. I met him again years later when he was the medical adviser to Time’s medicine section and I was its editor.

  We were in Florida exactly a month. We returned north through a cold, delayed spring, and, with the bleak weather, the fears that we had briefly fled closed in on us again. One thing I had made up my mind about: when I returned my neighbor his revolver, I resolved that I would not again be without the comfort of a gun. As we entered Baltimore, I stopped at Montgomery Ward’s and bought a shotgun. It looked big enough to fell an elephant and the clerk warned me that the kick might knock me down. “Just what do you want it for?” he asked me. What I wanted it for was so much in the front of my brain that I felt as if I had been caught with my thoughts down and fumbled: “Well, I think there are prowlers around the house and a gun might come in handy.” His reaction was completely different from what I expected. He was a Southerner with the fine abandon some Southerners have about Brearms and related matters. “Well, sir,” he said with immense pleasure, “you’ve bought the right gun. Just hold it in front of you, squeeze the trigger, and, brother, it will be fay-ya-you-well.”

  I have sometimes thought of him since. I have thought that while there are a few such uncomplicated souls around perhaps the battle is not quite lost yet.

  XI

  We settled back into our crowded rooms on the Old Court Road (in view of the future, a rather prophetic name) and resumed our furtive life. If that had been all we had to look forward to, it would have been intolerable. But in Florida I had made more than the decision to buy a gun. I had decided to come out of hiding.

  In their concern for us, our few friends strongly opposed this move. They saw in it an unnecessary doubling of our risks. One or two freely predicted that, if I came out of hiding, I would not survive a month. Those were the days when the G.P.U. dared to stage a daylight attack on Walter Krivitsky and his wife and small son as they stepped off the boat train in France to take ship for the United States. It was a time of tenseness. My friends were quite right in supposing that by coming out of hiding I would double the risks. They were quite wrong in thinking that the move was unnecessary. The logic of my position was that I must come out of hiding. Hiding had been a temporary tactic. Its purpose was to baffle the party in its first automatic lunge to capture or destroy me. That period had passed.

  Now, so long as I remained in hiding, I stood, in relation to the Communist Party, like a Communist Party that has been outlawed, driven completely underground and can no longer operate because it is severed from the normal life around it. Like the outlawed party, I was deprived of any base from which I could maneuver because I was cut off from the multitude of contacts through which a man (or a movement) uses his personal or social resources to go forward in life. While I was in hiding, I could not go forward, I could only go slowly backward. I could only become more and more depressed by my foredoomed position. Until I came out of hiding, I could not get a regular job. Until I had a regular job, I could not begin to reintegrate myself in life. Once I had a foothold in life, once I was in the open, the party would weigh much more carefully the risks involved in attacking me. Until then, I was a lone man fighting a war in the dark against a vastly superior force —a war whose secret nature worked in favor of the Communist Party and against me. Until I came out of hiding, the party could terminate this war whenever it might discover or trap me, leaving no more trace than a shot, a scamper of feet and the slam of a car door.

  Coming cut of hiding meant much more than walking freely on the streets of Baltimore, receiving letters through the United States mails or openly looking for a job. It meant ceasing merely to survive and beginning to live as other people live. It meant sinking roots and fostering growth. This was the problem which my wife and I, with the children in our minds, had d
iscussed in Florida. In this sense, the question of coming out of hiding and the question of establishing a permanent home were one.

  It seemed an impossible project. But I had gone to school to Lenin, who had taught me: “There are no absolutely hopeless situations.” The whole aggressive mood of Communism, which had been mine for years, now came to my aid against the Communist Party. Its mood had been: there is almost nothing that is impossible if the imagination is bold enough to block it out and the will resolute enough to carry it through. I had not lost the Communist imagination and will by ceasing to be a Communist.

  With little else but faith and this will to back us, my wife and I decided that if we could possibly manage it, we must buy a house. We decided that we would buy it in Baltimore. From a purely practical point of view, there were strong reasons against this. Washington with its heavy Communist concentration, and the Soviet embassy, which must harbor secret police, was only an hour away. In Baltimore itself the Communist Party was active and there were underground Communists in the city, some of whom I knew and who would have a special interest in getting rid of me. Yet where, in the eastern United States, and within easy reach of New York City, were there not Communists?

  Besides, the problem from our standpoint was not purely practical. My wife and I had come to love Baltimore above all cities. We were at home in it, finding in its kindly people and their quiet lives a tranquillity contrasting with our distress. We loved the physical city, its old brick houses in whose grave and fine proportions, we sensed the proportions of a soul as well as an architecture. We loved its moods of morning and of evening light, its long gardens, sometimes brick-walled, its gas-lit streets at night. We loved the touch of the continuing past and the present sense that, while the city’s commerce tapped the mainland, its harbor looked seaward. And under its traditional and easy order, we sensed a sultriness that spiked it with a special character, of people as well as of climate, and saved it from monotony—a sultriness that stirred the city and its people less in the dog days than in the bursts of hot spring nights. There was thus a propriety of the spirit in our choice that went beyond any practical reason, and determined us to make in this gracious and loved city our stand against death and for life. For that is how my wife and I regarded our next step.

  With my mother’s help, we bought, not long after our return from the South, a small brick house in the 2700 block of St. Paul Street. We made a down payment, $500, I believe—the balance to be paid monthly as rent. The difficulty was how, from month to month, we were going to pay the rent.

  In the months when I was carefully preparing my break with the Communist Party, and my friends, with whom I had shared some of my thoughts, became more and more impatient, thinking that I lacked courage, I used to ask half-jestingly: “What is a man to do with a wife and two small children?” One of them answered: “If you will break, I give you my word that I will help you until you can take care of yourself.” Give my word is easily said, I thought. The fact is harder, not because the generous will is lacking, but because all men have needs and obligations of their own which must come first. I never really expected help from our friends. Nevertheless, they stood by us loyally. We could not have pulled through without them. It is no disparagement of the rest to say that the friend who had least helped most. Grace Lumpkin, whom I have mentioned, lent us all her savings, the first debt that I repaid when I went to work for Time.

  Still, for us, the months on St. Paul Street were months of the shadows, the months that we do not often or willingly recall. We now received mail in our own name. We installed a telephone as a business necessity. We went openly about the streets. The old routine of vigilance continued. I still wrote or translated (for I presently got another book to translate) all night, now with the shotgun beside me. But the house had taken all our money. Want and the blank future had moved into the house with us, and were actually more real than fear of reprisals, which merely impended.

  In the back of our Bible, I keep a letter from my wife. It is undated but it seems to have been written to me at Time a day or two after I was made a senior editor. It says:

  “Dearest Loved One, I want to tell you how very proud we are of you and how much we love you. You have achieved so much in such a short time. It probably doesn’t seem so short to you, but when I remember that only so short a time ago you made your little trips to Center Street that we might eat, I am filled with the marvel of you and the tremendous urge that kept you at your job which has often been too humiliating and difficult. I naturally cannot see the entire picture as you have gone through it, but I could guess at agonies you have never expressed. Through it all, you have been the kindest, sweetest of husbands and most loving and thoughtful parent.”

  The little trips to Center Street that we might eat.... Center Street means the pawnshop. There were one or two such shops on that street, and the little trips were to pawn our only valuables —the watch I had been given at graduation, my wife’s wrist watch —so that the children could have food. This was the period when, for the same reason, my wife and I had decided to go on a diet of breakfast food. What father out of work has not felt like a man trying to scale a bare cliff at night, with his wife and children roped to him for safety though his least misstep may send them all below?

  We tried to spare the children this mood. We thought we had succeeded. But one day, when I was driving my daughter somewhere, a rather shabby man flagged us for a lift. As a precaution, I took no riders in those days. My daughter wanted to know who he was. I said that he was probably a poor man, hitching around the country looking for work. I said that when she was older I would tell her about such things; now it was too hard to explain. “And too sad?” she asked quietly. She was five.

  I think of that period in terms of two or three days that seemed catastrophic to me then, but have a comedy quality now. The rent was about to fall due and we did not have it. The thermometer suddenly fell steeply. We had a low fire burning and did not notice how cold it had become outside. When I went out, I found that the car had frozen (we kept it in the yard to save garage rent); the ice had forced the hoses from the pipes. I thought that the radiator was surely ruined. I had no way of replacing it. It was a psychological, as well as a mechanical, disaster. The car was our means of flight. We hoped never to have to use it, but the fact that it was there to use gave us peace of mind. Without it we were crippled.

  I went into the house in a fairly desperate mood to find that something was wrong with the furnace. It was an old one and had probably been cracked when we bought the house. The crack had opened and the water was putting out the fire in clouds of steam. In the chilling house we felt that we had been wiped out. It was all the more humiliating because the blows had not come from an enemy but from our own failure to meet ordinary life on its own terms.

  Somewhere we found a repairman. Most of the next day, he and his helpers spent tearing down the furnace. My wife kept the children in bed under blankets and coats. Late in the afternoon, the repairman gave it up. He said there was just one possibility of sealing the crack: to pour a mending liquid in the tank. It might work, it might not.

  While the men worked, I saw them eyeing me as I helped them, eyeing my wife on their trips through the house, trying to figure us out. The poor can smell poverty as a doctor can smell sickness. No doubt, they noted, those plain, untalkative men, that I was a jobless man with two small children. No doubt, they had children of their own. No doubt, they remembered months without work. Once again, I learned that the kindness of the poor to the poor is overpowering, given greatly out of little, without expectation or thought of return. When I finally asked the question that had been devouring my peace: “How much do I owe you?” the answer came: “The price of the mend-it, because we couldn’t do nothing with the furnace.” It was ridiculously little.

  By a small miracle the crack in the furnace sealed and the mend-it filled the house for weeks with a smell like simmering library paste. By another small miracle, the car suff
ered no damage from its freeze. So my wife and I found ourselves using, about this and similar experiences, the word that had come into my mind when my neighbor handed me the revolver in Florida—the word: “providential.”

  XII

  I left the Communist Party to fight it. I was already fighting it when I left it, as the manner of my break implies. There were other, less hazardous ways of disengaging myself from the Communist Party. I knew them. I could, possibly, have had myself transferred, on one pretext or another, from the underground to the open Communist Party—such transfers are not uncommon. Once back in the open party, after a suitable period of shuffling, I could gradually have lapsed from it. It would have been unpleasant. There might have been petty annoyances. It is unlikely that I would have been physically molested. But such a course would have meant some agreement, some kind of hobbling terms, between the Communist Party and me. I wanted no terms. I deliberately deserted from the Communist Party in a way that could leave no doubt in its mind, or anybody else’s, that I was at war with it and everything it stood for.