Witness

by Whittaker Chambers

  I have never been able to fight without a reason, and in that trifling comer of the world of force in which I suddenly found myself, I could see no reason for fighting and felt a desperate, personal violation that I should be forced to. I have never been afraid of pain or being beaten. In this case, my small opponent was flailing just as ineffectually as I was. But the crowding faces of my schoolmates suddenly transformed into those of animals, and their howling for a kill, filled me with overpowering disgust.

  At that point, when my opponent, who was just as reluctant as I was, was also flagging, two bigger boys stepped in and set us on again, like dogs. A little girl, whom I had thought of as being especially pretty, screamed: “Give him a bloody nose.” I stopped and walked away. A howling gaggle of children trailed me, like crows over a maimed rabbit, yelping “Sissy” and less printable words. I did not know what the words meant but I knew what they were intended to mean. I could not say to those who were shouting at me that they filled me with a loathing so deep that I could not resist it even by fighting it.

  I could fight when I had a reason, and what I would not do for myself, I could do for something else. We had an old, wet-eyed female dog that used to follow me on errands to the village. One day, the dog and I, going home, met one of my schoolmates, going to the store. By way of making himself agreeable, he kicked the dog in the stomach. Then he went on.

  My first reaction was stunned astonishment that anybody would do such a thing to an animal. My next was anger, which, as usual with me, mounted very slowly until there was little else in me but anger. I sat down on a stump (the beautiful old trees that once shaded the village streets were already falling to progress) and waited for the boy to come back. I waited some time. When he reached me, I got up and slapped his face. Then I waited until he put down his mother’s groceries. Then we fought. The battle ended when I punched his vulnerable nose. The blood ran down very satisfactorily and he began to blubber. My anger was gone. I felt only regret. I helped him pick up his bundles and tried to comfort him. He shrugged me off. As I watched him walk away, still bleeding and crying, I learned the valuable lesson that you may not comfort a man whom necessity forces you to defeat. We never fought again and we never became friends. I used to catch him watching me sometimes with a rather puzzled look, for I was the butt of the school.

  I never had any real friends. From time to time, this made me unhappy, or at least it gave me an unpleasant feeling of being out of step. But I was not a child who could go to anybody with his troubles. Besides, there was nobody to go to (my father was unapproachable and it would never have occurred to me to talk to my mother about such things).

  I do not mean that I never played with other boys. I played a good deal. I was active and strong. In time, I became a tireless basketball player, a tireless canoeist on the tidal creeks, a poor skater and swimmer, a good wrestler, and when I discovered that I could ride horses free by exercising them for a riding stable, I spent as much time as I could on horseback.

  But I felt that there was a wall between me and other children. I used to think it was of their making. I realized by degrees that it was of mine. If I had really wanted the fellowship that lay on the other side of the wall, I would have battered my way or scrambled over. The real wall was my own indifference and my liking for solitude. No matter how much I played or mixed, I never gave myself whole-heartedly. I was always making my own peculiar observations. In the end, I always withdrew to my own chief interests—books and nature.

  In some ways, I was more of a child than any child I knew, and remained a child longer. For one thing, I was incurably innocent. I had heard a good many things spelled out in frank detail and franker Saxon. They took no hold of my mind. In other ways, I was an adult, used to discussing the problems of adults as a grown-up with grown-ups. I knew what children should not know: that children are childish. I knew it better about others than I knew it about myself. I was not self-conscious. I did not realize, although I early began to write stories and poems, that what I was passing through, was my special version of the fumbling, painful, comical fore-life of the artist. I did not know that what seemed the special handicaps of my boyhood—extreme sensitivity, imaginativeness, gentleness, a need for quiet and seclusion—was the real difference between me and my fellows, a difference in the whole pitch and purpose of our lives, that is to say, a difference in the soul’s angle of vision.

  XI

  In fact, I did not know for some time that I was supposed to have a soul. I do not know where I first found out—possibly at Sunday school. For some months, my brother and I attended the Episcopal Sunday school (my parents were nominal Episcopalians). This brief exposure to formal religion ended abruptly when one of our small co-religionists developed whooping cough and it was suggested that the Chambers boys spread the germs.

  This was no hardship to my brother and me. There were kind and good people in that church, but I do not remember ever seeing any face transfigured by the awareness of God or of salvation. I do not even remember our Sunday-school teacher, what she looked like, or who was in the class with us. I do not remember anything we were taught. I remember only that each Sunday we were given a little colored card with a Biblical text encircled with forget-menots or some other flowers. We were also given two books (for perfect attendance, if I remember rightly). The cover of my book showed Christ standing in a field of lilies. My brother liked to tease me by joking about this picture. For he had discovered that I felt about it an unreasoning awe which I was ashamed to admit, but which his teasing exposed. At last I hid the books where he could not find them. From time to time, I would look at them surreptitiously.

  If there was any religion in our home, I do not remember it. We never prayed or said grace at table. I never heard my father mention religion in his life. My mother mentioned religion from time to time, but scarcely in a religious way. It was absurd, my mother sometimes said, for people to call themselves Christians when they did not practice Christianity. This does not mean that my parents were atheists. Each of them, I suspect, had a personal belief of some kind, which, in my mother’s case, later became active. But they shared the view (still current) that it is wrong to influence children’s minds in religious matters, and that they should be left to develop their own religious beliefs, or to have none at all, if they chose.

  What I knew, as a child, about religion I did not know as the result of any instruction. I knew it as a result of something I heard by chance, or that happened to me, and that touched something that was already in me.

  There were three such experiences. The first was a conversation with my mother, which had on me almost exactly the opposite effect to what was intended. In summer, my mother was a great pie maker and she had a way of holding up a pie on the fingertips of one hand while she trimmed the loose edges of crust with the other. She was doing this one day, when, in some rambling child’s conversation, I said something about “when God made the world.” I think I was trying it out on her. If so, the result was much better than I could have expected.

  She froze with the pie in one hand and the trimming knife suspended in the other. “Somebody told you that,” she said with a severity she seldom used to me. “You picked that up somewhere. You must learn to think for yourself. You must keep an open mind and not accept other people’s opinions. The world was formed by gases cooling in space.”

  I thought about this many times. But it was not the gaseous theory of creation that impressed me, though I did not reject it. What impressed me was that it was an opinion, too, since other people believed something else. Then, why had my mother told me what to think? Clearly, if the open mind was open (as I would say to myself later on, still turning over this conversation in my mind years afterwards), truth was simply a question of which opening you preferred. In effect, the open mind was always closed at one end.

  The other experience also occurred in my early childhood. One day I wandered off alone and found myself before a high hedge that I had never seen befor
e. It was so tall that I could not see over it and so thick that I could not see through it. But by lying flat against the ground, I wriggled between the privet stems.

  I stood up, on the other side, in a field covered from end to end, as high as my head, with thistles in full bloom. Clinging to the purple flowers, hovering over them, or twittering and dipping in flight, were dozens of goldfinches—little golden yellow birds with black, contrasting wings and caps. They did not pay the slightest attention to me, as if they had never seen a boy before.

  The sight was so unexpected, the beauty was so absolute, that I thought I could not stand it and held to the hedge for support. Out loud, I said: “God.” It was a simple statement, not an exclamation, of which I would then have been incapable. At that moment, which I remembered through all the years of my life as one of its highest moments, I was closer than I would be again for almost forty years to the intuition that alone could give meaning to my life—the intuition that God and beauty are one.

  The third experience occurred at school. There was a big girl at school who seemed much older than I; she may have been fifteen or sixteen. Her family was extremely poor; I had heard that her father was a drunkard. I thought that she was dreadful to look at. Her head was rather large. Her face was red-skinned, bony and hard, and there was an expression on it that I did not understand, but which I now realize was hunted and knowing.

  The other children called the unhappy girl “Stewguts.” As she walked home from school, they would form a pack around her, yelping “Stewguts! Stewguts!” until she went berserk. They were careful to keep out of her reach. for she was quick and strong. I never took part in these baitings. My mother warned me never to have anything to do with that girl, never to speak to her.

  Stewguts had a younger sister in my class—a pasty-faced child who looked a little like a sheep. She always kept her eyes down, as if she were keeping a secret. She was also very stupid.

  One day, during recess, I found myself alone in the classroom with this younger sister. Nobody else was in the room. The door to the cloakroom, which was beside the blackboard at the front of the classroom, opened cautiously. Stewguts peered in warily, and, seeing only the two of us, slipped in.

  She had come for a purpose. To impress the meaning of words on us, the teacher used to draw a column of flowers on the board with colored chalk—a different color for each flower. Opposite each flower was a word. The teacher would point to the word. If you knew it, you were privileged to go to the blackboard and erase the word and the flower. This was called “picking flowers.”

  Stewguts drew a column of colored daisies on the blackboard. Then she beckoned her sister to come up. Patiently, she went down the column of words, asking her sister each one. The younger girl got most of them wrong. Gently, they went over and over them again. Stewguts never showed impatience. Sometimes, she let her sister “pick a flower.” I watched fascinated, listening to the girls’ voices, rising and falling, in question and answer, with the greatest softness, until, with Stewguts’ help, almost all the flowers had been “picked.”

  Then there was a tramp of feet in the hall outside the room. Stewguts slapped down the pointer and hurriedly erased the last of the flowers. Suddenly she took her sister’s face in both of her hands, and, bending, gently kissed the top of her head. As the hall door opened with a burst of voices, Stewguts silently closed the cloakroom door behind her and fled.

  I knew that I had witnessed something wonderful and terrible, though I did not know what it was. I knew that it was a parable, though I did not know what parable meant, because I knew that in some simple way what I had seen summed up something very important, something more important than anything I had ever seen before. It is not strange that I should not have understood what I saw. What is strange, and humbling, is that I knew I had seen something which I never could forget. What I had seen was the point at which from corruption issues incorruption.

  After that, I knew that Stewguts, who was bad, was not bad.

  XII

  While I was taking my first insecure steps in the outside world, the one secure world that I knew—my home—collapsed. I had noticed that my father was “having to work” more and more often and was getting home from the office later and later. I remember the strange feeling of anxiety and curiosity when one morning I found that his bed had not been slept in and realized that he had not been home all night.

  We began to have an uneasy feeling about supper. Supper would be waiting. My brother and I would be hungry. We would listen to the trains steam into the station, which was only a few blocks away. “Perhaps Jay will be on that one,” my mother would say. By eight o‘clock, my brother and I would be hungry. “Let’s wait one more train,” my mother would say. By half-past eight, we would be ferociously hungry. By nine o’clock, my mother would say: “I guess Jay had to work late again tonight.” Our supper would have to be warmed over, but by then we were no longer very hungry, anyway.

  Once or twice, at this time, I was awakened in the night by angry voices—voices such as I had seldom heard anywhere. In terror, I realized that they were my parents’ voices. They were quarreling. Sometimes, in the morning, my mother would be crying. She took to shutting us out in the kitchen while she paced up and down the long living room, holding desperate monologues with the walls, her voice soaring dramatically in charge or devastating rejoinder. Sometimes a woman’s name was mentioned, a woman my father knew. The fact that our mother was alone in the room filled us with an anxiety that I could scarcely control. Once I opened the door and asked with the innocent guile of childhood: “Are you talking to somebody, Mother?” She turned on me fiercely and I never tried that again.

  At last, in her distress, my mother began to tell me expurgated snatches of what she was going through—and not very expurgated at that. I knew what frantic jealousy looked like long before I knew what jealousy was. From that time, I became my mother’s confidant, and I think that there is very little about her life with my father that she did not tell me.

  One night my mother served supper early. My father had long been disturbed by the way we children behaved (despite Boutet de Monvel) at table. I had a habit of resting my head on my fist that especially annoyed him. Twenty times in the course of a meal, he would say with conspicuous patience: “Beadle, take your elbow off the table.” At last, he bought us a child’s table and chairs (the only new furniture I ever remember his buying). Henceforth, my brother and I ate in resentful exile.

  It was at that table that my mother served us that night. There was juicy steak and mashed potato (I can see it clearly in my mind’s eye). But I must have sensed something, for, before I touched the food, I asked: “When is Jay coming home?”

  “Jay is never coming home again,” said my mother.

  I pushed away my plate. I was no longer hungry, but sick. I could not eat. Neither could my brother.

  XIII

  “Why did Jay go away?” I asked my mother.

  “I sent him away,” she said. He had taken a large room in Brooklyn. A family of his artist friends lived near by.

  I am not competent to discuss the immediate grounds for the separation of my parents, whom, moreover, I may not judge or judge between. I can only note their incompatibilities.

  No doubt, in his own way, my father loved his wife and children. Like other people, he must have craved affection himself, at least at times. Yet the slightest display of spontaneous affection toward him caused him an almost organic embarrassment. It challenged a similar response from him, and that he was unable to make. At the least loving gesture or word, he would freeze physically. His whole nature seemed to withdraw in a slow, visible motion that I can compare only to the creepy contraction of a snake into its coils—and, as in a snake, it was physically disturbing to watch. Then, from a cold fastness, he would strike deliberately at the very impulse of affection, by waiting silently with a cuttingly tolerant smile, for the impulse to pass; or he would simply disregard it with a bitingly irrelevant rem
ark.

  The effect was inhuman insult. Two or three such treatments were enough to poison a lifetime. There was almost no defense, since it is in the nature of a family to show its father affection, and spontaneous affection, by its nature, always lays itself open to such repulse. My father never failed to take advantage of this whenever we forgot ourselves. Or so it seemed. Yet sometimes, when the irreparable damage had been done, and the wincing victim was turning angrily away, my father’s face would reveal a baffled loneliness, in which his inability to give and take simple affection encased him, like a mute in a coat of mail. Only to those who made no real claim on his affection, did my father seem able to step out of his armor. Then, to his friends, and he had many of them, he would appear as a being singularly simple, gentle, warm, fun-loving, rather childlike, rather happy.

  I do not know to what degree this reaction was natural to my father’s character, and how much it was a result of his struggle with my mother. Certainly, it grew more noticeable as their relations grew more bitter. It also helps to explain those relations. For my mother was a woman the central need of whose life was affection. She needed, moreover, to be the unique center of affection. Not that she was conscious of this herself. For she never asserted her will, only the fullness of her nature, which was spirited, self-reliant, courageous, proud and capable of an intensity of devotion that required her to deny herself in all ways so that she could give herself more fully to the objects of her love. In return, she hoped only for a similar dedication from them. Sometimes, it used to seem to me as if the real meaning of affection for her lay in her continuous self-sacrifice. If, for any reason, the object of her affection drew away, or failed to respond in kind, it seemed to her like a betrayal, and in her hurt, she could react instinctively and fiercely. But her natural sweetness and sense of justice always asserted themselves, and she would deny her hurt, or that she had any reason to be hurt, with a gallantry made all the more eloquent by the quiet tears that she could not quite keep from filling her eyes.