Witness

by Whittaker Chambers

  Finally, the Bishop’s view of the world left a permanent, indelible impress on me: “He inclined toward the distressed and the repentant. The universe appeared to him like a vast disease; he perceived fever everywhere; he auscultated suffering everywhere. And without trying to solve the enigma, he sought to staunch the wound. The formidable spectacle of created things developed a tenderness in him....”

  My life failed at the moment when I began to try to “solve the enigma” and “staunch the wound,” for Marx and Lenin did little more for me than give me a modern diagnosis and a clinical ways and means to deal with that “vast disease” which the Bishop of Digne felt and that “social damnation” which his author first made me conscious of. Even as a Communist, I never quite escaped the Bishop. I put him out of my mind, but I could not put him out of my life.

  One night, in the Union Station, in Washington, I stood in line with J. Peters, the head of the underground section of the American Communist Party, to buy a ticket for New York. I noticed a man watching me closely. As I left the line, he came up to me and explained that he had some kind of special ticket to New York. It was good only for the week-end. It was Sunday night. He wanted to stay over in Washington. Would I exchange my regular ticket for his special ticket? His ticket seemed to be in order. I gave him mine. Peters, who had walked away so as not to be observed, asked me what had happened. I told him. “Bob,” he said, “you’re a fool.” He must have been pondering on the matter, for as we walked out to the train, he suddenly put his hand on my arm and said gently: “The party needs more fools.” I would have been surprised if someone had then suggested to me that the Bishop of Digne had handed my ticket to the stranger. J. Peters would have been horrified to think that it was still the invisible Bishop who made him touch my arm and say: “The party needs more fools.”

  No doubt, the Bishop was invisibly present still when I broke from the Communist Party, though by then I had strayed so far from him that I could no longer hear him saying: “Jean Valjean, my brother, you belong no longer to evil, but to good. It is your soul that I am buying for you. I withdraw it from dark thoughts and the spirit of perdition, and I give it to God.”

  XXII

  One passage of Les Misérables I knew almost by heart.

  Jean Valjean, whom the Bishop had reclaimed, had told the police that he, the prosperous factory owner and philanthropist, was in fact the convict they were looking for. They had jailed him. He had escaped. Nevertheless, he risked returning to the city hospital to tell a dying streetwalker that he would take care of her child. The police, with Inspector Javert at their head, closed in. Jean Valjean retreated to a little room, where he stood motionless in a comer, out of sight of the door. In the room with him was a nun, Sister Simplice, who loved him for his goodness and pitied him for his suffering.

  One fact distinguished Sister Simplice from the rest of the human race. In all her life, she had never told a lie. Sister Simplice heard Javert coming and fell upon her knees. The police inspector opened the door, but seeing her in prayer, stopped abashed. “This was Sister Simplice, who had never lied in her life. Javert knew this and venerated her especially because of it.”

  “Sister,” he said, “are you alone in this room?”

  Sister Simplice looked up and answered: “Yes.”

  Javert continued: “Excuse me, if I persist. It is my duty—you have not seen this evening a person, a man—he has escaped and we are searching for him—Jean Valjean—you have not seen him?”

  Sister Simplice answered: “No.”

  “She lied. Two lies in succession, one upon another, without hesitation, quickly, as if she were an adept in it.”

  “Your pardon,” said Javert and withdrew.

  Then followed the words that became a part of my mind: “Oh, holy maiden . . . may this falsehood be remembered to thee in Paradise.”

  XXIII

  One day my mother told my brother and me that my father was coming home to live. For some time he had been spending his Sundays with us. Once more the Sunday sketching trips were revived.

  Once more my mother would brush and brighten us up to accompany my father wherever his fancy led us. These outings, which we had once enjoyed, and later endured, we now openly detested. There was little fun in them for us and they broke up our free day. They were only one of our causes of resentment toward our father.

  In his absence, we had been half a family, but that half had been a happy, active unit. With his return, the chill of his presence spread through the house. Before, we had been able to forget that we were divided. Now the division had been closed, but not healed. Its infection no longer drained away; it festered inwardly and poisoned all our relations. On one side were my mother, my brother and I. On the other side was my father. Between the two sides was a pocket of hostility. My mother had told us that she had let my father come back because “it is better for you children to have a father at home.” I scarcely regarded him as my father. My mother, in sharing the too heavy burden of her unhappiness, had disclosed to me that my father had never wanted children in the first place; specifically, he had never wanted me. This information was like a poisoned knife. It cut the last ties that bound us. Yet if my father had tried to win us back, he might even yet have succeeded. It would never have been an easy task, and my father did not even know how to begin.

  He moved into the big front bedroom (the best room in the house, my mother pointed out). Soon he was surrounded by the artistic clutter without which he seemed unable to live—his big boxes of paintings, drawings, sketches and all kinds of drawing papers; his collection of bookplates; his miniature theater for which he used to spend hours painting scenery and cutting little figures out of pasteboard; the puppets which he was continually contriving out of glued strips of cloth and cardboard; his collection of toys, jumping-jack bears, wooden dolls, little carts and horses, be-babos that we were forbidden to touch. Once installed, he retired into this den and closed the door upon us.

  For years, all my father’s meals were served to him on a tray in his room. The rest of us ate downstairs in the kitchen, in part because that was the room farthest away from him. We were no longer a family in the usual sense of the word. We were four people, living in emotional and physical anarchy.

  For years, my brother and I had scarcely more than a nodding acquaintance with my father. But my brother was a cheerful, active boy and his terse acquaintanceship was probably easier to bear than the sullenness which I developed as a defense against my father’s chilling rebuffs.

  As soon as he entered the house, my father would go to his room and shut the door. Before we sat down to eat, I would take his tray of food upstairs. I would knock at his door. In a voice deliberately pitched so low that sometimes I could not hear him, he would say: “Come in.” When I entered, he would usually glance up with a smile. It was not an open or a pleasant smile. It was a faintly derisive smile, I thought then. Now I know that it was the smile of the defeated. It used to shrivel me night after night for years, like a bug on a hot stove lid. Sometimes, if he were feeling humorous (as I thought), my father would make a great show of clearing the heap of artist’s materials from his table so that the messenger from afar could set down the tray of food. There is almost nothing that a boy can take less easily than sarcasm. This pathetic by-play of my father’s put off for years my understanding of his loneliness. . In the kitchen, we spoke in carefully lowered voices. We knew that my father had a habit of opening his door quietly and padding halfway downstairs so softly that we often did not hear him. When we thought we did, my mother would say to my brother or me in a voice that carried clearly: “I think I hear your father. Will one of you go and see?” Sometimes, as we reached the hall stairs, we would see his door close noiselessly.

  Sometimes, the tension among us broke out in strange ways. In the back of our yard, my mother had had a pergola built. It was somewhat in the Italian style with arches supporting the upper struts. But the side posts were unbarked, so that there was al
so a touch of American rustic. Against this structure my mother, my brother and I had lovingly planted a grapevine and a clematis. In time, the clematis developed a trunk as thick as a small tree. Its vine covered half the pergola and masked its oddity. In the autumn, when the grapes were ripening, the little white clematis flowers filled the air with a fragrance like crushed cherry pits.

  One Sunday we heard my father quietly leave his room, pad downstairs and out the front door. He was carrying a sickle (one of the few tools I ever saw him use). With it he began to slash down some rank grass and weeds along the fence. This was sufficiently unusual so that each of us watched him furtively from behind separate curtains. But we lost interest and, presently, we heard him pad softly upstairs again. Nobody had said anything to him and he had said nothing to any of us.

  Later in the day, my mother came in from the yard and, in a voice in which there was a touch of horror, and, what was worse, a touch of fear, asked which of us had cut down the clematis. Neither of us had. Then she led us out to the pergola. The clematis had been hacked in two at the root, evidently by sickle strokes. Along one side of the pergola, the massive vine hung dying. My mother said: “Jay must have done this.” We all felt a little sick. We all realized that it was an outrage deliberately committed by him against us. I do hot think that we ever mentioned it again, certainly not to him. But I think I understand now why he did it—because he had to perpetrate some violence on us or the tensions of his hostile home would have driven him mad.

  XXIV

  While our family life festered incurably at the heart of our home, my father and mother began to lead a rather active, and outwardly rather uncomplicated, public life. My mother claimed to loathe the stage. My father was stage-struck. Shortly after he came back to live with us, he got together, under circumstances that I have forgotten, a group of young people from Lynbrook and neighboring villages for the purpose of giving amateur theatricals. They called themselves “The Larks.”

  There must have been eight or nine Larks. Two or three of them, like my father, were stage-struck. The rest were along for the fun. Somewhat against her will, I believe, my mother was also a Lark. Sometimes, the troupe met at the homes of individual players. More often, they met at our house, and I would sometimes waken in the night to hear a young male Lark, moaning, in simulated agony: “A-oh, my laig! A-oh, my laig!” Whereat a young woman player would answer with inspired flatness: “Darling, I did not mean to shoot you.”

  The Larks presented a number of plays. I must have heard them rehearsed in part or at length scores of times. I must have seen them acted publicly. I cannot remember what they were about or a single scene from one of them. But I remember quite well that I disliked seeing my father and mother act on a public stage. I remember how our house became a property room with rose-grown trellises standing against one wall, finished or half-finished scenery leaning against another wall, chairs draped with costumes or the iridescent silk fabrics for which my father gloatingly rummaged the East Side pushcarts.

  I remember much more vividly certain scenes that were enacted between my parents in private. To make costumes for Nance Old-field, my father bought some rather sleazy seersucker for my mother and some bright, rosebud stuff for a younger member of the cast. All day my mother brooded. When my father came home that night, there occurred the first scene that I had actually witnessed between my parents. It was the first time I had seen their faces as they raised their voices against each other. I do not know what years of hoarded bitterness then found release to swell my mother’s surges of anger or my father’s white-faced, stolid rage. The scene ended when my brother and I hid weeping in one of the unlighted rooms. A tense quiet settled over the house. When I took the tray of food to my father’s room, he smiled at me impishly. It was like a wink, and if I had been big enough, I think that I would have knocked him down.

  I sided completely with my mother, not because I knew or cared whether my father was a poor actor or a good one. I sided with her because my father obviously made her suffer and because, in his acting and his theatrical posturings, I felt a failure of dignity that struck me at the point where a boy is most vulnerable—his need to respect his father as a man.

  The Larks were long-lived birds. They did not fold, if I remember rightly, until after the First World War when the leading man (the player with the “laig” ) went into the Navy, and perhaps the others had lost interest. Long before, my father’s interest had shifted to another art form.

  This was tableaux. In tableaux, a whole book or drama was presented as a series of living pictures—static scenes in which nobody acted, nobody said anything, everybody stood still. The curtain rose and simply showed a group of people posed rigidly. After a few minutes, the curtain went down and then went up on a second scene. The art lay in the organization of the groups and poses and the sumptuousness of the sets. Tableaux exactly suited my father’s talent. It also gave my mother full scope since, before the curtain went up and while the actors were posing, she read dramatically a text which explained the scene.

  Sometimes, the tableaux were Biblical (Joseph and his brethren). More often, Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves was the subject. Most often, the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam was given. I hesitate to think how many times that great atheist and alcoholic tract was given under pious auspices, for my father usually presented his tableaux for the benefit of libraries, schools and churches, in neighboring villages, Brooklyn and New York.

  The tableaux called for much bigger casts than the plays. Even my brother and I were drafted under protest. In Ali Baba, we were the arms of the dead thieves sticking out of the jars in which we had been killed with hot oil. In the Rubaiyat, I was for years “I sent my soul through the invisible.” The curtain would rise. I would be discovered seated, very insecurely, on a globe made of cheesecloth and hoops. My right arm was thrust straight up. Mv hand was held as still as I could hold it and I wore nothing at all but a scrap of gauze laid across my middle—rather an accent than a concealment.

  “I sent my Soul through the Invisible (my mother’s voice would announce with soaring resonance)One. letter of that After-life to spell,

  And by and by my Soul returned to me,

  And answer’d ‘I Myself am Heaven and Hell.’

  This tableau always called forth a number of audible ahs and brought a great hand. I long fought helplessly against the indignity of this public exposure. An unexpected ally came to my aid —nature. For at last it became inescapable, even to my father, that his oldest son was on the way to manhood. To my great relief, some younger rival supplanted me as “I sent my Soul through the Invisible.”

  XXV

  The close of my stage career was a tiny turning point in our lives, though none of us knew it. It had happened because I had entered adolescence. Henceforth, I was to be a new disruptive force in our disrupted house. For with the other changes in me, I began to undergo a change of disposition. From being even-tempered, cheerful, active, I became lethargic, moody, irritable. I had only a vague idea of the reasons for this change, for nobody had ever told me the simplest facts that are now taught schoolchildren as a matter of course.

  My change was first noticeable in connection with our after-school walks. My mother loved to walk and long afternoon rambles with my brother and me had become one of our rituals. I no longer wanted to go. Sometimes, I would go to the window and watch my mother and brother walk off a little forlornly without me. I felt a little forlorn, too, but I wanted to be by myself, to think my own thoughts, which were beginning to be a little harsh. They became a little harsher as my mother and brother began to form a new separate unit of our family whose interests and intimacy I no longer shared.

  A change of schools played its unlucky part in my greater change. I had never been happy at the Lynbrook school, but, in time, I had grown used to my schoolmates and they had grown used to me. They were no longer a strange breed to me, and as we all grew older, I began to sense in them a simple humanity, spontaneous and unpretentious
, with which I felt at one. I began to make friends. At that point, it was decided that I should go to high school in a neighboring village, where my parents had made connections in the course of their theatrical ventures.

  The impact of this new experience caught me in the midst of my organic turmoil, complicated by my ignorance and our family peculiarities. I had always been docile and obedient. I became impudent and rebellious, and one of the school mischief-makers. (I was by no means alone.) I had never cursed, but, with an effort, I acquired the knack and found that there was nothing easier. I loathed foul language, but I forced myself to use it. It was almost harder for me not to learn than to learn, but I made a brave effort and soon my marks tumbled to just above failing. Only in English and Latin, when the spell of Vergil overtook me, did my marks hold up despite myself.

  I had become conscious of girls and felt that I was not attractive to them. With that went a new self-consciousness about appearance and a new sense of difference. My attitude was: if I am to be outcast, I will be outcast to the hilt. It amused me to be shock-headed and untidy among my barbered and tidy schoolmates. I wore short pants some time after most of my generation had let theirs down, for my father would not buy me long pants. When it became impossible to avoid long pants any longer, my father still refused to invest in a new suit for me. I was given his old suits to wear and I wore them as a badge of shame.

  I was afflicted, too, with that yearning for horizons which is so strong in some adolescents. Sometimes, on warm spring days, the drowsy tinkle of a junkman’s bells, the clop of his horse’s hoofs, or the cackle of a hen, would drift lazily into the study hall. I would suffer a longing to be free so acute that it seemed as if the heart would burst out of my body.