Witness

by Whittaker Chambers

  While I was desperately trying not to learn at school, I was doggedly studying by myself. My mother had urged me to study Gaelic, since that was the language of our forebears. I worked away zealously at the rather inadequate grammars of that nearly dead language. In this connection, I had begun a correspondence with an eminent philologist, George Frazier Black, who was then with the New York Public Library. With patient understanding, Dr. Black encouraged me, sending me a number of grammars from his own philological library. With his help, I began to study Arabic, Persian, Hindustani and the Assyrian of the cuneiform inscriptions. Dr. Black was the outstanding authority in the United States on gypsy dialects, and one of the leading authorities in the world. He encouraged me to visit a Rumanian gypsy encampment near us. I presently picked up a rough smattering of the dialect4 and began collecting vocabularies for Dr. Black. When he retired, he made me a present of the manuscripts of his Welsh and Rumanian gypsy studies. I still have most of Dr. Black’s grammars and dictionaries, long unused.

  For one day it occurred to me that, instead of studying languages that at best I could only hope to talk to myself, I might much better be learning German and mastering French. I got out my grandfather Whittaker’s old self-taught grammars. After that, I woke myself early enough each morning to study two lessons of each language before I got up. At night, I used to work on a translation of that least comic of comedies, Lessing’s Minna von Barnhelm, and of Goethe’s Iphigenia in Tauris, parts of which I still know by heart. I also began to study Spanish and Italian.

  These studies proved more useful than anything I ever learned in high school. As a German and French translator, I was later able to earn my living. In the underground, I was to speak German almost as much as English. Spanish was to be useful to me sooner than I knew.

  Sometimes, as I sat translating Minna von Barnhelm, I would hear in the distance the shuffling feet of the Home Guard and fifes playing “Little Shaver.” For the World War that my grandfather had predicted had come, and added a new element of turmoil to my mind. The First World War was in my thoughts day and night; I felt it with an intensity with which I never felt World War II. My family was traditionally Francophile. I was brought up to believe that Paris was less the capital of a country than the capital of Light. The German advance through Belgium filled us almost with as much consternation as if we had been invaded ourselves. I can still remember the Sunday morning when I picked up the newspaper and saw the headlines about the Battle of the Marne. I felt that I was experiencing an authentic miracle. After that, I lived day by day through the deadlock of the trench war on the Western Front. My grandfather had sent me a big military map of Europe, showing forts and naval bases. It covered almost one wall of my room. I had marked out the fronts with rubber bands. Every night before I went to bed, I moved the bands to correspond with the day’s communiqués.

  The war was the direct cause of my Russian studies. After the Russian Revolution (which interested me only as it affected Allied strategy), my mother decided that we might be fighting the Russians soon. She urged me to prepare for a career in the military intelligence by studying Russian. I had only Thimm’s Russian Self-Taught, which consisted chiefly of vocabularies. These my mother patiently heard me repeat day after day until I had learned two or three thousand Russian words. I never learned Russian grammar, though I learned to read Russian type and to write Russian script.

  I planned to get into the war as soon as I finished high school—a plan that I did not share with my mother. The false armistice was a tremendous blow. But as soon as it was denied, I saw that there was no time to lose. In New York City, one day, I had passed the British recruiting office and made a careful note of its address. The day after the false armistice, I left a note for my family, saying that I had gone to enlist. I walked into the British recruiting office and offered my services to the Empire. A stiff English officer looked me up and down. “Hell, boy,” he said, “the war’s over.” I slunk home. My family was amused. It should have been handwriting on the wall.

  As nobody seemed able to help me, I strove to help myself. I sought refuge in those places where I had always found it. I became a haunter of the woods and fields. I would set out by myself before the family was stirring in the morning and spend whole days in the woods, which required of me only that I be silent, patient and harmless. In return, nature gave me the peace that it gives to anyone who comes to see and hear and not to change.

  Those woods, and their lakes and streams, were then a part of the Brooklyn waterworks system. They have become a part of the New York State park system, and thousands pass through them in a day. In those days, I had them almost entirely to myself. I seldom met another person. I could soon find my way about them even at night, as I sometimes used to do. For I never found the loneliness of the woods at night as disturbing as people by daylight. I soon knew their birds, plants and insects as well as I knew my way along their trails. Only those who really live close to nature can understand the elation I felt when I first discovered where the seagulls roosted seven miles from the sea, or the shallow stream in the dense woods where all the robins in the area bathed just at sunrise, or the one brook where a cardinal flower grew, or my first pinxter bush in bloom.

  I presently discovered that the life below the surface of shallow ponds was as absorbing as the life on their shores. It reached a climax in the fore-spring when the alder catkins were bursting with pollen and the ice was still rotting on the pools. Through the ice I used to watch the watery world below coming back to life after winter, while the toads came down to the lowlands to deposit their masses of jellied eggs or the frogs unwound their slimy ribbons in the shallows. In these pursuits, I could not always take off my shoes in time to follow an exciting specimen. I learned simply to wade in with my shoes on. This habit so impressed one of my schoolmates that he remembered it through the years, and was able to testify to it, as an example of my bizarre behavior, during the first Hiss trial.

  In time, my ear became so sensitive that, sitting silently, I could sometimes hear the tiny tearing sound that a caterpillar makes in gnawing a leaf, and by following it, locate him. My eye, too, became sensitized, so that the slightest movement, the waving of grass stems, the way a leaf hung when the others were blowing, or the way a twig vibrated, always meant something and often something terrible, since nature, under the leaves, is a vast concealment and pursuit. I still retain this power to pick out minute movements in nature. But I have lost the power to sit silent for an hour, mentally alert, but physically lulled by the sun and the smell of plants each of which has a distinct odor. It was not necessary to sit motionless, but only to make those slow and explicit motions which said that I was not in hiding and did not mean attack. I never had to move much to observe the life of fields and woods, for its inquisitiveness is equal to its fear, and the woods and fields sooner or later drew near to observe me. I was a part of nature myself. In that habit of identification with nature is a healing peace more medicinal than herbs. Undoubtedly it carried me through the worst of my adolescence.

  During those quiet sessions, I was not only observing the life of the woods. I was making inner and outer observations of another kind, trying to sort out my thoughts about myself, my family and our dislocation within ourselves and within the life around us—dislocations both of which made me a fugitive in the woods. I sensed that one dislocation was connected with the other. I felt that the failure of my family was in part a failure of the life in which it found itself. But since I had no grasp of why these things were so, I was chiefly engaged in adding up the ways in which they were so. By degrees I told myself:

  I am an outcast. My family is outcast. We have no friends, no social ties, no church, no organization that we claim and that claims us, no community. We could scarcely be more foreign in China than in our alienation from the life around us. If we tried to share with it our thoughts, it would draw away, uncomprehending. If it tried to share its hopes with us, we would draw away, uncomprehending. It doe
s not want what we want. We do not want what it wants. It puts the things of the world first. We put the things of the mind first. It knows what it wants better than we know what we want. They are simple things. It measures happiness and success in terms of money, comfort, appearances and what it calls pleasure. I, for one, would not want to live a life in which money, comfort, appearances and pleasure mean success. There is something wrong with a people that measures its happiness and success in those terms. It has lost its mind. It has no mind; it has only activity. “What shall be said,” I had written, for I was writing more and more, “of those who have destroyed the mind of a nation?”

  But if there was something wrong with the life around us, there was also something wrong with us. Compared to us, the life around us was orderly and happy. We were not happy. Beneath our quiet, we were wretchedly unhappy. We were not a family. Our home was not a home. My father was not a father. My mother was not a mother. He was nothing. She was trying to be both father and mother. She dominated through her love, which was genuine, tender and sacrificing, but was dangerous. I felt it around me like coils, interposing between me and reality, coddling my natural weaknesses, to keep the world away from me, but also to keep me away from the world. “My mother does not want me to grow up,” I thought, “because she does not want me to go away from her.” As the life around me had no mind, only activity, my mother had no plans, a few hopes—not many of them.

  That left me absolutely alone. My family could give me no support against the alien world, from which the whole influence of our life divided me. And I felt about our family, a foreboding, an indefinable sense of doom, which I would also share unless I found the strength to free myself from it. I doubted that I had that strength. I decided to find out.

  I did not understand that the malady of the life around me from which I retreated into the woods, and the malady of the life of my family, from which I was about to retreat into the world, were different manifestations of the same malady—the disorder that overtakes societies and families when a world has lost its soul. For it was not its mind that the life around me had lost, though I thought so as a boy and was to continue to think so for almost twenty years, but its way, because it had lost its soul. I was about to set out from those quiet woods (to which I would return only at the decisive moment of the Hiss Case) on a lifelong quest for that lost way, first in personal, then in revolutionary, then in religious terms.

  XXVI

  It was the summer I graduated from high school. My mother wanted me to go on to college. My father was opposed. So was I, but for different reasons. I had had enough of school. I needed a job, but I was peculiarly helpless in finding one in the white-collar world where it was taken for granted that I should look, but where we had no roots. My father refused to interest himself in the problem.

  I decided to solve it for myself, to leave home, to make my own way, to turn my back on that middle-class world of white collars in which our claim to belong seemed to me a pretense unjustified by any reality. I knew that this announcement would cause wild emotional scenes, tearful charges of ingratitude and lack of love. Because I was a boy, I slipped away secretly, and, because I was a boy, and because even a wanderer likes to have a destination, I headed for Mexico.

  XXVII

  Few boys run away from happy homes. The world is too wide; it is easier to stay put. I left my unhappy home with a wrench that I could barely master. Once or twice, I was on the point of turning back. I kept on chiefly because I knew more about the unhappiness behind me than about the loneliness of the world ahead. I had a little money of my own—ten dollars possibly. I bought a ticket to Baltimore. It seems prophetic, but I was simply heading south, and Baltimore was about as far as I could go on the money I had.

  I reached Baltimore for the first time on a singeing Saturday afternoon. I was wearing my graduation suit—the first suit of my own I had had. I wandered in the stunning heat until I found an old flea-bag opposite the Calvert Station. There I took a room. There I met my first bedbugs and learned that there are worse things than a shabby house: there are filthy rooms.

  On Monday morning, after I had paid my bill, I had just enough money left for a newspaper, rolls and a cup of coffee. The coffee was a declaration of independence. I had never been allowed to drink coffee. In the newspaper, among the help wanted ads, I found that Engel & Hevenor, contractors, were hiring on laborers for a street railway job in Washington. Their address was on Eutaw Street. Seventeen years later, in underground days, I would live on its upper extension, Eutaw Place, where Alger Hiss, who was a younger boy in that same city on that morning of my first job hunt, would sometimes visit me.

  Engel & Hevenor’s headquarters was an empty store. Outside, on the sidewalk, a hard-faced young man in shirtsleeves was doing the hiring. A long line of men of all nationalities and all styles of rough faces and rough clothes, stretched away for a block. These had passed the hiring test; they already had jobs.

  The test was simple. When a man asked for a job, the hiring boss said: “Stick out your hands.” If the hands were callused, the man was sent to fall in at the end of the line. I was wearing a hat, my trim graduation suit with jacket (although it was hot), and my tie was neatly tied. The hiring boss took one startled look at me (one way or another, my appearance always seems to work against me). “Stick out your hands,” he said. They were soft, of course. “Can’t use you.”

  I turned away, with crushing defeat in my eyes, and walked down the line of life’s successes, trying to look invisible. Every man in the line knew what had happened. As I neared the end, hands reached out and pulled me through the line to the far side, where I was largely out of sight of the hiring boss, who was busy with others. Somebody said: “Give me your hat.” Somebody else grabbed the hat from my hand, folded it and stuffed it in his pocket. “Mess up your hair.” “Take off that tie.” “Take off your coat.” Somebody snatched my jacket and passed it down the line. Somebody else scooped muck out of the gutter and made me rub it on my hands. Then they made room for me-in the line.

  It was moving. A boss, standing at the head, was handing out transportation to Washington. The man behind me said: “Keep moving. Take a ticket. He won’t know you.” I shuffled along with the rest. I stood before the transportation boss. I reached out my grimy hand for a ticket. He slapped one into the palm. I walked past him. The line followed. The faces remained expressionless.

  In a rough group, an insurgence from the netherworld that made respectable Baltimoreans turn to stare, we marched to the Washington, Baltimore and Annapolis railroad station. We crowded together in a special coach—special in the sense that it was old and shabby. On the train, somebody handed me back my hat and jacket.

  The proletariat and I had met. The wretched of the earth had stretched out their hands and claimed me for their own because they understood my need. In four minutes, they had done for me what others failed to do in a lifetime. They had taught me that there is a level of humanity where compassion is a reflex of distress, and, in that sense, they humanized my soul for the rest of my life.

  XXVIII

  We piled off the W. B. & A. train on New York Avenue in Washington. The job lay just beyond. For a mile or so, the Engel & Hevenor company was tearing up street railway tracks or laying new ones. It was a little like a daylight scene from Hell. In places, big fires were burning and asphalt pots were belching blackly. For several blocks, the asphalt of the street and the concrete around the tracks had been cut out by pneumatic drills and picks and shoveled away. Elsewhere, picks and drills were clattering, air compressors were throbbing, the noise was deafening. In places, the earth had been scooped out around the tracks and the excavation shored up with timbers. Men, shoveling, picking, hammering, drilling, swarmed over the construction and destruction.

  I gave an assumed name, Charles Adams, to a straw boss, who handed me a badge with a number. Then I was attached to a gang whose boss wore a sweat-drenched silk shirt with peppermint candy stripes (post-war prosper
ity had not faded yet). He was a big, reserved, pleasant-looking man with a walrus moustache, who moved slowly among the men, giving a quiet order here, a quiet suggestion there, sometimes gently taking a tool from a laborer’s hand and showing him how to do the same job with less effort and more effect. He never raised his voice. The men respected him deeply—in part, because he had been a construction boss on a New York subway job and knew every detail of the work, in part, because he was fearless about what they most feared—the third rail.

  Sometimes, in cutting up concrete between the tracks, the stuttering, unwieldy pneumatic drills would go through the surface. The blade of the drill would touch the third rail below and the drill would stick there, burning with a brilliant blue electric light. The drillers wore heavy gloves and the shock of contact seemed to hurl them off the drills, so that I never saw anyone hurt in this way. Calmly, the boss would walk over to the blazing drill. Deliberately, he would take off his battered felt hat, punched with holes. He would fold it, wrap it around the drill handle and lug out the heavy tool.

  When I was turned over to him, he had stared at me a moment a little curiously. Then he went and got a short cold chisel and a short-handled sledge and set me to cracking the nuts on the bolts that tied the rail plates together. I worked doggedly in the killing sun. Once in a while I caught the boss watching me. Once he came over and told me not to grip the sledge and the chisel so tight. He did not mention my hands though he glanced at them. Ten minutes after I started working there was scarcely any skin left on palms or fingers. In that condition, I worked with them through the afternoon.