But what little I know of the stars I have passed on to my son over the years. When we go together to secure the ewes in the orchard-our last chore on late summer nights—we often stop to watch through the apple trees the great sky triangle tipped by the evening stars: Vega in Lyra, Altair in Aquila and Deneb, burning in the constellation of the Swan. Sometimes, I draw my son’s eye to the constellation Hercules, especially to the great nebula dimly visible about the middle of the group. Now and again, I remind him that what we can just make out as a faint haze is another universe—the radiance of fifty thousand suns whose light had left its source thirty-four thousand years before it brushes the miracle of our straining sight.
Those are the only statistics that I shall ever trouble my son with. I trouble him with them at all because I know that he and all his generation may soon bear witness of a kind before which every other shrinks in humility; and I want him to have a standard as simple as stepping into the dark and raising his eyes whereby to measure what he is and what he is not against the order of reality.
I want him to see for himself upon the scale of the universes that God, the soul, faith, are not simple matters, and that no easy or ingenuous view of them is possible. I want him to remember that God Who is a God of Love is also the God of a world that includes the atom bomb and virus, the minds that contrived and use or those that suffer them; and that the problem of good and evil is not more simple than the immensity of worlds. I want him to understand that evil is not something that can be condescended to, waved aside or smiled away, for it is not merely an uninvited guest, but lies coiled in foro interno at home with good within ourselves. Evil can only be fought.
I want him to know, in that dark, continuous struggle, that it is by his soul, and his soul alone, that he may sometimes glimpse, if only roughly, the hour of the night and his direction in it. I want him to understand, when he lifts up his eyes, that against the range of space and cold his soul, and his soul alone, is life for which, in the morning and the evening, he gives thanks to God to Whom it ties him. I want him to know that it is his soul, and his soul alone, that makes it possible for him to bear, without dying of his own mortality, the faint light of Hercules’ fifty thousand suns.
For myself, I now view the stars with the curiosity of any man who wonders in what form his soul may soon be venturing among them. For the Hiss Case has turned my wife and me into old people-not a disagreeable condition. But we who used to plan in terms of decades, now find a year, two years, the utmost span of time we can take in. Repeatedly, in this last autumn of unseasonable warmth, my wife has drawn me out to stand with her among our gardens, once so pleasant, now overgrown with weeds, because, as we say, neither of us really fooling the other, we no longer can find time to tend them. It is not time that we cannot find. Repeatedly, my wife has planned what we must do to bring them back to life. We do not do it. I do not think we shall unless time itself can lift from us the sense that we have lived our lives and the rest is a malingering.
This, which we both feel, we force ourselves seldom to entertain as a thought. For, with us, discipline must take the place of energy in that life to which it is our children, of course, who bind us. It is for them that we run through the routines of our days, outwardly cheerful, for we count among our blessings the fact that, a very few years more, and we shall be safely dispensable. Our trouble is that the smallest things now have power to disturb our precarious self-discipline-an unkindness, a meanness, or, on a greater scale, a sudden insight into the smugness of the world before its vast peril, or an occasional reminder that we are still beset by enemies that are powerful and vindictive. Then it becomes an effort to sustain those formal good spirits that are our hourly improvisation—the necessary grace notes to lead the ear away from the ground-bass which is our reality. For there are kinds of music that the world should not hear.
In the countryside, people are already beginning to plan for the spring which they can sense, like a thaw-wind, just beyond the drift of winter. It is three years since I have been able to plough a field on this farm. I have sometimes thought that, if, in this coming spring, my son and I could simply work and seed a field and watch it sprout, an absolute healing would follow. Or my wife and I have sometimes said that a year, or even six months, completely unharried by the world and its agencies, would refit us for struggle. For it is a season of peace that, like the world, we most crave, and, like the world, are most unlikely to get. Failing that, our spirits fall back upon an ultimate petition where our fears and hopes are one.
One of the tenderest of Greek fables tells how the gods decided to go down to the earth as beggars to try the charity of men. The god, Hermes, clad in rags, knocked at many prosperous doors and was driven from each. Toward evening, he came to the meanest door of all, a mere hut, where two old people, Philemon and Baucis, his wife, tended a few vines and milked their goats. Hermes knocked there. Because his need touched them, the old people took him in. They shared their meal with him, and, at night, let him sleep on the floor before their fire, trusting to their poverty and their age to prevent any harm that the beggar might intend.
In the morning, Hermes asked each of the old people to name his most secret wish, supposing that it would be for longer life, gold or great flocks. The dearest wish of each turned out to be the same—that both might die, as they had lived, together, that neither might die first, for neither could endure to face what remained of a life that would be unendurable without the other.
The god, now gleaming through his rags, raised his staff-the caduceus with the twined snakes, interlacing good and evil. Where Philemon and Baucis had stood, two trees rustled up whose branches met and touched when the wind blew.
In a world grown older and colder, my wife and I have no dearer wish for ourselves-when our time shall have come, when our children shall be grown, when the witness that was laid on us shall have lost its meaning because our whole world will have borne a more terrible witness or it will no longer exist.
INDEX
A
Aberdeen Proving Ground 469
Abt, John
Abt, Mrs. John
Acheson, Dean
Adams, Arthur
Adams, Maude
Agee, James
Agricultural Adjustment Administration
Agriculture Department (U.S.)
Air Force, U.S.
“Akyt”
Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves
Allen, George E.
Alien, James, See Auerbach, Sol
Amalgamated Bank
Amerasia Case
American (magazine)
American Communist Party
American Feature Writers Syndicate
American Legion
American Mercury
American Relief Administration
American-Russian Institute
American Society of International Law
Amtorg
Anderson, Marian
Andrews, Bert
Andrews, Mrs. Bert
Anthony, Susan B., III
Antony and Cleopatra (Shakespeare)
Appell, Donald T.
Arabian Nights
Arj, the
Army, U.S.
Art Students’ League
Asiev, Yevno
Assassin, The (O’Flaherty)
Assignment in Utopia (Lyons)
Associated Press
Astor, Lady
Auerbach, Sol
B
Bach, Johann Sebastian
Bachrach, Marion
Baker, Jake
Baldwin, Roger
Baltimore News-Post
Baltimore Sun
Bambi
Banister, Mr.
Banks, Louis
Barclay, Robert
Barkham, John
Barmine
Barnard College
Barrie, Sir James M.
Barth, Karl
Beardsley, Aubrey
Beaverbrook, Lord
; Bedacht, Max
Beethoven, Ludwig van
Benjamin, David
Bentley, Elizabeth
Berle, Adolf A.
Berle, Mrs. Adolf A.
Berliner Tageblatt
Bermingham
Bernanos
Berzin, General
“Bill”
Binger, Carl
Binger, Mrs. Carl
Bird, Miss Little
Bismarck, Karl von
Bittelman, Alexander
Black, George Frazier
Black Special Agent
Blanchard, Mary, See Whittaker, Mrs. Charles
Blatchford, Nicholas
Bloom, Sol
Bloor, Ella Reeve
Blucbird (Maeterlinck)
Board of Health (New York City)
Bone, Homer
Boorstein, Isidore, See Peters, J.
Booth Memorial Hospital (New York City)
Bosse, Comrade
Botticelli, Sandro
Boutet de Monvel, Bernard
Boutet de Monvel, Maurice
Bowen, Sterling
Bowman, Isaiah
Bradley, Fontaine
Breen, David
Breen, Ursula
Bretton Woods Conference
Bridges, Harry
British Communist Party
Brockdorff-Rantzau, Count
Brodsky, Joseph
Bronx Home News
Brookings Institution
Browder, Earl
Broz, Josip, See Tito, Marshal
Bryn Mawr Collegen.
Buck, Tim
Budenny, Marshal
Bukharin, Nikolai
Bullitt, William Marshall
Burck, Jacob
Burke, Arthur
Bykov, Colonel Boris
Bykov, Mrs. Boris
Byrnes, James F.
Byron, Lord
C
Cable, George Washington
Caldwell, Erskine
Callahan, Daniel
Cammer, Harold
Campbell, Alex
Can You Hear Their Voices?
Canadian Communist Party
Cannon James
Cantwell, Lloyd
Cantwell, Robert
Capital (Marx)
Carmon, Walt
Carnegie Endowment for World Peace
Carpenter, David
Caruso, Enrico
Case family
Cathedral of St. John the Divine
Catlett, Claudia
Cavalry Journal
Central Control Commission
Chamberlain John
Chambers, Ellen (daughter)
Chambers, Esther (wife)
Chambers, Eve Chambers, Helen (aunt)
Chambers, James S. (grandfather)
Chambers, Mrs. James S. (grandmother)
Chambers, Jay (father)
Chambers, Mrs. Jay (mother)
Chambers, John (son)
Chambers, Richard Godfrey (brother)
Chambers, Robert W.
“Charlie, See Minster, Leon
Chase, Charles F.
Chemists’ Club
Chemer, Mr.
Cherner Motor Company
Chesney family
Chestnut W. Calvin
Chiang Kai-shek
Chicago Sun
Chicherin
Chinese White (Gropper)
Christianity
Chrystie, Walter
Churchill, Winston S.
Civil Liberties Union
Civil Service Commission
Civil War
Clark, Bennett
Clark, Lance, See Reno, Franklin Victor
Class Reunion (Werfel)
Class Struggles and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat in Hungary (Szanto)
Clayton, William
Cleveland, Grover
Cleveland, Richard F.
Cleveland, Mrs. Richard F.
Clubb, Oliver Edmund
Coast Guard, U. S.
Coe, Bob
Coe, Frank
Cohen, Comrade
Cole, G. D. H.
Collins, Henry H., Jr.
Columbia University
Commerce Department (U. S.)
Communist International
Communist Labor Research Group
Communist Manifesto
Communist Party
American
British
Canadian
German
Italian
Mexican
Russian
Congress, U. S.
Congress of Industrial Organizations
Congressional Record
Constitution, U. S.
Coolidge, Calvin
Cooper, Gary
Cornell University
Coronet
Cotton, Mr.
Covington firm
Crime and Punishment (Dostoyevsky)
Crosley, G. E., M. D.
Crosley, George
Cross, Ctaude
Currie, Lauchlin
D
Daily Worker
Dante
Darkness at Noon (Koestler)
Daughter of Earth (Smedley)
Daughters of the American Revolution
Davidson, Ben
Davis, Chester
Davis John F.
Death of the Communists, The
Decorative Designers
Defeat in the Village (Chambers)
Devil, The
Dewey, Thomas E.
Dickens, Charles
Diderot, Denis
Dietrich, Colonel
Dirba, Charles A.
Divine Comedy
Djerjinsky, Felix
Dollard, Charles
“Don,” See Sherman, John
Donegan, Tom
Dorf, Eve, See Chambers, Eve
Doriot, Jacques
Dostoyevsky, Feodor
Dozenberg, Nicholas
Drexel Institute
Duggan, Laurence
Duggan, Mrs. Laurence
Dulles, John Foster
Dumbarton Oaks Conference
Du Maurier George
Dunant
Dunant, The Story of the Red Cross (Gumpert)
Duncan, Isadora
Dunne, William F.
Dunning, Dr.
Durant, Kenneth
Durant, Mrs. Kenneth
Dürer, Albrecht
Witness Page 96
