Witness

by Whittaker Chambers

  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