The Marx He Knew Part 3

"I told him one day about a little German lad in a bed at the lower end of the ward. Poor little chap, he had been operated on several times, but there was no hope. He was bound to die, the nurse told me.

When I told Karl the tears came into his eyes and he kept on moaning, 'Poor little chap! So young! Poor little chap!' He went down and talked with him for an hour or more, and I could hear the boy's laughter ring through the long hospital ward. We'd never heard him laugh before, for no one ever came to see him, poor lonesome little fellow.

"Karl always used to spend some of his time with the little chap after that. He would bring books and read to him in his mother tongue, or tell him wonderful stories. The poor little chap was so happy to see him and always used to kiss 'Uncle Nick,' as Karl taught the boy to call him. And when the little fellow died, Karl wept just as though the lad had been his own kin, and insisted upon following him to the grave."

"Ah, that was great and n.o.ble, Hans! How he must have felt the great universal heart-ache!"

"I used to go to the German Communist Club to hear Karl lecture. That was years later, in the winter of 1856, I think. Karl had been staying away from the club for three or four years. He was sick of their faction fights, and disgusted with the hot-heads who were always crying for violent revolution. I saw him very often during the time that he kept away from the club, when Kinkel and Willich and other romantic middle-cla.s.s men held sway there. Karl would say to me: 'Bah!

It's all froth, Hans, every bit of it is froth. They cry out for revolution because the words seem big and impressive, but they mustn't be regarded seriously. Pop-gun revolutionists they are!'

"Well, as I was saying, I heard the lectures on political economy which Karl gave at the club along in fifty-six and fifty-seven. He lectured to us just as he talked to the juries, quietly and slowly--like a teacher. Then he would ask us questions to find out how much we knew, and the man who showed that he had not been listening carefully got a scolding. Karl would look right at him and say: 'And did you _really_ listen to the lecture, Comrade So-and-So?' A fine teacher he was.

"I think that Karl's affairs improved a bit just them. Engels used to help him, too. At any rate, he and his family moved out into the suburbs and I did not see him so often. My family had grown large by that time, and I had to drop agitation for a few years to feed and clothe my little ones. But I used to visit Karl sometimes on Sundays, and then we'd talk over all that had happened in connection with the movement. I used to take him the best cigars I could get, and he always relished them.

"For Karl was a great smoker. Nearly always he had a cigar in his mouth, and, ugh!--what nasty things he had to smoke. We used to call his cigars 'Marx's rope-ends,' and they were as bad as their name.

That the terrible things he had to smoke, because they were cheap, injured his health there can be no doubt at all. I used to say that it was helping the movement to take him a box of decent cigars, for it was surely saving him from smoking old rope-ends.'

"Poor Jenny! She was so grateful whenever I brought Karl a box of cigars. 'So long as he must smoke, friend Fritzsche, it is better that he should have something decent to smoke. The cheap trash he smokes is bad for him, I'm sure.' She knew, poor thing, that the poverty he endured for the great Cause was killing Karl by inches, as you might say. And I knew it, too, laddie, and it made my heart bleed."

"Ah, he was a martyr, Hans--a martyr to the cause of liberty. And 'the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church,' always and everywhere," said the Young Comrade.

VI

Old Hans was silent for a few seconds. He gazed at the photograph above his bench like one enraptured. The Young Comrade kept silent, too, watching old Hans. A curious smile played about the old man's face. It was he who broke the silence at length.

"Of course, you've heard about the International, lad? Karl had that picture taken just about the time that the International was started.

Always promised me a picture he had, for years and years. And when he brought me that one Sunday he seemed half ashamed of himself, as if he thought it was too sentimental a thing for a serious man to do.

'You'll soon get tired looking at it, Hans,' he said.

"Ach, I remember that afternoon as though it were only day before yesterday. We were sitting smoking and talking after dinner when Karl said: 'Hans, I've made up my mind that it is time things begun to move a bit--in connection with the movement I mean. We must unite, Hans.

All the workers ought to unite--can unite--_must_ unite! We've got a good start in the visit of these French and German workingmen to the Universal Exhibition. The bourgeoisie have shown the way. It must be done.' Then he explained to me how the movement was to be launched, and I promised to help as much as possible in my union. Karl always wanted to get the support of the unions, and many a time did he come to me to get me to introduce some motion in my union.

"It was that way when the great Civil War broke out in America. Karl was mad at the way in which Gladstone and the middle cla.s.s in general sided with the slave-holders of the South. You see, he not only took the side of the slaves, but he loved President Lincoln. He seemed never to get tired of praising Lincoln. One day he came to me and said with that quiet manner he had when he was most in earnest, 'Hans, we must do something to offset Gladstone's d.a.m.ned infernal support of the slave-traders. We must show President Lincoln that the working cla.s.s in this country feel and know that he is in the right. And Abraham Lincoln belongs to us, Hans; he's a son of the working cla.s.s.'

"He said a lot more in praise of Lincoln, and told me how proud he was that the German Socialists had gone to the war, all enlisted in the Northern army; said he'd like to join with Weydemeyer, his old friend, who was fighting under Fremont. So earnest he was about it! n.o.body could have guessed that the war meant ruin to him by cutting off his only regular income, the five dollars a week he got for writing for the _New York Tribune_--I think that was the name of the paper.

"Well, he begged me to get resolutions pa.s.sed at our union condemning Gladstone and supporting President Lincoln, and I believe that our union was the first body of workingmen in England to pa.s.s such resolutions. But Karl didn't stop at that. He got the International to take the matter up with the different workingmen's societies, and meetings were held all over the country. And he kept so much in the background that very few people ever knew that it was Karl Marx who turned the tide of opinion in England to the side of Lincoln. And when Lincoln was murdered by that crazy actor, Booth, Karl actually cried.

He made a beautiful speech, and wrote resolutions which were adopted at meetings all over the country. Ah, boy, Lincoln appreciated the support we gave him in those awful days of the war, and Karl showed me the reply Lincoln sent to the General Council thanking them for it.

"Karl was always like that; always guiding the working people to do the right thing, and always letting other people get the credit and the glory. He planned and directed all the meetings of the workers demanding manhood suffrage, in 1866, but he never got the credit of it. All for the cause, he was, and never cared for personal glory. For years he gave all his time to the International and never got a penny for all he did, though his enemies used to say that he was 'getting rich out of the movement.'

"Ach, that used to make me mad--the way they lied about Karl. The papers used to print stories about the 'Brimstone League,' a sort of 'inner circle' connected with the International, though we all knew there was never such a thing in existence. Karl was accused of trying to plan murders and b.l.o.o.d.y revolutions, the very thing he hated and feared above everything else. Always fighting those who talked that way, he was; said they were spies and hired agents of the enemy, trying to bring the movement to ruin. Didn't he oppose Weitling and Herwegh and Bakunin on that very ground?

"I was with Karl when La.s.salle visited him, in 1862, and heard what he said then about foolish attempts to start revolutions by the sword.

La.s.salle had sent a Captain Schweigert to Karl a little while before that with a letter, begging Karl to help the Captain raise the money to buy a lot of guns for an insurrection. Karl had refused to have anything to do with the scheme, and La.s.salle was mad about it. 'Your ways are too slow for me, my dear Marx,' he said. 'Why, it'll take a whole generation to develop a political party of the proletariat strong enough to do anything.'

"Karl smiled in that quiet way he had and said: 'Yes, it's slow enough, friend La.s.salle, slow enough. But we want brains for the foundation of our revolution--brains, not powder. We must have patience, lots of patience. Mushrooms grow up in a night and last only a day; oaks take a hundred years to grow, but the wood lasts a thousand years. And it's oaks we want, not mushrooms.'"

"How like Marx that was, Hans," said the Young Comrade then, "how patient and far-seeing! And what did La.s.salle think of that?"

"He never understood Karl, I think. Anyhow, Karl told me that La.s.salle ceased to be his friend after that meeting. There was no quarrel, you understand, only La.s.salle realized that he and Karl were far apart in their views. 'La.s.salle is a clever man all right,' Karl used to say, 'but he wants twelve o'clock at eleven, like an impatient child.' And there's lots of folks like La.s.salle in that respect, my lad; folks that want oaks to grow in a night like mushrooms.

"Well, I stayed in the International until the very last, after the Hague Congress when it was decided to make New York the headquarters.

That was a hard blow to me, lad. It looked to me as if Karl had made a mistake. I felt that the International was practically killed when the General Council was moved to America, and told Karl so. But he knew that as well as I did, only he couldn't help himself.

"'Yes, Hans, I'm afraid you're right. The International can't amount to much under the circ.u.mstances. But it had to be, Hans, it had to be.

My health is very poor, and I'm about done for, so far as fighting is concerned. I simply can't keep on fighting Bakunin and his crowd, Hans, and if I drop the fight the International will pa.s.s into Bakunin's control. And I'd rather see the organization die in America than live with Bakunin at the head; it's better so, better so, Hans.'

And it was then, when I heard him talk like that, and saw how old-looking he had grown in a few months, that I knew we must soon lose Karl."

VII

"But he did not die soon--he lived more than ten years after that, Hans," said the Young Comrade. "And ten years is a good long time."

"Ach, ten years! But what sort of years were they? Tell me that,"

demanded old Hans with trembling voice. "Ten years of sickness and misery--ten years of perdition, that's what they were, my lad! Didn't I see him waste away like a plant whose roots are gnawed by the worms?

Didn't I see his frame shake to pieces almost when that cough took hold of him? Aye, didn't I often think that I'd be glad to hear that he was dead--glad for his own sake, to think that he was out of pain at last?

"Yes, he lived ten years, but he was dying all the while. He must have been in pain pretty nearly all the time, every minute an agony! 'Oh, I'd put an end to it all, Hans, if I didn't have to finish _Capital_,'

he said to me once as we walked over Hampstead Heath, he leaning upon my arm. 'It's h.e.l.l to suffer so, year after year, but I must finish that book. Nothing I've ever done means so much as that to the movement, and n.o.body else can do it. I must live for _that_, even though every breath is an agony.'

"But he didn't live to finish his task, after all. It was left for Engels to put the second and third volumes in shape. A mighty good thing it was for the movement that there was an Engels to do it, I can tell you. n.o.body else could have done it. But Engels was like a twin brother to Karl. Some of the comrades were a bit jealous sometimes, and used to call Karl and Engels the 'Siamese twins,' but that made no difference to anybody. If it hadn't been for Engels Karl wouldn't have lived so long as he did, and half his work would never have been done.

I never got so close to the heart of Engels as I did to Karl, but I loved him for Karl's sake, and because of the way he always stood by Karl through thick and thin.

"I can't bear to tell about the last couple of years--how I used to find Karl sick abed in one room and his wife, the lovely Jenny, in another room tortured by cancer. Terrible it was, and I used to go away from the house hoping that I might hear they were both dead and out of their misery forever. Only Engels seemed to think that Karl would get better. He got mad as a hatter when I said one day that Karl couldn't live. But when Jenny died Engels said to me after the funeral, 'It's all over with Marx now, friend Fritzsche; his life is finished, too.' And I knew that Engels spoke the truth.

"And then Karl died. He died sitting in his arm chair, about three o'clock in the afternoon of the fourteenth of March, 1883. I heard the news that evening from Engels and went over to the house in Maitland Park Road, and that night I saw him stretched out upon the bed, the old familiar smile upon his lips. I couldn't say a word to Engels or to poor Eleanor Marx--I could only press their hands in silence and fight to keep back the sobs and tears.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE MARX FAMILY GRAVE IN HIGHGATE CEMETERY.]

"And then on the Sat.u.r.day, at noon, he was buried in Highgate Cemetery, in the same grave with his wife. And while Engels was speaking over the grave, telling what a wonderful philosopher Karl was, my mind was wandering back over the years to Treves. Once more we were boys playing together, or fighting because he would play with little Jenny von Westphalen; once more I seemed to hear Karl telling stories in the schoolyard as in the old days. Once again it seemed as if we were back in the old town, marching through the streets shouting out the verses Karl wrote about the old teacher, poor old Herr von Holst.

"And then the scene changed and I was in Bingen with my Barbara, laughing into the faces of Karl and his Jenny, and Karl was picking the bits of rice from his pockets and laughing at the joke, while poor Jenny blushed crimson. What Engels said at the grave I couldn't tell; I didn't hear it at all, for my mind was far away. I could only think of the living Karl, not of the corpse they were giving back to Mother Earth.

"It seemed to me that the scene changed again, and we were back in Cologne--Karl addressing the judge and jury, defending the working cla.s.s, I listening and applauding like mad. And then the good old Lessner took my arm and led me away.

"Ah, lad, it was terrible, terrible, going home that afternoon and thinking of Karl lying there in the cold ground. The sun could no longer shine for me, and even Barbara and the little grandchild, our Barbara's little Gretchen, couldn't cheer me. Karl was a great philosopher, as Engels said there at the graveside, but he was a greater man, a greater comrade and friend. They talk about putting up a bronze monument somewhere to keep his memory fresh, but that would be foolish. Little men's memories can be kept alive by bronze monuments, but such men as Karl need no monuments. So long as the great struggle for human liberty endures Karl's name will live in the hearts of men.

"_Aye, and in the distant ages--when the struggle is over--when happy men and women read with wondering hearts of the days of pain which we endure--then Karl's name will still be remembered. n.o.body will know then that I, poor old Hans Fritzsche, went to school with Karl; that I played with him--fought with him--loved him for nearly sixty years.

But no matter; they can never know Karl as I knew him._"

Tears ran down the old man's cheeks as he lapsed into silence once more, and the Young Comrade gently pressed one of the withered and knotted hands to his lips and went out into the night.