Part 6

"But it was not from Karl that I learned the worst. He was always trying to hide the worst. Never did I hear of such a man as he was for turning things bright side upwards. But Conrad Schramm, who was related to Barbara--a sort of second cousin, I think--lodged in the same house with us. Schramm was the closest friend Karl and Jenny had in London then, and he told me things that made my heart bleed. Why, when a little baby was born to them, soon after they came to London, there was no money for a doctor, nor even to buy a cheap cradle for the little thing.

"For years that poverty continued. I used to see Karl pretty near every day until I fell and hurt my head and broke my leg in two places and was kept in the hospital many months. Barbara had to go out to work then, washing clothes for richer folks, and we couldn't offer to help dear old Karl as we would. So we just pretended that we didn't know anything about the poverty that was making him look so haggard and old. Karl would have died from the worry, I believe, if it had not been for the children. They kept him young and cheered him up. He might not have had anything but dry bread to eat for days, but he would come down the street laughing like a great big boy, a crowd of children tugging at his coat and crying 'Daddy Marx! Daddy Marx! Daddy Marx!' at the top of their little voices.

"He used to come and see me at the hospital sometimes. No matter how tired and worried he might be--and I could tell that pretty well by looking at his face when he didn't know that I was looking--he always was cheerful with me. He wanted to cheer me up, you see, so he told me all the encouraging news about the movement--though there wasn't very much that was encouraging--and then he would crack jokes and tell stories that made me laugh so loud that all the other patients in the room would get to laughing too.

"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 noble, 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-class 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.

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 class 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 damned infernal support of the slave-traders. We must show President Lincoln that the working class 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 class.'

"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! Nobody 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 passed at our union condemning Gladstone and supporting President Lincoln, and I believe that our union was the first body of workingmen in England to pass 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 bloody 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 Lassalle visited him, in 1862, and heard what he said then about foolish attempts to start revolutions by the sword. Lassalle 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 Lassalle 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 Lassalle, 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 Lassalle think of that?"

"He never understood Karl, I think. Anyhow, Karl told me that Lassalle ceased to be his friend after that meeting. There was no quarrel, you understand, only Lassalle realized that he and Karl were far apart in their views. 'Lassalle 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 Lassalle 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 circumstances. 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 pass 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."