VI

When a little later the Countess Hatzfeldt was announced, he had

forgotten he was expecting her. He slipped the photograph back among

the papers, and moved forward hurriedly to greet her.

Her face was the face of the beautiful portrait on the wall, grown

twice as old, but with the lines of beauty still clear under the

unnecessary touches of rouge, so that sometimes, despite her frosted

hair, one could imagine her life at its spring-tide. This was

especially so when the sunshine leapt into her eyes. But, at her

oldest, there remained to her the dignity of the Princess born, the

charm of the woman of virile intellect and vast social experience.

"Something is troubling you," she said.

He smiled reassuringly. "My brother-in-law popped in from Prague. He

read me a sermon."

"That would not trouble you, Ferdinand."

Lassalle was silent.

"You have heard again from that Sophie de Solutzew!"

"Divinatrix! After three years! You are wonderful as ever, Countess."

The compliment did not lighten her features. They looked haggard,

almost their real age.

"It is not the moment for petticoats--with the chance of your life

before you and months of imprisonment hanging over your head."

"Oh, I am certain my appeal will get me off with a fine at most. You

must remember, Countess, that only once in my life, despite incessant

snares, have the fowlers really caged me. And even then I was let out

every time I had to plead in one of your cases. It was quite illegal,"

and he laughed at the recollection of the many miracles his eloquence,

now insinuating, now menacing, had achieved.

"Yes, you are marvellous."

"I marvel at myself."

"Let me see your new 'Open Sesame.' Is it ready?"

"No, no, Sophie," he said banteringly. "You know you mean you want to

see your namesake's letter."

"That is not my concern."

"O Countess!" He tendered the letter.

"Hum," she said, casting a rapid eye over it. "Then you wrote her

first."

"Only because the letter was wanted for the new edition of Heine, and

I had no copy of it.".

"But I have a copy."

"You? Where?"

"In my heart, _mon cher enfant_. Why should I not remember the great

poet's words? 'Dearest brother-in-arms--Never have I found in any

other but you so much passion united with so much clairvoyance in

action. You have truly the divine right of autocracy. I only feel a

humble fly....'" She paused and smiled at him. "You see."

"Perfect," cried Lassalle, who had been listening complacently. "But

it's not that letter. The letter of introduction he gave me to

Varnhagen von Ense when I was a boy of twenty--in the year we met."

"How should I not remember that? Was it not the first you showed me?"

A sigh escaped her. In that year when he had won her love, she had

been just twice as old as he. Now, despite arithmetic, she felt three

times his age.

"I will dictate it to you," she went on; "and you can send it to the

publisher and be done with it."

"My rare Countess, my more than mother," he said, touched, "that you

should have carried all that in your dear, wise head."

"'My friend, Herr Lassalle, the bearer of this letter, is a young man

of extraordinary talent. To the most profound erudition and the

greatest insight and the richest gifts of expression, he unites--'"

"Doesn't it also say, 'that I have ever met?'"

"Yes, yes; my head is leaving me. Put it in after 'insight.' 'He

unites an energy of will and an attitude for action which plunge me

into astonishment.'"

"You see," interrupted Lassalle, looking up; "Heine saw at once the

difference between me and Karl Marx. Marx is, when all is said and

done, a student, and his present address is practically the British

Museum. In mere knowledge I do not pretend to superiority. What

language, what art, what science, is unknown to him? But he has run

almost entirely to brain. He works out his thoughts best in

mathematics--the Spinoza of socialism. But fancy Spinoza leading a

people; and even Spinoza had more glow. When I went to see him in

London in the winter to ask him to head the movement with me, he

objected to my phraseology, dissected my battle-cries in cold blood. I

preach socialism as a religion, the Church of the People--he won't

even shout 'Truth and Justice!' He will only prove you scientifically

that the illusion of the masses that Right is not done them will goad

them to express their Might. And his speeches! Treatises, not

trumpets! Once after one of his speeches in the prisoner's box, a

juror shook hands with him, and thanked him for his instructive

lecture. Ha! ha! ha! Take my _System of Acquired Rights_,

now."--Lassalle was now launched on one of his favorite monologues,

and the Countess at least never desired to interrupt him.--"There you

have learning and logic that has forced the most dry-as-dust to hail

it as a masterpiece of Jurisprudence. But it is enrooted in life, and

drew its sustenance from my actual practice in fighting my dear

Countess's battles. As Heine goes on to say, _savoir_ and _pouvoir_

are rarely united. Luther was a man of action, but his thought was not

the widest. Lessing was a man of thought, but he died broken on the

wheel of fortune. It was a combination of the two I tried to paint in

my Ulrich von Hutten--the Humanist who transcended Luther and who was

the morning star of the true Reformation. You remember his Frankfort

student who, having mistakenly capped a Jew, could not decide whether

the sin was mortal or venial. But though I put my own self into him, I

shall not be beaten like him." He jumped to his feet and threw down

his pen so that it stood quivering in the table. "For surely it was of

me that Heine was thinking when he wrote: 'Yes, a third man will

come'"--and Lassalle's accent became dramatically sonorous--"'and he

will conclude what Luther began, what Lessing continued, a man of whom

the Fatherland stands in such need, The Third Liberator.'"

"The Third Liberator," passionately echoed the Countess.

"Do you know," he went on, "I've often fancied it was I who gave Heine

the line of thought he developed in his sketch of German philosophy,

that our revolution will be the outcome of our Philosophy, that in the

earthquake will be heard the small still voice of Kant and Hegel. It

is what I tried to say the other day in my address on Fichte. It is

pure thought that will build up the German Empire. Reality--with its

fragments, Prussia, Saxony, etc.--will have to remould itself after

the Idea of a unified German--Republic. Why do you smile?" he broke

off uneasily, with a morbid memory of his audience drifting away into

the refreshment room.

"I was thinking of Heine's saying that we Germans are a methodical

nation, to take our thinking first and our revolution second, because

the heads that have been used for thinking may be afterwards used for

chopping off. But if you chopped off heads first, like the French,

they could not be of much use to philosophy."

Lassalle laughed. "I love Heine. He seemed my soul's brother. I loved

him from boyhood, only regretting he wasn't a republican like Börne.

Would he could have lived to see the triumph of his prediction, the

old wild Berserker rage that will arise among us Teutons when the

Talisman of the Cross breaks at last, as break it must, and the old

gods come to their own again. A tooth for a tooth, an eye for an eye.

The canting tyrants shall bite the dust, the false judges shall be

judged."

"That is how I like you to talk."

He smote the table with his fist. His own praises had fired him,

though his marvellous memory that could hold even the complete

libretti of operas had been little in doubt as to Heine's phrasing.

"Yes, the holy alliance of Science and the People--those opposite

poles! They will crush between their arms of steel all that opposes

the higher civilization. The State, the immemorial vestal fire of all

civilization--what a good phrase! I must write that down for my

_Kammergericht_ speech."

"And at the same time finish this Heine business, please, and be done

with that impertinent demoiselle. What! she must have letter for

letter! Of course it's a blessing she ceased to correspond with you.

But all the same, just see what these creatures are. No sympathy with

the wear and tear of your life. All petty egotisms and vanities! What

do they care about your world-reaching purposes? Yes, they'll sit at

your feet, but their own enjoyment or mental development is all

they're thinking of. These Russian girls are the most dreadful. I know

hundreds like your Sophie. They're a typical development of our

new-fangled age. They even take nominal husbands, merely to emancipate

themselves from the parental roof. I wonder she didn't play you that

trick. And now she's older and has got over her pique, she sees what

she has lost. But you will not be drawn in again?"

"No; you may rely on that," said Lassalle.

Her face became almost young.

"You are so ignorant of woman, _mon cher enfant_," she said, smoothing

his brown curly hair; "you are really an infant, without judgment or

reason where they are concerned."

"And you are so ignorant of man," thought Lassalle, for his

repudiation of the Russian girl had brought up vividly the vision of

his enchanting Brunehild. Did the Countess then think that a man could

feed for ever on memories? True, she had gracefully declined into a

quasi-maternal position, but a true mother would have felt more

strongly that the relation was not so sufficing to him as to her.

The Countess seemed to divine what was passing through his mind. "If

you could get a wife worthy of you," she cried. "A brain to match

yours, a soul to feel yours, a heart to echo the drum-beat of yours, a

mate for your dungeon or your throne, ready for either--but where is

this paragon?"

"You are right," cried Lassalle, subtly gratified. After all Helene

was a child with a child's will, broken by the first obstacle. "Never

have I met a woman I could really feel my mate. If ever I have kindled

a soul in one, it has been for a moment. No, I have always known I

must live and die alone. I have told you of my early love for the

beautiful Rosalie Zander, my old comrade's sister, who still lives

unmarried for love of me. But I knew that to marry her would mean

crippling myself through my tenderness. Alone I can suffer all, but

how drag a weaker than myself into the tragic circle of my destinies?

No, Curtius must leap into his gulf alone."

His words soothed her, but had a sting in them.

"But your happiness must be before all," she said, not without meaning

it. "Only convince me that you have found your equal, and she shall be

yours in the twinkling of an eye. I shouldn't even allow love-letters

to intervene--you are so colossal. Your Titanic emotions overflow

into hundreds of pages. You are the most uneconomical man I ever met."

He smiled.

"A volcano is not an ant-heap. But I know you are right. For Lassalle

the Fighter the world holds no wife. If I could only be sure that the

victory will come in my day."

"Remember what your own Heraclitus said: 'The best follow after

fame.'"

"Yes, Fame is the Being of Man in Non-Being. It is the immortality of

man made real," he quoted himself. "But--"

She hastened to continue his quotation. "'Hence it has always so

mightily stirred the greatest souls and lifted them beyond all petty

and narrow ends.'"

"The ends are great--but the means, how petty! The Presidency of a

Working-Men's Union, one not even to be founded in Berlin."

"But yet a General German Working-Men's Union. Who knows what it may

grow to! The capture of Berlin will be a matter of days."

"I had rather capture it with the sword. Bismarck is right. The German

question can only be solved by blood and iron."

"Is it worth while going over that ground again? Did we not agree last

year in Caprera when Garibaldi would not see his way to invading

Austria for us, that we must put our trust in peaceful methods. You

have as yet no real following at all. The Progressists will never make

a Revolution, for all their festivals and fanfaronades. This National

League of theirs is only a stage-threat."

"Yes, Bismarck knows our weak-kneed, white-livered _bourgeois_ too

well to be taken in by it. The League talks and Bismarck is silent.

Oh, if I had a majority in the Chamber, as they have, I'd leave _him_

to do the talking."

"But even if their rant was serious, they would allow _you_ no

leadership in their revolution. Have they not already rejected your

overtures? Therefore this deputation to you of the Leipzig working-men

(whom they practically rejected by offering them honorary membership)

is simply providential. The conception of a new and real Progressive

Party that is seething in their minds under the stimulus of their

contact with socialism in London--you did write that they had been in

London?"

"Yes; they went over to see the Exhibition. But they also represent, I

take it, the old communistic and revolutionary traditions, that have

never been wholly lulled to sleep by our pseudo-Liberalism. But that

is how history repeats itself. When the middle classes oppose the

upper classes, they always have the air of fighting for the whole

majority. But the day soon comes, especially if the middle classes get

into power, when the lower classes discover there never was any real

union of interests!"

"Well, that's just your chance!" cried the Countess. "Here is a new

party waiting to be called out of chaos, nay, calling to you. An

unformed party is just what you want. You give it the impress of your

own personality. Remember your own motto: _Si superos nequeo movere

Acheronta movebo._"

Lassalle shook his head doubtfully. He had from the first practically

resolved on developing the vague ideas of the Deputation, but he liked

to hear his own reasons in the mouth of the Countess.

"The headship of a party not even in existence," he murmured. "That

doesn't seem a very short cut to the German Republic."

"Do you doubt yourself? Think of what you were when you took up my

cause--a mere unknown boy. Think how you fought it from court to

court, picking up your Law on the way, a Demosthenes, a Cicero, till

all the world wondered and deemed you a demigod. You did that because

I stood for Injustice. You were the Quixote to right all wrong. You

saw the universal in the individual. My case was but a prefiguration

of your real mission. Now it is the universal that calls to you. See

in your triumph for me your triumph for that suffering humanity, with

which you have taught me to sympathize."

"My noble Countess!"

"What does your own Franz von Sickingen say of history?

"'And still its Form remains for ever Force.'

The Force of the modern world is the working-man. And as you yourself

have taught me that there are no real revolutions except those that

formally express what is already a fact, there wants then only the

formal expression of the working-man's Force. To this Force you will

now give Form."

"What an apt pupil!" He stooped and kissed her lips. Then, walking

about agitatedly: "Yes," he cried; "I will weld the workers of

Germany--to gain their ends they must fuse all their wills into

one--none of these acrid, petty, mutually-destructive individualities

of the _bourgeois_--one gigantic hammer, and I will be the Thor who

wields it." His veins swelled, he seemed indeed a Teutonic god. "And

therefore I must have Dictator's rights," he went on. "I will not

accept the Presidency to be the mere puppet of possible factions."

"There speaks Ferdinand Lassalle! And now, _mon cher enfant_, you

deserve to hear my secret."

She smiled brilliantly.

His heart beat a little quicker as he bent his ear to her customary

whisper. Her secrets were always interesting, sometimes sensational,

and there was always a pleasure in the sense of superiority that

knowledge conferred, and in the feeling of touching, through his

Princess-Countess, the inmost circles of European diplomacy. He was of

the gods, and should know whatever was on the knees of his

fellow-gods.

"Bismarck is thinking of granting Universal Suffrage!"

"Universal Suffrage!" he shouted.

"Hush, hush! Walls have ears."

"Then I must have inspired him."

"No; but you will have."

"How do you mean? Is it not my idea?"

"Implicitly, perhaps, but you have never really pressed for it

specifically. Your only contribution to practical politics is a futile

suggestion that the Diet should refuse to sit, and so cut off

supplies. Now of course Universal Suffrage is the first item of the

programme of your Working-Men's Union."

"Sophie!"

She smiled and nodded. "Why should Bismarck have the credit," she

whispered, "for what is practically your idea? You will seem to exact

it from him by the force of your new party, which will peg away at

that one point like the Anti-Corn-Law people in England."

"Yes; but I'll have no Manchester state-concepts."

"I know, I know. Now even if Bismarck hesitates,"--she made her

whisper still lower--"there are foreign complications looming that

will make it impossible for him to ignore the masses. Now I understand

that what the Leipzig working-men suggest is that you shall write them

an Open Letter."

"Yes. In it I shall counsel the creation of the Fourth Party, I shall

declare that the Progressists do not represent the People at all, that

their pretensions are as impertinent as their threats are hollow, that

there is no People behind them. It will be a thunderbolt! Like

Luther's nailing his theses to the church-door at Wittenberg. And to

the real masses themselves I shall declare: 'You are the rock on which

the Church of the Present is to be built. Steep yourselves in the

thought of this, your mission. The vices of the oppressed, the idle

indifference of the thoughtless, and even the harmless frivolity of

the unimportant no longer become you.' And I shall teach them how to

exact from the State the capital for co-operative associations that

will oust the capitalist."

"And make them capitalists themselves?"

"That is what Rodbertus and Marx object. But you must give the

working-man something definite, you must educate him gradually."

"Put that second if you will, but Universal Suffrage must be first."

"Naturally. It will be the instrument to force the second."

"It will be the instrument to force you to the front. Bismarck will

appear the mere tool of your will. Who knows but that the King himself

may be a pawn on your board!"