For he had reckoned without his Janko, always at hand to cover up a
scandal. The Will he had breathed into Helene had been exhausted in
the one supreme effort of her life. Sucked up again into the family
egotism, kept for weeks under a _régime_ of terror and intercepted
letters, hurried away from Geneva; chagrined and outraged, too, by her
lover's incomprehensible repudiation of her, which only success could
have excused, and which therefore became more unpardonable as day
followed day without rescue from a giant, proved merely windbag; she
fell back with compunction into the tender keeping of the ever-waiting
Janko. The one letter her father permitted her to send formally
announced her eternal love and devotion for her former _fiancé_.
Profitless to tell the story of how the stricken giant, raving in
outer darkness, this Polyphemus who had gouged out his own eye, this
Hercules self-invested in the poisoned robe of Nessus, moved heaven
and earth to see her again. It was an earthquake, a tornado, a
nightmare. He had frenzies of tears, his nights were sleepless reviews
of his folly in throwing her away, and vain phantasms of her eyes and
lips. He poured out torrents of telegrams and letters, in which cries
of torture mingled with minute legal instructions. The correspondence
of the Working-Men's Union alone was neglected. He pressed everybody
and anybody into his feverish service--musicians, artists, soldiers,
antiquarians, aristocrats. Would not Wagner induce the King of Bavaria
to speak to von Dönniges? Would not the Catholic Bishop Ketteler help
him?--he would become a Catholic. And ever present an insane belief in
the reality of her faithlessness, mockingly accompanied by a terribly
lucid recognition of the instability of character that made it
certain. The "No"--her first word to him at their first
meeting--resounded in his ears, prophetically ominous. The sunrise,
hidden by rain and mist, added its symbolic gloom. But he felt her
lips on his in the marvellous moonlight; a thousand times she clung to
him crying, "Take me away!" And now she was to be another's. She
refused even to see him. Incredible! Monstrous! If he could only get
an interview with her face to face. Then they would see if she was
resisting him of her own free will or under pressure illegal for an
adult. It was impossible his will-power over her should fail.
Helene evidently thought so too. By fair means and foul, by spies and
lawyers and friendly agents, Lassalle's frenzied energy had penetrated
through every defence to the inmost entrenchment where she sat
cowering. He had exacted the father's consent to an interview. Only
Helene's own consent was wanting. His friend Colonel Rustow brought
the sick Hercules the account of her refusal--a refusal which made
ridiculous his moving of mountains.
"But surely you owe Lassalle some satisfaction," he had protested.
"To what? To his wounded vanity?"
It was the last straw.
"Harlot!" cried Lassalle, and as in a volcanic jet, hurled her from
his burning heart.
A terrible calm settled upon him. It was as if fire should become ice.
Yes, he understood at last what Destiny had always been trying to tell
him--that love and happiness were not for him. He was consecrate to
great causes: His Will, entangled with that of others, grew feeble,
fruitless. Women were truly _enfants du diable_. He had been within an
ace of abandoning his historical mission. Now he would arise, strong,
sublime: a mighty weapon forged by the gods, and tempered by fire and
tears.
Only, one thing must first be done. The past must be wiped off. He
must recommence with a clean sheet. True, he had always refused duels.
But now he saw the fineness, the necessity of them. In a world of
chicanery and treachery the sword alone cut clean.
He sent a challenge to the father, a message of goodwill to the lover.
But it was Janko who took up the challenge.
The weapon chosen was the pistol.
Lassalle's friends begged him to practise.
"Useless! I know what is destined."
Never had he been so colossal, so assured. His nerves seemed to have
regained their tone. The night before the duel he slept like a
tranquil child.
In the early morn, on the way to the field outside Geneva, he begged
his second to arrange the duel on the French side of the frontier, so
that he might remain in Geneva and settle his account with the father.
At the word of command, "One!" Janko's shot rang out. Lassalle's was
not a second later, but he had already received his death-wound.
He lay three days, dying in terrible agony, relieved only by copious
opium. Between the spasms, surprise possessed his mind that his Will
should have counted for nothing before the imperturbable march of the
universe. "There will never be Justice for the People," he thought
bitterly. "I was a dreamer. Heine was right. A mad world, my masters."
But sometimes he had a gleam of suspicion that it was he that had
lacked sanity. His Will had become mere wilfulness. In his love as in
his crusade he had shut his eyes to the brute facts; had precipitated
what could only be coaxed. "I die by my own hand," he said. If he had
only married Rosalie Zander, who still lived on, loving him! These
Russian and Bavarian minxes were neurotic, fickle, shifting as sand;
the daughters of Judæa were sane, cheerful, solid. Then he thought of
his own sister married to that vulgarian, Friedland. He saw her, a
rosy-cheeked girl, sitting at the Passover table, with its picturesque
ritual. How happy were those far-off pious days! And then he felt a
cold wind, remembering how Riekchen had hidden her face to laugh at
these mediæval mummeries, and to spit out the bitter herbs, so
meaningless to her.
O terrible tragi-comedy of life, O strange, tangled world, in which
poor, petty man must walk, tripped by endless coils--religion, race,
sex, custom, wealth, poverty! World that from boyhood he had seemed to
see stretching so clearly before him, to be mapped out with lucid
logic, to be bestridden with triumphant foot by men become as gods,
knowing good and evil.
Only one thing was left--to die unbroken.
He had his lawyer brought to his bedside, went through his last
testament again, left money for the Union, recommended it to the
workers as their one sure path of salvation. Moses had only been
permitted to gaze upon the Promised Land, but the Chosen People--the
Germans--should yet luxuriate in its milk and honey.
A month after his meeting with Helene on the Righi--a month after his
glad shout, "By all the gods of Greece, 'tis she!"--he was a corpse,
the magic voice silent for ever; while the woman he had sought was to
give herself to his slayer, and the movement he had all but abandoned
for her was to become a great power in the State, under the
ever-growing glamour of his memory.
The Countess bent over the body. A strange, grim joy mingled with her
rage and despair. None of all these women had the right to share in
her grief. He belonged to her--to her and the People. Yes, she would
bear the body of her _cher enfant_ through the provinces of the
Rhine--he had been murdered by a cunning political plot, the People
who loved him should rise and avenge their martyred Messiah.
And suddenly she remembered with a fresh pang the one woman who had a
right to share her grief, nay, to call him--in no figurative
sense--"_enfant_"; the wrinkled old Jewess, palsied and deaf and
peevish, who lived on in a world despoiled of his splendid fighting
strength, of his superb fore-visionings.