“Well, a few months after that, I managed to get into trouble with the authorities at Cologne, along with a few other comrades.  We heard that we were to be arrested and knew that we could expect no mercy.  So Barbara and I talked things over and we decided to clear out at once, and go to London.  We sold our few things to a good comrade, and with the money made our way at once to join Barbara’s sister in Dean street.  I never dreamed that we should find Karl living next door to us.

“But we did.  Nobody told me about him ­I suppose that nobody in our house knew who he was ­but a few days after we arrived I saw him pass and ran out and called to him.  My, he looked so thin and worn out that my heart ached!  But he was glad to see me and grasped my hand with both of his.  Karl could shake hands in a way that made you feel he loved you more than anybody else in all the world.

“In a little while he had told me enough for me to understand why he was so pale and thin.  If it were not for hurting his feelings, I could have cried at the things he told me.  He and the beautiful Jenny without food sometimes, and no bed to lie upon!  And it seemed all the worse to me because I knew how well they had been reared, how they had been used to solid comfort and even luxury.

“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.