Chapter XVI: Part II: Uriel Acosta (11)

"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!"

Lassalle seized her hands. "There I recognize my soul's mate."

"And I recognize the voice of the von Bulows," she said, with a half-sob in her laughter, as she drew back.

The lunch was brilliant, blending the delicate perfume of aristocracy with free-and-easy Bohemianism, and enhanced by the artistic background of pictures, bric-à-brac, and marble facsimiles of the masterpieces of statuary, including the Venus of Milo and the Apollo Belvedere.

The Countess stayed only long enough to smoke a couple of cigarettes, but the other guests were much longer in shaking off the fascination of Lassalle's boyish spirits and delightful encyclopædic monologues. When the last guest was gone, Lassalle betook himself to the best florist in Berlin, composing a birthday poem on the way. At the shop he wrote it down, and, signing it "F.L.," placed it in the most beautiful basket of flowers he could find. The direction was Fräulein Helene von Dönniges.

VII

The "Open Reply Letter" did not thrill the world like a Lutheran thesis, but it made the Progressists very angry. What! they had not the People behind them! They were only exploiting, not representing the People! And while the Court organs chuckled over this flank attack on their bragging foes, the Liberal organs denounced Lassalle as the catspaw of reaction. The whilom "friends of the working-man," in their haste to overturn Lassalle's position, tumbled into their own pits. Schulze-Delitzsch himself, founder of co-operative working-men's societies, denouncer of the middleman, now found himself--in the face of Lassalle's uncompromising analysis--praising the Law of Competition, while that Iron Law of Wages, their tendency to fall to the minimum of subsistence (which was in the canon of all orthodox economists), was denied the moment it was looked at resentfully from the wage-earner's standpoint. Herculean labors now fell upon Lassalle--a great speech of four hours at Frankfort-on-the-Main, the founding of the General German Working-Men's Union, with himself as dictator for five years, the delivery of inflammatory speeches in town after town, the publishing of pamphlets against the Progressists, attempts to capture Berlin for the cause, the successful fighting of his own law-case. And amid all this, the writing of one of his most wonderful and virulent books, at once deeply instructing and passionately inflaming the German working-man.

And always the same sledge-hammer hitting at the same nail--Universal Suffrage. Get that and you may get everything. Nourish no resentment against the capitalists. They are the product of history as much as your happier children will be. But on the other hand, no inertia, no submission! Wake up! English or French working-men would follow me in a trice. You are a pack of valets.

In such a whirl Helene von Dönniges was shot off from his mind as a spinning-top throws off a straw.

But when, after a couple of months of colossal activity, incessant correspondence, futile attempts to convert friends, quarrels with the authorities, grapplings with the internal cabals of the Union itself, he fled on his summer tour--where was the great new Party? He had hoped to have five hundred thousand men at his back, but they had come in by beggarly hundreds. There was even talk of an insurance bonus to attract them. Lassalle had exaggerated both the magnetism of his personality and the intelligence and discontent of the masses. His masterful imagination had made the outer world a mere reflection of his inner world. Even in those early days, when he was scarcely known, and that favorably rather than otherwise, he had imagined himself the pet aversion of the comfortable classes. Knowing the rôle he purposed to play, his dramatic self-consciousness had reaped in anticipation the rebel's reward. And now, though he was nearer detestation than before, there was still no Party of revolt for him to lead. But he worked on undaunted, Titanic, spending his money to subsidize tottering democratic papers, using his summer journeyings to try to attach not abilities in the countries he passed through, and his stay at the waters to draw up a great speech, with which he toured on his return. And now a new cry! The cowardly venal Press must be swept away. "As true as you are here, hanging on my lips, eager and transported, as true as my soul trembles with the purest enthusiasm in pouring itself wholly into yours, so truly does the certainty penetrate me that a day will come when we shall launch the thunderbolt which will bury that Press in eternal night." He proposed that the newspapers should therefore be deprived of their advertisement columns. What wonder if they accused him of playing Bismarck's game! And, indeed, there was not wanting direct mention of Bismarck in the speech. He at least was a man, while the Progressists were old women. The orator mocked their festive demonstrations. They were like the Roman slaves who, during the Saturnalia, played at being free. To spare themselves a real battle, the defeated were intoning among the wines and the victuals a hymn of victory. "Let us lift up our arms and pledge ourselves, if this Revolution should come about, whether in this way or in that, to remember that the Progressists and members of the National League to the last declared they wanted _no_ revolution! Pledge yourselves to do this, raise your hands on high!" At the Sonningen meeting in the great shooting-gallery, they not only raised their hands, but their knives, against interrupting Progressists. The Burgomaster, a Progressist, at the head of ten gendarmes armed with bayonets, and policemen with drawn swords, dissolved the meeting. Lassalle, half followed, half borne onward by six thousand cheering men, strode to the telegraph office, and sent off a telegram to Bismarck. His working-men's meeting had been dissolved by a Progressist Burgomaster without any legal justification. "I ask for the severest, promptest legal satisfaction."

VIII

Bismarck took no official notice. But it was not long before the Countess succeeded in bringing the two men together. The way had indeed been paved. If Lassalle's idealism had survived the experience of the Hatzfeldt law-suits, if he had yet to learn that the Fighter cannot pick his steps as cleanly and logically as the Thinker, those miry law-suits, waged unscrupulously on both sides, had prepared him to learn the lesson readily and to apply it unflinchingly. Without Force behind one, victory must be sought more circuitously. But to a man who represents no Force, how shall Bismarck listen? What have you to offer? "_Do ut des_" is his overt motto. To poor devils I have nothing to say. Lassalle must therefore needs magnify his office of President, wave his arm with an air of vague malcontent millions. Was Bismarck taken in? Who shall say? In after-years, though he had in the meantime granted Universal Suffrage in Prussia, he told the Reichstag he was merely fascinated by this marvellous conversationalist, who delighted him for hours, without his being able to get a word in; by this grandiloquent Demagogue without a Demos, who plainly loved Germany, yet was uncertain whether the German Empire would be formed by a Hohenzollern dynasty or a Lassalle dynasty. And, in truth, since extremes meet, there was much in Lassalle's conception of the State, and in his German patriotism, which made him subtly akin to the Conservative Chancellor. They walked arm-in-arm in the streets of Berlin, Bismarck parading heart on sleeve; they discussed the annexation of Schleswig-Holstein. Bismarck promised both Universal Suffrage and State-Capitalized Associations--"only let us wait till the war is done with!" _En attendant_, the profit of his strange alliance with this thorn in his enemies' flesh, was wholly to the Minister. But Lassalle, exalted to forgetfulness of the pettiness of the army at his back, almost persuaded himself to believe as he believed Bismarck believed. "Bismarck is my tool, my plenipotentiary," he declared to his friends. And to his judges: "I play cards on table, gentlemen, for the hand is strong enough. Perhaps before a year is over Universal Suffrage will be the law of the land, and Bismarck will have enacted the rôle of Sir Robert Peel." He even gave his followers to understand that the King of Prussia's promise to consider the condition of the Silesian weavers was the result of his pressure. And was not the Bishop of Mayence an open partisan? Church, King, and Minister, do you not see them all dragged at my chariot wheels? Nevertheless, he failed completely to organize a branch at Berlin. And new impeachments for inciting to hatred and contempt, and for high-treason, came to cripple his activity. "If I have glorified political passion," he cried in his defence, "I have only followed Hegel's maxim: 'Nothing great has ever been done in the world without passion.'"

He was in elegant evening dress, with patent-leather boots, the one cool person in the stifling court. For hours and hours he spoke, with the perpetually changing accents of the great orator who has so studied his art that it has become nature. Now he was winning, persuasive, now menacing, terrible, now with disdainful smile and half-closed eyes of contempt. And ever and anon he threw back his head with the insolent majesty of a Roman Emperor. Even when there was a touch of personal pathos, defiance followed on its heels. "I used to go to gaol as others go to the ball, but I am no longer young. Prison is hard for a mature man, and there is no article of the code that entitles you to send me there." Yet six months' imprisonment was adjudged him, and the most he could obtain by his ingeniously inexhaustible technical pleas was deferment of his punishment.

But there was consolation in the memories of his triumphal tour through the Rhenish provinces, where the Union had struck widest root. Town after town sent its whole population to greet him. Roaring thousands met him at the railway stations, and he passed under triumphal arches and through streets a-flutter with flags, where working-girls welcomed him with showers of roses. "Such scenes as these," he wrote to the Countess, "must have attended the foundation of new religions." And, indeed, as weeping working-men fought to draw his carriage, and as he looked upon the vast multitudes surging around him, he could not but remember Heine's prophecy: "You will be the Messiah of the nineteenth century."

"I have not grasped this banner," he cried at Ronsdorf, "without knowing quite clearly that I myself may fall. But in the words of the Roman poet:

"'Exoriare aliquis nostris ex ossibus ultor.'

May some avenger and successor arise out of my bones! May this great and national movement of civilization not fall with my person. But may the conflagration which I have kindled spread farther and farther as long as one of you still breathes!"

Those were his last words to the working-men of Germany.

For beneath all the flowers and the huzzahing what a tragedy of broken health and broken hopes! Each glowing speech represented a victory over throat-disease and over his own fits of scepticism. His nerves, shattered by the tremendous strain of the year, the fevers, the disillusions, the unprofitable shiftings of standpoint, painted the prospect as black as they had formerly ensanguined it. And the six months' imprisonment hanging over him gained added terrors from his physical breakdown. Even on his eider-down bed he could not woo sleep--how then on a prison pallet?

When he started the Union he had imagined he could bring the Socialistic movement to a head in a year. When, after a year as crammed as many a lifetime, he went down at the Countess's persuasion to take the milk-cure at Kaltbad on the Righi, he confessed to his friend Becker that he saw no near hope save from a European war.

IX

One stormy day at the end of July, a bovine-eyed Swiss boy, dripping with rain, appeared at the hygienic hotel, where Lassalle sat brooding with his feet on the mantelpiece, to tell him that a magnificent lady wanted to see him. She was with a party that had taken refuge in a mountain-side shed. A great coup his resurging energy was meditating at Hamburg, was swept clean from his mind.

He dashed down, his heart beating with a hopeless surmise, and saw, amid a strange group, the golden hair of Helene von Dönniges shining like a star. He accepted it at once as the star of his destiny. His strength seemed flowing back in swift currents of glowing blood.

"By all the gods of Greece," he cried, "'tis she!"

In an instant they were lovers again, and her American friend and confidante, Mrs. Arson, was enchanted by this handsome apparition, which, Helene protested, she had only summoned up half laughingly. Dear old Holthoff had written her that Lassalle was somewhere on the Righi, but she had not really believed she would stumble on him. She was suffering from nervous prostration, and it was only the accident of Mrs. Arson's holiday plan for her children that had enabled her to obey the doctor's advice to breathe mountain air.

"I breathe it for the first time," said Lassalle. "Do you know what I was doing when your boy-angel came? Writing to Holthoff and old Boeckh the philologist for introductions to your father. The game has dallied on long enough. We must finish."

Helene blushed charmingly, and looked at Mrs. Arson with a glance that sought protection against and admiration for his audacity.

"I guess you're made for each other," said Mrs. Arson, carried off her feet. "Why, you're like twins. Are you relatives?"

"That's what everybody asks," said Helene. "Why, even before I met him, people piqued my curiosity about him by saying I talked like him."

"It was the best compliment I had ever received--said behind my back too. But people are right for once. Do you know that the painter to whom I gave your portrait to inspire him for the Brunehild fresco said that in drawing our two faces he discovered that they have exactly the same anatomical structure."

Her face took on that fascinating _diablerie_ which men found irresistible.

"Then your compliments to me are only boomerangs."

"Boomerangs only return when they miss."

The storm abating, they moved up the mountain, talking gaily. Mrs. Arson and her children kept considerately in the rear with their guide. Helene admired Lassalle's stick. He handed it to her.

"It was Robespierre's. Förster the historian gave it me. That _repoussé_ gold-work on the handle is of course the Bastille."

"How appropriate!" she laughed.

"Which? The Bastille to the stick, or the stick to me?"

"Both."

He grew serious.

"What would you do if I lost my head?"

"I should stand by till your head was severed in order that you might look on your beloved to the last. Then I should take poison."

"My Cleopatra!"

Her fitful face changed.

"Or marry Janko!"

"That weakling--is he still hovering?"

"He passed the winter with us. He looks upon me as his," she said dolefully.

"I flick him away. Do not try to belong to another. I tell you solemnly I claim you as mine. We cannot resist destiny. Our meeting to-day proves it. To-morrow we climb to see the sunrise together,--the sunrise over the mountains. Symbol of our future that begins. The heavens opening in purple and gold over the white summits--love breaking upon your virginal purity."

Already she felt, as of yore, swept off on roaring seas. But the rush and the ecstasy had their alloy of terror. To be with him was to be no longer herself, but a hypnotized stranger. Perhaps she was unwise to have provoked this meeting. She should have remembered he was not to be coquetted with. As well put a match to a gunpowder barrel to warm your fingers. Every other man could be played with. This one swallowed you up.

"But Prince Janko has no one but me," she tried to protest. "My little Moorish page, my young Othello!"

"Keep him a page. Othellos are best left bachelors. Remember the fate of Desdemona."

"I'll give you both up," she half whimpered. "I'll go on the stage."

"You!"

"Yes. Everybody says I'm splendid at burlesque. You should see me as a boy."

"You baby! You need no triumphs in the mimic world. Your rôle is grander."

"Oh, please let us wait for Mrs. Arson. You go too fast."

"I don't. I have waited a year for you. When shall we marry?"

"Not before our wedding-day."

"Evasive Helene!"

"Cruel Ferdinand! Ask anything of me, but not will-power."

A little cough came to accentuate her weakness.

"My darling!" he cried in deep emotion. "We'll fly to Egypt or the Indies. I'll hang up politics and all that frippery. My books and science shall claim me again, and I will watch over my ailing little girl till she becomes the old splendid Brunehild again!"

"No, no, I am no Brunehild; only a modern woman with nerves--the most feminine woman in the world, irresponsible, capricious--please, please remember."

"If you were not yourself I should not love you."

"But it cannot come to anything."

"Cannot? The word is for pigmies."

"But my mother?"

"She is a woman--I will talk to her."

"My father!"

"He is a man, with men one can always get on. They are reasonable. Besides, you tell me he is an author, and I will read his famous books."

She smiled faintly. "But there is myself."

"You are myself--and I never doubt myself."

"Oh, but there are heaps of other difficulties."

"There are none other."

She pouted deliciously. "You don't know everything under the sun."

"Under your aureole of hair, do you mean?"

"What if I do?" she smiled back. "You must not trust me too far. I am a spoilt child--wild, unbridled, unaccustomed to please others except by pleasing myself."

Her actress-nature enjoyed the picture of herself. She felt that Baudelaire himself would have admired it. Lassalle's answer was subtly attuned:

"My Satanic enchantress! my bewitching child of the devil."

"_Bien fou qui s'y fie._ When I lived at Nice in that royal Bohemia, where musicians rubbed shoulders with grand-duchesses, and the King of Bavaria exchanged epigrams with Bulwer Lytton, do you know what they called me?"

"The Queen of all the Follies!"

"You know?"

"Did I not love my Brunehild ere we met?"

"Yes, and I--knew of you. Only I didn't recognize you at first, because they told me you were a frightful demagogue and--a--a--Jew!"

He laughed. "And so you expected a gaberdine. And yet surely Bulwer Lytton gave you a presentation copy of _Leila_. Don't you remember the Jew in it? As a boy I had his ideal--to redeem my people. But if my Judaism offends you, I can become a Christian--not in belief of course, but--"

"Oh, not for worlds. I believe too little myself to bother about religion. My friends call me the Greek, because I can readily believe in many gods, but only with difficulty in one."

He laughed. "Is it the same in love?"

Her eyes gleamed archly.

"Yes. Hitherto, at least, a single man has never sufficed. With only one I had time to see all his faults, and since my first love, a Russian officer, I would always have preferred to keep three knives dancing in the air. But as that was impossible, I generally halved my loaf."

The mountains rang with his laughter.

"Well. I haven't lived a saint, and I can't expect my wife to bring more than I."

"You bring too much. You bring that Countess."

"My dear Helene," he said, struck serious. "I am entirely free in regard to the Countess, as she is long since as regards me. Of course she will, at the first shock, feel opposed to my marriage with a distinguished young girl on the same intellectual level as herself. That is human, feminine, natural. But when she knows you she will adore you, and you will repay her in kind, since she is my second mother. You do not understand her. The dear Countess desires no other happiness than to see me happy."

"And therefore," said Helene cynically, "she will warn you to beware. She will hunt up all my offences against holy German morals--"

"I don't care what she hunts up. All I ask is, be a monotheist henceforwards."

"Now you are asking _me_ to become a Jewess."

"I ask you only to become my wife."

He caught her hands passionately. His eyes seemed to drink her in. She fluttered, enjoying her bird-like helplessness.

"Turn your eyes away, my royal eagle!"

"You are mine! you are mine!" he cried.

"I am my father's--I am Janko's," she panted.

"They are shadows. Listen to yourself. Be true to yourself."

"I have no self. It seems so selfish to have one. I am anything--a fay, a sprite, an elf." She freed her hands with a sudden twist and ran laughing up the mountain.

"To the sunrise!" she cried. "To the sunrise!"

He gave chase: "To the sunrise! To the symbol!"

X

But the next morning the symbolic sunrise they rose to see was hidden by fog and rain.

And--what was still more disappointing to Lassalle--Mrs. Arson insisted on escaping with her charges from this depressing climate and re-descending to Wabern, the village near Berne, where they had been staying.

Not even Lassalle's fascinations and persuasions could counteract the pertinacious plash-plash of-the rain, and the chilling mist, and perhaps the uneasy pricks of her awakening chaperon-conscience. Nor could he extract a decisive "Yes" from his fluttering volatile enchantress. At Kaltbad, where they said farewell, he pressed her hands with passion. "For a little while! Be prudent and strong! You have the goodness of a child--and a child's will. Oh, if I could pour into these blue veins"--he kissed them fiercely--"only one drop of my giant's will, of my Titanic energy. Grip my hands; perhaps I can do it by magnetism. I will to join our lives. You must will too. Then there are no difficulties. Only say 'Yes'--but definitely, unambiguously, of your own free will--and I answer for the rest."

The thought of Janko resurged painfully when his giant's will was left behind on the heights. How ill she would be using him--her pretty delicate boy!

The giant's will left behind her? Never had Helene been more mistaken. The very reverse! It went before her all day like a pillar of fire. At the first stopping-place a letter already awaited her, brought by a swift courier; lower down a telegram; as she got off her horse another letter; at her hotel two copious telegrams; as she stepped on board the lake steamer a final letter--all breathing passion, encouragement, solicitous instructions to wrap up well.

Wrap up well! He wrapped one up in himself!

Half fascinated, half panting for free air, but wholly flattered and enamoured, she wrote at once to break off with Janko and surrender to her Satanic Ferdinand.

"Yes, friend Satan, the child _wills_! A drop of your diabolical blood has passed into her veins. I am yours for life. But first try reasonable means. Make my parents' acquaintance, cover up your horns and tail, try and win me like a bourgeois. If that fails, there is always Egypt. But quick, quick: I cannot bear scenes and delays and comments. Once we are married, let society stare. With you to lean on I snap my fingers at the world. The obstacles are gigantic, but you are also a giant, who with God's help smashes rocks to sand, that even my breath can blow away. I must stab the beautiful dream of a noble youth, but even this--frightfully painful for me as it is--I do for you. I say nothing of the disappointment to my parents, of the pain of all I love and respect. I am writing to Holthoff, my father-confessor. We must have him for us, with us, near us. God has destined us for each other."

A telegram replied: "Bravissimo! I am on my way to join you."

And to the Countess, fighting rheumatism at the waters of Wildbad in the Black Forest, he wrote: "The rain has passed, the long fog has gone. The mountains stand out mighty and dazzling, peak beyond peak, like the heights of a life. What a sunset! The Eiger seemed wrapped in a vapor of burning gold. My sufferings are nearly all wiped out. I am joyous, full of life and love. And I have also finished at last with that terrible correspondence for the Union. Seventy-six pages of minute writing have I sent to Berlin yesterday and to-day, and I breathe again. In my yesterday's letter I broke Helene to you. It is extraordinarily fortunate that on the verge of forty I should be able to find a wife so beautiful, so sympathetic, who loves me so much, and who, as you and I agreed was indispensable, is entirely absorbed in my personality. In your last letter you throw cold water on my proposed journey to Hamburg; and perhaps you are right in thinking the coup I planned not so great and critical as I have been imagining. But how you misunderstand my motives when you write: 'Cannot you, till your health is re-established, find contentment for a while in science, in friendship, in Nature?' You think politics the breath of my nostrils. Ah, how little you are _au fait_ with me! I desire nothing more ardently than to be quite rid of all politics, and to devote myself to science, friendship, and Nature. I am sick and tired of politics. Truly I would burn as passionately for them as any one, if there were anything serious to be done, or if I had the power or saw the means, a means worthy of me; for without supreme power nothing can be done. For child's play, however, I am too old and too great. That is why I very reluctantly undertook the Presidentship. I only yielded to you, and that is why it now weighs upon me terribly. If I were but rid of it, this were the moment I should choose to go to Naples with you. But how to get rid of it? For events, I fear, will develop slowly, so slowly, and my burning soul finds no interest in these children's maladies and petty progressions. Politics means actual, immediate activity. Otherwise one can work just as well for humanity by writing. I shall still try to exercise at Hamburg a pressure upon events. But up to what point it will be effective I cannot say. Nor do I promise myself much from it. Ah, could I but get out of it!

"Helene is a wonderful creature, the only personality I could wed. She looks forward to your friendship. I know it. For I am a good observer of women without seeming to be. That dear _enfant du diable_, as everybody calls her at Geneva, has a deep sympathy for you, because she is, as Goethe puts it, an original nature. Only one fault--but gigantic. She has no Will. But if we became husband and wife, that would cease to be a fault. I have enough Will for two, and she would be the flute in the hands of the artist. But till then--"

The Countess showed herself a kind Cassandra. His haste, she replied, would ruin his cause. He had to deal with Philistines. The father was a man of no small self-esteem--he had been the honored tutor of Maximilian II., and was now in high favor at the Bavarian court, even controlling university and artistic appointments. A Socialist would be especially distasteful to him. Twenty years ago Varnhagen von Ense had heard him lecture on Communism--good-humoredly, wittily, shrugging shoulders at these poor, fantastic fools who didn't understand that the world was excellently arranged centuries before they were born. Helene herself, with her weak will, would be unable to outface her family. Before approaching the parents, had he not better wait the final developments of his law-case? If he had to leave Germany temporarily to escape the imprisonment, would not that be a favorable opportunity for prosecuting his love-affairs in Switzerland? And what a pity to throw up his milk-cure! "_Enfin_, I wish you success, _mon cher enfant_, though I will only put complete trust in my own eyes. In feminine questions you have neither reason nor judgment."

Lassalle's response was to enclose a pretty letter from Helene, pleading humbly for the Countess's affection. Together let them nurse the sick eagle. She herself was but a child, and would lend herself to any childish follies to drive the clouds from his brow. She would try to comprehend his magnificent soul, his giant mind, and in happiness or in sorrow would remain faithful and firm at his side.

The Countess knit her brow. Then Lassalle was already with this Helena in Berne.

XI

It was a week of delicious happiness, niched amid the eternal mountains, fused with skies and waters.

With an accommodating chaperon who knew no German, the couple could do and say what they pleased. Lassalle, throwing off the heavy burdens of prophet and politician, alternated between brilliant lover and happy-hearted boy. It was almost a honeymoon. Now they were children with all the overflowing endearments of plighted lovers. Now they were on the heights of intellect, talking poetry and philosophy, and reading Lassalle's works; now they were discussing Balzac's _Physiologie du Mariage_. Anon Lassalle was a large dog, gambolling before his capricious mistress. "Lie down, sir," she cried once, as he was reading a poem to her. And with peals of Homeric laughter Ferdinand declared she had found the only inoffensive way of silencing him. "If ever I displease you in future, you have only to say, 'Lie down, sir!'" And he began barking joyously.

And in the glow of this happiness his sense of political defeat evaporated. He burgeoned, expanded, flung back his head in the old, imperial way. "By God!" he said, marching up and down the room feverishly, "you have chosen no mean destiny. Have you any idea of what Ferdinand Lassalle's wife will be? Look at me!" He stood still. "Do I look a man to be content with the second rôle in the State? Do you think I give the sleep of my nights, the marrow of my bones, the strength of my lungs, to draw somebody else's chestnuts out of the fire? Do I look like a political martyr? No! I wish to act, to fight, and also to enjoy the crown of victory, to place it on your brow."

A vision of the roaring streets and floral arches of the Rhenish cities flashed past him. "Chief of the People, President of the German Republic,--there's the only true sovereignty. That was what kings were once--giants of brain and brawn. King--one who knows, one who can! Headship is for the head. What is this mock dignity that stands on the lying breaths of winking courtiers? What is this farcical, factitious glamour that will not bear the light of day? The Grace of God? Ay, give me god-like manhood, and I will bend the knee. But to ask me to worship a stuffed purple robe on a worm-eaten throne! 'Tis an insult to manhood and reason. Hereditary kingship! When you can breed souls as you breed racehorses it will be time to consider that. Stand here by my side before this mirror. Is not that a proud, a royal couple? Did not Nature fashion these two creatures in a holiday mood of joy and intoxication? _Vive la République_ and its Queen with the golden locks!"

"_Vive la République_ and its eagle King!" she cried, intoxicated, yet with more of dramatic enjoyment than of serious conviction.

"Bravo! You believe in our star! Since I met you I see it shining clearer over the heights. We mount, we mount, peak beyond peak. We have enemies enough now, thick as the serpents in tropic forests. Well, let them soil with their impure slaver the hem of our garments. But how they will crawl fangless when Ferdinand--the Elect of the People--makes his solemn entry into Berlin. And at his side, drawn by six white horses, his blonde darling, changed into the first woman of Germany." He, too, though to him the fancy was real enough for the moment, enjoyed it with a certain artistic aloofness.

XII

In honor of the _fiancés_--for such they openly avowed themselves, Geneva and Helene's family being sufficiently distant to be temporarily forgotten--the American Consul at Berne gave a charming dinner. There was a gallant old Frenchman, a honey-tongued Italian, a pervasive air of complimentary congratulation. Helene returned to her hotel, thrilling with pleasure and happy auguries. The night was soft and warm. Before undressing she leaned out of the window of her room on the ground floor, and gazed upon the eternal glaciers, sparkling like silver under the full moon. Through every sense she drank in the mystery and perfume of the night, till her spirit seemed at one with the stars and the mountains. Suddenly she felt two mighty arms clasped about her. Lassalle stood outside. Her heart throbbed violently.

"Hush!" he said, "don't be frightened. I will stay outside here, good and quiet, till you are tired and say, 'Lie down, sir!' Then I will go!"

"My gentle Romeo!" she whispered, and bent her fragrant lips to meet his--the divine kiss of god and goddess in the divine night. "My Ferdinand!" she breathed. "If we should be parted after all. I tremble to think of it. My father will never consent."

"He shall consent. And you don't even need his consent. You are of age."

"Then take me now, dear heart. I am yours--your creature, your thing. Fly away with me, my beautiful eagle, to Paris, to Egypt, where you will. Let us be happy Bohemians. We do not need the world. We have ourselves, and the moonlight, and the mountains."

She was maddening to-night, his _enfant du diable_. But he kept a last desperate grip upon his common sense. What would his friends say if he involved Helene in the scandal of an elopement? What would Holthoff say, what Baron Korff? Surely this was not the conduct that would commend itself to the chivalry and nobility of Berlin! And besides, how could his political career survive a new scandal? He was already sufficiently hampered by his old connection with the Countess, and not even a public acquittal and twenty years had sufficed to lay that accusation of instigating the stealing of a casket of papers from her husband's mistress, which was perhaps the worst legacy of the great Hatzfeldt case. No, he must win his bride honorably: the sanctities and dignities of wedlock were seductive to the Bohemian in love.

"We shall have ourselves and the world, too," he urged gently. "Let us enter our realm with the six white horses, not in a coach with drawn blinds. Your father shall give you to me, I tell you, in the eye of day. What, am I an advertisement canvasser to be shown the door? Shall my darling not have as honorable nuptials as her father's wife. Shall the Elect of the People confess that a petty diplomatist didn't consider him good enough for a son-in-law? Think how Bismarck would chuckle. After all I have said to him!"

Her confidence came back. Yes, one might build one's house on the rock of such a Will! "What have you said to him?"

He laughed softly. "I've let slip a secret, little girl."

"Tell me."

"Incredible! That baby with her little fingers,"--he seized them--"with her fairy paws, she plunges boldly into my most precious secrets, into my heart's casket, picks out the costliest jewel, and asks for it."

"Well, do you like him? Is he an intellectual spirit?"

"Hum! If he is, we are not. He is iron, and of iron we make steel, and of steel pretty weapons; but one can make nothing but weapons. I prefer gold. Gold like my darling's hair"--he caressed it--"like my own magic power over men. You shall see, darling, how your gold and mine will triumph."

"But you also are always speaking of arms, of blood, of battles; and Revolutions are scarcely forged without arms and iron."

"Child, child," he answered, drawing her golden locks to his lips, "why do you wish to learn all in this beautiful starry night? The conquests of thousands of years, the results of profound studies, you ask for as for toys. To speak of battles, to call to arms, is by no means the same thing as to sabre one's fellow, one's brother, with icy heart and bloodstained hand. Don't you understand, sly little thing, of what arms I speak, of the golden weapons of the spirit, eloquence, the love of humanity, the effort to raise to manly dignity the poor, the unfortunate, the workers. Above all, I mean--Will. These noble weapons, these truly golden weapons, I count higher and more useful than the rusted swords of Mediævalism."

Her eyes filled with tears. She felt herself upborne on waves of religious emotion towards those shining stars. The temptation was over.

"Good-night, my love," she said humbly.

He drew her face to his in passionate farewell, and seemed as if he would never let her go. When her window closed he strode towards the glaciers.

An adventure next day came to show the conquered Helena that her spiritual giant was no less king of men physically. At the American Consul's dinner an expedition on the Niessen had been arranged. But as the party was returning at nightfall across the fields, and laughing over Lassalle's sprightly anecdotes, suddenly a dozen diabolical gnomes burst upon them with savage roars and incomprehensible inarticulate jabberings, and began striking at hazard with their short, solid cudgels, almost ere the startled picnickers could recognize in these bestial creatures, with their enormously swollen heads and horrible hanging goitres, the afflicted idiot peasants of the valley. The gallant Frenchman and the honey-tongued Italian screamed with the women, and made even less play with umbrellas and straps; but Lassalle fell like a thunderbolt with his Robespierre stick upon the whole band of cretins, and reduced them to howls and bloodstained tears. It was only then that Lassalle was able to extract from them that the party had trampled over the hay in their fields, and that they demanded compensation. Being given money, they departed, growling and waving their cudgels. When the excursionists looked at one another they found themselves all in rags, and Lassalle's face disfigured by two heavy blows. Helene ran to him with a cry.

"You are wounded, bruised!"

"No, only one of the towers of the Bastille," he said, ruefully surveying the stick; "the brutes have dinted it."

"And there are people who call him coward because he won't fight duels," thought Helene adoringly.

XIII

The drama shifted to Geneva, where heroine preceded hero by a few hours, charged to be silent till her parents had personally experienced Lassalle's fascinations. He had scarcely taken possession of his room in the Pension Bovet when a maidservant brought in a letter from Helene, and ere he had time to do more than break the envelope, Helene herself burst in.

"Take me away, take me away," she cried hysterically.

He flew to support her.

"What has happened?"

"I cannot bear it. I cannot fight them. Save me, my king, my master. Let us fly across the frontier--to Paris." She clung to him wildly.

Sternness gathered on his brow.

"Then you have disobeyed me!" he said. "Why?"

"I have written you," she sobbed.

He laid her gently on the bed, and ran his eye through the long, hysteric letter.

Unhappy coincidence! At Helene's arrival, her whole family had met her joyously at the railway station, overbrimming with the happy news that her little sister, Marguerite, had just been proposed to by Count Kayserling.

Helene had thought this a heaven-sent opportunity of breaking her own happiness to her radiant mother, foolishly forgetting that the Count Kayserling would be the last man in the world to endure a Jew and a demagogue as a brother-in-law. Terrible scenes had followed--the mother's tears, the father's thunders, the general family wail and supplication, sisters trembling for their prospects, brothers anticipating the sneers of club-land. What! exchange Prince Janko for a thief!

Cross-examined by Lassalle, Helene admitted her mother was not so furious as her father, and had even, weeping on her bosom, promised to try and smooth the Baron down. But she knew that was impossible--her father considered nothing but his egoistic plans. And so, when the dinner-bell was sounding, informed with a mad courage by the thought of her hero's proximity, she had flown to him.