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 ma.s.ses. 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 ma.s.ses 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 a.s.sociations 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 p.a.w.n on your board!"

La.s.salle 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-a-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 La.s.salle's boyish spirits and delightful encyclopaedic monologues.

When the last guest was gone, La.s.salle 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 Fraulein Helene von Donniges.

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 La.s.salle as the catspaw of reaction. The whilom "friends of the working-man,"

in their haste to overturn La.s.salle'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 La.s.salle's uncompromising a.n.a.lysis--praising the Law of Compet.i.tion, 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 La.s.salle--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 pa.s.sionately 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 Donniges 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. La.s.salle had exaggerated both the magnetism of his personality and the intelligence and discontent of the ma.s.ses. 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 cla.s.ses. Knowing the role he purposed to play, his dramatic self-consciousness had reaped in antic.i.p.ation 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, t.i.tanic, spending his money to subsidize tottering democratic papers, using his summer journeyings to try to attach not abilities in the countries he pa.s.sed 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 advertis.e.m.e.nt 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.

La.s.salle, 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 La.s.salle'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. La.s.salle 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 La.s.salle dynasty. And, in truth, since extremes meet, there was much in La.s.salle'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 a.s.sociations--"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 La.s.salle, 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 role 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 pa.s.sion," he cried in his defence, "I have only followed Hegel's maxim: 'Nothing great has ever been done in the world without pa.s.sion.'"

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 ent.i.tles 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 pa.s.sed 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 mult.i.tudes 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 La.s.salle 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 Donniges 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 G.o.ds 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 La.s.salle 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 La.s.salle. "Do you know what I was doing when your boy-angel came? Writing to Holthoff and old Bckh 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 La.s.salle's stick. He handed it to her.

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