The Marx He Knew | Page 3

von Holst
was like a great mad bull."
"And was he disciplined?"
"To be sure he was! His father was very angry, too. But what did we
care about that? We sang the verses on the streets, and wrote them on
the walls or anywhere else that we could. We made it so hot for the
poor teacher that he had to give up and leave the town. I wish I could
remember the verses, but I never was any good for remembering poetry,
and it was a long, long time ago--more than three score years ago now.
"We thought it was funny that Karl never gave over playing with the
girls--his sister and Jenny von Westphalen. When we were all big boys
and ashamed to be seen playing with girls, he would play with them
just the same, and sometimes when we asked him to play with us he
would say, 'No, boys, I'm going to play with Jenny and Sophie this
afternoon.' We'd be mad enough at this, for he was a good fellow to
have in a game, and sometimes we would try to tease him out of it. But
he could call names better than we could, and then we were all afraid of
his terrible verses. So we let him alone lest he make us look silly with
his poetry.
"Well, I left school long before Karl did. My father was poor, you see,
and there were nine of us children to feed and clothe, so I had to go to
work. But I always used to be hearing of Karl's cleverness. People
would talk about him in father's shop and say, 'That boy Marx will be a
Minister of State some day.'

"By and by we heard that he had gone to Bonn, to the University, and
everybody thought that he would soon become a great man. Father was
puzzled when Heinrich Marx came in one day and talked very sadly
about Karl. He said that Karl had wasted all his time at Bonn and
learned nothing, only getting into a bad scrape and spending a lot of
money. Father tried to cheer him up, but he was not to be comforted.
'My Karl--the child in whom all my hopes were centered--the brightest
boy in Treves--is a failure,' he said over and over again.
[Illustration: JOHANNA BERTHA JULIE JENNY VON
WESTPHALEN.]
"Soon after that Karl came home and I saw him nearly every day upon
the streets. He was most always with Jenny von Westphalen, and
people smiled and nodded their heads when the two passed down the
street. My! What a handsome couple they made! Jenny was the beauty
of the town, and all the young men were crazy about her. They wrote
poems about her and called her all the names of the goddesses, but she
had no use for any of the fellows except Karl. And he was as handsome
a fellow as ever laughed into a girl's eyes. He was tall and straight as a
line, and had the most wonderful eyes I ever saw in my life. They
seemed to dance whenever he smiled, but sometimes they flashed
fire--when he was vexed, I mean. But I suppose that what the girls liked
best was his great mass of coal black curls.
"The girls raved about Karl, and he could have had them all at his feet
if he would. I know, for I had two sisters older than myself, and I heard
how they and their friends used to talk about him. But Karl had no eyes
for any girl but Jenny, except it was his sister.
"Folks all said that Karl and Jenny would marry. Rachel--that's my
oldest sister--said so one night at the supper table, but our good mother
laughed at her. 'No, Rachel, they'll never marry,' she said. 'Jenny might
be willing enough, but the old Baron will never let her do it. Karl's
father is rich alongside of poor people like us, but poor enough
compared with Jenny's father. Karl is no match for the beautiful Jenny.'
"Then father spoke up. 'You forget, mother, that Heinrich Marx is the

best friend that old Baron von Westphalen has, and that the Baron is as
fond of Karl as of Jenny. And anyway he loves Jenny so much that he'd
be sure to let her marry whoever she loved, even if the man had not a
thaler to his name.'
"Soon Karl went away again to the University at Berlin, not back to
Bonn. Thought he'd get on better at Berlin, I suppose. He might have
been gone a year or more when his father came into father's little shop
one day while I was there. He said that Karl wasn't doing as well at
Berlin as he had