Page:Zelda Kahan - Karl Marx His Life And Teaching (1918).pdf/29

 Quoting from her mother's notes, Eleanor Marx says: "Soon after the arrival of the family (in London) a second son was born. He died when about 2 years old. Then a fifth child, a little girl, was born. When about a year old she too fell sick and died. 'Three days,' writes my mother 'the poor child wrestled with death. She suffered so … Her little dead body lay in the small back room; we all of us (i.e., my parents, Helen Demuth, the faithful household assistant, who dedicated her life to Marx and his family, and the three elder children) 'went into the front room, and when night came we made us beds on the floor, the three living children lying by us. And we wept for the little angel resting near us, cold and dead. The death of the dear child came in the time of our bitterest poverty. Our German friends could not help us; Engels, after vainly trying to get literary work in London, had been obliged to go, under very disadvantageous conditions, into his father's firm as a clerk, in Manchester; Ernest Jones, who often came to see us at this time and had promised help, could do nothing. … In the anguish of my heart I went to a French refugee who lived near and who had sometimes visited us. I told him our sore need. At once, with the friendliest kindness, he gave me £2. With that we paid for the little coffin in which the poor child now sleeps peacefully. I had no cradle for her when she was born, and even the last small resting place was long denied her. …' 'It was a terrible time,' Liebknecht writes to me, 'but it was grand, nevertheless.' In that 'front room' (they only had two rooms) in Dean Street, the children playing about him, Marx worked. I have heard tell how the children would pile up chairs behind him to represent a coach, to which he was harnessed as horse, and would 'whip him up' even as he sat at his desk writing."

Liebknecht, who for a long time was in daily intercourse with him, also lays stress on the unusual affection Marx had for children. "He was not only the most loving of fathers, who could be a child among children for hours, he also was attracted towards strange children, particularly helpless children in misery that chanced his way … physical weakness and helplessness always excited his