Page:Zelda Kahan - Karl Marx His Life And Teaching (1918).pdf/31

 old, "I shall never forget the scene," says Liebknecht. The sobbing Lenchen, the weeping mother convulsively clasping her two girls, and Marx in terrible excitement almost angrily refusing all consolation. At the funeral Marx sat in the carriage, "dumb, holding his head in his hands. I stroked his forehead: 'Mohr, you still have your wife, your girls and us-and we love you so well.' 'You cannot give me back my boy!' he groaned. … At the graveside Marx was so excited that I stepped to his side, fearing he might jump after the coffin.'

Thirty years later, when his wife died, Engels likewise at the funeral had to grasp his arm quickly or he would have jumped into her grave. Marx's wife died of cancer, December 2nd, 1881, after a brave fight with death. In spite of terrible suffering she maintained interest in general affairs to the last, and tried to dispel the fears of her family by joking and bright spirits. Their daughter Eleanor says: "When our dear general (Engels) came, he said—what I then almost resented—'Mohr is dead too,' and it was really so." Owing to overwork, his habit of often working almost all night, he had so undermined his originally strong constitution that he had already been ill for some time, and was obliged from time to time to give up work and travel for his health. His wife's death, however, undid all the good his travels had done him. He tried to keep up his strength and heart for the sake of the movement, but when, at the beginning of January, 1883, Jenny, his eldest daughter, also died, he never recovered from the blow. He died quietly in his study arm-chair on March I4th, 1883. Thus passed away, as Engels said, the "greatest mind of the second half of the 19th Century," and for his epitaph we have every right to use the words chosen by Eleanor Marx:

So mixed in him that Nature might stand up

And say to all the world: 'This was a man.'"