Page:Marx - Revolution and Counter-revolution.djvu/10

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6
NOTE BY THE EDITOR

the arrival of the family a second son was born. He died when about two 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, Helene Demuth, 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 (the Editor), “but it was grand nevertheless.”

In that “front room” in Dean Street, the children playing about him, Marx worked. I have heard tell how the children would pile up chairs