THE DEAD HAND
In a little house in Sofia lives the widow of Stambuloff, once the most
brilliant and beautiful woman in Sofia, now a withered crone who
continues to live on for a cherished purpose. Her most treasured
possession is the withered hand of a dead man; the hand of Stambuloff,
the Bismarck of the Balkans. The woman and the dead hand wait Christian
burial until the day when vengeance shall have been exacted from his
murderer, Ferdinand, Czar of Bulgaria.
The evidence that fixes the moral guilt for the murder upon Ferdinand
is unassailable. It was not adduced after the crime, but months before
it took place. In an interview published at the beginning of 1895, the
victim told the _Cologne Gazette_ from his own mouth the manner and the
very place of his death. For months beforehand the _Svoboda_, the
Sofiote organ of the Stambulovists, had warned the Government what
would take place, and declared that when it happened the moral guilt
would lie upon the Prince and his Ministers.
On the day after the murder, the paper accused the Prince of the moral
guilt of the crime in unmistakable words that still ring through Europe
when the death of Stambuloff is recalled.
“Who are the murderers of Stambuloff?” the _Svoboda_ asked. “Who took
the life of such a man as Bulgaria will never see again? Who lifted the
yataghan against him?
“They are officially unknown, but all Bulgaria knows them. For the last
seven months we have repeatedly and openly declared that the Government
was keeping the assassins of Beltcheff and Vulkovitch to murder
Stambuloff. The Minister of Foreign Affairs, M. Natchevitch, has given
some of these men posts under Government, and daily receives them in
his house.
“Whoever struck the blow, the moral murderers are the Prince and his
Government, who refused to allow Stambuloff to leave Sofia, and so gave
an opportunity to their assassins.
“The blood of Bulgaria’s finest patriot cries aloud for vengeance. Two
days ago the official journal, the _Mir_, called upon its friends to
tear the flesh from the bones of M. Stambuloff. Its orders have been
executed.”
Stambuloff was murdered in July, 1895. At the beginning of that year
the following remarkable interview with him was published by the
_Cologne Gazette_:
“I cannot help thinking that something serious is in the air.
Everything takes time. I hear from my friends that things have reached
a head. If I must fall, my friends will not desert my wife and my
children. I do not grudge my enemies that triumph.
“In influential circles care will be taken that telegrams are sent from
all Bulgaria denouncing the murderers, but expressing in the liveliest
terms the satisfaction of ‘the people’ at being freed for ever from
‘the tyrant’ and ‘the adulterer.’
“When the attempt on my life—to which Beltcheff fell a victim—was being
planned, all Sofia knew of it. The Chief of Police and his people
remained in blissful ignorance. To-day, too, numbers of people are
aware of the impending attempt on my life, and my friends—and friends I
have, thank God, everywhere—are more shrewd than the police.
“I cannot give you names, but my information is to be trusted. The
former Chief of Police, Ilija Lukanoff, a man of honour and great
ability, who is very sincerely devoted to me, and who has even to-day
very extensive connexions with home circles, came to me yesterday. He
was quite excited, this grave, reserved man.
“He wished to go to the Prince, and acquaint him with everything.
‘Ilija,’ I said to him, ‘it would be the stupidest thing that you could
do. Don’t you see that the murderers have the strongest support?’
“We know for an absolute fact that in Netschuinar, a suburb of Sofia,
there is a band which is being drilled in the use of arms. We know that
these people—Beltcheff’s murderers are among them—have taken an oath to
murder me.
“The gang of which I have been speaking consists of Rosareff, Hala,
Arnaut, Tufektschieff, and some others. Tufektschieff has been
sentenced at Constantinople to fifteen years’ hard labour for the
murder of Vulkovitch. Nevertheless he goes about here in safety.
“Velikoff and the other culprits are now at the head of affairs.
Stoiloff is nowhere obeyed. Why therefore should not the ‘tyrant,’ the
‘vampire,’ the ‘adulterer’ be assassinated?”
After the appearance of that interview the British agent at Sofia made
a determined attempt to obtain from Ferdinand permission for Stambuloff
to leave Sofia. He was not successful. All surrounding Ferdinand knew
that he laid his plans to be out of Sofia when the blow should fall,
and that he would send his sympathy, rejected by the widow, from
Carlsbad.
“If that fox should send a wreath, do not let it enter the house,”
moaned Stambuloff on his bed of agony. They were his dying words. His
right hand, slashed off by his vile butchers, remains, as I have said,
unburied to this day. For twenty years the Lesser Czar has walked under
the shadow of that dead hand; has walked so warily that the horrid
death for which his enemies destine him has not yet overtaken him.
For Ferdinand had taken his precautions long ere he had his enemy done
to death by hired braves. He knew he was going to a land where the
knife played an important part in affairs of State. “In our future
dominions,” wrote the Count de Grenoud, who accompanied him on this
journey in disguise to Bulgaria to assume the purple, “people are
assassinating each other. I wonder if we shall reach Bulgaria safe and
sound?”
It was a consideration which affected Ferdinand powerfully while on the
journey; so powerfully that he shook with fright at his first greeting
by his future subjects. But he had already taken elaborate precautions
against a death with the idea of which he was already familiar.
His interest in chain armour, displayed whenever any fine specimen was
brought under his notice, was not merely the enthusiasm of the
antiquarian. For years he wore a suit of it under his clothing; for all
I know, he wears it still. His craft has not so far failed him that he
has become careless of his life.
The apartment at the palace at Sofia which he calls _mon fumoir_ (my
den) has walls of steel and a door that can be hermetically fastened by
a spring operated from the writing desk. A series of secret signals,
known only to the trusted men who surround him, ensures that this door
shall only be opened to the men who are safe; or, rather, to the men
with whom Ferdinand is safe.
The shadow of the dead pursues him to Euxinograd, where the most
elaborate precautions are taken throughout the neighbourhood whenever a
royal visit is in progress. He is a haunted man even in his hunting
quarters at the monastery of Rilo, where the whole district is policed
by the monks in anticipation of the arrival of the kingly sportsman.
His travels abroad are marvels of precaution. Ask the Scotland Yard
men, whose duty it is to look after foreign potentates in this country,
who is the fussiest and most timid man they ever encountered, and an
unanimous vote will be cast for the Czar of Shoddy. In Paris he and his
suite are even more solicitous; their precautions, as I have once
before related, spoiled the pleasure of a Grand Prix crowd at
Longchamps, when the Czar of Bulgaria condescended to visit that former
scene of gaiety and gambling.
In Austria he is little better, and in Germany he is more fidgetty than
ever. But it is when he has visited Russia that his precautions become
portentous to the very degree of the ludicrous. He fancies, this scion
of the Bourbons, that the conspirators will call in the aid of science
and slay him with microbes. The very word disease makes him blench and
fly for safety.
Thus on the journey from Sofia to Petrograd, in 1909, he was informed
that the Grand Duke Nicholas had been deputed to meet and welcome him,
but would be compelled to see less of him than he would like, because
his nephew was down with scarlet fever, and although uncle and nephew
were not residing together, the Grand Duke visited him regularly.
Ferdinand meditated anxiously over this ominous message, and then
requested as a great favour that some other Grand Duke, further removed
from the infectious ills to which even royalties are subject, should
meet him; whereupon the Grand Duke Constantine was appointed. Then the
Czar of Bulgaria was tranquillized, and everything went smoothly for a
time.
But after a day or two spent in the Russian capital Ferdinand was
shocked to learn that, whereas the nephew of the Grand Duke Nicholas
was suffering from scarlet fever in another house, the Grand Duke
Constantine’s own children, who lived with him under the same roof,
were suffering from genuine diphtheria, which everybody knows is far
more malignant.
In the course of the next day Ferdinand was suffering from an imaginary
pain in the throat, and made such a fuss about it that the whole
Russian Court was convulsed with merriment. He sought the first excuse
for returning to Sofia, and only breathed freely when safe again under
the care of his trusted Court physician.
Ferdinand ought to be inured to threats of assassination, for not a
week passes but he gets threatening letters by the post. But the
receipt of a bottle labelled “typhus bacilli” never fails to make him
livid with fear. The sight of men cleaning off from the palace walls
drawings of himself suffering hideous deaths—Ferdinand is easy to draw,
and it is a favourite students’ amusement—always sets him chattering
with rage.
But there are traits in his character which overrule this fear of
assassination, strong as it is within him, and cause him to hang on to
his threatened throne, though he does so in fear and trembling. What
those characteristics are will presently be made plain; meanwhile, it
will be well to consider what country it is that he rules, where the
leading statesman can predict successfully the manner and place of his
own assassination without causing any surprise.
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WHO ARE THE BULGARIANS?
“_Bulgaria is a country where atrocities are perpetrated._”—“THE TIMES.”
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