The ice was breaking up along the river Neva, in 1917. At the Winter
Palace, the ladies were rejoicing over the good news. The Czar in the
field was reorganizing his dismembered armies. America was severing
diplomatic relations with the Central Powers. The Asquith Ministry had
dissolved and Lloyd-George was hurling his dynamic personality into
organizing Victory for the Allied forces in the field. Kut-el-Amara
had fallen to the British--Bagdad had been taken--the Crescent was
fleeing before the Cross of Russia--the Grand Duke was driving the
Turk from Trebizond. Even Hindenburg was retiring along the Western
Front--France with unexampled gallantry was holding back the
Juggernaut--America was getting mad and rolling up its sleeves.
The women at the palace did not disguise their happiness over the
cheerful events that heralded the approach of Victory. The evening
star that poured down its steel-blue rays upon the crosses of St.
Isaac's presaged to their encouraged fancies the early dawn of peace.
Yet the chilly wind that whistled round their dull-red household was
laden with a frosty air that blew from official regions and "froze
the genial current of their souls." The icy glances of ambitious
princelings, reflecting back the sinister sullenness of designing
ministers, fell like a spectral gloom upon their happy hearts. A
hollow roar rolled down the Nevskii Prospekt--a guard burst into the
palace and put the women under arrest. The pent-up Revolution at last
had burst--anarchy howled around the capital--the isolated Czar was
captive, and plotting princelings joined hands with puny lawyers to
browbeat courageous women and drive the chariot of State!
The miserable fiasco of a delirious Revolution went careering through
the giddy maze of treachery and madness until a frenzied wave of
rapine and disorder swept all the noblewomen of the Imperial household
into a barricaded fortress around which lust and inebriety held
unsated and remorseless vigil for the prize. (See Part II: Tumen.)
Among these prisoners of State were five women who realized that
the Power which had organized disorder as a feature of its military
strategy had also honeycombed the Army, the Navy and the State with
its agencies of pillage and so undermined the public conscience that
their purity and virtue, more than their jewels and fortune, became an
open challenge to the vanity of mob lust.
The younger of these women in their unsullied maidenhood looked
longingly and unsuspectingly in the direction of Siberia. They were
learning by degrees that the semblance of freedom which offered a
pathway to escape was nothing but a strategem employed by pretended
friends to entrap them into more cruel and ruthless hands. On every
side loomed the evidence of their danger. The villainous stares of
foreign interlopers, the ribald jests of guards, the furtive glances
of the envious, the scowls of the emancipated underling, the profanity
of the domineering agitator who denounced respectability and clamored
for possession of the girls,--no moment of their lives was free from
ugly threats; no retreat, save the wild jungle or the mountains,
offered any liberation from the immodest glare of cruel, licentious
eyes. (See Part II: Tobolsk.)
The eldest of the girls was scarcely twenty-two. Like her mother, she
was erect and stately and somewhat saddened by the hostile experiences
through which the family had just passed. The youngest was a chummy
little creature of sixteen years who did not conceal her admiration
for her next elder sister, whose courage seemed unfailing through
all the trying hours. The next eldest sister, with her little younger
brother, was openly planning to outwit the guard and escape to
the Siberian wilds. It was doubtless her undisguised activity that
ultimately betrayed the Royal prisoners into the unhappy tangle that
beset their future lives.
From one camp to another they were carted off like cattle and never
for a moment permitted to forget that, if they ever reached a place of
safety, they would have to pay the price. Along the frozen pathway
of their weary eastern journey there did come, here and there, some
slender little byways that offered an escape. Whenever they approached
these places and estimated the perils, they found no one to confide
in--there were none that they could trust. Treason, like a contagion,
lurked in smiles as well as scowls about them, and even their
steadfast trust in the Invisible Diplomacy of European Royalty was
gradually yielding in their hearts to the dissolving acid of despair.
(See Part II: Tobolsk.)
From the conflicting rumors that reached them they fully realized that
it was the politician in all countries who ignorantly obstructed their
relief. The ferocious and misleading propaganda employed to fanaticize
the populace as an element of military strategy seemed to sweep its
own authors from their feet and drag the prisoners through many months
of torture toward a time and place set for their execution by other
politicians in the drunken stupor of their power. (See Part II:
Tobolsk.)
Under the agitated surface of this tidal wave of fanaticism that
threatened to engulf the Royal prisoners there were a few men in
Europe and America, as well as in India and Thibet, who were slowly
converging in the direction of the victims with a _phrase upon their
lips_ that none but Royalty and themselves were privileged to use. It
was that ancient secret code transmitted by tradition to the followers
of a sturdy Tyrian king. It was made use of by Lycurgus, as well as by
Solomon and Justinian; and it was again employed by the partisans of
Louis XVIII to save the House of Bourbon. It is that mystic code which
binds Royalty together and is given only to those whom Royalty may
trust. That ancient code meant freedom if it reached the prisoners
in time! It rested with these silent men to pass the scrutiny of a
million eyes to liberate the victims from the fury of the mob.
Such a rescue, as time swept by, became nothing but a slender hope
with any of the women. They began to realize that their blood
would not very greatly shock the nerves of statesmen who had become
accustomed to the daily cataract that poured down upon the soil of
Europe. They felt abandoned by the diplomats. Their only friends were
busy in the red work of war. One chance alone remained. Soldiers might
be deceived by men disguised as comrades. The Secret Service might
overlook the hysterical entertainers who fluttered under the mask of
charitable workers and skipped across forbidden lines protected by a
Cross. This was the only possibility, this the phantom hope that stood
trembling on the brink of the prisoners' abysmal fear. Thus the sight
of a Red Cross driver or an English uniform in the midst of their
disaster became a welcome incident in the lives of these affronted
women. The appearance of either seemed to carry to the prisoners
a spirit of encouragement and reflect a ray of mercy into the dark
corners of their hearts. They indulged the hope that some of
those foreign uniforms might conceal trustworthy friends. And they
recognized a basis for such a hope in the mystifying movements of one
of those uniforms that met their notice day by day. It was near them
at the palace when they were thrown upon a maddened world. They saw it
following onward as they passed through pathless wilds. They could see
it hovering near them on that last historic night. They learned about
its maneuvers in the morning as it moved among the silent rooms of the
pretty mansard cottage that had witnessed their withdrawal from
the vision of historical events,--how it had paused to scan without
emotion the small blood stain on the floor--how an agitated censor
informed the credulous that the prisoners had been murdered in cold
blood! Thus they learned that the world had heard with skepticism
that, so far as history and international politicians were affected,
their _seven lives had been, technically, blotted out_! (See Part II:
Petrograd--Tumen--Tobolsk.)
Possibly the Prisoners of Tobolsk may have been willing to suffer what
is termed a "technical death" in diplomatic circles in order to elude
the hungry bloodhounds of the Revolution. They may have welcomed
the many opportunities such an event would furnish to read their own
obituary in the letters and official documents which treated of their
tragic fate. Who knows? They certainly possessed a saving sense of
humor or they would never have left behind them at Ekaterinburg
so many little reminders of the tragic romance to which calm
investigation hereafter will give birth. For instance, there are a
couple of diaries that some men must have kept. Of their existence it
seems certain that some of the prisoners knew. Why and just how the
hitherto profound State secrets narrated in these diaries come now to
light is suggested by a simple little letter that raises the inquiry,
"Did the Imperial Russian family escape?"
The letter that started this investigation is little different from
others one receives from friends traveling in the Orient. By itself it
does not clearly identify the family it describes; but, when the
scene it pictures is coupled with the events narrated in the purloined
diaries which the hands of some invisible diplomats _have_ left
behind, the student of the Russian Revolution will marvel at the skill
with which some other Royal hands untied the knot of Fate.