MORE LEAVES IN THE CURRENT
In an even, passionless voice Anna Virubova went on to tell me the story of the murder in the Yussupoff palace, as it had appeared to the slain man’s devotees in Tsarskoe Selo.
“We knew that certain people were plotting to kill Rasputin. His life was attempted, you may know, at least three times. But it never entered our minds that Prince Yussupoff was in the plot. He was not a favorite with the Empress, who thought him a very dissolute young man. Still, he was in Tsarskoe once in a while, because his wife, who is a lovely girl, often came, and sometimes he came with her. On one of his last visits he saw the Empress. I was in the room and I heard him say, quite casually, that he had invited Rasputin to come to his house. ‘My wife wants to meet him,’ he said.
“We thought no more about it, but on the morning after the dreadful thing happened one of Rasputin’s daughters called me on the telephone and asked me if I knew where her father was, and if not would I telephone the palace and find out if he was there. Some intuition seemed to tell me that something terribly wrong had occurred.
“Trying not to let my voice tremble, I asked the girl when her father had left the house and with whom. ‘He left about midnight,’ she answered. ‘I don’t know whose motor car it was that came for him, but he told us he was going to call on Prince Yussupoff.’ I did not telephone the palace to ask about Rasputin. I went there as quickly as I could and told the Empress my news. ‘He went to see Felix?’ she exclaimed. ‘Why should he have gone there now, when Irene is in the Crimea?’ We looked at each other and the same kind of awful fear looked out of her eyes that had gathered in my heart. ‘Send for the chief of police at once,’ said the Empress. ‘Tell him to come as fast as he possibly can.’ It is almost too terrible for me to tell you. The police found the Yussupoff house in the most ghastly state of blood and—ugh!” she exclaimed, “it made me sick to hear them describe it, and it makes me sick just to remember it.” After a moment she continued, real feeling in her voice. “The thing was not difficult to trace. The Yussupoff boy denied everything at first, made up a silly story about a dog that had to be killed.”
When Mme. Virubova said this I admit I shuddered. It was evident that she did not grasp the subtlety of that “silly story about a dog that had to be killed.”
“While Prince Felix was still insisting that no crime had been committed the police found the hole in the ice, and around it, on the snow, many bloodstains. And then they found the poor corpse. They had killed him, first by shooting and then by every horrible means in their power. He was shot in the head and in the body, crushed and mangled almost beyond recognition. There was one frightful, ragged wound across his stomach which could only have been made with a spur, the doctors told us. When he had been beaten until he was helpless those men tied him up with meters of rope and threw him in the river to drown. He must have regained consciousness at the end, because he had dragged one arm partially free and by his hand we knew that he tried to make the sign of the cross. Yussupoff persisted in his denials until Grand Duke Michael and his son drove to the palace and told the Czar that they were all more or less in it, and that it had been a good thing to do. A good thing to murder and mutilate a defenseless man! Well, you asked me what a court was like.
“There was a terrific time at the palace. The Emperor was horrified, and the Empress, I think, was nearer the insanity they accused her of than she had ever been before. They demanded the name of every man and woman connected with the plot, and promised that every one of them should be brought to sternest justice. But what power had they, after all? The grand dukes and the whole family stood as one against the Emperor and Empress. They declared that no one should be punished for that atrocious crime. I cannot tell you all they said and did, because that would be revealing confidences. But they held a strong enough club over the poor Emperor when they threatened to desert him in a troubled and uncertain time. He was absolutely forced to agree that only the principal plotters should be banished to their estates, and the others should be left unpunished. Afterward, when we could talk about it at all,” Mme. Virubova resumed, “I reminded the Empress that the day before Rasputin was murdered that Yussupoff boy had telephoned to me asking me to arrange for him to see the Empress. She had declined to see him, and we both believe that if she had received him he would have killed her and then, very likely, me also. We are convinced that there was a great assassination plot all laid. But there is no proof.”
This, then, is how the Rasputin murder appears in the reverse. Prince Felix Yussupoff did not look like a wholesale assassin to me, but, then, neither did Anna Virubova look like a poison plotter. Evidently you have to be accustomed to the atmosphere of courts to judge these things. I don’t judge anybody in this grewsome drama. I leave that to history.
I asked Mme. Virubova why the court cliques plotted against the Empress. “It was inevitable,” she replied. “The Empress came there, a stranger, a poor, beautiful, painfully shy young girl. She did not know how to flatter or win favor. She was studious, and she was devoted to her husband and children. They needed her devotion—oh, far more than the ordinary family needs that of the mother. You have heard, I suppose, some of the atrocious slanders that have been circulated about the Empress. One of these had it that she encouraged the Emperor in his weakness for alcohol because she wanted to keep him in a muddled state of mind and herself be the real ruler of Russia. The exact opposite is true. The poor Emperor did drink too much sometimes, but it was not her fault. There were others at that court who were vitally interested in keeping their Emperor in a muddled state of mind, and they constantly played on his weakness. His wife fought for him desperately, did everything in her power to save him from these men.
“Another slander said that the Empress tried to Germanize the court, and that she made her children talk German to her. The children almost never spoke a word of German to her or to any one else. Of course they were taught German, with other languages, but English and Russian were the only two languages spoken in the family circle. The Empress was anxious for all her children to be good linguists, but not all of them were gifted that way. Tatiana, the second daughter, for example, declared that she never would be able to carry on a conversation in French, the easiest of all foreign tongues. But English they all spoke from their cradles.
“As for the Empress’s intrigues for a separate peace with Germany,” and here Mme. Virubova’s voice trembled with indignation, “that was the greatest nonsense and the wickedest slander of them all. From the time the war broke out until the revolution last February the Empress was tireless in her work for the Russian soldiers and their families. She fairly lived in the hospitals at Tsarskoe Selo. Immediately after breakfast every morning she began her rounds, dressed in the plain cotton frock of the Red Cross nurse. There was no duty too humble, no task too arduous for her to undertake. She stood beside the surgeons in the operating room, seeing the most dreadful amputations. She sat beside the suffering and the dying in their beds. ‘Stand near me, czaritza,’ a poor wretch would cry to her in his anguish and pain, and she would take his rough hand and soothe him, pray for him, that he might bear it for Russia. They loved her then, those men, though they turned against her afterward. We used to motor home for luncheon and then go to more hospitals. It would be 5 o’clock before we reached home, and then the Empress always sent for her children. What time did she have, will you tell me, for German intrigues?
“The home life of the royal family was happy and harmonious above any I have ever seen,” interpolated Mme. Virubova. “The Czar worshiped his wife and the children worshiped both of them. Would you believe that some of those court parasites tried to break up that happy home? Once when the Emperor was at Livadia, in the Crimea, some one sent each day a great basket of flowers to be placed on his writing table. Attached to the basket was my card. They thought they could make the Empress believe that I was carrying on an intrigue with the Emperor. As a matter of fact, the Empress asked me directly if I sent the flowers. I had not heard a word of it before, and if she had merely sent me away I should never have known the reason. Against me they plotted ceaselessly. Why? Because the Empress loved and trusted me, and I would have died for her, and they all knew it. They resented our friendship. They hated to see us sitting together hours at a time over our books. We read a great deal. It may interest you to know that we read many American books.”
“What American books did the Empress read?” I asked.
“We read Mrs. Eddy’s book, of course, and the complete works of the great American author, Miller.”
“Miller?” I interrupted. “What Miller?”
“I don’t remember his first name,” said Mme. Virubova. “But you must know who I mean. He wrote many religious and philosophical works. The Empress was very fond of them.”
I was obliged to confess that I had never heard of Miller, and Mme. Virubova looked her surprise.
“Another reason why the Empress, and of course myself, were unpopular was because the children were with us so much of the time. The Empress simply would not allow them to associate with the sons and daughters of the nobility. She wanted to keep them sweet and clean minded and good, and she knew that very few of the children of high society in Russia were fit companions for them. The daughters of our nobility are mostly frivolous, selfish, empty-headed girls, and as for the sons, they are too often debauched in early boyhood. You can imagine that the Empress’s poor opinion of them and her refusal to allow her children to know them aroused great resentment. People always think their own children perfect, you know.”
The former Empress of Russia is one of the enigmas of histories. Mme. Virubova, who knew her better than almost any other living woman, makes her out a religious devotee and something of a puritan. She does not reveal her as an intellectual woman, in spite of her love of books. A really intelligent woman in her position would not have spent so much of her time in the wards of hospitals in the one small town of Tsarskoe Selo. She would have used her brains, her vast wealth and her almost unlimited power to organize the work of the hospitals all over the war area. I have seen some of those hospitals, and while some of them are modern and well equipped, many are of the crudest description. I never saw such a thing as a fly screen in any Russian hospital. Flies seem to be regarded as harmless domestic pets even in contagious disease hospitals in Russia.
The Empress may or may not have been a German plotter. I heard it said on high authority that the minutest search of all the palace records, after the revolution, failed to unearth any evidence to that effect. Practically everybody in Russia, however, believes that she was a traitor to her country in the war. Those who are charitably disposed toward her say that she was melancholy, mad, irresponsible, and a weak tool in the hands of Russia’s enemies. But when the days of revolution burst on the palace at Tsarskoe Selo, and the night of perpetual extinction began to descend on the royal house of Romanoff, it was this woman, the Empress of Russia, who alone showed strength of mind and character. She alone of the whole court kept her head and her cool nerve, and kept them to the last.
Much has been made of Alexandra’s influence over the weak and yielding Emperor. It is said that the Empress, when arguments failed to move him, resorted to hysterical fits which invariably brought results. But this may be the merest gossip. Alexandra’s influence over her husband was probably as strong as the average wife’s, but is it not a little curious that, while few countries allow women to inherit a throne and not all countries allow women to vote, when anything happens to a dynasty they always discover that the queen was the only member of the family who had any brains or any strength of character? The troubles of the whole house of Bourbon have been ascribed to Marie Antoinette, and the fall of the third empire and the house of Bonaparte was caused by the malign influence of Josephine.
Rasputin is another actor in the drama who will have to be judged by the historians. I firmly believe that Rasputin as a dark force was very much overrated. I have no doubt that he was a wicked, deceitful, plotting creature, a monster of sensuality, an impostor and an all-around bad lot. That seems to be settled. But I cannot find much evidence that he was anything more than a tool of the German plotters, whoever they were. He exercised great influence, but it seems to me that almost everything he did was out of personal spite. He demanded the suppression of a newspaper that attacked him, the removal of a minister who insulted him. His principal activities were against men in the orthodox church. Here he was about as venomous as a rattlesnake. An obscure monk, it filled him with pride and joy to humble a bishop, to unfrock a priest, to influence appointments.
Rasputin had a small, mean mind, and his egotism was colossal. Of course the women fools at court who flattered and deferred to him, perhaps worse, fostered this egotism until it reached the limit of inflation. But Rasputin, I believe, will live in history more as a scandal than as a menace to Russia. He was a menace also, because a bad, weak man is often even more of a menace than a bad, strong one. The weakling is almost sure sooner or later to fall into the hands of plotters and criminals, and under their directing power he becomes as dangerous as a rabid animal.