Chapter I: From Splendor to Gloom

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.