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.