Part 26 (2/2)

On the evening of the following day I drove up to the monastery and there found Rasputin at dinner with the ex-conjurer Rouchine. When I entered the cosy little room in which the pair were seated, Rasputin had removed his long robe and was seated in his s.h.i.+rt-sleeves like the peasant he was. I handed him the letter from the German-born Empress, whereupon he said:

”Oh! read it to me, Feodor. The woman's handwriting is always a puzzle to me.”

I knew how illiterate he was and the reason of his excuse.

I tore open the envelope and quickly scanned the scribbled lines.

”No,” I replied, ”not now, Gregory; later.”

”But I insist!” cried the Starets fiercely.

”And I refuse!” was my determined reply. ”I have reasons.”

Those last three words were not lost upon him, for Grichka was nothing if not the very acme of shrewdness. Not an adventurer or _escroc_ in Europe could compare with him in elusiveness.

”Well, Feodor, if you have reasons, then I know that they are sound ones,” he said. Then, turning to the ”holy” conjurer, he grinned and said: ”Feodor is a most excellent secretary. So discreet--too discreet, I often think.”

”One cannot be too discreet in the present international crisis,” I remarked. ”Enemy eyes and ears are open everywhere. One can never be too careful. Russia is full of the spies of Germany.”

”Quite true, Feodor--quite true!” exclaimed Rasputin, smiling within himself. ”Don't you agree, friend Rouchine?”

”Entirely,” replied his accomplice, who, though he was well paid to a.s.sist in working ”miracles” before the peasants, never dreamed that the Starets, who handed him money with such lavish hand, was the chief agent of Germany in Russia.

Indeed, Rouchine's only son had been killed in the advance on Warsaw, hence he held the Hun in abhorrence, and I am certain that had he known Rasputin was the Kaiser's personal agent matters would have gone very differently, and in all probability the enemy plots so cleverly connived at by Alexandra Feodorovna would have been exposed in those early days of the war.

The Russian nation even to-day still reveres its Tsar. They know that he was weak but meant well, and he was Russian at heart and intent upon stemming the Teutonic tide which flowed across his border. But for ”the German,” Alexandra Feodorovna, not one in all our Russian millions has a word except an execration or a curse, and as accursed by Russia, as is all her breed, she will go down in history for the detestation of generations of those who will live between the Baltic and the Pacific.

Rasputin grew indignant because I crushed the woman's letter into my pocket without reading it aloud, but I knew well how to treat him, therefore I began to explain all that I had learnt from the Secret Police concerning the activities of Ivan Naglovski.

Both men listened with rapt attention.

”Then the fellow really intends evil?” asked the monk, as he laid down a chicken-bone, for he always ate with his fingers.

”I fear he does,” was my reply. ”But Her Majesty wonders why you should trouble. She says that you, being sent as Russia's saviour, are immune from bodily harm.”

”Ah! but remember when that young fellow shot at you and grazed two of your fingers at Minsk,” remarked the conjurer with a grin.

”Yes, quite so. I don't like this fellow Naglovski and his friends. I will see Kurloff.”

Now, Kurloff was another treacherous bureaucrat, a creature of Rasputin's, who sat in Protopopoff's Ministry of the Interior, and who later on collected the gangs of the ”Black Hundred,” those hired a.s.sa.s.sins whom he clothed in police uniforms and had instructed in machine-gun practice--those renegades who played such a sinister part in the first Revolution.

I then gave the monk the urgent message from the Empress.

”Very well,” he replied, ”I will be back by Sat.u.r.day; not because I obey the woman, but became I must see Kurloff, and I must take active steps against this Ivan Naglovski and his accursed friends.”

Half-an-hour later, when alone in the bare little room allotted to me, I took out the Empress's letter to the Starets and re-read it. It was as follows:

”HOLY FATHER,--It is with deepest concern that from your trusted Feodor I hear of the plot against you. That you can be harmed I do not believe. You, sent by G.o.d as Russia's guide to the bright future of civilisation which Germany will bring to her, cannot be harmed by mere mortal. But if there are any who dare dispute your divine right, then, with our dear Sturmer, take at once drastic steps to crush them.

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