CHAPTER III

THE DIARY OF FRÄULEIN ARNHEIM

With these words the diary of Tsarevitch Alexis closed. I was present when he threw it into the fire.

_December 31._

To-day died the last Russian Tsaritsa. Marfa Matveevna, the widow of Peter’s stepbrother, Fédor Alexeyevitch. At foreign courts she had been considered dead long ago; ever since her husband’s death, during thirty-two years, she had lived half mad, a prisoner in her rooms, and never showed herself to anybody.

She was buried at dusk with great pomp. The funeral procession moved between two rows of torches planted in the ice all the way along from her house, (she lived next to us near the Church of All the Sorrowing) up to the Peter and Paul Cathedral, across the Neva on the ice. It was the same way along which her Highness’s body had been borne two months or more ago in the frigate of death. Then the first foreign Princess was buried, now the last Russian Tsaritsa.

First came the clergy in gorgeous palls, carrying candles and incense burners, chanting funeral songs. The coffin was drawn on sleighs. Behind it walked the Privy Councillor Tolstoi carrying a crown set with priceless gems.

The Tsar had for the first time at this funeral prohibited the ancient Russian custom of wailing; it was strictly ordered that none should cry aloud.

All moved along in silence, the night was still, nothing was heard but the crackling of the burning resin, the crunching of steps on the snow, and the funeral chanting. This silent procession aroused a shudder of terror. It seemed as though we were gliding along the ice after the dead, ourselves also dead, into the black eternal gloom.

With this old Tsaritsa New Russia seemed to be burying Old Russia, and Petersburg burying Moscow.

The Tsarevitch, who had loved the deceased as his own mother, was terribly upset by this death. He sees in it a bad omen for himself, his own fate. Several times during the ceremony he whispered to me, “The end has come, the end of everything!”

_January 1._

To-morrow morning I leave Petersburg, together with the two Barons Loewenwold for Riga, and then travel through Danzig into Germany. This is my last night in the Tsarevitch’s house.

This evening I went to bid him good-bye; the way we parted made me feel how much I love him, and that I will never forget him.

“Who knows,” said he, “we may meet again. I would like to pay another visit to Germany and other foreign countries; I liked those parts, you live in gaiety and light and freedom.”

“What holds your Highness back?”

He sighed heavily.

“I would like to go to heaven; it is my sins which keep me back.” And then he added with his genuine child-like smile, “The Lord keep you, Fräulein Juliana, do not remember my worst; greet the European countries for me, and your old friend Leibnitz. May be he will prove to be in the right, and that we shall, with God’s help, not eat, but serve one another.”

He embraced and kissed my forehead with brotherly tenderness.

I could not help crying. Once more I turned round and had a last look at him, and again my heart sank with a presentiment, just as on that day when I saw in the dark, and as it were prophetic mirror, the face of Charlotte and Alexis, when both had seemed to me to be victims doomed to some great suffering. She had perished, now his turn had come. And then I recalled him as he stood the last day in Roshdestveno, on the dove-cote, high up over the sullen wood against the blood-red sky, as it were wrapt in the white doves’ wings. So he will ever remain in my memory.

* * * * *

I hear that prisoners set free sometimes regret their prison. I experience a kindred feeling at the present moment with regard to Russia. I began this diary with curses. I cannot close it with blessings. I will only say, what probably many in Europe would say, were they better acquainted with Russia—“A mysterious country—a mysterious people.”