Reval
You are remarking to me of a charming letter written to me by the late Emperor of Russia’s youngest sister—the Grand Duchess Olga. She is a peculiarly sweet creature. Her nickname amongst the Russians was “Sunshine.” Stolypin, the Prime Minister, told me that, and he also said to me that she was a kind of life-buoy because if you walked about with her you would not get bombed by an anarchist. All loved her.
I made her acquaintance first at Carlsbad. On my arrival at the hotel I found King Edward’s Equerry waiting in the hall. I had written to tell the King, who was at Marienbad, in answer to his enquiry, as to the day I should arrive and what time; and he came over to Marienbad from Carlsbad. I went then and there and found him just finishing lunch with a peculiarly charming looking young lady, who turned out to be the Grand Duchess Olga, and her husband, the Grand Duke of Oldenburg, from whom happily she is now divorced (I didn’t like the look of him at all). The King, having satisfied himself that I had had lunch, and he then smoking a cigar as big as a capstan bar, after talking of various things which interested him, told me that his niece, the Grand Duchess Olga, did not know anyone in Carlsbad, and he relied on me to make her time there pleasant, so I promptly asked her if she could waltz. She said she loved it, but she somehow never got the step properly, whereupon I asked the King if he had any objection to getting into the corner of the room while I moved the table and took the rugs up to give her Imperial Highness a lesson. He made some little difficulty at first, but eventually went into the corner; and when the lesson began he was quite pleased and clapped his hands and called out “Bravo!” The best waltz tune in the world is one of Moody and Sankey’s hymns. I don’t know whether Sankey originated the saying that he didn’t see why the Devil should have all the good music. I don’t by that implicate that the waltz was the devil’s; but, without any doubt, there is a good deal of temptation in it, and when you get a good partner you cleave to her all the evening.
This dancing lesson was an unalloyed success, so I asked her to a dance the next night at the Savoy Hotel; and after some more words with the King I left, and walking down the stairs to go to my hotel, I thought to myself: “How on earth are you going to get up a dance when you don’t know a soul in the place?” when who should I meet but a friend of mine—a Spanish Grandee, the Marquis de Villa Vieja, and he arranged what really turned out to be a ball, as he knew everybody, and I having some dear American friends at Marienbad I telegraphed them to come over and dine with the Grand Duchess and stay the night for the ball, and they did. When the dance had begun, and the Grand Duchess was proving quite equal to her lesson of the day before, suddenly an apparition of extraordinary grace and loveliness appeared at the door. Villa Vieja took on the Grand Duchess and I welcomed the beautiful Polish Countess and danced with her many waltzes running in spite of a hint I received that her husband was very jealous and a renowned duellist. Next day, by telegram from the King, I was told by His Majesty that Isvolsky, the Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs, was to be asked by me to lunch on his arrival that day from St. Petersburg. I invited him; and just as we sat down to lunch the Polish angel of the night before came through the door and petrified Isvolsky, and the more so as she kissed her hand to me. He never took his eyes off her, and as she walked to her table I heard him breathe a sigh, and say sotto voce, “Alas, in heaven no woman!” I said to him: “Monsieur Isvolsky, pray pardon me; perhaps you did not intend it to be heard, but if it be true what you say, it takes away much of the charm which I had anticipated finding there.” He turned to me and said—quoting chapter and verse in the Revelations, “There was silence in heaven.”
So when I met the Grand Duchess Olga again, when I accompanied King Edward on that memorable visit to Reval—when, as Prince Orloff, the Emperor’s principal aide-de-camp, said to me, King Edward changed the atmosphere of Russian feelings towards England from suspicion to cordial trust—there was quite an affectionate meeting, and we danced the “Merry Widow” waltz—a then famous stage performance—with such effect as to make the Empress of Russia laugh. They told me she had not laughed for two years. At the banquet preceding the dance the Grand Duchess and I, I regret to say, made such a disturbance in our mutual jokes that King Edward called out to me that I must try to remember that it was not the Midshipmen’s Mess; and my dear Grand Duchess thought I should be sent to Siberia or somewhere. We sailed at daylight, and I got a letter from her when I arrived in England saying she had made a point of seeing Uncle Bertie and that it was all right, I was not going to be punished. Then she went on to describe that she had had a very happy day (being her birthday) picnicking in the woods; the only drawback was, she told me, that the gnats would bite her ankles. Being, at that period, both a courtier and a sycophant, I telegraphed to her at some Palace she was at in Russia to say “I wished to God I had been one of the gnats.” It was weeks before she got the telegram, as the Russian Secret Department believed it was from some anarchist, and was a cypher for bombing the Emperor or something of the sort, and there was a lot of bother to trace out who had sent it.
I find among my papers another charming letter which I received from the Grand Duchess Olga. It runs:
Peterhof.
11/25 July, 1909.
Dear Admiral,
I have been going to write to you for ever so long and now is a chance to send you a few lines.
How are you getting on? We speak of you very often. I suppose you’ll be going to Carlsbad this automn—and I am very sorry that we are not going—so as to meet you there!
I have a great favour to ask you—but as I believe and think you can grant it—I shall ask: Lieutenant —— of your Royal Navy—whom we got to like very much two years ago at Sorrento—is willing to come this automn and spend a month with us at our country place—if he gets leaves of course; I write all this to you as I don’t know who else can help and give him leave.
We should like to have him about the middle of your September (the very beginning of ours). If you think he can get leave just then would you kindly telegraph to me—then I could write and ask him (I suppose he will be at Cowes?). Today is my namesday, and having received any amounts of presents—we are going to Church—as one always does—on such occasions and then there will be a rather big lunch and the band will play—All this glorious occasion is not only for me—but also for my niece Olga.
My sister Xenia—who does not know you—says she is sorry not to have that honour and pleasure!
My husband sends his best love (or whatever one says). Goodbye dear Admiral. I wish I was going to see you soon it would be awfully amusing. Write to me later on when you will be free please!
Much love and good wishes.
Olga.
P.S. Mrs. Francklin sends lots of kind messages and love. Mama sends her best love too.
That visit of King Edward to Russia was really quite remarkable for the really eloquent speech the King made, without a note of any sort. I said to him at breakfast the next morning, when they brought in a copy of what they thought he had said, that I wondered on such a momentous occasion he didn’t have it written out. “Well!” he said to me, “I did try that once, when the French President Loubet came to visit me, and I learnt the speech off by heart in the garden of Buckingham Palace. When I got up to say it, I could not remember it, and had to keep on beginning again at the beginning. So I said to myself, ‘Never again’!” And I must say I share his conviction that there is no such eloquence as when out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh. Emotion and earnestness will do much more than move mountains; they will move multitudes—and that was what King Edward was able to do.
I have spoken elsewhere of what I deemed was a suitable epitaph for him—those great words of Pascal: “le cœur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît point.” The heart has reasons that the mind knows nothing about.
God bless him!
Stolypin, when we met him at Reval on King Edward’s visit to the Czar, was described to us as the greatest, the bravest and most single-minded Prime Minister that Russia had ever possessed. He spoke English fluently, and certainly was very pro-English. He was beyond deception. His only daughter, he told me, had been killed by a bomb while he was walking with her in the garden, and one of his hands was greatly mutilated by the same explosion. He was murdered at the theatre at Moscow not very long afterwards. We had many conversations together. He said it was criminal folly having the capital of Russia elsewhere than inland, as at Moscow, for that Petersburg was open to German attack by sea. He seemed to have a prophetic view of England’s imbecility as regards using her enormous sea supremacy to prevent the Baltic becoming a German lake, as it became in the war, though we were five times stronger than the German Fleet. So it passed by as an idle dream, any idea of England’s interference, and alas! he remembered our betrayal of Denmark when the Germans took Kiel and Schleswig-Holstein.
Stolypin repeatedly said to me the German frontier was his one and only thought, and he was devoting all his life to make that frontier impregnable against Germany, both in men and munitions, and strategic arrangements. But he did not live long enough to carry out his scheme.