“But I have nothing to wear!” I cried.
It was absolutely true. I had never expected to figure at a Court ceremony, and it had not occurred to me to bring a manteau de cour. Etiquette, however, is less severe in Russia than in Spain or in Prussia, as I soon discovered, and the next morning I put on my smartest frock and drove to the Winter Palace, a gigantic building, painted dull red, with rows of gods and goddesses standing on the cornice of its stupendous façade, looking cold and unhappy in the nipping air.
I had not seen the Empress since we were girls, staying with Queen Victoria at Windsor or in the beautiful Isle of Wight. And what a charming girl she was! A simple English girl in appearance, in a skirt and blouse, utterly unaffected, warm-hearted, and fresh as a rosebud touched with dew. I was thinking of the happy, careless days when we were in England together, as I drove to the palace, forgetting the change that the passage of the years makes in the friends of one’s youth, and when I went into the room where the Empress was waiting to watch the Blessing of the Waters from the window, I felt startled to find, instead of the girl I used to know, a surpassingly beautiful and stately woman. The petals of the rosebud had unfolded. She was the centre of a brilliant group of Grand Duchesses and ladies, all wearing the strange but beautiful dress of the Russian Court, with long hanging sleeves. On her head was a kokoshnik, a crescent-shaped diadem, flaming with diamonds, from which fell a long white veil, and her stateliness and beauty distinguished her from all the other sumptuous figures surrounding her. A stranger who had never seen her before would have been certain that it was she, and not one of the others, who was Empress.
“How good to see you again, Eulalia, after all these years,” she said, coming towards me; and she put her arms round me and kissed me.
And in that greeting I realised that the Tsaritsa had not changed. She was still the affectionate and unaffected friend I had known years before. We had a hundred questions to ask each other, but almost before we had had time to begin, we had to stop talking to attend to the imposing ceremony which was beginning on the frozen Neva.
From the window I saw that a pavilion, like an exceedingly decorative bandstand, had been erected on the ice, just in front of the palace, and I watched a procession of ecclesiastics in stiff Byzantine robes and glittering mitres move slowly across the road separating it from the palace, followed by the Grand Dukes and the Emperor. The singing of the choir floated to us through the frosty air and the Empress crossed herself devoutly. She is a sincerely religious woman.
I watched the Emperor standing motionless beneath the fretted and gilded canopy of the pavilion, and the thought suddenly flashed into my mind that the Russian Emperors alone claim the right to govern the souls as well as the bodies of their subjects. The Autocrat is a great ecclesiastical personage as well as a secular ruler, and the Russian Church depends upon him and can do nothing without his consent. I remembered that banishment to Siberia was the punishment for those who deserted the Orthodox Church and refused to believe as the Tsar believes and to pray as the Tsar prays. The Kings of Spain and the Emperors of Austria are sons, not rulers, of the Church, and I had been taught that the Pope was king of kings. It seemed to me that no worse form of despotism could be conceived than the concentration in the hands of an autocratic ruler of the spiritual and temporal power and, as these thoughts crowded into my mind, there seemed to me something sinister and terrible in the ceremony I was watching, and I realised, as I had never done before, the immensity and the awfulness of the power
Courtesy of Collier’s