Royal Romances of To-day

by Kellogg Durland

Easter is one of the greatest fêtes of the year in Russia. The long Lenten fast is usually kept rigorously by all classes over whom the church maintains dominion, and even by many who have ceased to reverence Orthodoxy, but in whom the instinct of traditional observance remains.

On Easter Eve there is a tremendously solemn service in all of the churches in the land. At the stroke of midnight priests and choir burst forth in loud hallelujahs and all the people shout “Christ is Risen!” “Christ is Risen!” and greet one another with a holy kiss. Everybody kisses everybody else in sight regardless of previous acquaintance. I remember standing bolt upright in a fearful press in St. Isaac’s Cathedral one Easter Eve for two mortal hours in the middle of the night, the atmosphere hot and fetid till even men swooned and all wearied unspeakably.

On Easter morning presents are exchanged and masters and mistresses greet all the servants of their households with the holy kiss. The Tsar and Tsaritsa observe this custom as religiously as the humblest of their subjects, and every palace maid and stable boy is greeted in this way. Long before the hour when the Emperor and Empress are to receive the household, there is great excitement below stairs where all the servants busily scrub their honest faces with soap and water till they shine like great apples in preparation for the kiss of their imperial master and mistress. The Tsar kisses every man in the palace, even to the soldiers on duty, and the Empress every maid servant. On one occasion the Tsaritsa remarked that she “sometimes thought the Emperor had rather the better of it because of the new leather that the soldiers wear on that day, and which smells so nice!”

In view of the fact that court observance would naturally expect the Tsaritsa to play the rôle of Empress, rather than of mother and wife as her life work, it is the more extraordinary that this mighty Queen (in point of power and opportunity) has chosen the quieter life of the home.

In addition to the private fortune of the Tsar, an immense income accrues from the gold and precious stone mines of Siberia which are worked by convicts for the private purse of the Emperor and from the vast timber holdings that he controls; besides all this, the Government officially grants him a “salary” of nearly five million dollars a year, which is paid to him in monthly instalments of four hundred thousand dollars each.

The Tsaritsa, as head of the Royal Household, is mistress of nearly thirty thousand servants, scattered in many palaces and residences throughout the Empire. It is not likely that this vast retinue is any particular care to her, for the army of servants, just like the army of soldiers, is divided into groups and officered by various functionaries. In fact, it is likely that the two armies are not dissimilar in the minds of the Tsar and Tsaritsa. Every wish of the Tsar’s is a command to the army and has only to be uttered to an aide to be executed. So the word of the Tsaritsa spoken to a lady-in-waiting is all sufficient to be carried out by any or all of her servant host.

There are fifty thousand head of cattle in the Royal pastures, and five thousand horses in the Royal stables. Over all these the Tsaritsa is supreme—as the wife and consort of the Tsar,—and one hundred and forty million subjects besides!

The point of her whole life as Empress is that when Princess Alix married Nicholas she gave herself and all of her activity to Nicholas—not to the Russian nation.

Every act of hers has been one of personal devotion. If Princess Alix had been ambitious as many women in court circles are, or if she had never loved so intensely and so blindly, the world looking back upon her career as it does to-day, might have deemed her a better Empress. As it happened, circumstances throughout her life have all driven her back from the public role and more into the circle of the family. Thus it comes about that the chronicler of her life must pass lightly over her life as Empress and dwell at length upon those sides of her character which the words wife and mother indicate. In other words, her entire life has been one long romance. A life of devotion to her husband and to her children, and this at the expense of her duties as Empress.

As the years have passed the disposition of the child once called “Sunny” has altered and changed, and the lines of wistful pathos which have settled round her still lovely face are doubtless indications of the drops of gall that have tainted her cup of life’s happiness. For all these mellowing lines the Tsaritsa wears an expression that in many lights is of that unusual other-worldly beauty, so seldom seen in the great world of to-day, but common to so many of the women whose portraits have been left us by the world artists of the Middle Ages. It is an expression that appears and ripens only under soul development, and as we see it in the Tsaritsa we do not find it difficult to understand and trace, for a considerable part of her life has been given over to religious thought and contemplation, and not to the study of theological doctrines and controversies only, but to the deeper truths of spiritualism and mysticism, truths whose elusiveness holds them for ever remote to all save the few, and whose realities are measured only by the standards of the eternal verities. This brings us to one of the most extraordinary, and at the same time one of the fascinating sides of the life of the Tsaritsa.