Russians, naturally enough, had shown their feelings of hostility to their potential enemies by practically boycotting the entire British Embassy. The English Government had then made a very wise choice, and had appointed to the Petrograd Embassy the one man capable of smoothing these troubled relations. The late Lord Dufferin was not then a diplomat by profession. He had just completed his term of office as Governor-General of Canada, where, as in every position he had previously occupied, he had been extraordinarily successful. Lord Dufferin had an inexhaustible fund of patience, blended with the most perfect tact; he had a charm of manner no human being could resist; but under it all lay an inflexible will. No man ever understood better the use of the iron hand under the velvet glove, and in a twelvemonth from the date of his arrival in Petrograd he had succeeded not only in gaining the confidence of official Russia, but also in re-establishing the most cordial relations with Russian society. In this he was very ably seconded by Lady Dufferin, who combined a perfectly natural manner with quiet dignity and a curious individual charm. Both Lord and Lady Dufferin enjoyed dancing, skating, and tobagganing as wholeheartedly as though they were children.
Our Petrograd Embassy was a fine old house, with a pleasant intimate character about it lacking in the more ornate building at Berlin. It contained a really beautiful snow-white ball-room, and all the windows fronted the broad, swift-flowing Neva, with the exquisitely graceful slender gilded spire of the Fortress Church, towering three hundred feet aloft, opposite them. We had a very fine collection of silver plate at the Embassy. This plate, valued at £30,000, was the property of our Government, and had been sent out sixty years previously by George IV, who understood the importance attached by Russians to externals. We had also a small set, just sufficient for two persons, of real gold plates. These solid gold plates were only used by the Emperor and Empress on the very rare occasions when they honoured the Embassy with their presence. I wonder what has happened to that gold service now!
Owing to the constant tension of the relations between Great Britain and Russia, our work at the Petrograd Embassy was very heavy indeed at that time. We were frequently kept up till 2 a.m. in the Chancery, cyphering telegrams. All important written despatches between London and Petrograd either way were sent by Queen's Messenger open to Berlin, "under Flying Seal," as it is termed. The Berlin Embassy was thus kept constantly posted as to Russian affairs. After reading our open despatches, both to and from London, the Berlin Embassy would seal them up in a special way. We also got duplicates, in cypher, of all telegrams received in London the previous day from the Paris, Vienna, Berlin, and Constantinople Embassies which bore in any way on Russia or the Eastern Question. This gave us two or three hours' work decyphering every day. Both cyphering and decyphering require the closest concentration, as one single mistake may make nonsense of the whole thing; it is consequently exhausting work. We were perfectly well aware that the Russian Government had somehow obtained possession of one of our codes. This particular "compromised code" was only used by us for transmitting intelligence which the Russians were intended to know. They could hardly blame us should they derive false impressions from a telegram of ours which they had decyphered with a stolen code, nor could they well admit that they had done this.
As winter came on, I understood why Russians are so fond of gilding the domes and spires of their churches. It must be remembered that Petrograd lies on parallel 60° N. In December it only gets four hours of very uncertain daylight, and the sun is so low on the horizon that its rays do not reach the streets of the city. It is then that the gilded domes flash and glitter, as they catch the beams of the unseen sun. When the long golden needle of the Fortress Church blazed like a flaming torch or a gleaming spear of fire against the murky sky, I thought it a splendid sight, as was the great golden dome of St. Isaac's scintillating like a second sun over the snow-clad roofs of the houses.
Soon after my arrival I went to the vast church under the gilded dome to hear the singing of the far-famed choir of St. Isaac's.
Here were none of the accessories to which I had been accustomed; no seats; no organ; no pulpit; no side-chapels. A blue haze of incense drifted through the twilight of the vague spaces of the great building; a haze glowing rosily where the red lamps burning before the jewelled ikons gave a faint-dawnlike effect in the semi-darkness. Before me the great screen of the "ikonostas" towered to the roof, with its eight malachite columns forty feet high, and its two smaller columns of precious lapis lazuli flanking the "Royal doors" into the sanctuary. Surely Montferrand, the Frenchman, had designedly steeped the cathedral he had built in perpetual twilight. In broad daylight the juxtaposition of these costly materials, with their discordant colours, would have been garish, even vulgar. Now, barely visible in the shadows, they, the rich mosaics, the masses of heavily-gilt bronze work in the ikonostas, gave an impression of barbaric magnificence and immense splendour. The jasper and polychrome Siberian marbles with which the cathedral was lined, the gold and silver of the jewelled ikons, gleaming faintly in the candle-light, strengthened this impression of sumptuous opulence. Then the choir, standing before the ikonostas, burst into song. The exquisitely beautiful singing of the Russian Church was a perfect revelation to me. I would not have believed it possible that unaccompanied human voices could have produced so entrancing an effect. As the "Cherubic Hymn" died away in softest pianissimo, its echoes floating into the misty vastness of the dome, a deacon thundered out prayers in a ringing bass, four tones deeper than those a Western European could compass. The higher clergy, with their long flowing white beards, jewelled crowns, and stiffly-archaic vestments of cloth of gold and silver, seemed to have stepped bodily out of the frame of an ikon; and the stately ritual of the Eastern Church gave me an impression as of something of immemorial age, something separated by the gap of countless centuries from our own prosaic epoch; and through it all rose again and again the plaintive response of the choir, "Gospodi pomiloi," "Lord have mercy," exquisitely sung with all the tenderness and pathos of muted strings.
This was at last the real Russia of my dreams. It was all as I had vaguely pictured it to myself; the densely-packed congregation, with sheepskin-clad peasant and sable-coated noble standing side by side, all alike joining in the prescribed genuflections and prostrations of the ritual; the singing-boys, with their close-cropped heads and curious long blue dressing-gowns; the rolling consonants of the Old Slavonic chanted by the priests; all this was really Russia, and not a bastard imitation of an exotic Western civilisation like the pseudo-classic city outside.
Two years later, Arthur Sullivan, the composer, happened to be in Petrograd, and I took him to the practice of the Emperor's private church choir. Sullivan was passionately devoted to unaccompanied part-singing, and those familiar with his delightful light operas will remember how he introduced into almost every one of them an unaccompanied madrigal, or a sextet. Sullivan told me that he would not have believed it possible for human voices to obtain the string-like effect of these Russian choirs. He added that although six English singing-boys would probably evolve a greater body of sound than twelve Russian boys, no English choir-boy could achieve the silvery tone these musical little Muscovites produced.
People ignorant of the country have a foolish idea that all Russians can speak French. That may be true of one person in two thousand of the whole population. The remainder only speak their native Russ. Not one cabman in Petrograd could understand a syllable of any foreign language, and though in shops, very occasionally, someone with a slight knowledge of German might be found, it was rare. All the waiters in Petrograd restaurants were yellow-faced little Mohammedan Tartars, speaking only Russian and their own language. I determined therefore to learn Russian at once, and was fortunate in finding a very clever teacher. All men should learn a foreign language from a lady, for natural courtesy makes one listen to what she is saying; whereas with a male teacher one's attention is apt to wander. The patient elderly lady who taught me knew neither English nor French, so we used German as a means of communication. Thanks to Madame Kumin's intelligence, and a considerable amount of hard work on my own part, I was able to pass an examination in Russian in eleven months, and to qualify as Interpreter to the Embassy. The difficulties of the Russian language are enormously exaggerated. The pronunciation is hard, as are the terminations; and the appalling length of Russian words is disconcerting. In Russian, great emphasis is laid on one syllable of a word, and the rest is slurred over. It is therefore vitally important (should you wish to be understood) to get the emphasis on the right syllable, and for some mysterious reason no foreigner, even by accident, ever succeeds in pronouncing a Russian name right. It is Schouvaloff, not Schòuvaloff; Brusìl-off, not Brùsiloff; Demìd-off, not Dèmidoff. The charming dancer's name is Pàv-Lova, not Pavlòva; her equally fascinating rival is Karsàv-ina, not Karsavìna. I could continue the list indefinitely. Be sure of one thing; however the name is pronounced by a foreigner, it is absolutely certain to be wrong.
What a wise man he was who first said that for every fresh language you learn you acquire a new pair of eyes and a new pair of ears; I felt immensely elated when I found that I could read the cabalistic signs over the shops as easily as English lettering.