Alexander Feodorovitch Kerensky.
“We want that German woman, that sister of the German spy in Tsarskoe Selo,” yelled the mob. “We want the Grand Duchess Serge.”
Tall and white, like a lily, the woman stood there. “I am the Grand Duchess Serge,” she replied in a clear voice that floated above the clamor. “What do you want with me?”
“We have come to arrest you,” they shouted.
“Very well,” was the calm reply. “If you want to arrest me I shall have to go with you, of course. But I have a rule that before I leave the convent for any purpose I always go into the church and pray. Come with me into the church, and after I have prayed I will go with you.”
She turned and walked across the garden to the church, the mob following. As many as could crowd into the small building followed her there. Before the altar door she knelt, and her nuns came and knelt around her weeping. The Grand Duchess did not weep. She prayed for a moment, crossed herself, then stood up and stretched her hands to the silent, staring mob.
“I am ready to go now,” she said.
But not a hand was lifted to take Elisabeta Feodorovna. What Kerensky could not have done, what no police force in Russia could have done with those men that day, her perfect courage and humility did. It cowed and conquered hostility, it dispersed the mob. That great crowd of liberty-drunk, blood-mad men went quietly home, leaving a guard to protect the convent. It is probably the only spot in Russia to-day where absolute inviolability may be said to exist for any members of the hated “bourju,” as the Bolsheviki call the intellectual classes.
On the August day when I rang the bell of the convent’s massive brown gate I did not really know that I was to see and speak with the grand duchess. Mr. William L. Cazalet, of Moscow, the friend who took me there, doubted very much whether I could be received thus informally, without a previous appointment. The gravity of the times, and especially the situation of the Romanoff family, placed the Grand Duchess Serge in a position of extreme delicacy, and Mr. Cazalet said frankly that he expected to find her living in strict retirement. The best he could promise, he said, was that I should see the convent, where one of his young cousins was a nun.