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It is best in my safe keeping." "No! I can't!" cried the wretched woman over whom Rasputin had now once again cast his inexplicable spell. "But you shall, Xenie! I, your holy Father, command you to render this assistance to your land. None shall ever know. Féodor, who knows all my innermost secrets, will remain dumb.
Then I proceeded to put it into the special code which Rasputin and Protopopoff alone used, and when Döllen called it was ready for transmission from Nauen back to the Russian battleship, to which I had addressed it, to be "picked up" by the wireless station in Petrograd. The "holy Father" greatly enjoyed himself in a quiet way in Berlin.
Dost thou know that, with thy Rasputin fellows, thou art going to thy doom, that thou art gambling away thy throne and the life of thy child?" "What?" gasped the monk, starting up. "Did he openly say that?" "He did." "Then the count shall be disgraced!" declared Rasputin. "He has long been my enemy; but I will suffer this no longer."
Xenie Kalatcheff failed, therefore I am not in favour of her being employed again." "True, Olga is a girl of great daring, and her lover has long been in the German service," Rasputin remarked. "I will see her to-morrow." Then, turning to me, he said: "Féodor, write to her and ask her to call on me to-morrow evening at eight. Send the letter by special messenger."
Heedless of the warning implied in the murder of Rasputin, and of the ever-growing opposition to the government and the throne, the Czar inaugurated, or permitted to be inaugurated, new measures of reaction and repression. Trepov was driven from the Premiership and replaced by Prince Golitizin, a bureaucrat of small brain and less conscience.
I typed an envelope with Monsieur Miliukoff's address, and then, slipping to the door quietly, I stole out and dropped it in the letter-box at the corner of the Kazanskaya. That I had saved the deputy's life I knew next afternoon when Madame Kalatcheff sent round a hurried note to Rasputin, explaining that, though she had invited him to her house, he had rather curtly refused the invitation.
Had there been anything serious against me I doubt whether I should have occupied, as I did for some years, the post of confidential secretary to "Grichka," that saintly unwashed charlatan whose real name was Gregory Novikh, and whom the world knew by the nickname of "Rasputin." Of my youth I need say but little.
One morning, among the monk's correspondence, I found a letter for Rasputin, which had been brought by hand from the Ministry of War, marked "Strictly private." On opening it, I read the following, which bore as signature the initials of Soukhomlinoff: "In a further reference to the suspicions against Colonel Svetchine, inquiries made fully confirm your view.
Tsar and Tsaritza were his puppets, so cleverly did he play his cards, yet as he frequently remarked to me in the weeks that followed: "Kokovtsov is against me. We are enemies. He must go." I knew that if the Premier had an enemy in Grichka, then the statesman was doomed. Now, the plot which Rasputin formed against the new Prime Minister was an extremely clever and subtle one.
All this time there had been growing, among the Russian people, a feeling that they were being robbed and betrayed by the grand dukes and high nobles. They distrusted the court. They felt that the Czar was well-meaning, but weak, and that he was a mere puppet in the hands of his German wife, his cousins the grand dukes, and above all a notorious monk, called Rasputin.
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