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A carriage will meet the train which arrives at seven-thirty." I promised to carry out the wishes of the Tsaritza's favourite lady-in-waiting, and half an hour later called upon Stürmer at his fine house in the Kirotshnaya, where I delivered the message. During the next few weeks I merely called at the Poltavskaya each morning for the monk's letters, which I opened and dealt with at my leisure.
The first I knew of the deep conspiracy was in the spring of 1911, by the visit one night to Rasputin's house in the Poltavskaya of a tall, fair-haired man named Hardt, whom I knew as a frequent visitor to the monk.
And he chuckled within himself as was his peasant's habit when mightily pleased. Truly, that meeting with the Tsar's valet Tchernoff was quite as fateful to Russia as the meeting with the neurotic spiritualistic Empress herself. ABOUT a week after Rasputin's first audience of the Empress Alexandra, the Bishop Theophanus, confessor of the Imperial family, paid him a visit at the Poltavskaya.
The usual meetings of the monk's "sister-disciples" were held at the house in the Poltavskaya, and often in the presence of a stranger or a female novice about to be admitted to the cult he pretended to speak to Alexandra Feodorovna over his mock telephone. Every action of the monk was that of an arrogant and erotic swindler.
On the following morning, according to my instructions given me by my new chief, I called upon him at the small ground-floor flat which he occupied in the Poltavskaya, close to the Nicholas Station.
The world was, of course, in ignorance, but we in the Poltavskaya, the monk and myself, knew of the despatch of Admiral Rozhdestvensky's blundering fleet on its voyage half-way round the world, how he was ordered to fire upon anything he saw in the North Sea, and how, as soon came out, he fired upon some of your British trawlers on the Dogger Bank, for which our Government paid quite willingly sixty-five thousand pounds in compensation.
Rasputin at last returned, forced to do so by the determined attitude of the Empress, who without doubt was suffering from serious religious mania, as well as an acute form of neurotic heart disease. The monk arrived quite unexpectedly at the Poltavskaya, and rang me up on the telephone late one evening. The Bishop Theophanus was, I found, with him.
All is prepared for the coup against Stolypin, who is still ignorant that Vera Baltz is in Petrograd." I knew Altschiller, who often called at the Poltavskaya. He was a close friend of Monsieur Raeff, whom Rasputin, when all-powerful a little later on, actually appointed as Procurator of the Holy Synod, having placed the appointment upon the Emperor's desk to sign!
It was not many months after his appointment when one night, at the Poltavskaya, Rasputin received a visit from General Rogogin, the Director of the Black Cabinet, the cabinet noir, the existence of which was rigorously kept secret until the Revolution afforded the public a glimpse of Russia behind the scenes. Even from the tribune of the Duma it was declared that the Black Cabinet was a fiction.
I left Peterhof with Rasputin at about three o'clock that afternoon, and on our return to the Poltavskaya I spoke over the telephone, at the monk's orders, to Doctor Badmayev, the expert herbalist who prepared those secret drugs with which Madame Vyrubova regularly doped the little Tsarevitch, keeping him in a constant state of ill-health and in such a condition that he puzzled the most noted physicians in Europe.
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