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Updated: June 16, 2025
"Our Father will apparently take no notice of her save to glance into her face, for why should he recognise in her the Empress?" I saw with what ingenuity the plan was being laid, for well I knew the amazing and quite uncanny fascination for women of all classes possessed by the Starets.
A week later I accompanied the Starets to have his first audience with His Majesty the Emperor at the Palace of Peterhof, that wonderful Imperial residence where the great Samson Fountain in gilded bronze throws up from the lion's jaws a thick jet seventy feet high, in imitation of Versailles, and where nearly six hundred servants were employed in various capacities.
Upon the marble top of the washhand-stand in the bedroom the police found some scrawled words in a character they could not decipher. Experts were brought in, when it was found that the writing was in Russian character, and the words were: "The holy Starets is " This conveyed nothing to the London police, who, of course, knew nothing save that a "Starets" in Russia is a "saint."
Had he not threatened that, if I revealed one single word of the secret doings of the holy Starets, my tongue would be cut out within those grim dark walls of that prison of mystery?
We passed the Marly Pond, where the carp were called by the ringing of a bell, and the Marly Cascade, where water runs over twenty gilded marble steps. Truly, the beauties of Peterhof were a revelation to the Starets and myself. On the previous day he had had audience of the Empress at Tsarskoe-Selo, but I had not been present, therefore I remained in ignorance of what had transpired.
To one man even though of the Germanophile party the intrusion of Rasputin into the Court circle caused great annoyance. That was Count Fredericks. Madame Vyrubova one day told me that the count had that afternoon, in her presence, inquired of the Emperor: "Who is this new Starets of whom everybody is talking?"
There were pilgrims who constantly tramped from one holy place to another and from one starets to another, and were always entranced by every shrine and every starets. Father Sergius knew this common, cold, conventional, and most irreligious type.
The woman's handwriting is always a puzzle to me." I knew how illiterate he was and the reason of his excuse. I tore open the envelope and quickly scanned the scribbled lines. "No," I replied, "not now, Gregory; later." "But I insist!" cried the Starets fiercely. "And I refuse!" was my determined reply. "I have reasons."
He believed this, and though the church services, for which he had to get up early in the morning, were a difficulty, they certainly calmed him and gave him joy. This was the result of his consciousness of humility, and the certainty that whatever he had to do, being fixed by the starets, was right.
I saw that the Empress was again startled, but folding his hands across his breast, an attitude habitual to him, the Starets passed out of the church without a second glance at her, leaving her breathless and trembling. When he had gone she turned in alarm and whispered with her lady-in-waiting.
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