One of his a.s.sistants had carried up four small tins of beef, with a couple of bottles of beef extract. These he placed on the table, and as we stood around he took a small bradawl, and having punctured the tin at the large end close to the rim, he took from one of the incubators a test-tube full of a cloudy brown liquid gelatine. Then filling a hypodermic syringe--upon which was an extra long needle--he thrust it into the contents of the tin and injected the virus into the meat.
Afterwards, with a small soldering-iron he closed the puncture.
"That tin, infected as it is, is sufficient to cause an epidemic which might result in thousands of deaths," declared the Hun professor proudly.
His a.s.sistant then took a bottle of beef extract, which in Russia is popular with all cla.s.ses in preparing their cabbage soup, and refilling the syringe, plunged the needle through the cork, afterwards placing a spot of melted resin upon the puncture.
"You see how simple it is!" laughed the professor, addressing the "saint." "All that now remains is for a firm in Petrograd to buy the consignment and arrange for it to be sold to wholesale dealers in Vologda and Nijni. This we expect you to arrange."
"I certainly will," replied Rasputin promptly. "Truly, the idea is a most ingenious one--a disease which is as yet unknown!"
We remained in Stockholm for four days longer. The professor and his a.s.sistants were working strenuously, we knew, preparing death for the population of those two Russian towns.
One afternoon, after he had lunched with us at the hotel, he said:
"If our experiment is successful, then we mean to repeat it from South America to England. It is therefore most important that news of the epidemic does not reach the ears of the Allies. You will point out that to the Minister Protopopoff. When the plague breaks out the censorship must be of the strictest."
Rasputin nodded. He quite understood. He hated the British just as heartily as did the Tsaritza.
A week later we were back at Tsarskoe-Selo, and the monk--who pretended to have been on a pilgrimage to Our Lady of Tver--made to the Empress a full report of his journey to Potsdam. He also told her of the diabolical plot to sweep off the population of Vologda and Nijni as an experiment, in order to see how Hun "science" could win the war.
Protopopoff came to Rasputin"s house half-a-dozen times within the next three days, and it was arranged that a firm of importers, Illine and Stroukoff, of Petrograd, should handle the consignment of preserved meat.
Both partners in the firm were in the pay of the Ministry of the Interior, hence it was not difficult to arrange that the whole cargo should be sent to Vologda and Nijni to relieve there the growing shortage of meat.
I strove to combat the clever plot, but was, alas! unable to do so. Every precaution was taken against possible failure. The cargo arrived, and was at once sent on by rail to its destination, payment being made for it through ordinary channels, and n.o.body suspecting. Food was welcomed indeed in Russia in those days of 1916.
In the stress of exciting events that followed I forgot the affair for several weeks. One night, however, Rasputin, on returning from Peterhof, where the Court was at that moment, received Protopopoff, and the pair sat down to drink together.
Suddenly His Excellency exclaimed, with a laugh:
"Your mission to Berlin has borne fruit, my dear Gregory! For the past four days I have been receiving terrible reports from Vologda, and worse from Nijni-Novgorod. The inhabitants have been seized by a mysterious and terribly fatal disease. A medical commission left Petrograd yesterday to study it."
"Let them study it!" laughed Rasputin. "They will discover no mode of treatment."
"Both towns are rapidly becoming decimated. There have been over thirty thousand deaths, and the mortality is daily increasing."
"As I expected," remarked the monk. "The professor knows what he is doing. Later on we shall be sending the infection into England and cause our John Bull friends a surprise."
"But the position is terribly serious," said His Excellency.
"No doubt. Berlin is watching the result. One day they may deem it wise to infect our army. But that must be left to their discretion."
Truly the result of that devilish plot was most awful. In the three months that followed--though not a word leaked out to the Allies, so careful were Protopopoff and the camarilla to suppress all the facts--more than half the population of the two cities died from a disease which to this day is a complete mystery, and its bacilli known only to German bacteriologists.
CHAPTER XIII
THE "PERFUME OF DEATH"
"I AM much grieved to hear of the disaster at Obukhov. The accident to Colonel Zinovief is most deplorable. Please place a wreath upon his grave from me. Pray always for us.
"ALIX."
This was the text of a telegram addressed to Rasputin from the Empress, which I opened when it was placed in my hands. It had been sent from Bakhtchisaray, the Oriental town in the Crimea, where Alexandra Feodorovna had gone to visit the military hospitals, it being necessary for her to pose before Russia as sympathetic to the wounded.
The disaster to which she referred had taken place at the great steel works at Obukhov, the outrage having been committed by two German secret agents named Lachkarioff and Filimonoff, who had visited Rasputin and from whose hand they had received German money. Nearly five hundred lives had been lost, as the foundry had been in close proximity to an explosives factory, where Colonel Zinovief, the director, had been blown to atoms.
It was late at night, and the monk, who was in a state of semi-intoxication, on hearing of the wish of Her Majesty, remarked:
"Ah! a clever woman, Feodor--very clever. She never misses an opportunity to show her sympathy with the people. Oh! yes--order the wreath to-morrow from Solovioff in the Nevski--a fine large one." Then laughing, he added: "The people, when they see it, will never suspect that Alexandra Feodorovna knew of the pending disaster eight days ago. But," he added suddenly, after a pause, "is it not time, Feodor, that I saw another vision?"
I laughed. I knew how, during the week that had elapsed since our return from the secret visit to Potsdam, he was constantly holding reunions of his sister-disciples, many fresh "converts" being admitted to the new religion.
Both Lachkarioff and Filimonoff, authors of the terrible disaster at Obukhov, had been furnished with pa.s.sports by Protopopoff, and were already well on their way to Sweden, but the catastrophe was the signal for a terrible period of unrest throughout Russia, and in the fortnight that followed, rumours, purposely started by German agents and the secret police under Protopopoff, a.s.sumed most alarming proportions.
All was the creation of Rasputin"s evil brain. With the Emperor and Empress absent in the South, he had, with the connivance of "No. 70, Berlin," determined to undermine the moral of the whole nation by disseminating false reports and arranging for disaster after disaster.
In the "saint"s" study in the Gorokhovaya there was arranged the terrible railway "accident" which occurred near Smolensk, in which a crowded troop train collided with an ambulance train, the wreckage being run into by a second troop train, all three trains eventually taking fire and burning.
The exact loss of life will never be known.
Another outrage was the destruction of the big railway bridge over the River Tvertza, not far from Kava, thus blocking the Petrograd-Moscow line, while a train conveying high explosives made in England a few days later blew up while pa.s.sing the station of Odozerskaja, completely wrecking the line between Archangel and Petrograd and killing nearly three hundred people.
Each of these outrages was arranged in my presence, and I was compelled to a.s.sist in counting the money which was afterwards given by the monk to their perpetrators as price of their perfidy.
"We must create unrest," Rasputin declared one night to His Excellency the Minister Protopopoff, as the precious pair sat together. "We must prepare Russia for disaster."
Hence it was that they arranged for a series of most alarming false rumours to be circulated throughout the length and breadth of the Empire.
Indeed, on the day following, I heard in a bank where I had business that all Moscow was involved in a great revolution, that the Moscow police were on strike, and that the troops had refused to fire upon the populace. Everyone stood aghast at the news. But the truth was that the telegraphs and telephones between Moscow and Petrograd had been wilfully cut in three places by agents of Protopopoff, and while those alarming rumours were current in Petrograd, similar rumours were rife in Moscow that revolution had broken out in the capital.
Rasputin and his friends in the course of a few days created a veritable whirlwind of false reports, hoping by that means to shatter or stifle all manifestations of patriotic feeling, and prepare Russia for a separate peace.
Meanwhile he had contrived, as the Kaiser ordered, to prevent the offensive being resumed in Poland; and yet so cleverly did he effect all this that General Brusiloff, who was at the south-west front, actually gave an interview to a British journalist, declaring that the war was already won, "though it was merely speculation to estimate how much longer will be required before the enemy are convinced that the cause for the sake of which they have drenched Europe in blood is irretrievably lost."
The cold white light of later events has indeed revealed the black hearts of Rasputin and his friends, for while all this was in progress Sturmer, though so active in the betrayal of his country, boldly made a speech deploring the fact that anyone credited the sinister rumours which his fellow-conspirators had started, and to save his face he warned the working-cla.s.ses to remain patient and prosecute the war with vigour.
I recollect well the day he had made that speech--the day on which the Labour group of the Central War Industrial Committee issued its declaration. There was a reunion of the sister-disciples, at which three new members were admitted to the cult, all society women under thirty, and all good-looking. Their names were Baroness Terenine, whose husband had been Governor of Yaroslav; Countess Chidlovski, one of the acknowledged society beauties of Petrograd, who had of late had an "affair" with an Italian tenor named Baccelli; and Anna, the pretty young daughter of a woman named Friede, who was also a "disciple."
There was a large attendance, and Rasputin exhibited more than the usual mock piety. In his jumbled jargon, which he called a sermon--that mixture of quotations from the "Lives of Saints" mingled with horrible obscenities--he had referred to the terrible rumours.
"These, I fear, my dear sisters, are, alas! too true," he declared.
"Being in the position of knowing much, I beg of you all to pray ceaselessly, and let these three who to-day join our holy circle take upon themselves the duty of obtaining fresh converts, and thus ensure to themselves the blessing of him who stands here before you--the saviour of Russia."
Then he paused, and all the kneeling women crossed themselves, piously murmuring, as was part of the creed:
"G.o.d"s will be done! G.o.d"s will be done! Truly, our Father Gregory is holy! Truly, the sacrifice which each and all of us make is made to G.o.d!"