Nicholas and Alexandra (6 page)

In India, Bariatinsky and Oblensky each killed a tiger, but
Nicholas, to his immense chagrin, shot nothing. The heat was intense and the Tsarevich grew irritable. From Delhi he complained to his mother, "How stifling it is to be surrounded again by the English and to see red uniforms everywhere." Hurriedly, Marie wrote back:

"I'd like to think you are very courteous to all the English who are taking such pains to give you the best possible reception, shoots, etc. I quite see that the balls and other official doings are not very amusing, especially in that heat, but you must understand that your position brings this with it. You have to set your personal comfort aside, be doubly polite and amiable, and above all, never show you are bored. You will do this, won't you, my dear Nicky? At balls you must consider it your duty to dance more and smoke less in the garden with officers just because it is more amusing. One simply cannot do this, my dear, but I know you understand all this so well and you know my

only wish is that nothing can be said against you and for you to leave a good impression with everybody everywhere."

George suffered in the Indian heat. His cough persisted and he developed a constant fever. To his great disappointment, his father and mother ordered him to break off the tour. When the
Pamiat Azova
sailed from Bombay, George left on a destroyer in the opposite direction to return to his quiet life in the Caucasus.

Nicholas continued eastward, stopping in Colombo, Singapore, Batavia and in Bangkok, where he called on the King of Siam. He went on to Saigon and Hong Kong, and arrived in Japan just as the cherry trees were blooming in Tokyo parks. He visited Nagasaki and Kyoto and he was passing through the town of Otsu when his tour— and his life—nearly came to an abrupt end. Suddenly on a street a Japanese jumped at him swinging a sword. The blade, aimed at his head, glanced off his forehead, bringing a gush of blood but failing to bite deep. The assassin swung a second time, but Prince George of Greece forcefully parried the blow with his cane.

The assailant's motives have never been clear. Nicholas, although he bore a scar for the rest of his life and sometimes suffered headaches in that part of his skull gave no explanation. Two stories, both largely rumor, have been offered. One attributes the assault to a fanatic outraged by the supposedly disrespectful behavior of Nicholas and his companions in a Japanese temple. The other describes it as the jealous lunge of a Samurai whose wife had received the Tsarevich's attention. The episode terminated the visit, and Alexander III telegraphed his son to return home immediately. Thereafter, Nicholas never liked Japan and customarily referred to most Japanese as "monkeys." A subsequent entry in his diary reads, "I received the Swedish minister and the Japanese monkey, the chargé d'affaires, who brought me a letter, a portrait and an ancient armor from Her Majesty [the Empress of Japan]."

On his way home, Nicholas stopped in Vladivostock long enough to lay the first stone of the eastern terminus of the Trans-Siberian Railway. He found Vladivostock a desolate frontier town of muddy, unpaved streets, open sewers, unpainted wooden houses and clusters of mud-plastered straw huts inhabited by Chinese and Koreans. On May 31, 1892, he attended an outdoor religious service swept by cold Siberian winds. He wielded a shovel to fill a wheelbarrow with dirt, trundled it along for several yards and emptied it down an embankment of the future railroad. Soon after, he grasped a trowel and cemented into place the first stone of the Vladivostock passenger station.

Upon his return to St. Petersburg, Nicholas again began to see Kschessinska. At first, they rendezvoused secretly in carriages on the bank of the Neva. Later, the Tsarevich began to call on Mathilde at her father's home. Usually, he brought with him three youthful cousins, Grand Dukes Serge, George and Alexander Mikhailovich. Kschessinska served the young men her father's champagne and listened while they sang songs from Russian Georgia. On Sundays, Mathilde went to the race track and sat just opposite the Imperial box, never failing to receive a bouquet of flowers, delivered for the Tsarevich by two fellow officers of the Guards.

As Nicholas's affection for Kschessinska grew stronger, he gave her a gold bracelet studded with diamonds and a large sapphire. The following summer, when Kschessinska returned to the military theatre at Krasnoe Selo, Nicholas came often to rehearsals, sitting in her dressing room, talking until the rehearsal began. After the performance, Nicholas came for Kschessinska, driving his own
troika.
Alone together they set off on starlit rides, galloping through the shadows on the great plain of Krasnoe Selo. Sometimes, after these blood-stirring rides, the Tsarevich stayed after supper until dawn.

At the end of that summer of 1892, Kschessinska decided that she needed a place of her own. "Though he did not openly mention it," she said, "I guessed that the Tsarevich shared this wish." Her father, shattered by her announcement, asked whether she understood that Nicholas could never marry her. Mathilde replied that she cared nothing about the future and wished only to seize whatever brief happiness Fate was offering her. Soon after, she rented a small two-story house in St. Petersburg, owned by the composer Rimsky-Korsakov.

When her house was ready, Nicholas celebrated the housewarming by giving her a vodka service of eight small gold glasses inlaid with jewels. Thereafter, she said, "we led a quiet, retiring life." Nicholas usually rode up on horseback in time for supper. They gave little parties, attended by the three young Grand Dukes, another dancer or two and a tenor of whom Nicholas was fond. After supper, in "an intimate and delightful atmosphere" the company played baccarat.

Nicholas, meanwhile, continued his functions at court. "I have been nominated a member of the Finance Committee," he wrote at one point. "A great honor, but not much pleasure. ... I received six members of this institution; I admit that I never suspected its existence." He became president of a committee to aid those who were starving in a famine, and he worked hard at the job, raising money and donating substantial funds of his own. His relations with his father

remained distant and deferential. "I would have liked to exercise with the Hussars today," he wrote, "but I forgot to ask Papa." Sergius Witte, the burly, efficient Finance Minister who built the Trans-Siberian Railway and later served Nicholas during the Japanese War and the 1905 Revolution, gave an account of a conversation he had with Alexander III. According to Witte, he began the conversation by suggesting to the Tsar that the Tsarevich be appointed president of the Trans-Siberian Railroad. Witte says Alexander III was astonished by his proposal.

"What? But you know the Tsarevich. Have you ever had a serious conversation with him?"

"No, Sire, I have never had the pleasure of having such a conversation with the Heir."

"He is still absolutely a child, he has only infantile judgments, how would he be able to be president of a committee?"

"Nevertheless, Sire, if you do not begin to initiate him to affairs of state, he will never understand them."

In 1893, Nicholas was sent to London to represent the family at the wedding of his first cousin George, Duke of York—later King George V—to Princess Mary of Teck. The Tsarevich was lodged in Marlborough House with most of the royal personages of Europe living just down the hall. The Prince of Wales, always concerned with sartorial matters, immediately decided that the young visitor needed sprucing. "Uncle Bertie, of course, sent me at once a tailor, a bootmaker and a hatter," Nicholas reported to his mother. This was his first visit to London. "I never thought I would like it so much," he said, describing his visits to Westminster Abbey, St. Paul's and the Tower. Appropriately, he avoided that citadel of representative government, the Houses of Parliament.

Nicholas was immediately taken with Princess Mary. "May is delightful and much better looking than her photographs," he wrote. As for his cousin George, Nicholas and the bridegroom looked so much alike that even people who knew them well confused one with the other. George was shorter and slimmer than Nicholas, his face was thinner and his eyes somewhat more protuberant, but both parted their hair in the middle and wore similar Van Dyke beards. Standing side by side, they looked like brothers and almost like twins. Several times during the ceremonies, the resemblance caused embarrassment. At a garden party, Nicholas was taken for George and warmly congratulated, while George was asked whether he had come to London only to attend the wedding or whether he had other business to transact. The day before the wedding, George, mistaken for Nicholas, was

begged by one gentleman of the court not to be late for the ceremony.

After the wedding, Nicholas visited Windsor Castle and had lunch with Queen Victoria. "She was very friendly, talked a lot, and gave me the Order of the Garter," he reported. He went to a ball at Buckingham Palace and, knowing his mother would be pleased, told her, "I danced a lot . . . but didn't see many beautiful ladies."

In St. Petersburg, meanwhile, little Kschessinska's career as a dancer was gathering momentum. Already, at nineteen, she was dancing such roles as the Sugar Plum Fairy in Tchaikovsky's
Nutcracker
and Princess Aurora in
Sleeping Beauty.
Tchaikovsky himself came to her rehearsals and accompanied the dancers on the piano. Once after Mathilde had danced Princess Aurora, the composer came to her dressing room especially to congratulate her. In later years Mathilde Kschessinska would rank with Anna Pavlova and Tamara Karsavina among the great ballerinas of pre-revolutionary Russia.

There were those, of course, who ascribed Mathilde's early success primarily to her connection with the Tsarevich. Not that society regarded the liaison on either side with moral disdain. For the Russian aristocracy, ballet was a supreme art and the mingling of great titles and pretty ankles was a common thing. Many a deep-bosomed young dancer in the back row of the Imperial Ballet left the Maryinsky Theatre pulling her cloak about her shoulders, gathered her skirts and stepped into the plush velvet interior of a waiting coach to be whirled away to a private supper in one of the city's elegant palaces.

Despite Mathilde's success on the stage, the flame between her and Nicholas began to flicker. Nicholas had never hidden from Kschessinska his interest in Princess Alix. Early in 1894, he told Mathilde that he hoped to make Alix his fiancée. Later that year, Nicholas and Mathilde parted, saying goodbye at a highway rendezvous, she seated in her carriage, he astride a horse. When he rode away, she wept. For months, she went through "the terrible boundless suffering ... of losing my Niki." The great ballet master Marius Petipa consoled her by persuading her that suffering in love is necessary to art, especially to the great stage roles to which she aspired. "I was not alone in my grief and trouble. . . . The [younger] Grand Duke Serge ... remained with me to console and protect me." Serge bought her a
dacha
with a garden by the sea. Later, at the height of her success, she met Grand Duke Andrei, another cousin of the Tsar. Although Andrei was seven years her junior, they traveled together on holidays to Biarritz and Venice. In 1902, Mathilde and Andrei had a son, and in 1921, in Cannes, they married.

CHAPTER THREE

Princess Alix

My dream is some day to marry Alix H. I have loved her a long while and still deeper and stronger since 1889 when she spent six weeks in St. Petersburg. For a long time, I resisted my feeling that my dearest dream will come true."

When Nicholas made this entry in his diary in 1892, he had not yet established his temporary little household with Kschessinska. He was discouraged about the prospects of his interest in Princess Alix. Russian society did not share Nicholas's rapture for this German girl with red-gold hair. Alix had made a bad impression during her visits to her sister Grand Duchess Elizabeth in the Russian capital. Badly dressed, clumsy, an awkward dancer, atrocious French accent, a schoolgirl blush, too shy, too nervous, too arrogant—these were some of the unkind things St. Petersburg said about Alix of Hesse.

Society sniped openly at Princess Alix, safe in the knowledge that Tsar Alexander III and Empress Marie, both vigorously anti-German, had no intention of permitting a match with the Tsarevich. Although Princess Alix was his godchild, it was generally known that Alexander III was angling for a bigger catch for his son, someone like Princess Hélène, the tall, dark-haired daughter of the Pretender to the throne of France, the Comte de Paris. Although a republic, France was Russia's ally, and Alexander III suspected that a link between the Romanov dynasty and the deposed House of Bourbon would strengthen the alliance in the hearts of the French people.

But the approach to Hélène did not please Nicholas. "Mama made a few allusions to Hélène, daughter of the Comte de Paris," he wrote in his diary. "I myself want to go in one direction and it is evident that Mama wants me to choose the other one."

Hélène also resisted. She was not at all willing to give up her Roman Catholicism for the Orthodox faith required of a future Russian em-

press. Frustrated, the Tsar next sent emissaries to Princess Margaret of Prussia. Nicholas flatly declared that he would rather become a monk than marry the plain and bony Margaret. Margaret spared him, however, by announcing that she, too, was unwilling to abandon Protestantism for Orthodoxy.

Through it all, Nicholas nurtured his hope that someday he would marry Alix. Before leaving for the Far East, he wrote in his diary, "Oh, Lord, how I want to go to Ilinskoe [Ella's country house, where Alix was visiting] . . . otherwise if I do not see her now, I shall have to wait a whole year and that will be hard." His parents continued to discourage his ardor. Alix, they said, would never change her religion in order to marry him. Nicholas asked permission only to see her and propose. If Alix were denied him, he stated, he would never marry.

As long as he was well, Alexander III ignored his son's demands. In the winter of 1894, however, the Tsar caught influenza and began having trouble with his kidneys. As his vitality began to ebb alarmingly, Alexander began to consider how Russia would manage without him. Nothing could be done immediately about the Tsarevich's lack of experience, but Alexander III decided that he could at least provide his heir with the stabilizing effect of marriage. As Princess Alix was the only girl whom Nicholas would even remotely consider, Alexander III and Marie reluctantly agreed that he should be allowed to propose.