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Read Ebook: The Argosy Vol. 51 No. 4 April 1891 by Various Wood Charles W Charles William Editor
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Ebook has 773 lines and 45444 words, and 16 pages
The Dowager Empress Marie
The Emperor Nicholas II
The Empress Alexandra
The Tsesarevich Alexei
The Grand Duke Michael
The Grand Duchess Elizabeth
The Grand Duchesses Anastasia, Marie and Tatiana
Nicholas II and His Children
The Tsesarevich Alexei and the Grand Duchesses Olga, Anastasia and Tatiana
The Grand Duchesses Marie, Olga, Anastasia and Tatiana
Views of Tobolsk
Ipatiev House, Ekaterinburg
The Death Chamber, Ipatiev House, Ekaterinburg
The Handkerchief
The Piece of Glass
Map of Ekaterinburg and Vicinity
The Grand Duchesses Marie and Anastasia
The Grand Duchess Anastasia
Nicholas II with His Children and His Nephew, Prince Vasili
The Grand Duchess Anastasia
The Grand Duchesses Olga, Tatiana, Anastasia and Marie
The Grand Duchess Anastasia
The Grand Duchess Anastasia and Marjorie Hanson
The Grand Duchess Anastasia
THIRD GROUP
Cameos of the Grand Duchess Anastasia Through the Years
Author's Preface
A few weeks after my arrival in Bukovina--after I had had time to recover from the emotional and nervous shock and body wounds which I had suffered at the time of the tragedy on the night of July 16-17, 1918--I decided to write about my home life with my beloved family, about our arrest, about our exile in Tobolsk and Ekaterinburg, about the assassination of the family in Ekaterinburg, and about my rescue and subsequent escape across the frontier.
I made many, many notes, totaling over three hundred pages. I spent hours and hours in the writing, days and nights of introspective experiences, of grief and horror. I wrote in a peasant cottage in a lonely village dotted with thatched-roof houses. I wrote at night in the candlelight, agonizing over my story. At times the only relief I had from my misery was the howling or barking of a dog. I remembered my beloved Father's words, "Dearest children, are you awake?" Tear after tear dropped as I labored.
On the very first evening of the Captain's arrival at Bon Repos, M. Platzoff had intimated that he was an opium smoker, and that at no very distant date he would enlighten Ducie as to the practice in question. About a week later, as they sat down to their pipes and coffee, said Platzoff, "This is one of my big smoke-nights. To-night I go on a journey of discovery into Dreamland--a country that no explorations can exhaust, where beggars are the equals of kings, and where the Fates that control our actions are touched with a fine eccentricity that in a more commonplace world would be termed madness. But there nothing is commonplace."
"You are going to smoke opium?" said Ducie, interrogatively.
"I am going to smoke drashkil. Let me, for this once, persuade you to follow my example."
"For this once I would rather be excused," said Ducie, laughingly.
Platzoff shrugged his shoulders. "I offer to open for you the golden gates of a land full of more strange and wondrous things than were ever dreamed of by any early voyager as being in that new world on whose discovery he was bent; I offer to open up for you a set of experiences so utterly fresh and startling that your matter-of-fact English intellect cannot even conceive of such things. I offer you all this, and you laugh me down with an air of superiority, as though I were about to present you with something which, however precious it might be in my eyes, in yours was utterly without value."
"If I sin at all," said Ducie, "it is through ignorance. The subject is one respecting which I know next to nothing. But I must confess that about experiences such as you speak of there is an intangibility--a want of substance--that to me would make them seem singularly valueless."
"And is not the thing we call life one tissue of intangibilities?" asked the Russian. "You can touch neither the beginning nor the end of it. Do not its most cherished pleasures fly you even as you are in the very act of trying to grasp them? Do you know for certain that you--you yourself--are really here?--that you do not merely dream that you are here? What do you know?"
"Your theories are too far-fetched for me," said Ducie. "A dream can be nothing more than itself--nothing can give it backbone or substance. To me such things are of no more value than the shadow I cast behind me when I walk in the sun."
"And yet without substance there could be no shadow," snarled the Russian.
"Do your experiences in any way resemble those recorded by De Quincey?"
"They do and do not," answered Platzoff. "I can often trace, or fancy that I can, a slight connecting likeness, arising probably from the fact that in the case of both of us a similar, or nearly similar, agent was employed for a similar purpose. But, as a rule, the intellectual difference between any two men is sufficient to render their experiences in this respect utterly dissimilar."
"It does not follow, I presume, that all the visions induced by the imbibing of opium, or what you term drashkil, are pleasant ones?"
"At which pleasant level I pray ever to be kept," said Ducie; "I have no desire to soar into those regions of romance where you seem so thoroughly at home."
"So be it," said Platzoff drily. "The intellects of you English have been nourished on beef and beer for so many generations that there is no such thing as spiritual insight left among you. We must not expect too much." This was said not ill-naturedly, but in that quiet jeering tone which was almost habitual with Platzoff.
Ducie maintained a judicious silence and went on puffing gravely at his meerschaum. Platzoff touched the gong and Cleon entered, for this conversation took place before the illness of the latter. The Russian held up two fingers, and Cleon bowed. Then Cleon opened a mahogany box in one corner of the room, and took out of it a pipe-bowl of red clay, into which he fitted a flexible tube five or six yards in length and tipped with amber. The bowl was then fixed into a stand of black oak about a foot high and there held securely, and the mouthpiece handed to Platzoff. Cleon next opened an inlaid box, and by means of a tiny silver spatula he cut out a small block of some black, greasy-looking mixture, which he proceeded to fit into the bowl of the pipe. On the top of this he sprinkled a little aromatic Turkish tobacco, and then applied an allumette. When he saw that the pipe was fairly alight, he bowed and withdrew.
While these preparations were going on Platzoff had not been silent. "I have spoken to you of what I am about to smoke, both as opium and drashkil," he said. "It is not by any means pure opium. With that great drug are mixed two or three others that modify and influence the chief ingredient materially. I had the secret of the preparation from a Hindoo gentleman while I was in India. It was imparted to me as an immense favour, it being a secret even there. The enthusiastic terms in which he spoke of it have been fully justified by the result, as you would discover for yourself if you could only be persuaded to try it. You shake your head. Eh bien! mon ami; the loss is yours, not mine."
"Some of what you have termed your 'experiences' are no doubt very singular ones?" said Ducie, interrogatively.
"They are--very singular," answered Platzoff. "In my last drashkil-dream, for instance, I believed myself to be an Indian fakir, and I seemed to realise to the full the strange life of one of those strange beings. I was stationed in the shade of a large tree just without the gate of some great city where all who came and went could see me. On the ground, a little way in front of me, was a wooden bowl for the reception of the offerings of the charitable. I had kept both my hands close shut for so many years that the nails had grown into the flesh, and the muscles had hardened so that I could no longer open them; and I was looked upon as a very holy man. The words of the passers-by were sweet in my ears, but I never spoke to them in return. Silent and immovable, I stood there through the livelong day--and in my vision it was always day. I had the power of looking back, and I knew that, in the first instance, I had been led by religious enthusiasm to adopt that mode of life. I should be in the world but not of it; I should have more time for that introspective contemplation the aim and end of which is mental absorption in the divine Brahma; besides which, people would praise me, and all the world would know that I was a holy man. But the strangest part of the affair remains to be told. In the eyes of the people I had grown in sanctity from year to year; but in my own heart I knew that instead of approaching nearer to Brahma, I was becoming more depraved, more wicked, with a great inward wickedness, as time went on. I struggled desperately against the slough of sin that was slowly creeping over me, but in vain. It seemed to me as if the choice were given me either to renounce my life of outward-seeming sanctity, and becoming as other men were, to feel again that inward peace which had been mine long years before; or else, while remaining holy in the eyes of the multitude, to feel myself sinking into a bottomless pit of wickedness from which I could never more hope to emerge. My mental tortures while this struggle was going on I can never forget: they are as much a real experience to me as if they had made up a part of my genuine waking life. And still I stood with closed hands in the shade of the tree; and the people cried out that I was holy, and placed their offerings in my bowl; and I could not make up my mind to abnegate the title they gave me and become as they were. And still I grew in inward wickedness, till I loathed myself as if I were some vile reptile; and so the struggle went on, and was still going on when I opened my eyes and found myself again at Bon Repos."
Ducie, who had never seen anyone similarly affected, was frightened by his host's death-like appearance. He was doubtful whether Platzoff had not been seized with a fit. In order to satisfy himself he touched the gong and summoned Cleon. That incomparable domestic glided in, noiseless as a shadow.
"Does your master always look as he does now after he has been smoking opium?" asked the Captain.
"Always, sir."
"And how long does it take him to come round?"
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