When at last they left Alexis alone, either because they had given up or because of Rasputin’s advice to the Empress, the effect could only have been good.
There is another possibility, more shadowy, but important to consider. That emotion plays a role in bleeding has long been suspected. Recently, the hypothesis has been greatly strengthened. In 1957, Dr. Paul J. Poinsard, of Jefferson Hospital in Philadelphia, described to an international symposium on hemophilia his belief “that the hemophiliac patient bleeds more profusely under a condition of emotional stress.” Turning the thesis around, Dr. Poinsard continued, “Emotional tranquillity with a feeling state of well-being appears to be conducive to less severe and less frequent bleeding than in the subject who is emotionally distressed.”
At the moment Rasputin’s telegram arrived at Spala, Alexandra, the only person with whom the semi- conscious Alexis had strong emotional communication, was in a state of frantic, if exhausted, hysteria. Alexis must have felt her fear and despair. Perhaps, in the manner Dr. Poinsard suggested, his condition was affected by these emotions. If it was, then the sudden overwhelming change in his mother’s emotional state produced by Rasputin’s telegram may also have affected Alexis. Alone, the new aura of calm and confidence probably could not have stopped the hemorrhage. But together with the natural reduction of the loss of blood caused by lowered blood pressure and the slow formation of clots, it may have helped. It could even, as Alexandra believed, have been the factor which turned back the tide of death.
Whatever the cause, everyone—doctors, court officials, grand duchesses, people who believed in Rasputin and those who hated him—recognized that a remarkably eerie coincidence had occurred. Only to one person was the mystery not a mystery. In her own mind, Alexandra understood clearly what had happened. To her, it seemed quite natural: after the best doctors in Russia had failed, after her own hours of prayer had gone unanswered, her plea to Rasputin had brought the intervention of God and a miracle had taken place. From that time, Alexandra was unshakably convinced that her son’s life lay in Rasputin’s hands. From this belief, enormous consequences were to flow.
Once the crisis had passed, most of the Imperial household quickly returned to their normal pursuits. Nicholas received his ministers to discuss the war which Bulgaria and Serbia were waging against Turkey. He hunted, played tennis, walked in the woods and went rowing on the river. He took Anna Vyrubova out in a boat which hit a rock in a rapid current and almost capsized.
But for the two most intimately involved in the ordeal, recovery was slow. For weeks, Alexandra and Alexis sat together in his room. He was propped against pillows in his bed, while she sat in a chair beside him, reading aloud or knitting. “I must warn you that according to the doctors, Alexei’s recovery will be very slow,” Nicholas wrote to Marie. “He still has a pain in his left knee and cannot bend it. It has to be propped up on a pillow. But that does not worry the doctors for the chief thing is that the process of internal absorption continues and for this, complete immobility is necessary. His complexion is quite good now, but at one time he looked like wax, his hands, his feet, his face, everything. He has grown terribly thin but the doctors are now stuffing him for all they are worth.”
A month later, Alexis had recovered sufficiently to be moved back to Tsarskoe Selo. At the Empress’s command, the road from the house to the station had been smoothed and graded so that there should not be the slightest jolt. On the homeward journey, the Imperial train crawled at fifteen miles an hour.
Almost a year was to pass before Alexis could walk again. For months, his left leg, drawn up against his chest, refused to straighten. The doctors applied a metal triangle with sliding sides which could be moved to varying points as the leg permitted. Bit by bit, the triangle was widened and the leg extended. But even a year later, at Livadia, Alexis still was undergoing a series of hot mudbaths as a treatment for the limp he had acquired at Spala. Through all this time, official photographs of the Heir were posed either seated or on steps so that the bent leg would appear to be normal.
After Spala, Alexis became a more serious child, more reflective and more considerate of other people. For an eight-year-old boy, it was a matter to ponder that his father was autocrat over millions of men and the master of the largest empire on earth, and yet had no power to spare him the pain he had felt in his leg. For Alexandra, Spala was a supreme religious experience. She had been, for what seemed an eternity, in Hell. The power that vanquished Hell and saved her son had been a sign from Heaven. Beneath that sign stood Gregory Rasputin.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
THERE was much about Gregory Rasputin that was repulsive. When he first appeared in 1905 in several of St. Petersburg’s most elegant drawing rooms, the heralded Siberian “miracle worker” was in his early thirties, broad-shouldered, muscular, of average height. He dressed roughly in loose peasant blouses and baggy trousers tucked into the top of heavy, crudely made leather boots. He was filthy. He rose and slept and rose again without ever bothering to wash himself or change his clothes. His hands were grimy, his nails black, his beard tangled and encrusted with debris. His hair was long and greasy. Parted loosely in the middle, it hung in thin strands to his shoulders. Not surprisingly, he gave off a powerful, acrid odor.
To his devotees, none of these details mattered. Women who found him disgusting discovered later that disgust was a new and thrilling sensation; that the rough and strong-smelling peasant was an alluring change from a surfeit of perfumed and pomaded cavalry officers and society gentlemen. Others, less sensual, reasoned that his coarse appearance was a sure sign of his spirituality. Were he not a Holy Man, they said to themselves, such a ragged
Rasputin’s eyes were his most remarkable feature. Friends and enemies alike described their strange power. Anna Vyrubova, who worshipped Rasputin, spoke of him as having a “pale face, long hair, un-cared for beard and the most extraordinary eyes, large, light, brilliant.” The monk Iliodor, who hated Rasputin, described his “steely grey eyes, deep set under their bushy eyebrows, which almost sank into pinpoints.” Paleologue, who had to consider Rasputin as a political phenomenon, found himself focusing on the eyes: “Rasputin was dark, with long stiff hair, a thick black beard, a high forehead, a broad prominent nose, and sensuous mouth. The full expression of his personality, however, seemed concentrated in his eyes. They were pale blue, of exceptional brilliance, depth and attraction. His gaze was at once piercing and caressing, naive and cunning, far-off and intent. When he was in earnest conversation, his pupils seemed to radiate magnetism. He carried with him a strong animal smell, like the smell of a goat.”
It was difficult to resist the power of Rasputin’s steady gaze. Men and women who met him out of curiosity found themselves fascinated, lured and compelled by the glimmering eyes and the urgent, mysterious will behind them. Prince Yussoupov, who murdered Rasputin, went to him first, coolly announcing that he was sick, to learn more about Rasputin’s methods of “healing.”
“The ‘
“Rasputin had tremendous hypnotic power. I felt as if some active energy were pouring heat, like a warm current into my whole being. I fell into a torpor, and my body grew numb; I tried to speak but my tongue no longer obeyed me and I gradually slipped into a drowsy state, as though a powerful narcotic had been administered to me. All I could see was Rasputin’s glittering eyes; two phosphorescent beams of light melting into a great luminous ring which at times drew nearer and then moved farther away. I heard the voice of the
“I remained in this state without being able to cry out or to move. My mind alone was free, and I fully realized that I was gradually falling into the power of this evil man. Then I felt stir in me the will to fight his hypnosis. Little by little the desire to resist grew stronger and stronger, forming a protective armour around me. I had the feeling that a merciless struggle was being fought out between Rasputin and me. I knew that I was preventing him from getting complete mastery over me, but still I could not move: I had to wait until he ordered me to get up.” Rasputin closed the interview with “Well, my dear, that’ll be enough for the first time.”
