Mrs. Marsh and the French lady patched up a chatting acquaintance, and during one of our halts, while the girls were lying outstretched on the snow, I asked her if the French lady had told her who our companions were. But the French lady, it appeared, would not say, until we had actually crossed the frontier.
I was astonished at the manner in which Mrs. Marsh stood the strain of our night adventure. She had been in prison nearly a month, living on the scanty and atrocious prison food, subjected to long, nerve-racking and searching cross-examinations, yet she bore up better than any of the other females in our party, and after rest-halts was always the first to be ready to restart. There were ditches to cross and narrow, rickety bridges to be traversed. Once our guide, laden with parcels, suddenly vanished, sinking completely into an invisible dyke which had filled with drifted snow. He scrambled up the other side all wet from the water into which he had plunged through the thin ice. The snow was so soft that we could find no foothold from which to jump, and it looked as if there were no means of crossing except as our poor guide had done, until the idea occurred to me that if I sprawled on my stomach the snowdrift might not collapse under my weight. So, planting my feet as deeply as I could, I threw myself across, digging with my hands into the other side till I got a grip, and thus forming a bridge. Mrs. Marsh walked tentatively across my back, the drift still held, the others followed. I wriggled over on my stomach, and we all got over dry.
At last we arrived at a dyke about eight or ten feet broad, filled with water and only partially frozen over. A square white-and-black post on its bank showed that we were at the frontier. “The outposts are a mile away on either hand,” whispered our peasant-guide. “We must get across as quickly as possible.”
The dyke lay across a clearing in the forest. We walked along it, looking wistfully at the other bank ten feet away, and searching for the bridge our guide said should be somewhere here. All at once a black figure emerged from the trees a hundred yards behind us. We stood stock-still, expecting others to appear, and ready, if attacked, to jump into the dyke and reach the other bank at all costs. Our guide was the most terrified of the party, but the black figure turned out to be only a peasant acquaintance of his from another village, who told us there was a bridge at the other end of the clearing.
The “bridge” we found to be a rickety plank, ice-covered and slippery, that threatened to give way as each one of us stepped on to it. One by one we crossed it, expecting it every moment to collapse, till at last we stood in a little group on the farther side.
“This is Finland,” observed our guide, laconically, “that is the last you will see of Sovdepia.” He used an ironical popular term for Soviet Russia constructed from the first syllables of the words Soviets of Deputies.
The moment they set foot on Finnish soil the two girls crossed themselves devoutly and fell on their knees. Then we moved up to a fallen tree-trunk some distance away and sat down to eat sandwiches.
“It’s all right for you,” the peasant went on, suddenly beginning to talk. “You’re out of it, but I’ve got to go back.” He had scarcely said a word the whole time, but once out of Russia, even though “Sovdepia” was but a few yards distant, he felt he could say what he liked. And he did. But most of the party paid but little attention to his complaints against the hated “Kommuna.” That was now all behind.
It was easy work from thence onward. There was another long walk through deep snow, but we could lie down as often as we pleased without fear of discovery by Red patrols. We should only have to report to the nearest Finnish authorities and ask for an escort until we were identified. We all talked freely now—no longer in nervous whispers—and everyone had some joke to tell that made everybody else laugh. At one of our halts Mrs. Marsh whispered in my ear, “They are the daughters of the Grand Duke Paul Alexandrovitch, the Tsar’s uncle, who was imprisoned the other day.”
The girls were his daughters by a morganatic marriage. I thought little of them at the time, except that they were both very pretty and very tastefully dressed in their sporting costumes. But I was reminded of them a few weeks later when I was back in Petrograd. Without trial, their father was shot one night in the fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul, and his body, together with other near relatives of the murdered Tsar, was thrown into a common and unmarked grave.
The incident did not impress me as it did some, for in the revolutionary tornado those of high estate pass like chaff before the wind. I could not but feel more for the hundreds less known and less fortunate who were unable to flee and escape the cruel scythe of revolution. Still, I was glad the young girls I had travelled with were no longer in the place called Sovdepia. How, I wondered, would they learn of the grim tragedy of the gloomy fortress? Who would tell them? To whom would fall the bitter lot to say: “Your father was shot for bearing the name he bore—shot, not in fair fight, but like a dog, by a gang of Letts and Chinese hirelings, and
