Princess Daisy (7 page)

At Landquart, in Switzerland, the private train had to be abandoned since it could not run on the narrow-gauge Alpine tracks. The Valenskys remained in it for several days until all their servants and possessions had been laboriously transported by a smaller Alpine train up to the heights of Davos-Dorf. Then they, too, made the steep, winding, upward journey among frozen waterfalls and snow-smothered fir trees. Titiana shivered although the compartment was warm and she was covered with furs. Her glance recoiled from the vast drop into the abyss on one side of the train but could find no comfortable resting place on the peaks toward which they climbed. Her small, gloved hand clutched her husband’s arm as they climbed higher and night began to fall. It was dark outside before they reached the point at which the valley began and the roadbed became level.

“We’re almost there, my darling,” Vasily said. “Boris will be waiting at the station with the Rolls-Royce.”

“What?” Titiana asked, her strange terror momentarily canceled by surprise.

“Certainly. Did you think we were going to drive in some hired cabriolet like a good bourgeois couple on their way to a christening? I ordered the new Silver Ghost last year as a present for you. It was ready two weeks ago so I merely telegraphed Mr. Royce in Manchester and requested that he send it on here instead.”

“But Boris can’t drive an automobile,” Titiana protested.

“I instructed Royce to send one of his English driver-mechanics with the car. He can teach Boris—or, if not, we’ll keep the man on.”

“Even the Tsar doesn’t have one!” Titiana clapped her hands gleefully. “How fast will it go?”

“Last year a special model went one hundred and one miles an hour—but I think well stay well under that—I don’t want to frighten Boris.” Vasily was delighted with the success of his surprise. It was exactly the thing needed to take Titiana’s mind off her arrival in a strange land where her disease would finally have to be faced. It had been worth all the effort and thousands of pounds expended to make sure that the automobile would be in Davos in time for their arrival.

It seemed perfectly natural to Titiana Valensky that her chalet in Davos should be a miniature of her palace in St. Petersburg, and that she should have the same quality of total service she had always taken for granted, service so complete that the same woman who risked her life on a horse without hesitation had never put on her own stockings. Women of her class never knew the price of anything, neither the price of their jewels, their shoes nor their furs. They would not recognize that piece of paper called a bill if they had ever chanced to see one. They chose everything they wanted without asking or thinking of cost Expense did not exist for them, not even as an abstract concept, just as it never occurred to them to visit the kitchens of their own palaces.

Now that Titiana was confined to Davos, she set about regaining her health with as much blind determination as she had put into losing it.

Vasily, marooned as a mountaintop, kept in almost daily touch with events in Russia by means of mail and the telegraph, and Russian, French and English newspapers reached him twice weekly by a special courier from Zurich. In 1912, when five thousand workers in the Lena goldfields went on strike and incredibly held out for a month, he took note. This strike led to others, far more widespread until, in 1912, there were over two thousand strikes. The last time there had been such serious troubles in Russia had been in 1905 when troops had fired on workers in front of the Winter Palace, a day that would always be known as Bloody Sunday.

For long hours Vasily pondered in his library in Davos. It was evident to him, from the doctors’ reports, that his family and his servants were not to leave Switzerland for many years. While his wife had not become dangerously worse, neither had she shown signs of improvement Willpower was no match for fever, courage could not win a victory over a bacillus. Her nighttime temperature curve was slightly higher than it had been several months ago when they first arrived and the rales in the right lobe of her lung were as harsh as ever. The doctors never spoke of time; a question about the future was treated as if it hadn’t been asked, as if it were the question of a fool.

Prince Vasily Valensky set his teeth and determined that if his family was to live in exile for years, they must certainly live without the bother of sending to St Petersburg for money. He decided to sell his platinum mines in
the Urals, and his sugar plantations, forests and sawmills in Kursk. He put the immense fortune thus realized into Swiss banks where it would be immediately available to him.

Tattersall, the Englishman from Manchester, who had failed utterly in instructing Boris in the mysteries of the Rolls-Royce, now taught Vasily to drive the Silver Ghost. The Prince discovered that while the great machine, the most famous model the firm of Rolls-Royce ever made, could negotiate any mountain road ever constructed, there were not enough roads around Davos for a good day’s motoring. It was then that he sent to Russia for the great wooden troika. As soon as snow covered the ground, Vasily took the reins of three strong horses, and strapped little Alexander securely to the seat at his side. The father and son became a familiar and much admired sight in the shop-filled, festive streets of Davos, as they passed through the town on their way to the snow meadows.

There were other Russians of noble birth among the patients of Davos, as well as a good sprinkling of British and French aristocrats, and soon many of those who were ambulatory could be discovered at Princess Titiana’s. It had never occurred to anyone in the family even to try to adapt themselves to this foreign country: cozy, quaint, comfortable, safe, dull, dull Switzerland. To enter the chalet was to walk into St. Petersburg where all things produced a distillation, profoundly nostalgic, of the profusion, the elaborate, careless abundance and warmth of their vanished home. Certain refugees who entered the chalet for the first time gazed about them, breathed in the scent of the dark, gold-tipped Russian cigarettes, listened to the sound of rapidly spoken French and burst into tears.

These elegantly dressed habitues, cheeks a shade too red, eyes a shade too bright, ate with unappeasable appetite. Here and there, throughout the reception rooms, stood long tables covered with food. The Valenskys kept open house, both at tea time and dinnertime, with dozens of Russian servants busy refilling glasses and plates and passing boxes of imported cigarettes and cigars. On those evenings when the Princess was not well enough to appear, none of her guests was so tactless as to remark on her absence. On the days when she felt strong enough, she was dressed by her maids in one or another of her two hundred tea gowns. Languidly Titiana decided whether to wear her
rope of Burmese sapphires of the prized cornflower blue which matched her eyes or her triple string of matched black pearls, before she descended on Vasily’s arm to reign over her guests.

The festive atmosphere of the Valensky chalet might have deceived a total stranger, but everyone in the huge house was trained to revolve around a sickroom. The inner weather of the family depended on whether the Princess had spent a quiet night or a restless one. The barometer of spirits, from the kitchen to Vasily’s study, from the peasants’ rooms to Alexander’s nursery, rose or fell determined by Titiana’s fever chart or the news that either she had been permitted out for a walk or was confined to her balcony. Every day two doctors attended her and, at all times, two trained nurses made up part of the permanent household.

From his earliest memories, the little boy, Alexander, never knew what it was like to have a healthy mother. His babyish play with her was always cut short by someone who was afraid that he was tiring her. When Titiana read out loud to him, a nurse would always close the book far too soon. When Alexander grew old enough to play simple games of cards with his mother, her chief doctor took him aside and gravely warned him of the dangerous excitement engendered by any games of chance. His love for her was imprinted, from earliest memory, by the terrible tension which lies between the sick and the well. From babyhood on he was crippled, permanently, with a resentment, a wordless hatred, and a deep and irrationally superstitious fear of any sign of illness. Even normal weakness was loathsome to him, although his frustrated child’s love for his mother made him conceal his sense of horror.

From 1912 to 1914 this life, half enforced holiday, half devoted to the monotonous routine of the cure, endured. On that day of June 28, 1914, when the Austrian Archduke Francis Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo, the Valensky family, attended by ten servants, was having a rare picnic in a green pasture from which they could clearly hear the sound of cowbells. Titiana was making the most of one of her brief and deceptive periods of well-being. Their world had just died although no one yet knew it.

Two months after that happy Alpine picnic, the defeat of Tannenberg took place, during which the finest and best of Russia’s fighting men were lost. Within a year over a
million Russian soldiers were dead, while in Davos, far from the sound of guns, Alexander received his first pony for his fourth birthday. In 1916, the year of Verdun, the year in which nineteen thousand British soldiers were killed in a single day in the Battle of the Somme, Alexander’s chief interest was in the hours he spent in the garage, being surreptitiously introduced to the interior workings of a Rolls-Royce engine.

On March 12, 1917, after another long winter during which his father had rarely smiled, Alexander, six years old, and already an audacious skier, had gone to the slopes of spring snow with his school friends. On that day in St. Petersburg, now called Petrograd, and soon to be called Leningrad, a starving mob, waving the red flags of the revolution, was seen near the Alexandra Bridge. Opposing them, on the other side of the bridge, stood a regiment of guards, the nemesis of rioters. However, the mob continued to press forward and the guards held their fire. Then, in a moment which was to change the history of the world, the two groups merged. Like two drops of water, the masses and the army became one body. As Alexander climbed back up the shadowy slopes for the last run of the day, as Titiana poured hot water from the samovar and offered a cup of tea to a French count, as Vasily, haggard and sad from his years of involuntary internment in Switzerland, bent over newspapers that were three days old, the Russian Revolution began.

World War I had been over for almost three years when the decision was made to send Alexander away to school. He was only nine years old, and Titiana might possibly have allowed him to continue in the Davos school where he was the undisputed leader of the gang of village boys, self-willed, taller, rougher, stronger and more ready to take a reckless dare than any of them, but Vasily saw clearly that their son was running wild. He had been born a prince but he was in danger of becoming a peasant. Even in a world in which princes were considered obsolete—particularly Russian princes—if they had managed to survive at all, there was the Valensky tradition to honor, and the Valensky fortune to inherit. He must be educated like the noble gentleman he would become.

“We’ll send him to Le Rosey,” he told his wife. “I’ve already made inquiries. He can start in the fall, just before his next birthday. Now don’t look sad, my dearest—it’s
only at Rolle, not far from here, and in the winter the whole school moves up to Gstaad. It’s so near that Alexander will have no trouble coming home for holidays.”

Eventually, Titiana accepted the idea as, with the necessary self-absorption of the chronic invalid, she had accepted the fact that her family was doomed to eternal exile, that the world of her girlhood no longer existed and that her disease never slept for long. Hope, in her soul, had been replaced with endurance.

Each time Alexander came home for vacations, his parents saw how he was being changed by his new life in the world’s most exclusive and expensive boarding school. They noticed little by little how his manners, in the fashion of his international crowd of schoolmates—young potentates, heirs to dynasties—began to show that he was newly comfortable wherever he found himself. He was at ease in
their
way, a way which was based on a sense of hauteur that eventually turned into the special, superior kind of lofty amusement which clings to the elite of the Le Rosey students, a secret, inward smile. He even acquired a new name—Stash—to which both his parents objected because it was a Polish, not a Russian, diminutive, but which they had to admit suited him in a way that Alexander never had.

4

S
tash had just turned fourteen when he came home, as usual, for the Christmas vacation of 1925. He had reached that age at which the outlines of the man he would become were unmistakably present to an attentive eye. His nose had been broken for the first time in a brawl with the heir to a French marquisate, his curls had been cut short and although he was still far from reaching his full muscular development, he was close to six feet tall. His lips were red with the turbulent vitality of youth and permanently chapped from outdoor sports. His eyes had exchanged their innocence for a gaze in which a hint of the relentlessness of his later years had already appeared.

As he always did, after a day of sport, Stash left his ski boots outside the chalet for one of the servants to clean. He put on a pair of after-ski boots and slipped into the salon in search of something to eat. He was an expert at moving among his mother’s coterie with a kind of warding-off politeness which prevented them from detaining him with unwelcome questions. Privately he thought them all unworthy of his mother, this titled band of tuberculosis patients whose illness alone brought them together. His terror of disease expressed itself as contempt for the invalids themselves. With an arrogance which made an exception only of his mother, he even despised the courage and resignation with which they faced their lives and he told himself that he would rather die cleanly than live with rotted lungs.

Deftly he helped himself to a big cup of hot chocolate and a plate of pastries, and started to escape to his own
room. However, a languid hand raised from a far corner indicated to him that this was one of the days on which his mother had joined her guests, and instantly he turned to cross the room and greet her.