113
B u s i n e s s
March 1931
T h e
K i n g ’ s
With a prayer for guidance, he uncovered an opening— a dark opening that told no secrets. Dawn was filtering into his cell as he cautionsly low ered into the hole a lighted taper on the end of a rope he had hastily knotted out of clothing. Strong and phleg matic as he was, he was sobbing hysterically at what he had seen in that fearful depth below his cell, as he drew up the taper and with trembling hands replaced the stone. He had waited long that day before his cell door had opened. And the start of surprise that his prison guard gave, when he saw that Nikolai was still on his bench, was not lost upon him. “Let him make way with himself. It is becoming un popular to execute religious fanatics,” had been the of ficial order. The guard rather hastily went out and returned with an excellent repast. He watched curiously as Nikolai ate. But his prisoner wisely refused to talk. In many Russian homes there is a corner reserved for honored guests, called “the red corner.” A color Russians love! It is not used by the family, but kept for special occasions. Ever after, Nikolai referred ironically to that corner of his cell, where the fearful opening had yawned its cold breath of death, as his “red corner.” The last taper flickered and went out. It had burned to its end. Nikolai was alone in the blackness of the dark ness of Russia. And, “If I say surely the darkness shall cover me; even the night shall be light about me.” The Personage had been fairly certain that this would happen to Nikolai. He had said so to the Snowdons in New York before he had sailed. And the Snowdons had told Kaimakov and Djemileh upon their return to the Pacific Coast. The Thin Red Line now began to meet for daily prayer. “In these times,” said Elise soberly, “those who love the Lord should speak often to one another—and to H im !” At one meeting, the young people were unusually stir red by a letter from the Princeling. It told of his meet ing with Nikolai for a few hours in Europe. Djemileh arose from her knees, unobserved by any of them. She slipped quietly across the hall to the spa cious, sunny room that Aunt Margot shared with her. Straight to her flat-topped desk in the old bay window, that looked right down Violet Vale Drive, she went. Pen and paper waited there. “I have just gotten up from my knees, Franz Josef,” she wrote. “We have prayed, and some of us have wept, over your letter—especially where you stood at the win dow in the top of the old castle tower and saw Nikolai, patient and slow, with his bundle on a staff over his shoulder, plodding away from friends and safety, toward terrible Russia. Hear my, plan through, and try it, if but once.” The Princeling smiled as he read the letter his tutor brought to him from his sister’s house. Franz Josef’s American correspondence was not official. He had told his family of it, and yet “they knew nothing.” “The clever little Tartar!” he exclaimed, turning to his young English tutor. “Look you! Is not this worth trying for the good man Nikolai? It may result in her foster father, the old General, finding Christ, as she says.” The two young men talked long into the night.
less and ungrateful the world had ever been toward Him who gave up all His glory to die for men. And now, as Nikolai saw the time approaching when there would be the most desperate human need of a def inite, personal Saviour, it was only his great faith in his Lord that kept him resting and trusting, while he was confined thus, instead of lifting up the Light of Life to his darkened country. He had heard the rivermen singing more than one old chanty. He had visited the patient, pathetic peasants in their humble dwellings, and found them the same people, cherishing the same home-love, as of yore. But they were under a cloud, and they knew it. The Red rule hung over them all like a nightmare that they could not shake off, and from which they would fain awaken but were unable. Poor, low-spoken, wide-cheeked people of the Steppes! They had seen their cultured class., wiped out. They had seen their Christian leaders sent to Siberia, to prison, and to death. Worst of all was the torture. Evangelists were placed in super-heated cells, and then suddenly trans ferred to other cells of freezing temperature. Or they might be sent in unheated freight cars, when it was be low zero, into an exile impossible to live through. Be fore he entered this land of frightfulness, Nikolai had heard one message directly out of Soviet Russia: “All ministers suffering in exile. Life impossible except to Communists.” . He felt dazed and crushed as he realized that for thirteen years his brothers in the faith had been suffering thus. “Does the world know it? And if so, why does not Christendom intervene? Do they know that if we preach the gospel, we are attacked and surrounded by vicious, blood-thirsty Communists ?” he cried. He had heard one Communist’s confession: the firing of a village by night—for no reason! The fiendish chase of its scantily clad inhabitants and their slaughter—for no reason! One family put to the sword in their own house, and then dismembered—all but the young daugh ter who emerged to find them killed! Her frantic effort to embrace them as they lay, and the sudden insanity ensuing! Her gaze so terrible that the arm of the slayer dropped, even as he would have killed h e r! And the final merciful funeral pyre of the dwelling and the murdered ones in which the girl victim perished! “But why?” Nikolai had asked miserably. “We long for human blood!” Was the speaker really human? “We thirst for it. We must be lower than the animals. We have no desire to kill brutes—only humans! It is a terrible obsession from which we recover to find our swords sheathed and the horror accomplished.” “It is more than human—the cause of your atrocities! It is deep as hell!” Nikolai exclaimed. “There is one who exalteth himself and would be as God, who hates our race and desires our extinction. Woe is the day that the spirit of this arch-enemy, the Antichrist, possessed him self of Russia!” From that hour, as though the “beast” himself had heard him, Nikolai was a marked man. A week after his imprisonment, a note had been slipped inside the dole of food allotted to him. It told him that escape lay under a marked stone in a certain corner of his cell. All night he had worked with the tool which he had found so near at hand. Suspiciously near at hand, he began to think, even as he worked!
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