HE revolution gave only the coup de grâce. For it was in the years preceding revolution and war that the Russian empire died.
It died as died Rome, cynically, glitteringly, stalking across the boards in crimson heels and grease paint and peruke and false-face like a romantic barnstormer of the old school, half aware of both cause and effect, and not caring a snap of the fingers for either. It died neither from Tsarism nor Nihilism, but from racial anemia; or rather because everybody who claimed to be anybody made a point of being stamped with the mark of civilization to which he did not belong. Thus the focus grew wrong, the viewpoint twisted; and everything sanely national being despised and ridiculed, by the aristocrats through social and by the bourgeois intelligentsia through esthetic snobbishness, the whole became warped and grimaced and unreal.
Here in Samarkand, where Europe and Asia linked rail metal and swapped lies and threats and bluffs, the situation was caricatured to an extraordinary degree. The Russian officers were too Orientalized, affecting enormous Buriat fur caps and hiltless Circassian sabres, belting their waists with embroidered Bokharan silver and spicing their gliding Slav phrases with Tartar gutturals; while the native-born Asiatic princelings, Sarts and Persians and Turkomans, copied Paris-via Moscow with high silk hats that correctly reflected eight lights, sweet champagne, and subscriptions to naughty French weeklies of which they understood nothing except the illustrations.
There were, too, other bizarre and picaresque comedians in that hodge-podge of commercial statistics, cabarets, gray-coated soldiers, bureaucrats, Kirgiz cameleers, and purple-tiled, minareted mosques which straddled the yellow Central Asian steppes and spoke of itself—without the slightest trace of humor—as a model town.
There were Russian government employees, recently promoted, pouchy, sharp-voiced, who hid their baldness and their forensic wisdom under tremendous, dusty wigs reaching back to the days of Peter the Great, and Russian businessmen, consciously cosmopolitan, the sort who—typically—scorned all foreign countries and hated their own; German cocottes who over-emphasized the ultra-chic of Paris in vogue and vice; French soubrettes who topped Castilian shawls with Catalonian combs and moved their hips in a subtle and sensuous Spanish rhythm; Austrian head-waiters who waxed their mustaches, burred their flat, cozy Viennese speech, and otherwise endeavored to pass muster as simon-pure Magyars; American mining engineers who aped the king's English, broadening their a's and dropping their g's; get-rich-quick Rumanian Jews who set their Semitic imagination to inventing a motley and spurious descent from Crimean gipsy chiefs; Poles who claimed to be Lithuanians and Lithuanians who claimed to be Norwegians. Even the English drummers forgot the small beer and the staid, boiled mutton of the Midlands and referred mysteriously to Huguenot great-great-grandmothers and Portuguese second-cousins.
It was all very unlikely. It was all in strident, garish, pinchbeck contrast—with itself, and with facts. It was all stucco and tinsel and spangles.
There was that reception and ball which Hassan Ghinghiz Khan—though he preferred his Muscovite title of Prince Gengizkhanski—gave to usher in the New Year in his grim old palace which he had inherited from his ancestors, the Tartar Khans of the Golden Horde who had once ruled the land from Pekin to Moscow and from the Himalayas to the frozen shore of the Arctic Ocean.
All Samarkand society was there: Russian officers and civil servants, the prominent business and professional people, the church and the bench, the consular corps and other representative foreigners, and a number of native chiefs whose high cheek bones, lemon complexions, and savage, glinting slit-eyes clashed ludicrously with the sober black-and-white of their evening dress. All except the natives who, being Moslims, still adhered to this one religious prejudice, had brought their wives and grown-up daughters. Yet everybody knew—it had been plainly, insolently engraved on the Prince's invitations—that the ball was given in honor of Mademoiselle Liane de la Tour de Crespigny; and everybody was familiar, if not with Liane's racial, then with her moral antecedents.
There was no arguing about the latter. As to the former, opinions differed.