David Dickinson - Death Comes to the Ballets Russes

Bakst had always suspected that when Diaghilev referred to the widest possible audience he was referring to the workers by brain rather than the workers by hand. He, Diaghilev, really wanted the intelligentsia of St Petersburg and Paris to rejoice at his talents, rather than members of some mighty proletariat who travelled on foot or by bus rather than by barouche or taxi.

‘The money is just a drop in the ocean,’ Diaghilev said rather sadly. The gossip about his being on the edge of bankruptcy was pretty close to the mark. What really irked him was the prospect of leaving the Savoy Hotel and its luxury, high-class food available at all hours of the day and night.

‘Is this place what we would call a palace, Fokine?’

‘I do not think, if it is anything like the Buckingham, it will be what we could call a palace at all. It sounded to me like a superior sort of hunting lodge with great military honours displayed on the inside.’

‘And they expect us to put on our art in a hunting lodge for five thousand pounds in all the uncertainties of the damned English weather? What do we do if it rains, in heaven’s name? The colour would start to run out of your bloody costumes, Bakst, wouldn’t it?’

Bakst laughed. ‘Sergei Pavlovich, it would be a lasting reminder of the impermanence of art, the transient nature of beauty.’

‘Do you think the bloody peasants will appreciate that? I bet their smocks don’t disintegrate in the rain. I don’t want to accept the offer, gentlemen. But I don’t want to upset any of the English aristocracy. Some of them have enormous incomes from coal and investments. They could bail out our poor company and not notice they’d done it.’ Diaghilev picked up the purple scarf and let it run through his fingers. ‘Would these colours hold in the rain, Bakst? Don’t tell me. I know what we are going to do. Fokine, can you get back in touch with the Duke’s man of business? Tell him we are honoured by his invitation. It would be a great tribute to the Ballets Russes to perform in such an august location. Lay it on with a trowel, Fokine, you know how to do that. Just tell him the money is wrong.’

‘What do you want me to say? Eight? Ten, for heaven’s sake?’

‘Let’s not beat about the bush, gentlemen. Great art has its price. Tell him twenty-five thousand pounds.’

Captain Yuri Gorodetsky of the London branch of the Russian Secret Service, the Okhrana, had always suffered from anxieties about the telephone. There was nothing rational about his concerns — he had even read through a manual for one of the wretched objects and understood how it worked. But he wondered, often last thing at night after a couple of hefty swigs at the vodka bottle, if other voices might come out of it, Peter the Great come to upbraid the inhabitants about their slowness in building his great city St Petersburg, Tolstoy on the line urging all those connected by those strange wires to abandon the sins of the flesh and join him in the universe of love on the way to some provincial railway station. His tidings this morning, as he waited for the connection to General Kilyagin in Paris, were undoubtedly out of the ordinary run of secret-service intelligence.

‘Gorodetsky, you old rogue,’ the voice of his master boomed out of the phone with considerable force, as if the General himself was one of those night-time phantoms. ‘What news of the Bolsheviks from Bethnal Green?’

‘Good morning, General, the news is most unusual.’

‘What do you mean unusual?’

‘I mean, I don’t think anybody could have predicted it!’

‘Out with it, man. Have those pocket-sized London Lenins robbed the banks as well as changing their money?’

‘It’s nothing like that, General. They simply ran away.’

‘What do you mean? Did they never even get as far as the bloody banks?’

‘You’re nearly there, General.’

‘They got as far as the bloody banks and couldn’t face going in?’

‘Exactly so, General. Only one of them had ever been in a bank before and that had to do with his mother’s funeral.’

‘Hold on a minute, Captain. Did our funereal friend at least make it inside the doors?’

‘On the contrary. His experience deserted him, or maybe it didn’t. He told the leader afterwards that he was so overcome by the memories of his mother’s death that he started running back to the East End as fast as he could go.’

‘Do we have eye witnesses to this tragic story?’

‘Mostly the head porters, sir, the men on guard at the entry to the banks. They’re pretty formidable fellows and they claim they intimidated the revolutionaries so much that they didn’t dare go inside.’

‘Revolutionaries be damned!’ The General was in full boom now. ‘England is safe from the Communist International and all the other crackpot bodies these fellows belong to! It’s as if the sans-culottes and the rest of the Paris mob took one look at the Bastille and simply ran away. It’s unthinkable. Just imagine French history without the storming of the Bastille — they’d probably still have a bloody monarchy, for God’s sake. This is the best news I’ve heard for a month, Captain. Are they regrouping, the Bolsheviks from Bethnal Green? Planning another assault by running away from the Bank of England with those pink-coated porters guarding the doors and the gold?’

‘I understand there is a plan to try again, sir. They’re going to go into a lot of smaller banks with very small deposits or to open accounts for themselves.’

‘Sounds to me like they’re joining the capitalist system, Captain. Any word in London about the ghastly Lenin with that bloody beard, in his Polish exile?’

‘Not as yet, sir. I think they’re not going to tell Lenin and his people for a while, if they tell him at all. One of the revolutionaries pointed out to his fellows that Lenin wasn’t doing much for the revolution just now, holed up in that café in Cracow reading newspapers and writing pamphlets. That’s hardly the first wave of the proletarian vanguard is it?’

‘“The opening scene, a green forest glade of tall willows and beeches, joined by a rocky bridge, and in the distance the red glow of the setting sun. In the semi-darkness, a strange band of wood sprites, with olive-green bodies and large pointed ears emerged from the shadows, some hopping half upright, some gliding on all fours.”’

It was breakfast time in Markham Square. Powerscourt was reading from the arts pages of his newspaper.

‘What on earth is that, Francis?’ asked Lady Lucy Powerscourt, who knew precisely what it was. She had been dreading this moment for days now.

‘There’s more,’ said her husband, ‘loads more. . “Karsavina was dressed in a violet pleated peplum, decorated with silver leaves, her long hair loose and hanging down her back. There was one inimitable gesture, which made the whole ballet worth while: the burying of her face in the crook of her arm, a moving demonstration of her grief when Narcissus disdained her love. Nijinsky wore a fair Grecian wig, a white chlamys with one shoulder bare, and green and gold sandals with the legs cross-gartered.”

‘We know somebody else who was cross-gartered, Lucy, do we not? And his dress made clear that Malvolio had lost his wits at the end of Twelfth Night . Has London lost its wits over these Russian dancers, Lucy?’

The dancers of the Ballets Russes had conquered Covent Garden and Lady Ripon’s little theatre at Coombe. Now they were laying siege to Markham Square and Lord Francis Powerscourt — a reluctant convert, if, indeed, convert he was.

‘I think that must be Narcissus , Francis, that ballet you were reading about. Your sister Burke and her daughters were raving to me about it only yesterday.’