David Dickinson - Death Comes to the Ballets Russes

‘And the other thing?

‘I think the other thing would only make sense to somebody who lived inside the company, my lord. It concerns Stravinsky, the composer. There have been rumours for months now that he was writing the music for a new kind of ballet altogether, one that would change the rules. Nobody knows what it is called. Nobody knows when it will be finished. But it is going to be very different, composed to sound like some ancient dancing, and the music of Slav and peasant Russia, not the classical sound of the cosmopolitan elite of the great cities. It will be more primitive, more rustic. Many in the ballet do not like the sound of it. They prefer the classics like Chopin or Tchaikovsky or Rimsky-Korsakov. Stravinsky’s music would bring out the tension between the western capital of St Petersburg and the peasant dances and folk music of the interior. It still has no name, this ballet — but, believe me, any news of its coming could rock the Ballets Russes to their foundations.’

‘Does it have a date for the first performance, the opening night?’

‘Nobody knows the answer to that, but if Diaghilev is in charge, and I’m sure he will be, the first night will be in Paris next year.’

In ballet, an attitude has nothing to do with your personality. Actually, an attitude is a pose, a way that a dancer can hold herself. In order to perform an attitude, a dancer must balance herself on one leg while holding the other leg at a ninety-degree angle in a curved position. The raised leg can either be held to the back or the front. The arms of the dancer usually remain in fourth position, curved, one arm above the head, and one arm to the side.

Natasha Shaporova was coming back to London. She sent a very long telegram to carry her news before her as she left.

‘Taneyev household hopeless. They must have had a family meeting and decided to get rid of me. This was after I had talked at length to the father and the brother. Both admitted that they had received the letters I spoke of before. Both had destroyed them. Both had agreed not to speak of the matter again to any living soul. They thanked me for my trouble and assured me that that was their final word. I might not have learnt the secret — if there was a secret — but nobody else would either. Alexander is in his grave, they said, and the content of his letters will stay with him there.

‘Back to War and Peace on the Warsaw train. Precious little peace here.’

Harry Smith, the printer from Camberwell who was printing the Lenin pamphlets, felt rather guilty about charging so much money for the job. He was, however, well schooled in the revolutionary doctrine that emphasized the importance of cell structure, that a comrade in one department should not tell anybody else what he was doing in another part of the organization, in case of capture or interrogation by the agents of the capitalist class. So he had not told Arthur Cooper that he had two very urgent jobs for trade unionists in the docks and the railways and that he had urgent work to be produced for them. And speed in the printing business cost money. As a penance he was bringing a couple of proof copies of the latest ‘Gospel according to Lenin’ round, to show Arthur Cooper that work was indeed in progress.

‘I’ve brought you these,’ he said, when they were closeted in the front room well away from wife and children, ‘a Russian one and an English one. These are just the first proofs. We’ve still got to check the translation and make sure that there aren’t any mistakes.’

‘Thank you very much,’ said Cooper, picking up a page in Russian rather gingerly, as if it might blow up. ‘I can’t do anything with the Russian one. I tried once, you know, to teach myself Russian in the big library round here, but I couldn’t do it.’

He stared rather helplessly at the page. He noticed that it seemed to contain a large number of explanation marks.

‘Try this one,’ said Harry Smith, producing a version written in the King’s English. Looking down, Harry Smith noticed that it seemed to contain a number of old friends: the weak and vacillating bourgeoisie, the primacy of the working class and the importance of the revolutionary vanguard ready to lead and to speak and act in the name of the workers. He noticed too that the days of the capitalist class were numbered, the final crisis was at hand and that it just needed one final heave for the workers to triumph. Like some early Christian reading the Gospel of John some years after reading the Gospels of Luke and Mark, he felt that he had heard the main points before and, quite possibly, more than once. Like the Russian version, the English one contained plenty of exclamation marks. He wondered if there might be too many of them, as if the readers might not get tired of being shouted at all the time.

‘This is very fine, Harry,’ he said, handing back the proof. ‘I presume I won’t see any more of them until they are ready.’

‘That’s correct, if it’s all right with you.’

Arthur Cooper nodded.

‘There is the question of where I should deliver them to,’ said Smith. ‘I’m afraid I couldn’t guarantee their safety or their security for very long. The police and their people are always sniffing around. I could keep them until a week today, if you like. They should be finished in a day or two.’

‘That should be fine, but I might want you to keep them somewhere safe, if you see what I mean,’ said Arthur Cooper, who was feeling slightly lost. You could hide revolutionary money in a capitalist bank, he said to himself. Where could you keep revolutionary literature? The British Museum? London University? The Bank of England? He rather thought not.

‘That’s fine,’ said Harry Smith.

As he departed on his bus for the delights of Camberwell, a figure emerged from the shadows beside Arthur Cooper’s house. The figure followed Harry Smith all the way home to his wife and his printing presses.

Sergeant Jenkins had never imagined there could be as many people with the surname Gilbert in the country. Surely, he thought, there can’t be as many as this, and these were only for the year of 1882. There were another thirty years to go. He gritted his teeth and decided that he just had to carry on. He wondered if he should ask for assistance in this dreary business.

The Sergeant had also decided to abandon his attempts at learning the Russian language. He had only just finished the tricky business of the alphabet with all those extra letters. Even if this case lasted until the end of the year, he didn’t think he’d be able to say any more than ‘Good morning’.

Walter Gilbert, Maidenhead. Walter Gilbert, Gateshead, William Gilbert, Padstow, William Gilbert, Richmond. William Gilbert, Newark. Looking ahead he thought there must be another sixty or seventy Williams to go.

Lord Rosebery, old friend of Powerscourt, former Foreign Secretary, former Prime Minister, had sent a note round to say he proposed to call at three o’clock.

‘How is your investigation into the Ballets Russes murders going, Francis?’

Powerscourt laughed rather bitterly.

‘It’s everywhere and nowhere, Rosebery. I don’t think we even know who the murder victim was meant to be — the understudy, or the man whose name appeared on the programme. Sometimes I think the answer’s to be found in St Petersburg, where we have been reading the understudy’s letters to no avail; sometimes we think it may lie in the internal politics of the ballet. If you’d asked me when I took the case on if I thought I would have made so little progress after all this time, I should have dismissed it as an improbable fantasy. But there we are.’

‘You must have some suspicions, Powerscourt? Surely, after all this time.’