'Isn't it fine?'
'Fine! Their arms are like iron, carrying you round.'
'Yes! Yes! And the muscles on their shoulders! I never knew there were
such muscles! I'm almost frightened.'
'But it's fine, isn't it? I'm getting into the dance.'
'Yes--yes--you've only to let them take you.'
Then the glasses are put down, the guitars give their strange, vibrant,
almost painful summons, and the dance begins again.
It is a strange dance, strange and lilting, and changing as the music
changed. But it had always a kind of leisurely dignity, a trailing kind
of polka-waltz, intimate, passionate, yet never hurried, never violent
in its passion, always becoming more intense. The women's faces changed
to a kind of transported wonder, they were in the very rhythm of
delight. From the soft bricks of the floor the red ochre rose in a thin
cloud of dust, making hazy the shadowy dancers; the three musicians, in
their black hats and their cloaks, sat obscurely in the corner, making a
music that came quicker and quicker, making a dance that grew swifter
and more intense, more subtle, the men seeming to fly and to implicate
other strange inter-rhythmic dance into the women, the women drifting
and palpitating as if their souls shook and resounded to a breeze that
was subtly rushing upon them, through them; the men worked their feet,
their thighs swifter, more vividly, the music came to an almost
intolerable climax, there was a moment when the dance passed into a
possession, the men caught up the women and swung them from the earth,
leapt with them for a second, and then the next phase of the dance had
begun, slower again, more subtly interwoven, taking perfect, oh,
exquisite delight in every interrelated movement, a rhythm within a
rhythm, a subtle approaching and drawing nearer to a climax, nearer,
till, oh, there was the surpassing lift and swing of the women, when the
woman's body seemed like a boat lifted over the powerful, exquisite wave
of the man's body, perfect, for a moment, and then once more the slow,
intense, nearer movement of the dance began, always nearer, nearer,
always to a more perfect climax.
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