I Should Not Mind It Myself If I Could Go Back There Next
Spring.
IV
We had refused with loathing the offer of those gipsy jades to dance for
us in their noisome purlieu at Triana, but we were not proof against the
chance of seeing some gipsy dancing in a cafe-theater one night in
Seville.
The decent place was filled with the "plain people," who sat
with their hats on at rude tables smoking and drinking coffee from tall
glasses. They were apparently nearly all working-men who had left nearly
all their wives to keep on working at home, though a few of these also
had come. On a small stage four gipsy girls, in unfashionably and
untheatrically decent gowns of white, blue, or red, with flowers in
their hair, sat in a semicircle with one subtle, silent, darkling man
among them. One after another they got up and did the same twisting and
posturing, without dancing, and while one posed and contorted the rest
unenviously joined the spectators in their clapping and their hoarse
cries of "Ole!" It was all perfectly proper except for one high moment
of indecency thrown in at the end of each turn, as if to give the house
its money's worth. But the real, overflowing compensation came when that
little, lithe, hipless man in black jumped to his feet and stormed the
audience with a dance of hands and arms, feet and legs, head, neck, and
the whole body, which Mordkin in his finest frenzy could not have
equaled or approached.
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