When I could not understand what she said she was furious;—I must have had a bad teacher, she herself would teach me Spanish. When she arrived with her mother she was demurely dressed in a pretty white frock like any other young Andaluz. Her short, thick black hair was curiously arranged in curls on either side of her face, held in place by tortoise-shell combs set with turquoises. I gave her a pair of crimson peonies I had bought from the old flower woman at the corner. These evidently decided the color of her dress. After a while she disappeared behind the vast canvas of the Death of the Matador, that takes up the whole end of the studio, and from this improvised dressing room she soon reappeared in a scarlet moreen skirt, and a manton de Manila draped gracefully a la maya, about her lithe figure. She had stuck the peonies in the curls on either side of her pale face.
Dionisio and the other lad began to play a strange droning, wailing chant; the chorus clapped hands keeping time. Imperio sat watching till she caught the right rhythm, then she sprang to the dance, the castanets on her fingers. What it all meant, I cannot begin to tell. It seemed the primitive expression of the joy, the pain, the mystery of life. As she made “the charm of woven passes,” like Vivian—only Vivian was bad, this child was virginal and pure—the combs dropped out, the short, black hair clung about her face and neck, the color surged to her cheeks; she seemed as one filled with the divine fury of the dance; a pythoness, a Bacchic priestess, might have looked like this. We had seen in Granada, in the Gypsy King’s cave, somewhat similar dances given by very old women and little girls of ten or eleven. These were as the past and the future. Imperio made the dance part of a glowing, splendid, breathless present. Life called to life, the life blood in our veins danced in time with those wonderful gestures of arms, of feet, of the whole perfect body of the creature. I believe she drew power from us, that it was all give and take. She gave us youth and the dance, the dance which is the natural expression of the lust of life; and we gave her the elixir of our sympathy. Suddenly she stopped and broke forth into song—singing a long panegyric of Seville:—
“Ay Sevillia, la poblacíon mas hermosa del mundo emtiero, la ciudad que yo amo mas que mi madre.”
Ah Seville town the most delightful in the entire world, city that I love better than my mother.
The flexibility of her body was unbelievable. I can see now the little, little hands held over her wild head, the fingers snapping rhythmically, for the castanets were soon thrown away and her fingers themselves marked the measure to which she danced; the impatient tapping of the feet, the wild leaps in air when she seemed to grow taller, to tower above us and her own original self, and finally the abandon of her last pose, the final attitude; the head thrown back, the red lips parted, the gasping breath coming from between the small perfect teeth, the left arm down, the right arm thrown above her head, her whole body quivering with the ecstacy of the dance—it was worth coming to Spain—just to see one of Pastora Imperio’s poses!
“I have never seen dance any gel as Imperio,” Jaime exclaimed. “More gracious, great spirit in her figure (he meant face) always smiling!”
“There’s something half dramatic, half religious about this,” said Patsy—“like David’s dancing before the Ark or like the Pyrric dance, don’t you think?”
“Maybe,” Don Jaime agreed, “I have not seen La Davide, nor the other dancer, La Pyrrique, you speak of. In Spain the dance is according to the region; in Madrid, the madrileña, in Seville the sevilliana, in La Mancha the manchego, and so on. The base of all our Spanish dances is oriental; this is rather correct, any lady may see it. Imperio dances with the entirety of the corpe. The French dance with toes, feet, and legs only.”
“Who taught you to dance?” I asked Imperio, “your mother, was it not?”
“Nobody!” she exclaimed proudly. “I have danced since I was eight years old.”