To judge by their movements, many of the dancers had in fact been there,
and had carefully studied the best indigenous models. They were doing some
quite extraordinary things. No two couples were doing quite the same thing
for more than a few seconds, so that there was an endless variety of
extraordinary postures. Some of them shuffled secretly along the edge of
the room, their faces tense, their shoulders swaying like reeds in a light
wind, their progress almost imperceptible; they did not rotate, they did
not speak, but sometimes the tremor of a skirt or the slight stirring of a
patent-leather shoe showed that they were indeed alive and in motion,
though that motion was as the motion of a glacier, not to be measured in
minutes or yards.
And some in a kind of fever rushed hither and thither among the thick
crowd, avoiding disaster with marvellous dexterity; and sometimes they
revolved slowly and sometimes quickly and sometimes spun giddily round for
a moment like gyroscopic tops. Then they too would be seized with a kind of
trance, or it may be with sheer shortness of breath, and hung motionless
for a little in the centre of the room, while the mad throng jostled and
flowed about them like the leaves in Autumn round a dead bird.
And some did not revolve at all, but charged straightly up and down; and
some of these thrust their loves for ever before them, as the Prussians
thrust the villagers in the face of the enemy, and some for ever navigated
themselves backwards like moving breakwaters to protect their darlings from
the precipitate seas.
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