She came slowly nearer, and those by the platform turned round to follow her with their eyes. Hadj's hood had slipped completely down over his face, and his chin was sunk on his chest. Batouch noticed it and looked angry, but Domini had forgotten both the comedy of the two cousins and the tragedy of Irena's love for Hadj. She was completely under the fascination of this dance and of the music that accompanied it. Now that Irena was near she was able to see that, without her genius, there would have been no beauty in her face. It was painfully thin, painfully long and haggard. Her life had written a fatal inscription across it as their life writes upon the faces of poor street-bred children the one word--Want. As they have too little this dancing woman had had too much. The sparkle of her robe of gold tissue covered with golden coins was strong in the lamplight. Domini looked at it and at the two sharp knives above her head, looked at her violent, shuddering movements, and shuddered too, thinking of Batouch's story of murdered dancers. It was dangerous to have too much in Beni-Mora.
Irena was quite close now. She seemed so wrapped in the ecstasy of the dance that it did not occur to Domini at first that she was imitating the Ouled Nail who had laid her greasy head upon the stranger's knees.
The abandonment of her performance was so great that it was difficult to remember its money value to her and to Tahar, the fair Kabyle. Only when she was actually opposite to them and stayed there, still performing her shuddering dance, still holding the daggers above her head, did Domini realise that those half-closed, passionate eyes had marked the stranger woman, and that she must add one to the stream of golden coins. She took out her purse but did not give the money at once. With the pitiless scrutiny of her sex she noticed all the dancer's disabilities. She was certainly young, but she was very worn.
Her mouth drooped. At the corners of her eyes there were tiny lines tending downward. Her forehead had what Domini secretly called a martyred look. Nevertheless, she was savage and triumphant. Her thin body suggested force; the way she held herself consuming passion. Even so near at hand, even while she was pausing for money, and while her eyes were, doubtless, furtively reading Domini, she shed round her a powerful atmosphere, which stirred the blood, and made the heart leap, and created longing for unknown and violent things. As Domini watched her she felt that Irena must have lived at moments magnificently, that despite her almost shattered condition and permanent weariness--only cast aside for the moment of the dance--she must have known intense joys, that so long as she lived she would possess the capacity for knowing them again. There was something burning within her that would burn on so long as she was alive, a spark of nature that was eternally red hot. It was that spark which made her the idol of the Arabs and shed a light of beauty through her haggard frame.
The spirit blazed.
Domini put her hand at last into her purse and took out a piece of gold. She was just going to give it to Irena when the white bundle that was Hadj made a sudden, though slight, movement, as if the thing inside it had shivered. Irena noticed it with her half-closed eyes.
Domini leaned forward and held out the money, then drew back startled.
Irena had changed her posture abruptly. Instead of keeping her head thrown back and exposing her long throat, she lifted it, shot it forward. Her meagre bosom almost disappeared as she bent over. Her arms fell to her sides. Her eyes opened wide and became full of a sharp, peering intensity. Her vision and dreams dropped out of her.
Now she was only fierce and questioning, and horribly alert. She was looking at the white bundle. It shifted again. She sprang upon it, showing her teeth, caught hold of it. With a swift turn of her thin hands she tore back the hood, and out of the bundle came Hadj's head and face livid with fear. One of the daggers flashed and came up at him. He leaped from the seat and screamed. Suzanne echoed his cry.
Then the whole room was a turmoil of white garments and moving limbs.
In an instant everybody seemed to be leaping, calling out, grasping, struggling. Domini tried to get up, but she was hemmed in, and could not make a movement upward or free her arms, which were pressed against her sides by the crowd around her. For a moment she thought she was going to be severely hurt or suffocated. She did not feel afraid, but only indignant, like a boy who has been struck in the face and longs to retaliate. Someone screamed again. It was Hadj. Suzanne was on her feet, but separated from her mistress. Batouch's arm was round her. Domini put her hands on the bench and tried to force herself up, violently setting her broad shoulders against the Arabs who were towering over her and covering her head and face with their floating garments as they strove to see the fight between Hadj and the dancer. The heat almost stifled her, and she was suddenly aware of a strong musky smell of perspiring humanity. She was beginning to pant for breath when she felt two burning, hot, hard hands come down on hers, fingers like iron catch hold of hers, go under them, drag up her hands. She could not see who had seized her, but the life in the hands that were on hers mingled with the life in her hands like one fluid with another, and seemed to pass on till she felt it in her body, and had an odd sensation as if her face had been caught in a fierce grip, and her heart too.
Another moment and she was on her feet and out in the moonlit alley between the little white houses. She saw the stars, and the painted balconies crowded with painted women looking down towards the cafe she had left and chattering in shrill voices. She saw the patrol of Tirailleurs Indigenes marching at the double to the doorway in which the Arabs were still struggling. Then she saw that the traveller was beside her. She was not surprised.
"Thank you for getting me out," she said rather bluntly. "Where's my maid?"