Page:Angna Enters - Among the Daughters.djvu/289

 converse. To achieve a communion of spirit first. Time is static for those who meet in its elasticity, thus there is no need to rush."

"I'm glad you feel that way," Lucy confided, "because I've never done barefoot dancing and I don't think I could get up and start right off." She tried to sound businesslike because the way Ranna looked at her was anything but. "A singer, a great artist, told me," she said, pretending not to notice, "that when she sang it was as if the words were telling her how to sing them. Do you think dancing is like that? Does the music tell you what to do?"

"Not at all. The music is but a necklace, a chain between oneself and the audience or, to put it literally, a telegram."

"Now that I think of it, that's the way ballet music is."

Ranna frowned, obviously displeased by the comparison. "No, no, there is no similarity. Ballet is artificial, geometric. It is not a sincere art. It has no soul. In the dance of India every gesture and movement has its meaning, especially in those dances which are symbolizations of love. In our dance the whole body speaks its own language—"

"Do you mean those Oriental belly dancers are artists? In our theatre ballet is supposed to be the most artistic."

"That is because you do not know the true art of the East. What you have seen in your Western theatre is a corruption of the true dance of India, a vulgarization of the nautch dance," he said coldly.

"I don't think it's artistic myself. It certainly isn't like what you do," she apologized. You had to be careful of what you said to artists, Simone had been touchy too.

"Thank you," he said, permitting himself to be mollified. She was an elusive one, difficult to enclose in a mystic mood of art which became love. Nuances were ignored by her, or rather she reduced them to a concrete literalness.

"I get awfully sick of doing the show routine over and over. What I really want is to be a concert dancer like you. Will you be giving a recital? In a theatre, I mean."

"I doubt whether I could bring myself to dance on a hideous glue-stinking Broadway stage," he said loftily.

Lucy looked at him astonished. It never had occurred to her anyone could think of a stage as stinking. To an audience the stage was an illusion; to her the rubbery heat of spotlights, the odors of glue, hemp ropes and acrid fireproofed scenery, the sandbags, the resilient canvased floor, all that was reality. It was not to abandon the stage Rh