The centurion slapped his tin armour, and made a jest, which reached
Stephen over his hostess's shoulder, and seemed to brand him where he
sat. He looked about for his hat and some excuse that would serve, and
while he looked the sound of applause rose from the house. It was a
demonstration without great energy, hardly more than a flutter from
stall to stall, with a vague, fundamental noise from the gallery; but
it had the quality which acclaimed something new. Arnold glanced at the
stage, and saw that while Pilate and the hollow-chested slaves and the
tin centurion were still on, they had somehow lost significance and
colour, and that all the meaning and the dominance of the situation
had gathered into the person of a woman of the East who danced. She was
almost discordant in her literalness, in her clear olive tints and
the kol smudges under her eyes, the string of coins in the mass of
her fallen hair, and her unfettered body. Beside her the slave-girls,
crouching, looked like painted shells. She danced before Pilate in
strange Eastern ways, in plastic weavings and gesturings that seemed
to be the telling of a tale; and from the orchestra only one unknown
instrument sobbed out to help her. The women of the people have ever
bought in Palestine, buy to-day in the Mousky, the coarse, thick
grey-blue cotton that fell about her limbs, and there was audacity in
the poverty of her beaten silver anklets and armlets. These shone and
twinkled with her movements; but her softly splendid eyes and reddened
lips had the immobility of the bazar. People looked at their playbills
to see whether it was really Hilda Howe or some nautch-queen borrowed
from a native theatre. By the time she sank before Pilate and placed his
foot upon her head a new spirit had breathed upon the house. Under the
unexpectedness of the representation it sat up straight, and there was a
keenness of desire to see what would happen next which plainly curtailed
the applause, as it does with children at a pantomime.