“What did you say?” asked Ursula, looking up in peaceful surprise.
“Will you sing while I do Dalcroze?” said Gudrun, suffering at having to repeat herself.
Ursula thought a moment, gathering her straying wits together.
“While you do—?” she asked vaguely.
“Dalcroze movements,” said Gudrun, suffering tortures of self-consciousness, even because of her sister.
“Oh, Dalcroze! I couldn’t catch the name.
Do
—I should love to see you,” cried Ursula, with childish surprised brightness. “What shall I sing?”
“Sing anything you like, and I’ll take the rhythm from it.”
But Ursula could not for her life think of anything to sing. However, she suddenly began, in a laughing, teasing voice:
“My love—is a high-born lady—”
Gudrun, looking as if some invisible chain weighed on her hands and feet, began slowly to dance in the eurythmic manner, pulsing and fluttering rhythmically with her feet, making slower, regular gestures with her hands and arms, now spreading her arms wide, now raising them above her head, now flinging them softly apart, and lifting her face, her feet all the time beating and running to the measure of the song, as if it were some strange incantation, her white, rapt form drifting here and there in a strange impulsive rhapsody, seeming to be lifted on a breeze of incantation, shuddering with strange little runs. Ursula sat on the grass, her mouth open in her singing, her eyes laughing as if she thought it was a great joke, but a yellow light flashing up in them, as she caught some of the unconscious ritualistic suggestion of the complex shuddering and waving and drifting of her sister’s white form, that was clutched in pure, mindless, tossing rhythm, and a will set powerful in a kind of hypnotic influence.
“My love is a high-born lady—She is-s-s—rather dark than shady—” rang out Ursula’s laughing, satiric song, and quicker, fiercer went Gudrun in the dance, stamping as if she were trying to throw off some bond, flinging her hands suddenly and stamping again, then rushing with face uplifted and throat full and beautiful, and eyes half closed, sightless. The sun was low and yellow, sinking down, and in the sky floated a thin, ineffectual moon.
Ursula was quite absorbed in her song, when suddenly Gudrun stopped and said mildly, ironically:
“Ursula!”
“Yes?” said Ursula, opening her eyes out of the trance.
Gudrun was standing still and pointing, a mocking smile on her face, towards the side.
“Ugh!” cried Ursula in sudden panic, starting to her feet.
“They’re quite all right,” rang out Gudrun’s sardonic voice.
On the left stood a little cluster of Highland cattle, vividly coloured and fleecy in the evening light, their horns branching into the sky, pushing forward their muzzles inquisitively, to know what it was all about. Their eyes glittered through their tangle of hair, their naked nostrils were full of shadow.
“Won’t they do anything?” cried Ursula in fear.
Gudrun, who was usually frightened of cattle, now shook her head in a queer, half-doubtful, half-sardonic motion, a faint smile round her mouth.
“Don’t they look charming, Ursula?” cried Gudrun, in a high, strident voice, something like the scream of a sea-gull.
“Charming,” cried Ursula in trepidation. “But won’t they do anything to us?”
Again Gudrun looked back at her sister with an enigmatic smile, and shook her head.
“I’m sure they won’t,” she said, as if she had to convince herself also, and yet, as if she were confident of some secret power in herself, and had to put it to the test. “Sit down and sing again,” she called in her high, strident voice.
“I’m frightened,” cried Ursula, in a pathetic voice, watching the group of sturdy short cattle, that stood with their knees planted, and watched with their dark, wicked eyes, through the matted fringe of their hair. Nevertheless, she sank down again, in her former posture.
“They are quite safe,” came Gudrun’s high call. “Sing something, you’ve only to sing something.”
It was evident she had a strange passion to dance before the sturdy, handsome cattle.
Ursula began to sing, in a false quavering voice:
“It’s a long, long way to Tipperary—”
She sounded purely anxious. Nevertheless, Gudrun, with her arms outspread and her face uplifted, went in a strange palpitating dance towards the cattle,
2
lifting her body towards them as if in a spell, her feet pulsing as if in some little frenzy of unconscious sensation, her arms, her wrists, her hands stretching and heaving and falling and reaching and reaching and falling, her breasts lifted and shaken towards the cattle, her throat exposed as in some voluptuous ecstasy towards them, whilst she drifted imperceptibly nearer, an uncanny white figure, towards them, carried away in its own rapt trance, ebbing in strange fluctuations upon the cattle, that waited, and ducked their heads a little in sudden contraction from her, watching all the time as if hypnotised, their bare horns branching in the clear light, as the white figure of the woman ebbed upon them, in the slow, hypnotising convulsion of the dance. She could feel them just in front of her, it was as if she had the electric pulse from their breasts running into her hands. Soon she would touch them, actually touch them. A terrible shiver of fear and pleasure went through her. And all the while, Ursula, spell-bound, kept up her high-pitched thin, irrelevant song, which pierced the fading evening like an incantation.
Gudrun could hear the cattle breathing heavily with helpless fear and fascination. Oh, they were brave little beasts, these wild Scotch bullocks, wild and fleecy. Suddenly one of them snorted, ducked its head, and backed.
“Hue! Hi-eee!” came a sudden loud shout from the edge of the grove. The cattle broke and fell back quite spontaneously, went running up the hill, their fleece waving like fire to their motion. Gudrun stood suspended out on the grass, Ursula rose to her feet.
It was Gerald and Birkin come to find them, and Gerald had cried out to frighten off the cattle.
“What do you think you’re doing?” he now called, in a high, wondering vexed tone.
“Why have you come?” came back Gudrun’s strident cry of anger.
“What do you think you were doing?” Gerald repeated, automatically.
“We were doing eurythmics,” laughed Ursula, in a shaken voice.
Gudrun stood aloof looking at them with large dark eyes of resentment, suspended for a few moments. Then she walked away up the hill, after the cattle, which had gathered in a little, spell-bound cluster higher up.
“Where are you going?” Gerald called after her. And he followed her up the hill-side. The sun had gone behind the hill, and shadows were clinging to the earth, the sky above was full of travelling light.
“A poor song for a dance,” said Birkin to Ursula, standing before her with a sardonic, flickering laugh on his face. And in another second, he was singing softly to himself, and dancing a grotesque step-dance in front of her, his limbs and body shaking loose, his face flickering palely, a constant thing, whilst his feet beat a rapid mocking tattoo, and his body seemed to hang all loose and quaking in between, like a shadow.
“I think we’ve all gone mad,” she said, laughing rather frightened.
“Pity we aren’t madder,” he answered, as he kept up the incessant shaking dance. Then suddenly he leaned up to her and kissed her fingers lightly, putting his face to hers and looking into her eyes with a pale grin. She stepped back, affronted.
“Offended—?” he asked ironically, suddenly going quite still and reserved again. “I thought you liked the light fantastic.”
“Not like that,” she said, confused and bewildered, almost affronted. Yet somewhere inside her she was fascinated by the sight of his loose, vibrating body, perfectly abandoned to its own dropping and swinging, and by the pallid, sardonic-smiling face above. Yet automatically she stiffened herself away, and disapproved. It seemed almost an obscenity, in a man who talked as a rule so very seriously.
“Why not like that?” he mocked. And immediately he dropped again into the incredibly rapid, slack-waggling dance, watching her malevolently. And moving in the rapid, stationary dance, he came a little nearer, and reached forward with an incredibly mocking, satiric gleam on his face, and would have kissed her again, had she not started back.
“No, don’t!” she cried, really afraid.
“Cordelia
bi
after all,” he said satirically. She was stung, as if this were an insult. She knew he intended it as such, and it bewildered her.
“And you,” she cried in retort, “why do you always take your soul in your mouth, so frightfully full?”
“So that I can spit it out the more readily,” he said, pleased by his own retort.
Gerald Crich, his face narrowing to an intent gleam, followed up the hill with quick strides, straight after Gudrun. The cattle stood with their noses together on the brow of a slope, watching the scene below, the men in white hovering about the white forms of the women, watching above all Gudrun, who was advancing slowly towards them. She stood a moment, glancing back at Gerald, and then at the cattle.
Then in a sudden motion, she lifted her arms and rushed sheer upon the long-horned bullocks, in shuddering irregular runs, pausing for a second and looking at them, then lifting her hands and running forward with a flash, till they ceased pawing the ground, and gave way, snorting with terror, lifting their heads from the ground and flinging themselves away, galloping off into the evening, becoming tiny in the distance, and still not stopping.
Gudrun remained staring after them, with a mask-like defiant face.
“Why do you want to drive them mad?” asked Gerald, coming up with her.
She took no notice of him, only averted her face from him.
“It’s not safe, you know,” he persisted. “They’re nasty, when they do turn.”
“Turn where? Turn away?” she mocked loudly.
“No,” he said, “turn against you.”
“Turn against
me?”
she mocked.
He could make nothing of this.
“Anyway, they gored one of the farmer’s cows to death, the other day,” he said.
“What do I care?” she said.
“
I
cared though,” he replied, “seeing that they’re my cattle.”
“How are they yours! You haven’t swallowed them. Give me one of them now,” she said, holding out her hand.
“You know where they are,” he said, pointing over the hill. “You can have one if you’d like it sent to you later on.”
She looked at him inscrutably.
“You think I’m afraid of you and your cattle, don’t you?” she asked.
His eyes narrowed dangerously. There was a faint domineering smile on his face.
“Why should I think that?” he said.
She was watching him all the time with her dark, dilated, inchoate eyes. She leaned forward and swung round her arm, catching him a blow on the face with the back of her hand.
“That’s why,” she said.
And she felt in her soul an unconquerable lust for deep brutality against him. She shut off the fear and dismay that filled her conscious mind. She wanted to do as she did, she was not going to be afraid.
He recoiled from the heavy blow across the face. He became deadly pale, and a dangerous flame darkened his eyes. For some seconds he could not speak, his lungs were so suffused with blood, his heart stretched almost to bursting with a great gush of ungovernable rage. It was as if some reservoir of black anger had burst within him, and swamped him.
“You have struck the first blow,”
3
he said at last, forcing the words from his lungs, in a voice so soft and low, it sounded like a dream within her, not spoken in the outer air.
“And I shall strike the last,” she retorted involuntarily, with confident assurance. He was silent, he did not contradict her.
She stood negligently, staring away from him, into the distance. On the edge of her consciousness the question was asking itself, automatically:
“Why are you behaving in this
impossible
and ridiculous fashion?” But she was sullen, she half shoved the question out of herself. She could not get it clean away, so she felt self-conscious.
Gerald, very pale, was watching her closely. His eyes were lit up with intent lights, absorbed and gleaming. She turned suddenly on him.
“It’s you who make me behave like this, you know,” she said, almost suggestive.
“I? How?” he said.
But she turned away, and set off towards the lake. Below, on the water, lanterns were coming alight, faint ghosts of warm flame floating in the pallor of the first twilight. The earth was spread with darkness, like lacquer, overhead was a pale sky, all primrose, and the lake was pale as milk in one part. Away at the landing stage, tiniest points of coloured rays were stringing themselves in the dusk. The launch was being illuminated. All round, shadow was gathering from the trees.
Gerald, white like a presence in his summer clothes, was following down the open grassy slope. Gudrun waited for him to come up. Then she softly put out her hand and touched him, saying softly:
“Don’t be angry with me.”
A flame flew over him, and he was unconscious. Yet he stammered:
“I’m not angry with you. I’m in love with you.”
His mind was gone, he grasped for sufficient mechanical control, to save himself. She laughed a silvery little mockery, yet intolerably caressive.
“That’s one way of putting it,” she said.
The terrible swooning burden on his mind, the awful swooning, the loss of all his control, was too much for him.
He grasped her arm in his one hand, as if his hand were iron.
“It’s all right, then, is it?” he said, holding her arrested.
She looked at the face with the fixed eyes, set before her, and her blood ran cold.
“Yes, it’s all right,” she said softly, as if drugged, her voice crooning and witch-like.