`Do you mind if I do Dalcroze to that tune, Hurtler?' she asked in a curious muted tone, scarce moving her lips.
`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 seagull.
`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:
`Way down in Tennessee --'
She sounded purely anxious.Nevertheless, Gudrun, with her arms outspread and her face uplifted, went in a strange palpitating dance towards the cattle, 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.