Women in Love

'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.