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.
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, auto-matically.
'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 after all,' he said satirically.
She was stung, as if this were an insult.