'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.
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