‘Are you happy, Prune?’ cried Ursula in delight, looking at her sister.
‘Ursula, I’m perfectly happy,’ replied Gudrun gravely, looking at the westering sun.
‘So am I.’
When they were together, doing the things they enjoyed, the two sisters were quite complete in a perfect world of their own. And this was one of the perfect moments of freedom and delight, such as children alone know, when all seems a perfect and blissful adventure.
When they had finished tea, the two girls sat on, silent and serene. Then Ursula, who had a beautiful strong voice, began to sing to herself, softly: ‘Annchen von Tharau.’ Gudrun listened, as she sat beneath the trees, and the yearning came into her heart. Ursula seemed so peaceful and sufficient unto herself, sitting there unconsciously crooning her song, strong and unquestioned at the centre of her own universe. And Gudrun felt herself outside. Always this desolating, agonised feeling, that she was outside of life, an onlooker, whilst Ursula was a partaker, caused Gudrun to suffer from a sense of her own negation, and made her, that she must always demand the other to be aware of her, to be in connection with her.
‘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 selfconsciousness, 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:
