Page 240 - women-in-love

‘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 sug-
gestion of the complex shuddering and waving and drifting
of her sister’s white form, that was clutched in pure, mind-
less, 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 up-

240 Women in Love