Women in Love · Chapter 14 (2/5)

“Will you have tea here then, or go across to the house, where there’s a tent on the lawn?” he asked.

“Can’t we have a rowing boat, and get out?” asked Ursula, who was always rushing in too fast.

“To get out?” smiled Gerald.

“You see,” cried Gudrun, flushing at Ursula’s outspoken rudeness, “we don’t know the people, we are almost complete strangers here.”

“Oh, I can soon set you up with a few acquaintances,” he said easily.

Gudrun looked at him, to see if it were ill-meant. Then she smiled at him.

“Ah,” she said, “you know what we mean. Can’t we go up there, and explore that coast?” She pointed to a grove on the hillock of the meadow-side, near the shore halfway down the lake. “That looks perfectly lovely. We might even bathe. Isn’t it beautiful in this light. Really, it’s like one of the reaches of the Nile⁠—as one imagines the Nile.”

Gerald smiled at her factitious enthusiasm for the distant spot.

“You’re sure it’s far enough off?” he asked ironically, adding at once: “Yes, you might go there, if we could get a boat. They seem to be all out.”

He looked round the lake and counted the rowing boats on its surface.

“How lovely it would be!” cried Ursula wistfully.

“And don’t you want tea?” he said.

“Oh,” said Gudrun, “we could just drink a cup, and be off.”

He looked from one to the other, smiling. He was somewhat offended⁠—yet sporting.

“Can you manage a boat pretty well?” he asked.

“Yes,” replied Gudrun, coldly, “pretty well.”

“Oh yes,” cried Ursula. “We can both of us row like water-spiders.”

“You can? There’s a light little canoe of mine, that I didn’t take out for fear somebody should drown themselves. Do you think you’d be safe in that?”

“Oh perfectly,” said Gudrun.

“What an angel!” cried Ursula.

“Don’t, for my sake, have an accident⁠—because I’m responsible for the water.”

“Sure,” pledged Gudrun.

“Besides, we can both swim quite well,” said Ursula.

“Well⁠—then I’ll get them to put you up a tea-basket, and you can picnic all to yourselves⁠—that’s the idea, isn’t it?”

“How fearfully good! How frightfully nice if you could!” cried Gudrun warmly, her colour flushing up again. It made the blood stir in his veins, the subtle way she turned to him and infused her gratitude into his body.

“Where’s Birkin?” he said, his eyes twinkling. “He might help me to get it down.”

“But what about your hand? Isn’t it hurt?” asked Gudrun, rather muted, as if avoiding the intimacy. This was the first time the hurt had been mentioned. The curious way she skirted round the subject sent a new, subtle caress through his veins. He took his hand out of his pocket. It was bandaged. He looked at it, then put it in his pocket again. Gudrun quivered at the sight of the wrapped up paw.

“Oh I can manage with one hand. The canoe is as light as a feather,” he said. “There’s Rupert!⁠—Rupert!”

Birkin turned from his social duties and came towards them.

“What have you done to it?” asked Ursula, who had been aching to put the question for the last half hour.

“To my hand?” said Gerald. “I trapped it in some machinery.”

“Ugh!” said Ursula. “And did it hurt much?”

“Yes,” he said. “It did at the time. It’s getting better now. It crushed the fingers.”

“Oh,” cried Ursula, as if in pain, “I hate people who hurt themselves. I can feel it.” And she shook her hand.

“What do you want?” said Birkin.

The two men carried down the slim brown boat, and set it on the water.

“You’re quite sure you’ll be safe in it?” Gerald asked.

“Quite sure,” said Gudrun. “I wouldn’t be so mean as to take it, if there was the slightest doubt. But I’ve had a canoe at Arundel, and I assure you I’m perfectly safe.”

So saying, having given her word like a man, she and Ursula entered the frail craft, and pushed gently off. The two men stood watching them. Gudrun was paddling. She knew the men were watching her, and it made her slow and rather clumsy. The colour flew in her face like a flag.

“Thanks awfully,” she called back to him, from the water, as the boat slid away. “It’s lovely⁠—like sitting in a leaf.”

He laughed at the fancy. Her voice was shrill and strange, calling from the distance. He watched her as she paddled away. There was something childlike about her, trustful and deferential, like a child. He watched her all the while, as she rowed. And to Gudrun it was a real delight, in make-belief, to be the childlike, clinging woman to the man who stood there on the quay, so good-looking and efficient in his white clothes, and moreover the most important man she knew at the moment. She did not take any notice of the wavering, indistinct, lambent Birkin, who stood at his side. One figure at a time occupied the field of her attention.

The boat rustled lightly along the water. They passed the bathers whose striped tents stood between the willows of the meadow’s edge, and drew along the open shore, past the meadows that sloped golden in the light of the already late afternoon. Other boats were stealing under the wooded shore opposite, they could hear people’s laughter and voices. But Gudrun rowed on towards the clump of trees that balanced perfect in the distance, in the golden light.

The sisters found a little place where a tiny stream flowed into the lake, with reeds and flowery marsh of pink willow herb, and a gravelly bank to the side. Here they ran delicately ashore, with their frail boat, the two girls took off their shoes and stockings and went through the water’s edge to the grass. The tiny ripples of the lake were warm and clear, they lifted their boat on to the bank, and looked round with joy. They were quite alone in a forsaken little stream-mouth, and on the knoll just behind was the clump of trees.

“We will bathe just for a moment,” said Ursula, “and then we’ll have tea.”

They looked round. Nobody could notice them, or could come up in time to see them. In less than a minute Ursula had thrown off her clothes and had slipped naked into the water, and was swimming out. Quickly, Gudrun joined her. They swam silently and blissfully for a few minutes, circling round their little stream-mouth. Then they slipped ashore and ran into the grove again, like nymphs.

“How lovely it is to be free,” said Ursula, running swiftly here and there between the tree trunks, quite naked, her hair blowing loose. The grove was of beech-trees, big and splendid, a steel-grey scaffolding of trunks and boughs, with level sprays of strong green here and there, whilst through the northern side the distance glimmered open as through a window.

When they had run and danced themselves dry, the girls quickly dressed and sat down to the fragrant tea. They sat on the northern side of the grove, in the yellow sunshine facing the slope of the grassy hill, alone in a little wild world of their own. The tea was hot and aromatic, there were delicious little sandwiches of cucumber and of caviar, and winy cakes.

“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: “Ännchen 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 self-consciousness, 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 highborn 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 highborn 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, spellbound, 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, automatically.

“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, spellbound cluster higher up.

“Where are you going?” Gerald called after her. And he followed her up the hillside. 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.”