Punctually at eleven o'clock, the carriages began to arrive. There was
a stir in the crowd at the gate, a concentration as a carriage drove
up, wedding guests were mounting up the steps and passing along the red
carpet to the church. They were all gay and excited because the sun was
shining.
Gudrun watched them closely, with objective curiosity. She saw each one
as a complete figure, like a character in a book, or a subject in a
picture, or a marionette in a theatre, a finished creation. She loved
to recognise their various characteristics, to place them in their true
light, give them their own surroundings, settle them for ever as they
passed before her along the path to the church. She knew them, they
were finished, sealed and stamped and finished with, for her. There was
none that had anything unknown, unresolved, until the Criches
themselves began to appear. Then her interest was piqued. Here was
something not quite so preconcluded.
There came the mother, Mrs Crich, with her eldest son Gerald. She was a
queer unkempt figure, in spite of the attempts that had obviously been
made to bring her into line for the day. Her face was pale, yellowish,
with a clear, transparent skin, she leaned forward rather, her features
were strongly marked, handsome, with a tense, unseeing, predative look.
Her colourless hair was untidy, wisps floating down on to her sac coat
of dark blue silk, from under her blue silk hat. She looked like a
woman with a monomania, furtive almost, but heavily proud.
Her son was of a fair, sun-tanned type, rather above middle height,
well-made, and almost exaggeratedly well-dressed. But about him also
was the strange, guarded look, the unconscious glisten, as if he did
not belong to the same creation as the people about him. Gudrun lighted
on him at once. There was something northern about him that magnetised
her. In his clear northern flesh and his fair hair was a glisten like
sunshine refracted through crystals of ice. And he looked so new,
unbroached, pure as an arctic thing. Perhaps he was thirty years old,
perhaps more. His gleaming beauty, maleness, like a young,
good-humoured, smiling wolf, did not blind her to the significant,
sinister stillness in his bearing, the lurking danger of his unsubdued
temper. 'His totem is the wolf,' she repeated to herself. 'His mother
is an old, unbroken wolf.' And then she experienced a keen paroxyism, a
transport, as if she had made some incredible discovery, known to
nobody else on earth. A strange transport took possession of her, all
her veins were in a paroxysm of violent sensation. 'Good God!' she
exclaimed to herself, 'what is this?' And then, a moment after, she was
saying assuredly, 'I shall know more of that man.' She was tortured
with desire to see him again, a nostalgia, a necessity to see him
again, to make sure it was not all a mistake, that she was not deluding
herself, that she really felt this strange and overwhelming sensation
on his account, this knowledge of him in her essence, this powerful
apprehension of him. 'Am I REALLY singled out for him in some way, is
there really some pale gold, arctic light that envelopes only us two?'
she asked herself. And she could not believe it, she remained in a
muse, scarcely conscious of what was going on around.