Women in Love

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.