Women in Love | Page 4

women made way for them, but barely sufficient, as if
grudging to yield ground. The sisters passed in silence through the
stone gateway and up the steps, on the red carpet, a policeman

estimating their progress.
'What price the stockings!' said a voice at the back of Gudrun. A
sudden fierce anger swept over the girl, violent and murderous. She
would have liked them all annihilated, cleared away, so that the world
was left clear for her. How she hated walking up the churchyard path,
along the red carpet, continuing in motion, in their sight.
'I won't go into the church,' she said suddenly, with such final decision
that Ursula immediately halted, turned round, and branched off up a
small side path which led to the little private gate of the Grammar
School, whose grounds adjoined those of the church.
Just inside the gate of the school shrubbery, outside the churchyard,
Ursula sat down for a moment on the low stone wall under the laurel
bushes, to rest. Behind her, the large red building of the school rose up
peacefully, the windows all open for the holiday. Over the shrubs,
before her, were the pale roofs and tower of the old church. The sisters
were hidden by the foliage.
Gudrun sat down in silence. Her mouth was shut close, her face averted.
She was regretting bitterly that she had ever come back. Ursula looked
at her, and thought how amazingly beautiful she was, flushed with
discomfiture. But she caused a constraint over Ursula's nature, a certain
weariness. Ursula wished to be alone, freed from the tightness, the
enclosure of Gudrun's presence.
'Are we going to stay here?' asked Gudrun.
'I was only resting a minute,' said Ursula, getting up as if rebuked. 'We
will stand in the corner by the fives-court, we shall see everything from
there.'
For the moment, the sunshine fell brightly into the churchyard, there
was a vague scent of sap and of spring, perhaps of violets from off the
graves. Some white daisies were out, bright as angels. In the air, the
unfolding leaves of a copper-beech were blood-red.

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