It was getting dark as they passed Radford Station. “Good,” Brian thought, “I don’t want to see anybody I know”—though no sooner had this crossed his mind than Uncle George came biking over the hill, from Woodhouse, calling as he went by: “Now then, Brian, you’re a bit young to be courting, aren’t you?” He put a good face on it, bawling back: “Ar, I’m doing all right an’ all.” Fancy shouting out like that, though he laughed at remembering back to when George had persuaded Vera to introduce him to a young unmarried woman in the yard, and she had sent Brian to tell Alice Dexter she wanted to see her a minute — all to help her stingy brother, blacksmith George. When Alice Dexter came into the house George picked up a newspaper to make her think he’d been reading like a sober educated man, but he’d been unable to read from birth and the paper was upside down. Which caused periodic laughs in the family, especially from Seaton, because he couldn’t read either and would never try to impress anybody that way by pretending he could.
Wind blew across the bare dark stretch of the Cherry Orchard. “Are you all right, duck?” he said to Pauline. “Keep well wrapped up.”
“It ain’t cold,” she whispered. The others were a merging shadow far to the left, intent on finding their own private hollow in which to snug down. He held her tightly around the waist. “We’ll find a good place.” Stars were pale and liquid-eyed, each as if nervous at not knowing whether it was next to be hidden away. “It’s marvellous out here. It’s warm and lonely.”
“It is an’ all,” he responded. “My grandma used to live over there”—pointed far off into the darkness. “And my grandad. He was a blacksmith.” An inexplicable pride came at the thought of his grandfather having been a blacksmith. Blacksmith was a word of skill and hardiness: a smith makes things, and black means the toughest sort of work — like when I did that bout of flue-cleaning — the shaping of iron and steel between hammer and anvil, moved by muscle in a subtle mixture of controlled strength.
“Ooooooh!” she drawled out. “Mek a wish, Brian.”
“What for? Mind that bush.”
“I saw a shooting star.”
“I didn’t, though”—pulled out of his blacksmith world.
“There’s another one, look”—still pointing.
“Yes, I saw that one,” he was glad to own. “I’ve made a wish.”
“So’ve I.”
“What did yo’ wish?” he wanted to know.
“I’m not telling you. It don’t cum true if you tell anybody.”
“Well,” he teased, “I shan’t tell you what I wished then.”
“I’m not asking you to,” she said, offended. “Don’t if you don’t want to.”
“What do you think I am?” he cried, indignant. “If you wain’t tell me, I’m not going to tell yo’.”
“Well,” she said, “if you tell me what yo’ wished, mine’ll still come true.”
“Mine wain’t, though,” he reasoned, no thought of self-sacrifice.
“P’raps our wishes was the same,” she ventured. This put him on his guard: “I bet they worn’t.” I didn’t wish we could get married, he told himself. It’s enough if she did, though I’ll bet she’ll be wrong. “You know what mine was, though, don’t you?” she said, pressing his hand. He did. It leapt across with no words, a shaft of love unseen in the darkness, meeting the wish he had made because no other was possible for him, being with his girl in the middle of the Cherry Orchard in the first darkness of a spring evening. Her words came sweet, into an isolation of something better than he’d ever known, even though it wasn’t the first time they’d worked out this desire between them.
“Mine was the same,” he said, seeing the two lines written on the picture in the Nook parlour: “If you love me as I love you, nothing will ever part us two.” The sentiment quickly vanished because he thought that if he told it to Pauline she might laugh and see him as too sloppy to go out with. Not that he was unhappy at this.
A moon was up, had severed all connection with the chimneypots of distant houses, was responsible for the faint luminous gleam that held the humps and hollows and solitary bushes back from the hand of complete darkness. A gentle warm infiltration of visibility overspread from hedge and houses to a vale of Serpent Wood, a vague light giving the impression that the dwindling countryside of the half-mile Cherry Orchard was a vast and untouchable heath-land through which no arteries of life ran. He pulled up a handful of fresh grass to smell. “I can’t see Jim and Joan any more,” she said.
“They’re just over there,” he told her. “They’d hear us if we shouted.” To stop any idea of it he drew her to him, arms fastened around the waist and shoulders of her coat. He caught her mouth, half-open to start some reply to his remark, and felt the moist warm surprise of her lips that closed and hardened to a passionate response, her arms also reinforcing the kisses that she seemed to try and repulse only by increasing the forward pressing of her own. The uneven ground caused him to lurch, and though he kept balance without thinking where to place his feet, he succeeded in breaking the force of her kisses, holding her to him and placing his lips on her at such an angle that it was impossible for them to breathe. Both knew the meaning of this manoeuvre; it gave each a chance of proving that the power of greatest love was on his side; for the one who craved breath first bore the lesser love. The closeness of her body and the pressure of her face and lips hardened and sweetened the urgent rod of his loins. He moved his lips over hers, neither taking nor giving breath, prolonging the fleshy meeting with her mouth, which was one second dormant and then moving to prove that she loved him with all her strength and was nowhere near losing the contest. He went harder into her face, wanting to lift his head away from her, though, and laugh and pull in gusts and lettershapes of pure air, but the sweetness of Pauline, the well and slight shifting of her lips drew him in so that his kisses, like tears, grew in strength at the feel of her love.
The wind came against them like an outside kiss from the distant curve of the woods (the last leapfrogged obstacle down from the bleak Pennines), and as the pushing within grew at the deep prolonged valley of the kiss, the air and grass and darkness outside pulled away and left them in the grip of an insoluble torment of love. Pauline’s hands were at his neck, around under the hair at the back of his head, and she hoped that he would see through her equal torment and relax his wild unfeeling pressure by allowing her to breathe and win because she loved him more. His inner world grew to a blind illuminated space, the inside of a sphere that marked the limit of all pictures in his mind and turned his kiss-breaking into a vision. This was marvellous. He wanted to breathe, but held himself, even though the artistry of his kisses suffered, went on through brief seconds of control with each one the reason for further prolongation. His hands roamed up and down her back, from neck to shoulders, to take away the drumbeats of his lungs protesting against such obstinacy. I love you, Pauline, I love you. Give in. Start breathing and let me prove it. She pulled him tighter, as if to say that the kiss could go on for another five minutes for all she cared. His knees shook. He moved his head from side to side to keep a further second of breath in him: like swimming under water and hoping to reach a better part of the shore before surfacing. Though her lips were fast closed, she swayed also, moaned and tried shaking his head away. He knew that a few more seconds would kill him, for his lungs were barrels of gunpowder and the only vision left in his lighted sphere was that of a curving fuse going into them, with smoke that had travelled along it now close. If he kept on, he would die like a man does when he drowns.