The Progress of Love

down and asking if there was any place they could hang their clothes. “I didn’t think boys like you would have a lot of clothes,” Miss Kernaghan said. “I never had boys before. Why can’t you do like Mr. Delahunt? He puts his trousers under the mattress every night, and that keeps the crease in them grand.”
    Edgar thought that was the end of it, but in a little while Callie came with a broom handle and some wire. She stood on the bureau and contrived a clothespole with loops of wire around a beam.
    “We could easy do that,” Sam said. They looked with curiosity but little pleasure at her floppy gray undergarments. She didn’t answer. She had even brought some clothes hangers. Somehow they knew already that this was all her own doing.
    “Thank you, Callie,” said Edgar, a slender boy with a crown of fair curls, turning on her the diffident, sweet-natured smile that had had no success downstairs.
    Callie spoke in the rough voice that she used in the grocery store when demanding good potatoes. “Will that be all right for yez?”
    Sam and Edgar were cousins—not brothers, as most people thought. They were the same age—seventeen—and had been sent to board in Gallagher while they went to business college. They had grown up about ten miles from here, and had gone to the same country school and village continuation school. After a year at business college, they could get jobs in banks or offices or be apprenticed to accountants. They were not going back to the farm.
    What they really wanted to do, and had wanted since they were about ten years old, was to become acrobats. They had practiced for years and put on displays when the continuation school gave its concerts. That school had no gym, but there were some parallel bars and a balancing rail and mats in the basement. At home, they practiced in the barn, and on the grass in fine weather. How do acrobats earn a living? Sam was the one who had begun to ask that question. He could not picture Edgar and himself in a circus. They were not dark enough, for one thing. (He had an idea that the people who worked in circuses were all Gypsies.) He thought there must be acrobats going around on their own, doing stunts at fairs and in church halls. He remembered seeing some when he was younger. Where were they from? How did they get paid? How did you find out about joining them? Such questions troubled Sam more and more and never seemed to bother Edgar at all.
    In the early fall, after supper, while there was still some light in the evenings, they practiced in the vacant lot across the street from Kernaghan’s, where the ground was fairly level. They wore their undershirts and woollen pants. They limbered up by doing cartwheels and handstands and headstands, somersaults and double somersaults, and then welded themselves together. They shaped their bodies into signs—into hieroglyphs—eliminating to an astonishing degree their separateness and making the bumps of heads and shoulders incidental. Sometimes, of course, these creations toppled, everything came apart, arms and legs flew free, and grappling bodies reappeared—just two boys’ bodies, one tall and slight, theother shorter and sturdier. They began again, building jerkily. The balancing bodies swayed. They might topple, they might hold. All depended on whether they could subdue themselves into that pure line, invisibly join themselves, attain the magic balance. Yes. No. Yes. Again.
    They had an audience of boarders sitting on the porch. Alice Peel took no notice. If she was not out with her fiancé, she was in her room attending to the upkeep of her clothes and person—painting her nails, doing up her hair or taking it out, plucking her eyebrows, washing her sweaters and silk stockings, cleaning her shoes. Adam Delahunt was a busy person, too—he had meetings of the Temperance Society and the Gideons to go to, social activities of his Sunday-school class to superintend. But he sat for a while and watched with Mrs. Cruze and Miss Verne and Miss Kernaghan. Mrs. Cruze still had good eyesight and she loved the show. She stamped her cane on the porch floor and yelled, “Get him, boy! Get him!” as if the stunts were some sort of wrestling match.
    Mr. Delahunt told Sam and Edgar about his Sunday-school class, called the Triple-Vs. The Vs stood for Virtue, Vigor, and Victory. He said that if they joined they could get to use the United church gymnasium. But the boys were Coldwater Baptists at home, so