The Progress of Love

and stay there that night. It would be late in the afternoon when they got in. They would first get something to eat, then ask somebody the way to the Y.M.C.A. Probably they could walk.
    He told Edgar what they would do. “Then tomorrow we’ll walk around and get to know the streets and find out where is the cheapest place to eat.”
    He knew that Edgar would accept any plan at the moment. Edgar had no notion yet of Toronto, in spite of that unexpected invention of a sister and a brother-in-law. Edgar was sitting here on the bench at the station, full of the idea of the train coming in and of their getting on. The blast of the whistle, the departure—the escape. Escape like an explosion, setting them free. He never saw them getting off the train, with their paper bags, in a banging, jarring, crowded, utterly bewildering new place. But Sam felt better now that he had a starting plan. If one good idea could occur to him out of the blue, why not another?
    After a while, other people began to gather, waiting for the same train. Two ladies dressed up to go shopping in Stratford. Their varnished straw hats showed that it was getting close to summer. An old man in a shiny black suit carrying a cardboard box secured with twine. The boys who hung around and didn’t go anywhere were nevertheless getting ready for the train’s arrival—sitting all together at the end of the platform, dangling their legs. A couple of dogs were patrolling the platform in a semi-official way, sniffing at a trunk and some waiting parcels, sizing up the baggage cart, even looking down the tracks as if they knew as well as anybody else which direction the train was coming from.
    As soon as they heard the whistle blowing for the crossroads west of town, Sam and Edgar got up and stood at the edge of theplatform. When the train arrived, it seemed a very good sign that they had chosen to stand in the exact spot at which the conductor stepped down, carrying the little step. After he had spent an interminable time assisting a woman with a baby, a suitcase, and two small children, they were able to get on. They went ahead of the ladies in summer hats, the man with the box, and whoever else had lined up. They didn’t once look behind. They walked to the end of the almost empty car and chose to sit where they could face each other, on the side of the train that looked out on the board fence, not on the platform. The same board fence they had been staring at for over three-quarters of an hour. They had to sit there for two or three minutes while there was the usual commotion outside, important-sounding shouts, and the conductor’s voice crying, “Board!” in a way that transformed the word from a human sound to a train sound. Then the train began to move. They were moving. They each had one arm still around a brown bag and a ticket held in the other hand. They were moving. They watched the boards of the fence to prove it. They left the fence behind altogether and were passing through the diminished outskirts of the town—the back yards, back sheds, back porches, apple trees in bloom. Lilacs straggling by the tracks, gone wild.
    While they were looking out the window, and before the town was entirely gone, a boy sat down in the seat across the aisle from them. Sam’s impression was that one of those boys loitering on the platform had slipped onto the train, or somehow connived to get a free ride, perhaps out to the junction. Without really looking, he got an idea of the way the boy was dressed—too shabbily and carelessly to be going on any real trip. Then he did look, and he saw that the boy was holding a ticket, just as they were.
    On the winter nights when they walked to the skating rink, they had not often looked at each other. Under the streetlights, they had watched their turning shadows on the snow. Inside the rink, the artificial moon altered colors and left some areas in near darkness. So the clothes this boy was wearing did not send any immediate message across the aisle. Except that they were notthe kind of clothes usually worn on a trip. Rubber boots, heavy breeches with stains of oil or paint on them, a windbreaker torn under one arm and too warm for the day, a large, unsuitable cap.
    How had Callie got past the station agent in that outfit? The same station agent who looked Sam and Edgar over so inquisitively, who wanted to know where they were planning to stay and who was meeting them, had let this absurd and dirty and ragged