he killed none of the fellows who called him a crook, though during the first two years of his schooling he was called a crook pretty often. whatever grade he was in, he was always that boy who differs from other boys, and is therefore the black swan in a flock of white ones. whatever his progress, he made it to the tune of his own history. he was a gutter-snipe. his mother had killed herself in jail! before she had killed herself both he and she had been arrested for thieving in a shop! there was not a house in harfrey where the tale was not told. there was never a boy or girl in the school who hadn't learned it before making his acquaintance.
besides, they said of him, he would have been "different" anyhow. being "different" was an offense less easily pardoned than being criminal. dressed more poorly than they, and with no claims of a social kind, he carried himself with that bearing which they could only describe as putting on airs. it was cilly tollivant who first brought this charge home to him.
"but i don't, cilly," he protested, earnestly. "i don't know how to be any other way."
cilly was by this time growing sisterly. she couldn't live in the house with him and not feel her heart relenting, and though she disdained him in public, as her own interests compelled her to do, in private she tried to help him.
[pg 77]
"don't know how to be any other way!" she exclaimed, indignantly. "tom whitelaw, you make me sick. don't you know even how to talk right?"
"yes, but...."
"there you go," she interrupted, bitterly. "why can't you say yep, like anybody else?"
he took the suggestion humbly. he would try. his only explanation of his eccentricity was that yep and nope didn't suit his tongue.
but adopting yep and nope, as he might have adopted words from a foreign language, adopting much else that was crude and crass and vulgar and noisy and swaggering and standardized, according to schoolboy notions of the standard, he still found himself "different." for one thing, he looked different. debase his language as he might, or coarsen his manners, or stultify his impulses, he couldn't keep himself from shooting up tall and straight, with a carriage of the head which was in itself an offense to those who knew themselves inferior. it made nothing easier for him that his teachers liked and respected him. "teacher's pet" was a term of reproach hardly less painful than crook or gutter-snipe. but he couldn't help learning easily; he couldn't help answering politely when politely spoken to; he couldn't help the rapture of his smile when a friendly word came his way. all this told against him. he was guyed, teased, worried, tortured. if there was a cap to be snatched it was his. if there was one of a pair of rubber shoes to be stolen or hidden it was his. if there was an exercise book to be grabbed and thrown up into a tree where the owner could be pelted while
[pg 78]
he clambered after it, it was his. because he was poor, friendless, defenseless, and yet with damnable pride written all over him, it became a recognized law of the school that any meanness done to him would be legitimate.
but in his third year at the tollivants the persecution waned, and in the fourth it stopped. his school-mates grew. growing, they developed other instincts. fair play was one of them; admiration for pluck was another.
"you've got to hand it to that kid," arthur tollivant, now fourteen, had been heard to say in a circle of his friends. "he's stood everything and never squealed a yelp. some young tough, believe me!"
this good opinion was reflected among the lads of tom whitelaw's own age. they had never been cruel; they had only been primitive. having passed beyond that stage, they forgot to no small degree what they had done while in it. the boy who at seven was the crook was at eleven whitey the sprinter. he walked to and from school with the best of them. with the best of them he played and fought and swore privately. if he put on airs it was the airs of being a much sadder dog than he was, daring to smoke a cigarette and go home with the smell of the wickedness on his breath.
so, outwardly, tom whitelaw came in for two full years of good-natured toleration. if it did not go further than toleration it was because he was a state ward. on the baseball or the football team he might be welcomed as an equal; in homes there was discrimination. he was not invited to parties, and
[pg 79]
among the young people of harfrey parties were not few. girls who met him at the tollivants' didn't speak to him outside. when cilly, now being known as cecilia, had her friends to celebrate her birthday, he remained in his room with no protest from the family at not joining them. none the less, it was a relief to be free from jeering in the streets, as well as from being reminded every day at school of his mother's tragedy. it was a relief to him; but it was no more.
for more than that the wound had gone too deep. outwardly, he accepted their approaches; in his heart he rejected them, biding his time. he was biding his time, not with longings for revenge—he was too sensible now for that—but in the hope of passing on and forgetting them. by the time he was twelve he was already aware of his impulse toward growth.
it was in his soul as a secret conviction, the seed's knowledge of its own capacity to germinate. most of the boys and girls around him he could judge, not by a precocious worldly wisdom, but by his gift for intuitive sizing up. their range was so far and no farther, and they themselves were aware of it. they would become clerks and plumbers and carpenters and school-teachers and shoe dealers and provision men, and whatever else could reach its fulfillment in a small country town. he himself felt no limit. life was big. he knew he could expand in it. to nurse resentments would be small, and would keep him small. all he asked was to forget them, to forget, too, those who called them forth; but to that end he must be far away.
