He had looked forward to Monday and school. After four days in the
Tollivant household he was eager for relief from it. Except for Cilly's
occasional, and always private, taunts, they were not unkind to him;
they only treated him as an outcast whom they had been obliged to
succor because no one else would do so. He had the same food and drink
as they; his room was good enough; of whatever was material he had no
complaint to make. There was only the distrust which rendered his bread
bitter and the bed hard to lie upon. They didn't take him in as one of
them. They kept him outside, an alien, an intruder.
It was again a new experience in that for the first time in his life he
was doing without love. When he was Tom Coburn he had had plenty of it
at the worst of times. The Swindon Street Home was full of it. In the
Tollivant house it was the only thing weighed and measured and stinted.
He couldn't, of course, make this analysis. He only knew that something
on which his life depended was not given him.
He hoped to find it in the school. In any case the school would admit
him to the larger life. It would bind him to that human family which he
had so long craved to enter. In addition to that, it was at school you
learned things.
He was the more eager to learn things for the reason that Mrs.
Tollivant had declared him backward. In the primary school Cilly was in
the second grade; he must go into the first. He would be with children
a year younger than himself. But the humiliation would be an incentive
to ambition. He had already decided that only by "knowing things"
should he be able to lift himself out of his despised estate.
The school session was all he had hoped for. Miss Pollard, the teacher,
put in touch with his story by Mrs. Tollivant, kept him near to her,
and watched over him. He learned to discriminate between _his_, _has_,
and _had_, as matters of orthography, as well as between _cat_,
_car_, and _can_. That twice two made four and twice four made eight
added much to his understanding of numbers. He sang _Roving the Old
Homeland_, while Miss Pollard pointed on the map to the places as they
were named.
From Plymouth town to Plymouth town
The Pilgrims made their way;
The Puritans settled Salem,
And Boston on the Bay.
The air had a rhythm and a lilt which allowed for the inclusion of any
reasonable number of redundant syllables.
The Dutch lived in New Amsterdam,
Where the blue waters fork;
The English came and conquered it,
And turned it into New York.
A little history, a little geography, being taught by the simple method
of doggerel, much pleasure was evoked by the exercise of healthy
lungs. Listening to her new pupil, Miss Pollard discovered a sweet
treble that had never before been aware of itself, with a linnet's joy
in piping. A linnet's joy was his joy throughout the whole morning,
with no more than a slight flaw in his ecstasy in the thought of two
hours in the Tollivant home before he came back for the afternoon.
As Cilly called for Bertie at the kindergarten, he walked homeward
by himself. Happy with a happiness never experienced before, he had
not noticed that his school-mates hung away from him, tittering as
he passed. To well-dressed little boys and girls his worn old cap,
his frayed knickerbockers, and above all his cheap gray overcoat with
a stringy sheepskin collar, naturally marked him for derision. They
would have marked him for derision even had his story not been known to
everyone.
He went singing on his way, stepping manfully to the measure.
The Dutch lived in New Amsterdam,
Where the blue waters fork;
The English came and conquered it,
And turned it into New York.
They massed themselves behind him, convulsed by his lack of
self-consciousness. The little girls giggled; the boys attempted to
make snowballs from snow too powdery to hold together. One lad found
a frozen potato which he hurled in such a way as to skim close to the
singing figure while just missing it. Tom Whitelaw, unsuspicious of
ill-will, turned round in curiosity. He was greeted by a hoot from the
crowd, but from whom he couldn't tell.
"Who's the boy what his mother was put in jail?"
The hoot became a chorus of jeers. By one after another the insult was
taken up.
"Who's the boy what his mother was put in jaaa-il?"
As far as he was able to distinguish, the voices of the little girls
were the louder. In their merriment they screamed piercingly.
"Gutter-snipe! Gutter-rat! Crook! Crook! Crook! Who's the boy what his
mother was put in ja-aa-ail?"
Crimson, with clenched fists, with gnashing teeth, with tears of rage
in his eyes, he stood his ground while they came on. They swept toward
him in a semicircle of which he made the center. Very well! So much the
better! He could spring on at least one of them, and dash his brains
out on the ground. There was no ferocity he would not enjoy putting
into execution.
He sprang, but amid the yells of the crowd his prey dodged and escaped
him. The semicircle broke. Instead of advancing in massed formation, it
danced round him now as forty or fifty imps. The imps bewildered him,
as _banderilleros_ bewilder a bull in the ring. He didn't know which to
attack. When he lunged at one, the charge was diverted by another, so
that he struck at the air wildly. Shrieks of mockery at these failures
maddened him, with the heartbreaking madness of a loving thing goaded
out of all semblance to itself. He panted, he groaned, he dashed about
foolishly, he stumbled, he fell. When pelted with pebbles or scraps of
ice, he was hardly aware of the rain upon his head.
But the mob swept on, leaving him behind. At gates and corners the boy
baiters disappeared, hungry for their dinners. Most of them forgot him
as soon as they had turned their backs. It was easy for them to stop
for awhile since they could begin again.
He was alone on the gritty, icy slope surrounding the schoolhouse.
There was no comfort for him in the world. Faintly he remembered as a
satisfaction that he hadn't cried, but even this consolation was cold.
He wondered if he couldn't kill himself.
He did not kill himself, though he pondered ways and means of doing
it. He came to the conclusion that it would be foolish to kill himself
before killing some of his tormentors. He prayed about it that night,
his first prayer, except for the one taught him on Christmas Eve by
Mrs. Crewdson.
To the family devotions, for which all were assembled about eight
o'clock, before the younger children went to bed, Mr. Tollivant had
begun to add a new petition.
"And, O Heavenly Father, take pity on the little stranger within our
gates, even as we have welcomed him into our home. Blot out his past
from Thy book. Give him a new heart. Make him truthful and honest
especially. Help him to be gentle, obedient...."
But savagely the boy intervened on his own behalf. "O Heavenly Father,
don't! Don't give me a new heart, or make me gentle and obedient, till
I kill some of them fellows that called me a crook, for Jesus Christ's
sake, Amen."
X
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.
"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 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 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.