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.
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"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............