And with that the school bell rang.
Some days afterwards he ran past me on the way from school. I noticed that his jacket was ripped open in the back.
“Wait a bit!” I said to him, “your jacket has split open in the back.”
“No,” he said, “it hasn’t split open, they have cut it open with a penknife.”
“Have they dirtied your book for you, too?” I asked.
“Yes, they’ve laid it in the gutter.”
“Why are they so mean to you?”
“I don’t know. They are stronger than I am.”
He knew of no other reason. But of course that was not the only one; they must have found something in him that irritated them. I saw it in him that he was not like the others. The exceptional, the divergent always irritates children and mobs. A school-boy’s eccentricities are punished by the teacher with a well-intended monition or a dry satiric smile; but by his comrades they are punished with kicks and cuffs and a bloody nose, with a torn jacket, a cap carefully laid under a rain-spout, and his best book thrown into the gutter.
Well, he is an actor now; that was surely his natural predestination. He now talks from the stage to a large public. It would be strange if sometime he did not make his way; I believe he has talent. Perhaps he will gradually transform his peculiarity to a pattern, according to which others try to conform as to an inoffensive regular verb.