Boycotted, and Other Stories

by Talbot Baines Reed

I tried to work hard in my study every evening, and to persuade myself I was glad of the opportunity of making up for lost time; but somehow or other the distant sounds of revelry and laughter made Livy and Euclid more dull and uninteresting than ever. I tried to hug myself with the notion of how independent I was in school and out, how free I was from bores, how jolly the long afternoon walks were with no one hanging on at my heels, how dignified it was to hold up my head when all the world was against me. But spite of it all I moped.

Greatly to my disgust, Draven’s did not mope. As I sat down in my study, or wandered, still more solitary, in the crowded playground, it seemed as if all the school except myself had never been in better spirits. Fellows seemed to have shaken off the cloud which Browne’s expulsion had left behind. The football team was better than it had been for a year or two, and I overheard fellows saying that the “Saturday nights” were jollier even than last winter. In fact, it seemed as if, like Jonah, the throwing of me overboard had brought fine weather all round.

Still I was not going to give in. Draven’s should be ashamed of itself before I met it half way!

So I watched with satisfaction my face growing pale day by day, and I aided this new departure in my favour by eating less than usual, giving up outdoor exercise, and staying up late over my lessons.

I calculated that at the rate I was going I should be reduced to skin and bones by the end of my term, and perhaps at my funeral Draven’s would own they had wronged me. At present, however, my pallor seemed to escape their observation, and as for my late hours, all the good they did me was an imposition from Mr Draven for breaking rules.

As the days went on, I seemed to have dropped altogether out of life. I might have been invisible, for anything any one seemed to see of me. Even the masters appeared to have joined in the conspiracy to ignore me, and for a whole week I sat at my solitary desk without hearing the sound of my own voice.

My readers may scoff when I tell them that at the end of a fortnight I felt like running away. The silence and isolation which had amused me at first became a slow torture at last, and, poor-spirited wretch that I was, my only comfort was in now and then crying in bed in the dark.

I made up for this secret weakness by putting on a swagger in public, and rendered myself ridiculous in consequence. Draven’s could hardly help being amused by a fellow who one day slunk in and out among them self-consciously pale, black under the eyes, with a hacking cough and a funereal countenance, and the next blustered about defiantly and glared at every one he met.

The fact was, having despaired of making a friend, my one longing now was to make an enemy. I would have paid all my pocket-money twice over for a quarrel or a fight with somebody. But that was a luxury harder to get even than a friendly word.

I tried one day.