In the story, the children are initially afraid of the professor because of his reclusive nature. He keeps to himself and seemingly admits no friends into his company. Because he is an unknown entity, no one can rightly say what he's like. Certainly, no one can predict how he will react in any given situation.
The professor's forbidding appearance also makes him a figure of fear in the children's neighborhood: he is tall, bent, bearded, and possessing of a most forbidding stare.
Although the children eventually use the backyard of the professor's store for their Egypt Game, he continues to remain a mysterious figure to them. The professor's reputation is further eroded when he becomes the main person of interest after a little girl is killed in the neighborhood. Almost overnight, the entire neighborhood becomes inordinately suspicious of the professor. A rumor begins the turn of public opinion against the...
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elderly man. Accordingly, someone had seen two police officers enter the professor's antique shop the day after the little girl disappeared.
This is enough for some people to think that the professor must be guilty of the crime. Soon, someone throws a brick through the professor's store window, and Mr. Schmitt organizes a campaign to kick the professor out of the neighborhood.
Notably, the Egypt Game children believe he is innocent, only because it would be terrible to imagine playing in the backyard of a murderer. So, more than anything, the fear of the professor is inspired by the fact that he is a reclusive figure and an unknown variable in the social fabric of the neighborhood.
Why are the children initially fearful of the Professor, and how do their feelings change?
The children are indeed scared of the Professor at first. But then, most people in their situation would be. He comes across as a really unfriendly man, kind of creepy in a way—certainly not the sort of person you'd want to get too close to. It's no wonder that children in the neighborhood stay away from his shop. The Professor's been turned into the local bogeyman, a figure of legend rumored to be responsible for not one, but two child murders in the vicinity. If this guy turns out to be anything other than a stone-cold psychopath, it'll be a miracle.
But miracles do happen, and over the course of the book we find out that we—and the children—have been getting the Professor all wrong. It turns out that his lack of engagement with the outside world isn't because he's a serial child killer, but because he withdrew into himself after his wife passed away. The death of the Professor's wife was so painful to him that he didn't want to get too close to anyone else, and so he retreated behind closed doors, cutting himself off from the neighborhood.
Now that they've seen a whole different side to the Professor, the children's feelings about him change accordingly. They learn to trust him, seeing him as one of life's good guys. He demonstrates this when he saves April from being attacked in his storage yard, and also when he gives the children the keys to the yard so that they can continue to play there.