“They’re dreadfully stiff, father, and the boots are too large,” said Arthur ungraciously. “Hadn’t we better get back?”
Poor Arthur repented his words most bitterly as soon as he had spoken them, for there was a hard light going on in the boy’s mind. Naturally very conceited, he had had the misfortune to be made the head of a little set at his school—a little set, for they were rather small boys, who looked up to him,—and dressed at him as far as they could, the effect being to make him more conceited still, and think his brother rough and common in his ways.
All this had been pointed out to Mr Temple, who, however, had seen it for himself, and he only said, smiling:
“It will all settle itself. These little spines will get knocked off by contact with the world. Besides which I hope that he will find out for himself the way to grow into a manly man.”
Mr Temple was quite right, and Arthur was beginning to discover that, where his brother was met with a genial smile by all whom he encountered, he, who was particular and precise and, as he considered it, gentlemanly in his ways, was either not noticed, or met with merely the coldest reception.
He was learning too that a man—especially an Englishman, whether gentle or simple—born in the lap of luxury, as people call it, or in the humblest cot, must be one who will always keep up the credit of the nation at large by being thoroughly English; and this brings one to the question—while the storm is raging on the Cornish coast, and Arthur Temple is in his glistening oilskins walking stiffly and awkwardly, and wincing beneath his father’s look, which said as plainly as look could speak, “If you are afraid you can go back;”—this brings one to the task of stating what one means by being thoroughly English, so let us set down here, something approaching one’s ideas of what an English lad should be.
Courageous of course, full of that sturdy determination not to be beaten, and when beaten, so far from being disheartened that he is ready to try again, whether in a fight, a battle with a difficulty, or in any failure.
Honest in his striving for what he knows to be right, and ready to maintain it against all odds, especially of such enemies as banter or ridicule, self-indulgence or selfishness.
That is enough: for so many wonderful little veins will start from those two trunks, that, given a boy who is courageous and honest, or who makes himself so, it would be almost an impossibility for him to turn out a bad, mean, and cowardly man.
And pray don’t imagine, you who read this, that by a cowardly man or boy I mean one who is afraid to take off his jacket and roll up his sleeves and fight with his fists. I mean quite a different kind of coward—the one who is afraid of himself and lets self rule him, giving up to every indulgence because it goes a little against the grain, and Arthur Temple is walking uncomfortably in his oilskins because they don’t look nice. The storm is raging, and he is still smarting under the belief that his father thinks him contemptible and cowardly, physically cowardly. And all the time, though the tears are rising in his eyes, and the wind is deafening him, and the spray beating in his face so that his tears are not seen, he is proving that, under his varnish, he is made of the right stuff. For even as he battled with self in the boat when conger-fishing, he is fighting the good fight again, has set his teeth, and has made a sort of vow that no one shall say he has not as much pluck as his brother Dick.