You thought you
were roughing it a good deal, but look at the state these men are in.
You gave yourself credit for some endurance, but look at their
unaffected cheeriness. The whole army is the same. In their thousands,
as you see them pass, the prevailing expression down all the swarthy
faces is one of unfailing good-humour. They make no more of their
hardships than Sandow of throwing about bars and bells that would crush
an ordinary man flat. It dawns on one, the depth of manhood that is
implied in endurance like this. "We sometimes get licked at first, but
we mostly come out all right in the end." Tommy's good-natured face as
he sweats it across the veldt gives some meaning to that boast.
In the crowds of his mates in the East End, in crowds of the unemployed
and the like, you see the same temper--a sort of rough, good spirits, an
indomitable, incorrigible cheerfulness that nothing, no outward misery,
seems able to damp. In West End crowds (Hyde Park, for instance) you
don't get this. There are smiles and laughs, as you look about at the
faces, but they seem merely individual--one here, another there. In the
crowd of roughs--though goodness knows there is little cause for
merriment, so far as one can see--there is a quite different, deeper,
and more universal feeling of bluff cheeriness, not put on, but
unconscious, as though, in spite of present misery, things were going
right for them somehow.
Pages:
127
128
129
130
131
132
133
134
135
136
137
138
139
140
141
142
143
144
145
146
147
148
149
150
151