again – won’t you?”
Stevie was staring at the horse, whose hind quarters appeared
unduly elevated by the effect of emaciation. The little stiff tail
seemed to have been fitted in for a heartless joke; and at the
other end the thin, flat neck, like a plank covered with old horse-
hide, drooped to the ground under the weight of an enormous bony
head. The ears hung at different angles, negligently; and the
macabre figure of that mute dweller on the earth steamed straight
up from ribs and backbone in the muggy stillness of the air.
The cabman struck lightly Stevie’s breast with the iron hook
protruding from a ragged, greasy sleeve.
“Look `ere, young feller. `Ow’d YOU like to sit behind this `oss
up to two o’clock in the morning p’raps?”
Stevie looked vacantly into the fierce little eyes with red-edged
lids.
“He ain’t lame,” pursued the other, whispering with energy. “He
ain’t got no sore places on `im. `Ere he is. `Ow would YOU like –
”
His strained, extinct voice invested his utterance with a character
of vehement secrecy. Stevie’s vacant gaze was changing slowly into
dread.
“You may well look! Till three and four o’clock in the morning.
Cold and `ungry. Looking for fares. Drunks.”
His jovial purple cheeks bristled with white hairs; and like
Virgil’s Silenus, who, his face smeared with the juice of berries,
discoursed of Olympian Gods to the innocent shepherds of Sicily, he
talked to Stevie of domestic matters and the affairs of men whose
sufferings are great and immortality by no means assured.
“I am a night cabby, I am,” he whispered, with a sort of boastful
exasperation. “I’ve got to take out what they will blooming well
give me at the yard. I’ve got my missus and four kids at `ome.”
The monstrous nature of that declaration of paternity seemed to
strike the world dumb. A silence reigned during which the flanks
of the old horse, the steed of apocalyptic misery, smoked upwards
in the light of the charitable gas-lamp.
The cabman grunted, then added in his mysterious whisper:
“This ain’t an easy world.” Stevie’s face had been twitching for
some time, and at last his feelings burst out in their usual
concise form.
“Bad! Bad!”
His gaze remained fixed on the ribs of the horse, self-conscious
and sombre, as though he were afraid to look about him at the
badness of the world. And his slenderness, his rosy lips and pale,
clear complexion, gave him the aspect of a delicate boy,
notwithstanding the fluffy growth of golden hair on his cheeks. He
pouted in a scared way like a child. The cabman, short and broad,
eyed him with his fierce little eyes that seemed to smart in a
clear and corroding liquid.
“‘Ard on `osses, but dam’ sight `arder on poor chaps like me,” he
wheezed just audibly.
“Poor! Poor!” stammered out Stevie, pushing his hands deeper into
his pockets with convulsive sympathy. He could say nothing; for
the tenderness to all pain and all misery, the desire to make the
horse happy and the cabman happy, had reached the point of a
bizarre longing to take them to bed with him. And that, he knew,
was impossible. For Stevie was not mad. It was, as it were, a
symbolic longing; and at the same time it was very distinct,
because springing from experience, the mother of wisdom. Thus when
as a child he cowered in a dark corner scared, wretched, sore, and
miserable with the black, black misery of the soul, his sister
Winnie used to come along, and carry him off to bed with her, as
into a heaven of consoling peace. Stevie, though apt to forget
mere facts, such as his name and address for instance, had a
faithful memory of sensations. To be taken into a bed of
compassion was the supreme remedy, with the only one disadvantage
of being difficult of application on a large scale. And looking at
the cabman, Stevie perceived this clearly, because he was
reasonable.
The cabman went on with his leisurely preparations as if Stevie had
not existed. He made as if to hoist himself on the box, but at the