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I could have been induced to take my purchase away then and there, as if I had been buying a canary, so unaccustomed was I to transactions of this kind, and I am afraid the job-master considered me little better than a fool. So I found myself the involuntary possessor of a Houyhnhnm, or something even worse, and I walked back to my rooms in Park Street in a state of stupor.
It was my great wish to go out to the F.A.N.Y.s again when I had got thoroughly accustomed to my leg. I tried riding a bicycle, and after falling off once or twice "coped" quite well, but it was not till November that I had the chance to try a horse. I was down at Broadstairs and soon discovered a job-master and arranged to go out the next day.
Happy is he who can, in spite of years, Retain at times the spirit of the Child." My own personal ambition at that period was a modest one. My mother always drove out in Dublin in a carriage-and-four, with postilions and two out-riders. We had always used black carriage-horses, and East, the well-known job-master, had provided us for Dublin with twenty-two splendid blacks, all perfect matches.
It belonged to a job-master in a small way, who drove it himself, and who jobbed it by the day, or hour, to most of the old ladies in Hampton Court Palace; but it was a point of ceremony, in that encampment, that the whole equipage should be tacitly regarded as the private property of the jobber for the time being, and that the job-master should betray personal knowledge of nobody but the jobber in possession.
"Nucingen must give her a carriage and horses; she will have to choose and buy everything herself. Go to the horse-dealer and the coachmaker who are employed by the job-master where Paccard finds work. We shall get handsome horses, very dear, which will go lame within a month, and we shall have to change them." "We might get six thousand francs out of a perfumer's bill," said Europe.
I should have been only too willing, for there was no room there for the horse, but the suspicious animal would not hear of it: he began to revolve immediately. 'Let us settle it now here, I said, 'I can't wait. The job-master stroked away a grin. No doubt there was something unbusinesslike and unpractical in such precipitation, especially as combined with my appearance at the time.
Little by little I grew to know something of his beginnings and his hopes of his mother, who had been a school-teacher in one of the northern counties, and of his red-headed father, a small job-master at Kirby Moors, who died when he was a child; of the examinations he had passed and of their exceeding and increasing difficulty; of his dreams of a shop in London; of his hate for the price-cutting Co-operative stores; and, most interesting, of his mental attitude towards customers.
The job-master was desolated, but he had sold three animals the day before to an English milord, a very big gentleman, and his party. He had just one horse, but it was a beauty. The horse was trotted out. It was well groomed they always are, and arsenic does impart a nice gloss to the hide and looked imposing, a tall three-quarter-bred bay gelding.
In a narrow alley off Sea Street lived Gorseth the job-master, with a household consisting of a lean and skinny wife, two half-starved horses, and a few ramshackle flies and sledges. The job-master himself was a hulking toper with red nose and beery-yellow eyes, who spent his nights in drinking and got home in the small hours of the morning when his wife was just about getting up.
As Peer was getting up: "Gracious mercy!" she cried suddenly, "what is that awful noise down in the yard?" "Oh, that's nothing to worry about," said Peer. "It's only the job-master and his wife. They carry on like that every blessed morning; you'll soon get used to it." Soon they were seated once more at the little table, drinking coffee and laughing and looking at each other.
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