"I don't blame the taxis, I don't blame nobody. It's come on us, that's
what it has. I left the wife this morning with nothing in the house.
She was saying to me only yesterday: 'What have you brought home the last
four months?' 'Put it at six shillings a week,' I said. 'No,' she said,
'seven.' Well, that's right--she enters it all down in her book."
"You are really going short of food?"
The cabman smiled; and that smile between those two deep hollows was
surely as strange as ever shone on a human face.
"You may say that," he said. "Well, what does it amount to? Before I
picked you up, I had one eighteen-penny fare to-day; and yesterday I took
five shillings. And I've got seven bob a day to pay for the cab, and
that's low, too. There's many and many a proprietor that's broke and
gone--every bit as bad as us. They let us down as easy as ever they can;
you can't get blood from a stone, can you?" Once again he smiled. "I'm
sorry for them, too, and I'm sorry for the horses, though they come out
best of the three of us, I do believe."
One of us muttered something about the Public.
The cabman turned his face and stared down through the darkness.
"The Public?" he said, and his voice had in it a faint surprise. "Well,
they all want the taxis. It's natural. They get about faster in them,
and time's money. I was seven hours before I picked you up.
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