“I shouldn’t think so. It costs a pile o’ money to go to Elgin, N.B. It’s a good deal north o’ Bedford, which is the farthest I ever went with the ’orses. That was in eighteen-eighty-four.”
He settled down for a story. Fortunately for Ann, he was allowed to get no further than clearing his throat, when he was cut short by the entry of Casey.
“Evening, miss,” said he. “I seen your young man in the neighborhood of Holland Park, standing on a street corner. I nodded to him, but he looked clean through me. Very queer, I thought. We’ve been good pals. When I came back an hour later he was still there. I was empty that time. So I stopped. ‘Keeping the pavement warm,’ I said, cheerful like. ‘Trying to warm myself,’ said he. ‘Draughty weather to be doing that in the streets,’ I said. ‘You go home, Casey,’ he said. ‘Oh, well,’ I thought, ‘we’re all fools, and every fool to his own folly.’ So I left him. I came home that way just now and he’d gone.”
“We been talking about him all evening,” said Martin, “me and Annie here.”
“He’s one of the best hands at an engine that ever I saw. And that brings me to what I want to talk to you about, guvnor. I been to see the doctor again, and he says London’s doing me a bit of no good, and if I go on with it, it’ll do me in. Now I’ve got an idea. Leastways it isn’t all my idea but mostly hisn, young Fourmy’s.”
“If you knew about ’orses, there’s a good livery at Barnet.”
Casey persisted:
“My idea is this: There’s just a few want motors in London. Something’s happening in the place. Well, one night in the cab-rank young Fourmy, Young Earnest, as we call him, took out the map of fifty miles round, and he pointed out how the railways go out of London like spokes of a wheel. Between the spokes, he says, is where London is going to live if it is made possible, and motors ought to make it possible. He says if you choose your place properly, so as to link up the main roads and two railways, you’d be bound to make a living. There’s enough houses already. Soon there’ll be factories and works out there. Then there’ll be more houses. I didn’t believe it at first. I said: ‘But if all the people live out there, what’s to become of dear old London?’ ‘London,’ he says, ‘will be a clearing-house and capital, a real center.’ I didn’t understand altogether what he was talking about, but I’ve been out to see for myself, and what he says is happening. All the little country towns have cinemas and new shops, and in the suburbs there are whole streets of houses empty. I’m no good for the West End traffic, and I want to try my luck at the other, if I can get hold of any capital.”
“Ah! Capital!” said Martin. “That wants a bit of getting, capital does.”
Clearly he had not understood a word of what Casey was talking about. He had his own idea of London, and was not going to change it or admit the possibility of change. From one year’s end to the other he never left the mews. His yard might actually be filled with motor-cars, but for him it was really a sanctuary of the ’orses. Their smell still clung about it. The one horse he had left had little else to do but provide the smell.