Page:Three stories by Vítězslav Hálek (1886).pdf/187

 to see what progress they were making, and when they were cured despatched them to their respective masters.

There were golden times in store for Poldik’s horses after Malka had broken faith with him. That spurt of briskness which they had found so tiresome was soon expended—and from horses they quickly sank again into jades. Poldik had no longer anyone to whom he could boast of them, and he was angry with himself for ever having been so possessed and for having given himself so much trouble with them. They fell once more into their old measured pacing along the streets of Prague, and nothing again aroused them from their ordinary shambling walk.

But after Malka and Francis were espoused with so much pomp and ceremony, Poldik could not any longer bear to see his horses and cart. He had sufficiently clear insight to perceive what an unequal contest he had waged as a scavenger with Francis the wherryman. Nor was it the fault of his intellect that he had lost, but of the common-place loutish-ness with which he was saturated through and through. It appeared to him that there was nothing more despicable than his own employment; at all events he himself despised it utterly; and at that time if he could have driven off his cart and the horses along with it on to some red hot rock, so that no vestige of them might remain, he would have done it without a moment’s reflection.