Deciphering of William Henley's "Bus-Driver": put 'a bit on'?

Solution 1:

I note that the book of Henley's poetry that you link to was published in 1901. That would make the phrase "put a bit on" well matched to this entry in Eric Partridge, A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, Fifth Edition (1961):

bit on, (have) a. (To lay) a stake: racing : 1894, George Moore

Henley is saying that the bus-driver sometimes bets on the horses, and when he loses pays out both with money and with lip (angry speech, presumably).

The same source has this as definition 3 of short:

'A conductor of an omnibus, or any other servant, is said to be short, when he does not give all the money he receives to his master.' H[otten, The Slang Dictionary], 3rd ed. [(1874)] : from ca. 1860.

The suggestion here is that the driver engages in low-level embezzling.

Update (February 4, 2021)

I hadn't realized this back in 2014, but the author of this poem is the same William Henley who teamed with John Farmer to compile the extraordinary seven-volume Slang and Its Analogues Past and Present dictionary of slang, published from 1890 to 1904. In this dictionary, bit is clearly identified as a slang term for money and, in particular, for "coins varying in value according to locality—usually, however, to the silver piece of the lowest denomination." The entry continues as follows:

Four-penny pieces are still called BITS in English slang, but are more popularly known as JOEYS; an in Demerara the term is in general use for the same coin; in America a 12 cent piece is called a BIT, and a defaced 20 cent piece is called a LONG BIT. A BIT is the smallest coin in Jamaica, equal to 6d.

As for short, Farmer & Henley identifies four common slang meanings of short as a noun, four more of short as an adjective, and more than a dozen colloquial phrases that include short in them. The four slang senses of stand-alone short as a noun are (1) in gaming, "a card (all below the eight) prepared so that nothing above the eight can be cut"; (2) knee breeches; (3) in stock exchanges, "a BEAR" (that is, "one who has 'sold short,' and whose interest is to depress the market"); (4) flannel trousers; and (5) "a dram". The three slang senses of stand-alone short as an adjective are (1) of alcohol, "unadulterated; NEAT"; (2) in commercial practice, small-denomination bank notes; and (3) "hard up; 'short of cash'".

I now think it most probable that, in his poem, Henley had in mind the small coin wager sense of bit and the straight dram of alcohol sense of short. Whatever his intentions, Henley was surely as aware as any person in England of the array of meanings that the various slang he used could possess.

Solution 2:

Put a bit on could/can colloquially also mean 'place a bet': almost certainly on a horse-race, so he's putting a bit on a horse (and facing the likely losses), and then coming to work and putting a bit (literally) on his cab-horse. I've no idea whether the pun was deliberate, either by Henley or by the wideboys (or whetever they were called in those days) who coined the slang.

I am convinced that short is alcohol of some sort, more likely shandy than the spirits it would now imply. But I've no evidence at all for that; merely the tone of the poem (and the notorious liking of bus-drivers and super-tramps for beer).