Kentucky -- Social life and customs -- Fiction; Short stories, American
The cash was counted. He carried it into the depths of the ancient and
cumbersome vault, which blocked off a section of the wall behind the
cashier's desk, and in their appointed niches bestowed, also, certain
large ledgerlike tomes. He closed and locked the inner steel door and
was in the act of swinging to the heavy outer door.
“Look here a minute!” came sharply from Mr. Caruthers.
It was like a command. Obeying involuntarily, Emanuel faced about. From
under his coat, where it had been hidden against his left side, Mr.
Caruthers, still standing at the wicket, was drawing forth something
long and black and slim, and of a most exceeding shininess--something
with silver trimmings on it and a bell mouth--a clarinet that was all a
clarinet should be, and yet a half brother to a saxophone.
“I sort of thought you'd be wanting to get a flash at it right away,”
said Mr. Caruthers, holding the magnificent instrument up in plain
sight. “So I brought it along--for a surprise.”
With joy Emanuel Moon's round eyes widened and moistened. After the
fashion of a rabbit suddenly confronted with lettuce his lower face
twitched. His overhanging upper lip quivered to wrap itself about that
virgin mouthpiece, as his fingers itched to fondle that slender polished
fountain of potential sweet melodies. And he forgot other things.
He came out from behind the counter and almost with reverence took the
splendid thing from the smiling Mr. Caruthers. He did remember to lock
the street door as they issued to the sidewalk; but from that juncture
on, until he discovered himself with Caruthers in Caruthers' room on
the third floor of the hotel, diagonally across the street and down the
block from the bank, and was testing the instrument with soft, tentative
toots and finding to his extreme gratification that this clarinet
bleated, not in sheeplike bleats, as his old one did, but rather mooed
in a deep bass voice suggestive of cows, all that passed was to Mr. Moon
but a confused blur of unalloyed joyousness.
Indeed, from that point thenceforward he was not quite sure of anything
except that, over his protests, Mr. Caruthers declined to accept any
reimbursement whatsoever for the cost of the new clarinet, he explaining
that, thanks to the generosity of that kindly soul, Izzy Gottlieb, the
requisite outlay had amounted to so trifling a sum as not to be worthy
of the time required for further discussion; and that, following this,
he played Annie Laurie all the way through, and essayed the first bars
of The Last Rose of Summer, while Mr. Caruthers sat by listening and
smoking, and seemingly gratified to the utmost at having been the means
of bringing this pleasure to Mr. Moon.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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