Presently the junior partner felt it incumbent on him to do a bit more honour to the prodigiousness of what the customer had disclosed. “An opery troupe!”
“Yes,” replied Xenophon Curry with warm and lingering affection. “And I want to tell you, gentlemen, I’ve got some of the finest songbirds in captivity! Next time we play here I’ll send you down some passes.”
“Be sure they’re well toward the front,” stipulated the old man. The laugh was crowding in, but he just managed to add: “My eyes aren’t quite as good as they used to be!”
“I suppose,” observed Jerome respectfully, “you’ve been in the business all your life?”
“Almost as far back as I can remember,” the impresario assured him. “Lord, gentlemen, you couldn’t get me to give it up for a million dollars! It’s the glory of doing what you’re made to do! I was made for music as sure as God made little green apples! Music—” he poised it a moment, quite ecstatically, his eyes raised toward the ceiling, “—that’s what I’m made for!” But then he seemed to realize that emotion was rather carrying him away, and that, after all, here he was in a ship chandlery store, with a clerk and an old man blinking at him behind the counter; so he ended, very simply, and with another of his fine smiles: “I’m sorry to have bothered you about the supplies, but you see I never tried to run a schooner before. Gentlemen, I’ll wish you good day!”
He made them a gallant flourish and was about to take his departure, when Jerome suggested: “If you like sir, I could go through the Skipping Goone to see if there’s anything in our line you might need. There usually are a lot of odds and ends missing.”
Mr. Whitley showered looks of affection upon his clerk. Yes, he was really an ornament to the establishment. But Xenophon Curry looked positively radiant.
“That’s a fine idea, young man! Say, would you? I’ll show you through myself, from top to bottom, upstairs and down!”
Jerome came around the counter and accompanied the impresario to the door. In the street where trucks were thundering endlessly by along the cobblestones, afternoon was on the wane, foggy and black. On the threshold the man extended a hand.