The Trombone

In the café the man who had come in carrying a polished brass trombone and a crate which, overturned, doubled as a usable rostrum, singled out a young man, D, from the crowd, a confident and apparently a most suitable customer for his demonstration. The trombone player wearing a purple buttoned-up top-coat and scarlet velvet knee-breeches above yellow stockings, while pointing his short beard at the audience to left and to right, stood with one arm akimbo and the other beckoning D. to come up. The urgers-forward, most of them friendly admirers of D, slapped their thighs and called him towards them, then pointed at the rostrum with one arm and with the other waved him forward until, seeing his private battle between his eagerness and his sense, were forced to pass him over their heads to the front. They set him on his feet. D. was thinking forward. He was seeing another D. The D. in his mind was grasping the trombone, was gazing in concentration to the floor, was setting the instrument to his lips then, taken over by a secret genius which had always been there laying undiscovered yet secretly hoped for, this D. played magnificent in his anger and his pride. He stepped up to the front. 

Half a minute later, the playful protestations of the audience over, the nervous little laugh which he uttered as he leapt from the toppling crate, had within it the horror of a well overdue awareness of his own limitations.