Page:Harvey O'Higgins--Don-a-dreams.djvu/414

 was aware at once that the bar-room was only a sort of foyer to a larger music-hall in which he could see an audience seated at tables before a little stage on which a woman stood to sing; and he hurried into that hall in the hope of escaping notice in the larger gathering. He found a table in a corner and sat down trembling with audacity. A soiled waiter polished off the beer stains from the table-top and bent to take his order. He said throatily: "Bring me a cigar."

It came—in a glass with three matches—a long "rat-tail" Italian cigar. He lit it and drew one puff that had the taste of scorched rags. He held it fuming before him, and waited for Conroy to appear, watching the animated faces of Italians whose excited volubility had no meaning for him, and listening to the screaming high notes of the cantatrice who sang with a distortion of mouth that might have been studied in a dentist's chair. It was all as unreal to him as lunacy; and an old man with a basket of macaroons on his arm, who wandered from table to table mumbling, "Bene cotti, bene cotti," had a horrid face—as brown and wrinkled as a baked apple—that made the whole scene in some way confusedly hideous to Don. He stared at three Italians at a table who were blowing out the matches with which a fourth tried to light his cigar, making an unearthly laughter—at a little girl who drank from a glass of beer primly and dried her lips with a dirty handkerchief after each sip—at the