Page:Harvey O'Higgins--Silent Sam and other stories.djvu/370

358 Swiss cheese with all the vacuous good-nature that goes, professionally, with beer.

He smiled a somewhat fuddled smile at little Mickey's shoulders, breathed heavily, and let his pouched eyes settle again on the pair of lovers before the footlights far below him. He did not hear what they were saying. He was occupied with thoughts of pride in his boy's precocity.

The heroine continued to talk to her "dear Robert" in a voice of affection that continued to make little Mickey squirm. He was not only impatient; he was not merely disgusted; he was beginning to despair. Since the rising of the curtain, there had been nothing but this "muggin'" going on. A blind wife had begun it, in a sickening high falsetto, her arms around her husband's neck. Then the comic Irishman and the inn-keeper's daughter had taken it up. Now another pair were at it. There had not been so much as the hint of a murder or a robbery to bear out the promises of the bloody posters on the avenue billboards. And Mickey—watching with eyes that were as big and round in his pale face as two holes in a triangle of his mother's Swiss cheese—kept complaining to himself: "Aw, dhis 's rotten! Aw, say, dhis 's rotten!"

Behind him the gallery rose in tier on tier of intent faces—faces strangely white in the reflected glare of the footlights—faces that protruded out of the darkness, bodiless, unblinking, like the faces of a nightmare. But from tier to tier an uneasy shuffling of hidden movements replied to Mickey's impatience. To all the