walked along.
Boyer, a much older man, whose wife had come over with him, stopped under a street light to consult his watch.
“Almost ten!” he said. “I hope you don’t mind, Byrne; but I told Jennie I was going to your pension. She detests Stewart.”
“Oh, that’s all right. She knows you’re playing poker?”
“Yes. She doesn’t object to poker. It’s the other. You can’t make a good woman understand that sort of thing.”
“Thank God for that!”
After a moment of silence Byrne took up his whistling again. It was the “Humoresque.”
Stewart’s apartment was on the third floor. Admission at that hour was to be gained only by ringing, and Boyer touched the bell. The lights were still on, however, in the hallways, revealing not overclean stairs and, for a wonder, an electric elevator. This, however, a card announced as out of order. Boyer stopped and examined the card grimly.
“‘Out of order’!” he observed. “Out of order since last spring, judging by that card. Vorwarts!”
They climbed easily, deliberately. At home in God’s country Boyer played golf, as became the leading specialist of his county. Byrne, with a driving-arm like the rod of a locomotive, had been obliged to forswear the more expensive game for tennis, with a resulting muscular development that his slight stoop belied. He was as hard as nails, without an ounce of fat, and he climbed the long steep flights with an elasticity that left even Boyer a step or so behind.
Stewart opened the door himself, long German pipe in hand, his coat replaced by a worn smoking-jacket. The little apartment was thick with smoke, and from a room on the right came the click of chips and the sound of beer mugs on wood.
Marie, restored to good humor, came out to greet them, and both men bowed ceremoniously over her hand, clicking their heels together and bowing from the waist. Byrne sniffed.
“What do I smell, Marie?” he demanded. “Surely not sausages!”
Marie dimpled. It was an old joke, to be greeted as one greets an old friend. It was always sausages.
“Sausages, of a truth—fat ones.’
“But surely not with mustard?”
“Ach, ja—englisch mustard.”
Stewart and Boyer had gone on ahead. Marie laid a detaining hand on Byrne’s arm.
“I was very angry with you to-day.”
“With me?”
Like the others who occasionally gathered in Stewart’s unconventional menage, Byrne had adopted Stewart’s custom of addressing Marie in English, while she replied in her own tongue.
“Ja. I wished but to see nearer the American Fraulein’s hat, and you—She is rich, so?”
“I really don’t know. I think not.”
“And good?”
“Yes, of course.”
Marie was small; she stood, her head back, her eyes narrowed, looking up at Byrne. There was nothing evil in her face, it was not even hard. Rather, there was a sort of weariness, as of age and experience. She had put on a white dress, cut out at the neck, and above her collarbones were small, cuplike hollows. She was very thin.
“I was sad to-night,” she said plaintively. “I wished to jump out the window.”
Byrne was startled, but the girl was smiling at the recollection.
“And I made you feel like that?”
“Not you—the other Fraulein. I was dirt to her. I—” She stopped tragically, then sniffled.
“The sausages!” she cried, and gathering up her skirts ran toward the kitchen. Byrne went on into the sitting- room.
Stewart was a single man spending two years in post-graduate work in Germany and Austria, not so much because the Germans and Austrians could teach what could not be taught at home, but because of the wealth of clinical material. The great European hospitals, filled to overflowing, offered unlimited choice of cases. The contempt for human life of overpopulated cities, coupled with the extreme poverty and helplessness of the masses, combined to form that tragic part of the world which dies that others may live.
Stewart, like Byrne, was doing surgery, and the very lack of fineness which Byrne felt in the man promised something in his work, a sort of ruthlessness, a singleness of purpose, good or bad, an overwhelming egotism that in his profession might only be a necessary self-reliance.
His singleness of purpose had, at the beginning of his residence in Vienna, devoted itself to making him comfortable. With the narrow means at his control he had the choice of two alternatives: To live, as Byrne was living, in a third-class pension, stewing in summer, freezing in winter, starving always; or the alternative he had chosen.
The Stewart apartment had only three rooms, but it possessed that luxury of luxuries, a bath. It was not a bath in the usual sense of water on tap, and shining nickel plate, but a bath for all that, where with premeditation and forethought one might bathe. The room had once been a fuel and store room, but now boasted a tin tub and a stove with a reservoir on top, where water might be heated to the boiling point, at the same time bringing up the atmosphere to a point where the tin tub sizzled if one touched it.
