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.
Behind the bathroom a tiny kitchen with a brick stove; next, a
bedroom; the whole incredibly neat. Along one side of the wall a
clothespress, which the combined wardrobes of two did not fill.
And beyond that again, opening through an arch with a dingy
chenille curtain, the sitting-room, now in chaotic disorder.
Byrne went directly to the sitting-room. There were four men
already there: Stewart and Boyer, a pathology man named Wallace
Hunter, doing research work at the general hospital, and a young
piano student from Tennessee named MacLean. The cards had been
already dealt, and Byrne stood by waiting for the hand to be
played.
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