The Lone Wolf - Louis Joseph Vance (year 7 reading list txt) 📗
- Author: Louis Joseph Vance
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certain amount of education was compulsory. So Marcel learned among
other things to read, and thereby took his first blind step toward
salvation.
Reading being the one pastime which could be practiced without making a
noise of any sort to attract undesirable attentions, the boy took to it
in self-defence. But before long it had become his passion. He read, by
stealth, everything that fell into his hands, a weird m�lange of
newspapers, illustrated Parisian weeklies, magazines, novels:
cullings from the d�bris of guest-chambers.
Before Marcel was eleven he had read “Les Mis�rables” with intense
appreciation.
His reading, however, was not long confined to works in the French
language. Now and again some departing guest would leave an English
novel in his room, and these Marcel treasured beyond all other books;
they seemed to him, in a way, part of his birthright. Secretly he
called himself English in those days, because he knew he wasn’t French:
that much, at least, he remembered. And he spent long hours poring over
the strange words until; at length, they came to seem less strange in
his eyes. And then some accident threw his way a small English-French
dictionary.
He was able to read English before he could speak it.
Out of school hours a drudge and scullion, the associate of scullions
and their immediate betters, drawn from that caste of loose tongues and
looser morals which breeds servants for small hotels, Marcel at eleven
(as nearly as his age can be computed) possessed a comprehension of
life at once exact, exhaustive and appalling.
Perhaps it was fortunate that he lived without friendship. His concept
of womanhood was incarnate in Madame Troyon; so he gave all the hotel
women a wide berth.
The men-servants he suffered in silence when they would permit it; but
his nature was so thoroughly disassociated from anything within their
experience that they resented him: a circumstance which exposed him to
a certain amount of baiting not unlike that which the village idiot
receives at the hands of rustic boors—until Marcel learned to defend
himself with a tongue which could distil vitriol from the vernacular,
and with fists and feet as well. Thereafter he was left severely to
himself and glad of it, since it furnished him with just so much more
time for reading and dreaming over what he read.
By fifteen he had developed into a long, lank, loutish youth, with a
face of extraordinary pallor, a sullen mouth, hot black eyes, and dark
hair like a mane, so seldom was it trimmed. He looked considerably
older than he was and the slightness of his body was deceptive,
disguising a power of sinewy strength. More than this, he could care
very handily for himself in a scrimmage: la savate had no secrets from
him, and he had picked up tricks from the Apaches quite as effectual as
any in the manual of jiu-jitsu. Paris he knew as you and I know the
palms of our hands, and he could converse with the precision of the
native-born in any one of the city’s several odd argots.
To these accomplishments he added that of a thoroughly practised petty
thief.
His duties were by day those of valet-de-chambre on the third floor;
by night he acted as omnibus in the restaurant. For these services he
received no pay and less consideration from his employers (who would
have been horrified by the suggestion that they countenanced slavery)
only his board and a bed in a room scarcely larger, if somewhat better
ventilated, than the boudoir-closet from which he had long since been
ousted. This room was on the ground floor, at the back of the house,
and boasted a small window overlooking a narrow alley.
He was routed out before daylight, and his working day ended as a rule
at ten in the evening—though when there were performances on at the
Od�on, the restaurant remained open until an indeterminate hour for the
accommodation of the supper trade.
Once back in his kennel, its door closed and bolted, Marcel was free to
squirm out of the window and roam and range Paris at will. And it was
thus that he came by most of his knowledge of the city.
But for the most part Marcel preferred to lie abed and read himself
half-blind by the light of purloined candle-ends. Books he borrowed as
of old from the rooms of guests or else pilfered from quai-side stalls
and later sold to dealers in more distant quarters of the city. Now and
again, when he needed some work not to be acquired save through
outright purchase, the guests would pay further if unconscious tribute
through the sly abstraction of small coins. Your true Parisian,
however, keeps track of his money to the ultimate sou, an idiosyncrasy
which obliged the boy to practise most of his peculations on the
fugitive guest of foreign extraction.
In the number of these, perhaps the one best known to Troyon’s was
Bourke.
He was a quick, compact, dangerous little Irishman who had fallen into
the habit of “resting” at Troyon’s whenever a vacation from London
seemed a prescription apt to prove wholesome for a gentleman of his
kidney; which was rather frequently, arguing that Bourke’s professional
activities were fairly onerous.
Having received most of his education in Dublin University, Bourke
spoke the purest English known, or could when so minded, while his
facile Irish tongue had caught the trick of an accent which passed
unchallenged on the Boulevardes. He had an alert eye for pretty women,
a heart as big as all out-doors, no scruples worth mentioning, a secret
sorrow, and a pet superstition.
The colour of his hair, a clamorous red, was the spring of his secret
sorrow. By that token he was a marked man. At irregular intervals he
made frantic attempts to disguise it; but the only dye that would serve
at all was a jet-black and looked like the devil in contrast with his
high colouring. Moreover, before a week passed, the red would crop up
again wherever the hair grew thin, lending him the appearance of a
badly-singed pup.
His pet superstition was that, as long as he refrained from practising
his profession in Paris, Paris would remain his impregnable Tower of
Refuge. The world owed Bourke a living, or he so considered; and it must
be allowed that he made collections on account with tolerable regularity
and success; but Paris was tax-exempt as long as Paris offered him
immunity from molestation.
Not only did Paris suit his tastes excellently, but there was no place,
in Bourke’s esteem, comparable with Troyon’s for peace and quiet.
Hence, the continuity of his patronage was never broken by trials of
rival hostelries; and Troyon’s was always expecting Bourke for the
simple reason that he invariably arrived unexpectedly, with neither
warning nor ostentation, to stop as long as he liked, whether a day or
a week or a month, and depart in the same manner.
His daily routine, as Troyon’s came to know it, varied but slightly: he
breakfasted abed, about half after ten, lounged in his room or the caf�
all day if the weather were bad, or strolled peacefully in the gardens
of the Luxembourg if it were good, dined early and well but always
alone, and shortly afterward departed by cab for some well-known bar
on the Rive Droit; whence, it is to be presumed, he moved on to other
resorts, for he never was home when the house was officially closed for
the night, the hours of his return remaining a secret between himself
and the concierge.
On retiring, Bourke would empty his pockets upon the dressing-table,
where the boy Marcel, bringing up Bourke’s petit d�jeuner the next
morning, would see displayed a tempting confusion of gold and silver
and copper, with a wad of banknotes, and the customary assortment of
personal hardware.
Now inasmuch as Bourke was never wide-awake at that hour, and always
after acknowledging Marcel’s “bon jour” rolled over and snored for
Glory and the Saints, it was against human nature to resist the allure
of that dressing-table. Marcel seldom departed without a coin or two.
He had yet to learn that Bourke’s habits were those of an Englishman,
who never goes to bed without leaving all his pocket-money in plain
sight and—carefully catalogued in his memory….
One morning in the spring of 1904 Marcel served Bourke his last
breakfast at Troyon’s.
The Irishman had been on the prowl the previous night, and his rasping
snore was audible even through the closed door when Marcel knocked and,
receiving no answer, used the pass-key and entered.
At this the snore was briefly interrupted; Bourke, visible at first
only as a flaming shock of hair protruding from the bedclothes,
squirmed an eye above his artificial horizon, opened it, mumbled
inarticulate acknowledgment of Marcel’s salutation, and passed
blatantly into further slumbers.
Marcel deposited his tray on a table beside the bed, moved quietly to
the windows, closed them, and drew the lace curtains together. The
dressing-table between the windows displayed, amid the silver and
copper, more gold coins than it commonly did—some eighteen or twenty
louis altogether. Adroitly abstracting en passant a piece of ten francs,
Marcel went on his way rejoicing, touched a match to the fire all
ready-laid in the grate, and was nearing the door when, casting one
casual parting glance at the bed, he became aware of a notable
phenomenon: the snoring was going on lustily, but Bourke was watching
him with both eyes wide and filled with interest.
Startled and, to tell the truth, a bit indignant, the boy stopped as
though at word of command. But after the first flash of astonishment
his young face hardened to immobility. Only his eyes remained constant
to Bourke’s.
The Irishman, sitting up in bed, demanded and received the piece of ten
francs, and went on to indict the boy for the embezzlement of several
sums running into a number of louis.
Marcel, reflecting that Bourke’s reckoning was still some louis shy,
made no bones about pleading guilty. Interrogated, the culprit deposed
that he had taken the money because he needed it to buy books. No, he
wasn’t sorry. Yes, it was probable that, granted further opportunity,
he would do it again. Advised that he was apparently a case-hardened
young criminal, he replied that youth was not his fault; with years and
experience he would certainly improve.
Puzzled by the boy’s attitude, Bourke agitated his hair and wondered
aloud how Marcel would like it if his employers were informed of his
peculations.
Marcel looked pained and pointed out that such a course on the part of
Bourke would be obviously unfair; the only real difference between
them, he explained, was that where he filched a louis Bourke filched
thousands; and if Bourke insisted on turning him over to the mercy of
Madame and Papa Troyon, who would certainly summon a sergent de ville,
he, Marcel, would be quite justified in retaliating by telling the
Pr�fecture de Police all he knew about Bourke.
This was no chance shot, and took the Irishman between wind and water;
and when, dismayed, he blustered, demanding to know what the boy meant
by his damned impudence, Marcel quietly advised him that one knew what
one knew: if one read the English newspaper in the caf�, as Marcel did,
one could hardly fail to remark that monsieur always came to Paris
after some notable burglary had been committed in London; and if one
troubled to follow monsieur by night, as Marcel had, it became evident
that monsieur’s first calls in Paris were invariably made at the
establishment of a famous fence in the rue des Trois Fr�res; and,
finally, one drew one’s own
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