The Lone Wolf quotes

It must have been Bourke who first said that even if you knew your way about Paris you had to lose it in order to find it to Troyon’s. But then Bourke was proud to be Irish.

Troyon’s occupied a corner in a jungle of side-streets, well withdrawn from the bustle of the adjacent boulevards of St. Germain and St. Michel, and in its day was a restaurant famous with a fame jealously guarded by a select circle of patrons.

But before long it had become his passion. He read, by stealth, everything that fell into his hands, a weird mélange of newspapers, illustrated Parisian weeklies, magazines, novels: cullings from the debris of guest-chambers.

Before Marcel was eleven he had read Les Misérables 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;

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 …

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.

But why—Bourke wanted to know—had Marcel lied to save him, when the truth would have earned him a hundred francs?

“Because,” Marcel explained coolly, “I, too, am a thief. Monsieur will perceive it was a matter of professional honour.”

Now the Irish have their faults, but ingratitude is not of their number.

“Because,” Marcel explained coolly, “I, too, am a thief. Monsieur will perceive it was a matter of professional honour.”

Now the Irish have their faults, but ingratitude is not of their number.

Bourke, packing hastily to leave Paris, France and Europe by the fastest feasible route, still found time to question Marcel briefly;

Bourke died in Switzerland, of consumption, in the winter of 1910—Lanyard at his side till the end.

Then the boy set his face against the world: alone, lonely, and remembering.

He ate slowly, chewing with the doggedness of a strong character hampered by a weak digestion, and all the while kept eyes fixed to an issue of the Paris edition of the London Daily Mail, with an effect of concentration quite too convincing.

Now one doesn’t read the Paris edition of the London Daily Mail with tense excitement. Humanly speaking, it can’t be done.

Where, then, was the object of this so sedulously dissembled interest?

Her soft brown eyes met his candidly, with a look cool in its composure, straightforward in its enquiry, neither bold nor mock-demure. And if they were the first to fall, it was with an effect of curiosity sated, without hint of discomfiture. …

And somehow the adventurer felt himself measured, classified, filed away.

Between amusement and pique he continued to stare while the elderly American recovered his breath and De Morbihan jabbered on with unfailing vivacity;

far too many promising young adventurers like himself were annually laid by the heels in that snare of their own infatuate weaving.

The mouse has every right, if he likes, to despise the cat for a heavy-handed and bloodthirsty beast, lacking wit and imagination, a creature of simple force-majeure; but that mouse will not advisedly swagger in cat-haunted territory; a blow of the paw is, when all’s said and done, a blow of the paw⁠—something to numb the wits of the wiliest mouse.

Considering Roddy, he believed it to be impossible to gauge the limitations of that essentially British intelligence—something as self-contained as a London flat. One thing only was certain: Roddy didn’t always think in terms of beef and Bass; he was nobody’s facile fool;

Not that he grudged the time; for in Lanyard’s esteem Bourke’s epigram had come to have the weight and force of an axiom:

“The more trouble you make for yourself, the less the good public will make for you.”

Paradoxically, he hadn’t the least intention of attempting to deceive anybody as to his permanent address in Paris, where Michael Lanyard, connoisseur of fine paintings, was a figure too conspicuous to permit his making a secret of his residence.

He drew a long face; whistled softly; shook his head; and smiled a wry smile.

“Glad I didn’t think of that two minutes ago, or I’d never have had the cheek⁠ ⁠…”

Without warning, incongruously and, in his understanding, inexplicably, he found himself beset by recurrent memory of the girl, Lucia Bannon.

And in his turn, Lanyard reviewed those well-remembered ways in vast weariness of spirit—disgusted with himself in consciousness that the girl had somehow divined his distrust. …

“The Lone Wolf, eh?” he mused bitterly. “Rather, the Cornered Rat⁠—if people only knew! Better still, the Errant⁠—no!⁠—the Arrant Ass!”

They were skirting the Palais Royal when suddenly she turned to him in an impulsive attempt at self-justification.

And so he secured that door, if very quietly; and having pocketed the key and made the round of doors and windows, examining their locks, he stumbled heavily into the bedroom of his friend the artist.

Darkness overwhelmed him then: he was stricken down by sleep as an ox falls under the pole.

and clipped between two fingers, his cigarette grew a long ash, let it fall, and burned down to a stump so short that the coal almost scorched his flesh. He dropped it and crushed out the fire with his heel, all unwittingly.

Slowly but irresistibly his world was turning over beneath his feet.⁠ ⁠…

The sound of a footfall recalled him as from an immeasurable remove; he looked up to see Lucia at pause upon the threshold, and rose slowly, with effort recollecting himself and marshalling his wits against the emergency foreshadowed by her attitude.

The girl deliberately finished her tea, and sat back, regarding him steadily beneath level brows. Then she said with an odd laugh:

“You have your own way of putting one on honour!”

“I don’t need to—with you.”

“

Nothing you don’t wish to!

” he interrupted. “The fact that I practically kidnapped you under pretence of doing you a service, and suspected you of being in the pay of that Pack, gives me no title to your confidence.”

“Mr. Lanyard, I promise. …”

To every woman, even the least lovely, her hour of beauty: it had not entered Lanyard’s mind to think this woman beautiful until that moment.

Of her exotic charm, of the allure of her pensive, plaintive prettiness, he had been well aware; even as he had been unable to deny to himself that he was all for her, that he loved her with all the strength that was his;

His spirits had mounted to a high pitch, thanks to their successful evasion.

He was young, he was in love, he was hungry, he was⁠—in short⁠—very much alive.

And the consciousness of common peril knitted an enchanting intimacy into their communications. For the first time in his history Lanyard found himself in the company of a woman with whom he dared—and cared—to speak without reserve: a circumstance intrinsically intoxicating.

Lanyard switched on the bedside light, turning it so that it struck full upon the face of the sleeper; and as he sat down, smiled.

The Minister of War lay upon his back, his distinguished corpulence severely dislocating the chaste simplicity of the bed-clothing.

Athwart his shelving chest, fat hands were folded in a gesture affectingly naive. His face was red, a noble highlight shone upon the promontory of his bald pate, his mouth was open.

It was bitter cold in the wind sweeping down from the west, and it had grown very dark. Only in the sky above the Bois a long reef of crimson light hung motionless, against which leafless trees lifted gnarled, weird silhouettes.

While he watched, the pushing crimson ebbed swiftly and gave way to mauve, to violet, to black.

“I’d like to believe you,” Lanyard admitted. “But when you ask me to sign articles with that damned assassin—!”

“You can’t play our game with clean hands,” Wertheimer retorted.

Lanyard found no answer to that.

But as minutes sped it became apparent that there was to be no renewed attempt upon his life for the time being. The pursuers could afford to wait.

They could afford to ape the patience of Death itself.

And it came then to Lanyard that he drove no more alone: Death was his passenger.

But as minutes sped it became apparent that there was to be no renewed attempt upon his life for the time being. The pursuers could afford to wait. They could afford to ape the patience of Death itself.

And it came then to Lanyard that he drove no more alone: Death was his passenger.

Absorbed though he was with the control of his machine and the ever-shifting problems of the road, he still found time to think quite clearly of himself, to recognize the fact that he was very likely looking his last on Paris … on life. …

It was a sound so slight, so very small and still, that only a super-subtle sense of hearing could have discriminated it from the confused multiplicity of almost inaudible, interwoven, interdependent sounds that make up the slumberous quiet of every human habitation, by night.

Lanyard, whose training had taught him how to listen, had learned that the nocturnal hush of each and every house has its singular cadence, its own gentle movement of muted but harmonious sound in which the introduction of an alien sound produces immediate discord, and …