With never a wink, Lufbery left his place, approached the offended
person, took him by the back of the neck and with neatness and
dispatch ejected him from the station. Under English civil law one is
promptly summoned for assault, and as the person Lufbery had treated
so summarily in accord with his own ideas of fitness chanced to be the
richest and most influential merchant of Bombay, the summons cost the
ticket-seller his place. Cochin-China was his resort, Saigon his haven,
and there, if you please, he viewed with envious admiration the aerial
antics of Marc Pourpe, the famous trick flyer.
There came a day when Pourpe lost his mechanic, and his exhibitions
came to a stop while he made vain quest among the natives for a
substitute. None cared for the office, preferring infinitely the
understood foundation of Mother Earth to antics in the air. Quite
right—Lufbery applied for the job. Was he a mechanic? No. Did he know
anything about an aeroplane motor? Not a thing.
“Why the deuce, then, do you come bothering me?” demanded the irritated
Pourpe.
“I don’t know the job now,” Lufbery said, “but I can learn. You only
have to show me once. Take me on. You won’t regret it. I’m not afraid
of work.”
Marc Pourpe is quoted as saying to some friends later in relating the
incident:
“His reasoning was full of logic. His method was original. I agreed,
and I will say that never have I seen a person more devoted, more
intelligent and more useful. He is already better informed about a
motor than most of the so-called mechanics of Paris. Moreover, this boy
has hung his hat in every country in the world. He is not a man, he is
an encyclopedia. He can tell you what the weather is in a given season
in Japan, in Egypt, in America, or in France. He observes everything
and once he has noticed it, it is engraved on his memory.
“He told me that in all his travels he had never been more than a week
without working. He was hospital interne at Cairo, a stevedore in
Calcutta, station master in India, a soldier in America. I am glad he
is now a mechanic.
“If he likes it, I will take him back with me at the end of my tour and
will keep him with me. It is rare to find a good mechanic. His name is
_Raoul Lafberg_, and he spent his childhood in the vicinity of Bourges.
If I return with him, you will see what a sympathetic character chance
has thrown in my way. So once more in my life everything goes well.”
This shift of name on the sudden from Lufbery to Lafberg was due to
a hope that the Frenchified turn would the more favorably determine
Pourpe to engage his services, especially as Lufbery spoke French
fluently, having learned it in his three years’ stay in France.