The Eight Strokes of the Clock Read online

  The Eight Strokes of the Clock

  Maurice Leblanc

  MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM

  INTRODUCTION

  Maurice Leblanc

  IF MAURICE LEBLANC (1864–1941) had done nothing except create Arsène Lupin—the rogue who has been wildly popular in France for more than a century—his place in the pantheon of French literature would still have been assured.

  Born in Rouen, he was educated in France; Berlin, Germany; and Manchester, England, and studied law before becoming a hack writer and police reporter for French periodicals. His sister Georgette—a famous actress and singer—was the mistress of Maurice Maeterlinck, the noted dramatist, and it is possible that this relationship influenced Leblanc’s work; some critics claim that his plays are his most polished literary productions.

  In 1906 Leblanc’s previously undistinguished career skyrocketed when he was asked to write a short story for a new journal and produced the first Lupin adventure. His subsequent success and worldwide fame culminated in his induction into the French Legion of Honor.

  Reading his fiction today, one is generally impressed with the fast pace and diversified action, although it borders on burlesque, and the incredible situations and coincidences may be a little difficult to accept.

  Arsène Lupin

  Unlike Fantômas, the other great criminal in French literature, Arsène Lupin is not violent or evil; his unlawful acts center on theft and clever cons rather than murder or anarchy.

  A brilliant rogue, he pursues his career with carefree élan, mocking the law for the sheer joy of it rather than for purely personal gain. Young, handsome, brave, and quick-witted, he has a joie de vivre uniquely and recognizably French. His sense of humor and conceit make life difficult for the police, who attribute most of the major crimes in France to him and his gang of ruffians and urchins.

  Like most French criminals and detectives, Lupin is a master of disguise. His skill is attested to by the fact that he once became Lenormand, chief of the Sûreté, and, for four years, conducted official investigations into his own activities. He employs numerous aliases, including Jim Barnett, Prince Renine, le Duc de Charmerace, Don Luis Perenna, and Ralph de Limezy; his myriad names, combined with his brilliant costumes, make it nearly impossible for the police to identify him (the reader of his exploits sometimes encounters a similar difficulty).

  After a long criminal career of uninterrupted successes, Lupin begins to shift position and aids the police in their work—usually for his own purposes and without their knowledge. Toward the end of his career, he becomes a full-fledged detective, and although he is as successful in his endeavors as ever before, his heart does not seem to be in it.

  The first book about him is Arsène Lupin, gentleman-cambrioleur (1907; US title: The Exploits of Arsène Lupin, 1907; reissued as The Extraordinary Adventures of Arsène Lupin, Gentleman-Burglar, 1910; British title: The Seven of Hearts, 1908). One of the stories, “Holmlock Shears Arrives Too Late,” is a parody of Sherlock Holmes. The second book in the series, and the worst, is Arsène Lupin contre Herlock Sholmes (1908; British title: The Fair-haired Lady, 1909; reissued as Arsène Lupin versus Holmlock Shears, 1909; reissued again as The Arrest of Arsène Lupin, 1911; US title: The Blonde Lady, 1910; reissued as Arsène Lupin versus Herlock Sholmes, 1910). Other short story collections about Lupin are The Confessions of Arsène Lupin (1912), The Eight Strokes of the Clock (1922), and Jim Barnett Intervenes (1928; US title: Arsène Lupin Intervenes). Among the best of the novels are 813 (1910), in which Lupin, accused of murder, heads the police investigation to clear himself by finding the true killer, and The Hollow Needle (1910), in which Lupin is shot by a beautiful girl and falls in love with her, vowing to give up his life of crime. Among the other Lupin novels are The Crystal Stopper (1913), The Teeth of the Tiger (1914), The Golden Triangle (1917), and The Memoirs of Arsène Lupin (1925; British title: The Candlesticks with Seven Branches).

  Films

  There are many early screen versions of Arsène Lupin’s basic conflicts with the Paris police, both in the United States, starting in 1917, and in Europe. The Teeth of the Tiger (Paramount, with David Powell) of 1919 is an old-dark-horse murder melodrama with sliding panels, secret passageways, and serial-like thrills. Wedgewood Nowell portrays Lupin in 813 (Robertson-Cole, 1920), in which Lupin impersonates a police officer to clear himself of a murder charge. There are several later European Lupins, notably French, in films even until the 1950s. The most important American Lupin films are given below.

  Arsène Lupin. MGM, 1932. John Barrymore, Lionel Barrymore, Karen Morley, John Miljan. Directed by Jack Conway. Based on the play by Leblanc and Francis de Croisset. When the silk-hatted Lupin announces that he will steal a famous painting from the Louvre under the nose of the police, and does so, the chief of detectives uses a pretty lady crook to lure him into a trap.

  Arsène Lupin Returns. MGM, 1938. Melvyn Douglas, Warren William, Virginia Bruce, Monty Woolley, E. E. Clive. Directed by George Fitzmaurice. The signature of Arsène Lupin, long thought dead, is scrawled across a safe from which a necklace has been stolen; the real Lupin, innocent and now living as a country gentleman, is as perplexed as the police are.

  Enter Arsène Lupin. Universal, 1944. Charles Korvin, Ella Raines, J. Carrol Naish, Gale Sondergaard, Miles Mander. Directed by Ford Beebe. International thief Lupin, on a train from Istanbul to Paris, steals an emerald from a young heiress but returns it when he begins to suspect that the girl’s aunt and uncle plan to murder her.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  These adventures were told to me in the old days by Arsène Lupin, as though they had happened to a friend of his, named Prince Rénine. As for me, considering the way in which they were conducted, the actions, the behaviour and the very character of the hero, I find it very difficult not to identify the two friends as one and the same person. Arsène Lupin is gifted with a powerful imagination and is quite capable of attributing to himself adventures which are not his at all and of disowning those which are really his. The reader will judge for himself.

  M. L.

  I. ON THE TOP OF THE TOWER

  Hortense Daniel pushed her window ajar and whispered:

  “Are you there, Rossigny?”

  “I am here,” replied a voice from the shrubbery at the front of the house.

  Leaning forward, she saw a rather fat man looking up at her out of a gross red face with its cheeks and chin set in unpleasantly fair whiskers.

  “Well?” he asked.

  “Well, I had a great argument with my uncle and aunt last night. They absolutely refuse to sign the document of which my lawyer sent them the draft, or to restore the dowry squandered by my husband.”

  “But your uncle is responsible by the terms of the marriage settlement.”

  “No matter. He refuses.”

  “Well, what do you propose to do?”

  “Are you still determined to run away with me?” she asked, with a laugh.

  “More so than ever.”

  “Your intentions are strictly honourable, remember!”

  “Just as you please. You know that I am madly in love with you.”

  “Unfortunately I am not madly in love with you!”

  “Then what made you choose me?”

  “Chance. I was bored. I was growing tired of my humdrum existence. So I’m ready to run risks … Here’s my luggage: catch!”

  She let down from the window a couple of large leather kit bags. Rossigny caught them in his arms.

  “The die is cast,” she whispered. “Go and wait for me with your car at the If crossroads. I shall come on horseback.”

  “Hang it, I can’t run off with your horse!”r />
  “He will go home by himself.”

  “Capital! … Oh, by the way …”

  “What is it?”

  “Who is this Prince Rénine, who’s been here the last three days and whom nobody seems to know?”

  “I don’t know much about him. My uncle met him at a friend’s shoot and asked him here to stay.”

  “You seem to have made a great impression on him. You went for a long ride with him yesterday. He’s a man I don’t care for.”

  “In two hours I shall have left the house in your company. The scandal will cool him off … Well, we’ve talked long enough. We have no time to lose.”

  For a few minutes she stood watching the fat man bending under the weight of her traps as he moved away in the shelter of an empty avenue. Then she closed the window.

  Outside, in the park, the huntsmen’s horns were sounding the reveille. The hounds burst into frantic baying. It was the opening day of the hunt that morning at the Château de la Marèze, where, every year, in the first week in September, the Comte d’Aigleroche, a mighty hunter before the Lord, and his countess were accustomed to invite a few personal friends and the neighbouring landowners.

  Hortense slowly finished dressing, put on a riding habit, which revealed the lines of her supple figure, and a wide-brimmed felt hat, which encircled her lovely face and auburn hair, and sat down to her writing desk, at which she wrote to her uncle, M. d’Aigleroche, a farewell letter to be delivered to him that evening. It was a difficult letter to word; and, after beginning it several times, she ended by giving up the idea.

  “I will write to him later,” she said to herself, “when his anger has cooled down.”

  And she went downstairs to the dining room.

  Enormous logs were blazing in the hearth of the lofty room. The walls were hung with trophies of rifles and shotguns. The guests were flocking in from every side, shaking hands with the Comte d’Aigleroche, one of those typical country squires, heavily and powerfully built, who lives only for hunting and shooting. He was standing before the fire, with a large glass of old brandy in his hand, drinking the health of each new arrival.

  Hortense kissed him absently:

  “What, uncle! You who are usually so sober!”

  “Pooh!” he said. “A man may surely indulge himself a little once a year! …”

  “Aunt will give you a scolding!”

  “Your aunt has one of her sick headaches and is not coming down. Besides,” he added, gruffly, “it is not her business … and still less is it yours, my dear child.”

  Prince Rénine came up to Hortense. He was a young man, very smartly dressed, with a narrow and rather pale face, whose eyes held by turns the gentlest and the harshest, the most friendly and the most satirical expression. He bowed to her, kissed her hand and said:

  “May I remind you of your kind promise, dear madame?”

  “My promise?”

  “Yes, we agreed that we should repeat our delightful excursion of yesterday and try to go over to that old boarded-up place, the look of which made us so curious. It seems to be known as the Domaine de Halingre.”

  She answered a little curtly:

  “I’m extremely sorry, monsieur, but it would be rather far and I’m feeling a little done up. I shall go for a canter in the park and come indoors again.”

  There was a pause. Then Serge Rénine said, smiling, with his eyes fixed on hers and in a voice which she alone could hear:

  “I am sure that you’ll keep your promise and that you’ll let me come with you. It would be better.”

  “For whom? For you, you mean?”

  “For you, too, I assure you.”

  She coloured slightly, but did not reply, shook hands with a few people around her and left the room.

  A groom was holding the horse at the foot of the steps. She mounted and set off towards the woods beyond the park.

  It was a cool, still morning. Through the leaves, which barely quivered, the sky showed crystalline blue. Hortense rode at a walk down winding avenues, which in half an hour brought her to a countryside of ravines and bluffs intersected by the high road.

  She stopped. There was not a sound. Rossigny must have stopped his engine and concealed the car in the thickets around the If crossroads.

  She was five hundred yards at most from that circular space. After hesitating for a few seconds, she dismounted, tied her horse carelessly, so that he could release himself by the least effort and return to the house, shrouded her face in the long brown veil that hung over her shoulders and walked on.

  As she expected, she saw Rossigny directly after she reached the first turn in the road. He ran up to her and drew her into the coppice!

  “Quick, quick! Oh, I was so afraid that you would be late … or even change your mind! And here you are! It seems too good to be true!”

  She smiled:

  “You appear to be quite happy to do an idiotic thing!”

  “I should think I am happy! And so will you be, I swear you will! Your life will be one long fairy tale. You shall have every luxury, and all the money you can wish for.”

  “I want neither money nor luxuries.”

  “What then?”

  “Happiness.”

  “You can safely leave your happiness to me.”

  She replied, jestingly:

  “I rather doubt the quality of the happiness which you would give me.”

  “Wait! You’ll see! You’ll see!”

  They had reached the motor. Rossigny, still stammering expressions of delight, started the engine. Hortense stepped in and wrapped herself in a wide cloak. The car followed the narrow, grassy path which led back to the crossroads and Rossigny was accelerating the speed, when he was suddenly forced to pull up. A shot had rung out from the neighbouring wood, on the right. The car was swerving from side to side.

  “A front tire burst,” shouted Rossigny, leaping to the ground.

  “Not a bit of it!” cried Hortense. “Somebody fired!”

  “Impossible, my dear! Don’t be so absurd!”

  At that moment, two slight shocks were felt and two more reports were heard, one after the other, some way off and still in the wood.

  Rossigny snarled:

  “The back tires burst now … both of them … But who, in the devil’s name, can the ruffian be? … Just let me get hold of him, that’s all! …”

  He clambered up the roadside slope. There was no one there. Moreover, the leaves of the coppice blocked the view.

  “Damn it! Damn it!” he swore. “You were right: somebody was firing at the car! Oh, this is a bit thick! We shall be held up for hours! Three tires to mend! … But what are you doing, dear girl?”

  Hortense herself had alighted from the car. She ran to him, greatly excited:

  “I’m going.”

  “But why?”

  “I want to know. Someone fired. I want to know who it was.”

  “Don’t let us separate, please!”

  “Do you think I’m going to wait here for you for hours?”

  “What about your running away? … All our plans …?”

  “We’ll discuss that tomorrow. Go back to the house. Take back my things with you … And good-bye for the present.”

  She hurried, left him, had the good luck to find her horse and set off at a gallop in a direction leading away from La Marèze.

  There was not the least doubt in her mind that the three shots had been fired by Prince Rénine.

  “It was he,” she muttered, angrily, “it was he. No one else would be capable of such behaviour.”

  Besides, he had warned her, in his smiling, masterful way, that he would expect her.

  She was weeping with rage and humiliation. At that moment, had she found herself face to face with Prince Rénine, she could have struck him with her riding whip.

  Before her was the rugged and picturesque stretch of country which lies between the Orne and the Sarthe,
above Alençon, and which is known as Little Switzerland. Steep hills compelled her frequently to moderate her pace, the more so as she had to cover some six miles before reaching her destination. But, though the speed at which she rode became less headlong, though her physical effort gradually slackened, she nevertheless persisted in her indignation against Prince Rénine. She bore him a grudge not only for the unspeakable action of which he had been guilty, but also for his behaviour to her during the last three days, his persistent attentions, his assurance, his air of excessive politeness.

  She was nearly there. In the bottom of a valley, an old park wall, full of cracks and covered with moss and weeds, revealed the ball turret of a château and a few windows with closed shutters. This was the Domaine de Halingre. She followed the wall and turned a corner. In the middle of the crescent-shaped space before which lay the entrance gates, Serge Rénine stood waiting beside his horse.

  She sprang to the ground, and, as he stepped forward, hat in hand, thanking her for coming, she cried:

  “One word, monsieur, to begin with. Something quite inexplicable happened just now. Three shots were fired at a motorcar in which I was sitting. Did you fire those shots?”

  “Yes.”

  She seemed dumbfounded:

  “Then you confess it?”

  “You have asked a question, madame, and I have answered it.”

  “But how dare you? What gave you the right?”

  “I was not exercising a right, madame; I was performing a duty!”

  “Indeed! And what duty, pray?”

  “The duty of protecting you against a man who is trying to profit by your troubles.”

  “I forbid you to speak like that. I am responsible for my own actions, and I decided upon them in perfect liberty.”

  “Madame, I overheard your conversation with M. Rossigny this morning, and it did not appear to me that you were accompanying him with a light heart. I admit the ruthlessness and bad taste of my interference and I apologise for it humbly, but I risked being taken for a ruffian in order to give you a few hours for reflection.”