THE CONSERVATORY
Once outside, and without cover, it seemed to me that everything was
spying on me; so I flung myself headlong into a little wood near the
conservatory; then through the thorn and creepers I made my way towards
my objective.
It was very warm. I advanced with great difficulty and taking thousands
of precautions to avoid scratches and tell-tale rents.
At last the conservatory with its central dome and one of its bulging
flanks loomed large before me. It was a side view that first presented
itself. I thought it would be wise to reconnoiter it before leaving the
shelter of the wood.
What struck me immediately was its appearance of cleanliness, its
perfect upkeep; not a paving-stone of the encircling footway displaced,
not a brick of the foundation broken; the blinds which were well
fastened had all their laths, and in the narrow open spaces of their
shutters the window-panes flashed in the sun.
I listened. No sound came to me from the castle or from the gray
buildings. In the conservatory there was complete silence. One heard
nothing but the vast hum of a burning afternoon.
Then I summoned up my courage, and approaching stealthily, I raised one
of the wooden sun-blinds and tried to look through the panes; but I
could see nothing; they had been smeared on the inside with a whitish
substance. It seemed more and more probable that Lerne had diverted the
conservatory from its original use, and now abandoned himself there
to any other culture than that of flowers. The idea of microbe broths
simmering under the warm light seemed to me quite a happy inspiration.
I moved round the glass house. Everywhere the same stuff smeared on the
window-panes intercepted the view--rather thick stuff it appeared.
The ventilation windows stood open but beyond my reach. The wings had
no doors, and one could not get into the central part from the back.
As I kept moving round scrutinizing the brick and the no less thick
glass, I soon found myself on the _château_ side opposite my balcony.
This position being unsheltered was dangerous. I thought I should have
to return to my bedroom, and give up the supposed palace of microbes
without examining the front. I limited my investigation therefore to a
most disappointed glance--a glance, however, which suddenly let me know
that the mystery lay open to me.
The door was only pressed against the door-post, and the bolt which was
quite free showed that some careless person had thought he had barred
the door securely. Oh, Wilhelm, you priceless donkey!
The moment I entered, my bacteriological hypothesis was at once
destroyed. A whiff of floral perfumes welcomed me--a moist and warm
whiff with a touch of nicotine in it.
I paused in wonderment on the threshold.
No hothouse--not even a royal one--has ever given me that impression
of riotous luxury which I at first experienced. In that rotunda in the
midst of all those sumptuous plants, the first sensation was that of
bedazzlement. The whole gamut of greens was played in a chromatic scale
on the keyboard of leaves, amid the multi-colored tones of flowers and
fruit, and on tiers which climbed up to the cupola those splendors
surged magnificently upward.
But one’s eyes became accustomed to the sight, and my admiration grew
somewhat less. Assuredly, however, for this Winter-Garden to arouse my
admiration so immediately, it must have been composed of plants very
remarkable in themselves, for in reality no attempt at harmony had
brought about their arrangement.
They were grouped in disciplinary order and not in accordance with
a spirit of elegance--like some Eldorado confided to the care of a
gendarme. Their ranks separated themselves brutally from one another,
like so many categories; the pots stood in military array, and each
of them bore a label, which had to do with botany rather than with
gardening, and gave evidence rather of science than of art. This
circumstance gave one food for meditation. After all, could I admit for
a moment that Lerne could possibly do gardening for pleasure?
Prosecuting my researches, I let my charmed eyes wander over all those
marvels, incapable in my ignorance of naming any of them. I tried to do
so, however, mechanically, and then that luxuriance, which on a cursory
general look had shown a sort of exotic character, began to appear to
me as it really was....
Incredulous, and a prey to a fever of curiosity, I looked at a cactus.
In spite of my want of expert knowledge, I could not be mistaken, but
its red flower utterly puzzled me.... I looked at it minutely, and my
perplexity only grew.
There was no possible doubt: this demoniac flower with its insolent
look, this rocket which soared up green to break in fiery stars, _was a
geranium_!
I went on to the next flower: three bamboo stalks rose out of the
soil, and capitals which crowned their slim columns were--dahlias.
Almost afraid, breathing in the unnatural perfumes in short breaths,
I looked questioningly at the place around me, and its miracle-like
incoherence clearly showed itself.
Spring, Summer, and Autumn reigned there in company, and Lerne had
doubtless suppressed Winter, which extinguishes flowers like flames.
They were all there, and all fruits too, _but neither flower nor fruit
had grown on its own tree_!
A colony of cornflowers garnished a stalk ceded by moss-roses, and
which now waved about, a thyrsus thenceforward blue. An araucaria
unfolded at the tip of its bristling branches the indigo-colored bells
of the gentian, and along an espalier among nasturtium leaves and on
the loops of its serpentine stalk, camelias and parti-colored tulips
blossomed fraternally together.
Opposite the entrance-door, a clump of bushes rose up against the glass
wall. The shrub which stood highest drew my attention. Pears were
hanging from it, and it was an orange tree! Behind it two vine-stocks
with branches worthy of the land of Canaan flung their garlands round a
trellis; their gigantic clusters differed as their stocks; the one bore
yellow fruit, the other purple--_but each grape was a Mirabelle plum or
a damson_!
On the twigs of a miniature oak, on which several rebellious acorns
were obstinately forming, one beheld walnuts and cherries rubbing
shoulders. One of these fruits was an abortion: neither “chalk nor
cheese” it was forming into a glaucous tumor streaked with pink--a
thing monstrous and repellant.
Instead of cones, a fir tree was dotted with chestnuts like shining
stars, and, moreover, it flaunted this strange contrast: the
orange--that golden sun of Eastern orchards--and the medlar, which
looks like a posthumous fruit of a tree that has died of cold!
Not far away there was a throng of still more fully developed miracles.
Flora was elbowing Pomona, as the good Demoustier would have phrased
it. Most of the plants that formed this crowd were strange to me, and I
only remember the commoner ones, those that anybody knows the list of.
I can still see an astounding willow which bore hortensias and peonies,
peaches and strawberries. But the prettiest of all those hybrids was
perhaps a rose tree with ox-eyes for flowers and crab-apples for fruit.
In the center of the rotunda a bush showed a mingling of leaves so
dissimilar as those of the holly, the lime and the poplar. Having
pressed them apart I satisfied myself that they issued all three from a
single stem.
It was the triumph of grafting--a science that Lerne had for fifteen
years been pushing to the verge of the miraculous, so far indeed that
the results presented a somewhat disquieting spectacle. “When man sets
his hand to Life, he makes monsters.” A kind of uneasiness troubled me.
“What right has one to upset Creation?” I said to myself. “Should one
turn the ancient laws topsy-turvy? Can one play this sacrilegious game
without high treason against Nature? If only those artificial things
had been in good taste! But, devoid of real novelty, they were merely
curious mixtures, a sort of vegetable chimeras, floral Fauns, half
this and half that. On my honor, graceful or not, this kind of work is
impious, and that’s the long and the short of it.”
Be that as it may, the Professor had toiled most laboriously to bring
his work to so successful an issue. The collection vouched for that,
and there were other signs that recalled the _savant’s_ industry: on a
table I perceived rows of bottles and an array of grafting-tools and
gardening implements which glittered like surgical instruments. This
discovery sent me back to the flowers, and looking into the matter I
became aware of all their wretchedness.
They were plastered with various sorts of gum, bandaged and full of
gashes which were like wounds, out of which oozed a suspicious juice.
There was a wound in the bark of the pear-bearing orange tree that
formed an eye which was slowly shedding tears.
I was becoming quite nervous. Would one have believed it? I was
assailed by a ridiculous anguish as I looked at the oak-tree (which
had had an operation) because I fancied the cherries looked like drops
of blood...! Flop! flop! Two ripe ones fell at my feet like the first
drops of a thunder-storm.
I was no longer possessed of the calm necessary for reading the labels.
They merely told me a few dates--and the fact that Lerne had covered
them with Franco-German terms which had originally been illegible, and
were rendered more so by erasures.
With my ears on the alert, and with my brow in my hands, I had to take
a moment’s respite in order to gather my wits together, and then I
opened the door of the right wing.
A little nave, as it were, stretched out before me. Its glass vault
filtered the daylight and attenuated it to a bluish and refreshingly
cool half-light. My steps rang out on the flagstones.
In this chamber there gleamed three aquariums, three tanks of glass,
so pure that the water seemed to be standing of itself in three
geometrical blocks.
The aquariums on the two sides of the hall held marine plants which did
not seem to differ much one from the other. However, the rotunda had
taught me with what method Lerne classified everything, and I could
not believe that he had separated into two tanks things absolutely
identical. So I watched the sea-weeds attentively.
Their tufts, on both sides of the place, formed the same submarine
landscape. On the right, as on the left, arborescences of every color
had fixed their rigid and bifurcated stems on the rocks; the sandy
bottom was sprinkled with stars like edelweiss, and here and there
sprung up sheaves of chalky rods, at the end of each of which a sort
of fleshy chrysanthemum unfolded itself like a yellow or a violet
flower. I cannot describe the host of other _corollæ_; they often
resembled oily _calices_ of wax or of gelatine; most of them showed an
indefinable color in a vague outline, and sometimes they had no edges
and were mere _nuances_ in the midst of the water.
Bubbles escaped in thousands from an inside tap, and their tumultuous
pearls raced madly along the foliage before they rose to burst on the
surface. One would have thought, seeing them, that that aquatic garden
had always to be drenched with air.
Recalling my schoolboy memories I grasped that the two sets of
flowering things--differing merely in detail--were exclusively composed
of _polypi_, those ambiguous creatures, such as coral or sponge, which
the naturalist interpolates between vegetables and animals.
Their peculiar ambiguity is never devoid of interest. I tapped the
left-hand trough.
Immediately an unexpected thing moved before me swimming by means of
contraction; it was like an opaline Venetian goblet which had remained
malleable; a second crossed over the first; they were two jelly-fish.
Meanwhile the tapping of my fingers had set other things moving. The
yellow and purple tufts of the anemones went back into their calcareous
sheaths, then rhythmically unfolding, emerged again; the rays of the
star-fish and sea-urchins stirred lazily; grays and reds and saffrons
swayed about, and, as if under the influence of an eddy the whole
aquarium became alive.
I tapped on the right-hand trough. Nothing budged.
This was proof positive; this separation of the polypi into two
receptacles gave me a clearer understanding of the connection which,
joining the animal and the vegetable, makes man akin to the blade
of grass. At this meeting-place of the two organized kingdoms, the
creatures on the left--active--were at the foot of their scale, and
those on the right--inactive--at the top of theirs; the former were on
the way to becoming beasts, the latter had finished being plants.
Thus, the gulf which seems to separate those two extreme poles in the
world is reduced, as far as structure goes, to slight divergences,
almost invisible--a less striking difference than that between the wolf
and the fox which are, however, brothers.
Now, this infinitesimal difference in organization which Science,
however, regards as unsurmountable, since it separates _inertia_
from spontaneous movement--this difference Lerne had bridged! In
the basin at the end of the room, _the two species were grafted on
to one another_. I noted there a gelatinous sort of leaf of the
immobile order, grafted on to a mobile stem, and now moving about too.
The grafts adopted the condition of the plant into which they were
inserted; penetrated with a life-giving juice, their indifference
changed to animation, and the activity of the other was paralyzed
through sucking in the _ankylosis_.
I would willingly have passed in review the various applications of
this principle; but a _medusa_ tied with a hundred knots to some
seaweed or other struggled violently in its mossy net, and I turned
away in disgust.
This last stage in grafting in spite of difficulties completed the
profanation in my eyes, and I looked away into the blue shadow for less
disagreeable sights.
The Professor’s apparatus stood ready for him. There was a whole
chemist’s shop on a dresser. Four tables with clear glass tops
alternated with the aquariums, and bore on them an arsenal of knives,
pincers and tweezers.
No! Lerne had no right to do this! It was as infamous as a butchery!
More so indeed! And his odious performances on virgin Nature offered
at one and the same time the horror of a murder and the ignominy of a
violation!
As I was yielding to this righteous indignation, a noise arose. Some
one was knocking.
Ah! my hell beyond the grave will be to hear that little insignificant
tapping. In a flash I felt every nerve in my body. Some one was
knocking!
In a bound I was in the rotunda, and my face must have been terrible to
see, for instinctively the dread of an adversary made me assume a look
of ferocity.
Nobody on the doorstep--nobody in the park--I went in again.
The noise began once more. It was coming from the yet unexplored wing.
Losing my head, I dashed towards it without realizing my rashness,
or the risk of finding myself face to face with the danger, and so
excited, that I banged my head against the door, as I opened it with a
violent pull.
Nervous exhaustion had brought me down to this condition of weakness.
And I ask myself to-day whether it had not to some extent given me
hallucinations and made me fancy things to be more bizarre than they
really were.
An intense light flooded the third hall and helped me at once to
recover my assurance. On a dresser there was a cage upside down which
was knocking about with a rat inside it, as in a prison. When the rat
jumped, the cage jumped; hence the noise. At the sight of me, the
rodent became quiet. I attached no importance to this little episode.
This place, which was less orderly than the others, looked like an
ill-kept hothouse. But towels stained with blood and thrown on the
ground, lancets lying anyhow among half empty test-tubes, all this told
of recent work and might serve as an excuse for the confusion.
I began my investigation.
The first two witnesses to appear did not give me much information.
These were some very humble plants in their china pots. Their names
in _um_ or _us_ have gone from my memory, a thing I deplore, for they
would give my tale more authoritativeness, and more resonance. But who,
at the mention of their ordinary names, could fail to represent to
himself a tuft of plantain and a tuft of hare’s-ear?
The former was, it is true, of an exceptionally long and supple sort.
As for the latter, it had nothing distinctive about it, and, like its
fellows, it conscientiously counterfeited a dozen great ear-lobes.
On two of its hairy, silvery leaves and on one of the twigs of the
plantain below it, a bandage showed like a bracelet of white cloth
which tar (apparently) stained brown.
I sighed a sigh of relief. “Good,” said I to myself, “Lerne has
inoculated them. This is only a repetition of what I have already seen,
or rather an early, timid and simple essay, a stage on the road to
the rotunda, as _it_ is a stage on the way to the atrocities of the
aquarium. I might have begun here, gone on to the central garden of
Eden, and finished off by the polypi. Thank God, I have seen the worst.”
So ran my thoughts, when _the twig of the plantain twisted about like a
worm_!
At the same time a mass of shining gray gave a jump which betrayed its
presence behind the dresser. There lay in the midst of a pool of blood
a rabbit with silvery fur. It had just expired, _and had nothing in the
way of ears but two bleeding holes_.
The presentiment of the reality made me break out into a sweat. It was
then I touched the hairy plant. Having felt the two grafted leaves like
ears, I perceived they were _hot and quivering_.
A recoil sent me up against the dresser. My hand stiff with disgust
tried to shake off the feeling of that contact as it would that of a
hideous spider; it knocked violently against the rat’s cage, which fell.
At once the rat bounded towards the middle of its cage, biting and
rolling about with mad fury ... and my staring eyes went continually
from the plantain to the animal, from the twig _quivering like a thin
black snake to the rat which had no tail_.
Its wound had healed, but the poor beast bore traces of another
experiment which it dragged about in its somersaults--a sort of
loosened girdle, which still, however, kept fixed in its place a piece
of greenery that had been inserted into its slashed flank!
This growth seemed to me to have withered. So Lerne was mounting the
scale of Being. He was now grafting together the higher animals and all
kinds of plants! Infamous and great, my uncle inspired me with disgust
and admiration, such as one might feel for a maleficient deity.
His works, however, seemed to me less estimable than repulsive, and I
had to do violence to myself to force myself to prolong my visit.
It was worth it, even if it was merely a figment of the brain.
What remained for me to learn surpasses the nightmare of a madman.
Frightful, assuredly, but comic too in a way--grotesque, sinister.
Which of the sufferers inspired most horror? The guinea-pig, the frog
or the trees?
The guinea-pig, perhaps was the least extraordinary. Its pelt may have
been green only as the result of the green reflection from all those
plants. That _may_ be so.
But the frog! But the trees! What was one to think of _them_?
The frog was green as grass and had all its four legs forced into the
soil, planted in the middle of a pot like a vegetable with four roots,
its eyelids closed, its aspect dull and mournful.
As for the date trees--at first they had given no sign of motion, and
I am certain there was no wind blowing--then, when they did move, it
was in all directions. Their leaves swayed very gently--I thought I
heard something, but I could not swear to it--yes, the trees swayed and
came closer at every moment; suddenly they gripped one another with all
their green fingers and embraced convulsively. Was it in wrath or in
lust? For battle or for love? I know not. The gestures are much alike.
Beside the frog a vase of white porcelain was full of a colorless
liquid in which was steeped a Pravoz syringe. A similar vase and
syringe had been placed near the trees, but here the liquid was brown
and curdling. I concluded that they were sap and blood.
The date trees had let go of each other, and my trembling hand advanced
towards them. I could feel, under the soft warm bark pulse-beats that
made it rise and fall with rhythmical cadence.
Since then I have said to myself that one may feel ones own pulse when
feeling that of others, and I was doubtless feverish; but at the moment
could I doubt my senses?... Besides, what follows in no wise impeaches
my lucidity then; it would on the contrary plead in its favor. I do
not know whether intensity of recollection in a doubtful case of
hallucination is an argument for or against a morbid state; but at
any rate I remember very intensely the picture of those monstrosities
rising out of the medley of linen wrappings and bottles among the
scattered instruments of steel.
Was there nothing more to see? I rummaged in the corners--no, nothing
more. I had followed step by step my uncle’s work and in the rational
order of their ascending scale.
I got back to the _château_ without let or hindrance and regained my
bedroom. There the hectic vigor which had been supporting me quite
failed me. Vainly I tried, as I undressed, to recapitulate my campaign.
It was already assuming the appearance of a bad dream and I no longer
believed in it. Could the vegetable kingdom really mingle with the
animal? What an absurdity! If plant-polypi are almost animal-polypi,
what can an insect and a leaf, for example, have in common? Then I
felt a sharp pain in the thumb of my right hand: a little white pustle
ringed with pink was budding there. In my journey through the woods
something had stung me. But I was unable to say whether it was the
vengeance of a nettle or of an ant. This made me feel the possibilities
of things, and that I had not to accept them as having been realized by
my uncle. My reflections were as follows:--
“To sum up, Lerne has tried to amalgamate vegetables and animals,
and to make them exchange their vitalities. His methods, judiciously
progressive, have succeeded. But are they aims in themselves, or only
a means to something else? What is he trying to reach? I cannot see
how those experiments can have practical applications that a financier
might exploit. So, they are not ends in themselves. It seems to me that
they tend to something more perfect which I can vaguely divine without
fully perceiving. My head is full of woolly headache--Come, let me
see!... Perhaps the Professor is carrying on at the same time other
researches converging to the same point as these, a knowledge of which
would make the final object clear. Come, come! Logic, logic. On the one
hand.... Oh, Lord I _am_ tired--On the one hand I have seen vegetables
grafted together, on the other hand my uncle has begun mixing up plants
and beasts ... ah, I give it up.”
My exhausted mind refused to reason any more. I saw in a confused
way that in his study of grafting he had neglected a whole branch of
the subject, or at least that the hothouse was not its theater. My
eyelids grew heavy. The more I tried to induce or deduce the more I got
confused. The apparition of the preceding night, the gray buildings,
and Emma came to aggravate my distraught condition with anxiety,
curiosity and desire. In short, never had a feather pillow been the
haunt of such a welter of ideas.
A riddle!
Yes, indeed, a riddle! And yet, though the sphinxes were all round me,
through the dim vapor which was now less thick I clearly distinguished
them. And as one of them had a pleasing face and a youthful figure, I
fell asleep smiling.