HOT AND COLD
_Qui dort dîne._ My slumber lasted till the next morning.
And yet I never rested so ill. The bruised feeling caused by a day
spent in a motor-car came over my loin-muscles, and for long I felt in
them the _ricochets_ of ghostly jolts and the twists of spectral skids.
Then I was visited by dreams in which a world of miracle came to life.
Brocéliande, the Shakespearean forest, began to move; in the press of
it trees walked along arm in arm; a birch tree which looked like a
lance made me a speech in German, and I could hardly hear it, for many
of the flowers were singing, plants yelped insistently, and great trees
every now and then howled aloud.
On my awakening, I remembered this hullabaloo with a phonographic
exactitude--so much so, that I was alarmed about it, and I was angry
with myself for not having made a full examination of the conservatory;
a less hasty and calmer study of it would doubtless have enlightened
me. I severely condemned my undue haste and my nervous condition of
the day before. But why not make up for it? Perhaps it was not too late?
With my hands behind my back, and a cigarette between my lips, with no
particular aim in my steps, I passed in front of the conservatory, as
if I were merely taking a stroll.
It was locked.
So, I had missed the one chance of learning the truth, yes, I felt, the
one and only chance. Oh, donkey, donkey!
In order not to arouse suspicion, I had passed the forbidden place
without pausing, and now an avenue led me towards the gray buildings.
Through the grass which covered it, a beaten path bore witness to
frequent passings to and fro.
After following the track for some time, I saw my uncle coming to meet
me. No doubt he had been on the watch for my coming out. He was quite
cheery. His discolored countenance, when he smiled, was now like his
young face of long ago. This affable expression restored my equanimity.
My escapade had passed unperceived.
“Well, my boy,” said he in almost a friendly way, “I bet you are of my
way of thinking. It is not a cheerful place. You will soon be weary of
your sentimental sojourn at the bottom of this stewpan!”
“Oh, uncle, I have always loved Fonval, not for the scenery, but as a
venerable friend, an ancestor, if you like. It is one of the family.
I have often played, you know, on its lawns and among the branches of
its trees; it’s a godfather that has dandled me on its knee--like--like
you, uncle.”
“Yes, yes,” said Lerne evasively. “All the same you will soon have had
enough of it.”
“Not at all. The park of Fonval is my earthly paradise.”
“There you are right. It’s just that,” he said laughingly, “the
forbidden tree grows in its inclosure. Every hour you will come up
against the Tree of Life, and the Tree of Knowledge which you must
not touch. It’s dangerous. In your position I should go out for a run
in your mechanical carriage. Oh, if Adam had only had a mechanical
carriage!”
“But, uncle, there is the labyrinth!”
“Oh,” cried the Professor gayly, “I’ll accompany you and guide you.
Besides I am anxious to see one of those what d’-you-call-ems working.”
“Automobile, uncle.”
“Ah, yes, automobile,” and his Teutonic accent gave the word, which
is a slow-moving one as it is, an amplitude, a weight, a monumental
immobility.
We were going side by side towards the coach-house. There was no
denying that my uncle had made up his mind to endure my intrusion with
courage. Nevertheless his persistent good temper only vexed me. My
projects of indiscretion seemed less legitimate to me. Perhaps I should
have abandoned them altogether at that moment, had not my desire for
Emma driven me to wish ill to her despotic jailor. Besides, was he
sincere? And was it not merely to incite me to keep my plighted word
that he said to me on arriving at the improvised garage:
“Nicolas, I have reflected a great deal. I really do think you
might be very useful to us in the future, and I desire your further
acquaintance. Since you want to remain here for some days, we shall
often have talks. In the mornings I do not work much; we shall
employ them in going about either on foot, or in your car, and in
conversation. But don’t forget your promises.”
I nodded assent. “After all,” thought I, “it really seems as if he
wanted one day to publish the solution to the problem. Why should it
not be legitimate enough, though the operations that are to procure
it are not so? It’s them he wishes to hide until the result comes; he
expects the _éclat_ of the latter to excuse the barbarity of the former
and to obtain his pardon--if only the end does not betray the means,
and the means can remain forever unknown. On the other hand, might
Lerne not be afraid of competition? Why not?”
I was ruminating on all this as I emptied a little tin of petrol into
the tank of my excellent car, a tin which propitious Chance had
allowed me to find in the boot.
Lerne got in beside me. He pointed out to me a straight road that
skirted a cliff of the defile, a surreptitious cross-road ingeniously
concealed. I was astonished at first that my uncle should have pointed
out this short cut to me, but, after all, was he not showing me how to
get away, and was not this _au fond_ what he most desired?
Oh, the dear uncle! He must have lived a very secluded or very absorbed
life, for he was pathetically ignorant of all that concerns motor-cars.
His was the sort of ignorance _savants_ have with regard to sciences
in which they are not specialists. My physiologist was not strong on
the subject of mechanics. He hardly suspected the principle of this
docile, supple, silent and speedy engine of locomotion which roused his
enthusiasm.
At the edge of the forest:
“Let us stop here, please,” said he. “You must explain this machine to
me. This is where I usually end my walks. I am an old eccentric. You
shall go on by yourself afterwards, if you like.”
I began my demonstration, and I perceived that the hooter, only
slightly damaged, could be repaired in a turn of the hand. Two screws
and a piece of wire restored its deafening power. Lerne, at the sound
of it, beamed with ingenuous delight. I went on with my lecture, and
as I talked, my uncle listened to me with increasing attention.
In truth the thing deserved attentive interest. During the preceding
three years, if motor engines had but little changed in the essentials
of their structure and in that of their principal organs, fittings
on the other hand had progressed, and the materials employed were
employed more judiciously. Thus, in the construction of my car, whose
only woodwork was the racing-seats, no wood had been employed. My 80
horse-power affair formed a little luxurious and neatly furnished
workshop all of cast iron and steel, of copper and aluminum. The
great invention of the day had been applied to it--I mean that it did
not rest on four pneumatic tires, but on spring-wheels which were
wonderfully elastic. Nowadays that seems quite a matter of course; but
a year ago my iron fellies caused much surprise.
But the most remarkable thing about my 234 XY, when you come to
think of it, was, I think, that improvement which engineers obtained
so slowly that one did not see it growing day by day--I mean its
automatism.
The first horseless machine was encumbered with levers, pedals, handles
and wheels necessary for its guidance, and with taps and grease-valves
to turn, which were indispensable for the functioning of the engine.
Now, each generation of motor-cars has dispensed with these more and
more completely. One by one, almost all those handles have disappeared
which require the incessant intervention of man. In our days, by means
of its organs which have become automatic, the mechanism controls the
mechanism. A chauffeur is no more than a pilot; once going, his machine
keeps up its own energy; once awake, it will only fall asleep again
at the word of command. In short, as Lerne bade me note, the modern
motor-car enjoys properties that a spinal cord might confer; it enjoys
instinct and reflex actions. Spontaneous movements take place in it
along with the voluntary movements caused by the intelligence of the
driver, who becomes as it were the brain of the vehicle. It is from
this intelligence that the orders for definite actions go, transmitted
by the metallic nerves to the steel muscles.
“Moreover,” said my uncle, “the resemblance between this machine and
the body of a vertebrate animal is striking.”
Here Lerne was entering his own domain. I lent an attentive ear, and he
went on:
“We have here the nervous and muscular systems represented by the
striker-rods, the driving-gear and the cranks. And the _châssis_,
Nicolas, what is it but the skeleton into which the tenants insert
themselves like tendons? Blood, the vital element, circulates in those
copper arteries in the form of petrol. The carburetor breathes; it’s a
lung; instead of combining air with blood, it mixes it with the vapor
of the petrol, that’s all! This hood resembles a _thorax_ in which
life beats rhythmically--our joints move in the _synovia_ as those
swivel-joints in oil. Under the shelter of the resisting skin of the
case is the tank, a stomach that grows hungry and is replenished. Here,
phosphorescent like those of cats, but _as yet_ void of sight, are
eyes, its lamps; its voice is the hooter; and--but I need not go into
further details. In a word, Nicolas, the only thing wanting to your car
is brain, which you sometimes supply; having that it would become a
great deaf beast, blind, insensitive and sterile, without the sense of
taste or of smell.”
“A regular collection of infirmities,” I said, bursting into a loud
laugh.
“Hum!” rejoined Lerne, “in other respects the motor-car is better off
than we. Think how the water cools it; what a remedy against fever! And
then what a time the engine can last, if it is wisely used! It can be
mended indefinitely--it can always be cured; have you not just restored
speech to its maw? You could replace an eye just as easily!”
The Professor was getting excited:
“It’s a powerful and terrible body,” he cried, “but a body that allows
itself to be clothed--it has armor which increases the power of the
wearer beyond all expectation, a cuirass that multiplies its force
and speed. Why, you inside it are like the Maritans of Mr. Wells in
their tripod cylinders! You are nothing but the brain of an artificial
monster that it makes one giddy to think of.”
“All machines are like that, uncle.”
“No. Not so completely. But for the form (which no animal resembles of
course) the automobile is the most congruous automaton ever contrived.
It is more made in our image than the best mannikin wound up by a key,
the most human of puppets. For under their anthropomorphic envelope
those mannikins hide a mere roasting-jack organism, which one would not
compare with the anatomy of a snail. Whereas here....”
He drew back a step and regarded my car with a look of tenderness:
“What a superb creature,” he exclaimed, “and how great is man!”
“Yes,” said I to myself, “there is a deal more beauty in a thing we
create, than in all your sinister joining of flesh and wood that are
both from of old. But it’s not bad on your part to have admitted it.”
Though it was late, I went on to Grey-l’Abbaye to replenish my stock
of petrol, and though he was a creature of routine, Lerne, infatuated
with automobilism, passed beyond the traditional limit of his walks and
insisted on accompanying me.
Then we resumed the way to Fonval. My uncle, with all the ardor of a
neophyte, bent over the bonnet in order to listen to the pulsations
within the metal frame, then he took to pieces one of the oil-valves.
All the time he kept questioning me, and I had to inform him of the
smallest details of my car, details which he assimilated with an
incredible accuracy.
“I say, Nicolas, sound the hooter, will you? Now--go slow--stop--start
again--quicker--that will do--put on the brake--back now--stop--it’s
colossal!”
He was laughing. His cloudy face seemed almost beautified. Seeing us
one would have said we were excellent friends. In fact we were so then
perhaps. And I fancied that perhaps, thanks to my “two-seater,” Lerne
might one day confide in me.
He preserved this gayety till our return to the _château_; the
proximity of the mysterious workshop did not affect it; it only
disappeared in the dining room. Then suddenly Lerne’s brow darkened.
Emma had just come in. And the husband of my aunt Lidivine seemed to
have effaced himself with my uncle’s smile, only an irritable old
_savant_ remaining between his two guests. I then felt how little his
future discoveries mattered in comparison with this woman, and that he
wanted to acquire glory and wealth only in order to keep the charming
girl by his side.
Assuredly he loved her just as I did, and with the same fierce desire.
* * * * *
Barbe came and went as she waited on us more or less anyhow. We were
silent. I avoided looking at Emma, being persuaded that my looks would
have resembled kisses and that my uncle would have divined them.
She, now quite at her ease, pretended indifference; and with her chin
in her hands, her elbows on the table, her bare arms showing out of
her short sleeves, she gazed through the windows at the meadows whose
inhabitants were lowing.
I should have liked to gaze at the same sight as my _bien-aimée_;
this distant and sentimental communion would have satisfied one; but
unluckily the meadows were not visible from where I sat, and my eyes
wandered idly about, none the less noting the whiteness of her bare
arms and the unwonted heaving of her bodice.
As I was interpreting this unwonted emotion on her part in my favor,
Lerne, hostile and taciturn, broke up the party. He ordered Emma off to
her room and giving me a book bade me go and read in the shade of the
forest.
I had but to obey. “Bah,” I said to myself, “in spite of his
exhortations, he is more to be pitied than I am.”
The happenings of that night cooled my pity most notably.
The incident troubled me all the more that it did nothing to lighten
the darkness of the mystery; in itself it seemed incomprehensible. This
is what it was:
I had peacefully fallen asleep with my mind dwelling on Emma, and the
delightful hope she inspired; but sleep instead of bringing me pleasant
dreams, brought back the absurdities of the preceding night, the
moaning and barking plants. The intensity of the sound kept increasing
in my dream, and at last it became so acute, so real, that I suddenly
woke up.
Sweat was drenching my body and my hot sheets. The echo of a recent cry
was just dying on my tympanum. It was not the first time I heard it.
No--in the labyrinth I had heard it before, that cry, far away in the
direction of Fonval.
I raised myself on my hands. A ray of moonlight lit my room. I could
hear nothing. Only from the old-fashioned clock came any sound--that
of Time’s sickle. My head fell back on the pillow.
Then suddenly, with a shuddering of my whole being, I buried myself
in the blankets with my fingers in my ears. The sinister howling was
rising from the park into the night, a sinister, unearthly howling. It
was indeed that which I had heard in my nightmare; my dream had mingled
with reality.
With a superhuman effort I arose, and it was then that I heard
yelpings--a sort of stifled yelpings, very much stifled.
Well, after all, it might all be proceeding from a dog’s throat, hang
it!
Nothing to be seen from the window on the garden side except the plane
tree and the other trees drowsing in the moonlight.
Then the howling began again on the left, and from the other window I
saw what seemed to me for a moment to explain everything.
Some distance away a starved-looking dog was standing with its back
towards me. It was a huge animal, and it had laid its front paws on the
closed shutters of my former bedroom, and every now and then uttered a
loud long wail. The other barkings--the stifled ones--replied to him
from the inside of the house; but were they really yelps? Had my ears
deceived me? It sounded more like the voice of a man trying to imitate
the voice of a dog. The more I listened, the more that conclusion
forced itself on me. Yes, certainly there could be no mistake; how
could I have hesitated? It was quite clear--some practical joker in my
bedroom was amusing himself with teasing the poor brute.
And he succeeded in doing so; for the animal gave signs of increasing
exasperation. He modulated his howling in the most extraordinary
manner, making it sound like a cry of despair. Finally he scratched
the shutters with rage and bit them. I heard the crackling of the wood
between his jaws.
Suddenly the beast became motionless, its hair bristling. There was
a brusque and violent outburst in that room. I recognized my uncle’s
voice but could not catch the meaning of his reprimand. Immediately
the joker was silent. But--and how to account for this amazing
circumstance?--the dog whose frenzy should have been appeased, was
now beside itself; its backbone bristled up like that of a wild boar.
Growling, it began to follow the wall of the _château_, till it reached
the main door.
Just as it reached it, Lerne opened it.
Fortunately for me I had, in caution, not raised my window curtain. His
first look was towards my window.
In a low voice, with restrained wrath, the Professor lectured the
dog, but he did not come forward, and I perceived he was afraid of it.
The other came nearer, growling, with its eyes flashing from under its
great brow. Lerne then spoke aloud:
“To your kennel, you dirty brute!” (Then came some words in a foreign
tongue.) “Get away,” he went on in French; and as the animal still came
on--“Do you want me to knock your brains out? Eh?”
My uncle seemed to be losing his wits. The moon heightened his
pallor. “He’ll be torn to bits,” I said to myself, “he has not even a
riding-switch.”
“Go back, Nell, go back.”
Nell? So it was the St. Bernard bitch belonging to the Scot.
And then came a stream of foreign words which to my complete
astonishment made me realize that my uncle knew English.
His invectives resounded in the silence of the night.
The dog gathered itself together; it was just going to spring when
Lerne, at the end of his resources, threatened it with a revolver and
with the other hand pointed out the way he wanted the beast to go.
Now, it has happened to me, when out shooting, to see a dog run away
when a gun is leveled at it; he knows its deadly power. That this
should happen in presence of a pistol seemed to me decidedly less
ordinary. Had Nell already experienced the effect of the weapon?
That was a plausible theory; but I fancied that she had understood
the English--English being Macbeth’s tongue--rather than my uncle’s
revolver.
She calmed down, as at the voice of Orpheus, cowered and with her tail
between her legs, made for the gray buildings which Lerne was pointing
out to her. He ran after the hound, and the darkness swallowed them.
In my clock the imperishable Harvester mowed down several minutes.
In the distance a door banged noisily. Then Lerne came in again.
That was all.
So there were at Fonval two beings whose existence had till then
been unsuspected by me; Nell, whose pitiful appearance hardly showed
her to be happy, Nell, abandoned doubtless by her master in a hasty
flight--and the practical joker. For this latter could not, in reason,
be either of the two women or one of the Germans; the nature of the
joke betrayed its author’s age. Only a child could divert itself at the
expense of a dog. But nobody to my knowledge lodged in that wing.
“Ah,” Lerne had said to me, “I am using your room.” Who, then, lived in
it?
I was determined to find out somehow. If the hidden presence of Nell
in the gray buildings invested them with a new interest, mysterious as
they already were, the closed rooms of the _château_ became yet another
center of attraction.
At last my objectives were clearing.
And as the prospect of hunting down the secret made me quiver with
excitement, a presentiment warned me that I should do well to pursue
it to the death, and so defy Lerne’s first command before breaking the
second.
“Let me find out first what it is all about,” said my conscience;
“there is something wrong. After that, I can attend to the baggage in
peace.”
Why did I not follow my own advice? But conscience speaks in a very low
voice, and who can hear it when passion begins to blare?