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?