Since I came back to Paris, having nothing to do, and reading nothing, I write every evening and every morning, at this round table, the story of my singular adventures.
Are they over yet?
The Klotz-automobile is there in the coach-house, in a box which I have specially constructed for it.
In spite of my orders, the Nanthel mechanic put in some petrol, and my new chauffeur and I had the greatest trouble in bringing the human car here, for it was impossible to turn the waste-cocks for emptying the tank.
It began by destroying its successor—a 20 h. p. machine of the latest model. What could I do with this accursed Klotz-car? Sell it? Expose my fellow creatures to its malignity? That would have been a crime. Destroy it and so kill the Professor in his final transformation? That would be murder. So I locked it up.
The box has high oak partitions, and the door is heavily bolted.
But the new beast passed its nights in roaring its threats and chromatic cries of pain, and the neighbors complained.
Then in my presence I had the delinquent hooter taken to pieces. We had extraordinary difficulty in taking out the screws and the bolts, and we found that the apparatus was, so to speak, soldered to the car. We had to tear it off, and as it came away the whole machine quivered.
A yellowish liquid, smelling like petrol, spurted from the wound, and flowed drop by drop from the amputated pieces. I concluded from this that the metal had become organic through the action of the infused life, hence my vain efforts to fix the new spring in the wheel, this operation being a sort of animal grafting, as impracticable as the transplanting of a wooden finger on to a living hand.
Though deprived of power of speech, my prisoner none the less persisted in his nightly outbursts for a week, dashing the battering-ram of its mass against the door. Then suddenly it became silent.