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.
CHAPTER IV
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.