Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea Page 8

  I had got to this point in my observations when Ned and Conseil woke up almost simultaneously, under the influence of this reviving air purification. They rubbed their eyes, stretched their arms, and sprang to their feet.

  “Did master sleep well?” Conseil asked me with his perennial good manners.

  “Extremely well, my gallant lad,” I replied. “And how about you, Mr Ned Land?”

  “Like a log, Professor. But I must be imagining things, because it seems like I’m breathing a sea breeze.”

  A seaman couldn’t be wrong on this topic, and I told the Canadian what had gone on while he slept.

  “Good,” he said. “That explains perfectly all that bellowing we heard, when our so-called narwhale lay in sight of the Abraham Lincoln.”

  “Perfectly, Mr Land. It was catching its breath.”

  “Only I’ve no idea what time it is, Professor Aronnax, unless maybe it’s dinnertime?”

  “Dinnertime, my fine harpooner? I’d say at least breakfast time, because we’ve certainly woken up to a new day.”

  “Which indicates,” Conseil replied, “that we’ve spent twenty-four hours in slumber.”

  “That’s my assessment,” I replied.

  “I won’t argue with you,” Ned Land answered. “But dinner or breakfast, that steward will be plenty welcome whether he brings the one or the other.”

  “The one and the other,” Conseil said.

  “Well put,” the Canadian replied. “We deserve two meals, and speaking for myself, I’ll do justice to them both.”

  “All right, Ned, let’s wait and see,” I replied. “It’s clear that these strangers don’t intend to let us die of hunger, otherwise last evening’s dinner wouldn’t make any sense.”

  “Unless they’re fattening us up,” Ned shot back.

  “I object,” I replied. “We have not fallen into the hands of cannibals.”

  “Just because they don’t make a habit of it,” the Canadian replied in all seriousness,

  “doesn’t mean they don’t indulge from time to time. Who knows? Maybe these people have gone without fresh meat for a long while, and in that case three healthy, well-built specimens like the professor, his manservant, and me—”

  “Get rid of those ideas, Mr Land,” I answered the harpooner. “And above all, don’t let them lead you to flare up against our hosts, which would only make our situation worse.”

  “Anyhow,” the harpooner said, “I’m as hungry as all Hades, and dinner or breakfast, not one puny meal has arrived.”

  “Mr Land,” I answered, “we have to adapt to the schedule on board, and I imagine our stomachs are running ahead of the chief cook’s dinner bell.”

  “Well then, we’ll adjust our stomachs to the chef’s timetable,” Conseil replied serenely.

  “There you go again, Conseil my friend,” the impatient Canadian shot back. “You never allow yourself any displays of bile or attacks of nerves. You’re everlastingly calm. You’d say your after-meal grace even if you didn’t get any food for your before-meal blessing—and you’d starve to death rather than complain.”

  “What good would it do?” Conseil asked.

  “Complaining doesn’t have to do good, it just feels good. And if these pirates—I say pirates out of consideration for the professor’s feelings, since he doesn’t want us to call them cannibals—if these pirates think they’re going to smother me in this cage without hearing what cusswords spice up my outbursts, they’ve got another think coming. Look here, Professor Aronnax, speak frankly. How long do you figure they’ll keep us in this iron box?”

  “To tell the truth, friend Land, I know little more about it than you do.”

  “But in a nutshell, what do you suppose is going on?”

  “My supposition is that sheer chance has made us privy to an important secret. Now then, if the crew of this underwater boat have a personal interest in keeping that secret, and if their personal interest is more important than the lives of three men, I believe that our very existence is in jeopardy. If such is not the case, then at the first available opportunity, this monster that has swallowed us will return us to the world inhabited by our own kind.”

  “Unless they recruit us to serve on the crew,” Conseil said, “and keep us here—”

  “Till the moment,” Ned Land answered, “when some frigate that’s faster or smarter than the Abraham Lincoln captures this den of buccaneers, then hangs all of us by the neck from the tip of a mainmast yardarm.”

  “Well thought out, Mr Land,” I replied. “But as yet, I don’t believe we’ve been tendered any enlistment offers. Consequently, it’s pointless to argue about what tactics we should pursue in such a case. I repeat, let’s wait, let’s be guided by events, and let’s do nothing, since right now there’s nothing we can do.”

  “On the contrary, Professor,” the harpooner replied, not wanting to give in. “There is something we can do.”

  “Oh? And what, Mr Land?”

  “Break out of here.”

  “Breaking out of a prison on shore is difficult enough, but with an underwater prison, it strikes me as completely unworkable.”

  “Come now, Ned my friend,” Conseil asked, “how would you answer master’s objection? I refuse to believe that an American is at the end of his tether.”

  Visibly baffled, the harpooner said nothing. Under the conditions in which fate had left us, it was absolutely impossible to escape. But a Canadian’s wit is half French, and Mr Ned Land made this clear in his reply.

  “So, Professor Aronnax,” he went on after thinking for a few moments, “you haven’t figured out what people do when they can’t escape from their prison?”

  “No, my friend.”

  “Easy. They fix things so they stay there.”

  “Of course,” Conseil put in. “Since we’re deep in the ocean, being inside this boat is vastly preferable to being above it or below it.”

  “But we fix things by kicking out all the jailers, guards, and wardens,” Ned Land added.

  “What’s this, Ned?” I asked. “You’d seriously consider taking over this craft?”

  “Very seriously,” the Canadian replied.

  “It’s impossible.”

  “And why is that, sir? Some promising opportunity might come up, and I don’t see what could stop us from taking advantage of it. If there are only about twenty men on board this machine, I don’t think they can stave off two Frenchmen and a Canadian.”

  It seemed wiser to accept the harpooner’s proposition than to debate it. Accordingly, I was content to reply, “Let such circumstances come, Mr Land, and we’ll see. But until then, I beg you to control your impatience. We need to act shrewdly, and your flare-ups won’t give rise to any promising opportunities. So swear to me that you’ll accept our situation without throwing a tantrum over it.”

  “I give you my word, Professor,” Ned Land replied in an unenthusiastic tone. “No vehement phrases will leave my mouth, no vicious gestures will give my feelings away, not even when they don’t feed us on time.”

  I stepped closer to him and laid my hand upon his arm. Conseil turned politely away to study the bare wall. “I have your word, Ned,” I answered the Canadian.

  Ned’s gaze softened. He sighed in defeat. He glanced towards my servant, who was still pointedly ignoring us, then hooked his hand behind my neck and pulled me to him. He kissed me gently on the lips and wrapped his arms around my waist to hold me tight. “No matter what,” he whispered, “I’m glad we somehow ended up here together.”

  Then our conversation petered out, and each of us withdrew into his own thoughts. For my part, despite the harpooner’s confident talk, I admit that I entertained no illusions. I had no faith in those promising opportunities that Ned Land mentioned. To operate with such efficiency, this underwater boat had to have a sizeable crew, so if it came to a physical contest, we would be facing an overwhelming opponent. Besides, before we could do anything, we had to be free, and that we definitely were not
. I didn’t see any way out of this sheet-iron, hermetically sealed cell. And if the strange commander of this boat did have a secret to keep—which seemed rather likely—he would never give us freedom of movement aboard his vessel. Now then, would he resort to violence in order to be rid of us, or would he drop us off one day on some remote coast? There lay the unknown. All these hypotheses seemed extremely plausible to me, and to hope for freedom through use of force, you had to be a harpooner.

  I realised, moreover, that our brief interlude had done little to quell Ned Land’s fury.

  His brooding was getting him madder by the minute. Little by little, I heard those aforesaid cusswords welling up in the depths of his gullet, and I saw his movements turn threatening again. He stood up, pacing in circles like a wild beast in a cage, striking the walls with his foot and fist. Meanwhile the hours passed, our hunger nagged unmercifully, and this time the steward did not appear. Which amounted to forgetting our castaway status for much too long, if they really had good intentions towards us.

  Tortured by the growling of his well-built stomach, Ned Land was getting more and more riled, and despite his word of honour, I was in real dread of an explosion when he stood in the presence of one of the men on board.

  For two more hours Ned Land’s rage increased. The Canadian shouted and pleaded, but to no avail. The sheet-iron walls were deaf. I didn’t hear a single sound inside this dead-seeming boat. The vessel hadn’t stirred, because I obviously would have felt its hull vibrating under the influence of the propeller. It had undoubtedly sunk into the watery deep and no longer belonged to the outside world. All this dismal silence was terrifying.

  As for our neglect, our isolation in the depths of this cell, I was afraid to guess at how long it might last. Little by little, hopes I had entertained after our interview with the ship’s commander were fading away. The gentleness of the man’s gaze, the generosity expressed in his facial features, the nobility of his bearing, all vanished from my memory. I saw this mystifying individual anew for what he inevitably must be, cruel and merciless. I viewed him as outside humanity, beyond all feelings of compassion, the implacable foe of his fellow man, towards whom he must have sworn an undying hate.

  But even so, was the man going to let us die of starvation, locked up in this cramped prison? This grim possibility took on a dreadful intensity in my mind, and fired by my imagination, I felt an unreasoning terror run through me. Conseil stayed calm. Ned Land bellowed.

  Just then a noise was audible outside. Footsteps rang on the metal tiling. The locks were turned, the door opened, and the steward appeared.

  Before I could make a single movement to prevent him, the Canadian rushed at the poor man, threw him down, held him by the throat. The steward was choking in the grip of those powerful hands.

  Conseil was already trying to loosen the harpooner’s hands from his half-suffocated victim, and I had gone to join in the rescue, when I was abruptly nailed to the spot by these words pronounced in French, “Calm down, Mr Land. And you, Professor, kindly listen to me.”

  Chapter Ten

  The Man of the Waters

  It was the ship’s commander who had just spoken.

  At these words Ned Land stood up quickly. Nearly strangled, the steward staggered out at a signal from his superior, but such was the commander’s authority aboard his vessel, not one gesture gave away the resentment that this man must have felt towards the Canadian. In silence we waited for the outcome of this scene—Conseil, in spite of himself, seemed almost fascinated, I was stunned.

  Arms crossed, leaning against a corner of the table, the commander studied us with great care. Was he reluctant to speak further? Did he regret those words he had just pronounced in French? You would have thought so.

  After a few moments of silence, which none of us would have dreamed of interrupting.

  “Gentlemen,” he said in a calm, penetrating voice, “I speak French, English, German, and Latin with equal fluency. Hence I could have answered you as early as our initial interview, but first I wanted to make your acquaintance and then think things over. Your four versions of the same narrative, perfectly consistent by and large, established your personal identities for me. I now know that sheer chance has placed in my presence Professor Pierre Aronnax, specialist in natural history at the Paris Museum and entrusted with a scientific mission abroad, his manservant Conseil, and Ned Land, a harpooner of Canadian origin aboard the Abraham Lincoln, a frigate in the national navy of the United States of America.”

  I bowed in agreement. The commander hadn’t put a question to me. So no answer was called for. This man expressed himself with perfect ease and without a trace of an accent. His phrasing was clear, his words well chosen, his facility in elocution remarkable. And yet, to me, he didn’t have ‘the feel’ of a fellow countryman.

  He went on with the conversation as follows, “No doubt, sir, you’ve felt that I waited rather too long before paying you this second visit. After discovering your identities, I wanted to weigh carefully what policy to pursue towards you. I had great difficulty deciding. Some extremely inconvenient circumstances have brought you into the presence of a man who has cut himself off from humanity. Your coming has disrupted my whole existence.”

  “Unintentionally,” I said.

  “Unintentionally?” the stranger replied, raising his voice a little. “Was it unintentionally that the Abraham Lincoln hunted me on every sea? Was it unintentionally that you travelled aboard that frigate? Was it unintentionally that your shells bounced off my ship’s hull? Was it unintentionally that Mr Ned Land hit me with his harpoon?”

  I detected a controlled irritation in these words. But there was a perfectly natural reply to these charges, and I made it.

  “Sir,” I said, “you’re surely unaware of the discussions that have taken place in Europe and America with yourself as the subject. You don’t realise that various accidents, caused by collisions with your underwater machine, have aroused public passions on those two continents. I’ll spare you the innumerable hypotheses with which we’ve tried to explain this inexplicable phenomenon, whose secret is yours alone. But please understand that the Abraham Lincoln chased you over the Pacific high seas in the belief it was hunting some powerful marine monster, which had to be purged from the ocean at all cost.”

  A half smile curled the commander’s lips, then, in a calmer tone, “Professor Aronnax,”

  he replied, “do you dare claim that your frigate wouldn’t have chased and cannonaded an underwater boat as readily as a monster?”

  This question baffled me, since Commander Farragut would certainly have shown no such hesitation. He would have seen it as his sworn duty to destroy a contrivance of this kind just as promptly as a gigantic narwhale.

  “So you understand, sir,” the stranger went on, “that I have a right to treat you as my enemy.”

  I kept quiet, with good reason. What was the use of debating such a proposition, when superior force can wipe out the best arguments?

  “It took me a good while to decide,” the commander went on. “Nothing obliged me to grant you hospitality. If I were to part company with you, I’d have no personal interest in ever seeing you again. I could put you back on the platform of this ship that has served as your refuge. I could sink under the sea, and I could forget you ever existed. Wouldn’t that be my right?”

  “Perhaps it would be the right of a savage,” I replied. “But not that of a civilised man.”

  “Professor,” the commander replied swiftly, “I’m not what you term a civilised man.

  I’ve severed all ties with society, for reasons that I alone have the right to appreciate.

  Therefore I obey none of its regulations, and I insist that you never invoke them in front of me.”

  This was plain speaking. A flash of anger and scorn lit up the stranger’s eyes, and I glimpsed a fearsome past in this man’s life. Not only had he placed himself beyond human laws, he had rendered himself independent, out of all reach, fre
e in the strictest sense of the word. For who would dare chase him to the depths of the sea when he thwarted all attacks on the surface? What ship could withstand a collision with his underwater Monitor? What armour plate, no matter how heavy, could bear the thrusts of his spur? No man among men could call him to account for his actions. God, if he believed in Him, his conscience if he had one—these were the only judges to whom he was answerable.

  These thoughts swiftly crossed my mind while this strange individual fell silent, like someone completely self-absorbed. I regarded him with a mixture of fear and fascination, in the same way, no doubt, that Oedipus regarded the Sphinx.

  After a fairly long silence, the commander went on with our conversation.

  “So I had difficulty deciding,” he said. “But I concluded that my personal interests could be reconciled with that natural compassion to which every human being has a right.

  Since fate has brought you here, you’ll stay aboard my vessel. You’ll be free here, and in exchange for that freedom, moreover totally related to it, I’ll lay on you just one condition.

  Your word that you’ll submit to it will be sufficient.”

  “Go on, sir,” I replied. “I assume this condition is one an honest man can accept?”

  “Yes, sir. Just this. It’s possible that certain unforeseen events may force me to confine you to your cabins for some hours, or even for some days as the case may be. Since I prefer never to use violence, I expect from you in such a case, even more than in any other, your unquestioning obedience. By acting in this way, I shield you from complicity, I absolve you of all responsibility, since I myself make it impossible for you to see what you aren’t meant to see. Do you accept this condition?”

  So things happened on board that were quite odd to say the least, things never to be seen by people not placing themselves beyond society’s laws. Among all the surprises the future had in store for me, this would not be the mildest.

  “We accept,” I replied. “Only, I’ll ask your permission, sir, to address a question to you, just one.”