An Antarctic Mystery - Jules Verne (good summer reads TXT) 📗

Guy came on deck, approached me, and said, speaking very low⁠—

“Sir, I have something to say to you.”

“I am ready to hear you, captain.”

“I have not spoken until today, for I am naturally taciturn.” Here he hesitated again, but after a pause, continued with an effort⁠—

“Mr. Jeorling, have you tried to discover my reason for changing my mind on the subject of your passage?”

“I have tried, but I have not succeeded, captain. Perhaps, as I am not a compatriot of yours, you⁠—”

“It is precisely because you are an American that I decided in the end to offer you a passage on the Halbrane.”

“Because I am an American?”

“Also, because you come from Connecticut.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You will understand if I add that I thought it possible, since you belong to Connecticut, since you have visited Nantucket Island, that you might have known the family of Arthur Gordon Pym.”

“The hero of Edgar Poe’s romance?”

“The same. His narrative was founded upon the manuscript in which the details of that extraordinary and disastrous voyage across the Antarctic Sea was related.”

I thought I must be dreaming when I heard Captain Len Guy’s words. Edgar Poe’s romance was nothing but a fiction, a work of imagination by the most brilliant of our American writers. And here was a sane man treating that fiction as a reality.

I could not answer him. I was asking myself what manner of man was this one with whom I had to deal.

“You have heard my question?” persisted the captain.

“Yes, yes, captain, certainly, but I am not sure that I quite understand.”

“I will put it to you more plainly. I ask you whether in Connecticut you personally knew the Pym family who lived in Nantucket Island? Arthur Pym’s father was one of the principal merchants there, he was a Navy contractor. It was his son who embarked in the adventures which he related with his own lips to Edgar Poe⁠—”

“Captain! Why, that story is due to the powerful imagination of our great poet. It is a pure invention.”

“So, then, you don’t believe it, Mr. Jeorling?” said the captain, shrugging his shoulders three times.

“Neither I nor any other person believes it, Captain Guy, and you are the first I have heard maintain that it was anything but a mere romance.”

“Listen to me, then, Mr. Jeorling, for although this ‘romance’⁠—as you call it⁠—appeared only last year, it is none the less a reality. Although eleven years have elapsed since the facts occurred, they are none the less true, and we still await the ‘word’ of an enigma which will perhaps never be solved.”

Yes, he was mad; but by good fortune West was there to take his place as commander of the schooner. I had only to listen to him, and as I had read Poe’s romance over and over again, I was curious to hear what the captain had to say about it.

“And now,” he resumed in a sharper tone and with a shake in his voice which denoted a certain amount of nervous irritation, “it is possible that you did not know the Pym family; that you have never met them either at Providence or at Nantucket⁠—”

“Or elsewhere.”

“Just so! But don’t commit yourself by asserting that the Pym family never existed, that Arthur Gordon is only a fictitious personage, and his voyage an imaginary one! Do you think any man, even your Edgar Poe, could have been capable of inventing, of creating⁠—?”

The increasing vehemence of Captain Len Guy warned me of the necessity of treating his monomania with respect, and accepting all he said without discussion.

“Now,” he proceeded, “please to keep the facts which I am about to state clearly in your mind; there is no disputing about facts. You may deduce any results from them you like. I hope you will not make me regret that I consented to give you a passage on the Halbrane.”

This was an effectual warning, so I made a sign of acquiescence. The matter promised to be curious. He went on⁠—

“When Edgar Poe’s narrative appeared in 1838, I was at New York. I immediately started for Baltimore, where the writer’s family lived; the grandfather had served as quartermaster-general during the War of Independence. You admit, I suppose, the existence of the Poe family, although you deny that of the Pym family?”

I said nothing, and the captain continued, with a dark glance at me⁠—

“I inquired into certain matters relating to Edgar Poe. His abode was pointed out to me and I called at the house. A first disappointment! He had left America, and I could not see him. Unfortunately, being unable to see Edgar Poe, I was unable to refer to Arthur Gordon Pym in the case. That bold pioneer of the Antarctic regions was dead! As the American poet had stated, at the close of the narrative of his adventures, Gordon’s death had already been made known to the public by the daily press.”

What Captain Len Guy said was true; but, in common with all the readers of the romance, I had taken this declaration for an artifice of the novelist. My notion was that, as he either could not or dared not wind up so extraordinary a work of imagination, Poe had given it to be understood that he had not received the last three chapters from Arthur Pym, whose life had ended under sudden and deplorable circumstances which Poe did not make known.

“Then,” continued the captain, “Edgar Poe being absent, Arthur Pym being dead, I had only one thing to do; to find the man who had been the fellow-traveller of Arthur Pym, that Dirk Peters who had followed him to the very verge of the high latitudes, and whence they had both returned⁠—how? This is not known. Did they come back in company? The narrative does not say, and there are obscure points in that part of it, as in many other places. However, Edgar Poe stated explicitly that Dirk Peters would be able to furnish information relating to the non-communicated chapters, and that he lived