Ned stood up at once. The steward, half strangled, staggered out at a sign from his master. The commander leaned against the table with his arms folded and studied us closely.
“Gentlemen,” he said at last, in a calm, clear voice, “I speak French, English, German and Latin equally well. I could have answered you at our first meeting, but I wanted to know you first, and then to think. Your stories agreed, so now I know who you are: Professor Pierre Aronnax of the Museum of Natural History in Paris, his servant Conseil, and Ned Land, harpooner on board the American frigate Abraham Lincoln.”
He spoke without any accent, and yet I did not feel that he was a Frenchman.
“I needed time to decide what to do with you,” he went on. “Bad luck has brought you to a man who has broken every tie with humanity. You have come to disturb my life.”
“We did not mean to,” I said.
“You did not mean to?” he answered, raising his voice a little. “Did the Abraham Lincoln not mean to chase me across every sea? Did Mr. Land not mean to strike my ship with his harpoon?”
“Sir,” I said, “ships have been damaged in collisions with your submarine, and people in America and Europe were alarmed. The Abraham Lincoln believed it was hunting a dangerous sea monster.”
A half-smile crossed his face. “Professor, can you honestly tell me that your frigate would not have fired at a submarine just as quickly as at a monster?”
I could not. Commander Farragut would certainly have thought it his duty to destroy a machine like this one.
“So I have the right to treat you as enemies,” he continued. “Nothing forced me to welcome you on board. I could put you back on the deck of this ship, dive, and forget that you ever existed. Would that not be my right?”
“It might be the right of a savage,” I answered, “but not of a civilized man.”
“Professor,” he replied quickly, “I am not what you call a civilized man! I have done with society entirely, for reasons which I alone have the right to judge. I do not obey its laws, and I ask you never to speak of them to me again!”
His eyes flashed with anger and contempt, and I caught a glimpse of a terrible past. This man lived outside human laws and beyond their reach. Who could follow him to the bottom of the sea? Only God, if he believed in God, and his conscience, if he had one, could judge him.
After a long silence he spoke again, more quietly.
“You will stay on board, since fate has brought you here. You will be free, and in return I ask only one thing. Now and then, something may happen that forces me to lock you in your cabins for a few hours or a few days. I do not wish to use force, so I expect you to obey without question. Do you accept?”
So strange things happened on board, things that nobody from the outside world was meant to see.
“We accept,” I said. “But what do you mean by free?”
“Free to come and go, and to see everything that happens here, except at those rare times. Free as my companions and I are.”
“But that is only the freedom of a prisoner to walk around his cell! Must we never see our country, our friends or our families again?”
“Never, Professor.”
“Well,” cried Ned, “I’ll never give my word that I won’t try to escape!”
“I did not ask for your word, Mr. Land,” the commander answered coldly. “You are my prisoners of war. You attacked me, and you have discovered the secret of my whole life. Do you think I will send you back to a world that must never hear of me again? By keeping you here, I am protecting myself, not you.”
I saw that no argument would move him. Then his voice grew gentler.
“Professor Aronnax, I know your book on the great depths of the sea. I have read it many times. You went as far as science on land allowed, but you have not seen everything. Believe me, you will not regret the time you spend on my ship. You are going to travel through a land of wonders.”
I cannot deny it: these words touched my weak point. For a moment I forgot that no wonder was worth my freedom.
“What should I call you?” I asked.
“Sir,” he answered, “to you I am only Captain Nemo, and you and your companions are only passengers on the Nautilus.”
He sent Ned and Conseil to a meal in their cabin and led me to breakfast in a dining room furnished with simple good taste. Most of the dishes were new to me. They were good, with an unusual flavor, and I was sure they came from the sea.
“You can eat everything without fear,” said Captain Nemo. “For a long time I have eaten nothing from the land, and I am never ill. The sea gives me all I need. This, which you take for beef, is turtle. And this cream is made from the milk of whales.”
“You love the sea, Captain?”
“Yes, I love it! The sea is everything. It covers seven tenths of the earth. It is a great desert where a man is never alone, for he feels life all around him. The sea does not belong to tyrants. On its surface men can still make unjust laws, fight and tear one another to pieces. But ten meters below the surface, their power ends. Ah, Professor, live in the heart of the sea! There I have no master! There I am free!”
He stopped suddenly, as if he had said too much, and walked up and down, deeply moved. Then he grew calm and cold again and offered to show me his ship.
A door at the back of the dining room opened into a library. Tall black cabinets held a great number of books, with soft leather sofas below them.
“There must be six or seven thousand books here,” I said.
“Twelve thousand, Professor. They are the only ties that still bind me to the land. But I was finished with the world on the day my Nautilus dived for the first time. That day I bought my last books, and since then I like to think that men no longer think or write. These books are yours to use.”
There were books on science and literature in every language, all mixed together, but I did not see a single one on politics.
Then he opened another door, and I entered the salon, a large, brilliantly lit room. It was a real museum. Paintings by great masters, Raphael, Leonardo da Vinci, Rubens and many others, hung on the walls, statues stood in the corners, and a large organ was covered with sheet music by Mozart, Beethoven and Wagner.
“I can see that you are an artist,” I said.
“Only an amateur. Once I loved to collect these beautiful works. They are my last memories of a world that is dead to me. And I am dead too, Professor, as dead as those of your friends who lie under the earth.”
He fell silent, lost in thought, and seemed to forget me. I turned to the glass cases along the walls. They held the most precious things the sea had ever shown a naturalist: corals, rare shells worth a fortune, pearls of every color, some larger than a pigeon’s egg. Where had he found the money for all this?
“You are looking at my shells?” he said. “I gathered every one of them with my own hands, and there is no sea on earth that I have not searched.”
He showed me my room, near the front of the ship: not a cabin, but an elegant bedroom. A door led from it into his own room, which was almost like a monk’s: a small iron bed, a table, and instruments on the walls.
“Please sit down,” he said, and he began to explain.