Captain Nemo: The Fantastic History of a Dark Genius (65 page)

Squirming and stuttering, Verne helped carry the injured Sardinian down into the sub-marine.
 
The long-haired man bled profusely from dozens of deep wounds, and Verne’s clothes were soon soaked with scarlet.
 
He felt ashamed that he could do nothing more to assist the man.
 
He wasn’t a doctor, and knew little about first aid -- had never even seen such terrible wounds before in his life.

Up above, the giant squid grew more agitated.
 
The stumps of its severed tentacles thumped against the
Nautilus
, while the other appendages thrashed like angry cobras.
 
When Nemo tried to tear his spear free from the mangled mouth, the parrotlike beak snapped its shaft, leaving the captain without a weapon.

One brash crewman, a broad-shouldered Englishman, ran forward and slashed with his scimitar between the squid’s eyes.
 
The monster reached out a huge tentacle as if to swat a fly and grabbed him.
 
Before Nemo or the other men could react, the giant squid released a burst of black dye, spraying clouds of acrid-smelling ink.
 
The terrible fumes stung their eyes and blinded them.

Then the squid plunged back into the ocean, still grasping the hapless Englishman as if demanding some small victory in payment for its pain. . . .

Nemo and the other survivors trembled with exhaustion.
 
Covered with slime and blood, they stared at the black murk dissipating in the waters.
 
Though the cold Atlantic mist made the vessel’s hull slippery and treacherous, at least the moisture rinsed away the oozing ichor.
 

Nemo shuddered as he looked around himself, grieving for the loss of the crewman.
 
He looked as if he wanted to collapse and weep.
 
After a long, uncertain moment, they staggered back down the ladder into the sub-marine.

On the deck below, a helpless Verne sat holding the bloodied man.
 
He had fashioned makeshift bandages, but it was no use.
 
Before Nemo could reach his man, the Sardinian also died.

#

The
Nautilus
crew wrapped the victim’s body in a pale shroud.
 
During a somber ceremony, the crewmen said their farewells, each in his own language, both to the dead Sardinian and to the lost Englishman.
 
They had all been together for years, laboring in Rurapente under the worst of circumstances. . . .

Maintaining a wounded silence, the
Nautilus
cruised aimlessly until Nemo found a private reef studded with waving seaweeds and beautiful shells.
 
He and several of his men suited up in underwater garments and cycled through the airlock.
 
Verne declined to accompany them, feeling that it wasn’t his place.
 
Instead, he went to the salon and watched through the broad windows.

The funeral procession plodded in slow motion through the waters, carrying their wrapped burden.
 
Verne’s heart grew heavy watching the poignant march as the
Nautilus
crew -- men without a country -- laid their slain comrade to rest.
 

Moving like a machine, Nemo helped pile undersea rocks in a cairn over the body, leaving a watery grave that no other man could ever visit.
 
They built a second mound in honor of the lost Englishman. . . .

When they returned to the vessel, Cyrus Harding piloted the
Nautilus
, while Nemo isolated himself in his private cabin to mourn.
 
He didn’t emerge for an entire day.
 
Finally he came out to speak with Verne.

“I must take you back now, Jules,” he said, his expression dark and his voice grim.
 
“It was a mistake to bring you here.
 
This is no picaresque journey, no amusing adventure for a starry-eyed dreamer.
 
I have no time for sightseers.”

#

The
Nautilus
dropped Verne off late at night on the coast of France, north of Paimboeuf.
 
Afire with enthusiasm, his journal full of ideas from Nemo’s stories, he watched the armored sub-marine sink beneath the water, cutting a wake out into the ocean.

Verne waved farewell, and headed back toward home, thoroughly inspired to write further books.

iv

For most of his life, whenever Jules Verne had an opportunity to see Caroline Hatteras, he leaped at the chance . . . and dreaded it at the same time.
 
She still made him tongue-tied and light-headed, and he still imagined a life with her, though that fantasy was even more unrealistic than his strangest extraordinary voyages.

Caroline and he always had much to discuss, old-time reminiscences and shared experiences.
 
Though Verne had already been married for eleven years now (and Caroline, ostensibly, for twenty-one) the thought of being alone in a room with her, face to face, still gave him chills.
 

Before leaving his flat on a blustery day, Verne told Honorine that he had a “business luncheon,” such as he often scheduled with his publisher Hetzel.
 
In spite of the many years that had passed, he’d never talked about Caroline with his wife, had never confessed how the fiery-blond woman still haunted his dreams with lost opportunities.

A similar reticence kept Verne from telling Caroline about Nemo and his sub-marine vessel.
 
Nemo had strongly hinted that he preferred for her to continue believing him dead, now that he could never come back to her.
 
He wanted Caroline to make her own life, without him -- but Verne knew she never would.
 

Now, the prospect of explaining that her long-lost love was still alive, against all odds (as usual), raised a morass of unresolved emotions in him.
 
Five years had passed since his voyage aboard the
Nautilus
.
 
Caroline divided her time between Paris and Nantes, yet Verne had not gone out of his way to see her.
 
He had stewed over the secret long and hard, and had decided that she must know.

Though Verne had kept his distance from her over the years, not trusting himself, he had also kept track of Caroline’s successes.
 
Madame Hatteras’s rivals resented the fact that a powerful, outspoken woman managed such an important business concern, but customers who admired her verve and ingenuity trusted her to take risks that more conservative merchants would not consider.
 

The sleek ships of ‘Aronnax, Merchant’ often brought commodities to port weeks sooner than those of her competitors.
 
Caroline was willing to consider new designs for faster clippers, and she investigated alternate sea routes.
 
Her childhood fascination with geography had served her well, though long ago her mother had scolded her for ‘unseemly pursuits.’
 
The captains of her fleet -- many of whom had worked for her father, or had been loyal to the famous Captain Hatteras -- were now devoted to Caroline.

To gain further business, she had also capitalized on her notoriety from the balloon journey across Africa.
 
With delight she had read Verne’s fictionalized and melodramatic account in
Five Weeks
, and had written him a congratulatory letter.
 
He still kept the handwritten note in a locked drawer in his study, treasuring it. . . .

In the end, it had been Caroline who’d invited
him
to her offices and, despite his better judgment, Verne didn’t have the heart to refuse.

Now, striding brightly down the river walkway, past left-bank brasseries and bookshops, Verne smelled the fresh air.
 
A brief rainstorm had passed during the previous evening, infusing the morning with a brisk dampness that made his nostrils tingle.
 
Gulls flew above like kites.
 
Whistling with the anticipation of seeing Caroline again, Verne could think of no more admirable place to live than Paris.
 
The City of Light had become so beautiful since Emperor Napoleon III had rebuilt it after so much civil unrest.

When he arrived on the tulip-surrounded doorstep of ‘Aronnax, Merchant,’ he gave his name to the clerk.
 
“Monsieur Jules Verne?”
 
The clerk squinted at him through gold-framed spectacles.
 
“The author?
 
Esteemed storyteller of the Extraordinary Voyages?”

Both pleased and embarrassed, Verne nodded.
 
His full beard, long nose, and penetrating eyes had become a trademark in Hetzel’s magazine.
 
People often recognized him on the streets, and he still didn’t know how to respond.

In the years since
Five Weeks in a Balloon
, readers had come to anticipate each new Jules Verne novel.
 
He had followed his balloon adventure with a massive epic called
Captain Hatteras
-- named for Caroline’s husband -- about a man’s quest to find the North Pole.

Of course, Verne had no special knowledge of what had happened to the real Hatteras, who had disappeared two decades earlier.
 
Using an author’s license, he had made up a story about bleak and unexplored lands.
 
In the novel, the obsessed but admirable hero had succeeded in his magnificent quest, though his incredible ordeals had driven him mad in the end.

Even believing Nemo dead, Caroline clung to her own reasons for not remarrying, preferring a life alone to a dreary marriage.
 
By day, she ran an important business and made her decisions, while she kept evenings free for painting or sketching or composing music.
 

How would she react to the news he brought today?
 
He cursed himself for having waited so long, but he had always made excuses, both intimidated by Caroline and longing to see her.
 
Every month, he kept expecting Nemo to change his mind and come back to civilization, but now he knew that would never happen.
 

The enthusiastic clerk startled him by reaching out to shake his hand.
 
“Monsieur, I have read
A Journey to the Centre of the Earth
.
 
Simply amazing.
 
My congratulations on your remarkable imagination.”
 

Pierre-Jules Hetzel couldn’t have been more pleased at the public reaction to these stories.
 
Each holiday season, Verne’s novels were bound in illustrated gift editions, after being serialized in Hetzel’s
Magasin d’Education et de Récréation
.
 
The number of readers grew with every volume.

Verne and Honorine now lived in a larger flat with a separate vacation residence on the damp seacoast he loved so well, though his wife and her daughters found it dreary and cold.
 
Feisty Michel just seemed fussy.
 
Even at seven years old, the boy had to complain about everything. . . .

Verne’s imagination went farther afield for his fourth novel,
From the Earth to the Moon
, in which he accepted Caliph Robur’s idea of a gigantic cannon that could fire a projectile with sufficient force to escape Earth’s gravity.
 
Intrepid explorers -- super-confident Americans, in this case -- rode inside the capsule to reach the Moon.
 
Because he’d been in a good mood, delighted to have secured a writing career at last, Verne added much humor to the Moon book, poking gentle fun at overly ambitious Americans.
 

In his most complex novel to date,
The Children of Captain Grant
, he took details from the
Coralie
and added Nemo’s reminiscences of the great and honorable Captain Grant, the pirate attacks, and being marooned on an island.
 
Nemo
again . . . always inspired by Nemo.
 
What is it about the man?

“I . . . I have come to see Madame Hatteras,” Verne told the clerk.
 
“I believe she is expecting me for lunch?”
 
Bright and eager, the bespectacled man bustled off to fetch Caroline. . . .