Archive of Our Own ^beta

I was in my cabin, going over my notes of our journey under the waves, an activity which occupied me often in those quiet evenings without company. Sifting, perhaps, through my time with Captain Nemo as some fish sift through the sandy floor of the ocean for their feed - except that I was sifting for some morsel of truth, a kernel of insight in the seemingly endless volume of experiences, wonders, the world opened to me by this strange man. I still knew so little, and all my knowledge seemed altogether like the traces of peaks in the fog, insufficient to chart anything of the shrouded shoreline much less the continent beyond. In the midst of this revision and reverie, I heard a sound that, sudden and startling, took me several moments to place.

It was a sneeze. Now that may seem like a very small revelation, but the reader will recall that I was on a submarine vessel, some hundreds of miles from any flora, fauna, or any particulates of dust or other debris that may trigger this most basic and involuntary of human actions. I was just coming to the somewhat disorienting realization that I had indeed not heard one single sneeze in all my time aboard, when a repeat came. This was a heavier one and, joined by a brief string of coughs, gave the impression not of a chance respiratory convulsion, but of miserable ill health.

At the very same moment, I saw that the door between my cabin and the Captain’s was ajar: the sounds had been coming to me through it.

“Ah,” thought I: “then the mystery is no mystery at all! When a man spends the better part of the night drenched, battered, and frozen by a storm at open sea, what is more natural than that he should catch cold? Even if that man is Captain Nemo, whose constitution is nearly the match of that of his boat - but though the Nautilus may be iron, its captain is flesh and blood!”

Indeed, strange as it may have been after all I had seen, I was finding it increasingly hard to overlook this last fact.

As soon as the thought passed through my head, my distraction was complete and any hope of returning to my notes was lost. I sat nearly breathless, waiting for any another slip of sound from beyond that door. I was forced to confess that the idea of this extraordinary man fighting such an ordinary ailment riveted my imagination. Would he dismiss it entirely, whom the torments of suffocation under the polar ice had not so much as moved? Or did the plain, practically universal humanity of this plight, reach past the grand part of his mind and induce the yearning, as the most mundane miseries often did most acutely, for simple comfort?

The last time I had intruded upon the Captain in his cabin was all too fresh in my mind: our conversation had been ugly, and now I could not help but think it had been some outburst of painful emotion caused by it that had led him to subject himself to the storm. But with that thought I reasoned that if my actions had, even in part, caused his current condition, it behoved me to at least take some notice of it. I had disturbed him: had been disturbing him for some time, with my unwelcome presence in his sanctum of the Nautilus. The thought that I had done so at detriment to his very health put me in an electrified rush of guilt. I went rushing thoughtlessly to the door.

At my abrupt entrance, the Captain looked sharply up from his desk. My anxiety was heightened to find how visibly unwell he looked: those penetrating eyes were dim, shot with scarlet blood vessels; the complexion, though too dark to show the paleness or flush an illness might induce in a fairer man, was sallow and marked faintly with sweat; his breath, a subtle rasp through parted lips. His voice when he spoke was husky, betraying some congestion of the sinuses and a swelling of the pharynx and larynx that I suspected quite painful.

“Is there any problem, Sir?”

It took me some moments to gather myself.

“I must apologise for intruding upon you,” I said at last. “But Captain - are you quite all right?”

“Perfectly,” answered he: his tone cool and masterful, but his thickened voice not entirely its equal.

“Then I must apologise again, but I think you are mistaken.”

“Oh?” said Captain Nemo, now arch. He stood up from his desk to face me: rather close up, despite the size of the cabin. I noted that one of his hands remained on the desk, as if to brace him. “Do you say, Professor Aronnax, that I am unable to judge my own state of being?”

In this instant, as soon as he had finished speaking, the Captain whirled back away and snatched up a handkerchief from his desk. He brought it with both hands to his face and wrenched into it with a third, barely restrained sneeze.

I would not have better opportunity: I seized my moment.

“Evidently not, if you would call this ‘perfectly’! How long have you been sneezing like this?”

“Does it concern you?”

“As a doctor, I must say it does.”

“It should not,” He said it with nonchalance I judged sincere, though then paused to blow his nose with a sound that gave me no encouragement at all as for the state of his respiratory tract. “The Nautilus is in safe waters; her crew are, as you know, able and experienced. Even if my health is briefly compromised, nothing else would be.”

His dismissal did nothing to lessen my agitation: too often, I thought, had I seen him show too little regard to his own well-being. It was one thing to do this in the service of some cause, some worthy act, where the limitations of Man’s mortal vessel may not suffer to impede the purposeful ambition of his mind. But this, I could credit to nothing but this man’s prideful stubbornness. Perhaps it was the instincts of a physician, but I could not allow myself to be so easily dismissed.

“Sir,” I said. “You will not like my saying so, but as I am a doctor, and moreover as your companion on this voyage - “

“An unwilling one!” said he, amid coughing into his fist. “Or haven’t you made that clear?”

“Even so - ! I will say it. You are not your Nautilus. She never wearies, that is true, nor does she take ill. But for you both are possible, and, I judge, in a state of worrying co-incidence. I have been thinking for some time that you demand too much of your body: this cold you have caught is its cry for reprieve.”

Anger blazed through him, and he made to draw straight and, I suspected, throw me out of his cabin. But the cough, increasing, now shuddered hard all through his frame. He was unable to reply. My words ran away from me, “Yesterday, when I joined you in the storm - “

“That,” Captain Nemo snapped, having barely caught his breath, “was a terrible foolishness. One I warn you not to repeat.”

“If I was foolish to risk an hour, how much riskier to endure half the night?”

“I know these storms, Sir. The risk that you so fear is to me an old friend. I ask none of my crew to bear it with me; I do not ask it of you. Do you think it would please me to see you battered to death by the waves, or chilled and wasting away with fever? No, Monsieur Aronnax. The storms, I face alone!”

I stood shaken again, unprepared for this outburst; the Captain, too, I saw, had not planned to be thus carried away, and had been left quite badly winded. He sat back in his chair and closed his eyes with a visible attitude of exhaustion the likes of which I had never seen from him before.

What was in the mind of this singular man, who so jealousy declared his solitude, yet had all this time been concerned with my well-being? What had been in that mind yesterday on the deck, when I had believed him unaware, unmindful of my presence? My thoughts raced, yet I could not permit myself to be distracted from the core of the matter. Yesterday, I had risked my life to witness him at that most sublime moment: I could not now turn away from his most mundane humanity.

Setting a different course, I asked, “Do you derive medicine from the sea, Sir?”

“Yes, though not often,” the Captain spoke in almost instinctive reply. Although his voice was very hoarse, I had gambled correctly that he would readily answer any question of mine on his innovations aboard the Nautilus. “My crew are hardy men, and the ailments of the land rarely troubles them. I derive a drug from certain algae, not known on the surface for reason of the depths in which it grows, good against pain and inflammation; another, from a the innards of a sea slug, induces a peaceful sleep. With the addition of alcohol distilled from seaweed for the cleaning of chance wounds, we have needed no other. So you see, Sir: the ocean furnishes my apothecary as readily, as fully as it furnishes my larder.”

I had, I realized, half expected among the wonders of the Nautilus to be a cure for the common cold. “Have you employed any of these remedies?”

“Many times, to excellent effect.”

“And for yourself, Captain, here and now?”

“What need?”

“Only that they may do you good.”

“Good!” said he with sharp mockery, as though awakening suddenly to my purpose. “Is this now a care of yours, who wants nothing but to be gone from my Nautilus? Leave me, Monsieur. I am, as you say, ill and weary. I have no patience for your company.”

No dismissal could be clearer. Though I could not fail to note that into this brusque outburst was also folded a confession: the Captain was in poor state. What part his physical discomfort played in the foul temper he was in, I couldn’t tell. Yet even as I left his cabin, it was clear to me that he will not, under any circumstance, seek any aid for relief of his condition, even from his incomparably loyal crew. No: though he trusted them with the magnificence of the Nautilus, the mortal foibles of his own body were another matter. What was more, I knew there was no other trained physician on board.

I can hardly say what possessed me, then, but exiting the saloon I did something that I would hardly have thought imaginable under other circumstances. I wandered the ship a little while until I found a member of that crew, and adopting a tone of perfect confidence, said to him: “Captain Nemo has granted me leave to access your store of medicine for the treatment of one of my companions. Here is what I will need.”

Did I fool that fellow, who looked at me with a face as sealed as the ship’s hatch separating us from the world without? I do not know nor suppose I would ever find out. But whatever his reasons, within minutes he had furnished me with all I asked for.

I returned to find the door between mine and Captain Nemo’s cabins shut, although from the position of the handle, unlocked. Still, to barge directly back in was to do nothing but invite escalation in the tension between us. I was forced to marshal my patience, consider my approach, and sit to listen with a heavy heart to the sounds of the man suffering in the room just next to my own.