Page:An Antarctic Mystery.pdf/54

36 "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.