The Cruise of the Jasper B.

by Don Marquis

  CHAPTER II

  THE ROOM OF ILLUSION

  That part of Brooklyn in which Cleggett lived overlooks a wide sweep ofwater where the East River merges with New York Bay. From his windowshe could gaze out upon the bustling harbor craft and see the shipsgoing forth to the great mysterious sea.

  He walked home across the Brooklyn Bridge, and as he walked he stillhummed tunes. Occasionally, still with the rapt and fatal manner whichhad daunted the managing editor, he would pause and flex his wrist, andthen suddenly deliver a ferocious thrust with his walking-stick.

  The fifth of these lunges had an unexpected result. Cleggett directedit toward the door of an unpainted toolhouse, a temporary structurenear one of the immense stone pillars from which the bridge is swung.But, as he lunged, the toolhouse door opened, and a policeman, who wascoming out wiping his mouth on the back of his hand, received a jab inthe pit of a somewhat protuberant stomach.

  The officer grunted and stepped backward; then he came on, raising hisnight-stick.

  "Why, it's--it's McCarthy!" exclaimed Cleggett, who had also sprungback, as the light fell on the other's face.

  "Mr. Cleggett, by the powers!" said the officer, pausing and loweringhis lifted club. "Are ye soused, man? Or is it your way of sayin'good avenin' to your frinds?"

  Cleggett smiled. He had first known McCarthy years before when he wasa reporter, and more recently had renewed the acquaintance in his walksacross the bridge.

  "I didn't know you were there, McCarthy," he said.

  "No?" said the officer. "And who were ye jabbin' at, thin?"

  "I was just limbering up my wrist," said Cleggett.

  "'Tis a quare thing to do," persisted McCarthy, albeit good-humoredly."And now I mind I've seen ye do the same before, Mr. Cleggett. You'reforiver grinnin' to yersilf an' makin' thim funny jabs at nothin' as yecross the bridge. Are ye subjict to stiffness in the wrists, Mr.Cleggett?"

  "Perhaps it's writer's cramp," said Cleggett, indulging the pleasanthumor that was on him. He was really thinking that, with $500,000 ofhis own, he had written his last headline, edited his last piece ofcopy, sharpened his last pencil.

  "Writer's cramp? Is it so?" mused McCarthy. "Newspapers is greatthings, ain't they now? And so's writin' and readin'. Gr-r-reatthings! But if ye'll take my advise, Mr. Cleggett, ye'll kape thatwritin' and readin' within bounds. Too much av thim rots the brains."

  "I'll remember that," said Cleggett. And he playfully jabbed theofficer again as he turned away.

  "G'wan wid ye!" protested McCarthy. "Ye're soused! The scent av it'sin the air. If I'm compilled to run yez in f'r assaultin' an officerye'll get the cramps out av thim wrists breakin' stone, maybe.Cr-r-r-amps, indade!"

  Cramps, indeed! Oh, Clement J. Cleggett, you liar! And yet, who doesnot lie in order to veil his inmost, sweetest thoughts from anunsympathetic world?

  That was not an ordinary jab with an ordinary cane which Cleggett haddirected towards the toolhouse door. It was a thrust en carte; thethrust of a brilliant swordsman; the thrust of a master; a terriblethrust. It was meant for as pernicious a bravo as ever infested thepages of romantic fiction. Cleggett had been slaying these gentry adozen times a day for years. He had pinked four of them on the wayacross the bridge, before McCarthy, with his stomach and his realism,stopped the lunge intended for the fifth. But this is not exactly thesort of thing one finds it easy to confide to a policeman, be he everso friendly a policeman.

  Cleggett--Old Clegg, the copyreader--Clegg, the commonplace--C. J.Cleggett, the Brooklynite-this person whom young reporters conceived ofas the staid, dry prophet of the dusty Fact--was secretly a mightyreservoir of unwritten, unacted, unlived, unspoken romance. He ate it,he drank it, he breathed it, he dreamed it. The usual copyreader, whenhe closes his eyes and smiles upon a pleasant inward vision, isthinking of starting a chicken-farm in New Jersey. But Cleggett--withgray sprinkled in his hair, sober of face and precise of manner, as theworld knew him--lived a hidden life which was one long, wild adventure.

  Nobody had ever suspected it. But his room might have given to thediscerning a clue to the real man behind the mask which heassumed--which he had been forced to assume in order to earn a living.When he reached the apartment, a few minutes after his encounter on thebridge, and switched the electric light on, the gleams fell upon anastonishing clutter of books and arms....

  Stevenson, cavalry sabers, W. Clark Russell, pistols, and Dumas; JackLondon, poignards, bowie knives, Stanley Weyman, Captain Marryat, andDumas; sword canes, Scottish claymores, Cuban machetes, Conan Doyle,Harrison Ainsworth, dress swords, and Dumas; stilettos, daggers,hunting knives, Fenimore Cooper, G. P. R. James, broadswords, Dumas;Gustave Aimard, Rudyard Kipling, dueling swords, Dumas; F. DuBoisgobey, Malay krises, Walter Scott, stick pistols, scimitars,Anthony Hope, single sticks, foils, Dumas; jungles of arms, jumbles ofbooks; arms of all makes and periods; arms on the walls, in thecorners, over the fireplace, leaning against the bookshelves, lying inambush under the bed, peeping out of the wardrobe, propping the windowsopen, serving as paper weights; pictures, warlike and romantic printsand engravings, pinned to the walls with daggers; in the wardrobe,coats and hats hanging from poignards and stilettos thrust into thewood instead of from nails or hooks. But of all the weapons it was therapiers, of all the books it was Dumas, that he loved. There was Dumasin French, Dumas in English, Dumas with pictures, Dumas unillustrated,Dumas in cloth, Dumas in leather, Dumas in boards, Dumas in papercovers. Cleggett had been twenty years getting these arms and bookstogether; often he had gone without a dinner in order to make a paymenton some blade he fancied. And each weapon was also a book to him; hesensed their stories as he handled them; he felt the personalities oftheir former owners stirring in him when he picked them up. It was inthat room that he dreamed; which is to say, it was in that room that helived his real life.

  Cleggett walked over to his writing desk and pulled out a bulkymanuscript. It was his own work. Is it necessary to hint that it wasa tale essentially romantic in character?

  He flung it into the grate and set fire to it. It represented thelabor of two years, but as he watched it burn, stirring the sheets nowand then so the flames would catch them more readily, he smiled,unvisited by even the most shadowy second thought of regret.

  For why the deuce should a man with $500,000 in his pocket writeromances? Why should anyone write anything who is free to live? Forthe first time in his existence Cleggett was free.

  He picked up a sword. It was one of his favorite rapiers. Sometimespeople came out of the books--sometimes shadowy forms came back toclaim the weapons that had been theirs--and Cleggett fought them.There was not an unscarred piece of furniture in the place. He bentthe flexible blade in his hands, tried the point of it, formallysaluted, brought the weapon to parade, dallied with his imaginaryopponent's sword for an instant....

  It seemed as if one of those terrible, but brilliant, duels, with whichthat room was so familiar, was about to be enacted.... But he laid therapier down. After all, the rapier is scarcely a thing of thiscentury. Cleggett, for the first time, felt a little impatient withthe rapier. It is all very well to DREAM with a rapier. But now, hewas free; reality was before him; the world of actual adventure called.He had but to choose!

  He considered. He tried to look into that bright, adventurous future.Presently he went to the window, and gazed out. Tides of night andmystery, flooding in from the farther, dark, mysterious ocean, all butsubmerged lower Manhattan; high and beautiful above these waves ofshadow, triumphing over them and accentuating them, shone a star fromthe top of the Woolworth building; flecks of light indicated the noblecurve of that great bridge which soars like a song in stone and steelabove the shifting waters; the river itself was dotted here and therewith moving lights; it was a nocturne waiting for its Whistler; heresea and city met in glamour and beauty and illusion.

  But it was not the city which called to Cleggett. It was the sea.

  A breeze blew in from the
bay and stirred his window curtains; it wassalt in his nostrils.... And, staring out into the breathing night, hesaw a succession of pictures....

  Stripped to a pair of cotton trousers, with a dripping cutlass in onehand and a Colt's revolver in the other, an adventurer at the head of abunch of dogs as desperate as himself fought his way across the reekingdecks of a Chinese junk, to close in single combat with a giganticone-eyed pirate who stood by the helm with a ring of dead men about himand a great two-handed sword upheaved.... This adventurer was--ClementJ. Cleggett! ...

  Through the phosphorescent waters of a summer sea, reckless of cruisingsharks, a sailor's clasp knife in his teeth, glided noiselessly astrong swimmer; he reached the side of a schooner yacht from which rosethe wild cries of beauty in distress, swarmed aboard with a mutteredprayer that was half a curse, swept the water from his eyes, and withpale, stern face went about the bloody business of a hero.... Again,this adventurer was Clement J. Cleggett!

  Cleggett turned from the window.

  "I'll do it," he cried. "I'll do it!"

  He grasped a cutlass.

  "Pirates!" he cried, swinging it about his head. "That's thething--pirates and the China Seas!"

  And with one frightful sweep of his blade he disemboweled a sofacushion; the second blow clove his typewriting machine clean to thetattoo marks upon its breast; the third decapitated a sectionalbookcase.

  But what is a sectional bookcase to a man with $500,000 in his pocketand the Seven Seas before him?