THE ROOM OF ILLUSION
That part of Brooklyn in which Cleggett lived overlooks a wide sweep of
water where the East River merges with New York Bay. From his windows
he could gaze out upon the bustling harbor craft and see the ships
going forth to the great mysterious sea.
He walked home across the Brooklyn Bridge, and as he walked he still
hummed tunes. Occasionally, still with the rapt and fatal manner which
had daunted the managing editor, he would pause and flex his wrist, and
then suddenly deliver a ferocious thrust with his walking-stick.
The fifth of these lunges had an unexpected result. Cleggett directed
it toward the door of an unpainted toolhouse, a temporary structure
near one of the immense stone pillars from which the bridge is swung.
But, as he lunged, the toolhouse door opened, and a policeman, who was
coming out wiping his mouth on the back of his hand, received a jab in
the pit of a somewhat protuberant stomach.
The officer grunted and stepped backward; then he came on, raising his
night-stick.
"Why, it's--it's McCarthy!" exclaimed Cleggett, who had also sprung
back, as the light fell on the other's face.
"Mr. Cleggett, by the powers!" said the officer, pausing and lowering
his 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 was
a reporter, and more recently had renewed the acquaintance in his walks
across 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're
foriver grinnin' to yersilf an' makin' thim funny jabs at nothin' as ye
cross the bridge. Are ye subjict to stiffness in the wrists, Mr.
Cleggett?"
"Perhaps it's writer's cramp," said Cleggett, indulging the pleasant
humor that was on him. He was really thinking that, with $500,000 of
his own, he had written his last headline, edited his last piece of
copy, sharpened his last pencil.
"Writer's cramp? Is it so?" mused McCarthy. "Newspapers is great
things, ain't they now? And so's writin' and readin'. Gr-r-reat
things! But if ye'll take my advise, Mr. Cleggett, ye'll kape that
writin' and readin' within bounds. Too much av thim rots the brains."
"I'll remember that," said Cleggett. And he playfully jabbed the
officer again as he turned away.
"G'wan wid ye!" protested McCarthy. "Ye're soused! The scent av it's
in the air. If I'm compilled to run yez in f'r assaultin' an officer
ye'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 does
not lie in order to veil his inmost, sweetest thoughts from an
unsympathetic world?
That was not an ordinary jab with an ordinary cane which Cleggett had
directed towards the toolhouse door. It was a thrust en carte; the
thrust of a brilliant swordsman; the thrust of a master; a terrible
thrust. It was meant for as pernicious a bravo as ever infested the
pages of romantic fiction. Cleggett had been slaying these gentry a
dozen times a day for years. He had pinked four of them on the way
across the bridge, before McCarthy, with his stomach and his realism,
stopped the lunge intended for the fifth. But this is not exactly the
sort of thing one finds it easy to confide to a policeman, be he ever
so friendly a policeman.
Cleggett--Old Clegg, the copyreader--Clegg, the commonplace--C. J.
Cleggett, the Brooklynite-this person whom young reporters conceived of
as the staid, dry prophet of the dusty Fact--was secretly a mighty
reservoir of unwritten, unacted, unlived, unspoken romance. He ate it,
he drank it, he breathed it, he dreamed it. The usual copyreader, when
he closes his eyes and smiles upon a pleasant inward vision, is
thinking of starting a chicken-farm in New Jersey. But Cleggett--with
gray sprinkled in his hair, sober of face and precise of manner, as the
world knew him--lived a hidden life which was one long, wild adventure.
Nobody had ever suspected it. But his room might have given to the
discerning a clue to the real man behind the mask which he
assumed--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 the
bridge, and switched the electric light on, the gleams fell upon an
astonishing clutter of books and arms....
Stevenson, cavalry sabers, W. Clark Russell, pistols, and Dumas; Jack
London, poignards, bowie knives, Stanley Weyman, Captain Marryat, and
Dumas; 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. Du
Boisgobey, Malay krises, Walter Scott, stick pistols, scimitars,
Anthony Hope, single sticks, foils, Dumas; jungles of arms, jumbles of
books; arms of all makes and periods; arms on the walls, in the
corners, over the fireplace, leaning against the bookshelves, lying in
ambush under the bed, peeping out of the wardrobe, propping the windows
open, serving as paper weights; pictures, warlike and romantic prints
and engravings, pinned to the walls with daggers; in the wardrobe,
coats and hats hanging from poignards and stilettos thrust into the
wood instead of from nails or hooks. But of all the weapons it was the
rapiers, of all the books it was Dumas, that he loved. There was Dumas
in French, Dumas in English, Dumas with pictures, Dumas unillustrated,
Dumas in cloth, Dumas in leather, Dumas in boards, Dumas in paper
covers. Cleggett had been twenty years getting these arms and books
together; often he had gone without a dinner in order to make a payment
on some blade he fancied. And each weapon was also a book to him; he
sensed their stories as he handled them; he felt the personalities of
their former owners stirring in him when he picked them up. It was in
that room that he dreamed; which is to say, it was in that room that he
lived his real life.
Cleggett walked over to his writing desk and pulled out a bulky
manuscript. It was his own work. Is it necessary to hint that it was
a tale essentially romantic in character?
He flung it into the grate and set fire to it. It represented the
labor of two years, but as he watched it burn, stirring the sheets now
and 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 write
romances? Why should anyone write anything who is free to live? For
the first time in his existence Cleggett was free.
He picked up a sword. It was one of his favorite rapiers. Sometimes
people came out of the books--sometimes shadowy forms came back to
claim the weapons that had been theirs--and Cleggett fought them.
There was not an unscarred piece of furniture in the place. He bent
the flexible blade in his hands, tried the point of it, formally
saluted, brought the weapon to parade, dallied with his imaginary
opponent's sword for an instant....
It seemed as if one of those terrible, but brilliant, duels, with which
that room was so familiar, was about to be enacted.... But he laid the
rapier down. After all, the rapier is scarcely a thing of this
century. Cleggett, for the first time, felt a little impatient with
the rapier. It is all very well to DREAM with a rapier. But now, he
was 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 and
mystery, flooding in from the farther, dark, mysterious ocean, all but
submerged lower Manhattan; high and beautiful above these waves of
shadow, triumphing over them and accentuating them, shone a star from
the top of the Woolworth building; flecks of light indicated the noble
curve of that great bridge which soars like a song in stone and steel
above the shifting waters; the river itself was dotted here and there
with moving lights; it was a nocturne waiting for its Whistler; here
sea 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 was
salt in his nostrils.... And, staring out into the breathing night, he
saw a succession of pictures....
Stripped to a pair of cotton trousers, with a dripping cutlass in one
hand and a Colt's revolver in the other, an adventurer at the head of a
bunch of dogs as desperate as himself fought his way across the reeking
decks of a Chinese junk, to close in single combat with a gigantic
one-eyed pirate who stood by the helm with a ring of dead men about him
and a great two-handed sword upheaved.... This adventurer was--Clement
J. Cleggett! ...
Through the phosphorescent waters of a summer sea, reckless of cruising
sharks, a sailor's clasp knife in his teeth, glided noiselessly a
strong swimmer; he reached the side of a schooner yacht from which rose
the wild cries of beauty in distress, swarmed aboard with a muttered
prayer that was half a curse, swept the water from his eyes, and with
pale, 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 the
thing--pirates and the China Seas!"
And with one frightful sweep of his blade he disemboweled a sofa
cushion; the second blow clove his typewriting machine clean to the
tattoo marks upon its breast; the third decapitated a sectional
bookcase.
But what is a sectional bookcase to a man with $500,000 in his pocket
and the Seven Seas before him?