The Cruise of the Jasper B. | Page 6

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