The Smart Set/Volume 71/Number 4/The Crusader
The Crusader
By Mary Jane Hammett
BERT PIRTLE fidgeted impatiently with his newspaper until the last loose thread had been severed by his wife’s little sharp teeth, and with a gesture of finality she had taken off her thimble; then he bore the robe off to the bedroom.
Drawing it down over his head and shoulders before the bureau glass, he perceived that a miracle had taken place: suddenly, as the folds of the garment had settled, Bert Pirtle had been whisked away, was gone from this room wherein every night for seven years he had slept with his wife. In the place where he had been stood a stranger, though perhaps not a strange man, for the newcomer seemed rather a spirit, a symbol, than a thing of frail bone and flesh. The figure within the white robe—if figure it really was—loomed larger and taller than the vanished Bert Pirtle had ever been, and was for all its shapelessness more pronouncedly existent. Out of twin holes—neatly finished with button-hole stitching—in the peaked hood eyes burned with an almost ineffable glow of holy purpose. It was not a man that stood before the mirror now, but a spirit: the spirit of a nation, even a race.
As he stood there, not moving, Bert Pirtle saw a vision. In one of his old school-books had been a picture of a Crusader, a white surcoat bearing a large cross worn over his armor. He remembered the picture now, not only remembered it but faced it across the oak top of the bureau. For the first time he visualized that Crusader, realized the wonderful pageantry of the Crusades, really saw the flower of Christendom—separate identities lost within iron helms even as his own selfness was lost behind white sheeting—moving in a strangely clear white light toward Jerusalem.
Beyond the lone figure in the foreground the glass held long marching columns, massive phalanxes of men who were iron under their snowy robes with emblazoned scarlet crosses going out to meet the Saracen; sunlight glinting on weapons and trappings of gold and silver and on plumes and banners of green and crimson and purple; dust swirling behind and overhead. And somewhere in one of those sacred regiments was he who had once been Bert Pirtle but who now was simply—with an almost divine simplicity—a knight.
He was unused to dreams of such intensity—the Bert Pirtle who stood in front of the bureau mirror—his body quivered, he breathed gulpingly, perspiration started from his pores. Never had he known such exaltation, not even at the initiation the night before, when he had stood on Nigger Hill among a white-shrouded throng, grotesque in the light of a gigantic bonfire, listening to and repeating a long, strange, inspiring, and not easily comprehensible oath.
Presently the swirling dust blotted out the files of men in the mirror and then out of the saffron cloud came a single rider all in white upon a white charger—another who rode in a Cause. A second school-day memory came to the man who dreamed; under the white hood his mouth muttered a name. “Galahad!”
The bedroom door opened. A baby tripped over the sill, thudded in a heap on the floor, rolled into the room, and bounced to its feet with awkward lightness. The child’s eyes widened at the sight of the figure before the bureau, two pink palms beat the air, a shriek of pure ecstasy came from its mouth. It tottered across the floor toward the man, gurgling joyously:
“Peekaboo! Papa play peekaboo!”
