He signalled the bartender again. They emptied their glasses, and he told her, “Well, I’m going to run along. I’ve got just about the price of a meal left.”
“Won’t you dance with me before you go?”
“No,” he said, a warm feeling of renunciation flooding him, “you run along and get a live one.”
“I don’t care whether you’ve got any money or not,” she said gravely. And then, resting one hand lightly on his sleeve, “Let me lend—”
He backed away shaking his head. “So long!” He turned toward the door.
The girl in soiled brown silk called out to him as he passed the end of the bar where she stood drinking with two men, “It’s too good to be true!” He smiled courteous agreement and went out into the street.
He stood for a moment beside the door, leaning against the wall, looking at the hazy figures around him — servicemen from San Diego in the uniforms of three branches, tourists, thieves, people who defied classification, the Mexicans (special policemen, all of them, rumor said) standing along the curb, the dogs — tasting a melancholy disgust at the tawdriness of this place which he thought could so easily be a gay play-spot.
From the doorway of the saloon he had just left, a pale girl spoke listlessly: “Come on in and get happy.”
He raised an arm in a doubtful gesture. “Look at ’em,” he ordered sadly, “a flock of—” He thrust his hands into his trouser pockets and walked down the street grinning. He’d make a damned fool of himself yet!
A rack of picture post cards in the window of a curio shop caught his eye. He went in and bought half a dozen. Five of them he sent to friends in Philadelphia and New York. Over the sixth he pondered for some time: he could think of lots of people to send it to but he couldn’t remember their addresses. Finally he sent it to a former casual acquaintance whom he hadn’t seen since before the war but whose address he remembered because it was 444 Fourth Avenue. He penciled the same message on all six cards. “They tell me the States have gone dry.”
In the street again he searched his pockets and counted his resources: eighty-five cents in silver and two return tickets: one from Tijuana to San Diego and the other from there to the hospital.
A husky voice whined at his elbow: “Say, buddy, can you give me the price of a cup of coffee?”
Paul laughed. “Fifty-fifty.” he cried. “I got eighty-five cents. You get forty and we match for the odd nickel.” He spun a coin in the air and was elated to find he had won. In an alley entrance across the street a San Diego stage was loading: he went over to it and sat beside the driver. He slumped down in the scat, half dozing through the ride back to the city, while behind him a girl with an undeveloped body and too-finely-drawn features sang a popular song in a thin, plaintive voice, and her companions — two sailors from the Pacific fleet — argued loudly some question having to do with gun-pointing.
Leaving the stage at its terminus, Paul walked up the side of the plaza to Broadway and turned toward a lunchroom where his forty-five cents would buy him a meal of sorts. Passing the entrance of the Grant Hotel he found himself in the center of a cluster of people and looking into the most beautiful face he had ever seen. He did not know he was staring until the beautiful face’s escort in the uniform of a petty officer whispered to him, with peculiar, threatening emphasis: “Like her looks?”
Paul went on down the street slowly, turning the query over in his mind, wondering just what would be the mental processes of a man who under those conditions would ask that question in just that tone. He thought of turning around, finding the couple, and staring at the woman again to see what the petty officer would say then. But, looking hack, he could not see them, so he went on to the lunch-room.
He found a cigar in his pocket after he had eaten, and smoked it during the ride back to the hospital. The fog-laden air rushing into the automobile chilled him and kept him coughing almost continuously. He wished he had brought an overcoat.
The Crusader
The Smart Set, August 1923; as 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!”
The Green Elephant
The Smart Set, October 1923
I
Joe Shupe stood in the doorway of the square-faced office building — his body tilted slantwise so that one thin shoulder, lodged against the gray stone, helped his crossed legs hold him up — looking without interest into the street.