CLOWN’S RUE

BY HUGH JOHNSON

Author of “A Man and his Dog,” etc.

WITH A PICTURE BY H. T. DUNN

THE “Incorrigibles” of the Sixteenth Cavalry was an unofficial gild of bachelors consisting of a major named Merton; of Gallipoli, who is named as the homeliest man in the army; of Fredericks, who is a born and joyful celibate; and of Swinnerton.

The round-faced good humor of fat, bandy-legged Swinnerton was proverbial. He was not a cavalry officer. He was a medico, and the best surgeon in the service; yet the only place where his mere passing did not provoke a smile was the operating-pavilion of his own hospital. His thin tow hair was of the unbrushable variety. Smooth and wet it as he would, it stuck out at divers angles in every conceivable form of horn and quirk and curl from a head that was of the contour of a peeled onion. His blue eyes were round, his lips seemed pursed in a perennial effort to form the letter o, and his torso was nearly spherical, with all of which grotesquery no one in the world seemed more pleased than Swinnerton himself. For with the advantage of having his laugh well launched before he had uttered a word, he had acquired an easy reputation as one of the army’s “funny men,” a thing in which he took no little pride, until between the dawn and the dark of a single day it became for him a shirt of fire which, strive as he would, he could not cast away, and which came as near as the breadth of a man’s hand from being the end of him.

Apart from these the Sixteenth is a “married” regiment, and when orders dropped from a seemingly placid sky, sending the command to the Mexican border, fifteen hundred miles away, with two hours’ notice, no one took thought of how this might affect the officers of the bachelors’ mess, and least of all Swinnerton.

At the railroad spur, where three long troop-trains lay puffing amid a debris of ammunition- and ration-cases, forage-bales, saddles, and equipment; where a regiment of soldiers swarmed, tugging and heaving supplies upon the train, leading, cajoling, and forcing frightened troop-horses up the heavy ramps to the crowded stock-cars; where sergeants swore and fretted, and orderlies ran about with belated orders for the officers who were devoting the between-times of all this to saying good-by to more or less numerous families, no one had eyes for Swinnerton. And eyes that might have seen him would not have been believed. For, fancying himself hidden behind a pile of canvas-bales of medical supplies, he was holding the two hands of a gravely beautiful girl, gazing into her tear-dimmed eyes and telling her in a hoarse and earnest voice that there was no danger, anyway, that all this could not possibly mean war, and that if it did, he, as a non-combatant, would keep well to the rear and safely out of harm’s way; that partings made no difference, anyway, so long as he loved her and she loved him, et cetera, et cetera, ad infinitum.

The shock to the Sixteenth’s credulity would not have been altogether that Swinnerton was trying to cut a serious figure; it would have sprung from the fact that the hands he was holding were those of Mary Smith—the Mary Smith, the regiment called her, because every youngster in the three-regiment post of Fort Robertson had vainly dreamed the dream that absurd little Swinnerton was here actually living, and which to him was no dream at all.

That night when the lights were on in the officers’ Pullman, the Incorrigibles were sitting in the smoking-compartment over a last pipe, and Fredericks said:

“No use talking, war or no war, these sudden trapesings to the antipodes are bad for family life—blamed bad, and I’m glad I’m not in it. Go to it, Swinney; but for Heaven’s sake don’t be irreverent. It’s no time for it.”

Swinnerton had puffed out his cheeks to abnormal rotundity. He did this near the point of a story or when he was excited. It served to heighten effects.

“I think I ought to tell you, fellows, first of all,” he began bluntly, “that I—I’m leaving my heart behind, too.”

Gallipoli burst into raucous laughter, and Fredericks chuckled expectantly. Swinnerton’s face contorted in puzzlement.

“Well,” he said aggressively, “what’s funny about that?”

“You are, Swinney,” said Merton; “that’s all.”

“In the first place,” began Gallipoli, didactically, “you haven’t any heart in the ordinary romantic acceptation. One of your infernal explorative incisions would disclose a two-foot layer of healthy fat, and then”—he patted Swinnerton affectionately on the pudgy shoulder—“a core of pure gold, perhaps, and you would have to conclude that it was all heart; but that, unfortunately, is not the sort of anatomical monstrosity to offer a lady.”

Swinnerton shook him off.

“Be serious, can’t you?” he said. “I am.”

“Manifestly absurd,” grinned Merton. “Get your banjo and sing that song about the chap they hired to get into the cage with the lion. You know—the one with the beller in the chorus.”

“That’s better than your fourth-dimension joke,” urged Fredericks. “Go on.”

Swinnerton was experiencing what was rare with him, anger.

“Do you people imagine,” he asked, “that because a man goes about six days in the seven making a silly ass of himself for the happiness of humanity that he pines to be placed beyond the pale of all that is beautiful and wholesome in life? I ask you.”

His round eyes snapped. His quirks of hair fairly trembled. Secretly the three were wary of Swinnerton. They feared some colossal hoax, some trap. The suspicion that he was serious did not come.

“Postulate one,” growled Merton, guardedly. “Grind out the logic. We do not think this thing.”

“If a good woman is blind enough to intrust her heart to me, is there any reason why I, of all men, shouldn’t accept it?”

“I should say not,” chuckled Fredericks, pleased with the possibilities of his own idea, “not when you can offer her an existence which is a breathing enactment of all for which the Sunday supplements are read. ‘My dear, allow me to present my esteemed confrère of the colored page, Dippy Dick, Mrs. Swinnerton. And this is Little Nemo.’”

The anger was leaving Swinnerton’s red face. These men did not believe him, and only because he was he. His twinkling eyes dulled, his round mouth straightened. He rose, and something in his drooping attitude arrested Fredericks.

“I was only going to say,” he began a little sadly, “that to you, of all the men I love to call my friends, I wished first to tell my great happiness. I am going to marry Mary Smith.” Indignation tinged his later words and indignation straightened his shoulders as he turned and walked with an unintended burlesque of dignity from the room. For Gallipoli had laughed again.

“What’s he trying to put over?” asked Fredericks, puzzled.

“Well, I don’t know,” confessed Merton, “but I think that even Swinney shouldn’t inject the names of ladies into his buffooneries.”

In his own berth, Swinnerton, fully dressed, sat rigidly staring at his hands, his face hard and expressionless. He was considering a new need that had come to him.

“Only for her,” he was saying, “I’d only ask it for her.” Then he added reflectively, “Only one person ever took me seriously; but she—” his face softened in a little smile—“will be my wife.”

THE regiment, its twelve troops strung along the line like beads on a string, took station at Agua Caliente, on the Arizona border, and strove to prevent filibustering. Across the border the old Mexican city of Angeles lay steeped in the strong desert sunlight, a cascade of whitewashed cubicles glistening against a yellow hill, with the bell-shaped domes of the twin-towered cathedral sharply outlined against the turquoise sky above. The Mexican town was garrisoned by a battalion of half-starved, shoddily uniformed infantry, who eyed the big American troopers with envious wonder.

There were bailes and fiestas in the American town, but Swinnerton did not attend them. Every one admitted the change in him. His room at headquarters contained a field cot, a table, and two chairs. On the table were a writing-pad and a framed photograph of the face of Mary Smith. Here he spent much of his time. He carried on conversations with the girl in the picture, and his half of them he wrote down in bulky letters that sometimes had to be rolled because no envelop would hold them—pleasant fancies of a future in which he built a dream palace and furnished it from keep to turret with imaginings. He received letters done in the same spirit, and thus he strove to find refuge from the self that was daily becoming more and more intolerable to him.

Swinnerton could sing. He had an unusually facile and sympathetic baritone voice, which he accompanied well on a guitar, and it was part of his panacea to sing in Spanish, some queer, immemorial folk-lilts, passionate with the throbbing tempo di bolero, that sometimes ended with a plaintive little wail at the inconstancy of a caballero lover, and sometimes with an impudent staccato note, like a Sevillan dancer’s final step in a whirling jota. It was perfectly possible to stand in the corridor and imagine the singer, who was inspired by a remembered face, to be the most gorgeous Escamillo that ever stepped gracefully toward an alluring Carmen—until the door opened. For there would stand Swinnerton, his fat face red and wet from exertion, his hair awry, his round rabbit’s eyes inquiring, and his pudgy little body partly covered by a Japanese crape kimono, and this would bring a smile.

It was this very sort of smile that Swinnerton had been pleased to see on the faces of people for thirty years, but that irked him sorely now. It meant that he was not taken seriously, and he shrank from offering to the pride of Mary Smith in him a thing so lightly held. He desired dignity; he yearned for it more passionately than he had ever longed for anything in his whole life before. It did not come, and nothing that he could do would bring it nearer. Swinnerton’s own smile became sad, and a little of this sadness seeped into his letters. Out of this grew something very like a misunderstanding, for it had been unconscious, and in far-away Fort Robertson Mary Smith sensed it and asked about it. It disappeared, but in its place came a strange, false little note of irrelevancy. There came to Swinnerton one day a vexed letter, and then for almost a week no letter at all.

The fire of insurrection was lapping up toward the border, and at Cananea, fifty miles away, Lopez was concentrating his ragamuffin battalions with ugly menace toward Angeles. Disquieting rumors were current on the American side, and one day the colonel, with his staff, was called to Huachuca, which left only Fredericks and Swinnerton to open the official mail. There were two bills and a wedding-invitation in Swinnerton’s sack, and only the daily bulletin of conditions along the border generally for the commanding officer. Fredericks opened this, and Swinnerton, the bills placed in his pocket, the wedding-invitation still in his hand, read it over Fredericks’s shoulder.

Color-Tone, engraved for THE CENTURY by H. Davidson

“GAZING INTO HER TEAR-DIMMED EYES AND TELLING HER ... THAT THERE WAS NO DANGER”

DRAWN BY H. T. DUNN

[❏
LARGER IMAGE]

“Information from reports of secret agents of the State and Treasury departments indicate a movement of Lopez forces toward Quebrantos smelter, five miles west of Agua Caliente—”

“Phew!” whistled Fredericks. “Getting warm. We’ll see a scrap yet, eh? Who’s getting married now, Swinney?”

The telegraph orderly had entered the corridor and stood saluting. Fredericks motioned him in and took the official despatch he proffered, while Swinnerton, with a swift insertion of his dexterous fingers, tore open the creamy envelop.

“Darned if I know. This thing came sandwiched between bills for other presents. I wish people would stop it.”

Fredericks was reading the loose scrawl of his telegram, and he heard nothing Swinnerton said. He left his chair with a suddenness that overturned it, and began yelling orders.

“Orderly, sound to horse! Whoop! Hurroo! It’s come, Swinney. Old Lopez and his pack of thieves have crossed the border. Hurry up, orderly!”

The trumpeter at the door glued his brass bugle to his lips and sounded the jumble of staccato notes that is the oldest of alarm-calls. The men had been forewarned. They were already swarming from their tents to the lines and saddle-racks. Fredericks turned to Swinnerton.

Poor little Swinnerton, his chubby cheeks had suddenly become flabby, his mouth hung loosely open. The square envelop had fallen to the floor; its engraved contents drooped from his fingers. Fredericks gripped him by the shoulder.

“For Heaven’s sake, what is it, Swinney? Are you sick? What is it, boy?”

Swinnerton turned a pained face, drawn in some spasm of expression that was intended for a smile.

“Devil of a funny joke, Fredericks. Best one that’s been pulled off on old fat Swinney yet. Read that, will you?”

Fredericks read:

“Mr. and Mrs. Charles Smith
request the honor of
your presence
at the marriage of their daughter
Mary
to
Mr. Feldmar Brown.”

Outside, the troopers were leading into line, and a trumpeter was holding Fredericks’s impatient charger. Fredericks had only a moment. He seized his pistol and field-glasses, threw an affectionate arm across Swinnerton’s slouching shoulders, and hugged him fiercely. There was not a word that he could say.

LOPEZ’S raid across the border never occurred, but the false report of it accomplished its intended purpose. The town of Agua Caliente was stripped of its combatant garrison, and two hours after Fredericks had trotted away a lonely vaquero appeared at the crest of the hill back of Angeles, a Mexican picket fired, and was instantly answered by a sheet-like volley from the hidden rebel battle-line. It flashed through the wind-swept streets of Angeles, it knocked great sections from the adobe buildings, it ricochetted from the flagstones of the street, it shattered windows by the score; but most significant of all, it crossed the border-line, and every bullet found a resting-place in American soil. This was a contingency that no one had foreseen.

An American at the custom-house whirled, threw up his hands, and fell in an anguished heap. The halyards of the headquarters flag snapped, and the flag dropped loosely from its pulley to the ground. A bullet crashed through Swinnerton’s window and thudded in the wall behind him. He scarcely looked up. He was sitting before the photograph in his room, and talking to it, as was his custom.

“No, I don’t blame you. No one could, and least of all I. It was a fine thing I offered you. People may laugh at a fool, but to live with one! Tired—I’m tired of it myself.” After a full minute’s silence, he added, “Dog-tired—pitifully tired.”

He rose wearily and walked toward the open window, whence he could see the long, supple slope of the tawny hillside, with the Mexican federal trenches cutting it diagonally on one flank, and the white smoke-puffs of the attackers on the other.

The mayor of Caliente came storming into the outer office, roaring at the abashed headquarters orderly:

“Where’s the commanding officer? Where is he, I say? What are you soldiers good for, anyway?”

Swinnerton quietly opened the door, to the immense relief of the trooper.

“The colonel’s gone to Huachuca,” he said, “and Captain Fredericks has taken the troop to Quebrantos under competent orders. Is there anything I can do for you?”

“Do? Do? Why, those damned Greasers are firing through this town.” The mayor’s fingers spread as though dropping from them something not to be entertained for a moment.

“I have no military function, you know,” drawled Swinnerton; “I’m just a surgeon. And if I had, the orders are plain. We must not cross that line, whatever happens.”

“Drat your orders!” bellowed his Excellency, the mayor. A bullet came and smashed the door-lintel. It covered the mayor with a shower of dust and plaster. He ducked incontinently, and came up furious at Swinnerton’s vapid smile.

“I know you, Doctor Swinnerton. You’re the regimental joker, the official fool. Gad! man, don’t you get sick of yourself? Doesn’t the sight of suffering humanity”—he waved his hand in an excited gesture that included a hurrying group of frightened non-combatants who were rushing a wounded man to shelter—“stir a spark of anger in you? Ain’t you weary of grinning and being grinned at? Ain’t you tired of it, I say?”

“Yes,” said Swinnerton, with unexpected decision, “I am tired. Get out of my way.” He walked deliberately through the door and out into the street, hatless and unarmed. The orderly at the door, a mere boy, followed him in his journey toward the plaza, to the custom-house door, and then to the line. Spiteful little dust-spots kicked up here and there in the open square, and a bullet whined close to the boy’s ear. Swinnerton turned and ordered him back.

“I ain’t goin’,” the soldier refused stolidly. “I’m a-goin’ to stay by you—an’ I know what orders is.”

Swinnerton seemed not disposed to argue the point. Perhaps he thought the hotter fire forward would drive the lad back. He walked unhesitatingly on. He did not stop at the federal trenches, though men and officers cheered him as he passed. But once he had clambered over the glacis, his and the boy’s were the only upright figures in a wide stretch of sloping, gravelly hillside. There was a sense of awful loneliness there for a moment; yet he did not hesitate.

His calm decision seemed, without qualification, good to Swinnerton. He expected to be killed. No one could look out across the bullet-spattered front and hope for less. The air was filled with gruesome sounds—the screams and whines and whistles of deflected rifle-balls. He did not yearn for the shot that would be the end, and yet he did not shrink from it. The very proximity of death caused nervous little shivers along his spine and in the pit of his stomach, but no regret. He was tired of disappointment, and glad to end it. There was an unavoidable trifle of revengeful school-boy thought, “They’ll be sorry when I’m gone,” and another that brought real pleasure, “There can never be any joke about this thing I am doing.”

A gentle breeze was sweeping down the hill with the fire; it ruffled in his hair and cooled his temples. Yes, it was all pleasant, all good, all desirable. He had forgotten the boy who had so faithfully followed him.

Swinnerton was just enough to see the terrible selfishness of what he had done. A cry came from behind. The lad was down, writhing and clawing at the gravelly soil, a bullet through his intestines. Calmness and self-satisfaction left Swinnerton between two pulse-throbs, and as he knelt beside the soldier and examined the wound, anger came to him—anger with himself at first, and then a bullet covered them with trash and another seared Swinnerton’s forehead like a red-hot iron. The rebels were firing at them both. His blood flowed down into his eyes. Blinded with this and rage, he rose and ran forward. He was no doubt absurd, but he was not unterrifying, as with lumbering gait he stumbled and ran straight on to the very muzzles of the firing-line. If he was grotesque, it was with the grotesquery of the bizarre and sinister figures of the first French Empire, and he was standing where vehemence commanded respect.

“Stop that infernal firing!” he yelled, purple with rage, his arms pumping in frantic gesture. And then he broke into a perfect tirade of English and Spanish. “I’ll bring the American troops across and hunt every hound of you to his hole and shoot him like the dog he is,” he screamed.

Your Mexican is not at his best in the psychology of bluff. Half the rifles were already raised. Swinnerton directed his words at the evil-faced little firing-director, who had lived a replete life with the reformed bandits of the Rurales, but who had yet to hear or see a thing like this.

“Do you imagine that you may fire into American territory, kill American soldiers, and escape the troops?”

The self-commissioned officer blew his firing-whistle.

“Señor,” he said, “igscouse. We do no know our fire offend. We will make attack from other quarters.”

Swinnerton wasted neither words nor time. He hurried back, and knelt at the side of the wounded orderly. He threw one of the boy’s arms about his own neck and lifted him, his voice running on like a mother’s crooning.

“Never mind, Felker; it’s not a bad wound. If I’m a surgeon at all, I’ll mend it. There, is that easy, boy? Then here we go.”

A special train had hurried the general and the colonel and staff back from Huachuca. Fredericks, good soldier that he was, had marched to the sound of the guns. From the time he had trotted out at the head of his troop, an absurd suspicion had been troubling Fredericks, and the moment of his return he verified it. He found and examined the envelop in Swinnerton’s room, and he was even ahead of the general in greeting Swinnerton when the latter came staggering under his heavy burden toward the custom-house steps. Despite the gravity of the occasion, the general smiled, the colonel chuckled, and Fredericks laughed aloud.

Swinnerton’s hair was rumpled like the ruffled crest of a cockatoo. Dust had blackened the caking streaks on his face, which was red from exertion. He was wheezing and puffing like a donkey-engine, and at every expiration of breath his cheeks bulged prodigiously. And what is more than mere words of description can ever convey, he was simply Swinnerton, at whom and with whom people smiled. He did not smile this time. He set his burden down and glared murderously at Fredericks.

“Well, Fredericks,” he gasped, with no thought of the deference due to the general’s stars, “what is there about this so infernally funny?”

“This is, Swinney,” said Fredericks, waving the wedding-card. “It isn’t even postmarked Fort Robertson. The last census found twenty-three thousand four hundred and five Mary Smiths. This is just one of the others, my boy.”

Swinnerton made a full confession to Fredericks before the week was over. He had received three delayed love-letters and a congratulatory telegram from the President of the United States, though it was significant that every admiring newspaper sensed the humor of a single fat surgeon waddling up to a firing-line and bluffing it into submission.

“I reckon,” he smiled a little ruefully, “that it’s written in the books that I’m to be a silly ass of sorts for all my mortal days. But I’m cured of minding it, and I’m a most uncommonly happy one, Freddie.”

THE THAMES