“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.