Scruffy - A Diversion

by Paul Gallico

  All that was missing was a cluster of roses or a spray of lilies of the valley at the shoulder of her smart blue costume. She wore a freshly starched white blouse with a white lace jabot at her neck and a half-hat, a semicircle with a bit of veiling in front. Her white gloves were immaculate, her pumps silver-buckled. There was high colour in her cheeks and a sparkle to her eyes. In a sense it was she rather than Amelia who was faring forth to meet her intended.

  There was something both sweet and touching in the way that she had got herself up for the occasion, and the ones who were moved most by it were Felicity and Lovejoy, Felicity who understood the woman’s heart that beat beneath the white blouse, the heart that never ceases to hope even long after the mind has surrendered, and Lovejoy, who was full of guilt for the part he had played in building up the picture of St. Harold of the Rock.

  Because Lovejoy was himself a simple and uncomplicated soul he was able to detect and be oddly stirred by the simplicity of Miss Boddy. They had learned to know one another during the days in Devon and on the flight to Gibraltar and the care with which the chubby little spinster had dressed was, he knew, a manifestation of her love for her own pet as well as a tribute to the Gunner’s imagination and powers of prevarication. Miss Boddy was preparing to meet a paragon of a Macaque, a hero, one of the heavenly-elect among beasts, a veritable seraph who would confer upon her Amelia those blessings of holy matrimony which she herself had been denied. And as she came down the steps of the Rock Hotel with Amelia perched upon her shoulder there was a great charm about her and Major Clyde again reflected how right he had been in assessing her innocence as her most powerful weapon against the world.

  The caravan consisted of four soldiers in the leading vehicle, a second car containing Major Clyde, Major McPherson and Gunner Lovejoy, and then a limousine in which rode Miss Boddy with Amelia, Timothy and Felicity, the latter clutching a large spray of bougainvillaea. She had been waiting outside the car and when Miss Boddy had descended the steps drawing on her white gloves, Felicity had moved to the terrace of the hotel and annexed some branches of the flowers growing there. She felt like a bridesmaid.

  With Tim on the jump seat and Felicity, Miss Boddy and Amelia comfortably settled in the back, the journey up the face of the great bastion Rock began.

  Miss Boddy tittered, “I’m so nervous. I feel just like a girl going to meet her first celebrity. I can hardly wait.”

  Felicity and Tim exchanged looks. Felicity’s look could have been interpreted, “Oh dear!” and Tim’s, “Crikey!”

  “You see,” Miss Boddy said, almost in reply to Tim’s look, “I feel that I know Harold almost as well as I do my own Amelia.”

  Felicity elevated an eyebrow. The elevation meant, “Harold? Since when?”

  Tim imperceptibly lowered his, meaning, “Well, you wouldn’t want her to know he was called Scruffy, would you?”

  “Mr. Lovejoy has told me the most wonderful stories about Harold and what a help he has been to everyone, how he protects the motor cars from the wicked ones who would like to steal the windscreen wipers, shares his goodies with his less fortunate brothers, and retrieves lost property for the visitors.”

  Felicity’s looks now became loaded with more words than she could successfully transfer via that route, and meant, “In heaven’s name, Tim, what have you done to this poor woman filling her up on lies like that? What is going to happen when she sets eyes on that utterly revolting specimen? It’s not fair.”

  If the gist didn’t reach Tim the import did, but he had no success whatsoever in broadcasting back to Felicity his anguished excuses, “It weren’t me, Mum. This was Major Clyde’s idea. I just loaned him Lovejoy.”

  “Of course,” said Felicity tentatively, having in mind somehow trying to soften the blow, “you might not find him exactly like that,”

  Miss Boddy smiled sweedy and trustingly, “Oh, but I’m sure I shall,” she said. “Lovejoy has told me everything about his sweetness, his gentleness, his generosity, and besides,” concluded Miss Boddy, “he’s so beautiful.”

  “Beautiful!” The exclamation, fraught with sheer horror, burst from Felicity’s lips before she could control it. But Miss Boddy was not even aware.

  “Oh yes. We think he’s lovely, Amelia and I. Don’t we, dear?” and she opened her purse and withdrew a glossy print of the retouched photograph that had been sent to Lovejoy to pass on to Miss Boddy as a reproduction of Amelia’s prospective spouse. The ape gazed at the picture and chittered softly. There was a melting look in her eyes. “I have carried it about with me ever since Mr. Lovejoy gave it to me—that is ever since Amelia and I decided to come out here. And to think that in a few minutes we will be seeing him face to face.”

  Felicity glanced briefly at the angelic countenance depicted, and choked. She then didn’t even bother to transfer her thoughts to her husband with a look, instead her lips directed at him the silently formed words, “You bastard!” It threw Tim into a panic, for he knew no way of lip-forming, wig-wagging, or telepathing back to her, “What about that bloke Holbein who gimmicked that portrait of Anne of Cleves? It’s all in a good cause, isn’t it?”

  They had already climbed high past the Moorish Castle and were bowling along the Queen’s Road. To their right and below them Gibraltar lay spread out like a relief map. Tim felt a slight sense of injury. There was the key to the East which they were all straggling to preserve. On the other hand as a fair man, although a husband, he had to admit that a girl would naturally side with another woman, particularly one who had been led up the garden path. As the caravan slowed down approaching Ferdinand’s Battery and the ape cages, he breathed a silent prayer to St. Whoever-it-was in charge of Macaca Sylvana, to let it be one of old Scruff’s better days.

  The same thing was weighing on the mind of Gunner Lovejoy, for when the command car in which he had been riding came to a halt he walked back to the vehicle from which Tim and his party were alighting and said, “Old Scruff—I mean Harold might be just a wee bit nervous at first.” He held out his arms to Amelia. “Perhaps I had better take her.” Amelia went to him as obediently and lovingly as a child to a father, wrapping her arms about the Gunner’s leathery neck and placing her jowl next to his seamed cheeks.

  Miss Boddy looked fondly upon the scene and said, “She loves you, Mr. Lovejoy. It makes me so happy.” They then walked in silent file to the cages. One of these stood empty and in the adjoining one, at the far end sat huddled with his back turned, the brown figure of the full-grown Macaque.

  Scruffy was brooding and nursing a large grievance made up of an accumulation of changes and things gone wrong. Life on the Rock had been charging to hell in a hand-barrow. All the other apes he used to fight, bully, beat up, bite and make love to had vanished, and in recent weeks instead of being free to go to town where he could break windows, tear up people’s gardens and foul the catchments, he had been locked up in a cage surrounded by soldiers carrying loaded guns. He did not understand this solitary confinement, and what was more, he didn’t like it and thus, had they but known it, had managed to accumulate the father of all grouches.

  Although crouched in his corner he looked to be calm and even contemplative, he was loaded. Never a sterling character to begin with, anti-human, anti-social and unmitigated tyrant, all he needed was the sight of one strange monkey or one strange human to pull the trigger. These the British Government had now provided in the shape of Amelia and Miss Boddy.

  What was wanted at that moment was one of the early nineteenth-century French painters who used to perpetrate those vast canvases showing Napoleon with his generals just before the battle of Something-or-Other. It had all arranged itself into that kind of tableau, Lovejoy inside the empty cage with Amelia on his shoulders, Miss Boddy a few paces from Lovejoy, and beyond, at the door, the anxious group consisting of the Majors Clyde, McPherson and Bailey, and 2nd Officer Felicity Bailey. To complete the picture there were the two groups of soldiery, the security troops already on guard at the
Battery to protect the lone surviving Barbary ape, and the other squads that had come up from the troop carrier, and for the instant they were all frozen in tense silence, waiting to see what would happen.

  They didn’t have long to wait. It was all over in what might be characterized as a jiffy. Hearing the noise, Scruffy turned around and an expression crossed his ugly features more vicious and cantankerous than Tim had ever seen there before.

  Whether it was the sight of a strange female perched on the shoulders of Lovejoy, or the not too attractive countenance of that female, Scruffy was across the intervening space in a blinding flash of speed, gathered up a handful of dung on the way, flung it through the bars at Amelia, squirted Lovejoy and finished off with a record-breaking display of Magot temper, inexhaustible cursing and bad behaviour, during which time he pelted everyone within reach with all and any garbage in the form of carrots, cabbages and banana skins plucked from the floor of his cage. Only Felicity, who had expected this and therefore remained calm and observant throughout, caught the final tragedy which was that after one look at this repellent brute Amelia fell violently and head-over-heels in love with him, and, in spite of the reception she had received and what had been thrown at her, stretched out yearning arms and chittered lovingly.

  “Oh dear,” said Miss Boddy, and then repeated again almost pathetically as though she could not believe what her ears and eyes told her, “Oh dear, dear.”

  “Scruff!” bawled Gunner Lovejoy, enraged by this performance to the point where he completely forgot himself and his surroundings, “Cut that out or I’ll come in there and kick your bloody arse for you.”

  The shock waves of what appeared to be a thoroughly disintegrating society rolled over all of them. Miss Boddy murmured, “My poor Amelia,” and held out her arms, and when her ape came to her moved out of range. Amelia, perched on her shoulder, continued to look beseechingly at the fiend in the cage. Major McPherson had his head buried in his hands as one who could no longer look, while Major Clyde had both arms upraised in the gesture reminiscent of the wicket-keeper appealing to the umpire, only in this case the umpire was God and he was asking how He, if He indeed loved the British Empire and was on its side as the clergy kept insisting, could permit its plans to be brought to nought by one foul beast.

  Timothy and Felicity, impelled by the magnitude of the disaster, had drawn close together, for Felicity was aware of how stricken her husband must be at that moment and in need of comfort. She was torn between loyalty to him and sympathy for Miss Boddy.

  But if anyone needed commiseration it was Gunner Lovejoy. Deep in his heart he had known all along that it would happen, that Scruffy would topple the edifice of the tales he had told.

  Yet somehow he had hoped for the miracle, banking on the theory that Scruffy, incarcerated and alone, removed from his own species, would somehow take kindly to a female when presented. All this was now up in smoke and not only that, he had so far forgotten himself as to use barrack-room language in the presence of one he had grown both to like and respect. Besides, he saw an end to his own cushy tenure as Keeper of the Apes. The brass would have its revenge for this calamity.

  All of this human anguish arising from the afflicted collected somewhat like electricity in a wet cell and communicated itself to Scruffy, showing him that he was definitely on the right track. By now he had had a good look at Amelia perched on the shoulders of a strange female, holding out her arms to him, making kissing movements with her mouth, her eyes still further crossed with love, and his sense of injury was deepened that such a specimen should have been offered to him—to him, Scruffy, King of the Rock, who could have any girl he wanted.

  He barked and coughed with rage. He spat. He bounced up and down on all fours. He combed his area for ammunition to hurl. He leaped on to the side of the cage, bared his yellow canines and shook the wire-netting so that the entire structure rattled and clattered.

  Felicity could see the hurt look growing in the eyes of Miss Boddy and the appearance of tears at the corners.

  It was quite true. Miss Boddy was not only appalled by the behaviour of one who had been held out to her as a paragon and a saint, but disappointed as well in the human species. She had grown truly fond of Mr. Lovejoy and his stories and to have him thus exposed as a shameless prevaricator was almost more than she could bear, And what was really so awful for all of them was that her gentleness was never for an instant diminished.

  “Oh, no,” she murmured, “no, no. I am afraid I could never permit Amelia to associate with such a creature. Quite impossible.” She turned reproachful eyes upon the Gunner. “I am afraid that you have told me a number of falsehoods for your own ends, Mr. Lovejoy. That was unkind. I trusted you.”

  The essential truth that lay behind this accusation was more than flesh and blood and Gunner Lovejoy could stand. He would not have cared to have been made the mug in private by his superiors for their own shortcomings—this was after all the accepted lot of every ranker—but not before Miss Boddy. For the second time that day the Gunner forgot himself.

  “It was ’im,” he cried, pointing an accusing finger at Major Clyde. “He made me. I never wanted to do it, but ’e’s got the crowns on his shoulders and what’s a man to do? Who gave me the photo to give to you? Who filled me up with a bellyful of psychology or whatever he called it? ‘Stand up and salute the Colours,’ ’e says, and a lot of balls about the wild geese flying homewards and children walking ’and in ’and, bonny England and backs to the wall and blast the filthy Hun. It was ’IM put me up to it.”

  All eyes were now focused upon Major Clyde who, under the accusing finger of the indignant Gunner, suddenly looked exactly as he had thirty years before when hauled up on the carpet before the headmaster. And for the first time in his military career as a clever and competent organizer and administrator of an Intelligence branch, the Major felt himself thoroughly discombobulated. This was one of the effects of Miss Boddy’s innocence against which all normal human standards of behaviour seemed to shatter. It was utterly ridiculous that a grown man should feel himself so confused, ill at ease, out of countenance and unable to think clearly, but there it was.

  Under the reproachful gaze that Miss Boddy turned upon him Major Clyde went completely to pieces and said quite the last thing which would ever have passed the lips of an English officer in his right mind and in front of people, “All I said to him was about England and what it was like, and did he love it or didn’t he, and what would happen if the filthy Hun took over and it was up to him to prevent it.”

  The tears that had been so close to Miss Boddy’s eyes now did spill over, for she was frightened, lonely and homesick among these alien people who spoke and behaved in such a queer manner. In an instant Felicity was at her side with her arms about her crying, “Oh, poor dear Miss Boddy, you mustn’t mind. Men are always like children when they make war; they grow quite soft in the head.” She looked around at the others, “Perhaps we had better go back to the hotel.”

  In his cage, and now out of things to throw, Scruffy bounced up and down on all fours in a gleeful rage and continued to do so until his visitors had departed and the riflemen once more took up their sentry positions around his cage. From his point of view it had been the first thoroughly satisfactory morning in a long, long time.

  There appeared to be no hope of budging Miss Boddy from her position. With the revelation that not only was Harold unsanctified, but a fiend ascended unquestionably directly from the nethermost pits of hell, her objections were crystallized more firm than steel, more hard than diamonds. To this was added the sense of loss and disappointment. Two figures with whom she had lived for a time with affection and admiration, one the phantom Harold and the other flesh and blood Lovejoy, had been shattered. She longed to return to the peace and quiet and the simple routine of living she had evolved in Hope Cove in South Devon. This great, huge Rock, this weird community populated half with Britons in uniform and half with a strange swarthy people who spoke a fore
ign language, was not for her. All the paraphernalia of war which she detested was too close here, the armed men, the warships and the great cannon staring with their single eyes into the sky and out to sea.

  The committee, minus Felicity and Gunner Lovejoy, met in Tim’s office late that evening, and be it said to their credit that there were no recriminations or attempts to lay blame for the fiasco, though McPherson did ask blandly of Major Clyde, “I say, Slinker, did you really fill old Lovejoy with that St. George for England stuff?” To which the Major replied gloomily, “Well, it worked, didn’t it? Up to a point? He got her here. In my business you get to learn to try everything, including even an appeal to patriotism.”

  “The point,” Timothy said, “at the moment seems rather to be—what do we do now?”

  “She wants to go home,” Major Clyde said cheerlessly. “She asked for transportation back to England. I said there were no ships available at the moment, but there was no sale. We can’t keep her here against her will. I suppose we can get old Howard to flip her home again.”

  “And in the meantime?” put in Tim.

  “I have something lined up in Oran,” Major McPherson said, “but I have to wait and see how it develops. It may be another six months before we can be certain and in the meantime if the Germans get on to it—”

  “It won’t do,” Tim burst out. “It’s a birth we need as Slinker says. We’ve got to have a new apelet born on the Rock with photographs and all that sort of thing. It will be a year before we can breed any of the apelets that survived. If the Jerries manage to get to them in the meantime—but if we can announce a normal birth that would knock them all right back on to their heels.”

  “You’re telling me,” Major Clyde picked up the thread morosely. “Our morale is being shot to hell.”