Scruffy - A Diversion Page 2

  The scientists are insistent that primates are neither able to go back into the past beyond remembering perhaps where food was accustomed to be buried during a series of experiments, nor project themselves into the future, such as deciding: “I think if the weather is fine tomorrow I’ll go down to town, but if it’s raining, I’ll stay home and let Annette, my favourite female, get on with a bit of grooming up my fur.”

  There then remains the present, and if Scruffy was denied the past and anticipating the future, his evil mind was a whizzer when it came to deciding what he would do now, or at any given instant. Thus his wicked, intelligent eyes coming to rest upon the tiling of the roof noted one that was slightly damaged and loose. At once his prying fingers completed the job, and quite naturally loosened the one next to it.

  Scruffy had a dozen off before the householder, hearing the noise, came forth and began jumping up and down with rage and shouting in Gibraltese Spanish.

  Since the householder was down on the street level and Scruffy was up out of his reach, the shouts of anger were no concern of his, except to arouse in him a feeling of satisfaction, but he now discovered that the flat roofing tiles when thrown sailed beautifully, almost like the flight of those wretched creatures, birds.

  Scruffy now busied himself with the interesting and exciting task of making tile-birds, while, drawn by the shouts of the irate householder, a crowd began to gather in the street. The ape, who in addition to his formidable list of vices was a ham, enjoyed nothing better than witnesses. He filled the air with whizzing red birds, and when one crashed into a wall and splintered it gave him another idea. Below him and a little to the right, mounted on a black and white pole, was the attractive glass globe of a street lamp.

  It took him three tile-birds to get the range and the hang of it, and then he sent the fourth crashing deliciously through it, shattering the globe into a thousand pieces.

  Two of those thin Gibraltar policemen arrived, their narrow, sallow Spanish features and figures looking, as usual, out of place in the costume of the London Bobby, rather as though they had been caught coming home in daylight from a fancy-dress ball. They were understandably and righteously wroth at this destruction of public property, drew batons and prepared to mount to the roof and do something about the situation.

  Again proving that when it came to the present Scruffy had all his mental buttons, he now decided that there had been sufficient entertainment for a first stop, and with a leap, a bound, a hop and a swing of his strong arms, and in spite of having to do without the assistance that every other monkey could claim, a fifth limb in the shape of a tail, Scruffy was three telegraph poles and five houses away from the scene.

  The policemen made a note of damages, and called their Sergeant. The Sergeant notified the Lieutenant, who had a word with the Inspector, who picked up the phone and dialled Fortress Headquarters to ask to speak with the Brigadier.

  The Chaplain to the Brigade of Royal Artillery stationed in Gibraltar, probably because of the nature of his calling, had been awarded quarters in a charming cottage not far from the French Consulate, in a grove of pepper and eucalyptus trees, but his pride and joy was his vegetable garden at the back. There was a Garden Club at Gibraltar, and the Chaplain was one of the fiercest competitors for the tiny, practically infinitesimal cups awarded for prize specimens. It had been an extraordinarily good spring, with just enough rain, and the Chaplain’s vegetables were in fine fettle. His leeks were bursting from the ground like tree trunks, his carrot-tops were lush and green; sturdy long green runner beans hung from the bean-poles, tomatoes as big as grapefruit were ripening in the sun. The Chaplain’s garden contained at least half a dozen firsts, and probably twice as many seconds and thirds, assuring him sufficient points for the Grand Championship trophy, which was about the size of an egg-cup.

  Scruffy had never been in that direction before, and so he did not know of this paradise. Whim, fancy and luck took him thither on that wonderful day, and it was like a starving man who finds himself suddenly seated at a Lucullan banquet and bidden to eat his fill. Nobody had bade Scruffy, but this was beside the point.

  When the Chaplain, finally roused from labours in his study by noises off, went out and stared aghast at his garden, it was all over. The tomato vines were down, the fruit trampled to a pulp, beans and peas were uprooted, ravished leeks strewed the ground, the tops had been torn off the carrots, tender courgettes shattered, the grape arbour denuded, and the place left a shambles. He was just in time to see the greyish-brown rear end of the depredator retire into a tree. When the Chaplain approached the tree, Scruffy spat out a mouthful at him and departed.

  The Chaplain went and dialled the private number of the Brigadier. By the time he had got through to him there was very little, if any, Christian charity in his heart.

  If the Chaplain had been proud of his vegetable garden, the librarian of the Garrison Library was equally proud of the orange tree in the lovely floral glade surrounding the building, and the golden oranges that hung thereon. Actually on his way to another part of the town, Scruffy had only paused in the orange tree for an instant to catch his breath and rest himself. For the moment he had neither mischief nor gluttony on his mind, but unfortunately the librarian had no way of knowing this. He saw only the largest and ugliest of the magots which an inscrutable Government insisted upon fostering on the Rock perched in his tree. No diplomat, and certainly no connoisseur of the vagaries of macaca silvana simia, the librarian picked up a large, smooth pebble from his gravel walk and shied it at the ape.

  Thinking apparatus or none, one thing that Scruffy could get was an idea when it was presented to him. He therefore deliberately and methodically detached each orange from its stem and fired it at the head of the librarian. After three direct hits, the unhappy custodian of Gibraltar’s culture retreated into the library. Scruffy raised his sights and continued the bombardment, splattering the fruit up against the doors and windows of the building. When there were no more oranges on the tree he continued on his way, feeling rested and refreshed by the incident. The librarian made for the telephone.

  The surveyor attached to the Colonial Secretary’s Office lived in a neat two-storey house not far from Ragged Staff Gates. It being then eleven o’clock of the morning of a working day, the Surveyor was out dutifully somewhere around Europa Point surveying, the children were at the beach with their nanny, and Mrs. Surveyor was out shopping. Like a good and careful housewife she had locked the front door and the back door, and closed the ground-floor windows. However, a window in the second storey was open to admit fresh air into the bedroom.

  If there was anything Scruffy loved, it was an inside job. On his roof-top way across town to turn more of the unimaginable future into the delectable present, the open window beckoned him like a lodestone. He went down the drain-pipe, pausing only a moment to detach a loose piece of the rain gutter and throw it down into the street, and then entered the Surveyor’s bedroom. The bed looked inviting, so he got into it, uncovering in the process the Surveyor’s red and white striped flannel pyjamas, the design and colour of which irritated Scruffy, so he shredded them and threw the remains out of the window.

  Encountering his ugly mug in the mirror of Madame Surveyor’s dressing-table, he was reduced to the usual state of fury, and picking up a chair whanged it into the mirror, thus causing himself to disappear. This may not have been a feat of memory, but it was certainly practical.

  He went sniffing through the dressing-table, opened a bottle of expensive scent and drank the contents, spilled powder and got it all over his face and up his nose, bringing on a sneezing fit. The ticking of an ormolu bedroom clock annoyed him, so he stopped it the only way he knew how—by pounding it on the floor until its innards came out.

  He then turned his attention to the cupboards, which he opened. The clothing that disturbed him either by its texture or colour he rendered into strips, but for some reason fell in love with a pair of the Surveyor’s checked golfing trousers. T
hese he flung over his shoulder and went to the window just as the Surveyor’s wife, returning from shopping with her baskets laden, looked up to see a brown-furred, white-faced fiend from hell with her husband’s golfing trousers wrapped around his neck staring at her.

  The scream she emitted was heard at the dockyards a mile away.

  Scruffy retired from the scene the same way he had come—up the rain spout and over the roofs—still bearing the trousers.

  Shaking, the Surveyor’s wife went into the house and called the Colonial Secretary’s secretary and dusted him off on the subject of the famous Rock apes. The buck then passed from one telephone to another until it ended in the lap of the Colonial Secretary himself, who said bitterly to his assistant, “When you can get through to Brigadier Gaskell, call me—and don’t stop trying until you do.”

  There was not a great deal left of Scruffy’s happy morning on the town. As time was getting short and he liked to be back up on the hill and into his favourite olive tree for his siesta before midday, he went through three flower-beds, disrupted education at the Grammar School by giving a performance of gymnastics and acrobatics on the flying rings and other playground equipment, then having thoroughly digested his meal, went off and relieved himself in a fresh-water catchment, where he was observed by the Chief Water Engineer, whose life was wrapped up in providing adequate and sanitary water for the people and the garrison of Gibraltar. Next to the Governor, Colonial Secretary and Military Commander, his job was the most important on the post, and the rocket he loosed at the C.R.A. when he got through to him really finished the job of boiling over the Brigadier.

  Since all of his telephone lines were tied up and apparently would remain so until the ape on the loose left town, the Brigadier summoned his Staff Captain and snarled, “Get over to Old Queen’s Gate H.Q. and find young Bailey. I want him brought here immediately.” Unspoken but implicit in the glare of the Brigadier’s eyes and the choleric crimson of his countenance was the phrase, “Dead or alive.”

  2

  The Brigadier is not Amused

  The Brigadier was a tall, florid man, whose mouth beneath a short military moustache was set in lines of permanent exasperation engendered by having to deal with young officers and rankers sent out these days who were simply not a patch on what soldiers had been in his own youth.

  His life had been dedicated to the service of the guns of the Royal Artillery, but now that he had reached General Officer status and Brigade Command he was not sure to what purpose. He had during his career dutifully blown up and dismembered an adequate number of human beings designated as enemies but whom he had never seen since the range was rarely less than 2,000 yards: he had himself suffered punctures of his hide. On his chest the fruit salad of ribbons contained the requisite decorations testifying to his courage and understanding of comportment consistent with the furthering of a military career. He was a thoroughly conscientious officer who had become set in the routine of trying to get on with things with men he considered inadequate for the job and administering his command with as little trouble as possible.

  Trouble was what Brigadier Gaskell hated, personal trouble, military trouble, trouble with superiors, trouble with inferiors, trouble at home, trouble on the post, and above all trouble with politicians, civil servants and civilians. Trouble was what he had on his hands now, trouble which would have repercussions quite possibly in the office of the Colonial Secretary, the Governor, Whitehall, and—one never knew—might even spark a nasty-minded question or two in Parliament, and which could have been avoided if a young nitwit of a Captain delegated to do the job had discharged his duties properly and kept his filthy beasts up at Queen’s Gate and Middle Hill where they belonged, instead of pestering him with requests for cages, sprays, concrete floorings, increase in food allowances and other damned coddlings of the foul creatures.

  Well, young Bailey was for it now, and Brigadier Gaskell, who had somewhat more imagination than usually associated with a soldier, relished the state that Captain Bailey would be in as Captain Quennel, his Staff Captain, marched him over to receive his chewing up. He would know that he was for the daddy of all rockets.

  Thus the C.R.A. was totally unprepared for the bustling, eager entrance of this officer, the engaging and friendly innocence of his blue eyes, and the unsettling expression of pleasure and enthusiasm on his countenance. He had under his arm a large manilla file, apparently filled with documents, and as he came through the door his fingers were already delving into it and bringing forth typewritten sheets and other pages covered with what appeared to be rough drawings and figures.

  So startled was the Brigadier by this breezy and whirlwind entrance, when his imagination had promised him a pale and shaking creature standing craven and trembling on the carpet, that he failed immediately to touch off the blast as he had intended, with the crash of his fist on to his desk and a shout of, “God damn it, Bailey—once and for all . . . !!!”

  Instead he took the Captain’s crisply delivered salute and remained seated behind his desk staring open-mouthed and unbelieving, listening to him say: “It’s frightfully decent of you to give me this time, sir. I know how busy you are, but I’ve got everything in shape, I think, so that you can practically take it in at a glance . . .”

  The papers were out of the file and spread on the desk before him, and in spite of what was pent up inside, the Brigadier could not help but find his fire-and-brimstone-shouting glance momentarily distracted to them, so that at one instant he found himself staring at what seemed to be a drawing of a large and primitive bear trap, the next at a list of names—“Joyce, Mary, Helen, Phyllis, Peter, Albert, Harold, Marjorie, Daisy, Penelope, Oswald, Jeremiah”—then again more drawings which looked like refrigerator coils, and other sheets drawn up most intriguingly in the form recognized as used for genealogies and lines of descent from ancient families.

  Staff Captain Quennel found himself staring down at the papers too, thus unwittingly drawing upon himself the explosion the C.R.A. had been saving up for the Captain.

  “What the devil are you standing there gazing at, Quennel?” he shouted, causing the Staff Captain to pale beneath his tan.

  Tim, who had produced a pencil, now pointed with it to one of the drawings and said, “I think probably my trap, sir. The way it works, sir, is—you put the banana here, with a nylon thread attached to it.”

  The Brigadier was beginning to recover his lost poise and said with a cold and repressed menace, “Captain Bailey, do you realize—?”

  “I know it isn’t exactly sporting, sir,” Captain Bailey continued, “but he picks up the banana, pulling the thread which is tied to this support here, dragging it out from under—down comes the cage, and there you are.”

  “CAPTAIN BAILEY!” At last the C.R.A. had gathered his forces for the shout he had meant to emit at the very first. “Do you realize why I have sent for you?”

  Tim did, and wondered how long he could continue to conceal the fact from the Brigadier. It had worked well so far, and was quite probably worth another try, but he also knew that there was such a thing as goading a man beyond the limits of containment. He said, “Yes, sir—to go over the things that need to be done for the apes.”

  Brigadier Gaskell’s fists clenched and unclenched. Then he said, “Do you see that telephone, Captain Bailey?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Do you know that that telephone has been ringing constantly for the last two hours?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Well it has. And during those two hours I have been compelled to listen to a list of complaints of depredations by a filthy brute that is supposed to be your responsibility to keep under control—gardens torn up, orange trees knocked down, gutters demolished, roofs torn off houses, the Surveyor’s trousers—” There was a slight movement on the part of the Staff Captain, and the Brigadier’s fury was again distracted to that unfortunate young man. “Captain Quennel,” he said icily, “if you laugh, you may consider your militar
y career at an end.” He returned to Tim. “—homes invaded, catchments fouled—I’m surprised there’s anything of the town left standing.”

  Tim’s voice suddenly went low and was filled with sympathy. He said, “I know, sir—and that’s not all.”

  “W-what?” The Brigadier here found his mind and senses reeling. “W-what’s not all?”

  “Of what’s happened,” Tim explained. “It started earlier up at the Queen’s Gate car park. Gunner Lovejoy is bringing down the list of claims, but I’ve heard some of them, and I don’t anticipate too much trouble. The chap who had his camera and binoculars smashed had obviously been teasing the animal. I think we can deal with him, sir. As for the child that was bitten—”

  “Child that was bitten?” repeated the Brigadier in tones of mingled fury, despair and disbelief.

  “If he had used his nut and let go the teddy bear, it wouldn’t have occurred.” Tim’s voice grew confiding and conciliatory. “The whole thing wouldn’t have happened, sir, if some attention had been paid to my memo of ten days ago on the peanut situation. It all ties in with what I had to say about the shocking lack of monkey-nuts— You see, he does like his peanuts, and I think if you will consult the order issued on 28th March, 1932, by the Secretariat on behalf of the Government, you will find he is entitled to them as a part of the regular rations.”

  The Brigadier at this point could do nothing more than stare helplessly.

  “Now, the other part of my plan,” continued Tim—“it’s all written down and set out here—is for better control of civilian molestation and unauthorized feeding of the apes in the town. Suggested: that further signs be posted on South Port Gates, Water Port Gates, Casemates Gates, Trafalgar Cemetery, the Post Office, and the Apes’ Den, warning civilians and Army personnel against feeding and enticing the apes; increasing the amount of the fine for violations; and above all, sir, jacking up the police to do their duty and arrest violators. If the apes didn’t know they could cadge monkey-nuts from the townspeople, they’d never come down. If I were you, I’d have the Police Commissioner in, and give him a real rocket.”