Scruffy - A Diversion

by Paul Gallico

  “How very wonderful for you,” she said, “to be able to live with them. Are they not the dearest creatures in the world? How you must miss them. What brings you to this part of the world?”

  And then a most astonishing and even more horrifying tiling happened to Gunner John Lovejoy, for while with one part of his cerebral system he realized that his error had gone unnoticed and he had been granted a reprieve which would enable him to answer with an adequate lie, the emotional hemisphere of his brain, hitherto a total stranger to him, rejected this subterfuge.

  “I’ve been sent ’ere to bring your ape back to Gibraltar with me,” the Gunner found himself blurting. “We’ve got to have a mate for old Scruff—’Arold that is. That’s his Christian name. ’E’s the last ape left on the Rock and the ’Uns caught on to it and ’as bought up all the apes around Africa and the P.M. sent a message we’ve got to start breeding the hapes on the Rock again or we’ll be druved off like it says in the history books, and there goes your flippin’ war—at least that’s what Major Clyde says. There,” concluded the Gunner, “now you know.”

  The Gunner then stood like a small boy feeling aghast at what he had done, knowing that his idiot declaration had knocked the props out from under the carefully-built structure of his superior officers and, in all probability, hastened the collapse of the British Empire. The anguish in his soul communicated itself to Amelia who climbed gently up his leg, then up his waist, thence to his shoulder where she clung, putting her cheek against his and making small noises in her throat.

  Miss Boddy rose from the rock on which she had been sitting and contemplated the soldier and her pet, looking with her clear eyes, now troubled, upon the lines and leathery countenance of the Gunner close to the little animal she had loved so long. And suddenly she was powerfully reminded of her father. But this was not all. With this memory somehow the Gunner had evoked a kind of nostalgia which swept through her of old times and places and people and ways of life. Had she closed her eyes she would have heard the mournful hooting of river craft on a foggy night, or the rumble of drays through the streets, or the cries and bustles of the barrow-boys and street vendors. And then it was gone.

  She took a second look at the Gunner. The new clean uniform, the shave, plus the anguish of soul had eradicated a good deal of the dissoluteness and cynicism from his general appearance. His cap sat at a rakish angle giving him rather a youthful aspect and not disagreeable. Nevertheless, she was shocked and somewhat hurt at this continued invasion of her privacy when she had already told the young man who had come upon a similar mission that she would have nothing whatever to do with the scheme of surrendering her innocent and virginal pet to the embraces of an unknown monster, in order that a lot of ridiculous and wicked-minded humans should be able to go on fighting and killing one another.

  Yet even though she found the revelation distasteful she was able to experience commiseration with the one who had confessed. She said with some severity, “Well, at least you are honest,” and then more gently, “and a good person at heart, I am sure, for Amelia loves you. Come, Amelia, we must be going.”

  It was to the credit of the ape that new love or no she didn’t hesitate a moment upon the command of her mistress but leaped to the shoulders of Miss Boddy, who marched off with her.

  The Gunner collapsed on to the rock vacated by the spinster and let his shamed head sink between his hands. He felt like an utter fool. The first time he had ever been entrusted with a mission more important than clearing out the barracks, scrounging groundnuts for his charges or polishing an anti-aircraft piece, he had let everyone down. Also for the first time during his rather rough and lonely life as a soldier during which his prime concern had been the welfare of John C. Lovejoy, the Gunner felt he had hurt someone he didn’t wish to hurt.

  He sat there a shrunken little figure of a man who seemed to have sunk inside his uniform. The hair emerging from his military cap was salted with grey and the hands that hid his unhappy countenance were knotted and veined. He silently cursed himself, Tim Bailey, Major Clyde, the Brigadier and even, somewhat more timidly, the Prime Minister, but mostly and with the greatest fervour the Army, which could uproot a man and order him into situations and actions which he would otherwise never even contemplate. Lovejoy’s shoulder heaved in a prodigious sigh, for he was feeling very sorry for himself.

  “There, there,” said a gentle voice which came from somewhere above him, “don’t take on so. Of course I should not dream of letting you have Amelia for such a horrid purpose, but if you like, some time later, you can tell me about Harold and his friends.”

  It was indeed Miss Boddy who had returned. Grief-stricken at the misery of her new-found love, Amelia had tugged at her mistress until she too had turned around and observed the woebegone scene and her kindly heart had sped her back.

  The Gunner felt his heart give a strange and unaccustomed leap within its cage. Again it seemed he had suffered a reprieve at the hands of this extraordinary woman.

  He stood up, “Yes, Ma’am,” he said. “Thank you, Ma’am. Tell you about ’Arold? That’d take time. ’E’s the best, ’e is. None other like ’im.”

  Amelia clapped her hands with pleasure. She could not, of course, understand what they had said, but she was sensitive to the fact that her mistress as well as her new-found friend were no longer unhappy.

  Gunner Lovejoy was no hagiographer, it’s even doubtful whether in his elementary education he had encountered the life of a single saint or was familiar with the method employed by both professionals and amateurs of this form of literature in building up a narrative, history, tradition, saga and personal characteristics of their holy men. But it would seem that every man, not completely insensitive, has within himself the ability to weave legends about his fellow man and elevate him to a superior position.

  Major Clyde had also found evidence of a vein of poetry imbedded in the Gunner. This now came to light as over the period of the next few days the Gunner proceeded to canonize old Scruff into St. Harold the Blessed, Patron Saint of Gibraltar.

  “Right from the beginning I could tell ’e was different from the others,” the Gunner was saying in the cool of the evening after supper. They were occupying a corner of the porch where Miss Boddy was enjoying a post-prandial cigarette, her feud with the various manifestations of wickedness on earth oddly enough not extending to nicotine, while Lovejoy, with Amelia entwined about his neck, tried to stomach a lime and water. Heaven could have testified his need to have Guinness replace the water, but mindful of Major Clyde’s awful threats the Gunner was still playing it straight and getting on with it as best he could unsupported and unfortified.

  “Y-a-a-s,” the Gunner went on, “like I was saying, ’e wasn’t like the rest, even when he was a little tiny baby. Why, I remember the day I gave him ’is first groundnut. As you know, Ma’am, they’d rather have groundnuts than anything.”

  “Oh yes,” sighed Miss Boddy, luxuriating in the pleasure of being told stories, “Amelia loves them, I always try to have some on me. But of course the war you know—”

  “Oh, we’ve lashings of them on the Rock, Ma’am,” said the Gunner, getting in a quick bit of propaganda, and then continued, “Well as you can imagine there was a scramble for them, half a dozen little hapelets squealing and jumping about, fighting to get their peanuts. Well, when it come to Harold’s turn—and I can see him now like it was yesterday, he was only a year old—he comes up nice and quiet and stands there waiting. If ’e’d have ’ad a hat on ’e’d have taken it off he was that polite. I gave him ’is handful of nuts and what do you think he did, Ma’am?”

  Miss Boddy’s friendly blue eyes were shining with delight and somewhat breathlessly she guessed, “Shared them with his fellows?”

  “Oh, better than that, Ma’am,” said Lovejoy. “Off in one corner there was an apelet that had ’urt himself a bit and was afraid to get into the scuffle. He was just sitting over there, mournful, wishing he had some groundnuts when H
arold went over to ’im and handed ’im all of ’is.”

  “Oh, how beautiful,” said Miss Boddy. “How happy you must have been.”

  For an instant Lovejoy experienced the ineffable joy of the appreciated author. He, of course, had no idea that he was already, and by sheer instinct, abiding by the first rule adhered to by biographers of saints down through the ages which was to endow the youth of the subject with suitable miracles and Sunday-school deeds.

  Success led the Gunner on to further flights.

  “There was never any mischief or ’arm in ’im. The cars of the tourists used to park up by the apes, you know, and the little beggars would jump up on the bonnets and steal the windscreen wipers off. They used to like to eat the rubber and then throw what was left over the cliff. Harold, ’e never took part in such doings, not ’im. Instead he would sit off by ’imself on a rock, keeping an eye open for when people would come back to their cars, then he’d shout monkey for Cave! and warn ’is mates!”

  Miss Boddy was silent for a moment at the conclusion of this anecdote and then said gently, “Would not it have been better for Harold to have reproved his little friends and taught them that it was wrong to steal, instead of aiding and abetting their mischief by acting as—ah—look-out?”

  “Oh yes, Ma’am, he did, he did!” the Gunner said hastily, realizing quickly that he and Miss Boddy apparently didn’t see eye to eye on questions of morality and that like so many authors who adorn their fiction with their own philosophy he had trodden upon dangerous ground.

  “Oh, he did that, Ma’am, after he found out. He was so very young you see, but after I had told him it was wrong and he had seen me scold the other apes he’d wait until he’d see one of his pals pinch one and then go and take it from ’im gently and put it back. ’E got so good at hanging them windscreen wipers back on the ’ooks we thought for a while of training him for a garage-’elper.”

  “Adorable,” said Miss Boddy, her scruples satisfied, and fascinated with the tale, “and did you?”

  “Oh no,” said the Gunner, “ ’e was destined for better things, he became me assistant, me own right-’and man in charge, me first leftenant, so to speak. There would not be a hape left on the Rock today but for ’im.” The Gunner concluded, finding to his surprise that fiction could sometimes be laced with truth.

  The trouble was, or developed, that Miss Boddy was insatiable for Harold stories, and she came to look forward more and more to those evenings on the veranda when their two cigarette ends glowed like fireflies and there was no sound but the lapping of the waves upon the beach, the soft contented chittering of Amelia and the voice of the soldier picturesquely embroidering the saga of Harold.

  Her childlike eagerness and delight in his stories pleased Lovejoy, at the same time taxing his imagination to the utmost. In fact the Gunner found that he was plumbing depths in himself hitherto totally unsuspected, leaving him often staggered with surprise at his own inventiveness which seemed to flower even without the dew of strong waters. He was also more keenly aware of the hazards and pitfalls of inspirational narrative, realizing that no man who composes for an audience can ever wholly ignore or forget the presence of same.

  “Why one day,” narrated the Gunner, “I was down town walking parst Trafalgar Cemetery with Harold on me shoulder when one of those German bast—tourists I mean, drives by a mile a minute in one of them blarsted Mercedes cars, ’onking like he owned the ruddy road, when to me ’orrer, right in the path of the oncoming vehicle I sees—” Lovejoy here found himself faced with deciding in the twinkling of an eye what it was in the path of the speeding motor car—a kitten, a child, a dog. Maybe Miss Boddy didn’t like children. Would she prefer cats or dogs? All this had to be debated and solved in the lightning-like flash of an instant passing. “An ’elpless little kitten.” Distress showing on Miss Boddy’s chubby countenance told the Gunner that he had chosen correctly.

  “Oh,” gasped Miss Boddy, “the poor thing!”

  “I was turned to stone,” continued Lovejoy, “but not Harold. Quicker than you could say, ‘I’ll ’ave a beer’, he was off my shoulder and on to the bonnet of the car. He reaches down and scoops up the kitten, does a back-flip and lands twenty yards away with the little thing safe and sound as though it was with its own mother.”

  “How wonderfully thrilling,” Miss Boddy breathed, “what a splendid thing to do. What happened to the kitten afterwards?”

  “Harold and me brung ’im up. ’E’s ’ad ’is home with me ever since. Finest cat you ever seed.”

  Miss Boddy’s cigarette end glowed in the darkness and she sighed with contentment. “What a dear, good, kind man you must be, Mr. Lovejoy, to love animals so. And to think you don’t drink either like so many of the rough soldiery.”

  The Gunner felt like a dog, having made a point of his teetotalism with Miss Boddy and his agreement with her that the most frequent early guise of the devil was in the shape of demon rum. However, he felt in one of his more distant bones, down around the ankles, that he might at some time or other be needing a hedge and so he said, “Y-a-a-s, Ma’am, but it ain’t been all that easy. It’s not that I haven’t had me battle with strong drink before I saw the light, or that there ain’t days when the tempteyshun comes over me to back-slide, a tempteyshun which up to now I have resisted.”

  In the darkness of the black-out village Miss Boddy’s voice vibrated with emotion. “Oh, Mr. Lovejoy,” she quavered, “how very brave of you. If ever the feeling should come over you when I was with you—if you told me about it, I should be proud to help you.”

  Something tickled the back of Gunner Lovejoy’s mind, a scrap of his conversation with Major Clyde in his office, something to do with the fact that Miss Boddy so far had evinced no weakness and that the Army was expecting him to discover one, if any, and make use of it.

  Was this then one, this passion for prohibition, and could it be put to account? The Gunner filed this away in his mind for future reference and continued enlarging the epic of Harold, in the hopes that Miss Boddy eventually could be led to consent to the idea of giving Amelia in marriage to this paragon.

  Lovejoy had his own built-in set of ethics and morals which served him very well in his profession, and though he had found it impossible to conceal his mission from Miss Boddy, he was not at all bothered by the false and smarmy picture of Harold he was setting up in the mind of Miss Boddy, or by scruples over what would occur should she yield and allow her pet to make the trip to Gibraltar. His job was to persuade her to let this happen, collect the ape, accompany it to the Rock and thereafter his responsibility would end. What took place then would be up to Captain Bailey and the rest.

  But what made his task even attractive now and left his conscience free was that like so many writers he was falling a victim to his own creation and was beginning to believe wholeheartedly in its reality.

  Thus Harold-Scruffy became a kind of split or dual personality. Scruffy was bad, but Harold was good. Scruffy was Scruffy and no remedy for that, but Harold became endowed with a life and character of his own, speeding towards canonization.

  Nor was the legend thus created in any way diminished by the cunning photographs of Harold with which Lovejoy had been supplied by Tim Bailey and one of which now resided on the dressing-table in Miss Boddy’s room, so that in privacy she could continue to contemplate the hero to whose saga she was listening nightly.

  Aside from compulsory teetotalism Gunner Lovejoy found himself enjoying his holiday in Devon. The hotel spoiled him with extra eggs and titbits and other things off-ration for his meals, having remained convinced that while his wound remained invisible he was bleeding internally. It was peaceful and quiet away from the racketing guns on the Rock and the onerous duties visited inevitably upon the ranker, and finally the pleasant personality of the plump spinster coupled with the love of Amelia combined to make the time pass quickly and delightfully.

  This idyll was shattered by a telephone call which turned out to have Maj
or Clyde sharply at the other end of the line.

  “What the devil is going on down there, Lovejoy, and why haven’t you reported? The Governor is giving me hell, the Colonial Secretary is cluttering up the cables, the Brigadier is getting hot under the collar, Major Bailey is close to a nervous breakdown and the P.M. has asked what’s been done about his directive to bring and keep the Rock apes up to strength. What are you trying to do, send us all down the drain?”

  “No, sir,” said the Gunner, genuinely starded to find that there was another world outside of Hope Cove, South Devon, and an irritable and angry one which apparently was still at war. “I was just thinking of writing you a letter, sir.”

  “Charming of you, Lovejoy,” came the acid voice of the Major. “Send it on by pigeon post, eh? Or maybe by dog sled via the Great Circle! What’s happening, man, what’s happening? That’s what I want to know. Have you got anywhere?”

  “Y-yes, sir, at least I think so. She loves me!”

  There was a moment of silence from the other end of the line after which the voice of Major Clyde filled it again, so freezingly that icicles must have formed on the wires between London and Devonshire. “May I be the first to congratulate you, Gunner, and at the same time might I also remind you that this is an army at war, and not a matrimonial bureau. In this instance your private life—”

  “Oh, for Gord’s sake, sir,” the Gunner rushed to explain as the penny clanked, “not ’er, Amelia, sir.”

  Major Clyde said, “Well, what’s going to come of it, or do you want me to ask for an armistice until you can make up your mind?”

  “No, sir,” said the unhappy Gunner, “I’ve been getting the old girl warmed up. I was going to ask ’er pretty soon to let me take Amelia—”