Scruffy - A Diversion

by Paul Gallico

  “Does that make any difference, sir?” Clyde asked, and actually was unable to keep the anxiety from his voice. “I thought monkeys were like—”

  “—People?” Sir Archibald concluded for him. “Not at all. For one thing monkeys don’t call upon the services of gynaecologists to assist them at birth. It might be better if they did, for the incidence of stillborn babies amongst the anthropoids and primates is very high, indicating that they have problems unique to their species.” He paused and as a new thought struck him quite suddenly he clapped his hand to his noble brow and cried, “What will happen when it gets out back in London that Archie Cruft was called in to midwife a monkey? And it will get out. I’ll never be able to face them. Rosen and Oates and that sneering old bluffer Pedgely,” he groaned. “My God,” and then, “Look here, Clyde, I won’t—”

  “Sir,” Tim Bailey put in, “might I—”

  Sir Archibald turned his massive craggy face towards Tim and stared at him as though he had never seen him before, which indeed he had not since Tim had remained in the background taking no part in the conversation.

  “It needn’t get out,” said Tim, “my wife—you see, we’re expecting, sir— If you could possibly see your way clear to—to accept her as a patient—why then that would be the story which would get back to London. We could see to that, sir.”

  It was a straw. Sir Archibald examined Tim more closely now. “Who are you?” he asked.

  Clyde reminded him, “Major Timothy Bailey, sir, O.I.C. that is, Officer in Charge of Apes. It has been his responsibility—”

  “Is your wife here?” Sir Archibald asked of Bailey.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I thought all of the women had been evacuated from the Rock.”

  “She’s a Wren officer, sir.”

  “Oh, I see. What’s her name?”

  “Felicity, sir.”

  Clyde put in quickly, “Admiral French’s daughter, sir.”

  The stern countenance of Sir Archibald Cruft suddenly brightened. “What,” he said, “not old Tubby French’s daughter! I used to beat him at golf. Hits the ball with a twitch! I’d be pleased to see him again.”

  “Will you take her, sir?” Tim asked eagerly.

  “Yes, yes of course,” Sir Archibald replied somewhat testily as though it had all been settled. “Tubby French’s daughter, naturally.”

  “And Amelia?” Clyde queried.

  Sir Archibald reflected for a moment while they all waited anxiously. “Well,” he said, and left no doubt as to the manner in which the affair was to be handled, “as long as I’m down here looking after Tubby French’s daughter, I might as well. Suppose I have a look at the patient.”

  Three sighs of relief exploded simultaneously and Major McPherson cried, “Splendid, sir! That’s very good of you. I’ll have Lovejoy take you to the upper Rock and show you Amelia.”

  Sir Archibald asked, “Lovejoy? Who is Lovejoy?”

  “Their keeper, sir,” Bailey explained, and Clyde added, “He’s been with them for more than twenty years.”

  “Felicity will be very pleased when I tell her,” Tim beamed, “and so will her father. It’s more than kind of you, sir.”

  “Yes, yes,” said Sir Archibald gruffly. “Well, let’s get on with it then. Where is this she-ape and this fellow Lovejoy? I hope he won’t be around all the time telling me what to do.”

  The Military Hospital of Gibraltar was a huge, sprawling affair of grey blocks with odd Victorian trimming in black, Moorish arches and crenellated towers. The operating and labour rooms, however, were modern enough, with incubators, X-ray and all the latest scientific gadgets, and Sir Archibald pronounced himself satisfied with the equipment and the nursing staff as well. There was also a waiting-room decorated in soothing tones which had once been set aside for expectant fathers, and it was here that the three Majors Bailey, Clyde and McPherson, Sergeant Lovejoy and his bride, the former Miss Boddy, and Felicity foregathered anxiously on the day that medical science, coupled with mathematics, had determined that Amelia would produce.

  Tim had been violently opposed to Felicity’s presence upon this occasion. The arithmetic in her case had decreed that she was not due for another two weeks and Tim did not wish her exposed prematurely to those grisly exhibits that are always being pushed or carried up and down hospital corridors. Felicity had overruled him. In the first place she would not have missed the show for anything in the world, and in the second she felt it her duty to be present to hold Tim’s hand. If the agitation the young man was showing at the preparations for the accouchement of Amelia were any indication, he was in for a bad time during the birth of his own child. At least Felicity could stand by for the former.

  There was far too much at stake to risk chancing a natural birth for Amelia in one of the cages up in the apes’ village, and besides, Sir Archibald was unaccustomed to working in the wilderness or on the concrete floor of a monkey cage. He felt comfortable only when aseptically scrubbed, capped and gowned in a proper operating theatre with a reliable anaesthetist, theatre nurses and other help. Birth was a serious drama to him. At the moment of its occurrence it was he who was the chief actor occupying the centre of the stage, and he liked an audience.

  Sir Archibald appeared at the door of the main operating theatre for a moment, gowned but not yet capped and scrubbed.

  Tim, who had been chain-smoking nervously, was on his feet instantly. “Is everything all right, doctor?” he cried.

  “Do you anticipate any trouble?” asked Major Clyde.

  “Oh, doctor, you will take good care of our Amelia, won’t you?” pleaded Mrs. Lovejoy.

  Sir Archibald had assumed his professional manner and soothing smile with his surgeon’s gown. “We haven’t even begun yet. In a Prime Ibs., as you know, the presentation is always a bit chancy. Still, I don’t anticipate any difficulty. The monkey appears to be normal. We’ll take every precaution, of course. Well, gentlemen, we shall know shortly. Don’t excite yourselves. If I encounter any trouble I’ll let you know. Not to worry, then.” He turned on his heel and strode through the door leading to the operating theatre, like an actor exiting on a good line.

  Chairs ran around the walls of the waiting-room, and the six were perched on the edges of them. Through the open door they had a view of the long hospital corridor and the entrance to the operating theatre. As Tim had anticipated, they were missing none of those fearful comings and goings, openings and closings of doors, the carrying out of things hidden under cloths, probationers bearing trays, nurses arriving with syringes and medicines.

  The time was nine o’clock in the evening. The nervously hurrying feet echoed in the otherwise silent hospital.

  There was a larger bustle and stir as down the corridor, flanked by two gowned and masked nurses, an attendant wheeled a stretcher table. On the table was a box. Inside the box sat Amelia. She was whimpering softly. Mrs. Lovejoy half-started up from her chair, and her husband laid a restraining arm upon hers and said, “Don’t worry, there’s nothing to it.”

  Major Clyde quoted, “Our birth is nothing but our death begun.”

  “For God’s sake, shut up,” Tim hissed at him in a furious whisper, indicating Felicity.

  Major Clyde clapped a hand over his mouth and said, “Sorry, old man! Must be the strain.”

  Felicity was watching the procession in the corridor as it passed through the door into the operating theatre. She murmured something which to Tim sounded very much like “Into the valley of shadows . . .” but she was giggling and appeared to be enjoying herself hugely. Tim was able to stem his nervousness for a moment to reflect upon the miracle of the woman he had married.

  From somewhere in the town a tower clock tolled the strokes of ten, the door of the theatre opened and Sir Archibald appeared minus gloves and mask, his cap pushed on to the back of his white locks. Instantly he was surrounded.

  “Well, sir?”

  “Has she had it?”

  “My poor Amelia!”
>
  “Is everything all right?”

  “For God’s sake, Sir Archibald, say something. I can’t stand this suspense.” This last cry of anguish came from Tim, for it seemed to him that all the effort and work and worry he had put in ever since he had resumed the job of O.I.C. Apes was now concentrated into one small pinpoint of time. It was almost unbearable that things were out of his hands and there was no more he could do. The jury was out and that was that.

  Sir Archibald blandly waved all queries aside. “Not yet,” he said. “We are still waiting. I have come out for a cigarette.” The three men in unison pressed smokes and fire upon him. Observing him, Clyde wondered whether the gynaecologist was concealing something from them. Tim was certain he was. The great man did not appear to be entirely at ease. He drew in and swallowed three long drags of smoke, then dropped the cigarette and stifled it with the toe of his boot. “Well,” he said, “I’d better be getting along back inside. Not to worry.”

  Inside the waiting-room heavy gloom began to settle. Tim commenced to pace up and down and Felicity noted that at the place where he was walking off his nervousness the carpet beneath his feet was worn thin by several generations of feet similarly agitated. She wanted to giggle again but refrained because her heart was too full of love for him, and she reflected that she was probably the only expectant mother in all history granted the privilege of observing the birth agonies of a husband. Poor thing—what would happen to him while she was occupied with her own delivery?

  Then they were all aware that the comings and goings of the nurses and messengers began to increase in tempo. Doors banged somewhat more loudly; feet scurried more quickly; and the almost unbearable atmosphere of mystery and tension was increased by the one-way conversations which were funnelled quite audibly down the long tunnel of the corridor from the switchboard located at the end of it.

  The operator appeared to be searching frantically for a Colonel Wheeler. “Is Colonel Wheeler there? Calling Colonel Wheeler! Dr. Wheeler is wanted in the operating theatre!” And then afterwards there was a search by telephone and minions for some elusive and difficult to locate piece of equipment with a name which sounded like thermosphygalamometer.

  Colonel-Dr. Wheeler never showed up, but the thermosphygalamometer did, justifying its name by turning out to be a terrifying-looking cabinet on wheels from which protruded tubes, arms, clamps and compressors, festooned with dials and gauges and columns of active and pulsing coloured liquids.

  Major Clyde remarked, “That ought to do the trick if anything can.”

  Tim, regarding the monster as it trundled past them and vanished through the door of the operating theatre, groaned, “My God, you shouldn’t be seeing that, Felicity.”

  But Felicity’s eyes were shining with excitement as she cried, “But I am absolutely fascinated!”

  The lower lip of Mrs. Constance Lovejoy began to quiver and tears came to her eyes. “Oh, oh,” she moaned, “my poor Amelia. I never should have allowed it.”

  Sergeant Lovejoy, who had slipped far more easily than one would ever have expected into the role of husband and protector, laid a comforting hand upon her arm and said, “There now, Constance, don’t take on so. She’ll be right as rain. I never saw an ’ealthier specimen. It’ll be no more trouble to ’er than layin’ an egg.”

  But if so, the egg was a long time coming for quarter-hours passed in agonizing succession with no news from behind the closed door.

  To Tim the waiting had become a double torment. For all of Felicity’s gallantry and lightheartedness the passage of the thermosphygalamometer had shaken him badly, dramatizing as it did the fact that birth which ordinarily ought to be a smooth and natural affair, sometimes isn’t. Waiting upon the delivery of this confounded monkey, upon whom so much seemed to depend, was like a preview and at the same time a travesty of what the production of his own child would be like, only then Felicity, his beloved Felicity, would be the silent victim hidden behind the silent door. It seemed somehow grotesque that she should be present during these alarums and excursions attendant upon the parturition of this monkey, and which would have been comic had not Major Clyde so effectively pointed up the seriousness of the situation. Win or lose, they were all embarked upon a project in whose importance they all believed and it had to be carried through.

  Major Clyde joined Tim on the well-worn carpet strip and said, “Move over and let someone pace who knows how.”

  Felicity watched them gravely for a moment and then said to Major McPherson, “Aren’t you going to join them?”

  Major McPherson half-started up from the edge of his seat in obedience to the suggestion, which showed how nervous he was. The four of them then burst simultaneously into roars of laughter which were stilled abruptly when the doors of the operating theatre opened, this time with swift urgency, and Sir Archibald Cruft appeared on the threshold. His white cap was askew on his hair and his surgeon’s mask had slipped under his chin. He was worried, and his alarm at once communicated itself to the waiting group as Sir Archibald said curtly, “We’re in trouble! There is a blockage.”

  “Blockage!” repeated Major Clyde. “What does that mean?”

  “Can’t you do something?” shouted Tim.

  Mrs. Lovejoy emitted a wail of anguish and threw herself into her husband’s arms, much to the Sergeant’s embarrassment.

  “She’s not presenting properly,” Sir Archibald explained. “She should have been bred much earlier. Special instruments are wanting. The only chance would be a Caesarean.”

  “Then get on with it, man,” ordered Clyde. “Do it.”

  “What are you waiting for?” cried Tim.

  Sir Archibald refused to be flustered. He was still very much in command of the situation. “We lose the mother if we do,” he said. “Unfortunately, there is no other choice.”

  And suddenly it was comedy no longer, not even to the irrepressible Felicity, and for the first time she experienced doubts with regard to her coming ordeal which up to that moment she had faced with fearless gaiety and calm anticipation. She read the horror in her husband’s eyes as the import of what the gynaecologist had told them struck home. He was faced not only with the problem resulting from his job, but she knew that in his mind he was transferring this dilemma to himself—which will you have—mother or child—I cannot save both! Then it was true what people said. There was danger. Things could go wrong. Husbands were right to worry and pace. Nature was not all that kind and genial.

  “Damn the mother!” snapped Major Clyde. “It’s the kid we want.”

  Mrs. John C. Lovejoy extracted herself from her husband’s arms, swollen with all the indignation of a foster mother and animal lover, to which was added the dignity of her recent bride-hood. “Oh no you don’t!” she cried. “Don’t you dare touch my Amelia! I’m going in there right now and—”

  Desperation had left Tim momentarily speechless and Felicity fairly ached with sympathy for him, coupled with the feeling of helplessness and a strange new kind of nervousness she had never experienced before.

  The voice that brought them all to a kind of shocked standstill belonged to Sergeant Lovejoy. “Look here,” he said, “what about letting me have a go?”

  “You?” shouted Major Clyde, who for the first time since he had engaged in fighting a war felt as though his nerves might be about to go. “What the devil can you do when the greatest gyno in England can’t—”

  “It’s my wife’s hape, sir,” replied Lovejoy, “and if it wasn’t for me she wouldn’t be in the trouble she’s in. If I ’ad alf a crown for every one of them creatures I’d ’elped when it was in a bit of difficulty—”

  Sir Archibald looked sharply at Lovejoy. “What’s that you say? You’ve been present at births?”

  Lovejoy snorted. “Like I said, if I ’ad ’alf a crown—”

  “Never mind your half-crowns, man,” interrupted Sir Archibald. “Go in then and don’t stand there gassing. Get into Colonel Wheeler’s surgical gown and cap. Th
e theatre sister will show you how to scrub. Hurry, man—in there!” and he pointed to the door of the operating theatre.

  Lovejoy rose, marched to it with a firm tread and went through. Mrs. Lovejoy looked after her husband as though she had just seen God.

  Felicity uttered a plaintive little cry, half-arose from her chair, and then sat down again with the most peculiar and frightened expression on her face. Quite suddenly there was something timorous and childlike in her looks and voice as she said, “Oh dear, Tim. I don’t think I feel very well.”

  Tim plunged to her side in what amounted almost to a rugby tackle, landing on his knees with his arms about her. “Felicity, darling, what’s wrong? What is it?”

  It seemed no longer absurd or ridiculous that her husband should be showing every sign of being reduced to dithering panic. She found that she was even glad. It was right that it should be so. She said, “It’s—it’s just that—I mean, with all the excitement and everything I think that—”

  “Oh, my God,” shouted Tim, and disintegrated completely. “Sir Archibald!” he bawled. “Quick! Get Sir Archibald!”

  That individual, who was standing no more than two feet behind Tim, said testily, “Yes, yes, I can hear you, you needn’t shout! Come on, my boy, pull yourself together and let me have a look.” He pushed Tim aside, examined Felicity briefly with no more than a knowing professional glance, and said, “Ah, well, here we are. And I must say I’m not surprised. I always thought you were wrong about the date.”

  At that moment the theatre sister appeared at the door and said, “Dr. Lovejoy is ready and waiting for you, sir.”

  “What? Who?” said Sir Archibald. “Oh yes, of course, I’ll be along in a moment. In the meantime take Mrs. Bailey here to Room C and prepare her. Call Sister Thomas and Nurse Agnew. I’ll look in as soon as I can.”

  He started for the door only to find his way blocked by Tim. “You’ll do what? To hell with these bloody monkeys! You’ll look after her right now! She’s my wife! You can’t leave her!”

  Sir Archibald again managed to remain calm and controlled. He was still the leading actor in the drama, now a double one. He said, “Will someone take this lunatic off me and explain the facts of life to him? It will be hours yet before Mrs. Bailey will have any need of me. In the meantime—” he brushed Tim aside, stalked into the operating theatre and vanished.