Scruffy - A Diversion Read Free Page A

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. These 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,