The Exploits of Engelbrecht (8 page)

After that it’s a regular bow wow wow. The rest of the cast are electrified and the performance of the last seven acts reaches classic heights. Never, as
The Fly Paper’s
music critic says, as he helps himself to my glass of mead at the party afterwards, never have such unearthly strains been heard. Engelbrecht does a fizzing deal with the libraries and Chippy de Zoete has to sell his dreams to pay his debts.

Now that the Race has run its course, and we exist but as whispers in the Void, I feel the time has come for me to lift the veil which has hitherto shrouded the parliamentary candidature of my friend Engelbrecht, the dwarf surrealist boxer.

For me, the story begins early one manic-depressive cycle, not long after the celebrations that followed—rather tastelessly, some thought—the collapse of the Moon…

I am lolling at ease on my cosy, red rubber-covered surgical couch in the Convulsion Room at the Surrealist Sportsman’s Club, watching the antics of poor little Charlie Wapentake. He has just regurgitated his gag and is endeavouring to spell out the leading article in the
Fly Paper,
when invitation placards are wheeled in from the Id, that veteran patron of Surrealist Sport, bidding us to a week-end of mixed electioneering at Nightmare Abbey.

We are no end vexed at such short notice.

“Impossible,” I say. “I’m suiciding with Lamia at the Necropole. She’ll never forgive me if I throw her over.”

“And I’m gnashed if I’m going to let little Bonzo de Sousa down,” cries Charlie staunchly. “We’re having fits together at Cruft’s.”

But an invitation from the Id is a Royal Command, and when, at 00.00 hours, the Town Drain glides into Platform N at the Infinite Terminus, there we are, milling for seats with the rest of the Surrealist Fancy, including Engelbrecht. The loquacious dwarf has brought a telescopic speakers’ platform from which he treats us all to an impromptu address of extracts from Bradshaw and Cruden’s Concordance—much to the disgust of his pessimistic manager, Lizard Bayliss.

“I dunno what’s come over the little beezer,” mutters this worthy. “He’s been talking nineteen to the dozen, any words he can get his tongue around, ever since he got the invite. Mixed electioneering indeed! It’s breaking training, that’s what it is. What sort of shape will he be in when the time comes for him to step into Parliament Square for his bout with Big Ben?”

En route
for Nightmare, Nodder Fothergill puts me in the political picture. The rural constituency of Monkslust, in which the Abbey stands, is a rotten borough in the gift of the Id’s family. Young Unconscious, the last holder of the seat, has two heads, and in the middle of his maiden speech, shortly before the liquidation of parliament, one of these heads interrupts the other and refuses to accept the Shrieker’s directive to pipe down. After this the Surrealist Party Flagellators decide that another and better integrated candidate is needed.

There is no time to be lost. On arrival at the Abbey, the rafters of the Great Oubliette are swept for informers. Then the nitrous oxide taps are turned on and our Convention gets down to business.

A move to adopt Bones Barlow, the Master of the Man-hunt and a wholesomely nightmarish type thought suitable for a rural constituency, is blocked by Monkey Trevelyan, the Id’s agent, who points out that the peasantry hold Bones in some abhorrence as a Ghoul. Charlie Wapentake, though a local boy and beautifully bred, is insufficiently responsible; an offer by Dr. Sadismus to stabilize him then and there by prefrontal lobotomy is declined with thanks. Discussion ranges from this character to that. Some are too old; some are too bad; some are too mad. And Salvador Dali is disqualified on grounds of nationality. In the end the nomination goes to Engelbrecht.

Monkey Trevelyan warns us against anything too extreme, and for his first manifesto Engelbrecht is content to promise two days off the working week, and one hour on to the Ecstasy. His foreign policy he takes direct from Edward III: the invasion of France. He adds, when it is pointed out to him that he is neglecting the unmarried woman’s Vote, the Repeal of the Laws against Witchcraft.

It is, as Nodder Fothergill opines, a modest little programme with something for everyone, and when our candidate proclaims it, without a murmur of dissent, at his first meeting in the boundless wastes of the Market Square at Monkslust, to an audience of grinning cobblestones, who have been well soused with rum by the council’s water carts, his election is thought to be in the bag —if only we can get someone to vote for him.

But no sooner do we start canvassing than we encounter a strange current of hostility towards us and our Party. It starts in a particularly remote and backward district where poor little Charlie Wapentake is brutally assaulted by a scarecrow whose vote he has solicited in all good faith. Nodder and I are sent out to bring in his remains, and when, after a stiff rearguard action, we fight our way hack to the Abbey, we find a scene of dismay and confusion. Reports coming through to HQ., where the Id’s Grandmother is on duty at the Witch Ball, indicate that a reign of terror is raging.

Everything and everyone is against us. Joey DeAth, addressing a meeting of cottage furniture in a tea shop named Ye Wee Waif, and thought to be an absolutely safe locale, is heckled by a Welsh Dresser and set upon by a pair of Wheel Backs. Bones Barlow, gallantly canvassing the wildest of the Women’s Institutes disguised as a
sage femme,
gets recognized and narrowly escapes being hatpinned to the notice board. Rollo Chatteridge, leafletizing the churchyard, is up-ended by a tombstone; and Crabs Felkin, attempting to put a public opinion poll to an Almshouse, is done dark brown by a poisoned wig.

We are bitterly counting our losses when Engelbrecht himself arrives—carried in on a stretcher.

“The dwarf’s been K.O.’d by a gipsy’s baby,” gulps Lizard Bayliss between his sobs. “We was winding up a meeting on Gallows Common, where the Condemned Dwellings are, and he starts kissing the babies same as Monkey Trevelyan tells him to, and this little perisher crowns him. It’s the first time he’s been K.O.’d since he was fouled in the Aura by a Nasmyth Hammer at Woolwich Arsenal. God blow me tight! Crowned by a crêche! If the
Fly Paper
gets to hear of this the Kid’s reputation is ruined.”

“A trois pas! Tirez aux Mouches!”
yells Tommy Prenderghast, who is still a bit concussed by a mammet, hurled by some unconvinced villein.

Engelbrecht is not one to take this kind of thing lying down. As soon as he has recovered the priceless gift of consciousness, he tells us to summon a monster mass meeting right away, and see that Market Square is packed, no matter what we have to do to pack it, and even if it’s only packed with monsters…

Well, of course, there’s only one way to pack the Square and that’s to call out the Man-hunt. Bones Barlow dons his Death’s Head, lets loose the Baskerville Breed, and draws that Rotten Borough from Gallows Wood to Witches’ Wen.

The Square is packed all right, though if I were to tell you all it’s packed with you wouldn’t sleep for a week. Take it from me there’s no space to squeeze in another succubus.

Engelbrecht climbs the steps to the rostrum. “My friends,” he says, and pauses to let that sink in because a good many of his audience have never been called “friends” before. Then he repeats the word, rolling the R so they shan’t mistake it for “fiends”. “My friends,” he says, “I’m not going to make a lot of lying electioneering promises which I shall never be able to keep. I’m not here to bulldoze you. I’m here to get elected. My policy is a simple one. Vote for me and I promise you eternal life for all…”

He pauses again, thinking that will knock them, and we members of the committee nudge each other in anticipation of the roar of applause.

But instead of applause there is a storm of heckling: “What standard of life?” “With or without Cripps?” “Will there he flesh-rationing?” “How about free false fangs for werwolves?”

In vain does Engelbrecht roar that the standard of life will be the highest imaginable. The hail of questions becomes a storm of booing. Finally the Id has to close the meeting by ringing the dread tocsin on the Abbey Bell.

“Well,” says Nodder Fothergill, as we troop back disconsolate, “there seems to be no satisfying those buzzards. If you ask me they’ve been got at.”

Monkey Trevelyan shakes his palsied head. “Much better have stuck to the old programme,” he says. “At least we should have been certain of the Witches’ vote.”

At this rate it looks as if the valuable Deposit, which the Id has been storing up, will be forfeit.

But at dinner this night—a scratch meal of cold vampire bats—little Charlie Wapentake has the one brain-wave of his life. Looking down the rows of gloomy faces he says: “I say, gnash it all, what’s become of Chippy de Zoete? I don’t seem to have seen him for ages.”

And at once everything becomes clear to us. Plain old-fashioned sabotage is our trouble. With Chippy de Zoete and his gang of doppelgangers spreading alternate slanders and fantasies throughout the constituency it’s no wonder we’ve been unable to canvass a vote.

The position seems hopeless. De Zoete has got such a start on us that whatever we can think up in the way of a programme he’s bound to beat us to the punch. Engelbrecht is all for a straight fight, but how?

We’re just going to turn it in when Monkey Trevelyan asks for the floor. “There’s one way and one only of swinging this election,” he says, wagging his sage old poll. “We must drop all our fancy programmes and go bald-headed for the Witches’ vote. There’s enough witches in this constituency to elect a whole parliament.”

“But, Monkey,” says Nodder, “how do you suppose we’re going to persuade the local Witches to vote for the Id’s candidate when it’s well known the Id’s the keenest Witch-shooter in the shire?”

“There’s only one way,” says Monkey Trevelyan. “The Id must sign a Covenant abrogating his Witch-shooting rights.”

All eyes turn to the head of the table where the old Id is sitting concealed behind a cloud of smoke.

It goes against the grain, of course, hut there’s nothing else to be done. The Id’s Grandmother gets through to the Chief Witch on her Witch Ball and presently she drops in to draw up the terms. The Id tries to persuade her that shooting Witches is the best way of preserving them and suggests he should keep the rights of Gallows Wood, but she’s not having any.

At last, it’s all signed and delivered, but Monkey Trevelyan thinks we should do a spot of canvassing to keep our constituents up to the mark. Engelbrecht, plucky as ever, thinks nothing of kissing Witches all round the clock, but Lizard Bayliss is so scared he goes to ground in Father Carfax’s—the Id’s Chaplain’s—cassock, and we have to send imps down to get him out.

What with guarding our little candidate in case the Witches take too strong a fancy to him, and protecting the electorate against intimidation by Chippy de Zoete, we have our hands full. Comes Polling Day, and Nodder Fothergill and I are posted on top of the Obelisk on Gallows Common to flag the Witches in through Chippy’s barrage balloons which he has adorned with biblical texts such as “Thou Shalt Not Suffer A Witch to Vote”, but we guide them all through; they touch down at the Polling Booth in Market Square. There’s a bit of a dust-up with the opposition but they soon clear the Square with their broomsticks. Engelbrecht gets in unopposed and is chaired all over the square in a ducking stool.

When the result is announced, Chippy de Zoete breaks down and confesses that he is being blackmailed by an owl which read his night thoughts. But just what he was promising the electorate we can never quite make out.

The opening of Parliament is fixed for the same day as Engelbrecht’s fight with Big Ben and the sky over Parliament Square is thick with constituents, waiting to cheer their candidate.

But the fight never takes place and Engelbrecht never takes his seat. Big Ben lodges a protest with the Referee that there are Witches in his works. The Ref. says “So what?” but Big Ben’s hands start turning backwards so fast that soon we’re back in the days of the Long Parliament and the Rump, followed by the Witenagemot, and before we know where we are there’s nothing in the Square except a tree and some apes squabbling over a groundnut, and soon after that nothing at all.

Despite our seeming remoteness from the World of Everyday, there are signs by which we members of the Surrealist Sportsman’s Club seldom fail to recognize the arrival of Spring.

Among these harbingers are natural phenomena, such as the budding of the Upas tree in our secretary’s buttonhole, the proliferation of Dead Men’s Fingers in the chef’s Electric Eel tank, and the appearance of cactus spikes round the edges of that Desert of Vast Eternity optimistically known as the Smoking Room carpet.

These latter are sown regularly by the Oldest Member, an inveterate sentimentalist and one of the most avid gluttons for punishment in the history of matrimony. He sows them, so he tells us, in memory of his twenty-fifth wife, “my poor little Gagool...”

It is one green gloaming, well on in the tender season, and a knot of us are reclining dreamily round the Witch Ball in the Wish Fulfilment Room.

The air is thick with romance. Presently little Charlie Wapentake breaks the silence with a sigh so deep that we have to fasten our safety belts to save ourselves from being sucked in.

“Cough it up, Charlie boy,” says Chippy de Zoete, a trifle coarsely. “What’s it this time? Animal? Vegetable? Mineral? Or Abstract?”

And it doesn’t take us twenty questions to find out that our susceptible fellow member has lost his heart to Good Queen Mary’s Galoshes.

A round of confessions follows and some winsome object choices are revealed.

Nodder Fothergill is head over heels in love with St. Pancras Station. Joey DeAth is crazy, but crazy, about the Iron Maiden of Nuremberg. Bones Barlow is clean gone on the Shot Tower. Monkey Trevelyan is threatening to handcuff himself to the Black Maria’s bonnet. Tommy Prenderghast has popped the question to the ’Pru. Salvador Dali has made suggestions to Smithfield Meat Market, though how he imagines that even he is going to fit it into a bijou love nest in St. John’s Wood is more than even we can figure out. As for Badger Norridge, he admits what we have known all along: that he is wedded to his opium Pipe.

After suitable toasts have been suitably drunk to our respective fetishes, we break, in chorus, into the well-known Surrealist Love Song:

I love it! I love it! And who shall dare

To chide me for loving my grandmother’s chair?

which, as the company does not fail to point out, is all the more poignant in my case, because my grandfather was a dentist.

We have just lowered the floor with this ditty when in strolls my friend Engelbrecht, the dwarf surrealist boxer, accompanied by his pessimistic manager, Lizard Bayliss.

I can tell at once, from the edgy way Lizard snaps at the Editor of the
Fly Paper,
who waltzes past just then, that something is up. Disentangling myself from the Oldest Member, who has gaffed me in the buttonhole the better to drool to me of his boyhood romance with Judith Malmains, the Plague Nurse, I hurry over.

“I tell you, kiddo,” Lizard is saying, “you can’t go through with it. It spells ruin for the pair of you.”

Engelbrecht ignores him. There is an expression of dreamy bliss on the dwarf’s rubbery mug. He keeps on humming: “I love it! I love it! And who shall dare!”

“Dare, indeed,” snorts Lizard. “He’ll do you both to rights. That’s what he’ll dare.” He turns to me. “He’s going to elope with Grandfather Clock’s grand-daughter, Cuckoo,” he whispers. “I tell him not over my watch-chain, he ain’t.”

I can well understand the faithful impresario’s trepidation. Ever since Engelbrecht’s sensational defeat of Grandfather Clock in their famous ten-round contest, his relations with all timepieces have been atrocious. The danger, therefore, of gang-work, of every conceivable kind, including the metaphysical, is too plain.

However, there is no stopping Engelbrecht. And we, his fellow members, true to the principle that all the world loves a lover, feel compelled to rally round and lend at least—as Badger Norridge wittily puts it—a minute hand.

The set-up is not altogether unfavourable. Grandfather Clock, accompanied by his grand-daughter, Cuckoo, is spending the week-end at Greenwich Observatory as guest of the Chronometer Royal. It’s a rather special house party in celebration of the Vernal Equinox, and the guests include some very distinguished dials, among them Big Ben, the BBC Time Pips, and a Roman Water Clock from the Museum at St. Albans.

Our plan is to infiltrate downstream, disguised as a party of marines escorting the Nautical Almanac, and, at the height of the festivities, during the Dance of the Hours, for Engelbrecht to nip ashore and carry off his prize. Father Carfax, the Id’s rascally Chaplain, undertakes to marry them secretly in the little Wristlet-Chapel of Watchmaker’s Hall, so that the runaway match shall be instantaneously regularized.

We get our final briefing at a tense meeting in the Trance Room. Lizard Bayliss, looking like a shadow of himself, owing to worry, goes round with his calendar, collecting the hours that will be needed to bribe the Alarm Clocks which the Special Chronological Branch have posted round the Observatory. Everybody gives him something. The Id, who is practically timeless, anyway, and can well afford it, comes through handsomely with a Light Year. Even the Oldest Member, who’s not got long to go, coughs up a wheezy five minutes.

At last everything is ready. I have been assigned to the forward landing party which is to cover Engelbrecht’s retreat. But no sooner do we arrive at the Robert Vick than we discover that all our watches have stopped and none of us can remember the date. Sabotage is suspected. Chippy de Zoete, grilled by Dr. Sadismus, breaks down and confesses he has sold our plans to the TIMe Signal at his local telephone exchange for the promise of a Leap Year.

With the element of surprise removed our chances of success have greatly diminished. Some of us, and especially Lizard Bayliss, are for turning back, but Engelbrecht is determined to proceed. He rallies us to him by apt quotation of the old adage: “Faint heart never won fair Chronometer.” We improvise a pendulum by suspending Chippy de Zoete from a post of vantage, and rig up an hour-glass with a handful of Wally Warlock’s loose teeth. Then we bend to the oars.

A full account of the tricks which those cunning clocks play on us would take me into abstruse realms of physics and philosophy. As little Charlie Wapentake says, “It’s bad enough not knowing where you are, but not knowing when’s the very devil.”

Soon after the start, Lizard Bayliss, who is the look-out man, emits a fearful, if correctly nautical, cry of “Horror on the port bow!” and falls overboard.

We look where he indicates and see ourselves on the way back, deplorably aged and much changed for the worse in every respect. We are followed immediately by Ourselves as We Might Have Been if only we hadn’t wasted so much Time.

This is dismal enough but there is plenty more to come. Somehow they have got at our works so that our rhythms and rates of growth are all different. Thus it takes Nodder Fothergill, who is rowing stroke, the best part of a week to clear his throat, while Badger Norridge, at bow, has brought up and reared a family before you can say Jack Ratcatcher. Some of us seem to be growing younger and some older, all at the same time, and what with school caps here, and skull caps there, it really is all very confusing indeed.

By the time we arrive at the point of disembarkation we are utterly disoriented, and the landing party that follows Engelbrecht ashore appears to consist of a brace of toddlers, three dotards, and something that looks as if it died a very long time ago, which we identify, from its expression of extreme dejection, as Lizard Bayliss. Before we can move a step we have to expend all our precious hoard of contributed Hours, intended for bribing the alarm clocks, on restoring ourselves to some semblance of vitality.

The Dance of the Hours is at its height. The Whittington Chimes are getting ready to swing their introduction to the dread Zero, as we file through the gate into the Astronomer Royal’s private garden. Miss Cuckoo Clock, a very sizable model, is waiting for her lover beside the historic sundial. She’s ticking away like mad.

Engelbrecht steps forward to claim her and all the alarm clocks planted by the Special Chronological Branch, who’ve been revelling on borrowed time, go off with a hideous jangle.

We start to run for it. I hear Lizard whisper to Engelbrecht: “Quick, put her hands back so she can’t strike!” But it’s too late. Miss Cuckoo Clock strikes midnight. And instead of a Cuckoo, a dear little carved Swiss cuckoo, there’s a harsh whirr and a great bird of prey, something midway between a vulture and pterodactyl, dashes out at us. It does for Badger Norridge, severely prangs Lizard Bayliss, and the last we see of it is heading north with Engelbrecht in its beak.

We make our way back to the boat sadder and not much wiser men with nothing to show for our losses except an outsize cuckoo clock.

But who should greet us when we get back to the Club but Engelbrecht. It seems he overpowered his captor in mid-air and wrung its neck. The chef is even now cooking it for the wedding breakfast.

When, however, we remove Miss Cuckoo Clock from her travelling case, we find that marriage is absolutely out of the question. She is hopelessly fast and Dr. Sadismus has to send her to the excitable ward of the Clock Hospital. On which rather sad note I must close the story of Engelbrecht’s elopement.