The Exploits of Engelbrecht Page 6

  “I’ve come to put a stop to all this,” he said in a creaking, leathery voice. Lifting his scythe for a back stroke he glided forward towards the pitch. There was a flutter and a scurry from the MCC. Then we saw that W.G. had gone down on his knees in front of the Willow King, edging right up close to his trunk. The Willow King put down a leafy branch and next moment there was nothing to be seen except the tree, and twenty-two yards away the Dwarf Engelbrecht chasing a cabbage white.

  THE DAY WE PLAYED MARS

  This is the story of how Engelbrecht, the dwarf surrealist boxer, wins his Global Football Cap. It’s a story the oldest members still whisper in the Ghost Room of the Surrealist Sportsman’s Club, a story of indomitable courage, and no little cunning, winning through against overwhelming odds.

  Engelbrecht has never played surrealist football before and his delight at finding his name, just above Engels, F., in the list—a sizeable work in many volumes—of the team to play Mars in the Final of the Interplanetary Challenge Cup, leads to a celebration in which we all take part.

  The Final of the Interplanetaries is played off on the Moon, and months before the kick-off all sorts of vehicles—everything from ordinary space-ships to beams, dreams, mediums, and telepathic wave-patterns—start arriving with the players. There’s a pause for rest and reorientation; then they begin trooping into the vast Metamorphosis or Changing Room. Engelbrecht and I blow in in a rocket with the usual party of our Skipper’s intimates. We’ve been training strictly on hashish and mescaline, and by the time we arrive on the Ground it’s a job to sort us out from our hallucinations.

  The Lunar Twickenham is a boundless plain of glassy black lava pitted with craters. The Larger Ball is considered de rigueur. It has to be something pretty sizeable to keep in play at all, though, as Charlie Wapentake says, it’s a bit nightmarish trying to dribble with a thing like a Roc’s egg.

  Dreamy Dan, our old-time surrealist umpire, is thought to be too biased, as well as a trifle slow for such a commando-type operation. The new referee is Cecil B. de Mille, picked for his crowd work. Presently he sends a message to ask the Id to scrabble along and meet the Martian Skipper in a neutral crater for final briefing. So off the Old Master trots, accompanied by Chippy de Zoete, his Vice. When they come back they’re shaking all over and Chippy de Zoete’s chest-wig, which he had made at Clarkson’s to strike terror into the opposing forwards, has turned white as fleece. From which we deduce that this year’s Martian team includes some pretty formidable Entities. So tough, indeed, does the opposition appear that it’s decided to try a very unorthodox ploy and put the full side, the entire human race, into the field straight away.

  The opening ceremony is held as usual. There’s a silent tribute to the honour of William Webb Ellis, that Glorious Precursor of Surrealist Sport, the Rugby Schoolboy who first ran with the Ball. Then the Band strikes up the Supersonic Symphony—a rather unfortunate choice for it brings half the Grandstand down with a crash. After which we take the Field.

  Even I, old hand as I am, haven’t quite bargained for the procession of Giant Monstrosities that come filing out of the Visitors Entrance. When Lizard Bayliss, Engelbrecht’s pessimistic manager, catches sight of them he tries to beat it back to the Changing Room, but the crush of characters is too thick.

  It’s our kick-off. It takes a bit of doing to sort us all out, but by the next full moon de Mille has us well in hand. I’ve been given a cosy little assignment, narking to the Central Captain’s Committee on the Wing Forwards, so I take Engelbrecht under my wing and pilot him.

  The whistle blows and Melchisedek takes the kick. Nebuchadnezzar follows up and gathers it. He passes to Nero, Nero to Attila, Attila to the Venerable Bede, the Venerable Bede to Ethelred the Unready, who knocks on into a crater. De Mille screams for a scrum. Engelbrecht tries to climb down into the thick of it. “You keep out of that,” I tell him. “The idea! A dwarf trying to scrum down between Henry VIII and Cetewayo. You’d get pulped.”

  De Mille rolls the ball down an inclined plane right into the centre of the great heaving mass. Anak and Harold Hardrada, our hookers, get their toes round it. But our frail human forwards are too light for those great Martian thugs. We can’t possibly hold them. Our only hope is to heel out quickly before they can crush us against the sides of the crater. It doesn’t take Charlie Marx, our scrum-half, long to twig this, and as we peer down over the lip we can hear his harsh bark of “Heel! You teufels! Heel in the name of History!” And heel they do, but only just in time. As Charlie Marx gathers the ovoid from Bismarck’s boot, our front line breaks and the Martian phalanx comes crashing through. Marx slings it back to Fred Engels, his fly-half. Then he’s down in a sea of boots and backsides. “You’ve got to hand it to old Charlie,” says Tommy Prenderghast, “he may he nasty tempered but he’s the nippiest scrum-half in this world or the next. Well, we’d better be heading for Goal. Can I give you chums a lift?”

  But Fred Engels has seen it coming and had time to get his life-line organized. He passes it up to Gladstone who makes a present of it to Blondin. And before you can say “I told you so”, Blondin’s away out on his tight-rope with the Giant Ball at his feet. It’s a great moment, one of the greatest in the history of the game. The field is in a frenzy and the Band can think of no more fitting token than to strike up the Second Movement of the Supersonic Symphony, which brings down the other half of the stand.

  We’re out of the crater but still on the defensive. Unfortunately, it’s not been possible to fix Blondin’s tight-rope to a strategic point, and he has to find touch. Still, we recover a good bit of ground, and it’s a lovely run of Blondin’s, especially when you remember that for the last five miles he’s being worried by a pack of pterodactyls loosed from a string-bag by a Martian bobby-soxer.

  At the line-out it’s our ball, but it falls into bad hands. Stavisky catches it and passes it to Bottomley, Bottomley to Jabez Balfour, Jabez Balfour to Charlie Peace, and Charlie Peace to Jonathan Wild, losing ground all the way. Jonathan Wild slings a long one to Judas Iscariot, who sells the pass to the Martian Threequarter line, and they get into their stride. For a surrealist football-fan, no doubt it’s a lovely sight to see this far-flung line of giants racing across the jet-black surface of the Moon with the Ball flashing from one wing to the other and back again. For us, who’re supposed to stop them, it’s slightly different. I’m too busy taking notes of shirkers’ names myself; but Engelbrecht insists on showing what he’s made of. With a grunt of defiance he hurls himself through the air and catches hold of a Martian Three Q’s bootlace. He hangs on like grim death, taking fearful punishment as he’s dragged over the lava.

  There’s nothing to stop them now except Salvador Dali, our Full Back. Some of us doubt the wisdom of our skipper’s choice of such an avant-garde type for such a die-hard position. But we’ve got to hand it to old Salvador. He tries Everything. As a last attempt to stop them he even camouflages the Goal Posts as a Giant Gallows with some very tasty objects from his studio strung up from the cross-bar. Neither—though some of his less charitable team-mates say this is because he’s got stuck in the chest of drawers with which he’s been protecting his person— does he flinch from the ultimate sacrifice of a flying tackle. Useless, of course. A brief splintering crash. Then the Martian Three Q touches down between the goal posts.

  As we all crowd together in the Goal Mouth there’s a multitude of doleful faces such as never was seen since the Last Trump. I’ve just handed in my list when Charlie Wapentake jogs my arm and points to the Id and Chippy de Zoete chatting to Pierpoint, the Public Executioner. We know what that means. Somebody’s going to swing for it.

  The Martians convert and we migrate back to midfield. Soon after the kick-off Vivekananda finds touch. But our luck’s out. At the line-out Zerubabel tips it back to Origen, but Origen passes to Julian the Apostate, who starts running back. Luther and John Huss trip him up and start a plucky dribble. They’re joined by Calvin who picks up and passes to Wesley. For a
glorious moment it looks as if we’re going to get somewhere. Wesley jinks like a rabbit, sells the dummy to three enemy forwards. But he hasn’t got the legs. He passes, and one of the Plymouth Brothers knocks on. This time the enemy forwards get the ball and wheel with it. Charlie Marx empties his pistol again and again into the back row of our scrum in an attempt to stop the rot.

  10-nil, and the game’s only in its first light-year. Some poets start a passing movement. Chatterton passes to Keats, Keats to Shelley, Shelley to Byron, Byron to Wilde, who muffs it. There’s a lot of tittering in the loose. The Martians get it back to their Three Q’s, and there’s no stopping them. They run through us like a dose of salts, cock snooks at the Easter Island statues which Dali has brought up to guard the Goal Mouth, and score again.

  After that it’s a procession and they score as they please. Full backs are tried by the dozen only to have rings made round them.

  At half-time the score is astronomical, and Wing-forwards are being shot in batches in the Changing Room.

  Towards the end of the Interval, Engelbrecht, Lizard Bayliss, his manager, and I, are reclining in our bivouac, toasting our toes at the core of a crater, when Charlie Marx and Fred Engels limp past. “There’s only one way, knabe,” we hear Charlie say. “We must give them the old Trojan horse.” “All very well,” says Fred, “but there’s not much room in there.” “Room for a little ’un,” says Charlie. His eye lights on Engelbrecht. “How about it, junge?” he says, raising an eyebrow and cocking his pistol. “Care to volunteer for an interesting mission in History’s service?” And before we can remonstrate he marches Engelbrecht off to the Changing Room.

  We come out for the second half dizzy and defeatist. But the moment they kick off it’s clear that a change has come over the game. The Ball is taking a hand. It won’t roll right for the Martians nohow. They muff pass after pass and in the scrum our hookers get it every time. It’s as if it’s grown a little pair of legs of its own. Soon comes our first try. Charlie gathers it clean as a whistle and passes to Fred, who punts for the open field. Stenka Razin and his band trap it and take it on with their feet. There’s a fierce loose scrummage in a crater, but Guy Fawkes has got a map of the Underground. The Ball seems to beckon him on. They surface just in front of the Goal, and Jack Cade slips over for a touch-down. Goliath, the new full back, takes the kick. The Ball grazes the cross bar, but instead of bouncing off it seems to hang there in the air. Then it drops over.

  The Score is 5555-5. Things are looking up. The Id commutes the sentences of one in ten of the doomed Wing Forwards to Life in the Scrum. Soon after the kick, Hannibal gets it and blunders right through with his footballing elephants. Goliath converts.

  All that epoch the same tactics are repeated. We’re using our feet like dancing masters. It’s 5555-5550 now. Not long to go. Some unlikely characters have scored, even Heliogabalus, Bishop Berkley, and Aubrey Beardsley.

  De Mille is looking at his travelling clock. He’s lifting the whistle to his lips with both hands. Sorrowfully, Lizard Bayliss folds up the special edition of the Fly Paper with Engelbrecht’s Obituary notice, and wipes away a tear. “If only he could have lived to see this,” he says.

  Charlie Marx is giving the forwards their final pep-talk. “A Spectre is haunting Football!” I hear him bark. “The time has come to convert the Feet of History into the History of Feet! Forwards of the World! Pack Tight! You have nothing to lose but your Shins!”

  The Martians try hard to find touch with a terrific root, but the Ball drops back into play. There follows one of the sweetest pieces of combination in History. Lecky passes to Gibbon, Gibbon to Tacitus, Tacitus to Josephus. Josephus slings a long pass to Isaiah, who punts ahead. Samuel catches it and passes to Lot, Lot to Noah, who gives it to Cain. Cain tries to keep it but it slips sideways out of his fingers. Abel dribbles it over the line and Adam falls flat on it.

  Goliath has strained a tendon and the Id orders Dali out of the Morgue to take the kick. He asks me to place for him.

  As he adjusts the angle to his liking I hear Engelbrecht’s voice speaking to me from inside the Ball. “What’s the score, chum?” it says. “I’ve rather lost count.”

  That night, at a little private ceremony in the Changing Room, attended only by Charlie Marx, Arnold of Rugby, and the Politbureau of the Selection Committee, Engelbrecht receives the highest award of Global Football, the crypto-Cap.

  As soon as the ceremony is over he’s smuggled out of the Changing Room in a tiny coffin.

  ENGELBRECHT AND THE MECHANICAL BRAIN

  The Committee’s announcement that the Mechanical Brain has been made an honorary member of the Surrealist Sportsman’s Club gets rather a mixed reception.

  In the vast, cigar-shaped Smoking Room, which is even blacker than usual with the post-prandial fumes of hashish, marijuana, opium, mescal, and other, less homely, narcotics, the gossip is all of the prospective addition to our company.

  The opposition is led by two of the oldest members, nicknamed, so as to distinguish them one from another, the Formless Shape and the Shapeless Form. These testy wraiths are quite invisible with indignation at the Committee for not giving them a chance to blackball the monster.

  Others, while less intransigent, express apprehension.

  “If you ask me,” says Joey DeAth, pulling hard at a refractory, ether-pickled Elfweed, “we got quite enough thought-readers in this club already.”

  Little Charlie Wapentake, surfacing after a marathon puff at his multiple bubble-bubble, opines sagely: “Gnash it all, I mean to say, what, he’s going to take up the deuce of a lot of room, eh? They say he occupies three floors of the Town Hall.”

  And Chippy de Zoete voices the opinion of the majority when he roars: “I vote we give the bounder the cold shoulder!” Which, as anyone who has had a peep at Chippy’s electro-encephalogram will scarcely need to be told, is more likely to mean the hot foot.

  However, as Salvador Dali never tires of reminding us, the best-laid schemes of mice and Surrealist Sportsmen gang aft agley. When our new honorary member is carried into the Smoking Room, and unpacked and put together by his attendants, he proves so nippy at anticipating Chippy’s practical jokes—always knowing exactly where in the carpet the forest fire is going to break out, which chandeliers have been timed to go off as catherine wheels and which to rain down assegais—and takes them all in such good part that before long he has become the most popular member in the club. His dials are thronged from Dreamtime to Coma with Surrealist Sportsmen, eager to chew the fat with him, and perhaps pick up a tip for some forthcoming cosmic event. Every now and again, such is the spell of the Mechanical Brain’s captivating personality, they burst into: “For he’s a jolly good entity! And so say all of us!”

  Into this atmosphere of peace and goodwill to all thought-forms enters my friend Engelbrecht, the dwarf surrealist boxer, fresh from a tour of the Welsh holiday resorts, where he has been giving a series of exhibition bouts with a punch-drunk dentist’s chair who fights under the name of Casse Noisette.

  Some of us have figured that Engelbrecht’s experiences in the ring, knocking the dials off clocks and eviscerating slot machines with right hooks to the works, will not be such as to endear him to a Mechanical Brain, and mischief-makers have hopes of promoting an unseemly fracas in the Smoking Room.

  But no sooner does the Mechanical Brain catch on to Engelbrecht’s wavelength than all the dials start purring at once and he registers the maximum degree of pleasure possible. From then on he and the dwarf are inseparable.

  Towards the end of the Epoch, at the season of celebration and regret, the Club Committee announce a special dinner in honour of the Mechanical Brain at which full clock-work will be worn. This time there is not a dissident voice, and everything looks to be all set for one of the most festive evenings in Surrealist Sporting history.

  Dinner, which is held in a private room at the Power Station, is the devil of a do. The Mechanical Brain sits between the Id and Engelbrecht,
and he’s so happy he gives out a continuous crackle of blue sparks. His diet is a bit recherché, consisting mainly of curves and measurements, but his attendants have done their best to fix him a really slap-up meal. Once the crackle becomes a roar, and I gather that the M.B. is laughing at a rather esoteric joke about the difference between the co-ordinates for a 4-dimensional sirloin and a bathing beauty’s hip.

  At last Dreamy Dan, our Surrealist Toastmaster, pronounces the time-honoured formula: “Gentlemen, you may drug.” Opium pipes and reefers are lit; ether sprays are squirted; and we wind up our main springs, oil our cogs, and get set for the speeches.

  I won’t bother you with all that is said, but so fervent and sincere are the tributes paid to the Mechanical Brain that when the time comes for him to reply he is overcome with Purpose Tremor (which is a complaint that Mechanical Brains suffer from in moments of stress) and unable to utter so much as a spark.

  It’s a heartrending time for us, as the attendants,—electronic engineers, statisticians and cybernetecists—fuss round his dials and coils, adjusting and computing until they get him on the beam again. Then he thanks us very prettily and, by way of an after-dinner story, proceeds to recite the contents of the “case” books in the British Museum Library—those which are kept under lock and key and can only be read, by special permission, in the North Library.

  By now we are well on in the seventh stage of intoxication. The weaker brethren have been carried away, some by the men in white, others by indescribable phantasms of their own imagining. Only the tough inner cadre of Surrealist Sport remains, grouped round the guest of honour, plying him with the formulae for vegetable alkaloids, which he seems well able to take.