The Exploits of Engelbrecht Read online

  Joey DeAth exhales lightly, and the last of the M.B.’s attendants to retain any shreds of the priceless gift of consciousness rolls over on his back, flat out as a slide-rule. With a high-pitched sound like a schoolgirl’s giggle the Mechanical Brain emits a stream of violent sparks. Engelbrecht leaps on the table to address the company.

  His proposal is simplicity itself. Nothing more than to give the Mechanical Brain a bit of fun, take him out and show him some mechanical night life, free him for a few glorious hours from the irksome restraint of the laboratory.

  There is tremendous enthusiasm for this humane, machine proposal, and in less time than it takes to tell, the M.B.—with Engelbrecht and Dr. Sadismus, the Surrealist Surgeon (who has just popped in after a difficult delivery at the Clock Hospital) at the controls—is being borne by a forest of willing hands, fins, tentacles and other appendages belonging to a host of Surrealist Sons of Belial, whooping and shrieking through the streets of night-town, en route for the red light district down by the marshalling yard.

  Our first port of call is “Puffing Billy’s”, a notorious haunt of dissolute locomotives. We arrive in the middle of the cabaret just as La Donkey Engine is completing her famous boiler dance. Puffing Billy ushers us to a table near the floor and whistles up a bevy of his most glamorous hostesses—pressure-gauges and cash registers—to keep us entertained.

  Soon they are clustered round the Mechanical Brain like odalisques in a seraglio. And all the time they’re ticking up the dollars. It seems they’re built to measure every amorous impulse transmitted by the customer’s works, and our guest of the evening has a no end friendly disposition. The last thing in the world we want is to embarrass the old dear, but it looks like our bill is going to be astronomical, so Engelbrecht chugs over for a quiet word with Puffing Billy to ask him to have mercy on us.

  I don’t know quite how it starts, but suddenly there is a piercing whistle followed by clouds of steam and the next thing we see is Engelbrecht knocking the bogie wheels from under Puffing Billy.

  It’s a cheerful little rough house while it lasts, hut as soon as Puffing Billy’s chuckers-out—two plug-ugly Bull-dozers and a Steam-shovel—come into action it’s all over, and we find ourselves out on our ears in the marshalling yard, all among the burdock, the coal dust, the granite chips, and the tarred sleepers. The Mechanical Brain seems rather the worse for wear, but Engelbrecht and Dr. Sadismus give him some first-aid shock treatment with a live rail, which makes him so frisky again that he clamours persistently to go on somewhere else.

  I must say I’ve no idea the Night Life of the Machine World is so elaborate. My recollections of the rest of the evening are a trifle blurred, but I distinctly remember being asked to leave “Pi” because Chippy de Zoete will keep peering under a young racing car’s bonnet. I am certainly present when we wreck The Needy Knife Grinder, a pretentious mechanical boîte with an early industrial revolution period décor, and a very equivocal clientele. But after this I become disoriented, and—though I am told later that I do my best to save poor little Charlie Wapentake from the frightful fate that overtakes him at The Saw Mill—I do not surface again until we are being shown to our table in The Precision Tool Room.

  This is a terrifically tony, upstage joint, a haunt of the Greenwich Observatory Chronometer and Instruments from the National Physical Laboratory. I’m very surprised they let us in, especially as Chippy de Zoete makes what I can only describe as a mechanically criminal assault on the photo-electric apparatus on duty in the cloakroom. His apology—that he thinks it is a hat check girl—is hardly likely to heal the breach.

  But in we go, and the first thing we see is a large party of Precision types from the Nat. Phys. Lab. escorted by some Range-finders and Geiger counters in uniform. The atmosphere is so overwhelmingly correct that anybody would think they were at the 400 on a night when the princesses have dropped in and there’s been a directive from the palace against dancing cheek to cheek.

  And now the effects of all the insidious stuff he’s been downing at last begin to tell on our guest of the evening. He develops a most disturbing form of machine’s megalomania, starts sending out ugly looking red waves and bawls at the top of his sound-box that he intends to enforce the good old mechanical tradition of the droit du seigneur, and will all machines present in The Precision Tool Room come over at once to our table and pay him homage. He makes it pretty clear what he means by homage.

  The management of The Precision Tool Room have already threatened to cut the power off if we don’t pull ourselves together, but Joey DeAth and the Formless Shape and the Shapeless Form degauss the chuckers-out and mount guard over the switch-board.

  It looks as if we’re in for a horrible orgy. But a deputation from their table consisting of the senior Range-finder, a Geiger counter, and something very diaphanous from the Nat. Phys. Lab., come over to us and start lecturing the Mechanical Brain for all they’re worth. It sounds like a sarcastic headmaster tongue-lashing the lower fifth. They end up by telling him he’s a disgrace to electronic engineering and ought to be thoroughly ashamed of himself and go home to bed.

  I don’t know how it is but their remarks go straight to the heart of the Mechanical Brain. There is a crackle of sparks followed by a terrible howling noise. Then he switches over to the most deplorable crying jag you ever witnessed. What’s more, the black waves he emits turn out to be highly infectious and in no time at all the entire party of us are prostrate with melancholia.

  You can hear the sobs and guilt-stricken lamentations all over Night-town. The Manager of The Precision Tool Room sends for a Breakdown Gang and we are taken away under care.

  And so this once hilarious night out draws to its gloomy close. It takes us some aeons to recover from this hangover, and the last we hear of the Mechanical Brain he is only able to earn a bare pittance in a penny bank, doing very simple addition, hand-operated.

  DIRTY WORK AT THE DOGS’ OPERA

  We have never suspected our friend, Engelbrecht, the dwarf surrealist boxer, of harbouring an aesthetic conscience. The news, therefore, that he is undertaking to finance a Season of Song at the Old Dogs’ Opera House causes quite a furore in the Dream Room of the Surrealist Sportsman’s Club.

  There is much cynical comment on the unwisdom of a tone-deaf dwarf setting up as Butter-and-Egg-Man to Bulldogs and Angel to Aberdeens. Then I hear the foggy voice of Chippy de Zoete laying five to two “in anything you like, Space, Time, or Pleasurable Sensations,” that the curtain will never rise again, after the opening night.

  To me, knowing Chippy’s form as a saboteur, this bodes little good to my friend’s cultural enterprise, and it is with a heavy heart that I listen presently to a message transmitted by the Club’s dumb waiter, whose telepathic gift enables us to dispense with a telephone, from Engelbrecht’s pessimistic manager, Lizard Bayliss.

  “You got to help us, chum,” he quavers. “We’re counting on you for Deputy Wardrobe Master and Second Prompter. For Dog’s sake come over quick. Ouch! Down! You brutes! Down, I say.” The rest is drowned in a chorus of baying and howling that sounds like a meet of the Baskerville.

  The Old Dogs’ Opera House, designed by the brothers Landseer, whose portraits of celebrated canine Thespians adorn the foyer and green-room, is a vast, kennel-shaped edifice that would make the Crystal Palace look like a mouse-trap. It’s fallen into desuetude this long time, not from any shortage of talent hut from lack of patronage.

  You see, Dogs’ Opera is big stuff, much bigger than Grand Opera. There’s only one work in the repertoire. It’s just called The Dogs’ Opera. But it’s got everything. It makes The Ring seem like one of Gertrude Jennings’ curtain-raisers.

  When I arrive, Engelbrecht is standing on top of a kennel the size of Noah’s Ark, beating time with a tuning fork with a lash tied to the end of it, while the bloodhound who sings the leading role of Fido tries out his famous aria, Semper Fideis.

  Meanwhile, in a clearing in a forest way down stage, Lizard Bayl
iss, wearing one of those padded outfits they use for police dog trials, is rehearsing the Drinking Chorus.

  “Call yourselves a Dogs’ Voice Choir?” he is sneering. “Why, a scratch mob from Battersea could sing better than that. Now we’ll start all over again. The St. Bernards with the brandy barrels come on from the O.P. side and fill the drinking bowls. Look at me, if you please, Towser, not at the scenery. Yes, it’s quite real but all the rabbits have been netted. Then the rest of you start quaffing, I mean lapping, like beggary. No, not now, Rover, you chump. Wait for it. Those who don’t know their words can wuff ’em.”

  With that he cracks his whip and they all give tongue:

  Here’s to the Basset of bashful fifteen

  And here’s to the Dachshund of fifty.

  It sounded a bit cracked to me but I’m not used to the canine voice.

  Lizard Bayliss seems as pleased as Punch. “Much more like it, dogs,” he says. “A very nice piece of vocalizing. Trot off to your kennels now and all be back here at nine sharp. Poodles in practice dress. We’ll try the Lament for Waldmann from Act One, Scene Fifty-six. You can’t go wrong on that. It’s straight howling. I’ll just refresh your memories. The veteran hound, Waldmann, has eaten the poisoned ragout intended for Fido. He’s lying dead in mid-stage with his paws folded. Fido enters and sniffs him. And mind you lie still, Waldmann. No irreverent twitching. Fido sings a long aria extolling the virtues of his dead friend. Towards its close the Dogs’ Voice Choir come softly on. Softly, I said, Rover, so get your claws clipped. It’s a sad scene, this, and we don’t want it spoiled by a ruddy tap dance…”

  Everything seems to me to be going a lot better than could be expected and it begins to look as if Chippy de Zoete may drop a packet. Fido strolls over with Engelbrecht on his shoulder, and they take me on a tour of the stars’ dressing kennels. I’m introduced to a ravishing little soubrette, a white poodle who sings Poupée, the diseuse at the dogs’ café chantant where Fido gets taken on as chucker-out in Act Two. Also to Dido, the heroine, a temperamental Great Dane with a rich, creamy, stableyard contralto.

  Although she’s heroine it’s not much of a part. She gets dog-napped early in the plot and is chained up off-stage for ages. I can see there’s no love lost between her and Poupée, and Lizard Bayliss tells me it’s a job to keep her from chawing the plucky little artiste right up.

  She’s equally jealous of the Red Setter—a gloriously regal looking lady-dog she is too—who sings Flavia, the Queen of the Coverts, and tries to corrupt Fido’s integrity in a long aria, All This To Thee I Promise, about the allure of smart dogs’ life in a gunroom de luxe and his photograph in the Caller and the Bitch.

  I also met Cavaliere Craporello, the canine Toscanini, whom Engelbrecht has imported from the Isle of Dogs to conduct the Canine Symphony Orchestra.

  From now on life is the usual backstage whirl with a fresh crisis breaking every hour. I’m taken off prompting because a lot of the libretto is in Latin and these dogs are so smart they all use the new pronunciation. But I find my level as Deputy Keeper of the Chorus Dogs’ Boots and Spurs and general man’s body....

  With his usual crazy optimism Engelbrecht hasn’t allowed us half enough time to rehearse and before we know where we are the First Night is upon us.

  Our temperamental cast gets worse jitters than any of the clientele of the Ivy, and the Opera House Vet has his hands full. Dido throws a howling fit. Poupée complains that Flavia has pupped on her ball-dress. Fido’s swallowed a swarm of flies and we have to spray his throat with Flit. And the old Airedale who

  plays the Fairy Fustypaws in the prologue is stuck in a rabbit hole up-stage.

  But somehow we get them all sorted out in time and I hear the Call-pup yapping along the corridors: “Prologue and Act One, Scene One. Beginners please.”

  We’ve been on the alert for sabotage all through rehearsals, of course, with strict screening of visitors and man-traps outside the stars’ dressing kennels; but nary a bite except one poor old stage-door-Johnnie delivering fan-mail. Our information is that Chippy de Zoete is saving his effort for the opening night. And if the butchers’ vans in front of the stage door mean what I think they mean, it’s going to be a whale of an effort.

  However, I have every confidence in Bowser and Bawsie, our stagedoor-keepers, two old mastiffs who used to sing in Dogs’ Opera themselves before they lost their voices. They may be passé, but they know, none better, the rule of the Opera House: No bouquets of meat, bones, or offal to be delivered to artistes, whether on the stage or in their dressing kennels, until after the final curtain.

  The Overture to the Dogs’ Opera is a full-bodied composition. As the music critic of The Fly Paper says, it makes Tchaikovski’s 1812 sound like Berners’ Lullaby for a New-Born Gnat. Craporello complains he’s never been able to rehearse it properly because Engelbrecht is so stingy with the gunpowder. Nevertheless, he gets some wonderful chords out of those massed cannon and cathedral chimes. Several times he’s blasted right off his rostrum into the orchestra pit, only to bound back, nonchalantly fitting a fresh rocket to his baton.

  Meanwhile, through the billowing clouds of smoke, steam, and sound, I glimpse row upon row of immaculate Dogs’ Opera-goers packing the stalls—and the Id, and his party of surrealist socialites Tommy Prenderghast, Monkey Trevelyan, Bones Barlow, Nodder Fothergill, Willy Warlock, Joey DeAth, and scores more, making mayhem in the immensity of the Stage-Box.

  Little Charlie Wapentake, who’s acting as my tip-off, starts to tic-tac a message, but just then there’s some more heavy percussion and when the smoke clears away poor Charlie is no longer in possession of the priceless gift of consciousness, one of his cronies having crowned him with a heavy Cr.8vo volume containing the programme.

  The Prologue is a formidable Epos in Dog-Latin, High German, Old and Middle English, liberally spiced with Sanscrit doubles entendres. But the Fairy Fustypaws never falters. All her training at the Comédie Canine comes to her aid and she holds that difficult, mixed audience spellbound by faultless declamation and brilliant miming. You’d never guess that a little while back she was drawing blood from her dressers as they plucked the burrs off her coat.

  The curtain rises on Scene One, with its slangily provocative Huntsman’s Chorus:

  D’ye ken John Peel?

  He’s a dog-gone heel.

  and the first Act goes off without serious mishap. There’s one awkward moment in the Duel Scene when Fido gets his sword stuck in a tree, and can’t get it out again, though he grunts and tugs at the hilt with his teeth like billyo.

  The hidden hand of Chippy de Zoete is long delayed, but when it strikes it strikes hard. Scene 56 of Act 4 is one of the biggest in the entire opus. Fido, our hero, wrongfully certified through the machinations of his enemy, the wolfhound, Masterman (by Moriarty out of Messalina, and a stupendous basso profundo), has fetched up in the refractory mental ward of the Royal Veterinary College. He is acting hysterically owing to the drug which Masterman put in his drinking trough, and is suspected of rabies. But he recovers his sanity just in time, joins forces with one of the other inmates, a deluded wirehaired terrier, known by his asylum sobriquet of the Mad God Rags, and organizes a break out. The scene, which is painful and moving in the extreme, closes with the stirring and thunderous March of the Mad Dogs—on Buckingham Palace.

  It is halfway through, and the stage is in darkness. I am keeping an eye on the Rovers—mostly collies—at the back of the Dress Circle, when I get a message to report back-stage.

  I don’t recognize Engelbrecht at first; he’s dressed as a Yorkshire terrier. “Hop into this, chum,” he says, holding out a dog-skin and mask, “and get down on all fours. We’re wanted on the stage. Under cover of darkness de Zoete’s loosed the population of the Good Samaritan Cats’ Home on us.”

  By the time we’ve rounded up the last cat, and Lizard and I have rescued Engelbrecht from the back row of the Dogs’ Voice Choir, who are worrying him like a hearthrug, the curtain is rea
dy to go up again. For several scenes after this the performance is very ragged indeed, and the Cavaliere Craporello more than once exchanges the baton for the whip.

  Then just as the cast are beginning to settle down again Chippy de Zoete plays his final coup. He infiltrates into the cast, via a tunnel in the Fairy Fustypaws’ dressing kennel, a band of desperate ruffians from the condemned kennel at Battersea.

  They dognap Fido, and one of them changes into his costume for the next scene—a tender passage between hero and heroine, which this villainous pseudo-Fido has been ordered to wreck by clowning in the lowest imaginable fashion, like any street cur round a lamp-post. It will spell the end of Dogs’ Opera for some time to come and we are powerless to prevent it because all three of us have been dognapped, muzzled and kennelled, in full view of the stage.

  The curtain rises to reveal the Dogs’ Voice Choir, one of whom is already so demoralized he’s chewing a string of sausages, dressed as Philosopher Kings, discussing, in strophe and anti-strophe, the Good, the True and the Beautiful. Dido enters, attended by a train of wise virgin spaniels.

  Horror-struck——for we have been told what is afoot—we watch the pseudo-Fido waiting in the wings for his cue. He quaffs a final Dog’s Nose proffered by his unsuspecting dresser, and bounds on-stage.

  But as the orchestra strikes up, a mysterious change comes over him. For a moment he looks as if he’s going to howl. And then, true as a bell, from his poor mangy throat, come the strains of Semper Fidelis.

  Afterwards we learn that the pseudo-Fido used to be a famous tenor himself until he lost his voice and went right down in the world. The opening bars of Semper Fidelis bring it back again. So, instead of clowning bestially, he sings the part straight, though he knows full well that by breaking his sabotage contract with Chippy he’s heading straight back for Battersea.