The Exploits of Engelbrecht Read Free

hasn’t been in the game very long and his rise has been sensationally quick. He’s licked to within an inch of its life the Town Hall Clock at Wolverhampton, a deuced ugly customer whom surrealist sportsmen in the Midlands have backed heavily, and on his South Coast Tour he’s fought all the weighing machines to a standstill, knocked out Try Your Grips and Test Your Strengths by the score, and left the piers from Southend to Bournemouth a shambles of springs and cog-wheels, battered brasswork and twisted remains of What the Butler Saw.
    His is quite an impressive record but, as some of the surrealist fancy remark, it’s a short one for a champion, and—as the sagacious Tommy Prenderghast points out—it doesn’t include nearly enough first-class clocks. After all, most of these automatic machines are terribly raw. They stand wide open and sling over haymakers. They’ve no science at all. True the Wolverhampton scrap is something to go by, but there are ugly rumours that Engelbrecht’s manager, Lizard Bayliss, slipped that Clock a couple of hundred hours to lie down.
    However, there’s a shortage of chopping blocks this season, and when Engelbrecht applies for a championship fight against a recognized opponent the committee of the Surrealist Sporting Club decide to let him have his fling.
    You hear gossip of some fast work behind the scenes. Tommy Prenderghast and some of the boys have got something up their sleeves and plan to rake in a packet laying odds against Engelbrecht. It looks as if they’re on to a good thing, too, because the Grandfather Clock, which the Committee nominates as official Champion and Engelbrecht’s opponent, is something really special. He comes originally, I believe, from a big country house in East Anglia. His case is made of thick black bog-oak and he stands every inch of ten feet high. Everything about him is of the strongest and stoutest. In addition to all the usual organs, hands, weights, pendulum, he’s got various accessories on top of his dial such as a Dance of the Hours and Death with a Scythe—a damned sharp one, too. And when he strikes, well, my God, you think it’s the voice of Doom itself.
    You only need to take half a look at him to see he’s as cunning as they come. On top of which he’s been trained to a hair-spring by Tommy Prenderghast and Chippy de Zoete, a former champion, and what those two don’t know about the game wouldn’t fill a watch wheel’s tooth.
    Engelbrecht sends Lizard Bayliss down to Grandfather Clock’s training quarters and he comes back very depressed. “Don’t think me defeatist, kiddo,” he says, “but you don’t stand a dog’s dance. They only let me see the old boy do a bit of shadow boxing but that was enough. It’ll be murder.”
    “What’d he take to lie down?” Engelbrecht asks.
    “Nothing less than a century and we couldn’t raise that between us, not if we was to live in training the rest of our lives. If I was you, kiddo, I’d turn it in. Lay everything you got against yourself and lie down snug before he clocks you to death.”
    “I’ll not do that,” says Engelbrecht. “If I can’t frame, I fight. Never let it be said that I quit.”
    “You’ll quit all right, kiddo. In a hearse.”
     
    Comes the fight which, like all surrealist championships, is held at the Dreamland Arena round behind the gasworks, a vast desert of cinders and coal dust with an occasional oasis of nettles and burdock between two parallel canals that don’t even meet at infinity.
    Engelbrecht as challenger has to be first in the ring and as he and the faithful Lizard Bayliss make their way through the crowd there is a dread chorus of alarm clocks, and a derisive yell of: “You couldn’t even box the compass!” This last is a little piece of psychological warfare on the part of Chippy de Zoete who doesn’t believe in leaving anything to chance and has hired a claque to undermine Engelbrecht’s morale. Lizard Bayliss blows a mournful