The Exploits of Engelbrecht Read Online Free PDF Page A

Engelbrecht grinned cheerfully back and swung his niblick. There was no daunting that indomitable dwarf.
     
    It was eleven more months and ten more days after we had driven off the first tee and I had just played our 2674321769th, a tricky little pitch out of the window of the 3.30 from Waterloo, when the Chief Caddy let out a yell and started dancing a reel. We had reached the green.
    We took all Engelbrecht’s wooden clubs away from him lest he should be tempted to press, because the green at Mooninghill is the size of an English county and proceeded to foozle our way smoothly and quietly towards the huge hole. We should have done a lot better if the psychiatrist had been functioning to treat us for the anxiety neurosis which is one of the special features of that green. At last, after several hours of being too short, too far, and upping the rim, we managed to tie up the ghostly hands that had been pushing our ball back from the hole and Engelbrecht sank a six-incher for 2674322269.
    The clubhouse was en fête. We could see its lights blazing from miles away in the inky night. And who should be the first persons we saw as we stumbled into the bar but Charlie Wapentake and Nodder Fothergill. Not only were they not dead, but by a strange combination of circumstances, the legitimacy of which is still being debated hotly by the committee to this day, they had done the hole in one. It appears that before Charlie had a chance to play their second out of the Valley of Dry Bones, a huge vulture swooped down and flew off with the ball. Nodder and their White Hunter opened fire and winged the vulture who eventually dropped the ball down the vest of one of the competitors in a Japanese Women’s Cross Country Race. She lost her way round the world while being chased by a Zen Buddhist monk and ran across the green and the ball slipped down the leg of her track shorts and rolled into the hole.
    The celebrations lasted far into the century. My last recollection is of little Engelbrecht taking a header into the loving cup of flaming rum punch. “Come on in,” he said, as he swam round and round, “it’s gloriously warm.”
     
     

A THICK NIGHT AT THE PLANT THEATRE
     
    I shall always remember the time—and a damned long time it was, too, as you’ll realize in a minute—when Engelbrecht, the dwarf surrealist boxer, and I were slung out of the Old Plant Theatre of Varieties. It was during the first night of an arboreal epic entitled Ash Before Oak. We’d looked in there after dining with the Id and some of his chums at a new Black Market Restaurant that had opened next door to the Royal College of Surgeons’ Museum.
    The dinner was by way of celebrating the close season for Man-hunting. Anyway, by the time we’d eaten our way through the menu of recherché Unmentionables, and drained the Ether decanter, I don’t suppose there was a single one of us who was anywhere near in his right mind. So when Nodder Fothergill suggested dropping in at the Plant Theatre we, that is those of us who still retained the priceless gift of consciousness, were inclined to be enthusiastic. We bundled into the Id’s huge black Fly and bowled off, whooping and shrieking like fiends.
    We didn’t realize just what we were in for. The fact is Plant Drama is apt to be a bit slow. All the parts are played by real plants, and plants, as you know, like to take their time about it. You can always rely on them for a sincere performance, but for a good deal of it you just have to sit there and watch them grow. It’s a bit agonizing now and again, especially during love scenes. You’d scarcely credit the time it takes some of these diffident vegetables to make a pass at one another. Why, even a relatively fast worker like mistletoe, convolvulus, or bamboo, playing in a light Coward type comedy, can take three months over a proposal. As for the hardwood trees, well all I can tell you is that the curtain went up 5000 years ago on the famous New Forest