DUE TO THE FESTIVE SEASON.
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A Yule Yarn (with Official Interruptions). By Fred Gillett.
JIT WAS Christmas Eve at the motored garage. (This sounds more up-to-date than " moated grange.") The festoons of evergreen and the sheen of the mistletoe berries-- (Do they have mistletoe in. garages?
Well, this is a Yule yarn, so perhaps a few liberties are permissible.
AU right. Carry on!) Possibly they were ball bearings, and the festoons were perhaps derelict inner tubes ; but to the eyes of our hero, young Noel Lovell (He was in love, then.? Yes, with the typist. Lie was working overtime to buy the box of chocolates and the two-seater he had promised her for Christmas.)
His was no soft job—welding a broken torque rod that had run amok and lost its bearings—
(E117 Tfhot's that? , The festive season-Well, proceed.) For some time nothing happened to break the silence, save the splash of the phosphor-bronze solder as it fell like scalding tears on his spotless overalls (7/Jan! Festive season again, I suppose? Well, carry on I)
And the click of the typewriter—
(Was she working overtime, too?
Yes ; she had got into arrears with her correspondence. Besides, she wished to be near Noel and to escape from. the attentions of a wealthy suitor by name Ichabod Wangle—known as Ikey, for short.) .
A long, low, rakish-looking ear---(Yes, yes; we know that car)—travelling at a potential speed of 70 m.p.h.,. dashed up to the garage and drew up in its own length, as the livened chauffeur clapped on all four brakes regardless of cost. From it emerged a furclad, begoggled figure, who crept stealthily towards the motored garage and sidled into the office. It was Ikey. (The mysterious "Mr. I.,"‘ so to speak.) Throwing open his fur coat to display his diamondstudded dickey, he announced his arrival.
" Ermyntrucle, I have come," he began. Then, to conceal his real motive, he added : " For some petrol." She started coldly. "You had two gallons only yesterday. This is merely an excuse for dropping in. Please switch off those diamonds ; they dazzle me. You had better interview the mechanic; he has the key of the pump."
"Very well," he said, buttoning up his fur coat and so blacking out the diamonds, " I will see him ; but to-morrow morning, when he stands in the felon's dock and his name appears in all the papers under the heading 'Another Insurance Claim Paid," you will regret this night's work. For to-night's the night! "
Leaving her unattended, he sought out Noel, and proceeded to carry out his deep-laid and nefarious designs for 1925.
"Noel, my boy," said he, with a Dellish and Garvicious smile, "would you like to earn £215—or, with self-starter, 2225? "
It was a wily offer—just the amount Noel needed. " There's no catch in it?" he asked.
" It's quite simple. A child could use it. It's only to drive a steam tractor—with trailers—about one hundred miles."
At this moment Errnyntrude put her spoke in. "Noel, don't take the job on! It may be a trap." " But with a steam tractor and trailers I am not likely to be trapped for exceeding." "You never know your luck.," said Ermyntrude. "Come," said Ikey, " be a sport! Be British! " An appeal to Noel's patriotism was irresistible. Had Ikey said "Be Chinese ! " nothing would have laeen doing. But "Be British!" gripped him. " Righto I " he answered. " I'm for it! "
"Me. too," said Errnyntrude.
"Then step aboard the lugger," said Ikey. The three got into Ikey's limousine and were whirled away through the night. The interior of Ikey's car was fitted with everything a motorist Might.-. require and everything he might not riluire on a journey, from a loud speaker to a Mah-jong set. Switching on the former and dealing out the tiles of the latter, Ikey soon had the two lovers hard at play mastering the mysteries of Mah-Jong or Chinese Bridge, a game not to be confused with Ju-jitsu. They played for high stakes, without a limit, and Ikey lost heavily, for every time
he tried to pung a chow Noel and Ermyntrude would trump it with a kong (see rules). By the time they reached their destination, an uncanny, ca'canny spot half-way between Beaehy Head and Selsey Bill, Ikey was a ruined man and Noel a millionaire.
('sn't this rather sudden?
Well the festive season, you know. Well, let it pass!) They had reached a lonely spot on a desolate shore, the haunt of the seamew and the haggis, the abode of the pirate and the smuggler. A ruined Martello Tower was silhouetted against the skyline, and in its shadow stood a heavy tractor, to which was attached a long line of tarpaulin-covered trucks.
"All aboard I" whispered Ikey to one of his myrmidons, an ugly, hulking fellow, who had lost his job at a garage through trying to draw light and heavy oil out of the same barrel.
"Aye, aye, sir! "
"Then," said Ikey, turning to Noel, "get up steam 1" Though he jibbed at his job, Noel was not a man to go back on his word or put in his reverse during a hill-climb ; so he put a couple of Yule logs into the firebox and stoked furiously, causing a barrage of smoke which completely baffled his pursuers, and, jumping into the tractor with Ermyntrude beside him, was off and away on the trusty tractor, with the ten trailers bumping and rocking in his wake.
(A bit rapid, ehl The festive— I see. Carry on—but go easy with your facts.)
lkey leapt into his limousine, telling his chauffeur to accelerate for all the engine was worth ; for it was necessary to his schemes that he should get on ahead in order to warn his private staff of policetrappers that Noel, with his convoy of contraband, was coming along. It was Ikey's intention to have our hero pinched, and possibly imprisoned, for being in love whilst in charge of a motor vehicle.
(The dirty dog!) Obedient to his master's voice, Long-Un-Hung, the Chink chauffeur, pressed his feet on all tlel! four juiceknobs at once, with the result that the car (being of alien make) chewed up its top gear and was obliged to run on second. Ikey gnashed his own false teeth at the delay. He knew that Noel's intention was to drive the trailers straight to the Custom House and hand them over to the Excise authorities.
1344 Slowly, but surely, the long, low, rakish limousine gained on the queue of trailers, and was in the very act of passing them (on the wrong side), when---
We must now take our readers back some fifty-odd years to a time when— (Here! Let's get on with it! We can't wait fifty Years.
It's only a temporary stop.) To a time when the village smithy stood beneath the spreading chestnut tree. The said smithy has long since fallen into desuetude or been converted into an A.A. telephone box, but the chestnut tree still kept up the good, old-fashioned custom of shedding its leaves annually on the road at that point. It had just shed its last batch of rich, ripe, juicy, autumnal boseage- (In December? • Yes; autumn was late this year.).
The surface of the cambered corner was slitheringly seccotined with a tacky film of sappy vegetation. Noel, remembering the warning issued by the A.A. to beware of skidding on wet leaves, carefully piloted his tractor and bee-line of trucks round the nasty corner. It was the last trailer of the ten that hap pened to strike the nastiest patch and did the mischief. When ten trailers get wagged like a whale's tail there is likely to be the sort of skid that one writes home about to say that one has just "turned over a new leaf."
It not only knocked the remains of the ancient smithy into smithereens, and knocked down the chestnut tree, but it also caught Ikey's car—which was at that moment overtaking—and knocked the stuffing out tif him and his car like a pack of Mah-Jong tiles on a broken wall.
(That's the end, I hope.
Yes; the story has practically petered out now, hasn't it?
But what was in the trailers?
Spare parts Of smuggled Mah-Jong sets, made in China and smuggled over here in order to undermine the activities of the Mah-Jong manufacturers and traders in this country and to evade the McKenna duties.
But the McKenna duties are scrapped!
Well, it's the festive season; so any httle divergences from facts in this narrative can, he put down to the extended licence of the moment.)