On an Odd Note Read online

  According to the pamphlet, Hodge said, “Your Reverence, begging your Reverence’s pardon, how can that be, since for the past fortnight there has been no breath of wind and no foreign vessel in these parts? If this be an unfortunate shipwrecked mariner, where is the wreck of his ship, and where was it wrecked? I have great respect for your Reverence’s opinions, but I humbly ask your Reverence how he appeared as you might say out of a bubble without warning on the face of the water, floating. And if your Honor will take the trouble to observe this unhappy creature’s skin your Reverence will see that it shows no signs of having been immersed for any considerable period in the ocean.”

  I do not imagine for a moment that this is what Hodge really said; he probably muttered the substance of the argument in the form of an angry protest emphasized by a bitten-off oath or two. However, the Reverend Arthur Titty perceived that what the fisherman said was “not without some show of reason” and said that he proposed to take the monster to his house for examination.

  Hodge protested vigorously. It was his monster, he said, because he had caught it in the open sea with his own hands, in his own boat, and parson or no parson, if Titty were the Archbishop himself an Englishman had his rights. After some altercation, in the course of which the monster fainted, the Reverend Arthur Titty gave Hodge a silver crown piece for the loan of the monster for philosophical observation. They poured a few buckets of sea water over the monster, which came back to consciousness with a tremulous sigh. This was regarded as positive proof of its watery origin. Then it was carried to Titty’s house on a hurdle.

  It rejected salt water as a drink, preferring fresh water or wine, and ate cooked food, expressing, with unmistakable grimaces, a distaste for raw fish and meat. It was put to bed on a heap of clean straw and covered with a blanket which was kept moistened with sea water. Soon the Monster of Brighthelmstone revived and appeared desirous of walking. It could even make sounds reminiscent of human speech.

  The Reverend Arthur Titty covered its nakedness under a pair of his old breeches and one of his old shirts . . . as if it had not been grotesque looking enough before.

  He weighed it, measured it and blooded it to discover whether it was thick or thin blooded, cold or hot blooded. According to Titty’s fussy little account the monster was about five feet one and three-quarter inches tall. It weighed exactly one hundred and nineteen pounds and walked upright. It possessed unbelievable strength and superhuman agility. On one occasion the Reverend Arthur Titty took it out for a walk on the end of a leather leash. The local blacksmith, one of Hodge’s boon companions, who was notorious for his gigantic muscular power and bad temper—he was later to achieve nationwide fame as Clifford, who broke the arm of the champion wrestler of Yorkshire—accosted the Reverend Arthur Titty outside his smithy and said, “Ah, so that’s Hodge’s catch as you stole from him. Let me feel of it to see if it be real,” and he pinched the monster’s shoulder very cruelly with one of his great hands—hands that could snap horseshoes and twist iron bars into spirals. The inevitably attendant crowd of awestruck children and gaping villagers witnessed the event. The monster, baring big white teeth in a snarl of rage, moving with dazzling speed picked up the two-hundred-pound blacksmith and threw him into a heap of scrap iron three yards away. For an anxious second or two Titty thought that the monster was going to run amok, for its entire countenance changed; the nostrils quivered, the eyes shone with fierce intelligence, and from its open mouth there came a weird cry. Then the creature relapsed into heavy dejection and let itself be led home quietly, while the astonished blacksmith, bruised and bleeding, limped back to his anvil with the shocked air of a man who has seen the impossible come to pass.

  Yet, the monster was an extremely sick monster. It ate little, sometimes listlessly chewing the same mouthful for fifteen minutes. It liked to squat on its haunches and stare unblinkingly at the sea. It was naturally assumed that it was homesick for its native element, and so it was soused at intervals with buckets of brine and given a large tub of sea water to sleep in if it so desired. A learned doctor of medicine came all the way from Dover to examine it and pronounced it human; unquestionably an air-breathing mammal. But so were whales and crocodiles breathers of air that lived in the water.

  Hodge, alternately threatening and whimpering, claimed his property. The Reverend Arthur Titty called in his lawyer, who so bewildered the unfortunate fisherman with Latin quotations, legal jargon, dark hints and long words that, cursing and growling, he scrawled a cross in lieu of a signature at the foot of a document in which he agreed to relinquish all claim on the monster in consideration of the sum of seven guineas, payable on the spot. Seven guineas was a great deal of money for a fisherman in those days. Hodge had never seen so many gold pieces in a heap, and had never owned one. Still, the monster brought him bad luck in the end, and it would have been better for Hodge if he had gone home instead of loitering optimistically on the still sea that August morning. A traveling showman visited the Reverend Arthur Titty and offered him twenty-five guineas for the monster, which Titty refused. In the interests of natural philosophy, this monster was not for sale. The showman spoke of the matter in “The Smack,” and Hodge, who had been drunk for a week, behaved “like one demented,” as Titty wrote in a contemptuous footnote. He made a thorough nuisance of himself, demanding the balance of the twenty-five guineas which were his by rights, was arrested and fined for riotous conduct. Then he was put in the stocks as an incorrigible drunkard, and the wicked little urchins of Brighthelmstone threw fish guts at him. By this time his simple-minded brother-in-law Rodgers, egged on by Hodge’s shrewish sister, had quarreled with him. Rodgers demanded half of the seven guineas. Hodge had given him only twelve shillings. Let out of the stocks with a severe reprimand, smelling horribly of dead fish, Hodge went to “The Smack” and ordered a quart of strong ale, which came in a heavy can. Rodgers came in for his modest morning draft, and told Hodge that he was nothing better than a damned rogue. Irritated to the verge of madness Hodge, having drunk his quart, struck Rodgers with the can, and broke his skull; for which he was hanged not long afterward.

  So the Brighthelmstone Monster brought bad luck to poor Rodgers too.

  The Reverend Arthur Titty, also, suffered because of the monster. After the killing of Rodgers and the hanging of Hodge the fishermen began to hate him. Heavy stones were thrown against his shutters at night. Someone set fire to one of his haystacks. This must have given Titty something to think about, for rick burning was a hanging matter, and one may as well hang for a parson as for a haystack. He made up his mind to go to London and live in polite, natural-philosophical circles. The fishermen hated the monster too. They regarded it as a sort of devil. But the monster did not care. It was languishing, dying of a mysterious sickness. Curious sores had appeared at various points on the monster’s body; they began as little white bumps such as one gets from stinging nettles, and slowly opened and would not close. The looseness of the skin, now, lent the dragons and snakes and fishes a disgustingly lifelike look: as the monster breathed, they writhed. Doctors bled the monster. A veterinary surgeon poured melted pitch on the sores. The Reverend Arthur Titty kept it well soaked in sea water and locked it in a room, because it had shown signs of wanting to escape.

  At last, nearly three months after its first appearance in Brighthelmstone, the monster escaped. An old manservant, Alan English, unlocked the door, in the presence of the Reverend Arthur Titty, in order to give the monster its daily mess of vegetables and boiled meat. As the key turned the door was flung open with such violence that English fell forward into the room—his hand was still on the doorknob—and the monster ran out, crying aloud in a high, screaming voice. The Reverend Arthur Titty caught it by the shoulder, whereupon he was whisked away like a leaf in the wind and lay stunned at the end of the passage. The monster ran out of the house. Three responsible witnesses—Rebecca West, Herbert George and Abraham Herris (or Harris)—saw it running toward the sea, stark naked, although a north-east w
ind was blowing. The two men ran after it, and Rebecca West followed as fast as she could. The monster’s wide bare feet crunched on the shingle. It ran straight into the bitter water and began to swim, its arms and legs vibrating like the wings of an insect. Herbert George saw it plunge into the green heart of a great wave, and then the heavy rain fell like a curtain and the Brighthelmstone Monster was never seen again.

  The monster had never spoken. In the later stages of its disease its teeth had fallen out. With one of these teeth—obviously a canine—it had scratched certain marks on the dark oak panels of the door of the room in which it was confined. These marks the Reverend Arthur Titty faithfully recorded, and reproduced in his pamphlet.

  The Brighthelmstone fishermen said that the sea devil had gone back where it belonged, down to the bottom of the sea to its palace built of the bones of lost Christian sailors. Sure enough, half an hour after the monster disappeared there was a terrible storm, and many seamen lost their lives. In a month or so Titty left Brighthelmstone for London. The city swallowed him. He published his pamphlet in 1746—a bad year for natural philosophy, because the ears of England were still full of the Jacobite Rebellion of ’45.

  Poor Titty! If he could have foreseen the real significance of the appearance of the Monster of Brighthelmstone he would have died happy . . . probably in a lunatic asylum.

  In April, 1947 I had the good fortune to meet one of my oldest and dearest friends, a colonel in Intelligence who, for obvious reasons, must remain anonymous, although he is supposed to be in retirement now and wears civilian clothes—very plain civilian clothes, elegantly cut in the narrow-sleeved style of the late nineteen-twenties, and rather the worse for wear. He has not had occasion to buy a suit since 1930, and is one of the last men in London to wear one of Lock’s little cocky gray-speckled bowler hats. The Colonel is in many ways a romantic character, something like Rudyard Kipling’s Strickland Sahib who lifted the last veil and saw things that no other white man ever saw and lived to boast about. His face is the color of lawyers’ red tape, curiously wrinkled—the skin has something of the excoriated, over-used appearance of an actor’s skin. He has played many strange parts in his time, that formidable old warrior; and his quick black eyes, disturbingly Asiatic-looking under the slackly drooping eyelids, have seen more than you and I will ever see.

  He never talks about his work. An Intelligence officer who talks ceases automatically to be an Intelligence officer. A good deal of his conversation is of sport, manly sport—polo, pig-sticking, cricket, rugby football, hunting and, above all, boxing and wrestling. I imagine that the Colonel, who has lived underground in disguise for so many years of his life, finds relief in the big wide-open games in which a man must meet his opponent face to face yet may, without breaking the rules, play quick tricks. At the age of forty-eight he boxed three rounds with the lightweight champion, who told him that he was wasting his time in the army. It is as well for us, though, that he stayed where he was; I am not at liberty to tell you why.

  We were drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes after dinner in my flat and he was talking about Oriental wrestling. He touched on wrestling technique among the Afghans and in the Deccan, and spoke with admiration of Gama, the Western Indian wrestler, still a rock-crusher at an age when most men are shivering in slippers by the fire, who beat Zbyszko in ten seconds; remarked on a South-Eastern Indian named Patil who could knock a strong man senseless with the knuckle of his left thumb; and went on to Chinese wrestlers, especially Mongolians, who are tremendously heavy and powerful, and use their feet. A good French Canadian lumberjack (the Colonel said), accustomed to dancing on rolling logs in a rushing river, could do dreadful things with his legs and feet, like Lucien Pacaud, the Tiger of Quebec who, in a scissors hold, killed Big Ted Glass of Detroit. In certain kinds of wrestling size and weight were essential, said the Colonel. The Japanese wrestlers of the heavy sort—the ones that weighed three or four hundred pounds and looked like pigs—those big ones that started on all fours and went through a series of ritual movements; they had to be enormously heavy. In fact the heavier they were the better.

  He did not find this amusing, although there were certain subtle points that a connoisseur could not possibly fail to appreciate.

  “No, Gerald my lad, give me jujitsu. There is no one on earth who can defeat a Black Belt—except someone who takes him by surprise. A three-hundred-and-fifty-pound man catching a jujitsu man unawares and simply falling on him with all his weight would naturally put him out of action, just as if the roof fell in on him. Or again, a scientific boxer, getting a well-placed punch in first would put him out for the count. But the higher initiates had better be attacked from behind. In jujitsu the real adept develops such wonderful co-ordination of hand and eye that if he happens to be expecting it he can turn to his own advantage even the lightning punch of a wizard like Jimmy Wilde. He could give away eight stone to Joe Louis and make him look silly. Of course, strictly speaking, it wouldn’t be fair. The opponents would be attacking or defending along different lines. Georges Hackenschmidt, for instance, was one of the greatest catch-as-catch-can wrestlers that ever lived, and one of the strongest men of his day. But I ask you: would he, wrestling Catch, have stood up against Yukio Otani using jujitsu? Oh, by the way, speaking of Yukio Otani, did you ever hear of a Japanese wrestler called Sato?”

  “I can’t say that I have. Why? Should I have heard of him?”

  “No, of course not. I have been so long out there that I tend to forget. You know, if I could only find that little fellow I might be a rich man yet. I always wanted to buy a nice little boat and go cruising around the Greek islands. A fat chance, on my wretched pay! And I sunk most of my savings in that wretched fellow Benny North, fool that I was. You remember that lout? I thought I’d discovered a real British heavyweight at last and as it turned out the damned fellow had a weak heart. No more heavyweights for me.”

  “What has this to do with Sato?”

  “Why, he is, or was, a phenomenon. I think he was a better wrestler than Otani. My idea was to take him all round the world and challenge all comers—boxers, wrestlers, even fencers, to stand up against him for ten minutes. He was unbelievable. Furthermore, he looked so frightful. I won a hundred and fifty quid on him at Singapore in 1938. He took on four of the biggest and best boxers and wrestlers we could lay our hands on and floored the whole lot in eleven minutes by the clock. Just a minute, I’ve got a picture in my wallet. I keep it because it looks so damn funny. Look.”

  The Colonel handed me a dog-eared photograph of an oddly assorted group. There was a hairy mammoth of a man, obviously a wrestler, standing with his arms folded so that his biceps looked like coconuts, by the side of another man, almost as big, but with the scrambled features of a rough-and-tumble bruiser. There was one blond grinning man who looked like a light heavyweight, and a beetle-browed middleweight with a bulldog jaw. The Colonel was standing in the background, smiling in a fatherly way. In the foreground smiling into the camera stood a tiny Japanese. The top of his head was on a level with the big wrestler’s breastbone, but he must have measured at least two feet six inches across the shoulders—he was more than half as broad as he was tall. He was all chest and arms. The knuckles of his closed hands touched his knees. I took the picture to the light and looked more closely. The photographer’s flash-bulb had illuminated every detail. Sato had made himself even more hideous with tattooing. He was covered with things that creep and crawl, real and fabulous. A dragon snarled on his stomach. Snakes were coiled about his legs. Another snake wound itself about his right arm from forefinger to armpit. The other arm was covered with angry looking lobsters and goggle-eyed fishes, and on the left breast there was the conventionalized shape of a heart.

  It was then that I uttered an astonished oath and went running to look for my old uniform, which I found, with the Reverend Arthur Titty’s pamphlet still in the inside breast pocket. The Colonel asked me what the devil was the matter with me. I smoothed out the pamphlet
and gave it to him without a word.

  He looked at it, and said: “How very extraordinary!” Then he put away his eyeglass and put on a pair of spectacles; peered intently at the Reverend Arthur Titty’s painstaking drawing of the Brighthelmstone Monster, compared it with the photograph of Sato and said to me, “I have come across some pretty queer things in my time, but I’m damned if I know what to make of this.”

  “What sort of tattooing did your Sato have on his back?” I asked.

  He replied, without hesitation, “A crimson and emerald-green hawk stooping between the shoulders and a foxy red fox chasing six bluey-green rabbits down his backbone; an octopus on the right buttock throwing out the tentacles around groin and belly—very clever piece of work—must have hurt him like the devil.”

  “Look here,” I said pointing to the relevant passage in the pamphlet.

  My friend the Colonel will swear horribly over trivialities. But when he is deeply moved he says: “Well! Really!” He said it now.

  “But wait a minute,” I said. “This Brighton Monster scratched something on the door. The old Reverend took a copy of it. Turn over four or five pages and you’ll see it there, I think.”

  The Colonel looked at the copied marks scratched by the monster with one of its own teeth on the door of its cell. The spongy old paper was crumpled and cracked, and the marks were blurred by time, and by the dampness of lumber rooms and the moisture of my body. He looked at them, found a piece of paper and a pencil, laid the paper against a wall, and copied the inscription, holding the pencil half an inch from the point. When he turned, I saw that the red of his face had faded to grayish pink.