On an Odd Note Read online

  “You’re right. Bacon, bread, wine, cigars. What more could you want? Geese?”

  “What I mean to say is, I wasn’t always poor like this.”

  “Who cares?” said Bicskas. “However poor you are there’s always a consolation. Somewhere there’s someone poorer. You have always got something somebody else wants. I’ve seen a man knifed in the back in Medvegy’s Cellar for a boot—one old boot with a hole in the sole. Good, that, eh?”

  “Medvegy’s Cellar; that’s in Budapest.”

  “In the spring, if you hang around the hotels—my dear sir,” said Probka, “you’d be surprised at the things they throw away. Many’s the leg of fowl I’ve got out of the dustbins in Budapest in the spring.”

  “Leg? Once I found a half a duck. I dusted it off a bit and there it was, like new. They’ve got so much, these people, they don’t know what to do with it. So they chuck it in the dust hole. It had some sauce on it, too.”

  “I once found a whole chicken,” said Probka.

  “Yes? I once found a goose, a whole goose, in a copper pan.”

  “You lie,” he said distinctly.

  “Say that again.”

  “Bah.” Probka uncorked the bottle. “I know a man who was in Berlin once, and so one day he happens to open up a dustbin and finds—guess what! A ham. I tell you, a whole ham, only a little bit off. But give me sausage.

  “In the old days,” said Probka, “I used to eat a lot of sausage, a kind of special sausage made with goose-fat and garlic.”

  “Millionaire,” sneered Bicskas.

  “I used to have a rag-and-bone business.”

  “You needn’t try to come over me with your rag-and-bone business. I used to be chucker-out in the Café Cseh. I had a blue uniform. I nearly bought a watch.”

  “By God,” said Probka, “it grows cold. I bet neither of us lives through the winter.”

  “I have also been a coachman. I had some proper boots then, I don’t mind telling you.”

  “We ought to have a fire,” said Probka.

  “My master was a count. We had Arab horses.”

  “I used to drink hot brandy on cold nights. I could do with some now, by heaven I could. Do you know what happened here last winter?”

  “What?”

  “A woman was found frozen right here, with a newborn baby in her arms. She was a lady, too.”

  “Lady!”

  “Yes, here she sat, blue and stiff, with this kid, not two hours old, dead in her arms.”

  “If she was a lady she wouldn’t have been here. She’d be at home, by the fire, that’s where she’d be.”

  “You wouldn’t understand, friend Bicskas. Perhaps there was a disgrace. I’ve dealt with many a noble family, and I understand things like that.”

  “Remember the wolves?” said Bicskas. “The winter when the wolves came down here and they sent fifty soldiers to kill them off? Snap-snap! All they found next day was fifty rifles in the snow. Not even a bloodstain; they’d lapped it all up. They’re devils, wolves.”

  “It was sixty soldiers.”

  “Fifty.”

  “I’ve been coming here for thirty years, so I ought to know.”

  “I’ve been here off and on for forty years.”

  “I can read and write,” said Probka.

  “I can read capital letters.”

  There was silence. Then Bicskas laughed and said, “The sun looks like blood.”

  “I ought to know what goes on round here,” said Probka, offended. “It’s house and home to me, this stone.”

  “Well, damn it, so it is to me, too. It’s a place. ‘Where now?’ you say; and then you say, ‘Let’s go to the stone.’ That’s how it is.”

  “You can sit here, sleep here, talk here, eat here. It’s a club. You can also write your name down. Then there’s sort of something. I cut my name over there.”

  “I did not exactly cut my name,” said Bicskas, “but I made a cross.”

  “Let us try to sleep,” said Probka.

  By daybreak four more tramps had come. There was a woman who did not resemble a woman, and a man who did not look like a man; there was a bundle of rags wrapped in an old sheepskin, that laughed and smoked, accompanied by his wife who sat in impenetrable silence. They rested, fitting their bones into the mossier indentations of the stone.

  “But who is this who comes?” asked Bicskas, suddenly.

  A train of carts, followed by a carriage, rolled slowly down the north fork of the road. The tramps, watching, saw that there were also men in uniform, riding horses.

  A giant in blue and silver, with a mustache quite twelve inches from tip to tip, rode up to the stone, surveyed the tramps with a supercilious scowl, wrinkled his nose and said, “Off.”

  “Sir?” said Probka.

  “Clear out.”

  Bicskas snarled.

  “Off!” roared the giant with the mustache. The tramps dragged themselves away. Only Probka and Bicskas remained.

  “We insist on our rights,” said Probka. “This is our stone.”

  The horseman drew a revolver, and said, “Two seconds.”

  “If you shoot it’s murder,” said Probka.

  “Get out!”

  Probka went away. Bicskas followed him. From a distance they watched. The shapeless thing in the sheepskin, speaking for the first and last time, said, “I cut a J, for Janos, in the right-hand corner, with a horseshoe nail, for luck. And an E for Etelka. That’s my old woman.”

  “They’ve brought up a crane,” said Bicskas. “They’re taking the stone away. By God! Let’s . . .”

  “Against guns?” said Probka. “I think they’re only turning it over.”

  The woman who did not resemble a woman shrieked suddenly. “It moves!”

  Slowly, encumbered by the weight of all its centuries, the stone moved. The earth cracked. Pale insects that lived out of the daylight writhed, terrified, back into the ground. The stone groaned. The crane groaned. The workmen shouted. The watchers held their breath. Probka prayed, “Oh God, let the chains break!”

  But the chains held. The bottom of the stone became visible, black with earth. The tramps cried out. They felt in the soles of their feet the jolt of the huge stone teetering on end. A workman yelled, “Hold!” The stone stood, gently rocking. An old gentleman said, “Here. Now.” Soon, having propped up the stone with beams, men began to dig. When night fell, flares were lit. The men dug till dawn. More men came with picks and spades. The waiting tramps, now fifty strong, muttered among themselves.

  From out of the newly dug pit came a shout, “Eljen! Eljen!” It was a cry of triumph. The chains clanked again. Men groaned. “Hup!” Strange objects were coming out of the ground into the light—dull, dirty pieces of armor; huge pots and troughs; battered cups; bent disks—masses of old, broken metal of unfamiliar shapes and unwieldy sizes.

  Probka, bowing low before an armed guard, said, “Honored sir, be graciously pleased to tell me why this old iron was buried here.”

  “That is not old iron,” said the guard. “That is pure gold. It is one of the treasures of the Scourge of God, Attila. It is worth God knows how many millions.”

  “And for seven hundred years we have been dying of hunger here,” said Probka. Nothing more was said. Bitterness was too profound for expression. There were no words, even in the frightful vocabularies of the damned.

  The tramps camped about the hole. When the diggers had gone away, they probed the pit with their fingers, hoping to find some forgotten coin or jewel. But they found nothing, except worms and stones, and a heavy smell as of the grave. And so, at last, they went their ways over the endless, wind-tattered plain; and although it covered a treasure the plainsmen still call the stone The Beggars’ Stone, in spite of the fact that since it was disturbed no beggar has rested there.

  THE BRIGHTON MONSTER

  By 1943 the importance of old rags, bones, bottles and scraps of waste paper had been drummed into the head of England so thoroughly that salv
age became a neurosis, a delirium, something like a disease. The British people were compelled to realize that waste cost lives. Merchant seamen risked everything in bringing to our shores cargoes of wood pulp, foodstuffs and metals. If you kept a book you did not need or burned a love letter, lost a hairpin, or threw an inch of potato peel into the wrong receptacle, you were made to feel that you had murdered a sailor. There was a formidable drive to round up hitherto unconsidered scraps—especially scraps of paper. The government offices, and even the secretive old-established lawyers of Bedford Row and the Temple let go their ancient, outdated documents. The authorities had solemnly promised that private papers would be shredded and pulped without being read.

  In those brave days I was the war correspondent for The People. One afternoon, a little while before I went to join the American Ninth Air Force at Saint Jacques, I called at my office and found the passage blocked with bins and baskets and bundles of waste paper, put out for the salvage men. (For all I know to the contrary I am writing this on a re-hashed bit of that same paper). There were tens of thousands of letters, unclaimed typescripts, execrable poems in manuscript, usually in a feminine hand, stale cablegrams, musty galley proofs, preposterous books sent for review that were not worth selling or giving away . . . the inevitable papery detritus of an active but old-fashioned office.

  I number among my weaknesses an incurable habit of rummaging among rubbish heaps. I must poke my fingers into everything. So I stirred the surface of the foremost basket and, having glanced at a letter on hand-made paper from a lord who had had a revelation of the end of the world, picked up an unbound, badly sewn pamphlet printed by Partridge of Paternoster Row in London, 1747.

  Attached to it with a rusty paper clip was an unsigned, undated note, without an address, which said: Dear Editor, I found this in my grandfather’s Bible. Please make what use of it you like. I do not put my name and address because I do not want publicity. As a regular reader of your excellent paper for the last thirty years my desire is only to do you a good turn. The writing was that of an old lady, probably rheumatic.

  If she will get in touch with me, whoever she may be, I will gladly give her whatever I may be paid for this story, to spend as she thinks fit; because her little unbound pamphlet of 1747 links up with the most terrible event in history, to make the most remarkable story of our time.

  The pamphlet, in itself, is nothing but a piece of pretentious nonsense written by one of those idle dabblers in natural philosophy (as they called it) who loved to rush into print at their own expense in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. They seem ridiculous now, with their pompous, Latin-­sprinkled “philosophical” accounts of seaweed and thunderbolts, electricity and dephlogisticated air, amalgams and rhubarb.

  Nearly everything then was “remarkable” or “extraordinary,” especially living freaks. Lambert the fat man was a celebrity—simply because he was big; someone else became famous merely because he was a midget. The author of my pamphlet had attempted to tickle his way into the public notice with the feather of his pen by writing an account of a monster captured by a boatman fishing several miles out of Brighthelmstone in the County of Sussex in the summer of the year 1745.

  The name of the author was the Reverend Arthur Titty. I see him as one of those pushing, self-assertive vicars of the period, a rider to hounds, a purple-faced consumer of prodigious quantities of old port; a man of independent fortune, trying to persuade the world and himself that he was a deep thinker and a penetrating observer of the mysterious works of God. There is a sort of boozy, winey, slapdash repetitiveness in his style. Yet he must have been a man of considerable education: he spoke to his monster in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, French and Italian—not one word of which the monster understood. Also he could draw a little. Titty, delin., is printed under the illustration.

  I should never have taken the trouble to pocket the Reverend Arthur Titty’s Account of a Strange Monster Captured Near Brighthelmstone in the County of Sussex on August 6th in the Year of Our Lord 1745 if it had not been for the coincidence of the date: I was born on August 6th. So I pushed the yellowed, damp-freckled pages into the breast pocket of my battledress, and thought no more about them until April, 1947, when a casual remark sent me running, yelling like a maniac, to the cupboard in which my old uniforms were hanging.

  The pamphlet was still in its pocket. I would not have lost that pamphlet for five hundred pounds.

  I shall not waste your time or strain your patience with the Reverend Arthur Titty’s turgid, high-falutin’ prose or his references to De rerum—this that and the other. I propose to give you the unadorned facts in the very queer case of the Brighthelmstone Monster.

  Brighthelmstone is now known as Brighton—a large, popular, prosperous holiday resort delightfully situated on the coast of Sussex by the Downs. But in the Reverend Arthur Titty’s day no one had ever heard of the place. King George IV made it popular when he was Prince Regent. The air and the water were recommended by his medical adviser. His presence made Brighthelmstone fashionable, and popular usage shortened the name of the place. In 1745 it was an obscure village.

  If a fisherman named Hodge had not had an unlucky night on August 5th, 1745, on the glass-smooth sea off Brighthelmstone, this story would never have been told. He had gone out with his brother-in-law, George Rodgers, and they had caught nothing but a few small and valueless fishes. Hodge was desperate. He was notorious in the village as a spendthrift and a drunkard and it was suspected that he had a certain connection with a barmaid at The Smack Inn—it was alleged that she had a child by Hodge in the spring of the following year. He had scored up fifteen shillings for beer and needed a new net. It is probable, therefore, that Hodge stayed out in his boat until after the dawn of August 6th because he feared to face his wife—who also, incidentally, was with child.

  At last, glum, sullen and thoroughly out of sorts, he prepared to go home.

  And then, he said, there was something like a splash—only it was not a splash: it was rather like the bursting of a colossal bubble; and there, in the sea, less than ten yards from his boat, was the monster, floating.

  George Rodgers said, “By gogs, Jack Hodge, yon’s a man!”

  “Man? How can ’a be a man? Where could a man come from?”

  The creature that had appeared with the sound of a bursting bubble drifted closer, and Hodge, reaching out with a boathook, caught it under the chin and pulled it to the side of the boat.

  “That be a merman,” he said, “and no Christian man. Look at ’un, all covered wi’ snakes and firedrakes, and yellow like a slug’s belly. By the Lord, George Rodgers, this might be the best night’s fishing I ever did if it’s alive, please the Lord! For if it is I can sell that for better money than ever I got for my best catch this last twenty years, or any other fisherman either. Lend a hand, Georgie-boy, and let’s have a feel of it.”

  George Rodgers said, “That’s alive, by hell—look now, and see the way the blood runs down where the gaff went home.”

  “Haul it in, then, and don’t stand there gaping like a puddock.”

  They dragged the monster into the boat. It was shaped like a man and covered from throat to ankle with brilliantly colored images of strange monsters. A green, red, yellow and blue thing like a lizard sprawled between breastbone and navel. Great serpents were coiled about its legs. A smaller snake, red and blue, was pricked out on the monster’s right arm: the snake’s tail covered the forefinger and its head was hidden in the armpit. On the lefthand side of its chest there was a big heart-shaped design in flaming scarlet. A great bird like an eagle in red and green spread its wings from shoulder blade to shoulder blade, and a red fox chased six blue rabbits from the middle of his spine into some unknown hiding place between his legs. There were lobsters, fishes and insects on his left arm and on his right buttock a devilfish sprawled, encircling the lower part of his body with its tentacles. The back of his right hand was decorated with a butterfly in yellow, red, indigo and green. Low down,
in the center of the throat, where the bone begins, there was a strange, incomprehensible, evil-looking symbol.

  The monster was naked. In spite of its fantastic appearance it was so unmistakably a male human being that George Rodgers—a weak-minded but respectable man—covered it with a sack. Hodge prised open the monster’s mouth to look at its teeth, having warned his brother-in-law to stand by with an ax in case of emergency. The man-shaped creature out of the sea had red gums, a red tongue and teeth as white as sugar.

  They forced it to swallow a little gin—Hodge always had a flask of gin in the boat—and it came to life with a great shudder and cried out in a strange voice, opening wild black eyes and looking crazily left and right.

  “Tie that up. You tie that’s hands while I tie that’s feet,” said Hodge.

  The monster offered no resistance.

  “Throw ’un back,” said George Rodgers, suddenly overtaken by a nameless dread. “Throw ’un back, Jack, I say!”

  But Hodge said, “You be mazed, George Rodgers, you born fool. I can sell ’e for twenty-five golden guineas. Throw ’un back? I’ll throw ’ee back for a brass farthing, tha’ witless fool!”

  There was no wind. The two fishermen pulled for the shore. The monster lay in the bilge, rolling its eyes. The silly, good-natured Rodgers offered it a crust of bread which it snapped up so avidly that it bit his finger to the bone. Then Hodge tried to cram a wriggling live fish into its mouth, but “the Monster spat it out pop, like a cork out of a bottle, saving your Honor’s presence.”

  Brighthelmstone boiled over with excitement when they landed. Even the Reverend Arthur Titty left his book and his breakfast, clapped on his three-cornered hat, picked up his clouded cane and went down to the fish-market to see what was happening. They told him that Hodge had caught a monster, a fish that looked like a man, a merman, a hypogriff, a sphinx—heaven knows what. The crowd parted, and Titty came face to face with the monster.

  Although the monster understood neither Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Italian nor French, it was obvious that it was a human being, or something remarkably like one. This was evident in its manner of wrinkling its forehead, narrowing its eyes, and demonstrating that it was capable of understanding—or of wanting to understand, which is the same thing. But it could not speak; it could only cry out incoherently and was obviously greatly distressed, like a man paralyzed by horror in a nightmare. The Reverend Arthur Titty said, “Oafs, ignorant louts! This is no sea monster, you fools, no lusus naturae, but an unfortunate shipwrecked mariner.”