Джералд Керш - On an Odd Note

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!”