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 salvage 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.