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.”
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.