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 wind 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.