Poor Titty! If he could have foreseen the real significance of the appearance of the Monster of Brighthelmstone he would have died happy . . . probably in a lunatic asylum.
In April, 1947 I had the good fortune to meet one of my oldest and dearest friends, a colonel in Intelligence who, for obvious reasons, must remain anonymous, although he is supposed to be in retirement now and wears civilian clothes—very plain civilian clothes, elegantly cut in the narrow-sleeved style of the late nineteen-twenties, and rather the worse for wear. He has not had occasion to buy a suit since 1930, and is one of the last men in London to wear one of Lock’s little cocky gray-speckled bowler hats. The Colonel is in many ways a romantic character, something like Rudyard Kipling’s Strickland Sahib who lifted the last veil and saw things that no other white man ever saw and lived to boast about. His face is the color of lawyers’ red tape, curiously wrinkled—the skin has something of the excoriated, over-used appearance of an actor’s skin. He has played many strange parts in his time, that formidable old warrior; and his quick black eyes, disturbingly Asiatic-looking under the slackly drooping eyelids, have seen more than you and I will ever see.
He never talks about his work. An Intelligence officer who talks ceases automatically to be an Intelligence officer. A good deal of his conversation is of sport, manly sport—polo, pig-sticking, cricket, rugby football, hunting and, above all, boxing and wrestling. I imagine that the Colonel, who has lived underground in disguise for so many years of his life, finds relief in the big wide-open games in which a man must meet his opponent face to face yet may, without breaking the rules, play quick tricks. At the age of forty-eight he boxed three rounds with the lightweight champion, who told him that he was wasting his time in the army. It is as well for us, though, that he stayed where he was; I am not at liberty to tell you why.
We were drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes after dinner in my flat and he was talking about Oriental wrestling. He touched on wrestling technique among the Afghans and in the Deccan, and spoke with admiration of Gama, the Western Indian wrestler, still a rock-crusher at an age when most men are shivering in slippers by the fire, who beat Zbyszko in ten seconds; remarked on a South-Eastern Indian named Patil who could knock a strong man senseless with the knuckle of his left thumb; and went on to Chinese wrestlers, especially Mongolians, who are tremendously heavy and powerful, and use their feet. A good French Canadian lumberjack (the Colonel said), accustomed to dancing on rolling logs in a rushing river, could do dreadful things with his legs and feet, like Lucien Pacaud, the Tiger of Quebec who, in a scissors hold, killed Big Ted Glass of Detroit. In certain kinds of wrestling size and weight were essential, said the Colonel. The Japanese wrestlers of the heavy sort—the ones that weighed three or four hundred pounds and looked like pigs—those big ones that started on all fours and went through a series of ritual movements; they had to be enormously heavy. In fact the heavier they were the better.
He did not find this amusing, although there were certain subtle points that a connoisseur could not possibly fail to appreciate.
“No, Gerald my lad, give me jujitsu. There is no one on earth who can defeat a Black Belt—except someone who takes him by surprise. A three-hundred-and-fifty-pound man catching a jujitsu man unawares and simply falling on him with all his weight would naturally put him out of action, just as if the roof fell in on him. Or again, a scientific boxer, getting a well-placed punch in first would put him out for the count. But the higher initiates had better be attacked from behind. In jujitsu the real adept develops such wonderful co-ordination of hand and eye that if he happens to be expecting it he can turn to his own advantage even the lightning punch of a wizard like Jimmy Wilde. He could give away eight stone to Joe Louis and make him look silly. Of course, strictly speaking, it wouldn’t be fair. The opponents would be attacking or defending along different lines. Georges Hackenschmidt, for instance, was one of the greatest catch-as-catch-can wrestlers that ever lived, and one of the strongest men of his day. But I ask you: would he, wrestling Catch, have stood up against Yukio Otani using jujitsu? Oh, by the way, speaking of Yukio Otani, did you ever hear of a Japanese wrestler called Sato?”
“I can’t say that I have. Why? Should I have heard of him?”
“No, of course not. I have been so long out there that I tend to forget. You know, if I could only find that little fellow I might be a rich man yet. I always wanted to buy a nice little boat and go cruising around the Greek islands. A fat chance, on my wretched pay! And I sunk most of my savings in that wretched fellow Benny North, fool that I was. You remember that lout? I thought I’d discovered a real British heavyweight at last and as it turned out the damned fellow had a weak heart. No more heavyweights for me.”
“What has this to do with Sato?”
“Why, he is, or was, a phenomenon. I think he was a better wrestler than Otani. My idea was to take him all round the world and challenge all comers—boxers, wrestlers, even fencers, to stand up against him for ten minutes. He was unbelievable. Furthermore, he looked so frightful. I won a hundred and fifty quid on him at Singapore in 1938. He took on four of the biggest and best boxers and wrestlers we could lay our hands on and floored the whole lot in eleven minutes by the clock. Just a minute, I’ve got a picture in my wallet. I keep it because it looks so damn funny. Look.”
The Colonel handed me a dog-eared photograph of an oddly assorted group. There was a hairy mammoth of a man, obviously a wrestler, standing with his arms folded so that his biceps looked like coconuts, by the side of another man, almost as big, but with the scrambled features of a rough-and-tumble bruiser. There was one blond grinning man who looked like a light heavyweight, and a beetle-browed middleweight with a bulldog jaw. The Colonel was standing in the background, smiling in a fatherly way. In the foreground smiling into the camera stood a tiny Japanese. The top of his head was on a level with the big wrestler’s breastbone, but he must have measured at least two feet six inches across the shoulders—he was more than half as broad as he was tall. He was all chest and arms. The knuckles of his closed hands touched his knees. I took the picture to the light and looked more closely. The photographer’s flash-bulb had illuminated every detail. Sato had made himself even more hideous with tattooing. He was covered with things that creep and crawl, real and fabulous. A dragon snarled on his stomach. Snakes were coiled about his legs. Another snake wound itself about his right arm from forefinger to armpit. The other arm was covered with angry looking lobsters and goggle-eyed fishes, and on the left breast there was the conventionalized shape of a heart.
It was then that I uttered an astonished oath and went running to look for my old uniform, which I found, with the Reverend Arthur Titty’s pamphlet still in the inside breast pocket. The Colonel asked me what the devil was the matter with me. I smoothed out the pamphlet and gave it to him without a word.
He looked at it, and said: “How very extraordinary!” Then he put away his eyeglass and put on a pair of spectacles; peered intently at the Reverend Arthur Titty’s painstaking drawing of the Brighthelmstone Monster, compared it with the photograph of Sato and said to me, “I have come across some pretty queer things in my time, but I’m damned if I know what to make of this.”
“What sort of tattooing did your Sato have on his back?” I asked.