Many years back, when I had been immersing myself in a lot of Steinbeck and Ray Bradbury, I read a short story about a swimming pool into which people were throwing the statuary from around the edges of the pool during the night, only to be fetched out the next day by the pool's caretaker. This happened every night. At some point, someone asked the caretaker why he kept doing this over and over, with no end to the nonesense in sight, and he replied something along the lines of this, "There's the ones who throw things in, and then there's the ones who take them back out".

Does anyone know if this was from Steinbeck, and which story or book if it was? Or who it was from if not Steinbeck?