“I can’t say, sir,” Mrs. Purvis answered, looking puzzled. “It seems I must ‘ave seen ‘er before, but I can’t be sure. But I will just keep my eyes open and I’ll let you know if I find out where she lives.”
A few days later Mrs. Purvis came in from her morning’s shopping tour, beaming with satisfaction and full of news. “Ah-h,” she said, “I ‘ave news for you. I found out about the girl.”
“What girl?” he said, looking up startled from his work.
“The girl you asked about the other day,” said Mrs. Purvis. “The one you pointed out to me.”
“Oh yes,” he said, getting up. “And what about her? Does shelive here in the street?”
“Of course,” said Mrs. Purvis. “I’ve seen ‘er a ‘undred times. I should ‘ave known ‘er in a second the other day, only she didn’t ‘ave ‘im with ‘er.”
“Him? Who?”
“Why, the rascal down at 46. That’s who she is.”
“That’s who who is, Mrs. Purvis?”
“Why, the great Dane, of course. You must ‘ave seen ‘im. ‘E’s big as a Shetland pony,” she laughed. “‘E’s always with ‘er. The only time I ever saw ‘er without ‘im was the other day, and that’s why,” she cried triumphantly, “I didn’t know ‘er. But to-day, they were out takin’ a walk together and I saw ‘em comin’...Then I knew who she was. They’re the ones in 46. And the rascal”—here shelaughed affectionately—“ah-h, what a rascal ‘e is! Oh, a fine fellow, you know. So big and strong ‘e is. I sometimes wonder where they keep ‘im, ‘ow they found a ‘ouse big enough to put ‘im in.”
Hardly a morning passed that she didn’t return from her little tour of the neighbourhood flushed with excitement over some new “rascal”, some “fine fellow”, some dog or horse she had observed and watched. She would go crimson with anger over any act of cruelty or indifference to an animal. She would come in boiling with rage because she had passed a horse that had been tightly bridled:
“...And I gave ‘im a piece of my mind, too,” she would cry, referring to the driver. “I told ‘im that a man as mistreated a hanimal in that way wasn’t fit to ‘ave one. If there’d been a constable about, I’d ‘ave ‘ad ‘im took in custody, that’s what I’d ‘ave done. I told ‘im so, too. Shockin’, I calls it. The way some people can b’ave to some poor, ‘elpless beast that ‘as no tongue to tell what it goes through. Let ‘em ‘ave a bridle in their mouth a bit! Let ‘em go round for a while with their faces shut up in a muzzle! Ah-h,” she would say grimly, as if the idea afforded her a savage pleasure, “that’d teach ‘em! They’d know then, all right!”
There was something disturbing and unwholesome about the extravagance of this feeling for animals. George observed Mrs. Purvis closely in her relations with people and found out that she was by no means so agitated at the spectacle of human suffering. Her attitude towards the poor, of whom she was one, was remarkable for its philosophic acceptance. Her feeling seemed to be that the poor are always with us, that they are quite used to their poverty, and that this makes it unnecessary for anybody to bother about it, least of all the miserable victims themselves. It had certainly never entered her head that anything should be done about it. The sufferings of the poor seemed to her as natural and as inevitable as the London fog, and to her way of thinking it was just as much a waste of honest emotion to get worked up about the one as about the other.
Thus, on the same morning that she would come in blazing with indignation over the mistreatment of a dog or horse, George would sometimes hear her speak sharply, curtly, and without a trace of feeling to the dirty, half-starved, and half-naked devil of a boy who always delivered the beer from the liquor shop. This wretched child was like some creature out of Dickens—a living specimen of that poverty which, at its worst, has always seemed to be lower and more degraded in England than anywhere else. The thing that gives it its special horror is that in England people of this type appear to be stogged to their misery, sucked down in a swamp of inherited wretchedness which is never going to be any better, and from which they know they can never escape.