Charity Ends At Home

“You could try Dawson’s and see if they stock it and if they remember who’s bought any.”

Love nodded. He was re-reading parts of the letter to himself. Over certain phrases his eye lingered while his lips silently formed the words, savouring them. Purbright waited.

“I reckon a woman wrote it,” Love announced at last. He looked suddenly pleased with himself.

“Do you think so?” Purbright’s raised brows hinted, without irony, that he was ready to learn and to commend.

“Well, look...” Eagerness brightened the sergeant’s face by several candlepower. “I mean, things like loyal and faithful companion—see?—and loved hand. And here...heart may be touched. Well, I mean it must be a woman, mustn’t it.”

“I suppose the phraseology is on the romantic side.”

“It’s downright sloshy.”

“You may be right, Sid.”

Nourished by this praise, Love took another, deeper plunge into deductive reasoning.

“This woman... There’s more than just one trying to do her in. Here, you see—They think I do not understand—that’s what she says. They. So there must be two of them.”

“At least.”

“Aye, well... Oh, I don’t know, though—two’s the usual, surely?”

There was a pause. Purbright felt a little mean at having disrupted the sergeant’s happy theorizing.

“There’s one thing I can’t understand at all,” he said, magnanimously. “Why does she say she can’t sign the letter? Presumably she would have been immediately identifiable from the photograph that was supposed to be enclosed.”

Love confessed that this point was very queer indeed—as was the absence of the photograph.

“She might have forgotten to put it into one of the letters, but it didn’t come with any of them. And look here...”—Purbright pointed to the corner of each page—”There are pin marks on all three.”

“She must have changed her mind,” said Love.

“Possibly.”

“Unless...”

Purbright looked at him with polite expectancy.

“Unless,” said the sergeant, “somebody tampered with her mail.”

“Ah,” Purbright said. He put the letters aside with the air of having received a judgment upon them that would not soon or lightly be upset.

There were more pressing problems to be solved, certainly, than what had seemed from the outset to be an isolated spurt of barmy correspondence from some local victim of persecution mania.

As soon as Love had departed to make his inquiries at the shop of Mr Oliver Dawson, bookseller and stationer, the inspector sent to the canteen for a mug of tea and turned his thoughts to charity.

Or, more precisely, to charities.

Of these, there were in Flaxborough forty-three known species. A further dozen undocumented examples were thought to exist, but evidence of their survival was unreliable. The biggest group—eighteen—was classifiable as canine. It included the O.D.C. (Our Dumb Companions), the Barkers’ League, the Dogs At Sea Society, the Canine Law Alliance and the Four Foot Haven. There were seven societies devoted specifically to the welfare of other domestic animals. A further six were dedicated to the protection of wild ones. Of the remaining twelve organizations, four could be said to have cornered the ministry of comforts to the human aged, and three to have swept the board of orphans.The objects of the rest were of astonishing diversity and ranged from the reclamation of fallen gentlewomen to the Christianization of Mongolia.

It might be thought that the common motive of benevolence would have ensured the mutual neutrality if not the co-operation of all these bodies. Inspector Purbright suffered no such delusion. He knew from long experience that the world of organized charity was one of contested frontiers, of entrenchments and forays. As far back as he could remember, the arrangement of a flag day or the timing of a fete had been as bitterly disputed as any filched military advantage. Membership of the various committees—a much sought after social cachet—had always carried the risk of assault, moral if not physical, by the unsuccessful contenders. Plots and counter-plots went on all the time. The town council, practically every member of which had his or her own charitable axe to grind, was bullied this way and that on behalf of all causes in turn. Letters winged every other week into the columns of the Flaxborough Citizen bearing insinuations as nearly libellous as their authors (advised, quite often, by the editor, Mr Lintz, who well knew the circulatory stimulus of correspondence just on the safe side of scurrility) dared render them.

Viewed dispassionately—or uncharitably, perhaps one should say—it was a lively sport that diverted into relatively harmless channels energy that might otherwise have fuelled crime and commotion. As a policeman, a professional upholder of the Queen’s peace, Inspector Purbright could not but approve. It was his earnest opinion, for instance, that had Alderman Mrs Thompson lacked the vocation of preserving the lives of pigeons that roosted behind the balustrade of the public library, she would long since have done for Mr Thompson and possibly a fair sprinkling of their neighbours as well. There were others he could call to mind whose equally unthinkable propensities had been sublimated into what the Flaxborough Citizen liked to term “tireless devotion to the well-being of the old folk of the town”.

The public took it all in pretty good part. It was true that there had been casualties. These had mounted steadily with the increase in the number of street collections (practically every Saturday of the year was now a flag day in some cause or other). But not one victim cared to acknowledge that the reason for his injury had been an unseemly dash into traffic to avoid the solicitations of yet another flag seller. For the most part the citizens of Flaxborough responded to calls on their charity with no less enthusiasm—and no more—than that with which they would have paid a bridge toll. Indeed, many of them vaguely supposed these demands to be ordained by authority