Pip

THE PHILANTHROPISTS-2

"Now, Pip, it's my turn to be Father!"

(Tattie had no father of her own, and imagined that the term merely implied a large, silent man who lived in a room full of fascinating playthings, opening Oven Doors and blowing down Talking-Holes.)

After that Pip would be the patient, Pipette Mr. Evans, and Tattie Father, and the performance was repeated in extenso. Pipette, as the youngest, succeeded to the proud position of "Father" last of all.

Each of them played the leading part in different fashion. Pip, enjoying every moment of his impersonation, always sat solemnly in the big swivel-chair at the table until the whistle blew, when he would lounge across to the Talking-Hole and conduct the conversation as deliberately as possible. Pipette, on the other hand, possessed none of this artistic restraint, and was always standing on a chair, with her small ear ecstatically pressed against the mouth of the tube, by the time that Pip, in the character of Mr. Evans, was ready to converse with her. Consequently his withering blast, when it arrived, impinged straight upon Pipette's eardrum, frequently knocking her off her chair and invariably dulling her hearing for the afternoon.

Considerable freedom, too, was permitted in the interpretation of the part of Mr. Evans, especially in describing the patients' symptoms. In this respect the children were compelled to draw chiefly upon their own somewhat slight experience; for Mr. Evans, though he invariably gave the patients' names, was not as a rule entrusted with their complaints as well. Consequently the maladies which were shrieked up the tube so gleefully were those indigenous to small children, cooks and the like. When introduced by Pipette, the patient was usually suffering from "palpurtations, that bad!" (an echo of Cook); Tattie, whose pretty and interesting mamma affected fashionable complaints, would diagnose the case in hand as "nerves all in a jangle again"; while Pip, who was lacking in imagination but possessed a retentive memory, invariably announced, with feeling, that the visitor was a victim of a "fearful pain in his (or her) tummy!"

Near the Talking-Hole, on a small table, stood "The Terriphone." This, they gathered, was a sort of long-distance talking-hole. You turned a little handle, and, taking a queer, cup-shaped arrangement off a hook, conversed affably through it with unseen people, situated somewhere at the back of beyond. The children had seen Mr. Evans use it for sending messages to Father via Mr. Pipes. Mr. Pipes was a great friend of Pipette's. In the first place, he wore a uniform, which always appeals to the feminine mind. Then he lived in a fascinating little glass house at the gates of a great building called "The Orspital," where Father apparently spent much of his time. In the courtyard inside the gates bareheaded young men passed to and fro, discoursing learnedly of mysterious things called "Ops." Mr. Pipes wore two medals on his uniform, but beyond these there was nothing very attractive in the glass house excepting the Terriphone, which stood on a little ledge beside the pigeon-hole. Mr. Pipes, being attached to Emily, the under-housemaid, was always glad to see the children when it was that engaging damsel's turn to take them for a walk. From him they learned one day that his Terriphone communicated with the one at home, quite three streets away.

"It must be a long hole," remarked Pip reflectively to his sister.

The conversation then turned upon the weather. Mr. Pipes announced to the sympathetic Emily that, as a result of having to sit all day in a blooming greenhouse, his feet were slowly turning to ice. The authorities of the Orspital, he added bitterly, declined to allow him a fire, alleging that an oil-stove was sufficient for his needs.

"What a shime!" said pretty Emily.

"Something crool!" exclaimed sympathetic Pipette. (She had picked up this expression from Susan, the kitchen-maid, who was regarded by her colleagues as being somewhat "common in her talk.")

"Pore devil!" remarked Pip dispassionately.

"Master Pip!" cried the scandalised Emily, blushing in a manner which Mr. Pipes thought most becoming.

Pip, who had just gathered this pearl of speech from the lips of one of the hatless young gentlemen who talked of "Ops," turned his steady and inscrutable gaze upon Emily, beneath which that damsel's fetching frown faded, as it always did, into an uneasy smirk.

"There is something about that child," she once confided to Cook, "that makes me feel as weak as water. Looks at you as though your 'air was coming down on your face smudged. Says nothink, but he's a masterful one. Be a terror some day!"

Meanwhile Pipette, in whose charitable little soul a new and splendid scheme of outdoor relief had just sprung into being, asked, in a tone of suppressed excitement—

"Mr. Pipes, please, does your Terriphone go straight to our house?"

"As straight as straight, me lady," replied Mr. Pipes, who affected an easy jocularity when conversing with Pipette.

"Ooh!" Pipette turned to her brother.

"Pip, amind me to tell you somethin' when we get home."

Pip turned a cold glance upon her.

"You'll tell me all about it on the way there, I expect."

"I won't!" cried Pipette indignantly.

"Oh, yes, you will. Women can't keep nothin' to theirselves."

This pronouncement, delivered in Mr. Evans's most impressive manner, roused Emily and Mr. Pipes to unseemly mirth, and nearly reduced Pipette to tears. Mr. Pipes remarked that Pip was a "caution," while Emily summed him up as a "cure." Shortly after that, Emily and Mr. Pipes having made a now familiar reference to "the same old spot at half-past four on Sunday," the visit terminated with the usual expressions of good-will, and the children were taken home to tea.

Pipette's offended dignity held out till next morning, when, as soon as the banging of the front door announced that Father had gone off in his brougham for his daily round, she proposed a visit to the Consulting Room.

"In the morning? What for?" said Pip.

Pipette was positively heaving with suppressed excitement.

"You go there and wait," she said, "and I'll run down to Cook a minute, and then we'll—no, I won't tell you yet! Go on!"

Fearful of letting her precious secret escape too soon, she gave Pip a push in the direction of the Consulting Room and danced off to the kitchen, leaving that impassive philosopher to ruminate upon the volatile temperament of the female s*x. However, he departed as bidden, and amused himself by sitting in the swing-chair, and endeavouring without success, for the hundredth time, to play a tune on a stethoscope.

Presently Pipette returned, carrying two little basins of the soup which usually served to span the yawning gulf between their breakfast and dinner.

Pip took his soup, and began to drink it.

"Stop a minute, Pip!" screamed Pipette.

Pip put down his basin.

"Well, what is it now?" he remarked.

Pipette at last unfolded her plan.

"Pip," she began a little shyly,—like all inventors, she dreaded criticism,—"you 'member poor Mr. Pipes saying how cold he was?"

"Yes."

"Well, let's send him this nice hot soup, Pip,—by Terriphone!"

The last words came with a rush. Then Pipette, heaving such a sigh as Sinbad must have emitted when he had got rid of the Old Man of the Sea, awaited her brother's reply.

Pip smiled indulgently.

"Silly kid!" he remarked.

Pipette had expected this.

"Yes," she said; "but, Pip, wouldn't it be loverly to do it?"

Pip's practical mind began to evolve difficulties.

"How are you goin' to do it?"

Pipette projected upon him a glance in which artless surprise, deferential admiration, and simple faith were exquisitely mingled,—a glance which, in after years, her husband once ruefully described as "good for a ten-pound note at any hour of the day,"—and replied simply—

"I thought you would manage all that, Pip. You're so bewwy clever!"

"All right," said Pip. "Let's do it."

Thus it is that women make fools of the strongest men.

They carried their soup carefully over to the little table beside the telephone.

"I say," said Pip suddenly, "is he to have both basins?"

Pipette's bounteous nature would gladly have sacrificed both Pip's lunch and her own, but she thought it wiser to concede this point.

"No; one will do, I fink," she replied.

"All right. You can drink half mine," said Pip.

They gravely drank Pip's soup, turn about, and then applied themselves to the matter in hand.

First, they lifted the receiver of the telephone from its rest and surveyed it doubtfully. There was a cup-shaped receptacle at one end into which soup could easily be poured, but the "tube" which connected it to the instrument was of very meagre dimensions.

"Are you sure there's a pipe all the way?" inquired Pip doubtfully.

"Certain. It's just the same as the Talking-Hole, only thinner. And the Talking-Hole has got a pipe all the way, 'cause don't you remember you put a glass marble in one day when I told you not to, and it fell out in the hall?"

Pip's doubts were not quite satisfied even with this brilliant parallel.

"It'll take a long time to get through," he said. He was fingering the silk-coated wire. "This pipe's awful thin. A marble would never get down it."

"No, but the soup will twickle down all right," said Pipette, whose mind, busy with works of mercy, soared far above these utilitarian details. (In later years she was a confirmed bazaar organiser.)

"We'll ring and tell him first, shall we?" suggested Pip.

"Yes, let's!" murmured Pipette joyfully.

She turned the call-handle, and Pip held the receiver, just as he had seen Mr. Evans do. After a decent interval he remarked into the cup—

"Are you there, Mr. Pipes? This is us."

This highly illuminating statement met with no response.

"I suppose he can hear you," said Pipette anxiously.

"Oh, yes. I'm talkin' just as loud as Mr. Evans does."

"I suppose you'll be able to hear him, then?"

"I expect so. But it's a long way. Ring again."

This time, in turning the call-handle, Pipette accidentally placed her hand on the receiver-hook, with the result that she actually rang up the Exchange Office.

Presently a voice inquired brusquely of Pip what he wanted. His reply was a delighted yell, and an announcement to Mr. Pipes that he had something for him. Further revelations were frustrated by Pipette, who tore the receiver from his grasp, and, holding her hand over the opening to prevent eavesdropping on the part of the bénéficiaire, whispered excitedly in his ear—

"Don't tell him any more! We'll just pour it in now, and give him such a surprise!"

Consequently the young lady in the Exchange Office was soon compelled to relinquish her languid efforts to find out what No. 015273 really wanted, and incontinently switched him off, recking little of the way in which two small philanthropists at the other end of the wire were treating the property of the National Telephone Company.

Very carefully Pip poured the soup into the cup-shaped receiver of the telephone, which Pipette held as steadily as her excitement would permit.

From the first it became obvious that soup-delivery by telephone was going to be a slow business, for the cup transmitted the generous fluid most reluctantly.

"It's such a very thin pipe," they explained to each other hopefully.

At length Pip remarked—

"I should think some of it had got there by now."

"Not bewwy much, I don't fink," said Pipette; "this handle thing's still pretty full."

"But the basin's nearly empty," said Pip. "The stuff must have gone somewhere."

"Some of it has gone on the floor," said Pipette truthfully.

At this moment the clock struck one.

"Father will be in soon," said Pip. "We'd better wipe up."

They propped the telephone receiver on the little table between the directory and a bookstand, and cleared up the mess on the floor with a handkerchief—Pipette's. As they finished they heard the brougham drive up.

"It isn't nearly all gone," said Pip gloomily, peering into the receiver. "If we hang it up on its hook the stuff will all fall out. Let's leave it like it is. Father doesn't never use the Terriphone till after lunch, and it will be all gone by then. Come on, Pipette."

The two Samaritans turned their backs upon the telephone and stole out of the room, leaving that sorely tried instrument to digest its unaccustomed luncheon as best it might.

It was Mr. Evans who suffered most. He was sent into the Consulting Room just before dinner to telephone a message to a patient. The telephone stood in a dark corner, and the gas in the room was turned low. Mr. Evans was surprised to find that the receiver, instead of hanging on its hook, was lying on the little table, carefully propped between the directory and a bookstand.

On lifting it up he was surprised by an unwonted feeling of stickiness; but when he held the instrument to the light, the reason revealed itself to him immediately in the form of a dollop of congealed chicken-broth, nicely rounded to the shape of the cup, which shot from its resting-place, with a clammy thud, on to his clean shirtfront, and then proceeded to slide rapidly down inside his dress waistcoat, leaving a snail-like track, dotted with grains of rice, behind it.

Pip was sent supperless to bed, where Pipette, completely broken down by remorse and sisterly affection, voluntarily joined him not much later. The following week they were sent to school.