Pip. Ian Hay
constantly usurping the duties and privileges of its fellow, such as cleaning his teeth, shaking hands, and blowing his nose—literal acts of gaucherie that distressed Emily's genteel soul considerably.
After the children had gone Father sat staring at his untasted dinner. Occasionally his gaze travelled to the opposite end of the table, where some one used to sit—some one who had been taken from him by an inscrutable Providence five years before. Had she lived, Pip would not have referred to the kitchen-maid as "one of the girls," nor would Pipette be calling the butler "Mr. Evans." All these years he had been trying to hide his desolation by burying himself in his work, with the result that he now found himself busy—overworked, in fact—rich, and famous, a man at the head of his profession. Cui bono? His children, whom he had promised his dying Dorothea to love and cherish, were learning to venerate the butler and to converse in the jargon of the scullery!
So the Oven Door had to remain an unsolved mystery, and Pip and Pipette were compelled to comfort themselves with the Talking-Hole. This was a most absorbing affair, and, thank goodness! it was no mystery.
The Talking-Hole was carefully plugged with a whistle; and whenever a visitor came to see Father—they came in shoals between one o'clock and three—Mr. Evans would uncork a similar hole in the wall of the hall, and after blowing up it vigorously, would murmur the name of the visitor; and his words, owing to the fact that the Talking-Hole in the hall was in some mysterious way connected with the Talking-Hole in the Consulting Room, were conveyed to Father's ear. The conversation as a rule was of a formal and fragmentary nature, limited on Mr. Evans's part to the announcement of the visitor's name and some such remark as "Special appointment," or "No appointment," and occasionally, "Urgent case,"—always concluding with "Very good, sir." After that Mr. Evans would conduct the visitor up the three carpeted stairs which led to the Consulting Room.
Pip and Pipette loved the Talking-Hole. It was almost their only toy, and it was the more precious to them because they could not use it except when Father was out and Mr. Evans taking his afternoon siesta. Their one child-friend, Tattie Fowler, who was occasionally brought to spend the afternoon with them when her nurse had made arrangements to spend it elsewhere, was always regaled with a full-dress performance whenever she came.
The method of procedure was invariably the same. The children knew every move by heart. The moment that Mr. Evans, having closed the front door on Father, had closed his bedroom door upon himself, Pip would stalk with much majesty into the Consulting Room, shutting the door carefully behind him.
After an interval of about one second, Tattie, endeavouring faithfully to imitate Mr. Evans's stately tread—have you ever seen a kitten trying to walk like an elephant, reader?—would approach the Talking-Hole in the hall, uncork the tube, and despatch an excited hurricane on its way to the Consulting Room. The following dialogue would then ensue:—
A gruff voice down the tube. Well?
Tattie [reading from an imaginary card]. Mr. Henry Hatkins, sir! (This, by the way, happened to be the name of Tattie's nurse's "young man.")
The Voice. Any appointment?
Tattie. None, sir.
The Voice. What's the matter wiv him?
Tattie. Infruenza, he thinks, sir.
The Voice. Send him up.
Tattie. Very good, sir.
Then Tattie would cork up the tube and conduct Pipette, who had been sitting patiently in the Waiting Room, up the three stairs to the Consulting Room. Here she abruptly dropped the rôle of Mr. Evans, and announced firmly—
"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