Pip : A Romance of Youth — Edition Insights

They had asked Mr. Evans about it, and he had informed them that it was a place to put bad little boys and girls in. But that was on a day when Mr. Evans was cross, having just had words with Cook about the disgraceful delay between the fish and joint at last night's dinner. Pipette, therefore, outwardly incredulous but inwardly quaking, appealed to Cook, and asked confidentially if the strange thing were not an oven; whereupon Cook embraced her and presented her with an apple, and wondered what the little precious would get into her poor head next, adding as an afterthought that Mr. Evans ought to be ashamed of himself. Pipette was so pleased with the apple and the task of conveying Cook's message to Mr. Evans's pantry--this was the name of the place where he lived; there was a delightful thing there called the Filter, with a little tap that you could turn on if no one was looking--that she quite forgot to ask what the Oven Door really was; so the mystery remained unsolved for many a day.

There were other wonderful things lying about. Books in plenty (but then books are dull things if you don't happen to be able to read), and two or three curious little articles like wooden trumpets, called "stuffyscopes." It was impossible to play tunes on these, though, and they puzzled the children sorely, until one joyful day when Pipette was taken with a cold on her chest, and Father--the name of the big, silent man who kissed them twice a day--took her into the Consulting Room and used one of those very instruments "to listen to my tummy wiv," as she afterwards explained to the envious Pip, who had not been permitted to be present.

"Did it hurt much?" inquired Pip.

"Not _bewwy_ much," replied Pipette, unwilling to throw away a good chance of posing as a martyr. "He putted one end against his ear and the other against my pinny, and said, 'Hold your breff,' and I holded it. Pip, I've thought of a lovely game! Let's see who can hold our breff longest."

This suggestion was adopted, and the new game kept them occupied for quite ten minutes. After that Pipette surrendered unconditionally. To hold your tongue is bad enough, but to hold your breath as well, in competition with a small, silent boy with a solemn face, serious eyes, and lungs apparently of gutta-percha, who seems to suffer no inconvenience from feats of endurance that would exhaust a Red Indian, is more than a mere daughter of Eve can compass.

They were in the Consulting Room at the time, Father having gone out, as he always did between eleven and one; and the various unexplained mysteries of that delightful apartment, which were becoming a serious strain upon Pipette's feminine curiosity, once more lay before them. For the hundredth time they made the tour of the room, gazing, fingering, and wondering.

They merely sighed as they passed the Oven Door. That mysterious portal was past all comprehension. They had made one last effort to obtain first-hand information on the subject only last night, with highly unsatisfactory results. They were always taken to the dining-room at half-past seven to say good-night to Father, who to his numerous other eccentricities added that of eating his dinner at an hour when properly constituted people were going to bed. (Pip's rather hazy scheme of theology, imbibed in scraps from Cook and others, included a private heaven of his own construction, in which at bedtime little boys, instead of being hustled upstairs by an under-housemaid, sat down to a heavy dinner of several courses.) On this occasion the pair had entered the dining-room bound by the most deadly oaths known to childhood to break down their shyness, and ask once and for all what lay behind the Oven Door. But alas! desire outran performance, and both--all three, in fact--made a sorry mess of things. The big man, almost as shy of them as they were of him, asked Pip, heavily but kindly, how he had spent the afternoon; not because he wished to know, but because the question afforded a conversational opening. Pip replied politely that he had been down the street posting a letter with "one of the girls." He used the expression in all good faith: his firm friend the milkman cried it down the area every afternoon in some such form as, "Anything fresh to-day, girls?" or, "Well, girls, what news?" The big man, however, frowned, and said, "Come, come, sir, no kitchen manners here, if you please," and turned to Pipette, who, with a boldness surprising to herself, was endeavouring to climb on to his knee.

Having reached that eminence, Pipette, assuming a certain coaxing expression which she had found absolutely infallible with Cook, and not without a certain effect on Mr. Evans himself, said rather tremulously--

"Please, Father, is that oven door in the Kersultin' Room _reelly_ a oven, or is it just--just to put bad little boys and girls in, like what Mr. Evans says?"

Mr. Evans, who up to this point had been standing in the background, listening to the conversation with an indulgent smile, suddenly remembered that it was time to bring the fish up.

Her father glanced down upon Pipette curiously. He looked tired and worried, as West-End physicians with enormous practices not infrequently do.

"What do you mean by 'oven door'? And what's all this nonsense about _Mr._ Evans?"

Pipette began to quail. This big man was cross about something, just like Mr. Evans when he had "indergestion." Her lip began to tremble.

"I didn't fink it would make you angry," she said rather piteously. "It was just that big oven door in the Kersultin' Room. Me and Pip wanted to know so much, and there wasn't nobody to ask, exceptin' Mr.----"

Here Father, much to Pipette's surprise and embarrassment, suddenly hugged her to his breast, murmuring the while to himself. Then he kissed her twice,--as a rule she kissed him once,--shook hands solemnly with Pip, and despatched them to bed.

The children had no nurse. The last holder of that position had left soon after their mother's death, and Cook had begged so hard to be allowed to take care of the "little dears" herself, that Father, who was too deeply sunk in the apathy of grief to desire to haggle over questions of domestic management, listlessly agreed. Since then Pip and Pipette had been washed, dressed, fed, and bedded by a syndicate composed of Cook and her myrmidons, who brought them up according to their own notions of respectability. Emily, the kitchen-maid, for instance, made no objection to Pip stirring his tea with the handle of his knife; but what shocked her ideas of etiquette and deportment was the fact that he insisted on doing so with his left hand. Somehow Pip's left hand was always getting him into trouble. It was so officious; it was 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?

_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 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 sex. 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?"

"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."