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Read Ebook: The House of Cariboo and Other Tales from Arcadia by Gardiner A Paul Graef Robert A Illustrator
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Ebook has 610 lines and 28582 words, and 13 pages
"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.
Pip's practical mind began to evolve difficulties.
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--
"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.
"No, but the soup will twickle down all right," said Pipette, whose mind, busy with works of mercy, soared far above these utilitarian details.
"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.
"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.
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.
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