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The Return of Peter Grimm
NOVELISED FROM THE PLAY
BY
DAVID BELASCO
ILLUSTRATIONS BY
JOHN RAE
NEW YORK
GROSSET & DUNLAP
PUBLISHERS
COPYRIGHT, 1912, BY
DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I A MAN AND A MAID 3
II THE HEIR 19
III PETER GRIMM HAS A PLAN 37
IV A WARNING AND A THEORY 56
V A QUEER COMPACT 77
VI BREAKING THE NEWS 99
VII THE HAND RELAXES 108
VIII AFTERWARD 118
IX THE EVE OF A WEDDING 125
X A WASTED PLEA 134
XI THE LEGACIES 149
XII MOSTLY CONCERNING GRATITUDE 157
XIII THE RETURN 164
XIV "I CAN'T GET IT ACROSS" 184
XV A HALF-HEARD MESSAGE 209
XVI THE "SENSITIVE" 231
XVII MR. BATHOLOMMEY TESTIFIES 254
XVIII DR. MCPHERSON'S STATEMENT 265
XIX BACK TO THE STORY 278
XX THE BENEFIT OF THE DOUBT 290
XXI "ONLY ONE THING REALLY COUNTS" 302
XXII "ALL THAT HAPPENS, HAPPENS AGAIN" 313
XXIII THE DAWNING 324
XXIV THE GOOD-BYE 337
ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
"I believe," said Peter irrelevantly, "that St.
Paul was a single man, was he not, Pastor?" 86
"Who's in the room!" he demanded 202
"Sleep well," said Peter Grimm. "I wish you
the very pleasantest of dreams a boy could
have in _this_ world" 321
CHAPTER I
A MAN AND A MAID
The train drew to a halt at the Junction. There was a fine jolt that ran
the length of the cars, followed by a clank of couplings and a
half-intelligible call from the conductor.
The passengers,--dusty, jaded, crossly annoyed at the need of changing
cars,--gathered up their luggage and filed out onto the bare, roofless
station platform. There, after a look down the long converging rails in
vain hope of sighting the train they were to take, they fell to glancing
about the cheerless station environs.
Far away were rolling hills, upland fields of wind-swept wheat, cool,
dark stretches of woodland. But around the station were areas of
ill-kept lots, with here and there a jerry-built cottage, sadly in need
of shoring, and bereft of paint. Across the road on one side stood the
general store with its clump of porch-step loafers and its windows full
of gaudy advertisements. To the side, and parallel with the tracks,
sprawled a huge, weather-buffeted signboard that read:
"_Grimm's Botanical Gardens and Nurseries._
_1 Mile._"
The passengers eyed the half-defaced lettering, pessimistically. But
almost at once they received a far pleasanter reminder of the botanical
gardens. A boy, flushed with running, and evidently distressed at being
late, pattered up the road and onto the platform. From one of his
fragile arms hung a great basket. The lid had fallen aside and showed
the basket piled to the brim with fresh flowers.
Hurrying to the nearest passenger--an obese travelling man who mopped a
very red face,--the boy timidly held a Gloire de Dijon rose up to him
and recited with parrot-like glibness:
"With the compliments of Peter Grimm."
The fat man half unconsciously took the rose from the little hand and
stood looking as though in dire doubt what to do with it. The boy did
not help him out. Already he had moved on to the next passenger,--this
time a man of clerical bearing and suspiciously vivid nose,--and handed
him a gleaming Madonna lily.
"With the compliments of Peter Grimm," he announced, passing on to the
next.
And so on down the bunched line of waiting men and women the lad made
his way. In front of each, he paused, presented a flower taken at random
from the basket, recited his droning formula, and passed on.
The fat travelling man stared stupidly at his rose. Then he looked about
him, half shamefacedly and in wonder.
"What in blazes----?" he began.
"You must be a stranger in this part of the state," volunteered a big
young fellow, who had just come out of the waiting-room. "Did you never
hear of the flower-giving at the Junction?"
"No. What's the idea? Is it done on a bet? Or is it an 'ad' for the man
on the sign over there?"
"Neither. It has been Peter Grimm's custom for twenty years or more.
Ever since I first knew him."
"And it isn't an ad?"
"No," was the enigmatic answer as the big young man moved off in the
wake of the lad. "It's Peter Grimm."
The boy meanwhile had reached the last of the passengers. She was
middle-aged and motherly-looking. She peered down at him with more than
common interest as he went through his pat little presentation formula.
A psychologist would have gathered much from the lad's tense, flushed
face and in the oddly strained look of the big blue eyes. To this woman,
he was only a thin, lonely looking youngster, whose face held an
unconscious appeal that she answered without reading it.
"I am very much obliged to Mr. Peter Grimm for sending me this lovely
flower," she said, a little patronisingly, as she sniffed at the
half-opened Killarney rose she held.
"You need not be," answered the boy. "He didn't really send it to you.
In fact, I'm quite sure he never even heard of you. He just sent it
because he is good and because----"
"Because he loves flowers," suggested the woman as the boy hesitated.
"No," corrected the boy, in his gentle, old-fashioned diction, wherein
lurked the faintest trace of foreign accent, "I never heard him say
anything about loving flowers. But I know the flowers love him."
"What?"
"You see, they grow for him as they don't grow for any one else. _Much_
better I am sure," he added a little bitterly, "than they will ever grow
for Frederik. I don't think flowers love Frederik."
"What queer ideas you have!" she laughed, embarrassed at his quiet
statement of facts that seemed to her absurd. "Are you Mr. Grimm's son?"
"No, ma'am. He is not married. I don't think he has any sons at all. I'm
Anne Marie's son."
"Anne Marie? Anne Marie--what?"
"Just Anne Marie. I'm Willem, you know."
"William?"
"No, ma'am. Willem."
"Willem Grimm?"
"No, ma'am. Anne Marie's Willem. I--Oh, Mr. Hartmann!" he broke off,
catching sight of the big young man who drew near, "Mynheer Peter said
you'd be on this train. Now I can have some one to walk back with."
Slipping his hand into Hartmann's, Willem turned his back on the
platformful of perspiring beneficiaries and, together, the two struck
off down the yellow, dusty road toward the double row of giant elms
that marked the beginning of the village street.
Willem shuffled in high contentment alongside his big companion. And as
he walked, he stole upward and sidelong glances of furtive hero worship
at the tall, plainly clad figure. Jim Hartmann was of a build and aspect
to rouse such worship in the frail little fellow. He had the shoulders,
the chest girth, the stride of an athlete, tempered by the slight
roundness of those same shoulders, the non-expansiveness of chest, and
the heavy tread of the large man whose strength and physique have been
acquired at manual labour instead of in athletics. A figure more common
east of the Atlantic than in America.
His dark suit was neat and fitted honestly well. But it was palpably not
the suit of a man whose father had worn custom-made clothes or whose own
earlier youth had been blessed with such garments. Yet there was a
breezy, staunch outdoorness about the whole man that reminded one of a
breath of mountain air in a close room and left half unnoticed the
details of costume and bearing.
"Weren't you glad to get away from New York City?" queried the boy as
they came into the elm shade of Grimm Manor's one real street. "A week
is an awful long time to be away from here."
"You bet it is. You're a lucky chap to be able to stay at Grimm Manor
all the time instead of being sent here, there, and everywhere on
business."
"I shouldn't like that," assented the boy; "I think people would be very
liable of losing their way. I wonder if Mynheer Peter will send me
'here, there, and everywhere on business' when I'm older."
"Perhaps," agreed Hartmann, catching the slight note of wistfulness in
Willem's voice. "You're beginning the way I began. It wasn't more than a
week after my father got his gardening job with Mr. Grimm that I used to
be sent up to meet the trains with a basket of flowers and 'the
compliments of Peter Grimm.' It seems more like yesterday than eighteen
years ago."
"I'm glad you're back from New York City," said the boy, circling back
to the conversation's starting-point. "It's been rather lonely. Mynheer
Peter has been so busy. And Frederik----"
"Well," queried Jim as the boy checked himself and looked nervously
behind him, "what about Frederik? And why do you always look like that
when you speak of him?"
"Like what?"
"As if you were afraid some one would slap you. Is Frederik ever unkind
to you?"
"No," denied the boy, in scared haste. "No, he never is. He--he doesn't
notice me at all. That's what I was going to say. He doesn't seem to
care to. But he likes to be with Kathrien, I think. Yes, I'm sure he
does. I think Kathrien missed you, too, Mr. Hartmann."
The big man grew of a sudden vaguely embarrassed. He cast back along the
trail of the talk for some divergent path, and found one.
"Yes," he said, "it's good to be back from New York. The city always
seems to cramp me and make it hard for me to breathe. The pavements hurt
my feet and I have a silly feeling as though the skyscrapers were going
to topple inward."
He was talking to himself rather than to the boy. But Willem rejoined
sympathetically:
"I don't like New York City either."
"You, why you surely can't remember when you used to live there?"
The boy's fair brow creased in an effort of memory.
"Sometimes," he hesitated, "I can. And sometimes I don't seem able to.
But I remember Anne Marie. She cried."
"How is Mynheer Peter?" demanded Hartmann with galvanic suddenness. "And
how are that last lot of Madonna lilies coming on? They ought to be----"
"Sometimes," went on the boy, still following his own line of thought
and oblivious of the interruption, "sometimes I wonder why she cried.
Sometimes for a minute or two--mostly at night, when I'm nearly
asleep--I seem to remember why. But I always forget. Mr. Hartmann, did
you see Anne Marie when you were in New York City?"
"No, of course not. How are Lad and Rex and Paddy? And do they still dig
for moles in the flower-beds? Or did the dose of red pepper my father
scattered over the beds cure them of digging?"
"I wonder," observed Willem, "why everybody always talks about
everything else when I want to talk about Anne Marie. And if other
fellows' mothers come to see them and live with them, why doesn't Anne
Marie come and live with me? I asked Oom Peter once and he said----"
"I've got to leave you now and hurry over to Mynheer Grimm's office with
my report," broke in Hartmann. "My train was a little late anyhow and
you know how he hates to be kept waiting."
They had entered a wide gateway and had come from suburban America, at a
step, into rural Holland. The prim gravelled drive led between acres of
prosaically regular flower-beds, flanked on one side by a domed green
house and on the other by a creaking Dutch windmill with weather-browned
sails.
Straight ahead and absurdly near the road for a country house that
boasted so much land about it, was the stone and yellow stucco cottage
that for centuries had sheltered successive generations of Grimms.
Painfully neat, unpicturesquely ugly, the house stood among its great
oaks. It did not nestle among them. It stood. As well expect a breadth
of starched brown holland to nestle. To deprive the abode of any
lingering taint of picturesqueness, a blue and white signboard, thirty
feet long, stretching between it and the main street, flashed to all the
passing world the news that this was the headquarters of the celebrated
"Grimm's Botanical Gardens and Nurseries."
The interior of the house was as delightful as its outside was hideous.
Here, neatness raised to the nth power chanced to strike the keynote of
a certain beauty. The big living-room, with its stairway leading to the
bedroom gallery above, was a repository of curios that would have set an
antiquary mad. From the ancient clock to the priceless old blue china,
three-fourths of the room's appointments might have served to deck a
Holland museum. The remaining fourth contained such articles as a
glaringly modern telephone on a nondescript desk, and a compromise
between old and new in the shape of a square piano in the bay window, an
ancient table. And several patently twentieth century articles helped
still further to rob the place of any harmony or unison in effect.
An altogether charming Dutch maiden was dusting, and occasionally
stopping to restore some slightly disarranged article to its
mathematically neat position. In her blue Dutch cap, her blue delft
gown, and white kerchief, she seemed to have danced down out of the past
to strike the one note of vivid life in all that sombre-furnished
place.
She paused in the sweep of sunshine that poured through the
muslin-curtained bay window. A step had sounded in the passage leading
from the rear of the house;--a step she evidently knew. For the full
young lips broke into an involuntary smile of expectancy, while the big
eyes grew all at once eager and happy. Jim Hartmann, a pen behind his
ear, a bundle of mail in his hand, came into the room. He had reached
the desk and deposited his packet there before he caught sight of her.
Then, wide-eyed, silent, tense, he halted, gazing at the sunshine-bathed
figure in the window embrasure. For an instant neither of them spoke. It
was the girl who broke the silence, her voice charged with a strange
shyness.
"Good-morning, James," she said primly.
"Good-morning, Miss Katie," he answered mechanically, his eyes still
wide with the loveliness of the sun-kissed face that so suddenly broke
in upon his workaday routine.
"I wondered if you'd gotten back yet," she continued, seeming to hunt
industriously for a phrase of sufficiently meaningless decorum.
"I got back ten minutes ago. I reported to Mr. Grimm and brought the
morning mail in here to look over for him. It seems strange to find the
day so far advanced at this hour," he went on, talking at random. "After
a week in New York, where no one thinks of doing business before nine in
the morning, it's like coming into another world to be back here where
the day's work begins at five."
He sat down, pleasantly regardless of the fact that she was still
standing, and began to open and sort the letters before him. The girl
noticed that his big hands fumbled at the unfamiliar task. But she
noticed far more keenly the strength and massive shapeliness of the
hands themselves.
"Do you like being secretary?" she queried.
"Yes, in a way. I've walked 'outside' in the gardens and nurseries so
many years, it seems queer to be penned up indoors and have to scribble
letters and open mail. But I'd sooner shovel dirt than not be here at
all. I couldn't last a month at a job where there wasn't gardening going
on all around me and where I couldn't sneak off once in a while and do a
bit of it myself."
"That's the way I feel," she said simply, "though I never thought to put
it in words before. I must live where things are growing. Where, every
time I look out of the window, I can see orchards and shrubs and
hothouses. Oh, it's all so beautiful! And, James, our orchids this
season--but I forgot. You don't care for orchids."
"They're pretty enough, I suppose," vouchsafed Hartmann. "But the big
men in the business are doing wonderful things with potatoes these days.
And look at what Father Burbank's done in creating an edible cactus!
Sometimes it makes me feel bitter when I think what I might have done
with vegetables if I hadn't squandered so much God-given time studying
Greek."
"But----"
"Oh, yes. It made a hit with father to have me study a lot of things
that would only help a college professor. He's worked in the dirt, in
overalls, all his life. And like most people who never had one, he sets
a crazy value on so-called 'education.' But all this can't interest
you," he finished ruefully.
"It _does_ interest me. You know it does. But there's something I'd like
to say to you if you won't be angry."
"At _you_? Why----"
"It's this: I want you so much to get on. Why won't you try harder
to--to please Uncle Peter?"
"I do try. I'm square with him. That's the trouble. That's why I don't
make more of a hit. He asks me my 'honest opinion' about something or
other. I give it. Then he blows up."
"But if you'd try to be more tactful----"
"You said that once before to me, Miss Katie. I asked you what 'tactful'
meant. And when you told me----"
"When I told you, you said it was 'just a fancy name for being
hypocritical.' But it isn't, a bit. Can't you try not to be quite
so--so----?"
"Cranky?"
"No, blunt. It will smooth things over so much with Uncle Peter. He's
really the gentlest, dearest----"
"I've noticed it," said Hartmann drily. "But I'll try if you want me to.
I promise."
"Thank you," she answered.
And, perhaps to seal the pledge, their hands met. The sealing of a
pledge is not a matter to slur over with careless haste, but requires
due time. And it was but natural that the handclasp should be symbolic
of that deliberation. Indeed, it is hard to say just how long his big
hand and her little one might have remained clasped together had
inclination been allowed to prevail. But, as usual in Hartmann's life,
inclination was not consulted. The door behind them opened sharply, and
the clasped hands parted as if at a signal. Hartmann slipped back into
his chair at the desk, while the girl busied herself with a new and
commendable activity in her task of setting the immaculate room to
rights.
Both seemed to realise without turning around that one more of their too
brief interviews had been unceremoniously cut short.
The man whose advent caused the curtailment of the promise's sealing was
as foreign looking as the room itself. Dapper, dressed in a sort of
elaborate carelessness, his figure alone carried with it an air of
assurance that Hartmann always found almost as irritating as the man's
gracefully exaggerated manner and speech. His blonde hair was brushed
back from a high, narrow forehead. A turned-up moustache and a
close-trimmed and pointed Van Dyke beard added to the foreign aspect.
The newcomer took in the scene with a glance that apparently grasped
none of its details. He nodded curtly to Hartmann, then crossed to where
the girl was dusting.