The Return of Peter Grimm Novelised From the Play

Excerpt

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....