The Return of Peter Grimm, David Belasco [most popular ebook readers TXT] 📗

even before the wave of outraged red could gush to Mrs. Batholommey's shaking visage.

"Will you--will you have a glass of plum brandy?" he asked her, and then caught himself with the scared grin of a very guilty schoolboy.

"I thank you," she retorted, safe for the moment in the full majesty of Temperance. "I do not take such things. Perhaps you forget I am the President of our local W. C. T. U. and the----"

"The Little Brothers of the Artesian Well," added Grimm, "or whatever they call it. I remember. And I'm sorry. I wouldn't tempt you from your principles for the world. Forgive me. How about _you_, Pastor? A little drop of plum brandy, for--for--let's see, what is it St. Paul says about----?"

"Thank you, no," declined the rector, with an apprehensive gesture towards his wife.

"Oh, come, come!" urged Peter hospitably. "Why, the other evening when you dropped over here after the vespers, sir, you----"

"I only use it when absolutely needful for medicinal purposes," insisted the rector hurriedly. "Not to-day, I thank you."

"I believe," said Peter irrelevantly, "that St. Paul was a single man, was he not, Pastor?"

"I--I believe so. It is not definitely known. But why?"

"I was only wondering," mused Peter, "how he would have accounted to St. Pauline, or whatever his wife's name would have been, for what he wrote in favour of 'a little wine for--'"

"Oh," explained Mrs. Batholommey, still safe, and ever feeling safer, now that temperance was again the theme, "St. Paul referred to unfermented wine, you know. Every one ought to understand that. It is so hard to make people see the difference."

"One bottle would convince them," said Peter very gravely.

"No," Mrs. Batholommey corrected him with serene loftiness. "You do not quite get my point, dear Mr. Grimm. For instance, when the poets,--even good men like the late Mr. Longfellow and Mr. Whittier--speak of 'wine,' they use the word of course in its poetical sense. They use it merely to typify----"

"Booze," growled McPherson.

"Good cheer," amended Mrs. Batholommey, withering him with a single frown. "And yet it is terribly misleading. I remember when we had the Walter Scott Tableaux and Recitations at the church last fall, and old Mr. Bertholf from Pompton was going to recite 'Lochinvar,' I had to suggest a change in the poem, lest the ignorant people in the village might get a wrong impression of dear Sir Walter Scott's principles. You remember the couplet occurs:


"'And now I have come with this lost love of mine
To tread one last measure, drink one cup of wine.'


"So I asked Mr. Bertholf to alter the words into something like this:


"'And now I have come with this beautiful maid
To tread one last measure,--drink one lemonade.'


"It left the poetry just as beautiful and it took away the dangerous reference to wine. Mr. Bertholf didn't like it very much, I'm afraid. But I insisted, and at last----"

"And at last," snarled McPherson, to whom the thought of any mutilation of his fellow Scotchman's verse was as sacrilege, "and at last, poor Bertholf got so mixed up that he clean forgot the silly rot you'd taught him. And when he came to that part of the poem, he stammered for a second and then blurted out:


"'And now I have come with my lovely lost mate
To tread one last measure, drink one whiskey straight.'"


"Yes," blazed Mrs. Batholommey, "and I have always believed _you_ put him up to it."

"Well," shrugged the noncommittal McPherson, "if I had, it would at least be more in keeping with what Sir Walter intended than your straining an immortal poem through a lemon-squeezer."

"Andrew and I," announced Peter, hastening to pour oil on the troubled waters of conversation, by filling two glasses and handing one of them to McPherson, "are going to drink a toast to spooks."

"_What?_" squealed Mrs. Batholommey, in the accents of a rabbit that has been stepped on.

"To spooks--we----"

"Oh, how _can_ you?" she gasped. "How _can_ you? To spooks! _You_ of all men! The very idea!"

"Mrs. Batholommey!" exclaimed Peter in real alarm, setting down his glass and moving toward her. "Something _has_ happened! You are quite----"

"No, no!" she wailed helplessly.

"It is nothing, Mr. Grimm," soothed the rector. "Nothing at all, I assure you. My wife is a trifle overwrought this morning. Nothing of any consequence. I mean--that is, of course--we must all keep our spirits up, Mr. Grimm."

"Good Lord, deliver us!" intoned McPherson in mingled fervour and disgust.

"I know what it is," declared Peter with sudden enlightenment. "You've just come from a wedding! That's it! I know. Women love weddings better than anything on earth. They'll talk about it for months beforehand. They'll walk miles to attend one.--And they'll weep all the rest of the day. I don't know why. But they do it. I should be grateful, I suppose, that no women were ever called upon to shed tears at _my_ wedding. But I hope, before so very long----"

Mrs. Batholommey had not in the very least caught the drift of the laughing speech whereby he had sought to put the poor woman at her ease. And now all at once, the last sagging vestige of self-control went from her.

"Oh, Mr. Grimm!" she moaned, breaking in upon his words. "You were always so kind to us. There never was a better, kinder, gentler man in all this world than you were."

"Than I _was_?" asked Peter bewildered. "Is my character changing or----?"

"No, no!" she corrected herself flounderingly. "I don't mean that. I mean--I meant----"

Her gaze fluttered helplessly about the big room and chanced at last to fall upon the reading boy, asprawl on the gallery bench above them.

"I meant," she plunged along, "what would become of poor little Willem if you----?"

This time her glance was caught and transfixed by McPherson's furious glare, much as a great flopping beetle might be pierced by the sting of a wasp. Mrs. Batholommey prided herself upon her tact. That glare nerved her to another effort.

"You see," she shrilled, wildly and awkwardly clambering out of the slough, "it's fearful he had such a 'M.'"

"Such a 'M'?" queried Peter. "What does that mean?"

With a warning glance toward the absorbed boy she shaped her lips noiselessly into the word "Mother."

"Oh!" said Peter. "I understand. But----"

"She ought to have told Mr. Batholommey or me," went on Mrs. Batholommey, climbing still higher on to solid ground, "who the 'F' was."

"'F'? What does that mean?"

And again the rabbit-like lips shaped themselves into a soundless word, this time 'Father.'

"Oh," grunted Peter, "the word you want isn't 'Father,' but 'Scoundrel!' Whoever he is----"

Willem flung aside his book and leaped to his feet as though his little body were galvanised. The others looked at him in guilty dread, fearing he had heard and had somehow understood their awkwardly veiled allusions to his parentage. But they were mistaken. A sound, far more potent to every normal child's ear than the fiercest thunders of morality, had reached his keen senses as he lounged up there. And a moment later they all heard it.

It was the braying of a distant but steadily approaching brass band. With it came a confused but ever louder medley of shouts, handclapping, raucous voices, and the higher tones of delighted children. As Kathrien came running in at one door, followed by Marta, and Frederik sauntered in from the office, Willem rushed down the stairway and into the window seat, where he sprang upon a chair and craned his neck to see the stretch of village street beyond. Nearer and louder came the music and the attendant vocal Babel.

"It's the circus parade!" shouted Willem. "The one they tell about in the advertisements and pictures on the fences. I didn't know the parade would start so early. There come some of them now. Oh, look! Oom Peter! Look! It's a clown! See! He's coming right toward us!"

The band in full brazen force was discoursing a "Dutch Ditties" waltz as it turned the corner above. And now, the voices of the barkers were heard in the land.

"Ladies and Gentlemen," came the leathern tones of one unseen announcer, "one hour before the big show begins in the main tent we will give a grand free balloon ascension!"

"Remember," adjured a second Unseen, "one price admits you to all parts of the big show!"

"Lemo--lemo--ice cold lemonade--five cents a glass!" shouted a youthful vender.

"You ought to quaff one beaker of it to Sir Walter Scott's memory, Mrs. Batholommey," observed McPherson.

But the din of the oncoming parade drowned his voice. The whole roomful, from Marta down to Willem, were thronging into the bay window. They were all children again. A touch of circus had renewed their youth as by the wave of a magic wand. Willem broke into a cry of utter joy and pointed ecstatically at the open window.

The next moment a clown, white and vermilion of face, clad in the traditional white, black, and scarlet motley of his tribe, had leaped cat-like upon the window sill and swept the room with his painted grin. In his hands he held a great bunch of variegated circus bills. Tossing a half-dozen of these at the feet of the all-absorbed spectators, he cried in high cracked falsetto:

"Well, _well_, _WELL_! Here we are again, good people! Billy Miller's Big Show! Larger--greater--grander than ever. Everything new! Come and see the wild animals! Hear the lions roar!"

Wheeling suddenly towards Mrs. Batholommey he pointed a whitened forefinger at her and broke into a truly frightful roar. The good lady jumped at least six inches from the ground.

"Steady, ma'am!" exhorted the clown. "I won't let him bite you! Come one, come all! Come see the diving deer! The human fly, Mademoiselle Zarella!" he added, addressing the rector. "She walks suspended from the ceiling! One ring and no confusion!" he confided to the delightedly smiling Peter. "And all for the price of admission! Remember the grand free exhibition one hour before the big show!"

He paused, catching sight of Willem for the first time. Now, it is a well-grounded tradition in one-ring circus life that no clown stays long in the business or scores a hit in it unless he is genuinely fond of children. Noting the all-absorbing bliss and adoration in Willem's wide eyes, the clown grinned at the boy in right brotherly fashion.

"Howdy!" said he cordially. "Shake!"

Marvelling, overcome with rapture, feeling as though the proffered honour was one far too wonderful to be real, Willem shyly extended his hand and met the friendly grasp of the flour-dusted fingers. The clown, striking an attitude, began in shrill, exaggerated diction, to chant the antiquated "Frog Opera" song:


"Uncle Rat has gone to town,--Ha-_H'M_!
Uncle Rat has gone to town,"


he sang on, addressing Willem,


"To buy his niece a wedding gown."


"Ha-_H'M_!" intoned Willem, delightedly; laughing aloud as he realised he was actually singing with a real live clown.


"What shall the wedding breakfast be?"


continued the clown, interrogating the equally youthful and delighted Peter Grimm. And this time more voices than Peter's and Willem's caught up the refrain:


"Ha-_H'M_!
Hard-boiled eggs and a cup of tea,"


sang