Little Miss Grouch is a comic transatlantic romance by Samuel Hopkins Adams, subtitled “A Narrative Based on the Log of Alexander Forsyth Smith’s Maiden Transatlantic Voyage.” It follows a young Westerner crossing to England aboard the Clan Macgregor, his entanglement with a runaway heiress, and the shipboard intrigues that keep them circling each other. The book appeared in the mid-1910s, illustrated by R. M. Crosby, and its chapters are framed by entries in “Smith’s Log,” the hero’s wry day-by-day record of the voyage.
“Blind as well as dumb! There’s a little godling who is also blind and–well, you know the proverb: ‘When the blind lead the blind, both shall fall in the ditch.”
The novel’s engine is a simple collision: a man who cannot keep his opinions to himself and a woman who has never been crossed. Alexander Forsyth Smith—”the Tyro,” a novice at sea—spots a small, veiled, miserable girl at the rail and pities her aloud. She turns out to be Cecily Wayne, the season’s most courted heiress, fleeing an engagement her father arranged and the newspapers printed. His careless remark that she is homely and cross brands her “Little Miss Grouch” and sets the whole voyage spinning.
From the Departure Dock to the Tender at Liverpool
The Clan Macgregor Sails
The tugs shoulder the Clan Macgregor away from her pier, and Alexander Forsyth Smith—the Tyro, as the log will call him—stands at the rail watching the farewell clamor with a loneliness sharpened by the fact that his own people have already gone ashore. His mother and sister have wept their goodbyes and vanished into the crowd; he waves indiscriminately at strangers and is rewarded by a smile from a piquant brunette. On the dock a fashionable, frantic man of uncertain age shakes a fist at him, a stranger. Nearby a small, heavily veiled girl sniffles, and the Tyro pities her. Then the crowd jams her against the rail, the man on the dock begins shouting for the pilot-boat, and the girl refuses to be returned. She stamps her heel down on the Tyro’s sore toe; he yelps and murmurs something about hell and good intentions. She resents his pity, insists she can only whisper, and confesses she is running away to her married sister in London, having left her maid Marie behind. Worse, she is engaged to the man on the dock—a match arranged by her father and printed in the newspapers—and she fears being sent back to him.
The Tyro offers to trade his stateroom, 123 D, for her 129 D. She scorns the offer; he takes offense; she apologizes badly; he calls her “Niobe.” He proposes a conspiracy instead: since she never gave her real name, she should stay muffled and meet him later. From Dr. Alderson, a grizzled veteran of twenty-seven crossings, he learns that a telegram to Quarantine could reach the pilot. A powerful message demands the daughter’s return, describing her as “very pretty.” The search fails because the Tyro loudly calls her “Amy” and claims to be her brother. The pilot-boat departs empty. The girl scolds him for the name; he delivers an ironic speech on the praiseworthy pig; she admits he is “rather a dear.” Later, seasick, she takes the deck air, and the Tyro tells Alderson about “Little Miss Grouch,” the crossest little patch ever grown up without being properly spanked.
The Insult and the Vow
Alderson remarks that sympathy is not in demand when one is seasick. The Tyro corrects him—it was not sickness but weeping for the vanished fatherland, “blubbery weeps”—and describes the girl as tiny, forlorn, red-nosed, and homely. A drunken stagger of the ship spins him around, and he finds himself looking down at a steamer-chair holding a bundle swathed in rugs, from which protrudes a veiled face with a swollen nose and fixed, malevolent eyes. He hastily excuses himself, saying he will step over the rail to speak to a fish he used to know. Alderson follows, asking if he is seasick already; the Tyro says it is worse—the bundle was Little Miss Grouch, and she heard every word. Alderson argues that any woman looks frightful when bunged up from crying, and that a pretty girl can summon her looking-glass as a witness in rebuttal. The Tyro laments having put his foot in it up to the knee. Alderson advises him to claim he meant the ship’s cat; the Tyro prefers avoidance, but Alderson says one cannot avoid a person on shipboard—ten to one she will sit next to him at table. The Tyro vows to change his seat, eat in his cabin, and fast for the week. Alderson promises help if he proves a game sport, then announces her approach.
Little Miss Grouch bears down on them with her nose in the air; as she maneuvers past, the ship’s roll carries her into the Tyro’s arms. Alderson extracts her, sets her on her way, and asks whether she bit him. The Tyro says she did not, that Alderson grabbed her just in time, and that the affair will be “Fate with a capital F.”
In her cabin the little lady matures a plot of righteous wrath, hurling off her apparel and diving into her bunk, punctuating her mutterings with pokes at the pillow: he called her homely, red-nosed, cross and ugly, and named her Little Miss Grouch; she employs the anathema “gribble him”; she resents that he pitied her. She resolves to be seasick and have it over with, cry until no tears remain, and then “fix him,” noting his nice, clear gray eyes with tigerish satisfaction. For several hours she carries out her programme, until Sleep banishes Grief and Temper. She wakes transformed, confirmed by one look in her glass, girds up her hair, and goes forth on the war-path of her sex.
A Wondrous Vision on Deck
The log for the second day out notes fair weather and the Tyro’s conviction that he will like the ocean. The narrator cites a proverb made up for the occasion about beauty and constancy to excuse the Tyro’s fickleness: within eighteen hours he has forgotten the woe-begone damsel, her plainness exorcised by interest in Beauty. At about one bell he wakes from agitated sleep, protests the ship’s swing, is bumped back onto the pillow, deduces morning, considers seasickness for a minute, decides to breakfast instead, eats well, and wobbles up to the deck. Alderson, triangulating the deck like a surveyor, welcomes him to the Society of Seaworthy Salts. They promenade past sparsely inhabited deck-chairs. Alderson asks whether he has seen “Miss Melancholia”; the Tyro admits he peeked around the corner before breakfast to make sure she was not there, and calls himself a beast. Alderson maliciously points out an approaching girl; the Tyro is reassured because she is surrounded by a masculine bodyguard—then a roll of the ship opens the phalanx, revealing a Wondrous Vision. The Tyro forgets Little Miss Grouch, Alderson, family, home, altars, fires, and manners, and prays to Neptune that the Clan Macgregor break down so the voyage lasts six months. Alderson warns of competition. The Tyro recalls her modeled face, pink tint, curves, delicate mirthful mouth, and quaintly slanted eyes; he asks whether there is an Angel of Laughter; Alderson says not in any hierarchy he knows, and that these sudden seizures are seldom fatal. The bodyguard enthrones her, tucking rugs and handing candy, flowers, and magazines—acts the Tyro characterizes regrettably. Alderson identifies the admirers: young Sperry, son of millionaire philanthropist and tax-dodger Diedrick Sperry, worth ten millions one day (the Tyro calls him “Slug”); Journay, guard on last year’s Princeton team (“Unfledged cub”); Castleton Flaunt, the illustrator, sketching her (“Poseur!”); and Lord Guenn, the polo-player (“Cheap sport!”). Alderson points out a tall man with wispy hair—the ablest honest lawyer in New York, who knows everybody—and hails Judge Enderby. Alderson asks the judge to identify the pretty girl; the judge says he knows her but refuses to tell, “because I like his looks.” The Tyro naively says he likes hers. The judge warns him—
Mrs. Denyse and the Newspaper
The Tyro parts from the Wondrous Vision, who has dismissed him with a rendezvous for the next morning after refusing his plea for that evening. Composing himself for a promenade and building air-castles about her, he nearly collides with an approaching woman; after several side-steps and sheers, she checks him at the rail and announces she wishes to speak to him. He finds a middle-aged lady with artificial pretensions to youth, her color-scheme compared to Turner’s sunsets and burning ships, wearing an air of curdled virtue and carrying her nose at a balancing angle.
The Lawyer’s Fee and the Cut Direct
The Tyro pours out his troubles to the leader of the New York bar, who clucks like a troubled hen and confirms the worst: the captain can indeed lock her up. Having already pocketed his fee, the lawyer advises the young man to keep away from “that pink-and-white peril,” though he concedes a note might be written. The Tyro writes it, but on coming on deck he meets Little Miss Grouch face to face and receives so cold and public a cut that he tears the letter up on the spot; a porpoise rolls the fragments out to sea. That night Judge Enderby observes to Dr. Alderson that it is fortunate the course of true love never runs smooth, since otherwise marriages would have to be made in heaven; love, he argues, is by nature an obstacle race, and Judge Cupid might as well advocate race suicide. Alderson answers only that she is a devilishly pretty girl.
The Judge Takes a Case
A “Smith’s Log” entry for the fifth day out records a dead, blank calm and a wish that its author had gone steerage. Judge Enderby, rising early with an appetite for romance, fingers the two five-dollar bills from his newest client and resolves to do his best for the young fellow, whom he likes and considers a confirmed romantic enjoying himself unusually. After breakfast he breaks through the cordon around Miss Cecily Wayne and takes her for a promenade, explaining that he acts for a client. She twits him about his browbeating of her papa on the stand; he calls her the tribunal of highest jurisdiction. Three young men are precipitated into the scuppers by the ship’s tilt. The judge says his client is stricken dumb, and Miss Wayne’s nose rises; she declares she does not want to hear about him. Asked whether he must return the fee, he explains that the client has paid two five-dollar sums, and she laughs that if Mr. Daddle—if his client—has anything to say, he should say it himself. The judge explains that the client is dumb by the captain’s order, forbidden to speak to her because unpleasant things will happen to a friend for whom he has regard if he disobeys: she will be sentenced to her stateroom. Her father, through Marconi, has exerted authority via the captain acting in loco parentis. She protests she is not a minor, having turned twenty-one last month, though her father told the captain she was under age. The judge asks if she can prove it and demands five dollars; she has none and goes to find some.
The Borrowed Bill and the Wicked Godmother
She spots the Tyro hiding behind a five-day-old newspaper and torments him, demanding he speak, then asking to borrow five dollars. He gives her a bill and flees, but Mrs. Charlton Denyse intercepts him, declaring “This is shameless!” and saying she saw him pass Miss Wayne a note. He tells her to ask Judge Enderby, since the judge now has the note. She refuses and threatens to report the affair to the captain; the Tyro groans, “Now I have done it!” He catches the judge and Miss Wayne, reporting that Mrs. Denyse saw them and has gone to the captain. The lawyer delights in fairy-tale language—the Wicked Godmother, the Wicked Ogre, the donjon-keep, the rescue in the last chapter—while Miss Wayne protests it will not be funny to be locked up. The judge hustles them around the cabin, sends the Tyro to watch for icebergs and Miss Wayne to a secluded spot, suspecting the captain is in no haste to find her.
The Watch as Evidence
Seated in refuge, the judge asks what she is doing to his client. She recites her wrongs: he said she was homely, red-nosed, had a voice like a sick crow, and called her Little Miss Grouch; she is getting even. The judge cackles that the client is blind as well as dumb and warns, “When the blind lead the blind, both shall fall in the ditch.” He asks for documentary proof of her birth; she has none, having left in a hurry, but has the watch her papa gave her on her birthday. He reads the inscription—“To my darling Cecily on her 21st birthday, from Father”—calling it not strictly legal but good enough. She asks him not to tell his other client, wanting her revenge complete, and claims her age is a privileged, confidential communication. With the timepiece the judge persuades the captain, and Miss Wayne learns her incarceration is ended—knowledge she keeps as a weapon against the Tyro.
The Hunted Hare
Thereafter the ship’s company witnesses a young man hunted by a Diana of the decks—chevied from chairs, flushed from nooks, baited in saloon and reading-room, trailed through passageways, hare to her hound—until he becomes a byword for the stricken eye of eternal watchfulness. Sometimes she stalks him unarmed, sometimes threatens with a five-dollar bill, sometimes trails in deadly silence or bays softly on the spoor. Once she pens him behind a lifeboat, greets him demurely as Little Miss Grouch, extends a five-dollar bill, speaks of “our adopted child” crying for him, and warbles a nursery ditty about a lady who loved a pig. He begs her to go away lest someone see and lock her up; she feigns surprise, saying it is more likely he should be locked up, and that as a helpless, unchaperoned young lady the captain is her natural guardian—claiming to see him coming. The Tyro drops and emerges ventre à terre from beneath the far end of the lifeboat.
The Wreck of the Sarah Calkins
The Tyro watches Little Miss Grouch from a shadow as she drops candies on the deck; she senses him and smiles. An officer reports the port screw struck wreckage and broke a blade—no danger, only delay—and praises her nerve. She says good-night and thanks the Tyro, thrilling him. Smith’s Log for the sixth day notes a bump and a three-day delay, which suits him. The narrative then recounts the steamship Sarah Calkins, old and decrepit, which sank at Latitude 43° 10′ North, Longitude 20° 12′ West, insured fraudulently as carrying pianos and furniture though loaded with rock; a Danish tramp rescued her crew. Her wreckage later damaged the Clan Macgregor’s screw and, hours after, punched a hole above the water-line of the leviathan, letting alternate waves enter. The Tyro wakes to cries, stopped engines, and water in his passageway; he dresses and knocks at 129 D, where Little Miss Grouch appears in a white coat. She says she knew he’d come and admits she was afraid; he carries her to the saloon. She protests his returning for clothes but gives a list and makes him promise to bring his own overcoat and sweater. Young Mr. Diedrick Sperry, drunk and demanding Cissy Wayne’s whereabouts, blocks the passage; the Tyro throws him through an opposite stateroom door, disturbing Mrs. Charlton Denyse, who pursues Sperry in pink. The Tyro returns with clothes; she questions whether he’d have come had she been homely, and he says not as anxiously but yes. He remembers the steerage baby and mother, brings them up despite ship’s rules, and an official soon announces the leak is patched and there is no danger, though D and E occupants should stay in the saloon. Judge Enderby advises sitting on the rudder for “safety first”; banter follows about her house and lawyer (she paid him five dollars, the Tyro ten). She asks if he will come to Guenn Oaks; he says his servitude will never end; she defers to tomorrow. She feigns sleepiness, then falls asleep holding his hand while he keeps watch. Judge Willis Enderby remarks to Dr.
The Publisher’s Advertisements
The narrative of Little Miss Grouch is finished by the time the edition reaches its back matter, and what follows belongs to the book as a manufactured object rather than to its story. Houghton Mifflin of Boston and New York fills the closing pages with notices for seven of its recent novels, each entry a short description followed by a cluster of quoted reviews from newspapers across the country. The first is Mary Roberts Rinehart’s The Street of Seven Stars, a study of two young lovers, students in far-off Vienna, beset by poverty and temptation against the backdrop of the war-worn Hapsburg city. The notices gathered in its praise call the book fresh, clean, and sweet, and one enthusiast goes so far as to predict it will still be read fifty years hence; it sells for a dollar and twenty-five cents net.
Meredith Nicholson’s The Poet comes next, a kindly portrait of a famous living poet woven together with a love story. Reviewers reach for comparisons to Henry Harland’s gentle Cardinal and his snuffbox and to Thomas Bailey Aldrich, calling the book a rare performance in American letters and its central figure a species of Good Samaritan; the volume is illustrated in color and priced at a dollar and thirty cents net. Mary Johnston’s The Witch is presented as her most successful historical novel, a romance of imagination, adventure, and surging passion set in the stormy Elizabethan days and telling of the witch and her lover. The quoted praise is warm: well told, powerful, her greatest book, a graphic picture of the witchcraft delusion in England after Elizabeth’s death. A color frontispiece accompanies it at a dollar and forty cents net.
Westerns, Mysteries, and Comedies
Harry Herbert Knibbs’s Overland Red is likened in the advertisements to Owen Wister’s Virginian and to David Harum. The reviews insist on its cleanness and decency, its romantic adventure, and its tingling with the virile life of the great West, when a steady eye and a six-shooter were the first aids to the law; it is a romance of California hills, mines, and ranges, illustrated in color at a dollar and thirty-five cents net. Rinehart returns with The After House, an absorbing tale of murder and mystery. Here the notices compare her to Stevenson and to F. Marion Crawford, call her an adept inventor of thrilling murder puzzles, observe that the mystery stays unsolved until the very last, and recommend the book for quick reading; May Wilson Preston supplies the illustrations, and the price is a dollar and twenty-five cents net.
Mrs. Romilly Fedden’s The Spare Room lightens the list: a bride and groom, a villa in Capri, a spare room, and seven assorted guests. The quoted reviews find it amusing, bubbling with laughter, a clever comedy brimful of rich humor, illustrated by Haydon Jones at a dollar net. The final notice belongs to Henry Sydnor Harrison’s V. V.’s Eyes, praised as elevated in spirit, an almost perfect example of idealistic realism, a delicate artistic study, and possibly the high-water mark in American fiction for the year; R. M. Crosby’s pictures accompany it at a dollar and thirty-five cents net.
The End of the Electronic Text
With the advertisements concluded, the edition marks the close of the Project Gutenberg eBook, naming the file 22196-8.txt and crediting Roger Frank and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team for their work on the text. There follows the full Project Gutenberg license: the terms of use and redistribution, the trademark, the Foundation’s non-profit status and contact details, the limited warranty and refund provisions, and information about donations. The novel itself has already reached its last scene; what remains is the legal and institutional apparatus that carries a public-domain book into a reader’s hands, and there the edition ends.
The Tyro and the Education of a Grouch
Smith is the book’s fixed point: decent, quick-tongued, bred to courtesy toward his elders, and hopelessly out of his depth among the wealthy. He arrives lonely, waving at strangers, and spends the crossing being managed by Judge Enderby, who takes his ten dollars and plays matchmaker with the relish of a man who has found a better case than any at the bar. What makes Smith worth following is that he never pretends to be more than he is. He admits the name Smith, defends his grandmother’s people, throws a drunk through a stateroom door, and carries a steerage baby up from below when the ship is holed. His one real weapon is his tongue, and he uses it well—the “hee-haw” that turns Diedrick Sperry’s mockery back on him is the crossing’s best stroke.
Cecily Wayne is the harder creation, and the more interesting one. Adams gives her money, beauty, and a court of suitors, then shows the loneliness underneath: a girl raised in a hothouse school, presented to a society she conquered almost by accident, and bored by all of it. Her “You-be-d—-d air,” as Lord Guenn calls it, is armor, not temperament. The New England mother in her refuses to truckle, and the Puritan in her wants happiness rather than the price society sets on it. Her pursuit of Smith across the decks—five-dollar bill in hand, warbling nursery rhymes about a lady who loved a pig—is revenge, but it is also the first game she has ever played for her own sake.
Around them Adams arrays a gallery of types who are never quite mere types. Judge Enderby, the ablest honest lawyer in New York, clucks like a troubled hen and quotes fairy tale while quietly arranging everyone’s future. Dr. Alderson, veteran of twenty-seven crossings, supplies the sea-law and the dry commentary. Mrs. Charlton Denyse, née Dennis of the wheat-pit, carries her nose at a balancing angle and her “curdled virtue” everywhere, the novel’s purest portrait of the social climber. Lord Guenn, the polo-playing Englishman, turns out to have a portrait of a Yankee ancestor on his wall; Diedrick Sperry, the millionaire’s son, exists to be thrown through doors.
What the Voyage Is Really About
Strip away the farce and the book is a comedy of manners with a sharp edge. Adams knows exactly what Mrs. Denyse is doing with her wireless messages and her advertised name, and he knows what Cecily’s father has done in printing her engagement in the papers before she agreed to it. The captain acting in loco parentis, the threat of a locked stateroom, the legal technicality of twenty-one on the high seas—these are jokes, but they are jokes about a real thing: a daughter treated as property to be transferred, and a woman who has to run away to have any say in the matter.
The title’s “grouch” is the book’s quiet argument. Cecily is called cross because she resents being pitied, managed, and married off; her temper is the only leverage she has. When Smith finally tells her the truth—that he would have come for her in the wreck, though not as anxiously had she been homely—the honesty matters more than the gallantry. The novel’s real subject is the distance between the person the world has decided you are and the person you turn out to be, and it works that subject out in staterooms, lifeboats, and one memorable rescue at the rail.
A Ship’s Log That Outlived Its Crossing
Little Miss Grouch belongs to the great age of the ocean liner in American popular fiction, when a six-day crossing could hold an entire plot and the wireless was still a marvel. Adams, a prolific journalist and novelist, wrote it as light entertainment, and it wears its era openly—the casual ethnic shorthand, the steerage passengers as picturesque background, the assumption that a rich girl’s problems are the world’s most interesting. Read today, it is also a small document of how American fiction handled class and courtship in the years just before the First World War, and of the transatlantic traffic in manners that ran both ways.
Its pleasures are durable ones: the log entries that puncture the Tyro’s dignity, the judge’s fairy-tale patter, the farce of the wrong name that sticks for half the voyage. The book ends where such books must, with firm earth underfoot and the “Realm of Realities” waiting—but not before Adams has had his fun with everyone aboard, the hero included.
