Part 25

Away back in ’80 or ’81 when the grand eruption of Krakatoa, in the Straits of Sunda, occurred, the news reached San Francisco late in the night--too late for editors to hunt for information about that unknown volcano in cyclopædias and write it up exhaustively and learnedly in time for the first edition. The managing editor said, “Send to Moffett’s home; rout him out and fetch him; he will know all about it; he won’t need the cyclopædia.” Which was true. He came to the office and swiftly wrote it all up without having to refer to books.

I will take a few paragraphs from the article about him in _Collier’s Weekly_:

If you wanted to know any fact about any subject it was quicker to go to him than to books of reference. His good nature made him the martyr of interruptions. In the middle of a sentence, in a hurry hour, he would look up happily, and whether the thing you wanted was railroad statistics or international law, he would bring it out of one of the pigeonholes in his brain. A born dispenser of the light, he made the giving of information a privilege and a pleasure on all occasions.

This cyclopædic faculty was marvelous because it was only a small part of his equipment which became invaluable in association with other gifts. A student and a humanist, he delighted equally in books and in watching all the workings of a political convention.

For any one of the learned professions he had conspicuous ability. He chose that which, in the cloister of the editorial rooms, makes fame for others. Any judge or Cabinet Minister of our time may well be proud of a career of such usefulness as his. Men with such a quality of mind as Moffett’s are rare.

Anyone who discussed with him the things he advocated stood a little awed to discover that here was a man who had carefully thought out what would be best for all the people in the world two or three generations hence, and guided his work according to that standard. This was the one broad subject that covered all his interests; in detail they included the movement for universal peace about which he wrote repeatedly; so small a thing as a plan to place flowers on the window sills and fire escapes of New York tenement houses enlisted not only the advocacy of his pen, but his direct personal presence and co-operation; again and again, in his department in this paper, he gave indorsement and aid to similar movements, whether broad or narrow in their scope--the saving of the American forests, fighting tuberculosis, providing free meals for poor school children in New York, old-age pensions, safety appliances for protecting factory employees, the beautifying of American cities, the creation of inland waterways, industrial peace.

He leaves behind him wife, daughter, and son--inconsolable mourners. The son is thirteen, a beautiful human creature, with the broad and square face of his father and his grandfather, a face in which one reads high character and intelligence. This boy will be distinguished, by and by, I think.

In closing this slight sketch of Samuel E. Moffett I wish to dwell with lingering and especial emphasis upon the dignity of his character and ideals. In an age when we would rather have money than health, and would rather have another man’s money than our own, he lived and died unsordid; in a day when the surest road to national greatness and admiration is by showy and rotten demagoguery in politics and by giant crimes in finance, he lived and died a gentleman.

THE NEW PLANET

(The astronomers at Harvard have observed “perturbations in the orbital movement of Neptune,” such as might be caused by the presence of a new planet in the vicinity.)

I believe in the new planet. I was eleven years old in 1846, when Leverrier and Adams and Mary Somerville discovered Neptune through the disturbance and discomfort it was causing Uranus. “Perturbations,” they call that kind of disturbance. I had been having those perturbations myself, for more than two months; in fact, all through watermelon time, for they used to keep dogs in some of the patches in those days. You notice that these recent perturbations are considered remarkable because they perturbate through three seconds of arc, but really that is nothing: often I used to perturbate through as much as half an hour if it was a dog that was attending to the perturbating. There isn’t any Neptune that can outperturbate a dog; and I know, because I am not speaking from hearsay. Why, if there was a planet two hundred and fifty thousand “light-years” the other side of Neptune’s orbit, Professor Pickering would discover it in a minute if it could perturbate equal to a dog. Give me a dog every time, when it comes to perturbating. You let a dog jump out at you all of a sudden in the dark of the moon, and you will see what a small thing three seconds of arc is: the shudder that goes through you then would open the seams of Noah’s Ark itself, from figurehead to rudder post, and you would drop that melon the same as if you had never had any but just a casual interest in it. I know about these things, because this is not tradition I am writing, but history.

Now then, notice this. About the end of August, 1846, a change came over me and I resolved to lead a better life, so I reformed; but it was just as well, anyway, because they had got to having guns and dogs both. Although I was reformed, the perturbations did not stop! Does that strike you? They did not stop, they went right on and on and on, for three weeks, clear up to the 23d of September; then Neptune was discovered and the whole mystery stood explained. It shows that I am so sensitively constructed that I perturbate when any other planet is disturbed. This has been going on all my life. It only happens in the watermelon season, but that has nothing to do with it, and has no significance: geologists and anthropologists and horticulturists all tell me it is only ancestral and hereditary, and that is what I think myself. Now then, I got to perturbating again, this summer--all summer through; all through watermelon time: and _where_, do you think? Up here on my farm in Connecticut. Is that significant? Unquestionably it is, for you couldn’t raise a watermelon on this farm with a derrick.

That perturbating was caused by the new planet. That Washington Observatory may throw as much doubt as it wants to, it cannot affect me, because I know there _is_ a new planet. I know it because I don’t perturbate for nothing. There has got to be a dog or a planet, one or the other; and there isn’t any dog around here, so there’s _got_ to be a planet. I hope it is going to be named after me; I should just love it if I can’t have a constellation.

MARJORIE FLEMING, THE WONDER CHILD

Marjorie has been in her tiny grave a hundred years; and still the tears fall for her, and will fall. What an intensely human little creature she was! How vividly she lived her small life; how impulsive she was; how sudden, how tempestuous, how tender, how loving, how sweet, how loyal, how rebellious, how repentant, how wise, how unwise, how bursting with fun, how frank, how free, how honest, how innocently bad, how natively good, how charged with quaint philosophies, how winning, how precious, how adorable--and how perennially and indestructibly interesting! And all this exhibited, proved, and recorded before she reached the end of her ninth year and “fell on sleep.”

Geographically considered, the lassie was a Scot; but in fact she had no frontiers, she was the world’s child, she was the human race in little. It is one of the prides of my life that the first time I ever heard her name it came from the lips of Dr. John Brown--his very own self--Dr. John Brown of Edinburgh--Dr. John Brown of _Rab and His Friends_--Dr. John Brown of the beautiful face and the sweet spirit, whose friends loved him with a love that was worship--Dr. John Brown, who was Marjorie’s biographer, and who had clasped an aged hand that had caressed Marjorie’s fifty years before, thus linking me with that precious child by an unbroken chain of handshakes, for I had shaken hands with Dr. John. This was in Edinburgh thirty-six years ago. He gave my wife his little biography of Marjorie, and I have it yet.

Is Marjorie known in America? No--at least to only a few. When Mr. L. MacBean’s new and enlarged and charming biography[17] of her was published five years ago it was sent over here in sheets, the market not being large enough to justify recomposing and reprinting it on our side of the water. I find that there are even cultivated Scotchmen among us who have not heard of Marjorie Fleming.

She was born in Kirkcaldy in 1803, and she died when she was eight years and eleven months old. By the time she was five years old she was become a devourer of various kinds of literature--both heavy and light--and was also become a quaint and free-spoken and charming little thinker and philosopher whose views were a delightful jumble of first-hand cloth of gold and second-hand rags.

When she was six she opened up that rich mine, her journals, and continued to work it by spells during the remainder of her brief life. She was a pet of Walter Scott, from the cradle, and when he could have her society for a few hours he was content, and required no other. Her little head was full of noble passages from Shakespeare and other favorites of hers, and the fact that she could deliver them with moving effect is proof that her elocution was a born gift with her, and not a mechanical reproduction of somebody else’s art, for a child’s parrot-work does not move. When she was a little creature of seven years, Sir Walter Scott “would read ballads to her in his own glorious way, the two getting wild with excitement over them; and he would take her on his knee and make her repeat Constance’s speeches in _King John_ till he swayed to and fro, sobbing his fill.” [Dr. John Brown.]

“_Sobbing his fill_”--that great man--over that little thing’s inspired interpretations. It is a striking picture; there is no mate to it. Sir Walter said of her:

“She’s the most extraordinary creature I ever met with, and her repeating of Shakespeare overpowers me as nothing else does.”

She spent the whole of her little life in a Presbyterian heaven; yet she was not affected by it; she could not have been happier if she had been in the other heaven.

She was made out of thunderstorms and sunshine, and not even her little perfunctory pieties and shop-made holiness could squelch her spirits or put out her fires for long. Under pressure of a pestering sense of duty she heaves a shovelful of trade godliness into her journals every little while, but it does not offend, for none of it is her own; it is all borrowed, it is a convention, a custom of her environment, it is the most innocent of hypocrisies, and this tainted butter of hers soon gets to be as delicious to the reader as are the stunning and worldly sincerities she splatters around it every time her pen takes a fresh breath. The adorable child! she hasn’t a discoverable blemish in her make-up anywhere.

Marjorie’s first letter was written before she was six years old; it was to her cousin, Isa Keith, a young lady of whom she was passionately fond. It was done in a sprawling hand, ten words to the page--and in those foolscap days a page was a spacious thing:

“MY DEAR ISA--

“I now sit down on my botom to answer all the kind & beloved letters which you was so so good as to write to me. This is the first time I ever wrote a letter in my life.

“Miss Potune, a lady of my acquaintance, praises me dreadfully. I repeated something out of Deen Swift & she said I was fit for the stage, & you may think I was primmed up with majestick Pride, but upon my word I felt myself turn a little birsay--birsay is a word which is a word that William composed which is as you may suppose a little enraged. This horid fat Simpliton says that my Aunt is beautifull which is intirely impossible for that is not her nature.”

Frank? Yes, Marjorie was that. And during the brief moment that she enchanted this dull earth with her presence she was the bewitchingest speller and punctuator in all Christendom.

The average child of six “prints” its correspondence in rickety and reeling Roman capitals, or dictates to mamma, who puts the little chap’s message on paper. The sentences are labored, repetitious, and slow; there are but three or four of them; they deal in information solely, they contain no ideas, they venture no judgments, no opinions; they inform papa that the cat has had kittens again; that Mary has a new doll that can wink; that Tommy has lost his top; and will papa come soon and bring the writer something nice? But with Marjorie it is different.

She needs no amanuensis, she puts her message on paper herself; and not in weak and tottering Roman capitals, but in a thundering hand that can be heard a mile and be read across the square without glasses. And she doesn’t have to study, and puzzle, and search her head for something to say; no, she had only to connect the pen with the paper and turn on the current; the words spring forth at once, and go chasing after each other like leaves dancing down a stream. For she has a faculty, has Marjorie! Indeed yes; when she sits down on her bottom to do a letter, there isn’t going to be any lack of materials, nor of fluency, and neither is her letter going to be wanting in pepper, or vinegar, or vitriol, or any of the other condiments employed by genius to save a literary work of art from flatness and vapidity. And as for judgments and opinions, they are as commodiously in her line as they are in the Lord Chief Justice’s. They have weight, too, and are convincing: for instance, for thirty-six years they have damaged that “horid Simpliton” in my eyes; and, more than that, they have even imposed upon me--and most unfairly and unwarrantably--an aversion to the horid fat Simpliton’s name; a perfectly innocent name, and yet, because of the prejudice against it with which this child has poisoned my mind for a generation I cannot see “Potune” on paper and keep my gorge from rising.

In her journals Marjorie changes her subject whenever she wants to--and that is pretty often. When the deep moralities pay her a passing visit she registers them. Meantime if a cherished love passage drifts across her memory she shoves it into the midst of the moralities--it is nothing to her that it may not feel at home there:

“We should not be happy at the death of our fellow creatures, for they love life like us love your neighbor & he will love you Bountifulness and Mercifulness are always rewarded. In my travels I met with a handsome lad named Charles Balfour Esge [Esqr.] and from him I got offers of marage--ofers of marage did I say? nay plainly [he] loved me. Goodness does not belong to the wicked but badness dishonor befals wickedness but not virtue, no disgrace befals virtue perciverence overcomes almost al difficulties no I am rong in saying almost I should say always as it is so perciverence is a virtue my Csosin says pacience is a cristain virtue, which is true.”

She is not copying these profundities out of a book, she is getting them out of her memory; her spelling shows that the book is not before her. The easy and effortless flow of her talk is a marvelous thing in a baby of her age. Her interests are as wide and varied as a grown person’s: she discusses all sorts of books, and fearlessly delivers judgment upon them; she examines whomsoever crosses the field of her vision, and again delivers a verdict; she dips into religion and history, and even into politics; she takes a shy at the news of the day, and comments upon it; and now and then she drops into poetry--into rhyme, at any rate.

Marjorie would not intentionally mislead anyone, but she has just been making a remark which moves me to hoist a danger-signal for the protection of the modern reader. It is this one: “_In my travels._” Naturally we are apt to clothe a word with its present-day meaning--the meaning we are used to, the meaning we are familiar with; and so--well, you get the idea: some words that are giants to-day were very small dwarfs a century ago, and if we are not careful to take that vast enlargement into account when we run across them in the literatures of the past, they are apt to convey to us a distinctly wrong impression. To-day, when a person says “_in my travels_” he means that he has been around the globe nineteen or twenty times, and we so understand him; and so, when Marjorie says it, it startles us for a moment, for it gives us the impression that _she_ has been around it fourteen or fifteen times; whereas, such is not at all the case. She has traveled prodigiously for _her_ day, but not for ours. She had “traveled,” altogether, three miles by land and eight by water--per ferryboat. She is fairly and justly proud of it, for it is the exact equivalent, in grandeur and impressiveness, in the case of a child of our day, to two trips across the Atlantic and a thousand miles by rail.

“In the love novels all the heroins are very desperate Isabella will not allow me to speak about lovers and heroins, and tiss too refined for my taste a loadstone is a curous thing indeed it is true Heroic love doth never win disgrace this is my maxum and I will follow it forever Miss Eguards [Edgeworth] tails are very good particularly some that are very much adopted for youth as Lazy Lawrence Tarelton False Key &c &c Persons of the parlement house are as I think caled Advocakes Mr Cay & Mr Crakey has that honour. This has been a very mild winter. Mr Banestors Budget is to-night I hope it will be a good one. A great many authors have expressed themselfs too sentimentaly.... The Mercandile Afares are in a perilous situation sickness & a delicante frame I have not & I do not know what it is, but Ah me perhaps I shall have it.[18] Grandure reigns in Edinburgh.... Tomson is a beautifull author and Pope but nothing is like Shakepear of which I have a little knolegde of. An unfortunate death James the 5 had for he died of greif Macbeth is a pretty composition but awful one Macbeth is so bad & wicked, but Lady Macbeth is so hardened in guilt she does not mind her sins & faults No.

“... A sailor called here to say farewell, it must be dreadful to leave his native country where he might get a wife or perhaps me, for I love him very much & with all my heart, but O I forgot Isabella forbid me to speak about love.... I wish everybody would follow her example & be as good as pious & virtious as she is & they would get husbands soon enough, love is a parithatick [pathetic] thing as well as troublesome & tiresome but O Isabella forbid me to speak about it.”

But the little rascal can’t _keep_ from speaking about it, because it is her supreme interest in life; her heart is not capacious enough to hold all the product that is engendered by the ever-recurring inflaming spectacle of man-creatures going by, and the surplus is obliged to spill over; Isa’s prohibitions are no sufficient dam for such a discharge.

“Love I think is the fasion for everybody is marring [marrying].... Yesterday a marrade man named Mr John Balfour Esg [Esq.] offered to kiss me, & offered to marry me though the man was espused [espoused], & his wife was present & said he must ask her permission but he did not, I think he was ashamed or confounded before 3 gentleman Mr Jobson and two Mr Kings.”

I must make room here for another of Marjorie’s second-hand high-morality outbreaks. They give me a sinful delight which I ought to grieve at, I suppose, but I can’t seem to manage it:

“James Macary is to be transported for murder in the flower of his youth O passion is a terible thing for it leads people from sin to sin at last it gets so far as to come to greater crimes than we thought we could comit and it must be dreadful to leave his native country and his friends and to be so disgraced and affronted.”

That is Marjorie talking shop, dear little diplomat--to please and comfort mamma and Isa, no doubt.

This wee little child has a marvelous range of interests. She reads philosophies, novels, baby books, histories, the mighty poets--reads them with burning interest, and frankly and freely criticizes them all; she revels in storms, sunsets, cloud effects, scenery of mountain, plain, ocean, and forest, and all the other wonders of nature, and sets down her joy in them all; she loves people, she detests people, according to mood and circumstances, and delivers her opinion of them, sometimes seasoned with attar of roses, sometimes with vitriol; in games, and all kinds of childish play she is an enthusiast; she adores animals, adores them all; none is too forlorn to fail of favor in her friendly eyes, no creature so humble that she cannot find something in it on which to lavish her caressing worship.

“I am going to-morrow to a delightfull place, Braehead by name, belonging to Mrs. Crraford [Crauford], where there is ducks cocks hens bobblyjocks 2 dogs 2 cats and swine which is delightful. I think it is shocking to think that the dog and cat should bear them and they are drowned after all.”

She is a dear child, a bewitching little scamp; and never dearer, I think, than when the devil has had her in possession and she is breaking her stormy little heart over the remembrance of it:

“I confess I have been very more like a little young divil than a creature for when Isabella went up stairs to teach me religion and my multiplication and to be good and all my other lessons I stamped with my foot and threw my new hat which she had made on the ground and was sulky and was dreadfully passionate, but she never whiped me but said Marjory go into another room and think what a great crime you are committing letting your temper git the better of you. But I went so sulkily that the devil got the better of me but she never never never whips me so that I think I would be the better of it & the next time that I behave ill I think she should do it for she never does it.... Isabella has given me praise for checking my temper for I was sulky even when she was kneeling an whole hour teaching me to write.”

The wise Isabella, the sweet and patient Isabella! It is just a hundred years now (May, 1909) since the grateful child made that golden picture of you and laid your good heart bare for distant generations to see and bless; a hundred years--but if the picture endures a thousand it will still bring you the blessing, and with it the reverent homage that is your due. You had the seeing eye and the wise head. A fool would have punished Marjorie and wrecked her, but you held your hand, as knowing that when her volcanic fires went down she would repent, and grieve, and punish herself, and be saved.

Sometimes when Marjorie was miraculously good, she got a penny for it, and once when she got an entire sixpence, she recognized that it was wealth. This wealth brought joy to her heart. Why? Because she could spend it on somebody else! We who know Marjorie would know that without being told it. I am sorry--often sorry, often grieved--that I was not there and looking over her shoulder when she was writing down her valued penny rewards: I would have said, “Save that scrap of manuscript, dear; make a will, and leave it to your posterity, to save them from want when penury shall threaten them; a day will come when it will be worth a thousand guineas, and a later day will come when it will be worth five thousand; here you are, rejoicing in copper farthings, and don’t know that your magic pen is showering gold coin all over the paper.” But I was not there to say it; those who were there did not think to say it; and so there is not a line of that quaint precious cacography in existence to-day.