(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.
I have adored Marjorie for six-and-thirty years; I have adored her
in detail, I have adored the whole of her; but above all other
details--just a little above all other details--I have adored her
because she detested that odious and confusing and unvanquishable
and unlearnable and shameless invention, the multiplication table:
“I am now going to tell you the horible and wretched plaege [plague]
that my multiplication gives me you can’t conceive it the most
Devilish thing is 8 times 8 & 7 times 7 it is what nature itself
cant endure.”