I have just been reading James Whitcomb Riley's response to "the old
man" at the annual dinner of the Indianapolis Literary club, and his
reference to Methuselah has awakened in my mind many recollections and
reminiscences of that grand old man. We first met Methuselah in the
capacity of a son. At the age of 65, Enoch arose one night and
telephoned his family physician to come over and assist him in meeting
Methuselah. Day at last dawned upon Enoch's happy home, and its first
red rays lit up the still redder surface of the little stranger. For
three hundred years Enoch and Methuselah jogged along together in the
capacity of father and son. Then Enoch was suddenly cut down. It was at
this time that little Methuselah first realized what it was to be an
orphan. He could not at first realize that his father was dead. He could
not understand why Enoch, with no inherited disease, should be shuffled
out at the age of 365 years. But the doctor said to Methuselah: "My son,
you are indeed fatherless. I have done all I could, but it is useless. I
had told Enoch many a time that if he went in swimming before the ice
was out of the creek it would finally down him, but he thought he knew
better than I did. He was a headstrong man, Enoch was. He sneered at me
and alluded to me as a fresh young gosling, because he was 300 years
older than I was. He has received the reward of the willful, and verily
the doom of the smart Aleck is his."
Methuselah now cast about him for some occupation which would take up
his attention and assuage his wild, passionate grief over the loss of
his father. He entered into the walks of men and learned their ways. It
was at this time that he learned the pernicious habit of using tobacco.
We can not wonder at it when we remember that he was now fatherless. He
was at the mercy of the coarse, rough world. Possibly he learned to use
tobacco when he went away to attend business college after the death of
his father. Be that as it may, the noxious weed certainly hastened his
death, for 600 years after this we find him a corpse!
Death is ever a surprise, even at the end of a long illness and after a
ripe old age. To those who are near it seems abrupt; so to his
grand-children some of whom survived him, his children having died of
old age, the death of Methuselah came like a thunderbolt from a clear
sky.
Methuselah succeeded in cording up more of a record such as it was, than
any other man of whom history informs us. Time, the tomb-builder and
amateur mower, came and leaned over the front fence and looked at
Methuselah, and ran his thumb over the jagged edge of his scythe, and
went away whistling a low refrain. He kept up this refrain business for
nearly ten centuries, while Methuselah continued to stand out amid the
general wreck of men and nations.
Even as the young, strong mower going forth with his mower to mow
spareth the tall and dignified drab hornet's nests and passeth by on the
other side, so time, with his Waterbury hour-glass and his overworked
hay-knife over his shoulder, and his long Mormon whiskers and his high,
sleek dome of thought, with its gray lambrequin of hair around the base
of it, mowed all around Methuselah and then passed on.
Methuselah decorated the graves of those who perished in a dozen
different wars. He did not enlist himself, for over nine hundred years
of his life he was exempt. He would go to the enlisting place and offer
his services, and the officer would tell him to go home and encourage
his grand-children to go. Then Methuselah would sit around Noah's steps,
and smoke and criticise the conduct of the war, also the conduct of the
enemy.
It is said of Methuselah that he never was the same man after his son
Lamech died. He was greatly attached to Lamech, and when he woke up one
night to find his son purple in the face with membraneous croup he could
hardly realize that he might lose him. The idea of losing a boy who had
just rounded the glorious morn of his 777th year had never occurred to
him. But death loves a shining mark, and he garnered little Lammie and
left Methuselah to moan and mourn on for a couple more centuries without
him.
Methuselah finally got so that he couldn't sleep after 4 o'clock in the
morning, and he didn't see how anyone else could. The older he got and
the less valuable his time became the earlier he would rise, so that he
could get an early start. As the centuries filed slowly by Methuselah
got where all he had to do was to shuffle into his loose-fitting
clothes, and rest his gums on the top of a large sleek-headed cane, and
mutter up the chimney, and then groan and extricate himself from his
clothes again and retire. He arose earlier and earlier in the morning,
and muttered more and more about the young folks sleeping away the best
of the day, and said he had no doubt that sleeping and snoring until
breakfast time helped to carry off Lam. But one day old Father Time came
along with a new scythe, and he drew the whetstone across it a few times
and rolled the sleeves of his red flannel undergarment up over his warty
elbows, and Mr. Methuselah passed on to that undiscovered country with a
ripe experience and a long, clean record.
We can almost fancy how the physicians, who had disagreed about his case
all the way through, came and insisted on a post-mortem examination to
prove which was right, and what was really the matter with him. We can
imagine how people went by shaking their heads and regretting that
Methuselah should have tampered with tobacco when he knew it affected
his heart.
But he is gone. He lived to see his own promissory notes rise, flourish,
acquire interest, pine away at last, and finally outlaw. He acquired a
large farm in the very heart of the county-seat, and refused to move or
to plot it and call it Methuselah's addition. He came out in spring
regularly for nine hundred years after he got too old to work out his
poll-tax on the road and put in his time telling the rising generation
how to make a good road. Meantime other old people, who were almost 100
years of age, moved away and went west, where they would attract
attention and command respect. There was actually no pleasure in getting
old around where Methuselah was and being ordered about and scolded and
kept in the background by him.
So when at last he died people sighed and said: "Well, it was better for
him to die before he got childish. It was best that he should die at a
time when he knew it all. We can't help thinking what an acquisition
Methuselah will be on the evergreen shore when he gets there, with all
his ripe experience and habits of early rising."
And the next morning after the funeral Methuselah's family did not get
out of bed till 9 o'clock.
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