Marjorie Fleming's Book - The Story Of Pet Marjorie

MARJORIE FLEMINGS BOOK THE STORY OF PET MARJORIE TOGETHER WITH HER JOURNALS AND HER LETTERS B7L. MAcBEAN TO WHICH IS ADDED MARJORIE FLEMING A STORY OF CHILD-LIFE FIFTY YEARS AGO BY JOHN BROWN, MJD. INTRODUCTION BY CLIFFORD SMYTH ILLUSTRATED OF, s, -i- Tf rtf W s ftf-, . fcrv, p. M t BONI AND LIVERIGHT PUBLISHERS .. .. NEW iYORK MARJORIE FLEMINGS BOOK Copyright, 1920, by BONI LlVERIGHT, INC. Printed in the United States of America Marjorie and Sir Walter Scott. From the title-page of Farnies Pet Marjorie. CONTENTS PAGE Introduction by Clifford Smyth . ix Marjorie Flemings Book by L. MacBean . . I Marjorie Fleming by John Brown, M. D., . J . 173 ILLUSTRATIONS Marjorie and Sir Walter Scott . . . Frontispiece PAGE Map Showing Location of Raith 3 Marjorie s Birthplace 7 One of Marjories Books 19 Specimen Page of Manuscript 25 Genealogies of the Families of Marjorie Fleming and Sir Walter Scott 240 INTRODUCTION YOU will surely love her you cant help it. If you are a woman, all the yearn ings of motherhood will draw you to her irresistibly. If you are a man, her innocent coquetries, her feminine graces will have you captive in less than half an hour, just as happened to her famous lover a century ago. For romance is as potent to-day as it was then and it was the innate romance of Marjories personality that appealed to Sir Walter, just as it is bound to appeal to those men and women of the twentieth century who are fortunate enough to read her book. This personality of hers is, indeed, the real secret of Marjorie Flemings assured place in our hearts. Had she been merely a precocious child who wrote verses that scanned and rhymed, that were distin guished by some flavor of originality, couchedin words unfamiliar to normal childhood, her memory would not have xi xii INTRODUCTION gone beyond the pages of some dry-as-dust chronicle of literary curiosities. Precocity is interesting to the parents of the unfortu nate child who is afflicted with it to the stranger, the casual visitor, or even the re mote relation, decorously attuned to the right degree of wonder and admiration, it is usually a weariness from which all of us pray to be spared. But neither learning above her years nor an amazing esthetic taste are qualities to which Pet Mar jorie owes her fame. In what she wrote there Is nothing quite so finished, so mature in thought, so delicately imaginative, as one finds, for instance, in much of little Hilda Conklings verse. Nor, for sustained humor and narrative excellence, can Marjories Diary bear comparison with Daisy Ash fords justly famous romance. Neverthe less, gifted as are these two child-writers of our own day, we dont fall unreservedly in love with them as we do with Scotts Mar jorie. It is her waywardness, her delicious medley of contradictions, her sudden pas sions, her solemn assurance that she has INTRODUCTION xiii been very more like a little young devil than a creature, her ardent friendships, her lapses into unexpected moods of moralizing, that tinge everything she writes with her own colorful personality, and make one long to snatch her up and hug her as one does with any normal child whose attractiveness is wholly unconscious and who appears no older than she really is. Marjorie, indeed, did excite that kind of impulsive affection in her admirers, a fact that she notes with characteristic piquancy Yesterday a mar rade man named Mr John Balfour Esg offered tokiss me, and offered to marry me though the man was espused, and his wife was present and said he must ask her permis sion but he did not, I think he was ashamed or confounded before 3 gentlemen Mr Job son and two Mr Kings. We are not told whether the intrepid Mr John Balfour Esg. succeeded in his nefarious purpose, for Marjorie, without the warning signal even of a punctuation mark, makes one of those flying leaps into a totally different subject that keeps her readers in a constant state of