Little Journeys to the Homes of Famous Women — Mary Lamb, Part 1

MARY LAMB

Her education in youth was not much attended to, and she happily missed all the train of female garniture which passeth by the name of accomplishments.

She was tumbled early, by accident or providence, into a spacious closet of good old English reading, without much selection or prohibition, and browsed at will upon that fair and wholesome pasturage.

Had I twenty girls they should be brought up exactly in this fashion.

I know not whether their chance in wedlock might not be diminished by it, but I can answer for it that it maketh (if worse comes to worst) most incomparable old maids.

--_Essays of Elia_ [Illustration: MARY LAMB] I sing the love of brother and sister.

For he who tells the tale of Charles and Mary Lamb's life must tell of a love that was an uplift to this brother and sister in childhood, that sustained them in the desolation of disaster, and was a saving solace even when every hope seemed gone and reason veiled her face.

This love caused the flowers of springtime to bloom for them again and again, and attracted such a circle of admirers that, as we read the records of their lives, set forth in the letters they received and wrote, we forget poverty, forget calamity, and behold only the radiant, smiling faces of loving, trusting, trustful friends.

The mother of Charles and Mary Lamb was a woman of fine natural endowment, of spirit and of aspiration.

She married a man much older than herself.

We know but little about John Lamb; we know nothing of his ancestry.

Neither do we care to.

He was not good enough to attract, nor bad enough to be interesting.

He called himself a scrivener, but in fact he was a valet.

He was neutral salts; and I say this just after having read his son's amiable mention of him under the guise of "Lovel," and with the full knowledge also that "he danced well, was a good judge of vintage, played the harpsichord, and recited poetry on occasion."

When a woman of spirit stands up before a priest and makes solemn promise to live with a man who plays the harpsichord and is a good judge of vintage, and to love until either he or she dies, she sows the seeds of death and disorder.

Of course, I know that men and women who make promises before priests know not at the time what they do; they find out afterwards.

And so they were married, were John Lamb and Elizabeth Field; and probably very soon thereafter Elizabeth had a premonition that this union only held in store a glittering blade of steel for her heart.

For she grew ill and dispirited, and John found companionship at the alehouse, and came stumbling home asking what the devil was the reason his wife couldn't meet him with a smile and a kiss and a' that, as a dutiful wife should!

Elizabeth began to live more and more within herself.

We often hear foolish men taunt women with inability to keep secrets.

But women who talk much often do keep secrets--there are nooks in their hearts where the sun never enters, and where those nearest them are never allowed to look.

More lives are blasted by secrecy than by frankness--ay!

a thousand times.

Why should such a thing as a secret ever exist?

'Tis preposterous, and is proof positive of depravity.

If you and I are to live together, my life must be open as the ether and all my thoughts be yours.

If I keep back this and that, you will find it out some day and suspect, with reason, that I also keep back the other.

Ananias and Sapphira met death, not so much for simple untruthfulness as for keeping something back.

Elizabeth Lamb sought to protect herself against an unappreciative mate by secrecy (perhaps she had to), and the habit grew until she kept secrets as a business--she kept foolish little secrets.

Did she get a letter from her aunt, she read it in suggestive silence and then put it in her pocket.

If visitors called she never mentioned it, and when the children heard of it weeks afterward they marveled.

And so shy little Mary Lamb wondered what it was her mother kept locked up in the bottom drawer of the bureau, and Mary was told that children must not ask questions--little girls should be seen and not heard.

At night, Mary would dream of the things that were in that drawer, and sometimes great, big, black things would creep out through the keyhole and grow bigger and bigger until they filled the room so full that you couldn't breathe, and then little Mary would cry aloud and scream, and her father would come with a strap that was kept on a nail behind the kitchen-door and teach her better than to wake everybody up in the middle of the night.

Yet Mary loved her mother, and sought in many ways to meet her wishes, and all the time her mother kept the bureau-drawer locked, and away somewhere on a high shelf was hidden all tenderness--all the gentle, loving words and the caresses which children crave.

And little Mary's life seemed full of troubles, and the world a grievous place where everybody misunderstands everybody else; and at nighttime she would often hide her face in the pillow and cry herself to sleep.

But when she was ten years of age a great joy came into her life--a baby brother came!

And all the love in the little girl's heart was poured out for the puny baby boy.

Babies are troublesome things, anyway, where folks are awful poor and where there are no servants and the mother is not so very strong.

And so Mary became the baby's own little foster-mother, and she carried him about, and long before he could lisp a word she had told him all the hopes and secrets of her heart, and he cooed and laughed, and lying on the floor, kicked his heels in the air and treated hope and love and ambition alike.

I can not find that Mary ever went to school.

She stayed at home and sewed, did housework, and took care of the baby.

All her learning came by absorption.

When the boy was three years old she taught him his letters, and did it so deftly and well that he used to declare he could always read--and this is as it should be.

When seven years of age the boy was sent to the Blue-Coat School.

This was brought about through the influence of Mr. Salt, for whom John Lamb worked.

Mr. Salt was a Bencher, and be it known a Bencher in England is not exactly the same thing as a Bencher in America.

Mr. Salt took quite a notion to little Mary Lamb, and once when she came to his office with her father's dinner, the honorable Bencher chucked her under the chin, said she was a fine little girl, and asked her if she liked to read.

And when she answered, "Oh, yes, sir!"

and then added, "If you please!"

the Bencher laughed, and told her she was welcome to take any book in his library.

And so we find she spent many happy hours in the great man's library; and it was through her importunities that Mr. Salt got banty Charles the scholarship in Christ's Hospital School.

Now the Blue-Coat boys are a curiosity to every sight-seer in London--and have been for these hundred years and more.

Their long-tailed blue coats, buckle-shoes, and absence of either hats or caps bring the Yankee up with a halt.

To conduct an American around to the vicinity of Christ's Hospital and let him discover a "Blue-Coat" for himself is a sensation.

The costume is exactly the same as that worn by Edward, "the Boy King," who founded the school; and these youngsters, like the birds, never grow old.

You lean against the high iron fence, and looking through the bars watch the boys frolic and play, just as visitors looked in the Eighteenth Century; and I've never been by Christ's Hospital yet when curious people did not stand and stare.

And one thing the Blue-Coats seem to prove, and that is that hats are quite superfluous.

One worthy man from Jamestown, New York, was so impressed by these hatless boys that he wrote a book proving that the wearing of hats was what has kept the race in bondage to ignorance all down the ages.

By statistics he proved that the Blue-Coats had attained distinction quite out of ratio to their number, and cited Coleridge, Leigh Hunt, Charles Lamb and many others as proof.

This man returned to Jamestown hatless, and had he not caught cold and been carried off by pneumonia, would have spread his hatless gospel, rendering the name of Knox the Hatter infamous, and causing the word "Derby" to be henceforth a byword and a hissing.

When little Charles Lamb tucked the tails of his long blue coat under his belt and played leap-frog in the school-yard every morning at ten minutes after 'leven, his sister, wan, yellow and dreamy, used to come and watch him through these selfsame iron bars.

She would wave the corner of her rusty shawl in loving token, and he would answer back and would have lifted his hat if he had had one.

When the bell rang and the boys went pellmell into the entry-way, Charles would linger and hold one hand above his head as the stone wall swallowed him, and the sister knowing that all was well would hasten back to her work in Little Queen Street, hard by, to wait for the morrow when she could come again.

"Who is that girl always hanging 'round after you?"

asked a tall, handsome boy, called Ajax, of little Charles Lamb.

"Wh' why, don't you know--that, wh' why that's my sister Mary!"

"How should I know when you have never introduced me!"

loftily replied Ajax.

And so the next day, at ten minutes after 'leven, Charles and the mighty Ajax came down to the fence, and Charles had to call to Mary not to run away, and Charles introduced Ajax to Mary and they shook hands through the fence.

And the next week Ajax, who was known in private life as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, called at the house in Little Queen Street where the Lambs lived, and they all had gin and water, and the elder Lamb played the harpsichord, a secondhand one that had been presented by Mr. Salt, and recited poetry, and Coleridge talked the elder Lamb under the table and argued the entire party into silence.

Coleridge was only seventeen then, but a man grown, and already took snuff like a courtier, tapping the lid of the box meditatively and flashing a conundrum the while on the admiring company.

Mary kept about as close run of the Blue-Coat School as if she had been a Blue-Coat herself.

Still, she felt it her duty to keep one lesson in advance of her brother, just to know that he was progressing well.

He continued to go to school until he was fourteen, when he was set to work in the South Sea Company's office, because his income was needed to keep the family.

Mary was educating the boy with the help of Mr. Salt's library, for a boy as fine as Charles must be educated, you know.

By and by the bubble burst, and young Lamb was transferred to the East India Company's office, and being promoted was making nearly a hundred pounds a year.

And Mary sewed and borrowed books and toiled incessantly, but was ill at times.

People said her head was not just right--she was overworked and nervous or something!

The father had lost his place on account of too much gin and water, especially gin; the mother was almost helpless from paralysis, and in the family was an aged maiden aunt to be cared for.

The only regular income was the salary of Charles.

There they lived in their poverty and lowliness, hoping for better things!

Charles was working away over the ledgers, and used to come home fagged and weary, and Coleridge was far away, and there was no boy to educate now, and only sick and foolish and quibbling people on whom to strike fire.

The demnition grind did its work for Mary Lamb as surely as it is today doing it for countless farmers' wives in Iowa and Illinois.

Thus ran the years away.

Mary Lamb, aged thirty-two, gentle, intelligent and wondrous kind, in sudden frenzy seized a knife from the table and with one thrust sank the blade into her mother's heart.

Charles Lamb, in an adjoining room, hearing the commotion, entered quickly and taking the knife from his sister's hand, put his arm about her and tenderly led her away.

Returning in a few moments, the mother was dead.

Women often make a shrill outcry at sight of a mouse; men curse roundly when large, buzzing, blue-bottle flies disturb their after-dinner nap; but let occasion come and the stuff of which heroes are made is in us all.

I

think well of my kind.

Charles Lamb made no outcry, he shed no tears, he spoke no word of reproach.

He met each detail of that terrible issue as coolly, calmly and surely as if he had been making entries in his journal.

No man ever loved his mother more, but she was dead now--she was dead.

He closed the staring eyes, composed the stiffening limbs, kept curious sightseers at bay, and all the time thought of what he could do to protect the living--she who had wrought this ruin.

Charles was twenty-one--a boy in feeling and temperament, a frolicsome, heedless boy.

In an hour he had become a man.

It requires a subtler pen than mine to trace the psychology of this tragedy; but let me say this much, it had its birth in love, in unrequited love; and the outcome of it was an increase in love.

O God!

how wonderful are Thy works!

Thou makest the rotting log to nourish banks of violets, and from the stagnant pool at Thy word springs forth the lotus that covers all with fragrance and beauty!