Entire PG Edition of The Works of William Dean Howells
by
William Dean Howells
Part 17 out of 78
literature is the reverse of all this. It wishes to know and to tell the
truth, confident that consolation and delight are there; it does not care
to paint the marvellous and impossible for the vulgar many, or to
sentimentalize and falsify the actual for the vulgar few. Men are more
like than unlike one another: let us make them know one another better,
that they may be all humbled and strengthened with a sense of their
fraternity. Neither arts, nor letters, nor sciences, except as they
somehow, clearly or obscurely, tend to make the race better and kinder,
are to be regarded as serious interests; they are all lower than the
rudest crafts that feed and house and clothe, for except they do this
office they are idle; and they cannot do this except from and through the
truth.
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A Thanksgiving-Christmas Story
Anthony Trollope
Authorities
Browbeat wholesome common-sense into the self-distrust
Canon Fairfax,'s opinions of literary criticism
Comfort from the thought that most things cannot be helped
Concerning popularity as a test of merit in a book
Critical vanity and self-righteousness
Critics are in no sense the legislators of literature
Dickens rescued Christmas from Puritan distrust
Effectism
Fact that it is hash many times warmed over reassures them
Forbear the excesses of analysis
Glance of the common eye, is and always was the best light
Greatest classics are sometimes not at all great
Holiday literature
Imitators of one another than of nature
Jane Austen
Languages, while they live, are perpetually changing
Let fiction cease to lie about life
Long-puerilized fancy will bear an endless repetition
Made them talk as seldom man and never woman talked
Michelangelo's "light of the piazza,"
No greatness, no beauty, which does not come from truth
Novels hurt because they are not true
Plain industry and plodding perseverance are despised
Pseudo-realists
Public wish to be amused rather than edified
Teach what they do not know
Tediously analytical
To break new ground
Unless we prefer a luxury of grief
Vulgarity: bad art to lug it in
What makes a better fashion change for a worse
Whatever is established is sacred with those who do not think
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Absence of distinction
Advertising
Aim at nothing higher than the amusement of your readers
Ambitious to be of ugly modern patterns
An artistic atmosphere does not create artists
Anise-seed bag
Any man's country could get on without him
Any sort of work that is slighted becomes drudgery
Artist has seasons, as trees, when he cannot blossom
As soon as she has got a thing she wants, begins to hate it
Begun to fight with want from their cradles
Blasts of frigid wind swept the streets
Book that they are content to know at second hand
Business to take advantage of his necessity
Clemens is said to have said of bicycling
Competition has deformed human nature
Conditions of hucksters imposed upon poets
Could not, as the saying is, find a stone to throw at a dog
Disbeliever in punishments of all sorts
Do not want to know about such squalid lives
Early self-helpfulness of children is very remarkable
Encounter of old friends after the lapse of years
Even a day's rest is more than most people can bear
Eyes fixed steadfastly upon the future
Face that expresses care, even to the point of anxiety
Fate of a book is in the hands of the women
For most people choice is a curse
General worsening of things, familiar after middle life
God of chance leads them into temptation and adversity
Happy in the indifference which ignorance breeds in us
Hard to think up anything new
Heart of youth aching for their stoical sorrows
Heighten our suffering by anticipation
Here and there an impassioned maple confesses the autumn
Historian, who is a kind of inferior realist
Houses are of almost terrifying cleanliness
I do not think any man ought to live by an art
If he has not enjoyed writing no one will enjoy reading
If one were poor, one ought to be deserving
Impropriety if not indecency promises literary success
Ladies make up the pomps which they (the men) forego
Lascivious and immodest as possible
Leading part cats may play in society
Leaven, but not for so large a lump
Literary spirit is the true world-citizen
Literature beautiful only through the intelligence
Literature has no objective value
Literature is Business as well as Art
Look of challenge, of interrogation, almost of reproof
Malevolent agitators
Man is strange to himself as long as he lives
Mark Twain
Meet here to the purpose of a common ostentation
Men read the newspapers, but our women read the books
More zeal than knowledge in it
Most journalists would have been literary men if they could
Neatness that brings despair
Never quite sure of life unless I find literature in it
No man ought to live by any art
No rose blooms right along
Noble uselessness
Not lack of quality but quantity of the quality
Openly depraved by shows of wealth
Our deeply incorporated civilization
Our huckstering civilization
People have never had ideals, but only moods and fashions
People might oftener trust themselves to Providence
People of wealth and fashion always dissemble their joy
Picturesqueness which we should prize if we saw it abroad
Plagiarism carries inevitable detection with it
Public whose taste is so crude that they cannot enjoy the best
Pure accident and by its own contributory negligence
Put aside all anxiety about style
Refused to see us as we see ourselves
Results of art should be free to all
Reviewers
Reward is in the serial and not in the book--19th Century
Rogues in every walk of life
Should be very sorry to do good, as people called it
Should sin a little more on the side of candid severity
So many millionaires and so many tramps
So touching that it brought the lump into my own throat
Solution of the problem how and where to spend the summer
Some of it's good, and most of it isn't
Some of us may be toys and playthings without reproach
Summer folks have no idea how pleasant it is when they are gone
Superiority one likes to feel towards the rich and great
Take our pleasures ungraciously
The old and ugly are fastidious as to the looks of others
Their consciences needed no bossing in the performance
There is small love of pure literature
They are so many and I am so few
Those who decide their fate are always rebelling against it
Those who work too much and those who rest too much
Trouble with success is that it is apt to leave life behind
Two branches of the novelist's trade: Novelist and Historian
Unfailing American kindness
Visitors of the more inquisitive sex
Wald with the lurch and the sway of the deck in it
Warner's Backlog Studies
We cannot all be hard-working donkeys
We who have neither youth nor beauty should always expect it
Whatever choice you make, you are pretty sure to regret it
Work not truly priced in money cannot be truly paid in money
Work would be twice as good if it were done twice
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Absence of distinction
Absolute devotion to the day of her death,
Absolutely, so positively, so almost aggressively truthful
Abstract, the air-drawn, afflicted me like physical discomforts
Act officiously, not officially
Addressed to their tenderness out of his tenderness
Advertising
Aim at nothing higher than the amusement of your readers
Always sumptuously providing out of his destitution
Ambitious to be of ugly modern patterns
Amiable perception, and yet with a sort of remote absence
Amuse him, even when they wronged him
Amusingly realized the situation to their friends
An artistic atmosphere does not create artists
Anglo-American genius for ugliness
Anise-seed bag
Any sort of work that is slighted becomes drudgery
Any man's country could get on without him
Appeal, which he had come to recognize as invasive
Appeared to have no grudge left
Artist has seasons, as trees, when he cannot blossom
As soon as she has got a thing she wants, begins to hate it
Backed their credulity with their credit
Bayard Taylor: incomparable translation of Faust
Became gratefully strange
Begun to fight with want from their cradles
Best talkers are willing that you should talk if you like
Blasts of frigid wind swept the streets
Book that they are content to know at second hand
Business to take advantage of his necessity
But now I remember that he gets twenty dollars a month"
Candle burning on the table for the cigars
Celia Thaxter
Charles F. Browne
Charles Reade
Christianity had done nothing to improve morals and conditions
Church: "Oh yes, I go It 'most kills me, but I go,"
Clemens was sole, incomparable, the Lincoln of our literature
Clemens is said to have said of bicycling
Cold-slaw
Collective opacity
Competition has deformed human nature
Conditions of hucksters imposed upon poets
Confidence I have nearly always felt when wrong
Could easily believe now that it was some one else who saw it
Could make us feel that our faults were other people's
Could not, as the saying is, find a stone to throw at a dog
Could only by chance be caught in earnest about anything
Couldn't fire your revolver without bringing down a two volumer
Dawn upon him through a cloud of other half remembered faces
Death of the joy that ought to come from work
Death's vague conjectures to the broken expectations of life
Despair broke in laughter
Despised the avoidance of repetitions out of fear of tautology
Did not feel the effect I would so willingly have experienced
Dinner was at the old-fashioned Boston hour of two
Disbeliever in punishments of all sorts
Discomfort which mistaken or blundering praise
Do not want to know about such squalid lives
Dollars were of so much farther flight than now
Early self-helpfulness of children is very remarkable
Edmund Quincy
Edward Everett Hale
Either to deny the substance of things unseen, or to affirm it
Emerson
Encounter of old friends after the lapse of years
Enjoying whatever was amusing in the disadvantage to himself
Espoused the theory of Bacon's authorship of Shakespeare
Ethical sense, not the aesthetical sense
Even a day's rest is more than most people can bear
Everlasting rock of human credulity and folly
Expectation of those who will come no more
Express the appreciation of another's fit word
Eyes fixed steadfastly upon the future
Face that expresses care, even to the point of anxiety
Fate of a book is in the hands of the women
Feigned the gratitude which I could see that he expected
Fell either below our pride or rose above our purse
Felt that this was my misfortune more than my fault
Few men last over from one reform to another
First dinner served in courses that I had sat down to
Flowers with which we garland our despair in that pitiless hour
For most people choice is a curse
Forbearance of a wise man content to bide his time
Forebore to speak needlessly to him, or to shake his hand
Found life was not all poetry
Francis Parkman
Gay laugh comes across the abysm of the years
General worsening of things, familiar after middle life
Generous lover of all that was excellent in literature
George William Curtis
Giggle which Charles Lamb found the best thing in life
Give him your best wine
God of chance leads them into temptation and adversity
Got out of it all the fun there was in it
Greeting of great impersonal cordiality
Grieving that there could be such ire in heavenly minds
Happy in the indifference which ignorance breeds in us
Hard of hearing on one side. But it isn't deafness
Hard to think up anything new
Harriet Beecher Stowe and the Autocrat clashed upon homeopathy
Hate of hate, the scorn of scorn, The love of love
He did not care much for fiction
He was not bored because he would not be
He was not constructive; he was essentially observant
He did not paw you with his hands to show his affection
He was a youth to the end of his days
He had no time to make money
Heart of youth aching for their stoical sorrows
Heighten our suffering by anticipation
Heine
Here and there an impassioned maple confesses the autumn
Heroic lies
His plays were too bad for the stage, or else too good for it
His coming almost killed her, but it was worth it
His remembrance absolutely ceased with an event
His enemies suffered from it almost as much as his friends
His readers trusted and loved him
Historian, who is a kind of inferior realist
Hollowness, the hopelessness, the unworthiness of life
Honest men are few when it comes to themselves
Houses are of almost terrifying cleanliness
I do not think any man ought to live by an art
I find this young man worthy
I believe neither in heroes nor in saints
I did not know, and I hated to ask
If he was not there to your touch, it was no fault of his
If he was half as bad, he would have been too bad to be
If he has not enjoyed writing no one will enjoy reading
If one were poor, one ought to be deserving
Impropriety if not indecency promises literary success
In the South there was nothing but a mistaken social ideal
Incredible in their insipidity
Industrial slavery
Insatiable English fancy for the wild America no longer there
Intellectual poseurs
It was mighty pretty, as Pepys would say
It is well to hold one's country to her promises
Jane Austen
Julia Ward Howe
Ladies make up the pomps which they (the men) forego
Lascivious and immodest as possible
Leading part cats may play in society
Leaven, but not for so large a lump
Left him to do what the cat might
Lie, of course, and did to save others from grief or harm
Liked being with you, not for what he got, but for what he gave
Liked to find out good things and great things for himself
Lincoln
Literary dislikes or contempts
Literary spirit is the true world-citizen
Literature has no objective value
Literature is Business as well as Art
Literature beautiful only through the intelligence
Livy Clemens: nthe loveliest person I have ever seen
Long breath was not his; he could not write a novel
Longfellow
Look of challenge, of interrogation, almost of reproof
Looked as if Destiny had sat upon it
Love and gratitude are only semi-articulate at the best
Love of freedom and the hope of justice
Lowell
Made all men trust him when they doubted his opinions
Malevolent agitators
Man who may any moment be out of work is industrially a slave
Man is strange to himself as long as he lives
Man who had so much of the boy in him
Mark Twain
Marriages are what the parties to them alone really know
Meet here to the purpose of a common ostentation
Mellow cordial of a voice that was like no other
Memory will not be ruled
Men who took themselves so seriously as that need
Men read the newspapers, but our women read the books
Men's lives ended where they began, in the keeping of women
Met with kindness, if not honor
Might so far forget myself as to be a novelist
Mind and soul were with those who do the hard work of the world
Mock modesty of print forbids my repeating here
More zeal than knowledge in it
Most desouthernized Southerner I ever knew
Most serious, the most humane, the most conscientious of men
Most journalists would have been literary men if they could
Motley
Napoleonic height which spiritually overtops the Alps
Nearly nothing as chaos could be
Neatness that brings despair
Never saw a dead man whom he did not envy
Never quite sure of life unless I find literature in it
Never paid in anything but hopes of paying
Never saw a man more regardful of negroes
No rose blooms right along
No man ever yet told the truth about himself
No man ought to live by any art
No time to make money
No man more perfectly sensed and more entirely abhorred slavery
Noble uselessness
Not much patience with the unmanly craving for sympathy
Not a man who cared to transcend; he liked bounds
Not quite himself till he had made you aware of his quality
Not lack of quality but quantity of the quality
Not much of a talker, and almost nothing of a story-teller
Not possible for Clemens to write like anybody else
Now death has come to join its vague conjectures
NYC, a city where money counts for more and goes for less
Odious hilarity, without meaning and without remission
Offers mortifyingly mean, and others insultingly vague
Old man's tendency to revert to the past
Old man's disposition to speak of his infirmities
One could be openly poor in Cambridge without open shame
Only one concerned who was quite unconcerned
Openly depraved by shows of wealth
Ought not to call coarse without calling one's self prudish
Our huckstering civilization
Our deeply incorporated civilization
Pathos of revolt from the colorless rigidities
People have never had ideals, but only moods and fashions
People might oftener trust themselves to Providence
People of wealth and fashion always dissemble their joy
Person who wished to talk when he could listen
Picturesqueness which we should prize if we saw it abroad
Plagiarism carries inevitable detection with it
Plain-speaking or Rude Speaking
Pointed the moral in all they did
Polite learning hesitated his praise
Praised it enough to satisfy the author
Praised extravagantly, and in the wrong place
Public whose taste is so crude that they cannot enjoy the best
Pure accident and by its own contributory negligence
Put your finger on the present moment and enjoy it
Put aside all anxiety about style
Quarrel was with error, and not with the persons who were in it
Quebec was a bit of the seventeenth century
Reformers, who are so often tedious and ridiculous
Refused to see us as we see ourselves
Remember the dinner-bell
Reparation due from every white to every black man
Results of art should be free to all
Reviewers
Reward is in the serial and not in the book--19th Century
Rogues in every walk of life
Secret of the man who is universally interesting
Seen through the wrong end of the telescope
Shackles of belief worn so long
Should sin a little more on the side of candid severity
Should be very sorry to do good, as people called it
Shy of his fellow-men, as the scholar seems always to be
So refined, after the gigantic coarseness of California
So many millionaires and so many tramps
So touching that it brought the lump into my own throat
Solution of the problem how and where to spend the summer
Some superstition, usually of a hygienic sort
Some of us may be toys and playthings without reproach
Some of it's good, and most of it isn't
Sometimes they sacrificed the song to the sermon
Sought the things that he could agree with you upon
Spare his years the fatigue of recalling your identity
Standards were their own, and they were satisfied with them
Stoddard
Study in a corner by the porch
Stupidly truthful
Summer folks have no idea how pleasant it is when they are gone
Superiority one likes to feel towards the rich and great
Take our pleasures ungraciously
The ornament of a house is the friends who frequent it
The old and ugly are fastidious as to the looks of others
The world is well lost whenever the world is wrong
Their consciences needed no bossing in the performance
There is small love of pure literature
They are so many and I am so few
Things common to all, however peculiar in each
Thoreau
Those who work too much and those who rest too much
Those who have sorrowed deepest will understand this best
Those who decide their fate are always rebelling against it
Times when a man's city was a man's country
Tired themselves out in trying to catch up with him
Trouble with success is that it is apt to leave life behind
True to an ideal of life rather than to life itself
Truthful
Turn of the talk toward the mystical
Two branches of the novelist's trade: Novelist and Historian
Unfailing American kindness
Used to ingratitude from those he helped
Vacuous vulgarity of its texts
Visited one of the great mills
Visitors of the more inquisitive sex
Wald with the lurch and the sway of the deck in it
Walter-Scotticized, pseudo-chivalry of the Southern ideal
Warner's Backlog Studies
Wasted face, and his gay eyes had the death-look
We who have neither youth nor beauty should always expect it
We have never ended before, and we do not see how we can end
We cannot all be hard-working donkeys
Welcome me, and make the least of my shyness and strangeness
Well, if you are to be lost, I want to be lost with you
What he had done he owned to, good, bad, or indifferent
Whatever choice you make, you are pretty sure to regret it
When to be an agnostic was to be almost an outcast
Whether every human motive was not selfish
Whitman's public use of his privately written praise
Wit that tries its teeth upon everything
Women's rights
Wonder why we hate the past so--"It's so damned humiliating!"
Wonderful to me how it should remain so unintelligible
Work would be twice as good if it were done twice
Work not truly priced in money cannot be truly paid in money
Work gives the impression of an uncommon continuity
Wrote them first and last in the spirit of Dickens
NOVELS
THE RISE OF SILAS LAPHAM
by William Dean Howells
Prepared by John Hamm
I.
WHEN Bartley Hubbard went to interview Silas Lapham
for the "Solid Men of Boston" series, which he undertook
to finish up in The Events, after he replaced their
original projector on that newspaper, Lapham received
him in his private office by previous appointment.
"Walk right in!" he called out to the journalist, whom he
caught sight of through the door of the counting-room.
He did not rise from the desk at which he was writing,
but he gave Bartley his left hand for welcome, and he
rolled his large head in the direction of a vacant chair.
"Sit down! I'll he with you in just half a minute."
"Take your time," said Bartley, with the ease he instantly felt.
"I'm in no hurry." He took a note-book from his pocket,
laid it on his knee, and began to sharpen a pencil.
"There!" Lapham pounded with his great hairy fist
on the envelope he had been addressing.
"William!" he called out, and he handed the letter
to a boy who came to get it. "I want that to go
right away. Well, sir," he continued, wheeling round
in his leather-cushioned swivel-chair, and facing Bartley,
seated so near that their knees almost touched, "so you
want my life, death, and Christian sufferings, do you,
young man?"
"That's what I'm after," said Bartley. "Your money
or your life."
"I guess you wouldn't want my life without the money,"
said Lapham, as if he were willing to prolong these moments
of preparation.
"Take 'em both," Bartley suggested. "Don't want your
money without your life, if you come to that. But you're
just one million times more interesting to the public than
if you hadn't a dollar; and you know that as well as I do,
Mr. Lapham. There 's no use beating about the bush."
"No," said Lapham, somewhat absently. He put out his huge
foot and pushed the ground-glass door shut between his
little den and the book-keepers, in their larger den outside.
"In personal appearance," wrote Bartley in the sketch
for which he now studied his subject, while he waited
patiently for him to continue, "Silas Lapham is a fine type
of the successful American. He has a square, bold chin,
only partially concealed by the short reddish-grey beard,
growing to the edges of his firmly closing lips.
His nose is short and straight; his forehead good,
but broad rather than high; his eyes blue, and with a light
in them that is kindly or sharp according to his mood.
He is of medium height, and fills an average arm-chair
with a solid bulk, which on the day of our interview was
unpretentiously clad in a business suit of blue serge.
His head droops somewhat from a short neck, which does
not trouble itself to rise far from a pair of massive
shoulders."
"I don't know as I know just where you want me to begin,"
said Lapham.
"Might begin with your birth; that's where most of us begin,"
replied Bartley.
A gleam of humorous appreciation shot into Lapham's
blue eyes.
"I didn't know whether you wanted me to go quite so far
back as that," he said. "But there's no disgrace in
having been born, and I was born in the State of Vermont,
pretty well up under the Canada line--so well up, in fact,
that I came very near being an adoptive citizen; for I
was bound to be an American of SOME sort, from the word
Go! That was about--well, let me see!--pretty near sixty
years ago: this is '75, and that was '20. Well, say I'm
fifty-five years old; and I've LIVED 'em, too; not an hour
of waste time about ME, anywheres! I was born on a farm,
and----"
"Worked in the fields summers and went to school winters:
regulation thing?" Bartley cut in.
"Regulation thing," said Lapham, accepting this irreverent
version of his history somewhat dryly.
"Parents poor, of course," suggested the journalist.
"Any barefoot business? Early deprivations of any kind,
that would encourage the youthful reader to go and do
likewise? Orphan myself, you know," said Bartley, with a
smile of cynical good-comradery.
Lapham looked at him silently, and then said with quiet
self-respect, "I guess if you see these things as a joke,
my life won't interest you."
"Oh yes, it will," returned Bartley, unabashed. "You'll see;
it'll come out all right." And in fact it did so,
in the interview which Bartley printed.
"Mr. Lapham," he wrote, "passed rapidly over the story
of his early life, its poverty and its hardships,
sweetened, however, by the recollections of a devoted mother,
and a father who, if somewhat her inferior in education,
was no less ambitious for the advancement of his children.
They were quiet, unpretentious people, religious,
after the fashion of that time, and of sterling morality,
and they taught their children the simple virtues
of the Old Testament and Poor Richard's Almanac."
Bartley could not deny himself this gibe; but he trusted
to Lapham's unliterary habit of mind for his security
in making it, and most other people would consider it
sincere reporter's rhetoric.
"You know," he explained to Lapham, "that we have to look
at all these facts as material, and we get the habit
of classifying them. Sometimes a leading question will
draw out a whole line of facts that a man himself would
never think of." He went on to put several queries,
and it was from Lapham's answers that he generalised the
history of his childhood. "Mr. Lapham, although he did
not dwell on his boyish trials and struggles, spoke of them
with deep feeling and an abiding sense of their reality."
This was what he added in the interview, and by the time
he had got Lapham past the period where risen Americans
are all pathetically alike in their narrow circumstances,
their sufferings, and their aspirations, he had beguiled him
into forgetfulness of the check he had received, and had
him talking again in perfect enjoyment of his autobiography.
"Yes, sir," said Lapham, in a strain which Bartley was
careful not to interrupt again, "a man never sees all
that his mother has been to him till it's too late to let
her know that he sees it. Why, my mother--" he stopped.
"It gives me a lump in the throat," he said apologetically,
with an attempt at a laugh. Then he went on: "She
was a little frail thing, not bigger than a good-sized
intermediate school-girl; but she did the whole work
of a family of boys, and boarded the hired men besides.
She cooked, swept, washed, ironed, made and mended
from daylight till dark--and from dark till daylight,
I was going to say; for I don't know how she got any
time for sleep. But I suppose she did. She got time
to go to church, and to teach us to read the Bible,
and to misunderstand it in the old way. She was GOOD.
But it ain't her on her knees in church that comes back
to me so much like the sight of an angel as her on her knees
before me at night, washing my poor, dirty little feet,
that I'd run bare in all day, and making me decent for bed.
There were six of us boys; it seems to me we were all
of a size; and she was just so careful with all of us.
I can feel her hands on my feet yet!" Bartley looked at
Lapham's No. 10 boots, and softly whistled through his teeth.
"We were patched all over; but we wa'n't ragged.
I don't know how she got through it. She didn't seem
to think it was anything; and I guess it was no more
than my father expected of her. HE worked like a horse
in doors and out--up at daylight, feeding the stock,
and groaning round all day with his rheumatism, but not
stopping."
Bartley hid a yawn over his note-book, and probably,
if he could have spoken his mind, he would have suggested
to Lapham that he was not there for the purpose of
interviewing his ancestry. But Bartley had learned
to practise a patience with his victims which he did
not always feel, and to feign an interest in their
digressions till he could bring them up with a round turn.
"I tell you," said Lapham, jabbing the point of his penknife
into the writing-pad on the desk before him, "when I hear
women complaining nowadays that their lives are stunted
and empty, I want to tell 'em about my MOTHER'S life.
I could paint it out for 'em."
Bartley saw his opportunity at the word paint, and cut in.
"And you say, Mr. Lapham, that you discovered this mineral
paint on the old farm yourself?"
Lapham acquiesced in the return to business. "I didn't
discover it," he said scrupulously. "My father found
it one day, in a hole made by a tree blowing down.
There it was, lying loose in the pit, and sticking to the
roots that had pulled up a big, cake of dirt with 'em. I
don't know what give him the idea that there was money
in it, but he did think so from the start. I guess,
if they'd had the word in those days, they'd considered
him pretty much of a crank about it. He was trying
as long as he lived to get that paint introduced;
but he couldn't make it go. The country was so poor they
couldn't paint their houses with anything; and father hadn't
any facilities. It got to be a kind of joke with us;
and I guess that paint-mine did as much as any one thing
to make us boys clear out as soon as we got old enough.
All my brothers went West, and took up land; but I
hung on to New England and I hung on to the old farm,
not because the paint-mine was on it, but because the
old house was--and the graves. Well," said Lapham,
as if unwilling to give himself too much credit,
"there wouldn't been any market for it, anyway. You can go
through that part of the State and buy more farms than you
can shake a stick at for less money than it cost to build
the barns on 'em. Of course, it's turned out a good thing.
I keep the old house up in good shape, and we spend a month
or so there every summer. M' wife kind of likes it,
and the girls. Pretty place; sightly all round it.
I've got a force of men at work there the whole time,
and I've got a man and his wife in the house. Had a
family meeting there last year; the whole connection from
out West. There!" Lapham rose from his seat and took
down a large warped, unframed photograph from the top
of his desk, passing his hand over it, and then blowing
vigorously upon it, to clear it of the dust. "There we are,
ALL of us."
"I don't need to look twice at YOU," said Bartley,
putting his finger on one of the heads.
"Well, that's Bill," said Lapham, with a gratified laugh.
"He's about as brainy as any of us, I guess. He's one
of their leading lawyers, out Dubuque way; been judge
of the Common Pleas once or twice. That's his son--just
graduated at Yale--alongside of my youngest girl.
Good-looking chap, ain't he?"
"SHE'S a good-looking chap," said Bartley, with prompt
irreverence. He hastened to add, at the frown which
gathered between Lapham's eyes, "What a beautiful creature
she is! What a lovely, refined, sensitive face! And she looks GOOD, too."
"She is good," said the father, relenting.
"And, after all, that's about the best thing in a woman,"
said the potential reprobate. "If my wife wasn't good
enough to keep both of us straight, I don't know what
would become of me." "My other daughter," said Lapham,
indicating a girl with eyes that showed large, and a face
of singular gravity. "Mis' Lapham," he continued,
touching his wife's effigy with his little finger.
"My brother Willard and his family--farm at Kankakee.
Hazard Lapham and his wife--Baptist preacher in Kansas.
Jim and his three girls--milling business at Minneapolis.
Ben and his family--practising medicine in Fort Wayne."
The figures were clustered in an irregular group
in front of an old farm-house, whose original ugliness
had been smartened up with a coat of Lapham's
own paint, and heightened with an incongruous piazza.
The photographer had not been able to conceal the fact
that they were all decent, honest-looking, sensible people,
with a very fair share of beauty among the young girls;
some of these were extremely pretty, in fact. He had put
them into awkward and constrained attitudes, of course;
and they all looked as if they had the instrument of torture
which photographers call a head-rest under their occiputs.
Here and there an elderly lady's face was a mere blur;
and some of the younger children had twitched
themselves into wavering shadows, and might have passed
for spirit-photographs of their own little ghosts.
It was the standard family-group photograph, in which most
Americans have figured at some time or other; and Lapham
exhibited a just satisfaction in it. "I presume,"
he mused aloud, as he put it back on top of his desk,
"that we sha'n't soon get together again, all of us."
"And you say," suggested Bartley, "that you stayed right
along on the old place, when the rest cleared out West?"
"No o-o-o," said Lapham, with a long, loud drawl;
"I cleared out West too, first off. Went to Texas.
Texas was all the cry in those days. But I got enough
of the Lone Star in about three months, and I come back
with the idea that Vermont was good enough for me."
"Fatted calf business?" queried Bartley, with his pencil
poised above his note-book.
"I presume they were glad to see me," said Lapham,
with dignity. "Mother," he added gently, "died that winter,
and I stayed on with father. I buried him in the spring;
and then I came down to a little place called Lumberville,
and picked up what jobs I could get. I worked round at
the saw-mills, and I was ostler a while at the hotel--I
always DID like a good horse. Well, I WA'N'T exactly
a college graduate, and I went to school odd times.
I got to driving the stage after while, and by and
by I BOUGHT the stage and run the business myself.
Then I hired the tavern-stand, and--well to make a long
story short, then I got married. Yes," said Lapham,
with pride, "I married the school-teacher. We did
pretty well with the hotel, and my wife she was always
at me to paint up. Well, I put it off, and PUT it off,
as a man will, till one day I give in, and says I,
'Well, let's paint up. Why, Pert,'--m'wife's name's
Persis,--'I've got a whole paint-mine out on the farm.
Let's go out and look at it.' So we drove out. I'd let
the place for seventy-five dollars a year to a shif'less
kind of a Kanuck that had come down that way; and I'd
hated to see the house with him in it; but we drove out
one Saturday afternoon, and we brought back about a bushel
of the stuff in the buggy-seat, and I tried it crude, and I
tried it burnt; and I liked it. M'wife she liked it too.
There wa'n't any painter by trade in the village, and I
mixed it myself. Well, sir, that tavern's got that coat
of paint on it yet, and it hain't ever had any other,
and I don't know's it ever will. Well, you know,
I felt as if it was a kind of harumscarum experiment,
all the while; and I presume I shouldn't have tried it
but I kind of liked to do it because father'd always
set so much store by his paint-mine. And when I'd got
the first coat on,"--Lapham called it CUT,--"I presume I
must have set as much as half an hour; looking at it and
thinking how he would have enjoyed it. I've had my share
of luck in this world, and I ain't a-going to complain
on my OWN account, but I've noticed that most things get
along too late for most people. It made me feel bad,
and it took all the pride out my success with the paint,
thinking of father. Seemed to me I might 'a taken more
interest in it when he was by to see; but we've got to
live and learn. Well, I called my wife out,--I'd tried
it on the back of the house, you know,--and she left
her dishes,--I can remember she came out with her sleeves
rolled up and set down alongside of me on the trestle,--
and says I, 'What do you think, Persis?' And says she,
'Well, you hain't got a paint-mine, Silas Lapham;
you've got a GOLD-mine.' She always was just so enthusiastic
about things. Well, it was just after two or three
boats had burnt up out West, and a lot of lives lost,
and there was a great cry about non-inflammable paint,
and I guess that was what was in her mind. 'Well, I
guess it ain't any gold-mine, Persis,' says I; 'but I
guess it IS a paint-mine. I'm going to have it analysed,
and if it turns out what I think it is, I'm going
to work it. And if father hadn't had such a long name,
I should call it the Nehemiah Lapham Mineral Paint.
But, any rate, every barrel of it, and every keg,
and every bottle, and every package, big or little,
has got to have the initials and figures N.L.f. 1835,
S.L.t. 1855, on it. Father found it in 1835, and I tried it
in 1855.'"
"'S.T.--1860--X.' business," said Bartley.
"Yes," said Lapham, "but I hadn't heard of Plantation
Bitters then, and I hadn't seen any of the fellow's labels.
I set to work and I got a man down from Boston; and I
carried him out to the farm, and he analysed it--made
a regular Job of it. Well, sir, we built a kiln, and we
kept a lot of that paint-ore red-hot for forty-eight hours;
kept the Kanuck and his family up, firing. The presence
of iron in the ore showed with the magnet from the start;
and when he came to test it, he found out that it
contained about seventy-five per cent. of the peroxide
of iron."
Lapham pronounced the scientific phrases with a sort
of reverent satisfaction, as if awed through his pride
by a little lingering uncertainty as to what peroxide was.
He accented it as if it were purr-ox-EYED; and Bartley
had to get him to spell it.
"Well, and what then?" he asked, when he had made a note
of the percentage.
"What then?" echoed Lapham. "Well, then, the fellow set
down and told me, 'You've got a paint here,' says he,
'that's going to drive every other mineral paint out of
the market. Why' says he, 'it'll drive 'em right into
the Back Bay!' Of course, I didn't know what the Back Bay
was then, but I begun to open my eyes; thought I'd had 'em
open before, but I guess I hadn't. Says he, 'That paint
has got hydraulic cement in it, and it can stand fire
and water and acids;' he named over a lot of things.
Says he, 'It'll mix easily with linseed oil, whether you
want to use it boiled or raw; and it ain't a-going
to crack nor fade any; and it ain't a-going to scale.
When you've got your arrangements for burning it properly,
you're going to have a paint that will stand like the
everlasting hills, in every climate under the sun.'
Then he went into a lot of particulars, and I begun
to think he was drawing a long-bow, and meant to make his
bill accordingly. So I kept pretty cool; but the fellow's
bill didn't amount to anything hardly--said I might pay
him after I got going; young chap, and pretty easy;
but every word he said was gospel. Well, I ain't a-going
to brag up my paint; I don't suppose you came here to hear
me blow"
"Oh yes, I did," said Bartley. "That's what I want.
Tell all there is to tell, and I can boil it down afterward.
A man can't make a greater mistake with a reporter than
to hold back anything out of modesty. It may be the very
thing we want to know. What we want is the whole truth;
and more; we've got so much modesty of our own that we can
temper almost any statement.
Lapham looked as if he did not quite like this tone,
and he resumed a little more quietly. Oh, there isn't
really very much more to say about the paint itself.
But you can use it for almost anything where a paint is wanted,
inside or out. It'll prevent decay, and it'll stop it,
after it's begun, in tin or iron. You can paint the inside
of a cistern or a bath-tub with it, and water won't hurt it;
and you can paint a steam-boiler with it, and heat won't.
You can cover a brick wall with it, or a railroad car,
or the deck of a steamboat, and you can't do a better thing
for either."
"Never tried it on the human conscience, I suppose,"
suggested Bartley.
"No, sir," replied Lapham gravely. "I guess you want to keep
that as free from paint as you can, if you want much use of it.
I never cared to try any of it on mine." Lapham suddenly
lifted his bulk up out of his swivel-chair, and led the
way out into the wareroom beyond the office partitions,
where rows and ranks of casks, barrels, and kegs stretched
dimly back to the rear of the building, and diffused
an honest, clean, wholesome smell of oil and paint.
They were labelled and branded as containing each so many
pounds of Lapham's Mineral Paint, and each bore the mystic
devices, N.L.f. 1835--S.L.t. 1855. "There!" said Lapham,
kicking one of the largest casks with the toe of his boot,
"that's about our biggest package; and here," he added,
laying his hand affectionately on the head of a very small keg,
as if it were the head of a child, which it resembled
in size, "this is the smallest. We used to put the paint
on the market dry, but now we grind every ounce of it
in oil--very best quality of linseed oil--and warrant it.
We find it gives more satisfaction. Now, come back
to the office, and I'll show you our fancy brands."
It was very cool and pleasant in that dim wareroom,
with the rafters showing overhead in a cloudy perspective,
and darkening away into the perpetual twilight at the rear
of the building; and Bartley had found an agreeable seat
on the head of a half-barrel of the paint, which he was
reluctant to leave. But he rose and followed the vigorous
lead of Lapham back to the office, where the sun of a
long summer afternoon was just beginning to glare in at
the window. On shelves opposite Lapham's desk were tin
cans of various sizes, arranged in tapering cylinders,
and showing, in a pattern diminishing toward the top,
the same label borne by the casks and barrels in the wareroom.
Lapham merely waved his hand toward these; but when Bartley,
after a comprehensive glance at them, gave his whole
attention to a row of clean, smooth jars, where different
tints of the paint showed through flawless glass,
Lapham smiled, and waited in pleased expectation.
"Hello!" said Bartley. "That's pretty!"
"Yes," assented Lapham, "it is rather nice.
It's our latest thing, and we find it takes with
customers first-rate. Look here!" he said, taking down
one of the jars, and pointing to the first line of the label.
Bartley read, "THE PERSIS BRAND," and then he looked
at Lapham and smiled.
"After HER, of course," said Lapham. "Got it up and
put the first of it on the market her last birthday.
She was pleased."
"I should think she might have been," said Bartley,
while he made a note of the appearance of the jars.
"I don't know about your mentioning it in your interview,"
said Lapham dubiously.
"That's going into the interview, Mr. Lapham, if nothing
else does. Got a wife myself, and I know just how you feel."
It was in the dawn of Bartley's prosperity on the Boston
Events, before his troubles with Marcia had seriously begun.
"Is that so?" said Lapham, recognising with a smile
another of the vast majority of married Americans;
a few underrate their wives, but the rest think them
supernal in intelligence and capability. "Well," he added,
"we must see about that. Where'd you say you lived?"
"We don't live; we board. Mrs. Nash, 13 Canary Place."
"Well, we've all got to commence that way,"
suggested Lapham consolingly.
"Yes; but we've about got to the end of our string.
I expect to be under a roof of my own on Clover Street
before long. I suppose," said Bartley, returning to business,
"that you didn't let the grass grow under your feet much
after you found out what was in your paint-mine?"
"No, sir," answered Lapham, withdrawing his eyes from a long
stare at Bartley, in which he had been seeing himself
a young man again, in the first days of his married life.
"I went right back to Lumberville and sold out everything,
and put all I could rake and scrape together into paint.
And Mis' Lapham was with me every time. No hang back
about HER. I tell you she was a WOMAN!"
Bartley laughed. "That's the sort most of us marry."
"No, we don't," said Lapham. "Most of us marry silly
little girls grown up to LOOK like women."
"Well, I guess that's about so," assented Bartley,
as if upon second thought.
"If it hadn't been for her," resumed Lapham, "the paint
wouldn't have come to anything. I used to tell her it
wa'n't the seventy-five per cent. of purr-ox-eyed
of iron in the ORE that made that paint go; it was
the seventy-five per cent. of purr-ox-eyed of iron in HER."
"Good!" cried Bartley. "I'll tell Marcia that."
"In less'n six months there wa'n't a board-fence, nor
a bridge-girder, nor a dead wall, nor a barn, nor a face
of rock in that whole region that didn't have 'Lapham's
Mineral Paint--Specimen' on it in the three colours we begun
by making." Bartley had taken his seat on the window-sill,
and Lapham, standing before him, now put up his huge
foot close to Bartley's thigh; neither of them minded that.
"I've heard a good deal of talk about that S.T.--1860--
X. man, and the stove-blacking man, and the kidney-cure man,
because they advertised in that way; and I've read articles
about it in the papers; but I don't see where the joke
comes in, exactly. So long as the people that own the barns
and fences don't object, I don't see what the public has
got to do with it. And I never saw anything so very sacred
about a big rock, along a river or in a pasture, that it
wouldn't do to put mineral paint on it in three colours.
I wish some of the people that talk about the landscape,
and WRITE about it, had to bu'st one of them rocks OUT
of the landscape with powder, or dig a hole to bury it in,
as we used to have to do up on the farm; I guess they'd
sing a little different tune about the profanation
of scenery. There ain't any man enjoys a sightly bit
of nature--a smooth piece of interval with half a dozen
good-sized wine-glass elms in it--more than I do.
But I ain't a-going to stand up for every big ugly rock
I come across, as if we were all a set of dumn Druids.
I say the landscape was made for man, and not man for
the landscape."
"Yes," said Bartley carelessly; "it was made for the
stove-polish man and the kidney-cure man."
"It was made for any man that knows how to use it,"
Lapham returned, insensible to Bartley's irony.
"Let 'em go and live with nature in the WINTER, up there
along the Canada line, and I guess they'll get enough
of her for one while. Well--where was I?"
"Decorating the landscape," said Bartley.
"Yes, sir; I started right there at Lumberville,
and it give the place a start too. You won't find it
on the map now; and you won't find it in the gazetteer.
I give a pretty good lump of money to build a town-hall,
about five years back, and the first meeting they held
in it they voted to change the name,--Lumberville WA'N'T
a name,--and it's Lapham now."
"Isn't it somewhere up in that region that they get
the old Brandon red?" asked Bartley.
"We're about ninety miles from Brandon. The Brandon's
a good paint," said Lapham conscientiously. "Like to show
you round up at our place some odd time, if you get off."
"Thanks. I should like it first-rate. WORKS there?"
"Yes; works there. Well, sir, just about the time I
got started, the war broke out; and it knocked my paint
higher than a kite. The thing dropped perfectly dead.
I presume that if I'd had any sort of influence, I might
have got it into Government hands, for gun-carriages
and army wagons, and may be on board Government vessels.
But I hadn't, and we had to face the music. I was about
broken-hearted, but m'wife she looked at it another way.
'I guess it's a providence,' says she. 'Silas, I guess
you've got a country that's worth fighting for. Any rate,
you better go out and give it a chance.' Well, sir, I went.
I knew she meant business. It might kill her to have
me go, but it would kill her sure if I stayed.
She was one of that kind. I went. Her last words was,
'I'll look after the paint, Si.' We hadn't but just one
little girl then,--boy'd died,--and Mis' Lapham's mother
was livin' with us; and I knew if times DID anyways come
up again, m'wife'd know just what to do. So I went.
I got through; and you can call me Colonel, if you want to.
Feel there!" Lapham took Bartley's thumb and forefinger
and put them on a bunch in his leg, just above the knee.
"Anything hard?"
"Ball?"
Lapham nodded. "Gettysburg. That's my thermometer.
If it wa'n't for that, I shouldn't know enough to come
in when it rains."
Bartley laughed at a joke which betrayed some evidences
of wear. "And when you came back, you took hold
of the paint and rushed it."
"1 took hold of the paint and rushed it--all I could,"
said Lapham, with less satisfaction than he had hitherto
shown in his autobiography. "But I found that I had got
back to another world. The day of small things was past,
and I don't suppose it will ever come again in this country.
My wife was at me all the time to take a partner--somebody
with capital; but I couldn't seem to bear the idea.
That paint was like my own blood to me. To have anybody
else concerned in it was like--well, I don't know what.
I saw it was the thing to do; but I tried to fight it off,
and I tried to joke it off. I used to say, 'Why didn't
you take a partner yourself, Persis, while I was away?'
And she'd say, 'Well, if you hadn't come back, I should,
Si.' Always DID like a joke about as well as any woman I
ever saw. Well, I had to come to it. I took a partner."
Lapham dropped the bold blue eyes with which he had been
till now staring into Bartley's face, and the reporter
knew that here was a place for asterisks in his interview,
if interviews were faithful. "He had money enough,"
continued Lapham, with a suppressed sigh; "but he didn't know
anything about paint. We hung on together for a year or two.
And then we quit."
"And he had the experience," suggested Bartley,
with companionable ease.
"I had some of the experience too," said Lapham,
with a scowl; and Bartley divined, through the freemasonry
of all who have sore places in their memories, that this
was a point which he must not touch again.
"And since that, I suppose, you've played it alone."
"I've played it alone."
"You must ship some of this paint of yours to foreign countries,
Colonel?" suggested Bartley, putting on a professional air.
"We ship it to all parts of the world. It goes to South America,
lots of it. It goes to Australia, and it goes to India,
and it goes to China, and it goes to the Cape of Good Hope.
It'll stand any climate. Of course, we don't export
these fancy brands much. They're for home use. But we're
introducing them elsewhere. Here." Lapham pulled open
a drawer, and showed Bartley a lot of labels in different
languages--Spanish, French, German, and Italian.
"We expect to do a good business in all those countries.
We've got our agencies in Cadiz now, and in Paris,
and in Hamburg, and in Leghorn. It's a thing that's bound
to make its way. Yes, sir. Wherever a man has got a ship,
or a bridge, or a lock, or a house, or a car, or a fence,
or a pig-pen anywhere in God's universe to paint, that's the
paint for him, and he's bound to find it out sooner or later.
You pass a ton of that paint dry through a blast-furnace,
and you'll get a quarter of a ton of pig-iron. I believe
in my paint. I believe it's a blessing to the world.
When folks come in, and kind of smell round, and ask me
what I mix it with, I always say, 'Well, in the first place,
I mix it with FAITH, and after that I grind it up
with the best quality of boiled linseed oil that money
will buy.'"
Lapham took out his watch and looked at it, and Bartley
perceived that his audience was drawing to a close.
"'F you ever want to run down and take a look at our works,
pass you over the road,"--he called it RUD" and it sha'n't cost
you a cent." "Well, may be I shall, sometime," said Bartley.
"Good afternoon, Colonel."
"Good afternoon. Or--hold on! My horse down there yet,
William?" he called to the young man in the counting-room
who had taken his letter at the beginning of the interview.
"Oh! All right!" he added, in response to something
the young man said.
"Can't I set you down somewhere, Mr. Hubbard? I've got
my horse at the door, and I can drop you on my way home.
I'm going to take Mis' Lapham to look at a house I'm driving
piles for, down on the New Land."
"Don't care if I do," said Bartley.
Lapham put on a straw hat, gathered up some papers lying
on his desk, pulled down its rolling cover, turned the
key in it, and gave the papers to an extremely handsome
young woman at one of the desks in the outer office.
She was stylishly dressed, as Bartley saw, and her smooth,
yellow hair was sculpturesquely waved over a low,
white forehead. "Here," said Lapham, with the same
prompt gruff kindness that he had used in addressing
the young man, "I want you should put these in shape,
and give me a type-writer copy to-morrow."
"What an uncommonly pretty girl!" said Bartley, as they
descended the rough stairway and found their way out to
the street, past the dangling rope of a block and tackle
wandering up into the cavernous darkness overhead.
"She does her work," said Lapham shortly.
Bartley mounted to the left side of the open buggy standing at
the curb-stone, and Lapham, gathering up the hitching-weight,
slid it under the buggy-seat and mounted beside him.
"No chance to speed a horse here, of course," said Lapham,
while the horse with a spirited gentleness picked her way,
with a high, long action, over the pavement of the street.
The streets were all narrow, and most of them crooked,
in that quarter of the town; but at the end of one
the spars of a vessel pencilled themselves delicately
against the cool blue of the afternoon sky. The air
was full of a smell pleasantly compounded of oakum,
of leather, and of oil. It was not the busy season,
and they met only two or three trucks heavily straggling
toward the wharf with their long string teams; but the
cobble-stones of the pavement were worn with the dint of
ponderous wheels, and discoloured with iron-rust from them;
here and there, in wandering streaks over its surface,
was the grey stain of the salt water with which the street
had been sprinkled.
After an interval of some minutes, which both men
spent in looking round the dash-board from opposite
sides to watch the stride of the horse, Bartley said,
with a light sigh, "I had a colt once down in Maine
that stepped just like that mare."
"Well!" said Lapham, sympathetically recognising the
bond that this fact created between them. "Well, now,
I tell you what you do. You let me come for you 'most
any afternoon, now, and take you out over the Milldam,
and speed this mare a little. I'd like to show you what
this mare can do. Yes, I would."
"All right," answered Bartley; "I'll let you know
my first day off."
"Good," cried Lapham.
"Kentucky?" queried Bartley.
"No, sir. I don't ride behind anything but Vermont; never did.
Touch of Morgan, of course; but you can't have much Morgan
in a horse if you want speed. Hambletonian mostly.
Where'd you say you wanted to get out?"
"I guess you may put me down at the Events Office,
just round the corner here. I've got to write up this
interview while it's fresh."
"All right," said Lapham, impersonally assenting
to Bartley's use of him as material.
He had not much to complain of in Bartley's treatment,
unless it was the strain of extravagant compliment which
it involved. But the flattery was mainly for the paint,
whose virtues Lapham did not believe could be overstated,
and himself and his history had been treated with as much
respect as Bartley was capable of showing any one.
He made a very picturesque thing of the discovery of the
paint-mine. "Deep in the heart of the virgin forests
of Vermont, far up toward the line of the Canadian snows,
on a desolate mountain-side, where an autumnal storm had done
its wild work, and the great trees, strewn hither and thither,
bore witness to its violence, Nehemiah Lapham discovered,
just forty years ago, the mineral which the alchemy
of his son's enterprise and energy has transmuted
into solid ingots of the most precious of metals.
The colossal fortune of Colonel Silas Lapham lay at the
bottom of a hole which an uprooted tree had dug for him,
and which for many years remained a paint-mine of no more
appreciable value than a soap-mine."
Here Bartley had not been able to forego another grin;
but he compensated for it by the high reverence with which
he spoke of Colonel Lapham's
record during the war of the rebellion, and of the motives
which impelled him to turn aside from an enterprise
in which his whole heart was engaged, and take part in
the struggle. "The Colonel bears embedded in the muscle
of his right leg a little memento of the period in the
shape of a minie-ball, which he jocularly referred to as
his thermometer, and which relieves him from the necessity
of reading 'The Probabilities' in his morning paper.
This saves him just so much time; and for a man who,
as he said, has not a moment of waste time on him anywhere,
five minutes a day are something in the course of a year.
Simple, clear, bold, and straightforward in mind and action,
Colonel Silas Lapham, with a prompt comprehensiveness and a
never-failing business sagacity, is, in the best sense of that
much-abused term, one of nature's noblemen, to the last inch
of his five eleven and a half. His life affords an example
of single-minded application and unwavering perseverance
which our young business men would do well to emulate.
There is nothing showy or meretricious about the man.
He believes in mineral paint, and he puts his heart and
soul into it. He makes it a religion; though we would
not imply that it IS his religion. Colonel Lapham is
a regular attendant at the Rev. Dr. Langworthy's church.
He subscribes liberally to the Associated Charities,
and no good object or worthy public enterprise fails to
receive his support. He is not now actively in politics,
and his paint is not partisan; but it is an open secret
that he is, and always has been, a staunch Republican.
Without violating the sanctities of private life, we cannot
speak fully of various details which came out in the free
and unembarrassed interview which Colonel Lapham accorded
our representative. But we may say that the success
of which he is justly proud he is also proud to attribute
in great measure to the sympathy and energy of his
wife--one of those women who, in whatever walk of life,
seem born to honour the name of American Woman, and to
redeem it from the national reproach of Daisy Millerism.
Of Colonel Lapham's family, we will simply add that it
consists of two young lady daughters.
"The subject of this very inadequate sketch is building
a house on the water side of Beacon Street, after designs
by one of our leading architectural firms, which,
when complete, will be one of the finest ornaments
of that exclusive avenue. It will, we believe, be ready
for the occupancy of the family sometime in the spring."
When Bartley had finished his article, which he did
with a good deal of inward derision, he went home
to Marcia, still smiling over the thought of Lapham,
whose burly simplicity had peculiarly amused him.
"He regularly turned himself inside out to me," he said,
as he sat describing his interview to Marcia.
"Then I know you could make something nice out of it,"
said his wife; "and that will please Mr. Witherby."
"Oh yes, I've done pretty well; but I couldn't let myself
loose on him the way I wanted to. Confound the limitations
of decency, anyway! I should like to have told just
what Colonel Lapham thought of landscape advertising
in Colonel Lapham's own words. I'll tell you one thing,
Marsh: he had a girl there at one of the desks that you
wouldn't let ME have within gunshot of MY office.
Pretty? It ain't any name for it!" Marcia's eyes
began to blaze, and Bartley broke out into a laugh,
in which he arrested himself at sight of a formidable
parcel in the corner of the room.
"Hello! What's that?"
"Why, I don't know what it is," replied Marcia tremulously.
"A man brought it just before you came in, and I didn't
like to open it."
"Think it was some kind of infernal machine?" asked Bartley,
getting down on his knees to examine the package.
"MRS. B. Hubbard, heigh?" He cut the heavy hemp string
with his penknife. "We must look into this thing.
I should like to know who's sending packages to Mrs. Hubbard
in my absence." He unfolded the; wrappings of paper,
growing softer and finer inward, and presently pulled
out a handsome square glass jar, through which a crimson
mass showed richly. "The Persis Brand!" he yelled.
"I knew it!"
"Oh, what is it, Bartley?" quavered Marcia. Then,
courageously drawing a little nearer: "Is it some kind
of jam?" she implored. "Jam? No!" roared Bartley.
"It's PAINT! It's mineral paint--Lapham's paint!"
"Paint?" echoed Marcia, as she stood over him while he
stripped their wrappings from the jars which showed
the dark blue, dark green, light brown, dark brown,
and black, with the dark crimson, forming the gamut
of colour of the Lapham paint. "Don't TELL me it's
paint that I can use, Bartley!"
"Well, I shouldn't advise you to use much of it--all
at once," replied her husband. "But it's paint that you
can use in moderation."
Marcia cast her arms round his neck and kissed him.
"O Bartley, I think I'm the happiest girl in the world!
I was just wondering what I should do. There are places
in that Clover Street house that need touching up
so dreadfully. I shall be very careful. You needn't
be afraid I shall overdo. But, this just saves my life.
Did you BUY it, Bartley? You know we couldn't afford it,
and you oughtn't to have done it! And what does the Persis
Brand mean?"
"Buy it?" cried Bartley. "No! The old fool's sent it to
you as a present. You'd better wait for the facts before
you pitch into me for extravagance, Marcia. Persis is
the name of his wife; and he named it after her because
it's his finest brand. You'll see it in my interview.
Put it on the market her last birthday for a surprise
to her."
"What old fool?" faltered Marcia.
"Why, Lapham--the mineral paint man."
"Oh, what a good man!" sighed Marcia from the bottom
of her soul. "Bartley! you WON'T make fun of him as you
do of some of those people? WILL you?"
"Nothing that HE'LL ever find out," said Bartley,
getting up and brushing off the carpet-lint from his knees.
II.
AFTER dropping Bartley Hubbard at the Events building,
Lapham drove on down Washington Street to Nankeen Square
at the South End, where he had lived ever since the
mistaken movement of society in that direction ceased.
He had not built, but had bought very cheap of a terrified
gentleman of good extraction who discovered too late that
the South End was not the thing, and who in the eagerness
of his flight to the Back Bay threw in his carpets and
shades for almost nothing. Mrs. Lapham was even better
satisfied with their bargain than the Colonel himself,
and they had lived in Nankeen Square for twelve years.
They had seen the saplings planted in the pretty oval
round which the houses were built flourish up into sturdy
young trees, and their two little girls in the same period
had grown into young ladies; the Colonel's tough frame had
expanded into the bulk which Bartley's interview indicated;
and Mrs. Lapham, while keeping a more youthful outline,
showed the sharp print of the crow's-foot at the corners
of her motherly eyes, and certain slight creases in
her wholesome cheeks. The fact that they lived in an
unfashionable neighbourhood was something that they had
never been made to feel to their personal disadvantage,
and they had hardly known it till the summer before
this story opens, when Mrs. Lapham and her daughter
Irene had met some other Bostonians far from Boston,
who made it memorable. They were people whom chance had
brought for the time under a singular obligation to the
Lapham ladies, and they were gratefully recognisant of it.
They had ventured--a mother and two daughters--as far
as a rather wild little Canadian watering-place on the
St. Lawrence, below Quebec, and had arrived some days
before their son and brother was expected to join them.
Two of their trunks had gone astray, and on the night
of their arrival the mother was taken violently ill.
Mrs. Lapham came to their help, with her skill as nurse,
and with the abundance of her own and her daughter's wardrobe,
and a profuse, single-hearted kindness. When a doctor could
be got at, he said that but for Mrs. Lapham's timely care,
the lady would hardly have lived. He was a very effusive
little Frenchman, and fancied he was saying something very
pleasant to everybody.
A certain intimacy inevitably followed, and when the
son came he was even more grateful than the others.
Mrs. Lapham could not quite understand why he should
be as attentive to her as to Irene; but she compared
him with other young men about the place, and thought
him nicer than any of them. She had not the means
of a wider comparison; for in Boston, with all her
husband's prosperity, they had not had a social life.
Their first years there were given to careful getting
on Lapham's part, and careful saving on his wife's.
Suddenly the money began to come so abundantly that she
need not save; and then they did not know what to do
with it. A certain amount could be spent on horses,
and Lapham spent it; his wife spent on rich and rather
ugly clothes and a luxury of household appointments.
Lapham had not yet reached the picture-buying stage
of the rich man's development, but they decorated their
house with the costliest and most abominable frescoes;
they went upon journeys, and lavished upon cars and hotels;
they gave with both hands to their church and to all the
charities it brought them acquainted with; but they did
not know how to spend on society. Up to a certain period
Mrs. Lapham had the ladies of her neighbourhood in to tea,
as her mother had done in the country in her younger days.
Lapham's idea of hospitality was still to bring a
heavy-buying customer home to pot-luck; neither of them
imagined dinners.
Their two girls had gone to the public schools, where they
had not got on as fast as some of the other girls;
so that they were a year behind in graduating from the
grammar-school, where Lapham thought that they had got
education enough. His wife was of a different mind;
she would have liked them to go to some private school
for their finishing. But Irene did not care for study;
she preferred house-keeping, and both the sisters were
afraid of being snubbed by the other girls, who were of
a different sort from the girls of the grammar-school;
these were mostly from the parks and squares, like themselves.
It ended in their going part of a year. But the elder
had an odd taste of her own for reading, and she took some
private lessons, and read books out of the circulating library;
the whole family were amazed at the number she read,
and rather proud of it.
They were not girls who embroidered or abandoned
themselves to needle-work. Irene spent her abundant
leisure in shopping for herself and her mother, of whom
both daughters made a kind of idol, buying her caps
and laces out of their pin-money, and getting her dresses
far beyond her capacity to wear. Irene dressed herself
very stylishly, and spent hours on her toilet every day.
Her sister had a simpler taste, and, if she had done
altogether as she liked, might even have slighted dress.
They all three took long naps every day, and sat hours
together minutely discussing what they saw out of the window.
In her self-guided search for self-improvement, the elder
sister went to many church lectures on a vast variety
of secular subjects, and usually came home with a comic
account of them, and that made more matter of talk for the
whole family. She could make fun of nearly everything;
Irene complained that she scared away the young men whom
they got acquainted with at the dancing-school sociables.
They were, perhaps, not the wisest young men.
The girls had learned to dance at Papanti's; but they had
not belonged to the private classes. They did not even know
of them, and a great gulf divided them from those who did.
Their father did not like company, except such as came
informally in their way; and their mother had remained
too rustic to know how to attract it in the sophisticated
city fashion. None of them had grasped the idea of
European travel; but they had gone about to mountain
and sea-side resorts, the mother and the two girls,
where they witnessed the spectacle which such resorts
present throughout New England, of multitudes of girls,
lovely, accomplished, exquisitely dressed, humbly glad
of the presence of any sort of young man; but the Laphams
had no skill or courage to make themselves noticed, far less
courted by the solitary invalid, or clergyman, or artist.
They lurked helplessly about in the hotel parlours,
looking on and not knowing how to put themselves forward.
Perhaps they did not care a great deal to do so.
They had not a conceit of themselves, but a sort of content
in their own ways that one may notice in certain families.
The very strength of their mutual affection was a barrier
to worldly knowledge; they dressed for one another;
they equipped their house for their own satisfaction;
they lived richly to themselves, not because they were selfish,
but because they did not know how to do otherwise.
The elder daughter did not care for society, apparently.
The younger, who was but three years younger, was not yet
quite old enough to be ambitious of it. With all her
wonderful beauty, she had an innocence almost vegetable.
When her beauty, which in its immaturity was crude and harsh,
suddenly ripened, she bloomed and glowed with the unconsciousness
of a flower; she not merely did not feel herself admired,
but hardly knew herself discovered. If she dressed well,
perhaps too well, it was because she had the instinct
of dress; but till she met this young man who was so nice
to her at Baie St. Paul, she had scarcely lived a detached,
individual life, so wholly had she depended on her mother
and her sister for her opinions, almost her sensations.
She took account of everything he did and said,
pondering it, and trying to make out exactly what he meant,
to the inflection of a syllable, the slightest movement
or gesture. In this way she began for the first time
to form ideas which she had not derived from her family,
and they were none the less her own because they were
often mistaken.
Some of the things that he partly said, partly looked,
she reported to her mother, and they talked them over,
as they did everything relating to these new acquaintances,
and wrought them into the novel point of view which
they were acquiring. When Mrs. Lapham returned home,
she submitted all the accumulated facts of the case,
and all her own conjectures, to her husband, and canvassed
them anew.
At first he was disposed to regard the whole affair as of
small importance, and she had to insist a little beyond
her own convictions in order to counteract his indifference.
"Well, I can tell you," she said, "that if you
think they were not the nicest people you ever saw,
you're mightily mistaken. They had about the best manners;
and they had been everywhere, and knew everything. I declare
it made me feel as if we had always lived in the backwoods.
I don't know but the mother and the daughters would have let
you feel so a little, if they'd showed out all they thought;
but they never did; and the son--well, I can't express it,
Silas! But that young man had about perfect ways."
"Seem struck up on Irene?" asked the Colonel.
"How can I tell? He seemed just about as much struck up
on me. Anyway, he paid me as much attention as he did her.
Perhaps it's more the way, now, to notice the mother than
it used to be."
Lapham ventured no conjecture, but asked, as he had
asked already, who the people were.
Mrs. Lapham repeated their name. Lapham nodded his head.
"Do you know them? What business is he in?"
"I guess he ain't in anything," said Lapham.
"They were very nice," said Mrs. Lapham impartially.
"Well, they'd ought to be," returned the Colonel.
"Never done anything else."
"They didn't seem stuck up," urged his wife.
"They'd no need to--with you. I could buy him and sell him,
twice over."
This answer satisfied Mrs. Lapham rather with the fact than
with her husband. "Well, I guess I wouldn't brag, Silas," she said.
In the winter the ladies of this family, who returned
to town very late, came to call on Mrs. Lapham.
They were again very polite. But the mother let drop,
in apology for their calling almost at nightfall,
that the coachman had not known the way exactly.
"Nearly all our friends are on the New Land or on the Hill."
There was a barb in this that rankled after the ladies
had gone; and on comparing notes with her daughter,
Mrs. Lapham found that a barb had been left to rankle
in her mind also.
"They said they had never been in this part of the town before."
Upon a strict search of her memory, Irene could not report
that the fact had been stated with anything like insinuation,
but it was that which gave it a more penetrating effect.
"Oh, well, of course," said Lapham, to whom these facts
were referred. "Those sort of people haven't got much
business up our way, and they don't come. It's a fair
thing all round. We don't trouble the Hill or the New
Land much."
"We know where they are," suggested his wife thoughtfully.
"Yes," assented the Colonel. "I know where they are.
I've got a lot of land over on the Back Bay."
"You have?" eagerly demanded his wife.
"Want me to build on it?" he asked in reply, with a
quizzical smile.
"I guess we can get along here for a while."
This was at night. In the morning Mrs. Lapham said--
"I suppose we ought to do the best we can for the children,
in every way."
"I supposed we always had," replied her husband.
"Yes, we have, according to our light."
"Have you got some new light?"
"I don't know as it's light. But if the girls are going
to keep on living in Boston and marry here, I presume
we ought to try to get them into society, some way;
or ought to do something."
"Well, who's ever done more for their children than we have?"
demanded Lapham, with a pang at the thought that he could
possibly have been out-done. "Don't they have everything
they want? Don't they dress just as you say? Don't you
go everywhere with 'em? Is there ever anything going
on that's worth while that they don't see it or hear
it? I don't know what you mean. Why don't you get them
into society? There's money enough!"
"There's got to be something besides money, I guess,"
said Mrs. Lapham, with a hopeless sigh. "I presume we
didn't go to work just the right way about their schooling.
We ought to have got them into some school where they'd
have got acquainted with city girls--girls who could help
them along.
Nearly everybody at Miss Smillie's was from some where else."
"Well, it's pretty late to think about that now,"
grumbled Lapham.
"And we've always gone our own way, and not looked
out for the future. We ought to have gone out more,
and had people come to the house. Nobody comes."
"Well, is that my fault? I guess nobody ever makes
people welcomer."
"We ought to have invited company more."
"Why don't you do it now? If it's for the girls, I don't
care if you have the house full all the while."
Mrs. Lapham was forced to a confession full of humiliation.
"I don't know who to ask."
"Well, you can't expect me to tell you."
"No; we're both country people, and we've kept our
country ways, and we don't, either of us, know what to do.
You've had to work so hard, and your luck was so long coming,
and then it came with such a rush, that we haven't had any
chance to learn what to do with it. It's just the same
with Irene's looks; I didn't expect she was ever going
to have any, she WAS such a plain child, and, all at once,
she's blazed out this way. As long as it was Pen that didn't
seem to care for society, I didn't give much mind to it.
But I can see it's going to be different with Irene.
I don't believe but what we're in the wrong neighbourhood."
"Well," said the Colonel, "there ain't a prettier lot on
the Back Bay than mine. It's on the water side of Beacon,
and it's twenty-eight feet wide and a hundred and fifty deep.
Let's build on it."
Mrs. Lapham was silent a while. "No," she said finally;
"we've always got along well enough here, and I guess we
better stay."
At breakfast she said casually: "Girls, how would you
like to have your father build on the New Land?"
The girls said they did not know. It was more convenient
to the horse-cars where they were.
Mrs. Lapham stole a look of relief at her husband,
and nothing more was said of the matter.
The mother of the family who had called upon Mrs. Lapham
brought her husband's cards, and when Mrs. Lapham returned
the visit she was in some trouble about the proper form
of acknowledging the civility. The Colonel had no card
but a business card, which advertised the principal
depot and the several agencies of the mineral paint;
and Mrs. Lapham doubted, till she wished to goodness
that she had never seen nor heard of those people,
whether to ignore her husband in the transaction altogether,
or to write his name on her own card. She decided
finally upon this measure, and she had the relief of not
finding the family at home. As far as she could judge,
Irene seemed to suffer a little disappointment from the fact.
For several months there was no communication between
the families. Then there came to Nankeen Square
a lithographed circular from the people on the Hill,
signed in ink by the mother, and affording Mrs. Lapham
an opportunity to subscribe for a charity of undeniable
merit and acceptability. She submitted it to her husband,
who promptly drew a cheque for five hundred dollars.
She tore it in two. "I will take a cheque
for a hundred, Silas," she said.
"Why?" he asked, looking up guiltily at her.
"Because a hundred is enough; and I don't want to show
off before them."
"Oh, I thought may be you did. Well, Pert," he added,
having satisfied human nature by the preliminary thrust,
"I guess you're about right. When do you want I should begin
to build on Beacon Street?" He handed her the new cheque,
where she stood over him, and then leaned back in his chair
and looked up at her.
"I don't want you should begin at all. What do
you mean, Silas?" She rested against the side of his desk.
"Well, I don't know as I mean anything. But shouldn't
you like to build? Everybody builds, at least once
in a lifetime."
"Where is your lot? They say it's unhealthy, over there."
Up to a certain point in their prosperity Mrs. Lapham
had kept strict account of all her husband's affairs;
but as they expanded, and ceased to be of the retail nature
with which women successfully grapple, the intimate knowledge
of them made her nervous. There was a period in which she
felt that they were being ruined, but the crash had not come;
and, since his great success, she had abandoned herself
to a blind confidence in her husband's judgment, which she
had hitherto felt needed her revision. He came and went,
day by day, unquestioned. He bought and sold and got gain.
She knew that he would tell her if ever things went wrong,
and he knew that she would ask him whenever she was anxious.
"It ain't unhealthy where I've bought," said Lapham,
rather enjoying her insinuation. "I looked after that
when I was trading; and I guess it's about as healthy
on the Back Bay as it is here, anyway. I got that lot
for you, Pert; I thought you'd want to build on the Back
Bay some day."
"Pshaw!" said Mrs. Lapham, deeply pleased inwardly,
but not going to show it, as she would have said.
"I guess you want to build there yourself." She insensibly
got a little nearer to her husband. They liked to talk
to each other in that blunt way; it is the New England way
of expressing perfect confidence and tenderness.
"Well, I guess I do," said Lapham, not insisting upon
the unselfish view of the matter. "I always did like
the water side of Beacon. There ain't a sightlier
place in the world for a house. And some day there's
bound to be a drive-way all along behind them houses,
between them and the water, and then a lot there is
going to be worth the gold that will cover it--COIN.
I've had offers for that lot, Pert, twice over what I give
for it. Yes, I have. Don't you want to ride over there
some afternoon with me and see it?" "I'm satisfied where
we be, Si," said Mrs. Lapham, recurring to the parlance
of her youth in her pathos at her husband's kindness.
She sighed anxiously, for she felt the trouble a woman
knows in view of any great change. They had often talked
of altering over the house in which they lived, but they
had never come to it; and they had often talked of building,
but it had always been a house in the country that they
had thought of. "I wish you had sold that lot."
"I hain't," said the colonel briefly.
"I don't know as I feel much like changing our way of living."
"Guess we could live there pretty much as we live here.
There's all kinds of people on Beacon Street; you mustn't
think they're all big-bugs. I know one party that lives in a
house he built to sell, and his wife don't keep any girl.
You can have just as much style there as you want, or just
as little. I guess we live as well as most of 'em now,
and set as good a table. And if you come to style,
I don't know as anybody has got more of a right to put it
on than what we have."
"Well, I don't want to build on Beacon Street, Si,"
said Mrs. Lapham gently.
"Just as you please, Persis. I ain't in any hurry to leave."
Mrs. Lapham stood flapping the cheque which she held
in her right hand against the edge of her left.
The Colonel still sat looking up at her face, and watching
the effect of the poison of ambition which he had artfully
instilled into her mind.
She sighed again--a yielding sigh. "What are you going
to do this afternoon?"
"I'm going to take a turn on the Brighton road,"
said the Colonel.
"I don't believe but what I should like to go along,"
said his wife.
"All right. You hain't ever rode behind that mare yet,
Pert, and I want you should see me let her out once.
They say the snow's all packed down already, and the going
is A 1."
At four o'clock in the afternoon, with a cold,
red winter sunset before them, the Colonel and his wife
were driving slowly down Beacon Street in the light,
high-seated cutter, where, as he said, they were a pretty
tight fit. He was holding the mare in till the time
came to speed her, and the mare was springily jolting
over the snow, looking intelligently from side to side,
and cocking this ear and that, while from her nostrils,
her head tossing easily, she blew quick, irregular whiffs
of steam.
"Gay, ain't she?" proudly suggested the Colonel.
"She IS gay," assented his wife.
They met swiftly dashing sleighs, and let them pass
on either hand, down the beautiful avenue narrowing
with an admirably even sky-line in the perspective.
They were not in a hurry. The mare jounced easily along,
and they talked of the different houses on either side
of the way. They had a crude taste in architecture,
and they admired the worst. There were women's faces at
many of the handsome windows, and once in a while a young
man on the pavement caught his hat suddenly from his head,
and bowed in response to some salutation from within.
"I don't think our girls would look very bad behind
one of those big panes," said the Colonel.
"No," said his wife dreamily.
"Where's the YOUNG man? Did he come with them?"
"No; he was to spend the winter with a friend of his that
has a ranch in Texas. I guess he's got to do something."
"Yes; gentlemaning as a profession has got to play out
in a generation or two."
Neither of them spoke of the lot, though Lapham knew
perfectly well what his wife had come with him for,
and she was aware that he knew it. The time came when he
brought the mare down to a walk, and then slowed up almost
to a stop, while they both turned their heads to the right
and looked at the vacant lot, through which showed the frozen
stretch of the Back Bay, a section of the Long Bridge,
and the roofs and smoke-stacks of Charlestown.
"Yes, it's sightly," said Mrs. Lapham, lifting her hand
from the reins, on which she had unconsciously laid it.
Lapham said nothing, but he let the mare out a little.
The sleighs and cutters were thickening round them.
On the Milldam it became difficult to restrict the mare
to the long, slow trot into which he let her break.
The beautiful landscape widened to right and left of them,
with the sunset redder and redder, over the low,
irregular hills before them. They crossed the Milldam
into Longwood; and here, from the crest of the first upland,
stretched two endless lines, in which thousands of cutters
went and came. Some of the drivers were already speeding
their horses, and these shot to and fro on inner lines,
between the slowly moving vehicles on either side
of the road. Here and there a burly mounted policeman,
bulging over the pommel of his M'Clellan saddle, jolted by,
silently gesturing and directing the course, and keeping
it all under the eye of the law. It was what Bartley
Hubbard called "a carnival of fashion and gaiety on the
Brighton road," in his account of it. But most of the
people in those elegant sleighs and cutters had so little
the air of the great world that one knowing it at all
must have wondered where they and their money came from;
and the gaiety of the men, at least, was expressed,
like that of Colonel Lapham, in a grim almost fierce,
alertness; the women wore an air of courageous apprehension.
At a certain point the Colonel said, "I'm going to let
her out, Pert," and he lifted and then dropped the reins
lightly on the mare's back.
She understood the signal, and, as an admirer said,
"she laid down to her work." Nothing in the immutable
iron of Lapham's face betrayed his sense of triumph
as the mare left everything behind her on the road.
Mrs. Lapham, if she felt fear, was too busy holding her
flying wraps about her, and shielding her face from the
scud of ice flung from the mare's heels, to betray it;
except for the rush of her feet, the mare was as silent
as the people behind her; the muscles of her back and
thighs worked more and more swiftly, like some mechanism
responding to an alien force, and she shot to the end
of the course, grazing a hundred encountered and rival
sledges in her passage, but unmolested by the policemen,
who probably saw that the mare and the Colonel knew
what they were about, and, at any rate, were not the sort
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