The Rise of Silas Lapham

by William Dean Howells

  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, recognizing 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 wan’t the seventy-five percent of purr-ox-eyed of iron in the ore that made that paint go; it was the seventy-five percent of purr-ox-eyed of iron in her.”

  “Good!” cried Bartley. “I’ll tell Marcia that.”

  “In less’n six months there wan’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 colors we begun by making.” Bartley had taken his seat on the windowsill, 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 colors. 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 wineglass 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 gazeteer. 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 wan’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 maybe on board government vessels. But I hadn’t, and we had to face the music. I was about brokenhearted, 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 wan’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.”

  “I 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 dock, or a house, or a car, or a fence, or a pigpen 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 shan’t cost you a cent.”

  “Well, maybe 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 typewriter copy tomorrow.”

  “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 curbstone, 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 penciled 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 cobblestones of the pavement were worn with the dint of ponderous wheels and discolored with iron rust from them; here and there, in wandering streaks over its surface, was the gray 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 dashboard 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 recognizing 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 anyone. 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 mountainside, 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 forgo 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 minié 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, t
o 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 businessmen 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 honor 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.