The Rise of Silas Lapham

by William Dean Howells

  “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 the 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 color 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. “Oh, 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 neighborhood 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 recognizant 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 neighborhood 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 potluck; 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 housekeeping, 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 needlework. 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 th
ey 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 seaside resorts, the mother and the two girls, where they witnessed the spectacle which such resorts present through 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 parlors, 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 nonetheless 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 outdone. “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 worthwhile 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 somewhere 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 neighborhood.”

  “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 awhile. “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.