The Rise of Silas Lapham

by William Dean Howells

  “Your Uncle Jim does?” queried Mrs. Corey in amaze.

  “Yes; I consulted him the whole way through, and I’ve acted on his advice.”

  This seemed an incomprehensible treachery on her brother’s part.

  “Yes; I thought you would like to have me. And besides, I couldn’t possibly have gone to anyone so well befitted to advise me.”

  His mother said nothing. In fact, the mineral-paint business, however painful its interest, was, for the moment, superseded by a more poignant anxiety. She began to feel her way cautiously toward this.

  “Have you been talking about your business with Mr. Lapham all night?”

  “Well, pretty much,” said her son, with a guiltless laugh. “I went to see him yesterday afternoon, after I had gone over the whole ground with Uncle Jim, and Mr. Lapham asked me to go down with him and finish up.”

  “Down?” repeated Mrs. Corey.

  “Yes, to Nantasket. He has a cottage down there.”

  “At Nantasket?” Mrs. Corey knitted her brows a little. “What in the world can a cottage at Nantasket be like?”

  “Oh, very much like a ‘cottage’ anywhere. It has the usual allowance of red roof and veranda. There are the regulation rocks by the sea; and the big hotels on the beach about a mile off, flaring away with electric lights and roman candles at night. We don’t have them at Nahant.”

  “No,” said his mother. “Is Mrs. Lapham well? And her daughter?”

  “Yes, I think so,” said the young man. “The young ladies walked me down to the rocks in the usual way after dinner, and then I came back and talked paint with Mr. Lapham till midnight. We didn’t settle anything till this morning coming up on the boat.”

  “What sort of people do they seem to be at home?”

  “What sort? Well, I don’t know that I noticed.” Mrs. Corey permitted herself the first part of a sigh of relief; and her son laughed, but apparently not at her. “They’re just reading Middlemarch. They say there’s so much talk about it. Oh, I suppose they’re very good people. They seemed to be on very good terms with each other.”

  “I suppose it’s the plain sister who’s reading Middlemarch.”

  “Plain? Is she plain?” asked the young man, as if searching his consciousness. “Yes, it’s the older one who does the reading, apparently. But I don’t believe that even she overdoes it. They like to talk better. They reminded me of Southern people in that.” The young man smiled, as if amused by some of his impressions of the Lapham family. “The living, as the country people call it, is tremendously good. The Colonel—he’s a colonel—talked of the coffee as his wife’s coffee, as if she had personally made it in the kitchen, though I believe it was merely inspired by her. And there was everything in the house that money could buy. But money has its limitations.”

  This was a fact which Mrs. Corey was beginning to realize more and more unpleasantly in her own life; but it seemed to bring her a certain comfort in its application to the Laphams. “Yes, there is a point where taste has to begin,” she said.

  “They seemed to want to apologize to me for not having more books,” said Corey. “I don’t know why they should. The Colonel said they bought a good many books, first and last; but apparently they don’t take them to the seaside.”

  “I daresay they never buy a new book. I’ve met some of these moneyed people lately, and they lavish on every conceivable luxury, and then borrow books, and get them in the cheap paper editions.”

  “I fancy that’s the way with the Lapham family,” said the young man, smilingly. “But they are very good people. The other daughter is humorous.”

  “Humorous?” Mrs. Corey knitted her brows in some perplexity. “Do you mean like Mrs. Sayre?” she asked, naming the lady whose name must come into every Boston mind when humor is mentioned.

  “Oh no; nothing like that. She never says anything that you can remember; nothing in flashes or ripples; nothing the least literary. But it’s a sort of droll way of looking at things; or a droll medium through which things present themselves. I don’t know. She tells what she’s seen, and mimics a little.”

  “Oh,” said Mrs. Corey coldly. After a moment she asked: “And is Miss Irene as pretty as ever?”

  “She’s a wonderful complexion,” said the son unsatisfactorily. “I shall want to be by when father and Colonel Lapham meet,” he added with a smile.

  “Ah, yes, your father!” said the mother, in that way in which a wife at once compassionates and censures her husband to their children.

  “Do you think it’s really going to be a trial to him?” asked the young man quickly.

  “No, no, I can’t say it is. But I confess I wish it was some other business, Tom.”

  “Well, Mother, I don’t see why. The principal thing looked at now is the amount of money; and while I would rather starve than touch a dollar that was dirty with any sort of dishonesty—”

  “Of course you would, my son!” interposed his mother proudly.

  “I shouldn’t at all mind its having a little mineral paint on it. I’ll use my influence with Colonel Lapham—if I ever have any—to have his paint scraped off the landscape.”

  “I suppose you won’t begin till the autumn.”

  “Oh yes, I shall,” said the son, laughing at his mother’s simple ignorance of business. “I shall begin tomorrow morning.”

  “Tomorrow morning!”

  “Yes. I’ve had my desk appointed already, and I shall be down there at nine in the morning to take possession.”

  “Tom,” cried his mother, “why do you think Mr. Lapham has taken you into business so readily? I’ve always heard that it was so hard for young men to get in.”

  “And do you think I found it easy with him? We had about twelve hours’ solid talk.”

  “And you don’t suppose it was any sort of—personal consideration?”

  “Why, I don’t know exactly what you mean, Mother. I suppose he likes me.”

  Mrs. Corey could not say just what she meant. She answered, ineffectually enough: “Yes. You wouldn’t like it to be a favor, would you?”

  “I think he’s a man who may be trusted to look after his own interest. But I don’t mind his beginning by liking me. It’ll be my own fault if I don’t make myself essential to him.”

  “Yes,” said Mrs. Corey.

  * * *

  “Well,” demanded her husband, at their first meeting after her interview with their son, “what did you say to Tom?”

  “Very little, if anything. I found him with his mind made up, and it would only have distressed him if I had tried to change it.”

  “That is precisely what I said, my dear.”

  “Besides, he had talked the matter over fully with James, and seems to have been advised by him. I can’t understand James.”

  “Oh! it’s in regard to the paint, and not the princess, that he’s made up his mind. Well, I think you were wise to let him alone, Anna. We represent a faded tradition. We don’t really care what business a man is in, so it is large enough and he doesn’t advertise offensively; but we think it fine to affect reluctance.”

  “Do you really feel so, Bromfield?” asked his wife seriously.

  “Certainly I do. There was a long time in my misguided youth when I supposed myself some sort of porcelain; but it’s a relief to be of the common clay, after all, and to know it. If I get broken, I can be easily replaced.”

  “If Tom must go into such a business,” said Mrs. Corey, “I’m glad James approves of it.”

  “I’m afraid it wouldn’t matter to Tom if he didn’t; and I don’t know that I should care,” said Corey, betraying the fact that he had perhaps had a good deal of his brother-in-law’s judgment in the course of his life. “You had better consult him in regard to Tom’s marrying the princess.”

  “There is no necessity at present for that,” said
Mrs. Corey, with dignity. After a moment, she asked, “Should you feel quite so easy if it were a question of that, Bromfield?”

  “It would be a little more personal.”

  “You feel about it as I do. Of course, we have both lived too long, and seen too much of the world, to suppose we can control such things. The child is good, I haven’t the least doubt, and all those things can be managed so that they wouldn’t disgrace us. But she has had a certain sort of bringing up. I should prefer Tom to marry a girl with another sort, and this business venture of his increases the chances that he won’t. That’s all.”

  “‘’Tis not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a church door, but ’twill serve.’”

  “I shouldn’t like it.”

  “Well, it hasn’t happened yet.”

  “Ah, you never can realize anything beforehand.”

  “Perhaps that has saved me some suffering. But you have at least the consolation of two anxieties at once. I always find that a great advantage. You can play one off against the other.”

  Mrs. Corey drew a long breath as if she did not experience the suggested consolation; and she arranged to quit, the following afternoon, the scene of her defeat, which she had not had the courage to make a battlefield. Her son went down to see her off on the boat, after spending his first day at his desk in Lapham’s office. He was in a gay humor, and she departed in a reflected gleam of his good spirits. He told her all about it as he sat talking with her at the stern of the boat, lingering till the last moment, and then stepping ashore with as little waste of time as Lapham himself on the gangplank, which the deckhands had laid hold of. He touched his hat to her from the wharf to reassure her of his escape from being carried away with her, and the next moment his smiling face hid itself in the crowd.

  He walked on smiling up the long wharf, encumbered with trucks and hacks and piles of freight, and, taking his way through the deserted business streets beyond this bustle, made a point of passing the door of Lapham’s warehouse, on the jambs of which his name and paint were lettered in black on a square ground of white. The door was still open, and Corey loitered a moment before it, tempted to go upstairs and fetch away some foreign letters which he had left on his desk, and which he thought he might finish up at home. He was in love with his work, and he felt the enthusiasm for it which nothing but the work we can do well inspires in us. He believed that he had found his place in the world, after a good deal of looking, and he had the relief, the repose, of fitting into it. Every little incident of the momentous, uneventful day was a pleasure in his mind, from his sitting down at his desk, to which Lapham’s boy brought him the foreign letters, till his rising from it an hour ago. Lapham had been in view within his own office, but he had given Corey no formal reception, and had, in fact, not spoken to him till toward the end of the forenoon, When he suddenly came out of his den with some more letters in his hand, and after a brief “How d’ye do?” had spoken a few words about them, and left them with him. He was in his shirtsleeves again, and his sanguine person seemed to radiate the heat with which he suffered. He did not go out to lunch, but had it brought to him in his office, where Corey saw him eating it before he left his own desk to go out and perch on a swinging seat before the long counter of a downtown restaurant. He observed that all the others lunched at twelve, and he resolved to anticipate his usual hour. When he returned, the pretty girl who had been clicking away at a typewriter all the morning was neatly putting out of sight the evidences of pie from the table where her machine stood, and was preparing to go on with her copying. In his office Lapham lay asleep in his armchair, with a newspaper over his face.

  Now, while Corey lingered at the entrance to the stairway, these two came down the stairs together, and he heard Lapham saying, “Well, then, you better get a divorce.”

  He looked red and excited, and the girl’s face, which she veiled at sight of Corey, showed traces of tears. She slipped ’round him into the street.

  But Lapham stopped, and said, with the show of no feeling but surprise: “Hello, Corey! Did you want to go up?”

  “Yes; there were some letters I hadn’t quite got through with.”

  “You’ll find Dennis up there. But I guess you better let them go till tomorrow. I always make it a rule to stop work when I’m done.”

  “Perhaps you’re right,” said Corey, yielding.

  “Come along down as far as the boat with me. There’s a little matter I want to talk over with you.”

  It was a business matter, and related to Corey’s proposed connection with the house.

  The next day the head bookkeeper, who lunched at the long counter of the same restaurant with Corey, began to talk with him about Lapham. Walker had not apparently got his place by seniority; though with his forehead, bald far up toward the crown, and his round smooth face, one might have taken him for a plump elder, if he had not looked equally like a robust infant. The thick drabbish-yellow mustache was what arrested decision in either direction, and the prompt vigor of all his movements was that of a young man of thirty, which was really Walker’s age. He knew, of course, who Corey was, and he had waited for a man who might look down on him socially to make the overtures toward something more than business acquaintance; but, these made, he was readily responsive, and drew freely on his philosophy of Lapham and his affairs.

  “I think about the only difference between people in this world is that some know what they want, and some don’t. Well, now,” said Walker, beating the bottom of his saltbox to make the salt come out, “the old man knows what he wants every time. And generally he gets it. He knows what he’s about, but I’ll be blessed if the rest of us do half the time. Anyway, we don’t till he’s ready to let us. You take my position in most business houses. It’s confidential. The head bookkeeper knows right along pretty much everything the house has got in hand. I’ll give you my word I don’t. He may open up to you a little more in your department, but, as far as the rest of us go, he don’t open up any more than an oyster on a hot brick. They say he had a partner once; I guess he’s dead. I wouldn’t like to be the old man’s partner. Well, you see, this paint of his is like his heart’s blood. Better not try to joke him about it. I’ve seen people come in occasionally and try it. They didn’t get much fun out of it.”

  While he talked, Walker was plucking up morsels from his plate, tearing off pieces of French bread from the long loaf, and feeding them into his mouth in an impersonal way, as if he were firing up an engine.

  “I suppose he thinks,” suggested Corey, “that if he doesn’t tell, nobody else will.”

  Walker took a draft of beer from his glass and wiped the foam from his mustache.

  “Oh, but he carries it too far! It’s a weakness with him. He’s just so about everything. Look at the way he keeps it up about that typewriter girl of his. You’d think she was some princess traveling incognito. There isn’t one of us knows who she is, or where she came from, or who she belongs to. He brought her and her machine into the office one morning, and set ’em down at a table, and that’s all there is about it, as far as we’re concerned. It’s pretty hard on the girl, for I guess she’d like to talk; and to anyone that didn’t know the old man—” Walker broke off and drained his glass of what was left in it.

  Corey thought of the words he had overheard from Lapham to the girl. But he said, “She seems to be kept pretty busy.”

  “Oh yes,” said Walker; “there ain’t much loafing ’round the place, in any of the departments, from the old man’s down. That’s just what I say. He’s got to work just twice as hard, if he wants to keep everything in his own mind. But he ain’t afraid of work. That’s one good thing about him. And Miss Dewey has to keep step with the rest of us. But she don’t look like one that would take to it naturally. Such a pretty girl as that generally thinks she does enough when she looks her prettiest.”

  “She’s a pretty girl,” said Corey, noncommittally. “But I su
ppose a great many pretty girls have to earn their living.”

  “Don’t any of ’em like to do it,” returned the bookkeeper. “They think it’s a hardship, and I don’t blame ’em. They have got a right to get married, and they ought to have the chance. And Miss Dewey’s smart, too. She’s as bright as a biscuit. I guess she’s had trouble. I shouldn’t be much more than half surprised if Miss Dewey wasn’t Miss Dewey, or hadn’t always been. Yes, sir,” continued the bookkeeper, who prolonged the talk as they walked back to Lapham’s warehouse together, “I don’t know exactly what it is—it isn’t any one thing in particular—but I should say that girl had been married. I wouldn’t speak so freely to any of the rest, Mr. Corey—I want you to understand that—and it isn’t any of my business, anyway; but that’s my opinion.”

  Corey made no reply as he walked beside the bookkeeper, who continued: “It’s curious what a difference marriage makes in people. Now, I know that I don’t look any more like a bachelor of my age than I do like the man in the moon, and yet I couldn’t say where the difference came in, to save me. And it’s just so with a woman. The minute you catch sight of her face, there’s something in it that tells you whether she’s married or not. What do you suppose it is?”

  “I’m sure I don’t know,” said Corey, willing to laugh away the topic. “And from what I read occasionally of some people who go about repeating their happiness, I shouldn’t say that the intangible evidences were always unmistakable.”

  “Oh, of course,” admitted Walker, easily surrendering his position. “All signs fail in dry weather. Hello! What’s that?” He caught Corey by the arm, and they both stopped.

  At a corner, half a block ahead of them, the summer-noon solitude of the place was broken by a bit of drama. A man and woman issued from the intersecting street, and at the moment of coming into sight the man, who looked like a sailor, caught the woman by the arm, as if to detain her. A brief struggle ensued, the woman trying to free herself, and the man half coaxing, half scolding. The spectators could now see that he was drunk; but before they could decide whether it was a case for their interference or not, the woman suddenly set both hands against the man’s breast and gave him a quick push. He lost his footing and tumbled into a heap in the gutter. The woman faltered an instant, as if to see whether he was seriously hurt, and then turned and ran.