The Rise of Silas Lapham

by William Dean Howells

  When Corey and the bookkeeper reentered the office, Miss Dewey had finished her lunch and was putting a sheet of paper into her typewriter. She looked up at them with her eyes of turquoise blue, under her low white forehead, with the hair neatly rippled over it, and then began to beat the keys of her machine.

  IX

  LAPHAM had the pride which comes of self-making, and he would not openly lower his crest to the young fellow he had taken into his business. He was going to be obviously master in his own place to everyone; and during the hours of business he did nothing to distinguish Corey from the half-dozen other clerks and bookkeepers in the outer office, but he was not silent about the fact that Bromfield Corey’s son had taken a fancy to come to him. “Did you notice that fellow at the desk facing my typewriter girl? Well, sir, that’s the son of Bromfield Corey—old Phillips Corey’s grandson. And I’ll say this for him, that there isn’t a man in the office that looks after his work better. There isn’t anything he’s too good for. He’s right here at nine every morning, before the clock gets in the word. I guess it’s his grandfather coming out in him. He’s got charge of the foreign correspondence. We’re pushing the paint everywhere.” He flattered himself that he did not lug the matter in. He had been warned against that by his wife, but he had the right to do Corey justice, and his brag took the form of illustration. “Talk about training for business—I tell you it’s all in the man himself! I used to believe in what old Horace Greeley said about college graduates being the poorest kind of horned cattle; but I’ve changed my mind a little. You take that fellow Corey. He’s been through Harvard, and he’s had about every advantage that a fellow could have. Been everywhere, and talks half a dozen languages like English. I suppose he’s got money enough to live without lifting a hand, any more than his father does; son of Bromfield Corey, you know. But the thing was in him. He’s a natural-born businessman; and I’ve had many a fellow with me that had come up out of the street, and worked hard all his life, without ever losing his original opposition to the thing. But Corey likes it. I believe the fellow would like to stick at that desk of his night and day. I don’t know where he got it. I guess it must be his grandfather, old Phillips Corey; it often skips a generation, you know. But what I say is, a thing has got to be born in a man; and if it ain’t born in him, all the privations in the world won’t put it there, and if it is, all the college training won’t take it out.”

  Sometimes Lapham advanced these ideas at his own table, to a guest whom he had brought to Nantasket for the night. Then he suffered exposure and ridicule at the hands of his wife, when opportunity offered. She would not let him bring Corey down to Nantasket at all.

  “No, indeed!” she said. “I am not going to have them think we’re running after him. If he wants to see Irene, he can find out ways of doing it for himself.”

  “Who wants him to see Irene?” retorted the Colonel angrily.

  “I do,” said Mrs. Lapham. “And I want him to see her without any of your connivance, Silas. I’m not going to have it said that I put my girls at anybody. Why don’t you invite some of your other clerks?”

  “He ain’t just like the other clerks. He’s going to take charge of a part of the business. It’s quite another thing.”

  “Oh, indeed!” said Mrs. Lapham vexatiously. “Then you are going to take a partner.”

  “I shall ask him down if I choose!” returned the Colonel, disdaining her insinuation.

  His wife laughed with the fearlessness of a woman who knows her husband.

  “But you won’t choose when you’ve thought it over, Si.” Then she applied an emollient to his chafed surface. “Don’t you suppose I feel as you do about it? I know just how proud you are, and I’m not going to have you do anything that will make you feel meeching afterward. You just let things take their course. If he wants Irene, he’s going to find out some way of seeing her; and if he don’t, all the plotting and planning in the world isn’t going to make him.”

  “Who’s plotting?” again retorted the Colonel, shuddering at the utterance of hopes and ambitions which a man hides with shame, but a woman talks over as freely and coolly as if they were items of a milliner’s bill.

  “Oh, not you!” exulted his wife. “I understand what you want. You want to get this fellow, who is neither partner nor clerk, down here to talk business with him. Well, now, you just talk business with him at the office.”

  The only social attention which Lapham succeeded in offering Corey was to take him in his buggy, now and then, for a spin out over the Milldam. He kept the mare in town, and on a pleasant afternoon he liked to knock off early, as he phrased it, and let the mare out a little. Corey understood something about horses, though in a passionless way, and he would have preferred to talk business when obliged to talk horse. But he deferred to his business superior with the sense of discipline which is innate in the apparently insubordinate American nature. If Corey could hardly have helped feeling the social difference between Lapham and himself, in his presence he silenced his traditions and showed him all the respect that he could have exacted from any of his clerks. He talked horse with him, and when the Colonel wished he talked house. Besides himself and his paint Lapham had not many other topics; and if he had a choice between the mare and the edifice on the water side of Beacon Street, it was just now the latter. Sometimes, in driving in or out, he stopped at the house, and made Corey his guest there, if he might not at Nantasket; and one day it happened that the young man met Irene there again. She had come up with her mother alone, and they were in the house, interviewing the carpenter as before, when the Colonel jumped out of his buggy and cast anchor at the pavement. More exactly, Mrs. Lapham was interviewing the carpenter, and Irene was sitting in the bow window on a trestle, and looking out at the driving. She saw him come up with her father, and bowed and blushed. Her father went on upstairs to find her mother, and Corey pulled up another trestle which he found in the back part of the room. The first floorings had been laid throughout the house, and the partitions had been lathed so that one could realize the shape of the interior.

  “I suppose you will sit at this window a good deal,” said the young man.

  “Yes, I think it will be very nice. There’s so much more going on than there is in the Square.”

  “It must be very interesting to you to see the house grow.”

  “It is. Only it doesn’t seem to grow fast as I expected.”

  “Why, I’m amazed at the progress your carpenter has made every time I come.”

  The girl looked down, and then lifting her eyes she said, with a sort of timorous appeal: “I’ve been reading that book since you were down at Nantasket.”

  “Book?” repeated Corey, while she reddened with disappointment. “Oh yes. Middlemarch. Did you like it?”

  “I haven’t got through with it yet. Pen has finished it.”

  “What does she think of it?”

  “Oh, I think she likes it very well. I haven’t heard her talk about it much. Do you like it?”

  “Yes; I liked it immensely. But it’s several years since I read it.”

  “I didn’t know it was so old. It’s just got into the Seaside Library,” she urged, with a little sense of injury in her tone.

  “Oh, it hasn’t been out such a very great while,” said Corey politely. “It came a little before Daniel Deronda.”

  The girl was again silent. She followed the curl of a shaving on the floor with the point of her parasol.

  “Do you like that Rosamond Vincy?” she asked, without looking up.

  Corey smiled in his kind way.

  “I didn’t suppose she was expected to have any friends. I can’t say I liked her. But I don’t think I disliked her so much as the author does. She’s pretty hard on her good-looking”—he was going to say girls, but as if that might have been rather personal, he said—“people.”

  “Yes, that’s what Pen says
. She says she doesn’t give her any chance to be good. She says she should have been just as bad as Rosamond if she had been in her place.”

  The young man laughed. “Your sister is very satirical, isn’t she?”

  “I don’t know,” said Irene, still intent upon the convolutions of the shaving. “She keeps us laughing. Papa thinks there’s nobody that can talk like her.” She gave the shaving a little toss from her, and took the parasol up across her lap. The unworldliness of the Lapham girls did not extend to their dress; Irene’s costume was very stylish, and she governed her head and shoulders stylishly. “We are going to have the back room upstairs for a music room and library,” she said abruptly.

  “Yes?” returned Corey. “I should think that would be charming.”

  “We expected to have bookcases, but the architect wants to build the shelves in.”

  The fact seemed to be referred to Corey for his comment.

  “It seems to me that would be the best way. They’ll look like part of the room then. You can make them low, and hang your pictures above them.”

  “Yes, that’s what he said.” The girl looked out of the window in adding, “I presume with nice bindings it will look very well.”

  “Oh, nothing furnishes a room like books.”

  “No. There will have to be a good many of them.”

  “That depends upon the size of your room and the number of your shelves.”

  “Oh, of course! I presume,” said Irene, thoughtfully, “we shall have to have Gibbon.”

  “If you want to read him,” said Corey, with a laugh of sympathy for an imaginable joke.

  “We had a great deal about him at school. I believe we had one of his books. Mine’s lost, but Pen will remember.”

  The young man looked at her, and then said, seriously, “You’ll want Greene, of course, and Motley, and Parkman.”

  “Yes. What kind of writers are they?”

  “They’re historians too.”

  “Oh yes; I remember now. That’s what Gibbon was. Is it Gibbon or Gibbons?”

  The young man decided the point with apparently superfluous delicacy. “Gibbon, I think.”

  “There used to be so many of them,” said Irene gaily. “I used to get them mixed up with each other, and I couldn’t tell them from the poets. Should you want to have poetry?”

  “Yes; I suppose some edition of the English poets.”

  “We don’t any of us like poetry. Do you like it?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t very much,” Corey owned. “But, of course, there was a time when Tennyson was a great deal more to me than he is now.”

  “We had something about him at school too. I think I remember the name. I think we ought to have all the American poets.”

  “Well, not all. Five or six of the best: you want Longfellow, and Bryant and Whittier and Holmes and Emerson and Lowell.”

  The girl listened attentively, as if making mental note of the names.

  “And Shakespeare,” she added. “Don’t you like Shakespeare’s plays?”

  “Oh yes, very much.”

  “I used to be perfectly crazy about his plays. Don’t you think Hamlet is splendid? We had ever so much about Shakespeare. Weren’t you perfectly astonished when you found out how many other plays of his there were? I always thought there was nothing but Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth and Richard III and King Lear, and that one Robeson and Crane have—oh yes! Comedy of Errors.”

  “Those are the ones they usually play,” said Corey.

  “I presume we shall have to have Scott’s works,” said Irene, returning to the question of books.

  “Oh yes.”

  “One of the girls used to think he was great. She was always talking about Scott.” Irene made a pretty little amiably contemptuous mouth. “He isn’t American, though?” she suggested.

  “No,” said Corey; “he’s Scotch, I believe.”

  Irene passed her glove over her forehead. “I always get him mixed up with Cooper. Well, Papa has got to get them. If we have a library, we have got to have books in it. Pen says it’s perfectly ridiculous having one. But Papa thinks whatever the architect says is right. He fought him hard enough at first. I don’t see how anyone can keep the poets and the historians and novelists separate in their mind. Of course, Papa will buy them if we say so. But I don’t see how I’m ever going to tell him which ones.” The joyous light faded out of her face and left it pensive.

  “Why, if you like,” said the young man, taking out his pencil, “I’ll put down the names we’ve been talking about.”

  He clapped himself on his breast pockets to detect some lurking scrap of paper.

  “Will you?” she cried delightedly. “Here! take one of my cards,” and she pulled out her card case. “The carpenter writes on a three-cornered block and puts it into his pocket, and it’s so uncomfortable he can’t help remembering it. Pen says she’s going to adopt the three-cornered-block plan with Papa.”

  “Thank you,” said Corey. “I believe I’ll use your card.” He crossed over to her, and after a moment sat down on the trestle beside her. She looked over the card as he wrote. “Those are the ones we mentioned, but perhaps I’d better add a few others.”

  “Oh, thank you,” she said, when he had written the card full on both sides. “He has got to get them in the nicest binding, too. I shall tell him about their helping to furnish the room, and then he can’t object.” She remained with the card, looking at it rather wistfully.

  Perhaps Corey divined her trouble of mind. “If he will take that to any bookseller, and tell him what bindings he wants, he will fill the order for him.”

  “Oh, thank you very much,” she said, and put the card back into her card case with great apparent relief. Then she turned her lovely face toward the young man, beaming with the triumph a woman feels in any bit of successful maneuvering, and began to talk with recovered gaiety of other things, as if, having got rid of a matter annoying out of all proportion to its importance, she was now going to indemnify herself.

  Corey did not return to his own trestle. She found another shaving within reach of her parasol, and began poking that with it and trying to follow it through its folds. Corey watched her awhile.

  “You seem to have a great passion for playing with shavings,” he said. “Is it a new one?”

  “New what?”

  “Passion.”

  “I don’t know,” she said, dropping her eyelids and keeping on with her effort. She looked shyly aslant at him. “Perhaps you don’t approve of playing with shavings?”

  “Oh yes, I do. I admire it very much. But it seems rather difficult. I’ve a great ambition to put my foot on the shaving’s tail and hold it for you.”

  “Well,” said the girl.

  “Thank you,” said the young man. He did so, and now she ran her parasol point easily through it. They looked at each other and laughed. “That was wonderful. Would you like to try another?” he asked.

  “No, I thank you,” she replied. “I think one will do.”

  They both laughed again, for whatever reason or no reason, and then the young girl became sober. To a girl everything a young man does is of significance; and if he holds a shaving down with his foot while she pokes through it with her parasol, she must ask herself what he means by it.

  “They seem to be having rather a long interview with the carpenter today,” said Irene, looking vaguely toward the ceiling. She turned with polite ceremony to Corey. “I’m afraid you’re letting them keep you. You mustn’t.”

  “Oh, no. You’re letting me stay,” he returned.

  She bridled and bit her lip for pleasure. “I presume they will be down before a great while. Don’t you like the smell of the wood and the mortar? It’s so fresh.”

  “Yes, it’s delicious.” He bent forward and picked up from the floor the shavi
ng with which they had been playing, and put it to his nose. “It’s like a flower. May I offer it to you?” he asked, as if it had been one.

  “Oh, thank you, thank you!” She took it from him and put it into her belt, and then they both laughed once more.

  Steps were heard descending. When the elder people reached the floor where they were sitting, Corey rose and presently took his leave.

  “What makes you so solemn, ’Rene?” asked Mrs. Lapham.

  “Solemn?” echoed the girl. “I’m not a bit solemn. What can you mean?”

  Corey dined at home that evening, and as he sat looking across the table at his father, he said, “I wonder what the average literature of noncultivated people is.”

  “Ah,” said the elder, “I suspect the average is pretty low even with cultivated people. You don’t read a great many books yourself, Tom.”

  “No, I don’t,” the young man confessed. “I read more books when I was with Stanton, last winter, than I had since I was a boy. But I read them because I must—there was nothing else to do. It wasn’t because I was fond of reading. Still I think I read with some sense of literature and the difference between authors. I don’t suppose that people generally do that; I have met people who had read books without troubling themselves to find out even the author’s name, much less trying to decide upon his quality. I suppose that’s the way the vast majority of people read.”

  “Yes. If authors were not almost necessarily recluses, and ignorant of the ignorance about them, I don’t see how they could endure it. Of course, they are fated to be overwhelmed by oblivion at last, poor fellows; but to see it weltering all ’round them while they are in the very act of achieving immortality must be tremendously discouraging. I don’t suppose that we who have the habit of reading, and at least a nodding acquaintance with literature, can imagine the bestial darkness of the great mass of people—even people whose houses are rich and whose linen is purple and fine. But occasionally we get glimpses of it. I suppose you found the latest publications lying all about in Lapham cottage when you were down there?”