The Rise of Silas Lapham

by William Dean Howells

  These conditions, however, so perilous to the foreigner, are a source of strength and security to those native to them. An uncertain acquaintance may be so effectually involved in the meshes of such a cousinship, as never to be heard of outside of it, and tremendous stories are told of people who have spent a whole winter in Boston, in a whirl of gaiety, and who, the original guests of the Suffolks, discover upon reflection that they have met no one but Essexes and Middlesexes.

  Mrs. Corey’s brother James came first into her mind, and she thought with uncommon toleration of the easygoing, uncritical good nature of his wife. James Bellingham had been the adviser of her son throughout, and might be said to have actively promoted his connection with Lapham. She thought next of the widow of her cousin Henry Bellingham, who had let her daughter marry that Western steamboat man, and was fond of her son-in-law; she might be expected at least to endure the paint king and his family. The daughters insisted so strongly upon Mrs. Bellingham’s son Charles, that Mrs. Corey put him down—if he were in town; he might be in Central America; he got on with all sorts of people. It seemed to her that she might stop at this: four Laphams, five Coreys, and four Bellinghams were enough.

  “That makes thirteen,” said Nanny. “You can have Mr. and Mrs. Sewell.”

  “Yes, that is a good idea,” assented Mrs. Corey. “He is our minister, and it is very proper.”

  “I don’t see why you don’t have Robert Chase. It is a pity he shouldn’t see her—for the color.”

  “I don’t quite like the idea of that,” said Mrs. Corey; “but we can have him too, if it won’t make too many.” The painter had married into a poorer branch of the Coreys, and his wife was dead. “Is there anyone else?”

  “There is Miss Kingsbury.”

  “We have had her so much. She will begin to think we are using her.”

  “She won’t mind; she’s so good-natured.”

  “Well, then,” the mother summed up, “there are four Laphams, five Coreys, four Bellinghams, one Chase, and one Kingsbury—fifteen. Oh! and two Sewells. Seventeen. Ten ladies and seven gentlemen. It doesn’t balance very well, and it’s too large.”

  “Perhaps some of the ladies won’t come,” suggested Lily.

  “Oh, the ladies always come,” said Nanny.

  Their mother reflected. “Well, I will ask them. The ladies will refuse in time to let us pick up some gentlemen somewhere; some more artists. Why! we must have Mr. Seymour, the architect; he’s a bachelor, and he’s building their house, Tom says.”

  Her voice fell a little when she mentioned her son’s name, and she told him of her plan, when he came home in the evening, with evident misgiving.

  “What are you doing it for, Mother?” he asked, looking at her with his honest eyes.

  She dropped her own in a little confusion. “I won’t do it at all, my dear,” she said, “if you don’t approve. But I thought— You know we have never made any proper acknowledgment of their kindness to us at Baie St. Paul. Then in the winter, I’m ashamed to say, I got money from her for a charity I was interested in; and I hate the idea of merely using people in that way. And now your having been at their house this summer—we can’t seem to disapprove of that; and your business relations to him—”

  “Yes, I see,” said Corey. “Do you think it amounts to a dinner?”

  “Why, I don’t know,” returned his mother. “We shall have hardly anyone out of our family connection.”

  “Well,” Corey assented, “it might do. I suppose what you wish is to give them a pleasure.”

  “Why, certainly. Don’t you think they’d like to come?”

  “Oh, they’d like to come; but whether it would be a pleasure after they were here is another thing. I should have said that if you wanted to have them, they would enjoy better being simply asked to meet our own immediate family.”

  “That’s what I thought of in the first place, but your father seemed to think it implied a social distrust of them; and we couldn’t afford to have that appearance, even to ourselves.”

  “Perhaps he was right.”

  “And besides, it might seem a little significant.”

  Corey seemed inattentive to this consideration. “Whom did you think of asking?” His mother repeated the names. “Yes, that would do,” he said, with a vague dissatisfaction.

  “I won’t have it at all, if you don’t wish, Tom.”

  “Oh yes, have it; perhaps you ought. Yes, I daresay it’s right. What did you mean by a family dinner seeming significant?”

  His mother hesitated. When it came to that, she did not like to recognize in his presence the anxieties that had troubled her. But “I don’t know,” she said, since she must. “I shouldn’t want to give that young girl, or her mother, the idea that we wished to make more of the acquaintance than—than you did, Tom.”

  He looked at her absentmindedly, as if he did not take her meaning. But he said, “Oh yes, of course,” and Mrs. Corey, in the uncertainty in which she seemed destined to remain concerning this affair, went off and wrote her invitation to Mrs. Lapham. Later in the evening, when they again found themselves alone, her son said, “I don’t think I understood you, Mother, in regard to the Laphams. I think I do now. I certainly don’t wish you to make more of the acquaintance than I have done. It wouldn’t be right; it might be very unfortunate. Don’t give the dinner!”

  “It’s too late now, my son,” said Mrs. Corey. “I sent my note to Mrs. Lapham an hour ago.” Her courage rose at the trouble which showed in Corey’s face. “But don’t be annoyed by it, Tom. It isn’t a family dinner, you know, and everything can be managed without embarrassment. If we take up the affair at this point, you will seem to have been merely acting for us; and they can’t possibly understand anything more.”

  “Well, well! Let it go! I daresay it’s all right. At any rate, it can’t be helped now.”

  “I don’t wish to help it, Tom,” said Mrs. Corey, with a cheerfulness which the thought of the Laphams had never brought her before. “I am sure it is quite fit and proper, and we can make them have a very pleasant time. They are good, inoffensive people, and we owe it to ourselves not to be afraid to show that we have felt their kindness to us, and his appreciation of you.”

  “Well,” consented Corey. The trouble that his mother had suddenly cast off was in his tone; but she was not sorry. It was quite time that he should think seriously of his attitude toward these people if he had not thought of it before, but, according to his father’s theory, had been merely dangling.

  It was a view of her son’s character that could hardly have pleased her in different circumstances, yet it was now unquestionably a consolation if not wholly a pleasure. If she considered the Laphams at all, it was with the resignation which we feel at the evils of others, even when they have not brought them on themselves.

  Mrs. Lapham, for her part, had spent the hours between Mrs. Corey’s visit and her husband’s coming home from business in reaching the same conclusion with regard to Corey; and her spirits were at the lowest when they sat down to supper. Irene was downcast with her; Penelope was purposely gay; and the Colonel was beginning, after his first plate of the boiled ham—which, bristling with cloves, rounded its bulk on a wide platter before him—to take note of the surrounding mood, when the doorbell jingled peremptorily, and the girl left waiting on the table to go and answer it. She returned at once with a note for Mrs. Lapham, which she read, and then, after a helpless survey of her family, read again.

  “Why, what is it, Mama?” asked Irene, while the Colonel, who had taken up his carving knife for another attack on the ham, held it drawn half across it.

  “Why, I don’t know what it does mean,” answered Mrs. Lapham tremulously, and she let the girl take the note from her.

  Irene ran it over, and then turned to the name at the end with a joyful cry and a flush that burned to the top of her forehead. Then sh
e began to read it once more.

  The Colonel dropped his knife and frowned impatiently, and Mrs. Lapham said, “You read it out loud, if you know what to make of it, Irene.” But Irene, with a nervous scream of protest, handed it to her father, who performed the office.

  Dear Mrs. Lapham:

  Will you and General Lapham—

  “I didn’t know I was a general,” grumbled Lapham. “I guess I shall have to be looking up my back pay. Who is it writes this, anyway?” he asked, turning the letter over for the signature.

  “Oh, never mind. Read it through!” cried his wife, with a kindling glance of triumph at Penelope, and he resumed:

  —and your daughters give us the pleasure of your company at dinner on Thursday, the 28th, at half-past six.

  Yours sincerely,

  Anna B. Corey

  The brief invitation had been spread over two pages, and the Colonel had difficulties with the signature which he did not instantly surmount. When he had made out the name and pronounced it, he looked across at his wife for an explanation.

  “I don’t know what it all means,” she said, shaking her head and speaking with a pleased flutter. “She was here this afternoon, and I should have said she had come to see how bad she could make us feel. I declare I never felt so put down in my life by anybody.”

  “Why, what did she do? What did she say?” Lapham was ready, in his dense pride, to resent any affront to his blood, but doubtful, with the evidence of this invitation to the contrary, if any affront had been offered. Mrs. Lapham tried to tell him, but there was really nothing tangible; and when she came to put it into words, she could not make out a case. Her husband listened to her excited attempt, and then he said, with judicial superiority, “I guess nobody’s been trying to make you feel bad, Persis. What would she go right home and invite you to dinner for, if she’d acted the way you say?”

  In this view it did seem improbable, and Mrs. Lapham was shaken. She could only say, “Penelope felt just the way I did about it.”

  Lapham looked at the girl, who said, “Oh, I can’t prove it! I begin to think it never happened. I guess it didn’t.”

  “Humph!” said her father, and he sat frowning thoughtfully awhile—ignoring her mocking irony, or choosing to take her seriously. “You can’t really put your finger on anything,” he said to his wife, “and it ain’t likely there is anything. Anyway, she’s done the proper thing by you now.”

  Mrs. Lapham faltered between her lingering resentment and the appeals of her flattered vanity. She looked from Penelope’s impassive face to the eager eyes of Irene. “Well—just as you say, Silas. I don’t know as she was so very bad. I guess maybe she was embarrassed some—”

  “That’s what I told you, Mama, from the start,” interrupted Irene. “Didn’t I tell you she didn’t mean anything by it? It’s just the way she acted at Baie St. Paul, when she got well enough to realize what you’d done for her!”

  Penelope broke into a laugh. “Is that her way of showing her gratitude? I’m sorry I didn’t understand that before.”

  Irene made no effort to reply. She merely looked from her mother to her father with a grieved face for their protection, and Lapham said, “When we’ve done supper, you answer her, Persis. Say we’ll come.”

  “With one exception,” said Penelope.

  “What do you mean?” demanded her father, with a mouth full of ham.

  “Oh, nothing of importance. Merely that I’m not going.”

  Lapham gave himself time to swallow his morsel, and his rising wrath went down with it. “I guess you’ll change your mind when the time comes,” he said. “Anyway, Persis, you say we’ll all come, and then, if Penelope don’t want to go, you can excuse her after we get there. That’s the best way.”

  None of them, apparently, saw any reason why the affair should not be left in this way, or had a sense of the awful and binding nature of a dinner engagement. If she believed that Penelope would not finally change her mind and go, no doubt Mrs. Lapham thought that Mrs. Corey would easily excuse her absence. She did not find it so simple a matter to accept the invitation. Mrs. Corey had said “Dear Mrs. Lapham,” but Mrs. Lapham had her doubts whether it would not be a servile imitation to say “Dear Mrs. Corey” in return; and she was tormented as to the proper phrasing throughout and the precise temperature which she should impart to her politeness. She wrote an unpracticed, uncharacteristic round hand, the same in which she used to set the children’s copies at school, and she subscribed herself, after some hesitation between her husband’s given name and her own, “Yours truly, Mrs. S. Lapham.”

  Penelope had gone to her room, without waiting to be asked to advise or criticize; but Irene had decided upon the paper, and on the whole, Mrs. Lapham’s note made a very decent appearance on the page.

  When the furnace man came, the Colonel sent him out to post it in the box at the corner of the square. He had determined not to say anything more about the matter before the girls, not choosing to let them see that he was elated; he tried to give the effect of its being an everyday sort of thing, abruptly closing the discussion with his order to Mrs. Lapham to accept; but he had remained swelling behind his newspaper during her prolonged struggle with her note, and he could no longer hide his elation when Irene followed her sister upstairs.

  “Well, Pers,” he demanded, “what do you say now?”

  Mrs. Lapham had been sobered into something of her former misgiving by her difficulties with her note. “Well, I don’t know what to say. I declare, I’m all mixed up about it, and I don’t know as we’ve begun as we can carry out in promising to go. I presume,” she sighed, “that we can all send some excuse at the last moment, if we don’t want to go.”

  “I guess we can carry out, and I guess we shan’t want to send any excuse,” bragged the Colonel. “If we’re ever going to be anybody at all, we’ve got to go and see how it’s done. I presume we’ve got to give some sort of party when we get into the new house, and this gives the chance to ask ’em back again. You can’t complain now but what they’ve made the advances, Persis?”

  “No,” said Mrs. Lapham lifelessly; “I wonder why they wanted to do it. Oh, I suppose it’s all right,” she added in deprecation of the anger with her humility which she saw rising in her husband’s face; “but if it’s all going to be as much trouble as that letter, I’d rather be whipped. I don’t know what I’m going to wear; or the girls either. I do wonder—I’ve heard that people go to dinner in low necks. Do you suppose it’s the custom?”

  “How should I know?” demanded the Colonel. “I guess you’ve got clothes enough. Any rate, you needn’t fret about it. You just go ’round to White’s or Jordan & Marsh’s, and ask for a dinner dress. I guess that’ll settle it; they’ll know. Get some of them imported dresses. I see ’em in the window every time I pass; lots of ’em.”

  “Oh, it ain’t the dress!” said Mrs. Lapham. “I don’t suppose but what we could get along with that; and I want to do the best we can for the children; but I don’t know what we’re going to talk about to those people when we get there. We haven’t got anything in common with them. Oh, I don’t say they’re any better,” she again made haste to say in arrest of her husband’s resentment. “I don’t believe they are; and I don’t see why they should be. And there ain’t anybody has got a better right to hold up their head than you have, Silas. You’ve got plenty of money, and you’ve made every cent of it.”

  “I guess I shouldn’t amounted to much without you, Per-sis,” interposed Lapham, moved to this justice by her praise.

  “Oh, don’t talk about me!” protested the wife. “Now that you’ve made it all right about Rogers, there ain’t a thing in this world against you. But still, for all that, I can see—and I can feel it when I can’t see it—that we’re different from those people. They’re well meaning enough, and they’d excuse it, I presume, but we’re too old to learn to be like th
em.”

  “The children ain’t,” said Lapham shrewdly.

  “No, the children ain’t,” admitted his wife, “and that’s the only thing that reconciles me to it.”

  “You see how pleased Irene looked when I read it?”

  “Yes, she was pleased.”

  “And I guess Penelope’ll think better of it before the time comes.”

  “Oh yes, we do it for them. But whether we’re doing the best thing for ’em, goodness knows. I’m not saying anything against him. Irene’ll be a lucky girl to get him, if she wants him. But there! I’d ten times rather she was going to marry such a fellow as you were, Si, that had to make every inch of his own way, and she had to help him. It’s in her!”

  Lapham laughed aloud for pleasure in his wife’s fondness; but neither of them wished that he should respond directly to it. “I guess, if it wasn’t for me, he wouldn’t have a much easier time. But don’t you fret! It’s all coming out right. That dinner ain’t a thing for you to be uneasy about. It’ll pass off perfectly easy and natural.”