“Oh, I don’t think that would be exactly the way, sir,” said the son, smiling at his father’s patrician unworldliness.
“No? Why not?”
“I’m afraid it would be a bad start. I don’t think it would strike him as business-like.”
“I don’t see why he should be punctilious, if we’re not.”
“Ah, we might say that if he were making the advances.”
“Well, perhaps you are right, Tom. What is your idea?”
“I haven’t a very clear one. It seems to me I ought to get some business friend of ours, whose judgment he would respect, to speak a good word for me.”
“Give you a character?”
“Yes. And of course I must go to Colonel Lapham. My notion would be to inquire pretty thoroughly about him, and then, if I liked the look of things, to go right down to Republic Street and let him see what he could do with me, if anything.”
“That sounds tremendously practical to me, Tom, though it may be just the wrong way. When are you going down to Mount Desert?”
“To-morrow, I think, sir,” said the young man. “I shall turn it over in my mind while I’m off.”
The father rose, showing something more than his son’s height, with a very slight stoop, which the son’s figure had not. “Well,” he said, whimsically, “I admire your spirit, and I don’t deny that it is justified by necessity. It’s a consolation to think that while I’ve been spending and enjoying, I have been preparing the noblest future for you — a future of industry and self-reliance. You never could draw, but this scheme of going into the mineral-paint business shows that you have inherited something of my feeling for colour.”
The son laughed once more, and waiting till his father was well on his way upstairs, turned out the gas and then hurried after him and preceded him into his chamber. He glanced over it to see that everything was there, to his father’s hand. Then he said, “Good night, sir,” and the elder responded, “Good night, my son,” and the son went to his own room.
Over the mantel in the elder Corey’s room hung a portrait which he had painted of his own father, and now he stood a moment and looked at this as if struck by something novel in it. The resemblance between his son and the old India merchant, who had followed the trade from Salem to Boston when the larger city drew it away from the smaller, must have been what struck him. Grandfather and grandson had both the Roman nose which appears to have flourished chiefly at the formative period of the republic, and which occurs more rarely in the descendants of the conscript fathers, though it still characterises the profiles of a good many Boston ladies. Bromfield Corey had not inherited it, and he had made his straight nose his defence when the old merchant accused him of a want of energy. He said, “What could a man do whose unnatural father had left his own nose away from him?” This amused but did not satisfy the merchant. “You must do something,” he said; “and it’s for you to choose. If you don’t like the India trade, go into something else. Or, take up law or medicine. No Corey yet ever proposed to do nothing.”
“Ah, then, it’s quite time one of us made a beginning,” urged the man who was then young, and who was now old, looking into the somewhat fierce eyes of his father’s portrait. He had inherited as little of the fierceness as of the nose, and there was nothing predatory in his son either, though the aquiline beak had come down to him in such force. Bromfield Corey liked his son Tom for the gentleness which tempered his energy.
“Well let us compromise,” he seemed to be saying to his father’s portrait. “I will travel.”
“Travel? How long?” the keen eyes demanded. “Oh, indefinitely. I won’t be hard with you, father.” He could see the eyes soften, and the smile of yielding come over his father’s face; the merchant could not resist a son who was so much like his dead mother. There was some vague understanding between them that Bromfield Corey was to come back and go into business after a time, but he never did so. He travelled about over Europe, and travelled handsomely, frequenting good society everywhere, and getting himself presented at several courts, at a period when it was a distinction to do so. He had always sketched, and with his father’s leave he fixed himself at Rome, where he remained studying art and rounding the being inherited from his Yankee progenitors, till there was very little left of the ancestral angularities. After ten years he came home and painted that portrait of his father. It was very good, if a little amateurish, and he might have made himself a name as a painter of portraits if he had not had so much money. But he had plenty of money, though by this time he was married and beginning to have a family. It was absurd for him to paint portraits for pay, and ridiculous to paint them for nothing; so he did not paint them at all. He continued a dilettante, never quite abandoning his art, but working at it fitfully, and talking more about it than working at it. He had his theory of Titian’s method; and now and then a Bostonian insisted upon buying a picture of him. After a while he hung it more and more inconspicuously, and said apologetically, “Oh yes! that’s one of Bromfield Corey’s things. It has nice qualities, but it’s amateurish.”
In process of time the money seemed less abundant. There were shrinkages of one kind and another, and living had grown much more expensive and luxurious. For many years he talked about going back to Rome, but he never went, and his children grew up in the usual way. Before he knew it his son had him out to his class-day spread at Harvard, and then he had his son on his hands. The son made various unsuccessful provisions for himself, and still continued upon his father’s hands, to their common dissatisfaction, though it was chiefly the younger who repined. He had the Roman nose and the energy without the opportunity, and at one of the reversions his father said to him, “You ought not to have that nose, Tom; then you would do very well. You would go and travel, as I did.”
LAPHAM and his wife continued talking after he had quelled the disturbance in his daughters’ room overhead; and their talk was not altogether of the new house.
“I tell you,” he said, “if I had that fellow in the business with me I would make a man of him.”
“Well, Silas Lapham,” returned his wife, “I do believe you’ve got mineral paint on the brain. Do you suppose a fellow like young Corey, brought up the way he’s been, would touch mineral paint with a ten-foot pole?”
“Why not?” haughtily asked the Colonel.
“Well, if you don’t know already, there’s no use trying to tell you.”
VI.
THE Coreys had always had a house at Nahant, but after letting it for a season or two they found they could get on without it, and sold it at the son’s instance, who foresaw that if things went on as they were going, the family would be straitened to the point of changing their mode of life altogether. They began to be of the people of whom it was said that they stayed in town very late; and when the ladies did go away, it was for a brief summering in this place and that. The father remained at home altogether; and the son joined them in the intervals of his enterprises, which occurred only too often.
At Bar Harbour, where he now went to find them, after his winter in Texas, he confessed to his mother that there seemed no very good opening there for him. He might do as well as Loring Stanton, but he doubted if Stanton was doing very well. Then he mentioned the new project which he had been thinking over. She did not deny that there was something in it, but she could not think of any young man who had gone into such a business as that, and it appeared to her that he might as well go into a patent medicine or a stove-polish.
“There was one of his hideous advertisements,” she said, “painted on a reef that we saw as we came down.”
Corey smiled. “Well, I suppose, if it was in a good state of preservation, that is proof positive of the efficacy of the paint on the hulls of vessels.”
“It’s very distasteful to me, Tom,” said his mother; and if there was something else in her mind, she did not speak more plainly of it than to add: “It’s not only the kind of business, but the kind of people you would be mixed u
p with.”
“I thought you didn’t find them so very bad,” suggested Corey.
“I hadn’t seen them in Nankeen Square then.”
“You can see them on the water side of Beacon Street when you go back.”
Then he told of his encounter with the Lapham family in their new house. At the end his mother merely said, “It is getting very common down there,” and she did not try to oppose anything further to his scheme.
The young man went to see Colonel Lapham shortly after his return to Boston. He paid his visit at Lapham’s office, and if he had studied simplicity in his summer dress he could not have presented himself in a figure more to the mind of a practical man. His hands and neck still kept the brown of the Texan suns and winds, and he looked as business-like as Lapham himself.
He spoke up promptly and briskly in the outer office, and caused the pretty girl to look away from her copying at him. “Is Mr. Lapham in?” he asked; and after that moment for reflection which an array of book-keepers so addressed likes to give the inquirer, a head was lifted from a ledger and nodded toward the inner office.
Lapham had recognised the voice, and he was standing, in considerable perplexity, to receive Corey, when the young man opened his painted glass door. It was a hot afternoon, and Lapham was in his shirt sleeves. Scarcely a trace of the boastful hospitality with which he had welcomed Corey to his house a few days before lingered in his present address. He looked at the young man’s face, as if he expected him to despatch whatever unimaginable affair he had come upon.
“Won’t you sit down? How are you? You’ll excuse me,” he added, in brief allusion to the shirt-sleeves. “I’m about roasted.”
Corey laughed. “I wish you’d let me take off MY coat.”
“Why, TAKE it off!” cried the Colonel, with instant pleasure. There is something in human nature which causes the man in his shirt-sleeves to wish all other men to appear in the same deshabille.
“I will, if you ask me after I’ve talked with you two minutes,” said the young fellow, companionably pulling up the chair offered him toward the desk where Lapham had again seated himself. “But perhaps you haven’t got two minutes to give me?”
“Oh yes, I have,” said the Colonel. “I was just going to knock off. I can give you twenty, and then I shall have fifteen minutes to catch the boat.”
“All right,” said Corey. “I want you to take me into the mineral paint business.”
The Colonel sat dumb. He twisted his thick neck, and looked round at the door to see if it was shut. He would not have liked to have any of those fellows outside hear him, but there is no saying what sum of money he would not have given if his wife had been there to hear what Corey had just said.
“I suppose,” continued the young man, “I could have got several people whose names you know to back my industry and sobriety, and say a word for my business capacity. But I thought I wouldn’t trouble anybody for certificates till I found whether there was a chance, or the ghost of one, of your wanting me. So I came straight to you.”
Lapham gathered himself together as well as he could. He had not yet forgiven Corey for Mrs. Lapham’s insinuation that he would feel himself too good for the mineral paint business; and though he was dispersed by that astounding shot at first, he was not going to let any one even hypothetically despise his paint with impunity. “How do you think I am going to take you on?” They took on hands at the works; and Lapham put it as if Corey were a hand coming to him for employment. Whether he satisfied himself by this or not, he reddened a little after he had said it.
Corey answered, ignorant of the offence: “I haven’t a very clear idea, I’m afraid; but I’ve been looking a little into the matter from the outside.”
“I hope you hain’t been paying any attention to that fellow’s stuff in the Events?” Lapham interrupted. Since Bartley’s interview had appeared, Lapham had regarded it with very mixed feelings. At first it gave him a glow of secret pleasure, blended with doubt as to how his wife would like the use Bartley had made of her in it. But she had not seemed to notice it much, and Lapham had experienced the gratitude of the man who escapes. Then his girls had begun to make fun of it; and though he did not mind Penelope’s jokes much, he did not like to see that Irene’s gentility was wounded. Business friends met him with the kind of knowing smile about it that implied their sense of the fraudulent character of its praise — the smile of men who had been there and who knew how it was themselves. Lapham had his misgivings as to how his clerks and underlings looked at it; he treated them with stately severity for a while after it came out, and he ended by feeling rather sore about it. He took it for granted that everybody had read it.
“I don’t know what you mean,” replied Corey, “I don’t see the Events regularly.”
“Oh, it was nothing. They sent a fellow down here to interview me, and he got everything about as twisted as he could.”
“I believe they always do,” said Corey. “I hadn’t seen it. Perhaps it came out before I got home.”
“Perhaps it did.”
“My notion of making myself useful to you was based on a hint I got from one of your own circulars.”
Lapham was proud of those circulars; he thought they read very well. “What was that?”
“I could put a little capital into the business,” said Corey, with the tentative accent of a man who chances a thing. “I’ve got a little money, but I didn’t imagine you cared for anything of that kind.”
“No, sir, I don’t,” returned the Colonel bluntly. “I’ve had one partner, and one’s enough.”
“Yes,” assented the young man, who doubtless had his own ideas as to eventualities — or perhaps rather had the vague hopes of youth. “I didn’t come to propose a partnership. But I see that you are introducing your paint into the foreign markets, and there I really thought I might be of use to you, and to myself too.”
“How?” asked the Colonel scantly.
“Well, I know two or three languages pretty well. I know French, and I know German, and I’ve got a pretty fair sprinkling of Spanish.”
“You mean that you can talk them?” asked the Colonel, with the mingled awe and slight that such a man feels for such accomplishments. “Yes; and I can write an intelligible letter in either of them.”
Lapham rubbed his nose. “It’s easy enough to get all the letters we want translated.”
“Well,” pursued Corey, not showing his discouragement if he felt any, “I know the countries where you want to introduce this paint of yours. I’ve been there. I’ve been in Germany and France and I’ve been in South America and Mexico; I’ve been in Italy, of course. I believe I could go to any of those countries and place it to advantage.”
Lapham had listened with a trace of persuasion in his face, but now he shook his head.
“It’s placing itself as fast as there’s any call for it. It wouldn’t pay us to send anybody out to look after it. Your salary and expenses would eat up about all we should make on it.”
“Yes,” returned the young man intrepidly, “if you had to pay me any salary and expenses.”
“You don’t propose to work for nothing?”
“I propose to work for a commission.” The Colonel was beginning to shake his head again, but Corey hurried on. “I haven’t come to you without making some inquiries about the paint, and I know how it stands with those who know best. I believe in it.”
Lapham lifted his head and looked at the young man, deeply moved.
“It’s the best paint in God’s universe,” he said with the solemnity of prayer.
“It’s the best in the market,” said Corey; and he repeated, “I believe in it.”
“You believe in it,” began the Colonel, and then he stopped. If there had really been any purchasing power in money, a year’s income would have bought Mrs. Lapham’s instant presence. He warmed and softened to the young man in every way, not only because he must do so to any one who believed in his paint, but because he had done t
his innocent person the wrong of listening to a defamation of his instinct and good sense, and had been willing to see him suffer for a purely supposititious offence.
Corey rose.
“You mustn’t let me outstay my twenty minutes,” he said, taking out his watch. “I don’t expect you to give a decided answer on the spot. All that I ask is that you’ll consider my proposition.”
“Don’t hurry,” said Lapham. “Sit still! I want to tell you about this paint,” he added, in a voice husky with the feeling that his hearer could not divine. “I want to tell you ALL about it.”
“I could walk with you to the boat,” suggested the young man.
“Never mind the boat! I can take the next one. Look here!” The Colonel pulled open a drawer, as Corey sat down again, and took out a photograph of the locality of the mine. “Here’s where we get it. This photograph don’t half do the place justice,” he said, as if the imperfect art had slighted the features of a beloved face. “It’s one of the sightliest places in the country, and here’s the very spot “ — he covered it with his huge forefinger— “where my father found that paint, more than forty — years — ago. Yes, sir!”
He went on, and told the story in unsparing detail, while his chance for the boat passed unheeded, and the clerks in the outer office hung up their linen office coats and put on their seersucker or flannel street coats. The young lady went too, and nobody was left but the porter, who made from time to time a noisy demonstration of fastening a distant blind, or putting something in place. At last the Colonel roused himself from the autobiographical delight of the history of his paint. “Well, sir, that’s the story.”
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells Page 229
