Part 1 (1/2)

The Rise of Silas Lapham.

by William Dean Howells.

I.

WHEN Bartley Hubbard went to interview Silas Lapham for the ”Solid Men of Boston” series, which he undertook to finish up in The Events, after he replaced their original projector on that newspaper, Lapham received him in his private office by previous appointment.

”Walk right in!” he called out to the journalist, whom he caught sight of through the door of the counting-room.

He did not rise from the desk at which he was writing, but he gave Bartley his left hand for welcome, and he rolled his large head in the direction of a vacant chair. ”Sit down! I'll be with you in just half a minute.”

”Take your time,” said Bartley, with the ease he instantly felt. ”I'm in no hurry.” He took a note-book from his pocket, laid it on his knee, and began to sharpen a pencil.

”There!” Lapham pounded with his great hairy fist on the envelope he had been addressing.

”William!” he called out, and he handed the letter to a boy who came to get it. ”I want that to go right away. Well, sir,” he continued, wheeling round in his leather-cus.h.i.+oned swivel-chair, and facing Bartley, seated so near that their knees almost touched, ”so you want my life, death, and Christian sufferings, do you, young man?”

”That's what I'm after,” said Bartley. ”Your money or your life.”

”I guess you wouldn't want my life without the money,” said Lapham, as if he were willing to prolong these moments of preparation.

”Take 'em both,” Bartley suggested. ”Don't want your money without your life, if you come to that. But you're just one million times more interesting to the public than if you hadn't a dollar; and you know that as well as I do, Mr. Lapham. There's no use beating about the bush.”

”No,” said Lapham, somewhat absently. He put out his huge foot and pushed the ground-gla.s.s door shut between his little den and the book-keepers, in their larger den outside.

”In personal appearance,” wrote Bartley in the sketch for which he now studied his subject, while he waited patiently for him to continue, ”Silas Lapham is a fine type of the successful American. He has a square, bold chin, only partially concealed by the short reddish-grey beard, growing to the edges of his firmly closing lips. His nose is short and straight; his forehead good, but broad rather than high; his eyes blue, and with a light in them that is kindly or sharp according to his mood. He is of medium height, and fills an average arm-chair with a solid bulk, which on the day of our interview was unpretentiously clad in a business suit of blue serge. His head droops somewhat from a short neck, which does not trouble itself to rise far from a pair of ma.s.sive shoulders.”

”I don't know as I know just where you want me to begin,” said Lapham.

”Might begin with your birth; that's where most of us begin,” replied Bartley.

A gleam of humorous appreciation shot into Lapham's blue eyes.

”I didn't know whether you wanted me to go quite so far back as that,”

he said. ”But there's no disgrace in having been born, and I was born in the State of Vermont, pretty well up under the Canada line--so well up, in fact, that I came very near being an adoptive citizen; for I was bound to be an American of SOME sort, from the word Go! That was about--well, let me see!--pretty near sixty years ago: this is '75, and that was '20. Well, say I'm fifty-five years old; and I've LIVED 'em, too; not an hour of waste time about ME, anywheres! I was born on a farm, and----”

”Worked in the fields summers and went to school winters: regulation thing?” Bartley cut in.

”Regulation thing,” said Lapham, accepting this irreverent version of his history somewhat dryly.

”Parents poor, of course,” suggested the journalist. ”Any barefoot business? Early deprivations of any kind, that would encourage the youthful reader to go and do likewise? Orphan myself, you know,” said Bartley, with a smile of cynical good-comradery.

Lapham looked at him silently, and then said with quiet self-respect, ”I guess if you see these things as a joke, my life won't interest you.”

”Oh yes, it will,” returned Bartley, unabashed. ”You'll see; it'll come out all right.” And in fact it did so, in the interview which Bartley printed.

”Mr. Lapham,” he wrote, ”pa.s.sed rapidly over the story of his early life, its poverty and its hards.h.i.+ps, sweetened, however, by the recollections of a devoted mother, and a father who, if somewhat her inferior in education, was no less ambitious for the advancement of his children. They were quiet, unpretentious people, religious, after the fas.h.i.+on of that time, and of sterling morality, and they taught their children the simple virtues of the Old Testament and Poor Richard's Almanac.”

Bartley could not deny himself this gibe; but he trusted to Lapham's unliterary habit of mind for his security in making it, and most other people would consider it sincere reporter's rhetoric.

”You know,” he explained to Lapham, ”that we have to look at all these facts as material, and we get the habit of cla.s.sifying them. Sometimes a leading question will draw out a whole line of facts that a man himself would never think of.” He went on to put several queries, and it was from Lapham's answers that he generalised the history of his childhood. ”Mr. Lapham, although he did not dwell on his boyish trials and struggles, spoke of them with deep feeling and an abiding sense of their reality.” This was what he added in the interview, and by the time he had got Lapham past the period where risen Americans are all pathetically alike in their narrow circ.u.mstances, their sufferings, and their aspirations, he had beguiled him into forgetfulness of the check he had received, and had him talking again in perfect enjoyment of his autobiography.

”Yes, sir,” said Lapham, in a strain which Bartley was careful not to interrupt again, ”a man never sees all that his mother has been to him till it's too late to let her know that he sees it. Why, my mother--”

he stopped. ”It gives me a lump in the throat,” he said apologetically, with an attempt at a laugh. Then he went on: ”She was a little frail thing, not bigger than a good-sized intermediate school-girl; but she did the whole work of a family of boys, and boarded the hired men besides. She cooked, swept, washed, ironed, made and mended from daylight till dark--and from dark till daylight, I was going to say; for I don't know how she got any time for sleep. But I suppose she did. She got time to go to church, and to teach us to read the Bible, and to misunderstand it in the old way. She was GOOD. But it ain't her on her knees in church that comes back to me so much like the sight of an angel as her on her knees before me at night, was.h.i.+ng my poor, dirty little feet, that I'd run bare in all day, and making me decent for bed. There were six of us boys; it seems to me we were all of a size; and she was just so careful with all of us. I can feel her hands on my feet yet!” Bartley looked at Lapham's No. 10 boots, and softly whistled through his teeth. ”We were patched all over; but we wa'n't ragged. I don't know how she got through it. She didn't seem to think it was anything; and I guess it was no more than my father expected of her. HE worked like a horse in doors and out--up at daylight, feeding the stock, and groaning round all day with his rheumatism, but not stopping.”