The Rise of Silas Lapham

The Rise of Silas Lapham

by

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-cushioned 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-glass 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 massive 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.

AFTER dropping Bartley Hubbard at the Events building, Lapham drove on

down Washington Street to Nankeen Square at the South End, where he had

lived ever since the mistaken movement of society in that direction

ceased. He had not built, but had bought very cheap of a terrified

gentleman of good extraction who discovered too late that the South End

was not the thing, and who in the eagerness of his flight to the Back

Bay threw in his carpets and shades for almost nothing. Mrs. Lapham

was even better satisfied with their bargain than the Colonel himself,

and they had lived in Nankeen Square for twelve years. They had seen

the saplings planted in the pretty oval round which the houses were

built flourish up into sturdy young trees, and their two little girls

in the same period had grown into young ladies; the Colonel's tough

frame had expanded into the bulk which Bartley's interview indicated;

and Mrs. Lapham, while keeping a more youthful outline, showed the

sharp print of the crow's-foot at the corners of her motherly eyes, and

certain slight creases in her wholesome cheeks. The fact that they

lived in an unfashionable neighbourhood was something that they had

never been made to feel to their personal disadvantage, and they had

hardly known it till the summer before this story opens, when Mrs.

Lapham and her daughter Irene had met some other Bostonians far from

Boston, who made it memorable. They were people whom chance had

brought for the time under a singular obligation to the Lapham ladies,

and they were gratefully recognisant of it. They had ventured--a

mother and two daughters--as far as a rather wild little Canadian

watering-place on the St. Lawrence, below Quebec, and had arrived some

days before their son and brother was expected to join them. Two of

their trunks had gone astray, and on the night of their arrival the

mother was taken violently ill. Mrs. Lapham came to their help, with

her skill as nurse, and with the abundance of her own and her

daughter's wardrobe, and a profuse, single-hearted kindness. When a

doctor could be got at, he said that but for Mrs. Lapham's timely care,

the lady would hardly have lived. He was a very effusive little

Frenchman, and fancied he was saying something very pleasant to

everybody.

A certain intimacy inevitably followed, and when the son came he was

even more grateful than the others. Mrs. Lapham could not quite

understand why he should be as attentive to her as to Irene; but she

compared him with other young men about the place, and thought him

nicer than any of them. She had not the means of a wider comparison;

for in Boston, with all her husband's prosperity, they had not had a

social life. Their first years there were given to careful getting on

Lapham's part, and careful saving on his wife's. Suddenly the money

began to come so abundantly that she need not save; and then they did

not know what to do with it. A certain amount could be spent on

horses, and Lapham spent it; his wife spent on rich and rather ugly

clothes and a luxury of household appointments. Lapham had not yet

reached the picture-buying stage of the rich man's development, but

they decorated their house with the costliest and most abominable

frescoes; they went upon journeys, and lavished upon cars and hotels;

they gave with both hands to their church and to all the charities it

brought them acquainted with; but they did not know how to spend on

society. Up to a certain period Mrs. Lapham had the ladies of her

neighbourhood in to tea, as her mother had done in the country in her

younger days. Lapham's idea of hospitality was still to bring a

heavy-buying customer home to pot-luck; neither of them imagined

dinners.

Their two girls had gone to the public schools, where they had not got