The Rise of Silas Lapham

by William Dean Howells

  For several months there was no communication between the families. Then there came to Nankeen Square a lithographed circular from the people on the Hill, signed in ink by the mother, and affording Mrs. Lapham an opportunity to subscribe for a charity of undeniable merit and acceptability. She submitted it to her husband, who promptly drew a check for five hundred dollars.

  She tore it in two. “I will take a check for a hundred, Silas,” she said.

  “Why?” he asked, looking up guiltily at her.

  “Because a hundred is enough; and I don’t want to show off before them.”

  “Oh, I thought maybe you did. Well, Pert,” he added, having satisfied human nature by the preliminary thrust, “I guess you’re about right. When do you want I should begin to build on Beacon Street?” He handed her the new check, where she stood over him, and then leaned back in his chair and looked up at her.

  “I don’t want you should begin at all. What do you mean, Silas?” She rested against the side of his desk.

  “Well, I don’t know as I mean anything. But shouldn’t you like to build? Everybody builds, at least once in a lifetime.”

  “Where is your lot? They say it’s unhealthy, over there.”

  Up to a certain point in their prosperity Mrs. Lapham had kept strict account of all her husband’s affairs; but as they expanded, and ceased to be of the retail nature with which women successfully grapple, the intimate knowledge of them made her nervous. There was a period in which she felt that they were being ruined, but the crash had not come; and, since his great success, she had abandoned herself to a blind confidence in her husband’s judgment, which she had hitherto felt needed her revision. He came and went, day by day, unquestioned. He bought and sold and got gain. She knew that he would tell her if ever things went wrong, and he knew that she would ask him whenever she was anxious.

  “It ain’t healthy where I’ve bought,” said Lapham, rather enjoying her insinuation. “I looked after that when I was trading; and I guess it’s about as healthy on the Back Bay as it is here, anyway. I got that lot for you, Pert; I thought you’d want to build on the Back Bay someday.”

  “Pshaw!” said Mrs. Lapham, deeply pleased inwardly, but not going to show it, as she would have said. “I guess you want to build there yourself.” She insensibly got a little nearer to her husband. They liked to talk to each other in that blunt way; it is the New England way of expressing perfect confidence and tenderness.

  “Well, I guess I do,” said Lapham, not insisting upon the unselfish view of the matter. “I always did like the water side of Beacon. There ain’t a sightlier place in the world for a house. And someday there’s bound to be a driveway all along behind them houses, between them and the water, and then a lot there is going to be worth the gold that will cover it—coin. I’ve had offers for that lot, Pert, twice over what I give for it. Yes, I have. Don’t you want to ride over there some afternoon with me and see it?”

  “I’m satisfied where we be, Si,” said Mrs. Lapham, recurring to the parlance of her youth in her pathos at her husband’s kindness. She sighed anxiously, for she felt the trouble a woman knows in view of any great change. They had often talked of altering over the house in which they lived, but they had never come to it; and they had often talked of building, but it had always been a house in the country that they had thought of. “I wish you had sold that lot.”

  “I hain’t,” said the Colonel briefly.

  “I don’t know as I feel much like changing our way of living.”

  “Guess we could live there pretty much as we live here. There’s all kinds of people on Beacon Street; you mustn’t think they’re all big-bugs. I know one party that lives in a house he built to sell, and his wife don’t keep any girl. You can have just as much style there as you want, or just as little. I guess we live as well as most of ’em now, and set as good a table. And if you come to style, I don’t know as anybody has got more of a right to put it on than what we have.”

  “Well, I don’t want to build on Beacon Street, Si,” said Mrs. Lapham gently.

  “Just as you please, Persis. I ain’t in any hurry to leave.”

  Mrs. Lapham stood flapping the check, which she held in her right hand against the edge of her left.

  The Colonel still sat looking up at her face, and watching the effect of the poison of ambition which he had artfully instilled into her mind.

  She sighed again—a yielding sigh. “What are you going to do this afternoon?”

  “I’m going to take a turn on the Brighton road,” said the Colonel.

  “I don’t believe but what I should like to go along,” said his wife.

  “All right. You hain’t ever rode that mare yet, Pert, and I want you should see me let her out once. They say the snow’s all packed down already, and the going is A 1.”

  At four o’clock in the afternoon, with a cold red winter sunset before them, the Colonel and his wife were driving slowly down Beacon Street in the light, high-seated cutter, where, as he said, they were a pretty tight fit. He was holding the mare in till the time came to speed her, and the mare was springily jolting over the snow, looking intelligently from side to side, and cocking this ear and that, while from her nostrils, her head tossing easily, she blew quick, irregular whiffs of steam.

  “Gay, ain’t she?” proudly suggested the Colonel.

  “She is gay,” assented his wife.

  They met swiftly dashing sleighs, and let them pass on either hand, down the beautiful avenue narrowing with an admirably even skyline in the perspective. They were not in a hurry. The mare jounced easily along, and they talked of the different houses on either side of the way. They had a crude taste in architecture, and they admired the worst. There were women’s faces at many of the handsome windows, and once in a while a young man on the pavement caught his hat suddenly from his head and bowed in response to some salutation from within.

  “I don’t think our girls would look very bad behind one of those big panes,” said the Colonel.

  “No,” said his wife dreamily.

  “Where’s the young man? Did he come with them?”

  “No; he was to spend the winter with a friend of his that has a ranch in Texas. I guess he’s got to do something.”

  “Yes; gentlemaning as a profession has got to play out in a generation or two.”

  Neither of them spoke of the lot, though Lapham knew perfectly well what his wife had come with him for, and she was aware that he knew it. The time came when he brought the mare down to a walk, and then slowed up almost to a stop, while they both turned their heads to the right and looked at the vacant lot, through which showed the frozen stretch of the Back Bay, a section of the Long Bridge, and the roofs and smokestacks of Charlestown.

  “Yes, it’s sightly,” said Mrs. Lapham, lifting her hand from the reins, on which she had unconsciously laid it.

  Lapham said nothing, but he let the mare out a little.

  The sleighs and cutters were thickening ’round them. On the Milldam it became difficult to restrict the mare to the long, slow trot into which he let her break. The beautiful landscape widened to right and left of them, with the sunset redder and redder, over the low, irregular hills before them. They crossed the Milldam into Longwood; and here, from the crest of the first upland, stretched two endless lines, in which thousands of cutters went and came. Some of the drivers were already speeding their horses, and these shot to and fro on inner lines, between the slowly moving vehicles on either side of the road. Here and there a burly mounted policeman, bulging over the pommel of his M’Clellan saddle, jolted by, silently gesturing and directing the course and keeping it all under the eye of the law. It was what Bartley Hubbard called “a carnival of fashion and gaiety on the Brighton road,” in his account of it. But most of the people in those elegant sleighs and cutters had so little the air of the great world that one knowing it at all must have
wondered where they and their money came from; and the gaiety of the men, at least, was expressed, like that of Colonel Lapham, in a grim, almost fierce, alertness; the women wore an air of courageous apprehension. At a certain point the Colonel said, “I’m going to let her out, Pert,” and he lifted and then dropped the reins lightly on the mare’s back.

  She understood the signal, and, as an admirer said, “she laid down to her work.” Nothing in the immutable iron of Lapham’s face betrayed his sense of triumph as the mare left everything behind her on the road. Mrs. Lapham, if she felt fear, was too busy holding her flying wraps about her, and shielding her face from the scud of ice flung from the mare’s heels, to betray it; except for the rush of her feet, the mare was as silent as the people behind her; the muscles of her back and thighs worked more and more swiftly, like some mechanism responding to an alien force, and she shot to the end of the course, grazing a hundred encountered and rival sledges in her passage, but unmolested by the policemen, who probably saw that the mare and the Colonel knew what they were about, and, at any rate, were not the sort of men to interfere with trotting like that. At the end of the heat, Lapham drew her in and turned off on a side street into Brookline.

  “Tell you what, Pert,” he said, as if they had been quietly jogging along, with time for uninterrupted thought since he last spoke, “I’ve about made up my mind to build on that lot.”

  “All right, Silas,” said Mrs. Lapham; “I suppose you know what you’re about. Don’t build on it for me, that’s all.”

  When she stood in the hall at home, taking off her things, she said to the girls, who were helping her, “Someday your father will get killed with that mare.”

  “Did he speed her?” asked Penelope, the elder. She was named after her grandmother, who had in her turn inherited from another ancestress the name of the Homeric matron whose peculiar merits won her a place even among the Puritan Faiths, Hopes, Temperances, and Prudences. Penelope was the girl whose odd, serious face had struck Bartley Hubbard in the photograph of the family group Lapham showed him in the day of the interview. Her large eyes, like her hair, were brown; they had the peculiar look of nearsighted eyes which is called mooning; her complexion was of a dark pallor.

  Her mother did not reply to a question which might be considered already answered. “He says he’s going to build on that lot of his,” she next remarked, unwinding the long veil which she had tied ’round her neck to hold her bonnet on. She put her hat and cloak on the hall table, to be carried upstairs later, and they all went in to tea: creamed oysters, birds, hot biscuit, two kinds of cake, and dishes of stewed and canned fruit and honey. The women dined alone at one, and the Colonel at the same hour downtown. But he liked a good hot meal when he got home in the evening. The house flared with gas; and the Colonel, before he sat down, went about shutting the registers, through which a welding heat came voluming up from the furnace.

  “I’ll be the death of that darky yet,” he said, “if he don’t stop making on such a fire. The only way to get any comfort out of your furnace is to take care of it yourself.”

  “Well,” answered his wife from behind the teapot, as he sat down at the table with this threat, “there’s nothing to prevent you, Si. And you can shovel the snow too, if you want to—till you get over to Beacon Street, anyway.”

  “I guess I can keep my own sidewalk on Beacon Street clean, if I take the notion.”

  “I should like to see you at it,” retorted his wife.

  “Well, you keep a sharp lookout, and maybe you will.”

  Their taunts were really expressions of affectionate pride in each other. They liked to have it, give and take, that way, as they would have said, right along.

  “A man can be a man on Beacon Street as well as anywhere, I guess.”

  “Well, I’ll do the wash, as I used to in Lumberville,” said Mrs. Lapham. “I presume you’ll let me have set tubs, Si. You know I ain’t so young anymore.” She passed Irene a cup of Oolong tea—none of them had a sufficiently cultivated palate for Souchong—and the girl handed it to her father.

  “Papa,” she asked, “you don’t really mean that you’re going to build over there?”

  “Don’t I? You wait and see,” said the Colonel, stirring his tea.

  “I don’t believe you do,” pursued the girl.

  “Is that so? I presume you’d hate to have me. Your mother does.” He said doos, of course.

  Penelope took the word. “I go in for it. I don’t see any use in not enjoying money, if you’ve got it to enjoy. That’s what it’s for, I suppose; though you mightn’t always think so.” She had a slow, quaint way of talking that seemed a pleasant personal modification of some ancestral Yankee drawl, and her voice was low and cozy, and so far from being nasal that it was a little hoarse.

  “I guess the ayes has it, Pen,” said her father. “How would it do to let Irene and your mother stick in the old place here, and us go into the new house?” At times the Colonel’s grammar failed him.

  The matter dropped, and the Laphams lived on as before, with joking recurrences to the house on the water side of Beacon. The Colonel seemed less in earnest than any of them about it; but that was his way, his girls said; you never could tell when he really meant a thing.

  III

  TOWARD the end of the winter there came a newspaper, addressed to Miss Irene Lapham; it proved to be a Texas newspaper, with a complimentary account of the ranch of the Hon. Loring G. Stanton, which the representative of the journal had visited.

  “It must be his friend,” said Mrs. Lapham, to whom her daughter brought the paper; “the one he’s staying with.”

  The girl did not say anything, but she carried the paper to her room, where she scanned every line of it for another name. She did not find it, but she cut the notice out and stuck it into the side of her mirror, where she could read it every morning when she brushed her hair, and the last thing at night when she looked at herself in the glass just before turning off the gas. Her sister often read it aloud, standing behind her and rendering it with elocutionary effects.

  “The first time I ever heard of a love letter in the form of a puff to a cattle ranch. But perhaps that’s the style on the Hill.”

  Mrs. Lapham told her husband of the arrival of the paper, treating the fact with an importance that he refused to see in it.

  “How do you know the fellow sent it, anyway?” he demanded.

  “Oh, I know he did.”

  “I don’t see why he couldn’t write to ’Rene, if he really meant anything.”

  “Well, I guess that wouldn’t be their way,” said Mrs. Lapham; she did not at all know what their way would be.

  When the spring opened, Colonel Lapham showed that he had been in earnest about building on the New Land. His idea of a house was a brownstone front, four stories high, and a French roof with an air chamber above. Inside, there was to be a reception room on the street and a dining room back. The parlors were to be on the second floor and finished in black walnut or parti-colored paint. The chambers were to be on the three floors above, front and rear, with side rooms over the front door. Black walnut was to be used everywhere except in the attic, which was to be painted and grained to look like black walnut. The whole was to be very high studded, and there were to be handsome cornices and elaborate centerpieces throughout, except, again, in the attic.

  These ideas he had formed from the inspection of many new buildings which he had seen going up, and which he had a passion for looking into. He was confirmed in his ideas by a master builder who had put up a great many houses on the Back Bay as a speculation, and who told him that if he wanted to have a house in the style, that was the way to have it.

  The beginnings of the process by which Lapham escaped from the master builder and ended in the hands of an architect are so obscure that it would be almost impossible to trace them. But it all happened, and Lapham promptly developed h
is ideas of black-walnut finish, high studding, and cornices. The architect was able to conceal the shudder which they must have sent through him. He was skillful, as nearly all architects are, in playing upon that simple instrument Man. He began to touch Colonel Lapham’s stops.

  “Oh, certainly, have the parlors high studded. But you’ve seen some of those pretty, old-fashioned country houses, haven’t you, where the entrance story is very low studded?”

  “Yes,” Lapham assented.

  “Well, don’t you think something of that kind would have a very nice effect? Have the entrance story low studded, and your parlors on the next floor as high as you please. Put your little reception room here beside the door, and get the whole width of your house frontage for a square hall, and an easy low-tread staircase running up three sides of it. I’m sure Mrs. Lapham would find it much pleasanter.” The architect caught toward him a scrap of paper lying on the table at which they were sitting and sketched his idea. “Then have your dining room behind the hall, looking on the water.”

  He glanced at Mrs. Lapham, who said, “Of course,” and the architect went on: “That gets you rid of one of those long, straight, ugly staircases”—until that moment Lapham had thought a long, straight staircase the chief ornament of a house—“and gives you an effect of amplitude and space.”

  “That’s so!” said Mrs. Lapham. Her husband merely made a noise in his throat.

  “Then, were you thinking of having your parlors together, connected by folding doors?” asked the architect deferentially.

  “Yes, of course,” said Lapham. “They’re always so, ain’t they?”

  “Well, nearly,” said the architect. “I was wondering how would it do to make one large square room at the front, taking the whole breadth of the house, and, with this hall space between, have a music room back for the young ladies?”

  Lapham looked helplessly at his wife, whose quicker apprehension had followed the architect’s pencil with instant sympathy. “First rate!” she cried.