The Rise of Silas Lapham

by William Dean Howells

  The Colonel gave way. “I guess that would do. It’ll be kind of odd, won’t it?”

  “Well, I don’t know,” said the architect. “Not so odd, I hope, as the other thing will be a few years from now.” He went on to plan the rest of the house, and he showed himself such a master in regard to all the practical details that Mrs. Lapham began to feel a motherly affection for the young man, and her husband could not deny in his heart that the fellow seemed to understand his business. He stopped walking about the room, as he had begun to do when the architect and Mrs. Lapham entered into the particulars of closets, drainage, kitchen arrangements, and all that, and came back to the table. “I presume,” he said, “you’ll have the drawing room finished in black walnut?”

  “Well, yes,” replied the architect, “if you like. But some less expensive wood can be made just as effective with paint. Of course, you can paint black walnut too.”

  “Paint it?” gasped the Colonel.

  “Yes,” said the architect quietly. “White, or a little off-white.”

  Lapham dropped the plan he had picked up from the table. His wife made a little move toward him of consolation or support.

  “Of course,” resumed the architect, “I know there has been a great craze for black walnut. But it’s an ugly wood; and for a drawing room there is really nothing like white paint. We should want to introduce a little gold here and there. Perhaps we might run a painted frieze ’round under the cornice—garlands of roses on a gold ground; it would tell wonderfully in a white room.”

  The Colonel returned less courageously to the charge. “I presume you’ll want Eastlake mantel shelves and tiles?” He meant this for a sarcastic thrust at a prevailing foible of the profession.

  “Well, no,” gently answered the architect. “I was thinking perhaps a white marble chimneypiece, treated in the refined Empire style, would be the thing for that room.”

  “White marble!” exclaimed the Colonel. “I thought that had gone out long ago.”

  “Really beautiful things can’t go out. They may disappear for a little while, but they must come back. It’s only the ugly things that stay out after they’ve had their day.”

  Lapham could only venture very modestly, “Hardwood floors?”

  “In the music room, of course,” consented the architect.

  “And in the drawing room?”

  “Carpet. Some sort of moquette, I should say. But I should prefer to consult Mrs. Lapham’s taste in that matter.”

  “And in the other rooms?”

  “Oh, carpets, of course.”

  “And what about the stairs?”

  “Carpet. And I should have the rail and banisters white—banisters turned or twisted.”

  The Colonel said under his breath, “Well, I’m dumned!” but he gave no utterance to his astonishment in the architect’s presence. When he went at last—the sessions did not end till eleven o’clock—Lapham said, “Well, Pert, I guess that fellow’s fifty years behind, or ten years ahead. I wonder what the Ongpeer style is?”

  “I don’t know. I hated to ask. But he seemed to understand what he was talking about. I declare, he knows what a woman wants in a house better than she does herself.”

  “And a man’s simply nowhere in comparison,” said Lapham. But he respected a fellow who could beat him at every point, and have a reason ready, as this architect had; and when he recovered from the daze into which the complete upheaval of all his preconceived notions had left him, he was in a fit state to swear by the architect. It seemed to him that he had discovered the fellow (as he always called him) and owned him now, and the fellow did nothing to disturb this impression. He entered into that brief but intense intimacy with the Laphams which the sympathetic architect holds with his clients. He was privy to all their differences of opinion and all their disputes about the house. He knew just where to insist upon his own ideas, and where to yield. He was really building several other houses, but he gave the Laphams the impression that he was doing none but theirs.

  The work was not begun till the frost was thoroughly out of the ground, which that year was not before the end of April. Even then it did not proceed very rapidly. Lapham said they might as well take their time to it; if they got the walls up and the thing closed in before the snow flew, they could be working at it all winter. It was found necessary to dig for the kitchen; at that point the original salt marsh lay near the surface, and before they began to put in the piles for the foundation they had to pump. The neighborhood smelled like the hold of a ship after a three years’ voyage. People who had cast their fortunes with the New Land went by professing not to notice it; people who still “hung onto the Hill” put their handkerchiefs to their noses, and told each other the old terrible stories of the material used in filling up the Back Bay.

  Nothing gave Lapham so much satisfaction in the whole construction of his house as the pile driving. When this began, early in the summer, he took Mrs. Lapham every day in his buggy and drove ’round to look at it; stopping the mare in front of the lot, and watching the operation with ever keener interest than the little loafing Irish boys who superintended it in force. It pleased him to hear the portable engine chuckle out a hundred thin whiffs of steam in carrying the big iron weight to the top of the framework above the pile, then seem to hesitate, and cough once or twice in pressing the weight against the detaching apparatus. There was a moment in which the weight had the effect of poising before it fell; then it dropped with a mighty whack on the iron-bound head of the pile, and drove it a foot into the earth.

  “By gracious!” he would say, “there ain’t anything like that in this world for business, Persis!”

  Mrs. Lapham suffered him to enjoy the sight twenty or thirty times before she said, “Well, now drive on, Si.”

  By the time the foundation was in and the brick walls had begun to go up, there were so few people left in the neighborhood that she might indulge with impunity her husband’s passion for having her clamber over the floor timbers and the skeleton staircases with him. Many of the householders had boarded up their front doors before the buds had begun to swell and the assessor to appear in early May; others had followed soon; and Mrs. Lapham was as safe from remark as if she had been in the depth of the country. Ordinarily she and her girls left town early in July, going to one of the hotels at Nantasket, where it was convenient for the Colonel to get to and from his business by the boat. But this summer they were all lingering a few weeks later, under the novel fascination of the new house, as they called it, as if there were no other in the world.

  Lapham drove there with his wife after he had set Bartley Hubbard down at the Events office, but on this day something happened that interfered with the solid pleasure they usually took in going over the house. As the Colonel turned from casting anchor at the mare’s head with the hitching weight, after helping his wife to alight, he encountered a man to whom he could not help speaking, though the man seemed to share his hesitation if not his reluctance at the necessity. He was a tallish, thin man, with a dust-colored face, and a dead, clerical air, which somehow suggested at once feebleness and tenacity.

  Mrs. Lapham held out her hand to him.

  “Why, Mr. Rogers!” she exclaimed; and then, turning toward her husband, seemed to refer the two men to each other. They shook hands, but Lapham did not speak. “I didn’t know you were in Boston,” pursued Mrs. Lapham. “Is Mrs. Rogers with you?”

  “No,” said Mr. Rogers, with a voice which had the flat, succinct sound of two pieces of wood clapped together. “Mrs. Rogers is still in Chicago.”

  A little silence followed, and then Mrs. Lapham said: “I presume you are quite settled out there.”

  “No; we have left Chicago. Mrs. Rogers has merely remained to finish up a little packing.”

  “Oh, indeed! Are you coming back to Boston?”

  “I cannot say as yet. We some think of so doing.”<
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  Lapham turned away and looked up at the building. His wife pulled a little at her glove, as if embarrassed, or even pained. She tried to make a diversion.

  “We are building a house,” she said, with a meaningless laugh.

  “Oh, indeed,” said Mr. Rogers, looking up at it.

  Then no one spoke again, and she said helplessly, “If you come to Boston, I hope I shall see Mrs. Rogers.”

  “She will be happy to have you call,” said Mr. Rogers.

  He touched his hat brim, and made a bow forward rather than in Mrs. Lapham’s direction.

  She mounted the planking that led into the shelter of the bare brick walls, and her husband slowly followed. When she turned her face toward him her cheeks were burning, and tears that looked hot stood in her eyes.

  “You left it all to me!” she cried. “Why couldn’t you speak a word?”

  “I hadn’t anything to say to him,” replied Lapham sullenly.

  They stood awhile, without looking at the work, which they had come to enjoy, and without speaking to each other.

  “I suppose we might as well go on,” said Mrs. Lapham at last, as they returned to the buggy. The Colonel drove recklessly toward the Milldam. His wife kept her veil down and her face turned from him. After a time she put her handkerchief up under her veil and wiped her eyes, and he set his teeth and squared his jaw.

  “I don’t see how he always manages to appear just at the moment when he seems to have gone fairly out of our lives, and blight everything,” she whimpered.

  “I supposed he was dead,” said Lapham.

  “Oh, don’t say such a thing! It sounds as if you wished it.”

  “Why do you mind it? What do you let him blight everything for?”

  “I can’t help it, and I don’t believe I ever shall. I don’t know as his being dead would help it any. I can’t ever see him without feeling just as I did at first.”

  “I tell you,” said Lapham, “it was a perfectly square thing. And I wish, once and for all, you would quit bothering about it. My conscience is easy as far as he’s concerned, and it always was.”

  “And I can’t look at him without feeling as if you’d ruined him, Silas.”

  “Don’t look at him, then,” said her husband, with a scowl. “I want you should recollect in the first place, Persis, that I never wanted a partner.”

  “If he hadn’t put his money in when he did, you’da broken down.”

  “Well, he got his money out again, and more, too,” said the Colonel, with a sulky weariness.

  “He didn’t want to take it out.”

  “I gave him his choice: buy out or go out.”

  “You know he couldn’t buy out then. It was no choice at all.”

  “It was a business chance.”

  “No; you had better face the truth, Silas. It was no chance at all. You crowded him out. A man that had saved you! No, you had got greedy, Silas. You had made your paint your god, and you couldn’t bear to let anybody else share in its blessings.”

  “I tell you he was a drag and a brake on me from the word go. You say he saved me. Well, if I hadn’t got him out he’da ruined me sooner or later. So it’s an even thing, as far forth as that goes.”

  “No, it ain’t an even thing, and you know it, Silas. Oh, if I could only get you once to acknowledge that you did wrong about it, then I should have some hope. I don’t say you meant wrong exactly, but you took an advantage. Yes, you took an advantage! You had him where he couldn’t help himself, and then you wouldn’t show him any mercy.”

  “I’m sick of this,” said Lapham. “If you’ll tend to the house, I’ll manage my business without your help.”

  “You were very glad of my help once.”

  “Well, I’m tired of it now. Don’t meddle.”

  “I will meddle. When I see you hardening yourself in a wrong thing, it’s time for me to meddle, as you call it, and I will. I can’t ever get you to own up the least bit about Rogers, and I feel as if it was hurting you all the while.”

  “What do you want I should own up about a thing for when I don’t feel wrong? I tell you Rogers hain’t got anything to complain of, and that’s what I told you from the start. It’s a thing that’s done every day. I was loaded up with a partner that didn’t know anything, and couldn’t do anything, and I unloaded; that’s all.”

  “You unloaded just at the time when you knew that your paint was going to be worth about twice what it ever had been; and you wanted all the advantage for yourself.”

  “I had a right to it. I made the success.”

  “Yes, you made it with Rogers’ money; and when you’d made it you took his share of it. I guess you thought of that when you saw him, and that’s why you couldn’t look him in the face.”

  At these words Lapham lost his temper.

  “I guess you don’t want to ride with me any more today,” he said, turning the mare abruptly ’round.

  “I’m as ready to go back as what you are,” replied his wife. “And don’t you ask me to go to that house with you anymore. You can sell it, for all me. I shan’t live in it. There’s blood on it.”

  IV

  THE silken texture of the marriage tie bears a daily strain of wrong and insult to which no other human relation can be subjected without lesion; and sometimes the strength that knits society together might appear to the eye of faltering faith the curse of those immediately bound by it. Two people by no means reckless of each other’s rights and feelings, but even tender of them for the most part, may tear at each other’s heartstrings in this sacred bond with perfect impunity; though if they were any other two they would not speak or look at each other again after the outrages they exchange. It is certainly a curious spectacle, and doubtless it ought to convince an observer of the divinity of the institution. If the husband and wife are blunt, outspoken people like the Laphams, they do not weigh their words; if they are more refined, they weigh them very carefully, and know accurately just how far they will carry, and in what most sensitive spot they may be planted with most effect.

  Lapham was proud of his wife, and when he married her it had been a rise in life for him. For a while he stood in awe of his good fortune, but this could not last, and he simply remained supremely satisfied with it. The girl who had taught school with a clear head and a strong hand was not afraid of work; she encouraged and helped him from the first, and bore her full share of the common burden. She had health, and she did not worry his life out with peevish complaints and vagaries; she had sense and principle, and in their simple lot she did what was wise and right. Their marriage was hallowed by an early sorrow: they lost their boy, and it was years before they could look each other in the face and speak of him. No one gave up more than they when they gave up each other and Lapham went to the war. When he came back and began to work, her zeal and courage formed the spring of his enterprise. In that affair of the partnership she had tried to be his conscience, but perhaps she would have defended him if he had accused himself; it was one of those things in this life which seem destined to await justice, or at least judgment, in the next. As he said, Lapham had dealt fairly by his partner in money; he had let Rogers take more money out of the business than he put into it; he had, as he said, simply forced out of it a timid and inefficient participant in advantages which he had created. But Lapham had not created them all. He had been dependent at one time on his partner’s capital. It was a moment of terrible trial. Happy is the man forever after who can choose the ideal, the unselfish part, in such an exigency! Lapham could not rise to it. He did what he could maintain to be perfectly fair. The wrong, if any, seemed to be condoned to him, except when from time to time his wife brought it up. Then all the questions stung and burned anew, and had to be reasoned out and put away once more. It seemed to have an inextinguishable vitality. It slept, but it did not die.

  His course did not shake Mr
s. Lapham’s faith in him. It astonished her at first, and it always grieved her that he could not see that he was acting solely in his own interest. But she found excuses for him, which at times she made reproaches. She vaguely perceived that his paint was something more than business to him; it was a sentiment, almost a passion. He could not share its management and its profit with another without a measure of self-sacrifice far beyond that which he must make with something less personal to him. It was the poetry of that nature, otherwise so intensely prosaic; and she understood this, and for the most part forbore. She knew him good and true and blameless in all his life, except for this wrong, if it were a wrong; and it was only when her nerves tingled intolerably with some chance renewal of the pain she had suffered that she shared her anguish with him in true wifely fashion.

  With those two there was never anything like an explicit reconciliation. They simply ignored a quarrel; and Mrs. Lapham had only to say a few days after at breakfast, “I guess the girls would like to go ’round with you this afternoon and look at the new house,” in order to make her husband grumble out as he looked down into his coffee cup, “I guess we better all go, hadn’t we?”

  “Well, I’ll see,” she said.

  There was not really a great deal to look at when Lapham arrived on the ground in his four-seated bench wagon. But the walls were up, and the studding had already given skeleton shape to the interior. The floors were roughly boarded over, and the stairways were in place, with provisional treads rudely laid. They had not begun to lath and plaster yet, but the clean, fresh smell of the mortar in the walls mingling with the pungent fragrance of the pine shavings neutralized the Venetian odor that drew in over the water. It was pleasantly shady there, though for the matter of that the heat of the morning had all been washed out of the atmosphere by the tide of east wind setting in at noon, and the thrilling, delicious cool of a Boston summer afternoon bathed every nerve.

  The foreman went about with Mrs. Lapham, showing her where the doors were to be; but Lapham soon tired of this, and having found a pine stick of perfect grain, he abandoned himself to the pleasure of whittling it in what was to be the reception room, where he sat looking out on the street from what was to be the bay window. Here he was presently joined by his girls, who, after locating their own room on the water side above the music room, had no more wish to enter into details than their father.