



Produced by John Hamm.  HTML version by Al Haines









THE RISE OF SILAS LAPHAM


by

William Dean Howells


JTABLE 5 27 1



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-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.

"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, "passed rapidly over the story of his early
life, its poverty and its hardships, 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
fashion 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 classifying 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 circumstances, 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, washing
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