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 groaning round all day with his
rheumatism, but not stopping."
Bartley hid a yawn over his note-book, and probably, if he could have
spoken his mind, he would have suggested to Lapham that he was not
there for the purpose of interviewing his ancestry. But Bartley had
learned to practise a patience with his victims which he did not always
feel, and to feign an interest in their digressions till he could bring
them up with a round turn.
"I tell you," said Lapham, jabbing the point of his penknife into the
writing-pad on the desk before him, "when I hear women complaining
nowadays that their lives are stunted and empty, I want to tell 'em
about my MOTHER'S life. I could paint it out for 'em."
Bartley saw his opportunity at the word paint, and cut in. "And you
say, Mr. Lapham, that you discovered this mineral paint on the old farm
yourself?"
Lapham acquiesced in the return to business. "I didn't discover it,"
he said scrupulously. "My father found it one day, in a hole made by a
tree blowing down. There it was, lying loose in the pit, and sticking
to the roots that had pulled up a big, cake of dirt with 'em. I don't
know what give him the idea that there was money in it, but he did
think so from the start. I guess, if they'd had the word in those
days, they'd considered him pretty much of a crank about it. He was
trying as long as he lived to get that paint introduced; but he
couldn't make it go. The country was so poor they couldn't paint their
houses with anything; and father hadn't any facilities. It got to be a
kind of joke with us; and I guess that paint-mine did as much as any
one thing to make us boys clear out as soon as we got old enough. All
my brothers went West, and took up land; but I hung on to New England
and I hung on to the old farm, not because the paint-mine was on it,
but because the old house was--and the graves. Well," said Lapham, as
if unwilling to give himself too much credit, "there wouldn't been any
market for it, anyway. You can go through that part of the State and
buy more farms than you can shake a stick at for less money than it
cost to build the barns on 'em. Of course, it's turned out a good
thing. I keep the old house up in good shape, and we spend a month or
so there every summer. M' wife kind of likes it, and the girls.
Pretty place; sightly all round it. I've got a force of men at work
there the whole time, and I've got a man and his wife in the house.
Had a family meeting there last year; the whole connection from out
West. There!" Lapham rose from his seat and took down a large warped,
unframed photograph from the top of his desk, passing his hand over it,
and then blowing vigorously upon it, to clear it of the dust. "There
we are, ALL of us."
"I don't need to look twice at YOU," said Bartley, putting his finger
on one of the heads.
"Well, that's Bill," said Lapham, with a gratified laugh. "He's about
as brainy as any of us, I guess. He's one of their leading lawyers,
out Dubuque way; been judge of the Common Pleas once or twice. That's
his son--just graduated at Yale--alongside of my youngest girl.
Good-looking chap, ain't he?"
"SHE'S a good-looking chap," said Bartley, with prompt irreverence. He
hastened to add, at the frown which gathered between Lapham's eyes,
"What a beautiful creature she is! What a lovely, refined, sensitive
face! And she looks GOOD, too."
"She is good," said the father, relenting.
"And, after all, that's about the best thing in a woman," said the
potential reprobate. "If my wife wasn't good enough to keep both of us
straight, I don't know what would become of me." "My other daughter,"
said Lapham, indicating a girl with eyes that showed large, and a face
of singular gravity. "Mis' Lapham," he continued, touching his wife's
effigy with his little finger. "My brother Willard and his
family--farm at Kankakee. Hazard Lapham and his wife--Baptist preacher
in Kansas. Jim and his three girls--milling business at Minneapolis.
Ben and his family--practising medicine in Fort Wayne."
The figures were clustered in an irregular group in front of an old
farm-house, whose original ugliness had been smartened up with a coat
of Lapham's own paint, and heightened with an incongruous piazza. The
photographer had not been able to conceal the fact that they were all
decent, honest-looking, sensible people, with a very fair share of
beauty among the young girls; some of these were extremely pretty, in
fact. He had put them into awkward and constrained attitudes, of
course; and they all looked as if they had the instrument of torture
which photographers call a head-rest under their occiputs. Here and
there an elderly lady's face was a mere blur; and some of the younger
children had twitched themselves into wavering shadows, and might have
passed for spirit-photographs of their own little ghosts. It was the
standard family-group photograph, in which most Americans have figured
at some time or other; and Lapham exhibited a just satisfaction in it.
"I presume," he mused aloud, as he put it back on top of his desk,
"that we sha'n't soon get together again, all of us."
"And you say," suggested Bartley, "that you stayed right along on the
old place, when the rest cleared out West?"
"No o-o-o," said Lapham, with a long, loud drawl; "I cleared out West
too, first off. Went to Texas. Texas was all the cry in those days.
But I got enough of the Lone Star in about three months, and I come
back with the idea that Vermont was good enough for me."
"Fatted calf business?" queried Bartley, with his pencil poised above
his note-book.
"I presume they were glad to see me," said Lapham, with dignity.
"Mother," he added gently, "died that winter, and I stayed on with
father. I buried him in the spring; and then I came down to a little
place called Lumberville, and picked up what jobs I could get. I
worked round at the saw-mills, and I was ostler a while at the hotel--I
always DID like a good horse. Well, I WA'N'T exactly a college
graduate, and I went to school odd times. I got to driving the stage
after while, and by and by I BOUGHT the stage and run the business
myself. Then I hired the tavern-stand, and--well to make a long story
short, then I got married. Yes," said Lapham, with pride, "I married
the school-teacher. We did pretty well with the hotel, and my wife she
was always at me to paint up. Well, I put it off, and PUT it off, as a
man will, till one day I give in, and says I, 'Well, let's paint up.
Why, Pert,'--m'wife's name's Persis,--'I've got a whole paint-mine out
on the farm. Let's go out and look at it.' So we drove out. I'd let
the place for seventy-five dollars a year to a shif'less kind of a
Kanuck that had come down that way; and I'd hated to see the house with
him in it; but we drove out one Saturday afternoon, and we brought back
about a bushel of the stuff in the buggy-seat, and I tried it crude,
and I tried it burnt; and I liked it. M'wife she liked it too. There
wa'n't any painter by trade in the village, and I mixed it myself.
Well, sir, that tavern's got that coat of paint on it yet, and it
hain't ever had any other, and I don't know's it ever will. Well, you
know, I felt as if it was a kind of harumscarum experiment, all the
while; and I presume I shouldn't have tried it but I kind of liked to
do it because father'd always set so much store by his paint-mine. And
when I'd got the first coat on,"--Lapham called it CUT,--"I presume I
must have set as much as half an hour; looking at it and thinking how
he would have enjoyed it. I've had my share of luck in this world, and
I ain't a-going to complain on my OWN account, but I've noticed that
most things get along too late for most people. It made me feel bad,
and it took all the pride out my success with the paint, thinking of
father. Seemed to me I might 'a taken more interest in it when he was
by to see; but we've got to live and learn. Well, I called my wife
out,--I'd tried it on the back of the house, you know,--and she left
her dishes,--I can remember she came out with her sleeves rolled up and
set down alongside of me on the trestle,--and says I, 'What do you
think, Persis?' And says she, 'Well, you hain't got a paint-mine, Silas
Lapham; you've got a GOLD-mine.' She always was just so enthusiastic
about things. Well, it was just after two or three boats had burnt up
out West, and a lot of lives lost, and there was a great cry about
non-inflammable paint, and I guess that was what was in her mind.
'Well, I guess it ain't any gold-mine, Persis,' says I; 'but I guess it
IS a paint-mine. I'm going to have it analysed, and if it turns out
what I think it is, I'm going to work it. And if father hadn't had
such a long name, I should call it the Nehemiah Lapham Mineral Paint.
But, any rate, every barrel of it, and every keg, and every bottle, and
every package, big or little, has got to have the initials and figures
N.L.f. 1835, S.L.t. 1855, on it. Father found it in 1835, and I tried
it in 1855.'"
"'S.T.--1860--X.' business," said Bartley.
"Yes," said Lapham, "but I hadn't heard of Plantation Bitters then, and
I hadn't seen any of the fellow's labels. I set to work and I got a
man down from Boston; and I carried him out to the farm, and he
analysed it--made a regular Job of it. Well, sir, we built a kiln, and
we kept a lot of that paint-ore red-hot for forty-eight hours; kept the
Kanuck and his family up, firing. The presence of iron in the ore
showed with the magnet from the start; and when he came to test it, he
found out that it contained about seventy-five per cent. of the
peroxide of iron."
Lapham pronounced the scientific phrases with a sort of reverent
satisfaction, as if awed through his pride by a little lingering
uncertainty as to what peroxide was. He accented it as if it were
purr-ox-EYED; and Bartley had to get him to spell it.
"Well, and what then?" he asked, when he had made a note of the
percentage.
"What then?" echoed Lapham. "Well, then, the fellow set down and told
me, 'You've got a paint here,' says he, 'that's going to drive every
other mineral paint out of the market. Why' says he, 'it'll drive 'em
right into the Back Bay!' Of course, I didn't know what the Back Bay
was then, but I begun to open my eyes; thought I'd had 'em open before,
but I guess I hadn't. Says he, 'That paint has got hydraulic cement in
it, and it can stand fire and water and acids;' he named over a lot of
things. Says he, 'It'll mix easily with linseed oil, whether you want
to use it boiled or raw; and it ain't a-going to crack nor fade any;
and it ain't a-going to scale. When you've got your arrangements for
burning it properly, you're going to have a paint that will stand like
the everlasting hills, in every climate under the sun.' Then he went
into a lot of particulars, and I begun to think he was drawing a
long-bow, and meant to make his bill accordingly. So I kept pretty
cool; but the fellow's bill didn't amount to anything hardly--said I
might pay him after I got going; young chap, and pretty easy; but every
word he said was gospel. Well, I ain't a-going to brag up my paint; I
don't suppose you came here to hear me blow."
"Oh yes, I did," said Bartley. "That's what I want. Tell all there is
to tell, and I can boil it down afterward. A man can't make a greater
mistake with a reporter than to hold back anything out of modesty. It
may be the very thing we want to know. What we want is the whole
truth; and more; we've got so much modesty of our own that we can
temper almost any statement."
Lapham looked as if he did not quite like this tone, and he resumed a
little more quietly. "Oh, there isn't really very much more to say
about the paint itself. But you can use it for almost anything where a
paint is wanted, inside or out. It'll prevent decay, and it'll stop
it, after it's begun, in tin or iron. You can paint the inside of a
cistern or a bath-tub with it, and water won't hurt it; and you can
paint a steam-boiler with it, and heat won't. You can cover a brick
wall with it, or a railroad car, or the deck of a steamboat, and you
can't do a better thing for either."
"Never tried it on the human conscience, I suppose," suggested Bartley.
"No, sir," replied Lapham gravely. "I guess you want to keep that as
free from paint as you can, if you want much use of it. I never cared
to try any of it on mine." Lapham suddenly lifted his bulk up out of
his swivel-chair, and led the way out into the wareroom beyond the
office partitions, where rows and ranks of casks, barrels, and kegs
stretched dimly back to the rear of the building, and diffused an
honest, clean, wholesome smell of oil and paint. They were labelled
and branded as containing each so many pounds of Lapham's Mineral
Paint, and each bore the mystic devices, N.L.f. 1835--S.L.t. 1855.
"There!" said Lapham, kicking one of the largest casks with the toe of
his boot, "that's about our biggest package; and here," he added,
laying his hand affectionately on the head of a very small keg, as if
it were the head of a child, which it resembled in size, "this is the
smallest. We used to put the paint on the market dry, but now we grind
every ounce of it in oil--very best quality of linseed oil--and warrant
it. We find it gives more satisfaction. Now, come back to the office,
and I'll show you our fancy brands."
It was very cool and pleasant in that dim wareroom, with the rafters
showing overhead in a cloudy perspective, and darkening away into the
perpetual twilight at the rear of the building; and Bartley had found
an agreeable seat on the head of a half-barrel of the paint, which he
was reluctant to leave. But he rose and followed the vigorous lead of
Lapham back to the office, where the sun of a long summer afternoon was
just beginning to glare in at the window. On shelves opposite Lapham's
desk were tin cans of various sizes, arranged in tapering cylinders,
and showing, in a pattern diminishing toward the top, the same label
borne by the casks and barrels in the wareroom. Lapham merely waved
his hand toward these; but when Bartley, after a comprehensive glance
at them, gave his whole attention to a row of clean, smooth jars, where
different tints of the paint showed through flawless glass, Lapham
smiled, and waited in pleased expectation.
"Hello!" said Bartley. "That's pretty!"
"Yes," assented Lapham, "it is rather nice. It's our latest thing, and
we find it takes with customers first-rate. Look here!" he said, taking
down one of the jars, and pointing to the first line of the label.
Bartley read, "THE PERSIS BRAND," and then he looked at Lapham and
smiled.
"After HER, of course," said Lapham. "Got it up and put the first of
it on the market her last birthday. She was pleased."
"I should think she might have been," said Bartley, while he made a
note of the appearance of the jars.
"I don't know about your mentioning it in your interview," said Lapham
dubiously.
"That's going into the interview, Mr. Lapham, if nothing else does.
Got a wife myself, and I know just how you feel." It was in the dawn of
Bartley's prosperity on the Boston Events, before his troubles with
Marcia had seriously begun.
"Is that so?" said Lapham, recognising with a smile another of the vast
majority of married Americans; a few underrate their wives, but the
rest think them supernal in intelligence and capability. "Well," he
added, "we must see about that. Where'd you say you lived?"
"We don't live; we board. Mrs. Nash, 13 Canary Place."
"Well, we've all got to commence that way," suggested Lapham
consolingly.
"Yes; but we've about got to the end of our string. I expect to be
under a roof of my own on Clover Street before long. I suppose," said
Bartley, returning to business, "that you didn't let the grass grow
under your feet much after you found out what was in your paint-mine?"
"No, sir," answered Lapham, withdrawing his eyes from a long stare at
Bartley, in which he had been seeing himself a young man again, in the
first days of his married life. "I went right back to Lumberville and
sold out everything, and put all I could rake and scrape together into
paint. And Mis' Lapham was with me every time. No hang back about
HER. I tell you she was a WOMAN!"