"No, we don't," said Lapham. "Most of us marry silly little girls
grown up to LOOK like women."
"Well, I guess that's about so," assented Bartley, as if upon second
thought.
"If it hadn't been for her," resumed Lapham, "the paint wouldn't have
come to anything. I used to tell her it wa'n't the seventy-five per
cent. of purr-ox-eyed of iron in the ORE that made that paint go; it
was the seventy-five per cent. of purr-ox-eyed of iron in HER."
"Good!" cried Bartley. "I'll tell Marcia that."
"In less'n six months there wa'n't a board-fence, nor a bridge-girder,
nor a dead wall, nor a barn, nor a face of rock in that whole region
that didn't have 'Lapham's Mineral Paint--Specimen' on it in the three
colours we begun by making." Bartley had taken his seat on the
window-sill, and Lapham, standing before him, now put up his huge foot
close to Bartley's thigh; neither of them minded that.
"I've heard a good deal of talk about that S.T.--1860--X. man, and the
stove-blacking man, and the kidney-cure man, because they advertised in
that way; and I've read articles about it in the papers; but I don't
see where the joke comes in, exactly. So long as the people that own
the barns and fences don't object, I don't see what the public has got
to do with it. And I never saw anything so very sacred about a big
rock, along a river or in a pasture, that it wouldn't do to put mineral
paint on it in three colours. I wish some of the people that talk
about the landscape, and WRITE about it, had to bu'st one of them rocks
OUT of the landscape with powder, or dig a hole to bury it in, as we
used to have to do up on the farm; I guess they'd sing a little
different tune about the profanation of scenery. There ain't any man
enjoys a sightly bit of nature--a smooth piece of interval with half a
dozen good-sized wine-glass elms in it--more than I do. But I ain't
a-going to stand up for every big ugly rock I come across, as if we
were all a set of dumn Druids. I say the landscape was made for man,
and not man for the landscape."
"Yes," said Bartley carelessly; "it was made for the stove-polish man
and the kidney-cure man."
"It was made for any man that knows how to use it," Lapham returned,
insensible to Bartley's irony. "Let 'em go and live with nature in the
WINTER, up there along the Canada line, and I guess they'll get enough
of her for one while. Well--where was I?"
"Decorating the landscape," said Bartley.
"Yes, sir; I started right there at Lumberville, and it give the place
a start too. You won't find it on the map now; and you won't find it
in the gazetteer. I give a pretty good lump of money to build a
town-hall, about five years back, and the first meeting they held in it
they voted to change the name,--Lumberville WA'N'T a name,--and it's
Lapham now."
"Isn't it somewhere up in that region that they get the old Brandon
red?" asked Bartley.
"We're about ninety miles from Brandon. The Brandon's a good paint,"
said Lapham conscientiously. "Like to show you round up at our place
some odd time, if you get off."
"Thanks. I should like it first-rate. WORKS there?"
"Yes; works there. Well, sir, just about the time I got started, the
war broke out; and it knocked my paint higher than a kite. The thing
dropped perfectly dead. I presume that if I'd had any sort of
influence, I might have got it into Government hands, for gun-carriages
and army wagons, and may be on board Government vessels. But I hadn't,
and we had to face the music. I was about broken-hearted, but m'wife
she looked at it another way. 'I guess it's a providence,' says she.
'Silas, I guess you've got a country that's worth fighting for. Any
rate, you better go out and give it a chance.' Well, sir, I went. I
knew she meant business. It might kill her to have me go, but it would
kill her sure if I stayed. She was one of that kind. I went. Her
last words was, 'I'll look after the paint, Si.' We hadn't but just one
little girl then,--boy'd died,--and Mis' Lapham's mother was livin'
with us; and I knew if times DID anyways come up again, m'wife'd know
just what to do. So I went. I got through; and you can call me
Colonel, if you want to. Feel there!" Lapham took Bartley's thumb and
forefinger and put them on a bunch in his leg, just above the knee.
"Anything hard?"
"Ball?"
Lapham nodded. "Gettysburg. That's my thermometer. If it wa'n't for
that, I shouldn't know enough to come in when it rains."
Bartley laughed at a joke which betrayed some evidences of wear. "And
when you came back, you took hold of the paint and rushed it."
"I took hold of the paint and rushed it--all I could," said Lapham,
with less satisfaction than he had hitherto shown in his autobiography.
"But I found that I had got back to another world. The day of small
things was past, and I don't suppose it will ever come again in this
country. My wife was at me all the time to take a partner--somebody
with capital; but I couldn't seem to bear the idea. That paint was
like my own blood to me. To have anybody else concerned in it was
like--well, I don't know what. I saw it was the thing to do; but I
tried to fight it off, and I tried to joke it off. I used to say, 'Why
didn't you take a partner yourself, Persis, while I was away?' And
she'd say, 'Well, if you hadn't come back, I should, Si.' Always DID
like a joke about as well as any woman I ever saw. Well, I had to come
to it. I took a partner." Lapham dropped the bold blue eyes with which
he had been till now staring into Bartley's face, and the reporter knew
that here was a place for asterisks in his interview, if interviews
were faithful. "He had money enough," continued Lapham, with a
suppressed sigh; "but he didn't know anything about paint. We hung on
together for a year or two. And then we quit."
"And he had the experience," suggested Bartley, with companionable ease.
"I had some of the experience too," said Lapham, with a scowl; and
Bartley divined, through the freemasonry of all who have sore places in
their memories, that this was a point which he must not touch again.
"And since that, I suppose, you've played it alone."
"I've played it alone."
"You must ship some of this paint of yours to foreign countries,
Colonel?" suggested Bartley, putting on a professional air.
"We ship it to all parts of the world. It goes to South America, lots
of it. It goes to Australia, and it goes to India, and it goes to
China, and it goes to the Cape of Good Hope. It'll stand any climate.
Of course, we don't export these fancy brands much. They're for home
use. But we're introducing them elsewhere. Here." Lapham pulled open
a drawer, and showed Bartley a lot of labels in different
languages--Spanish, French, German, and Italian. "We expect to do a
good business in all those countries. We've got our agencies in Cadiz
now, and in Paris, and in Hamburg, and in Leghorn. It's a thing that's
bound to make its way. Yes, sir. Wherever a man has got a ship, or a
bridge, or a lock, or a house, or a car, or a fence, or a pig-pen
anywhere in God's universe to paint, that's the paint for him, and he's
bound to find it out sooner or later. You pass a ton of that paint dry
through a blast-furnace, and you'll get a quarter of a ton of pig-iron.
I believe in my paint. I believe it's a blessing to the world. When
folks come in, and kind of smell round, and ask me what I mix it with,
I always say, 'Well, in the first place, I mix it with FAITH, and after
that I grind it up with the best quality of boiled linseed oil that
money will buy.'"
Lapham took out his watch and looked at it, and Bartley perceived that
his audience was drawing to a close. "'F you ever want to run down and
take a look at our works, pass you over the road,"--he called it
RUD--"and it sha'n't cost you a cent." "Well, may be I shall,
sometime," said Bartley. "Good afternoon, Colonel."
"Good afternoon. Or--hold on! My horse down there yet, William?" he
called to the young man in the counting-room who had taken his letter
at the beginning of the interview. "Oh! All right!" he added, in
response to something the young man said.
"Can't I set you down somewhere, Mr. Hubbard? I've got my horse at the
door, and I can drop you on my way home. I'm going to take Mis' Lapham
to look at a house I'm driving piles for, down on the New Land."
"Don't care if I do," said Bartley.
Lapham put on a straw hat, gathered up some papers lying on his desk,
pulled down its rolling cover, turned the key in it, and gave the
papers to an extremely handsome young woman at one of the desks in the
outer office. She was stylishly dressed, as Bartley saw, and her
smooth, yellow hair was sculpturesquely waved over a low, white
forehead. "Here," said Lapham, with the same prompt gruff kindness
that he had used in addressing the young man, "I want you should put
these in shape, and give me a type-writer copy to-morrow."
"What an uncommonly pretty girl!" said Bartley, as they descended the
rough stairway and found their way out to the street, past the dangling
rope of a block and tackle wandering up into the cavernous darkness
overhead.
"She does her work," said Lapham shortly.
Bartley mounted to the left side of the open buggy standing at the
curb-stone, and Lapham, gathering up the hitching-weight, slid it under
the buggy-seat and mounted beside him.
"No chance to speed a horse here, of course," said Lapham, while the
horse with a spirited gentleness picked her way, with a high, long
action, over the pavement of the street. The streets were all narrow,
and most of them crooked, in that quarter of the town; but at the end
of one the spars of a vessel pencilled themselves delicately against
the cool blue of the afternoon sky. The air was full of a smell
pleasantly compounded of oakum, of leather, and of oil. It was not the
busy season, and they met only two or three trucks heavily straggling
toward the wharf with their long string teams; but the cobble-stones of
the pavement were worn with the dint of ponderous wheels, and
discoloured with iron-rust from them; here and there, in wandering
streaks over its surface, was the grey stain of the salt water with
which the street had been sprinkled.
After an interval of some minutes, which both men spent in looking
round the dash-board from opposite sides to watch the stride of the
horse, Bartley said, with a light sigh, "I had a colt once down in
Maine that stepped just like that mare."
"Well!" said Lapham, sympathetically recognising the bond that this
fact created between them. "Well, now, I tell you what you do. You
let me come for you 'most any afternoon, now, and take you out over the
Milldam, and speed this mare a little. I'd like to show you what this
mare can do. Yes, I would."
"All right," answered Bartley; "I'll let you know my first day off."
"Good," cried Lapham.
"Kentucky?" queried Bartley.
"No, sir. I don't ride behind anything but Vermont; never did. Touch
of Morgan, of course; but you can't have much Morgan in a horse if you
want speed. Hambletonian mostly. Where'd you say you wanted to get
out?"
"I guess you may put me down at the Events Office, just round the
corner here. I've got to write up this interview while it's fresh."
"All right," said Lapham, impersonally assenting to Bartley's use of
him as material.
He had not much to complain of in Bartley's treatment, unless it was
the strain of extravagant compliment which it involved. But the
flattery was mainly for the paint, whose virtues Lapham did not believe
could be overstated, and himself and his history had been treated with
as much respect as Bartley was capable of showing any one. He made a
very picturesque thing of the discovery of the paint-mine. "Deep in the
heart of the virgin forests of Vermont, far up toward the line of the
Canadian snows, on a desolate mountain-side, where an autumnal storm
had done its wild work, and the great trees, strewn hither and thither,
bore witness to its violence, Nehemiah Lapham discovered, just forty
years ago, the mineral which the alchemy of his son's enterprise and
energy has transmuted into solid ingots of the most precious of metals.
The colossal fortune of Colonel Silas Lapham lay at the bottom of a
hole which an uprooted tree had dug for him, and which for many years
remained a paint-mine of no more appreciable value than a soap-mine."
Here Bartley had not been able to forego another grin; but he
compensated for it by the high reverence with which he spoke of Colonel
Lapham's record during the war of the rebellion, and of the motives
which impelled him to turn aside from an enterprise in which his whole
heart was engaged, and take part in the struggle. "The Colonel bears
embedded in the muscle of his right leg a little memento of the period
in the shape of a minie-ball, which he jocularly referred to as his
thermometer, and which relieves him from the necessity of reading 'The
Probabilities' in his morning paper. This saves him just so much time;
and for a man who, as he said, has not a moment of waste time on him
anywhere, five minutes a day are something in the course of a year.
Simple, clear, bold, and straightforward in mind and action, Colonel
Silas Lapham, with a prompt comprehensiveness and a never-failing
business sagacity, is, in the best sense of that much-abused term, one
of nature's noblemen, to the last inch of his five eleven and a half.
His life affords an example of single-minded application and unwavering
perseverance which our young business men would do well to emulate.
There is nothing showy or meretricious about the man. He believes in
mineral paint, and he puts his heart and soul into it. He makes it a
religion; though we would not imply that it IS his religion. Colonel
Lapham is a regular attendant at the Rev. Dr. Langworthy's church. He
subscribes liberally to the Associated Charities, and no good object or
worthy public enterprise fails to receive his support. He is not now
actively in politics, and his paint is not partisan; but it is an open
secret that he is, and always has been, a staunch Republican. Without
violating the sanctities of private life, we cannot speak fully of
various details which came out in the free and unembarrassed interview
which Colonel Lapham accorded our representative. But we may say that
the success of which he is justly proud he is also proud to attribute
in great measure to the sympathy and energy of his wife--one of those
women who, in whatever walk of life, seem born to honour the name of
American Woman, and to redeem it from the national reproach of Daisy
Millerism. Of Colonel Lapham's family, we will simply add that it
consists of two young lady daughters.
"The subject of this very inadequate sketch is building a house on the
water side of Beacon Street, after designs by one of our leading
architectural firms, which, when complete, will be one of the finest
ornaments of that exclusive avenue. It will, we believe, be ready for
the occupancy of the family sometime in the spring."
When Bartley had finished his article, which he did with a good deal of
inward derision, he went home to Marcia, still smiling over the thought
of Lapham, whose burly simplicity had peculiarly amused him. "He
regularly turned himself inside out to me," he said, as he sat
describing his interview to Marcia.
"Then I know you could make something nice out of it," said his wife;
"and that will please Mr. Witherby."
"Oh yes, I've done pretty well; but I couldn't let myself loose on him
the way I wanted to. Confound the limitations of decency, anyway! I
should like to have told just what Colonel Lapham thought of landscape
advertising in Colonel Lapham's own words. I'll tell you one thing,
Marsh: he had a girl there at one of the desks that you wouldn't let ME
have within gunshot of MY office. Pretty? It ain't any name for it!"
Marcia's eyes began to blaze, and Bartley broke out into a laugh, in
which he arrested himself at sight of a formidable parcel in the corner
of the room.
"Hello! What's that?"
"Why, I don't know what it is," replied Marcia tremulously. "A man
brought it just before you came in, and I didn't like to open it."
"Think it was some kind of infernal machine?" asked Bartley, getting
down on his knees to examine the package. "MRS. B. Hubbard, heigh?" He
cut the heavy hemp string with his penknife. "We must look into this
thing. I should like to know who's sending packages to Mrs. Hubbard in
my absence." He unfolded the wrappings of paper, growing softer and
finer inward, and presently pulled out a handsome square glass jar,
through which a crimson mass showed richly. "The Persis Brand!" he
yelled. "I knew it!"
"Oh, what is it, Bartley?" quavered Marcia. Then, courageously drawing
a little nearer: "Is it some kind of jam?" she implored. "Jam? No!"
roared Bartley. "It's PAINT! It's mineral paint--Lapham's paint!"
"Paint?" echoed Marcia, as she stood over him while he stripped their
wrappings from the jars which showed the dark blue, dark green, light
brown, dark brown, and black, with the dark crimson, forming the gamut
of colour of the Lapham paint. "Don't TELL me it's paint that I can
use, Bartley!"
"Well, I shouldn't advise you to use much of it--all at once," replied
her husband. "But it's paint that you can use in moderation."
Marcia cast her arms round his neck and kissed him. "O Bartley, I
think I'm the happiest girl in the world! I was just wondering what I
should do. There are places in that Clover Street house that need
touching up so dreadfully. I shall be very careful. You needn't be
afraid I shall overdo. But, this just saves my life. Did you BUY it,
Bartley? You know we couldn't afford it, and you oughtn't to have done
it! And what does the Persis Brand mean?"
"Buy it?" cried Bartley. "No! The old fool's sent it to you as a
present. You'd better wait for the facts before you pitch into me for
extravagance, Marcia. Persis is the name of his wife; and he named it
after her because it's his finest brand. You'll see it in my
interview. Put it on the market her last birthday for a surprise to
her."
"What old fool?" faltered Marcia.
"Why, Lapham--the mineral paint man."
"Oh, what a good man!" sighed Marcia from the bottom of her soul.
"Bartley! you WON'T make fun of him as you do of some of those people?
WILL you?"
"Nothing that HE'LL ever find out," said Bartley, getting up and
brushing off the carpet-lint from his knees.