The Rise of Silas Lapham (American Classics Series). William Dean Howells
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elder, who had been smoking with his profile toward his son, now turned his face full upon him. “I didn’t know you had seen him?”
“I hadn’t until today,” said young Corey, with a little heightening of his colour. “But I was walking down street this afternoon, and happened to look round at a new house some one was putting up, and I saw the whole family in the window. It appears that Mr. Lapham is building the house.”
The elder Corey knocked the ash of his cigarette into the holder at his elbow. “I am more and more convinced, the longer I know you, Tom, that we are descended from Giles Corey. The gift of holding one’s tongue seems to have skipped me, but you have it in full force. I can’t say just how you would behave under peine forte et dure, but under ordinary pressure you are certainly able to keep your own counsel. Why didn’t you mention this encounter at dinner? You weren’t asked to plead to an accusation of witchcraft.”
“No, not exactly,” said the young man. “But I didn’t quite see my way to speaking of it. We had a good many other things before us.”
“Yes, that’s true. I suppose you wouldn’t have mentioned it now if I hadn’t led up to it, would you?”
“I don’t know, sir. It was rather on my mind to do so. Perhaps it was I who led up to it.”
His father laughed. “Perhaps you did, Tom; perhaps you did. Your mother would have known you were leading up to something, but I’ll confess that I didn’t. What is it?”
“Nothing very definite. But do you know that in spite of his syntax I rather liked him?”
The father looked keenly at the son; but unless the boy’s full confidence was offered, Corey was not the man to ask it. “Well?” was all that he said.
“I suppose that in a new country one gets to looking at people a little out of our tradition; and I dare say that if I hadn’t passed a winter in Texas I might have found Colonel Lapham rather too much.”
“You mean that there are worse things in Texas?”
“Not that exactly. I mean that I saw it wouldn’t be quite fair to test him by our standards.”
“This comes of the error which I have often deprecated,” said the elder Corey. “In fact I am always saying that the Bostonian ought never to leave Boston. Then he knows — and then only — that there can BE no standard but ours. But we are constantly going away, and coming back with our convictions shaken to their foundations. One man goes to England, and returns with the conception of a grander social life; another comes home from Germany with the notion of a more searching intellectual activity; a fellow just back from Paris has the absurdest ideas of art and literature; and you revert to us from the cowboys of Texas, and tell us to our faces that we ought to try Papa Lapham by a jury of his peers. It ought to be stopped — it ought, really. The Bostonian who leaves Boston ought to be condemned to perpetual exile.”
The son suffered the father to reach his climax with smiling patience. When he asked finally, “What are the characteristics of Papa Lapham that place him beyond our jurisdiction?” the younger Corey crossed his long legs, and leaned forward to take one of his knees between his hands.
“Well, sir, he bragged, rather.”
“Oh, I don’t know that bragging should exempt him from the ordinary processes. I’ve heard other people brag in Boston.”
“Ah, not just in that personal way — not about money.”
“No, that was certainly different.”
“I don’t mean,” said the young fellow, with the scrupulosity which people could not help observing and liking in him, “that it was more than an indirect expression of satisfaction in the ability to spend.”
“No. I should be glad to express something of the kind myself, if the facts would justify me.”
The son smiled tolerantly again. “But if he was enjoying his money in that way, I didn’t see why he shouldn’t show his pleasure in it. It might have been vulgar, but it wasn’t sordid. And I don’t know that it was vulgar. Perhaps his successful strokes of business were the romance of his life ——”
The father interrupted with a laugh. “The girl must be uncommonly pretty. What did she seem to think of her father’s brag?”
“There were two of them,” answered the son evasively.
“Oh, two! And is the sister pretty too?”
“Not pretty, but rather interesting. She is like her mother.”
“Then the pretty one isn’t the father’s pet?”
“I can’t say, sir. I don’t believe,” added the young fellow, “that I can make you see Colonel Lapham just as I did. He struck me as very simple-hearted and rather wholesome. Of course he could be tiresome; we all can; and I suppose his range of ideas is limited. But he is a force, and not a bad one. If he hasn’t got over being surprised at the effect of rubbing his lamp.”
“Oh, one could make out a case. I suppose you know what you are about, Tom. But remember that we are Essex County people, and that in savour we are just a little beyond the salt of the earth. I will tell you plainly that I don’t like the notion of a man who has rivalled the hues of nature in her wildest haunts with the tints of his mineral paint; but I don’t say there are not worse men. He isn’t to my taste, though he might be ever so much to my conscience.”
“I suppose,” said the son, “that there is nothing really to be ashamed of in mineral paint. People go into all sorts of things.”
His father took his cigarette from his mouth and once more looked his son full in the face. “Oh, is THAT it?”
“It has crossed my mind,” admitted the son. “I must do something. I’ve wasted time and money enough. I’ve seen much younger men all through the West and South-west taking care of themselves. I don’t think I was particularly fit for anything out there, but I am ashamed to come back and live upon you, sir.”
His father shook his head with an ironical sigh. “Ah, we shall never have a real aristocracy while this plebeian reluctance to live upon a parent or a wife continues the animating spirit of our youth. It strikes at the root of the whole feudal system. I really think you owe me an apology, Tom. I supposed you wished to marry the girl’s money, and here you are, basely seeking to go into business with her father.”
Young Corey laughed again like a son who perceives that his father is a little antiquated, but keeps a filial faith in his wit. “I don’t know that it’s quite so bad as that; but the thing had certainly crossed my mind. I don’t know how it’s to be approached, and I don’t know that it’s at all possible. But I confess that I ‘took to’ Colonel Lapham from the moment I saw him. He looked as if he ‘meant business,’ and I mean business too.”
The father smoked thoughtfully. “Of course people do go into all sorts of things, as you say, and I don’t know that one thing is more ignoble than another, if it’s decent and large enough. In my time you would have gone into the China trade or the India trade — though I didn’t; and a little later cotton would have been your manifest destiny — though it wasn’t mine; but now a man may do almost anything. The real-estate business is pretty full. Yes, if you have a deep inward vocation for it, I don’t see why mineral paint shouldn’t do. I fancy it’s easy enough approaching the matter. We will invite Papa Lapham to dinner, and talk it over with him.”
“Oh, I don’t think that would be exactly the way, sir,” said the son, smiling at his father’s patrician unworldliness.
“No? Why not?”
“I’m afraid it would be a bad start. I don’t think it would strike him as business-like.”
“I don’t see why he should be punctilious, if we’re not.”
“Ah, we might say that if he were making the advances.”