The Rise of Silas Lapham | Page 4

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