The Rise of Silas Lapham | Page 9

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."

"1 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