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!”
Bartley laughed. “That’s the sort most of us marry.”
“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 percent of purr-ox-eyed of iron in the ore that made that paint go; it was the seventy-five percent 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 windowsill, 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 wineglass 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
