They talked all day, going out to lunch together at the Astor House, and sitting with their knees against the counter on a row of stools before it for fifteen minutes of reflection and deglutition, with their hats on, and then returning to the basement from which they emerged.The West Virginia company's name was lettered in gilt on the wide low window, and its paint, in the form of ore, burnt, and mixed, formed a display on the window shelf Lapham examined it and praised it;from time to time they all recurred to it together;they sent out for some of Lapham's paint and compared it, the West Virginians admitting its former superiority.
They were young fellows, and country persons, like Lapham, by origin, and they looked out with the same amused, undaunted provincial eyes at the myriad metropolitan legs passing on the pavement above the level of their window.
He got on well with them.At last, they said what they would do.
They said it was nonsense to talk of buying Lapham out, for they had not the money; and as for selling out, they would not do it, for they knew they had a big thing.
But they would as soon use his capital to develop it as anybody else's, and if he could put in a certain sum for this purpose, they would go in with him.
He should run the works at Lapham and manage the business in Boston, and they would run the works at Kanawha Falls and manage the business in New York.The two brothers with whom Lapham talked named their figure, subject to the approval of another brother at Kanawha Falls, to whom they would write, and who would telegraph his answer, so that Lapham could have it inside of three days.
But they felt perfectly sure that he would approve;and Lapham started back on the eleven o'clock train with an elation that gradually left him as he drew near Boston, where the difficulties of raising this sum were to be over come.It seemed to him, then, that those fellows had put it up on him pretty steep, but he owned to himself that they had a sure thing, and that they were right in believing they could raise the same sum elsewhere;it would take all OF it, he admitted, to make their paint pay on the scale they had the right to expect.
At their age, he would not have done differently;but when he emerged, old, sore, and sleep-broken, from the sleeping-car in the Albany depot at Boston, he wished with a pathetic self-pity that they knew how a man felt at his age.A year ago, six months ago, he would have laughed at the notion that it would be hard to raise the money.But he thought ruefully of that immense stock of paint on hand, which was now a drug in the market, of his losses by Rogers and by the failures of other men, of the fire that had licked up so many thousands in a few hours; he thought with bitterness of the tens of thousands that he had gambled away in stocks, and of the commissions that the brokers had pocketed whether he won or lost; and he could not think of any securities on which he could borrow, except his house in Nankeen Square, or the mine and works at Lapham.
He set his teeth in helpless rage when he thought of that property out on the G.L.& P., that ought to be worth so much, and was worth so little if the Road chose to say so.
He did not go home, but spent most of the day shining round, as he would have expressed it, and trying to see if he could raise the money.But he found that people of whom he hoped to get it were in the conspiracy which had been formed to drive him to the wall.Somehow, there seemed a sense of his embarrassments abroad.Nobody wanted to lend money on the plant at Lapham without taking time to look into the state of the business; but Lapham had no time to give, and he knew that the state of the business would not bear looking into.He could raise fifteen thousand on his Nankeen Square house, and another fifteen on his Beacon Street lot, and this was all that a man who was worth a million by rights could do! He said a million, and he said it in defiance of Bellingham, who had subjected his figures to an analysis which wounded Lapham more than he chose to show at the time, for it proved that he was not so rich and not so wise as he had seemed.His hurt vanity forbade him to go to Bellingham now for help or advice; and if he could have brought himself to ask his brothers for money, it would have been useless; they were simply well-to-do Western people, but not capitalists on the scale he required.
Lapham stood in the isolation to which adversity so often seems to bring men.When its test was applied, practically or theoretically, to all those who had seemed his friends, there was none who bore it; and he thought with bitter self-contempt of the people whom he had befriended in their time of need.He said to himself that he had been a fool for that; and he scorned himself for certain acts of scrupulosity by which he had lost money in the past.Seeing the moral forces all arrayed against him, Lapham said that he would like to have the chance offered him to get even with them again;he thought he should know how to look out for himself.
As he understood it, he had several days to turn about in, and he did not let one day's failure dishearten him.
The morning after his return he had, in fact, a gleam of luck that gave him the greatest encouragement for the moment.
A man came in to inquire about one of Rogers's wild-cat patents, as Lapham called them, and ended by buying it.
He got it, of course, for less than Lapham took it for, but Lapham was glad to be rid of it for something, when he had thought it worth nothing; and when the transaction was closed, he asked the purchaser rather eagerly if he knew where Rogers was; it was Lapham's secret belief that Rogers had found there was money in the thing, and had sent the man to buy it.But it appeared that this was a mistake; the man had not come from Rogers, but had heard of the patent in another way; and Lapham was astonished in the afternoon, when his boy came to tell him that Rogers was in the outer office, and wished to speak with him.
