Snopes: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion

breath to keep it, there aint nothing he will stop at, aint nobody or nothing within his scope and reach that may not anguish and grieve and suffer.”

“Respectability,” I said.

“That’s right,” Ratliff said. “Vice president of that bank aint enough any more. He’s got to be president of it.”

“Got to be?” I said.

“I mean soon, that he dont dare risk waiting, putting it off. That girl of Miz Snopes’s—Linda. She’s going on —”

“She’ll be nineteen the twelfth of April,” I said.

“—nineteen now, over there—How do you know it’s the twelfth?”

“That’s what Uncle Gavin says,” I said.

“Sho, now,” Ratliff said. Then he was talking again. “—at the University at Oxford where there’s a thousand extry young fellers all new and strange and interesting and male and nobody a-tall to watch her except a hired dormitory matron that aint got no wife expecting to heir half of one half of Uncle Billy Varner’s money, when it was risky enough at the Academy right here in Jefferson last year before your uncle or her maw or whichever it was or maybe both of them together, finally persuaded Flem to let her quit at the Academy and go to the University after Christmas where he couldn’t his—himself supervise her masculine acquaintance down to the same boys she had growed—grown up with all her life so at least their folks might have kinfolk that owed him money to help handle them; not to mention having her home ever—every night where he could reach out and put his hand on her ever— every time the clock struck you might say. So he cant, he dassent, risk it; any time now the telegram or the telephone might come saying she had jest finished running off to the next nearest town with a j.p. in it that never give a hoot who Flem Snopes was, and got married. And even if he located them ten minutes later and dragged her—”

“Drug,” I said.

“—back, the—what?” he said.

“Drug,” I said. “You said ‘dragged.’ ”

Ratliff looked at me a while. “For ten years now, whenever he would stop talking hisself long enough that is, and for five of them I been listening to you too, trying to learn—teach myself to say words right. And, jest when I call myself about to learn and I begin to feel a little good over it, here you come, of all people, correcting me back to what I been trying for ten years to forget.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean it that way. It’s because I like the way you say it. When you say it, ‘taken’ sounds a heap more took than just ‘took,’ just like ‘drug’ sounds a heap more dragged than just ‘dragged.’ ”

“And not jest you neither,” Ratliff said. “Your uncle too: me saying ‘dragged’ and him saying ‘drug’ and me saying ‘dragged’ and him saying ‘drug’ again, until at last he would say, ‘In a free country like this, why aint I got as much right to use your drug for my dragged as you got to use my dragged for your drug?’ ”

“All right,” I said. “ ‘Even if he drug her back.’ ”

“—even if he drug—dragged—drug—You see?” he said. “Now you done got me so mixed up until even I dont know which one I dont want to say?”

“ ‘—it would be too late and the damage—’ ” I said.

“Yes,” Ratliff said. “And at least even your Uncle Gavin knows this; even a feller as high-and delicate-minded as him must know that the damage would be done then and Miz Snopes would quit Flem too and he could kiss good- bye not jest to her share of Uncle Billy’s money but even to the voting weight of his bank stock too. So Flem’s got to strike now, and quick. He’s not only got to be president of that bank to at least keep that much of a holt on that Varner money by at least being president of where Uncle Billy keeps it at, he’s got to make his lick before the message comes that Linda’s done got married or he’ll lose the weight of Uncle Billy’s voting stock.”

SEVENTEEN

GAVIN STEVENS

At last we knew why he had moved his money. It was as a bait. Not putting it into the other bank, the old Bank of Jefferson, as the bait, but for the people of Jefferson and Yoknapatawpha County to find out that he had withdrawn his own money from the bank of which he himself was vice president, and put it somewhere else.

But that wasn’t first. At first he was simply trying to save it. Because he knew no better then. His association with banks had been too brief and humble for the idea even to have occurred to him that there was a morality to banking, an inevictable ethics in it, else not only the individual bank but banking as an institution, a form of social behavior, could not endure.

His idea and concept of a bank was that of the Elizabethan tavern or a frontier inn in the time of the opening of the American wilderness: you stopped there before dark for shelter from the wilderness; you were offered food and lodging for yourself and horse, and a bed (of sorts) to sleep in; if you waked the next morning with your purse rifted or your horse stolen or even your throat cut, you had none to blame but yourself since nobody had compelled you to pass that way nor insisted on your stopping. So when he realised that the very circumstances which had made him vice president of a bank had been born of the fact that the bank had been looted by an oaf with no more courage or imagination than he knew his cousin Byron to possess, his decision to remove his money from it as soon as he could was no more irrational than the traveller who, unsaddling in the inn yard, sees a naked body with its throat cut being flung from an upstairs window and re-cinches his saddle with no loss of time and remounts and rides on again, to find another inn perhaps or if not, to pass the night in the woods, which after all, Indians and bears and highwaymen to the contrary, would not be a great deal more unsafe.

It was simply to save his money—that money he had worked so hard to accumulate, too hard to accumulate, sacrificed all his life to gather together from whatever day it had been on whatever wornout tenant farm his father had mved from, onto that other wornout one of old Will Varner’s at Frenchman’s Bend which nobody else except a man who had nothing would undertake, let alone hope, to wrest a living from—from that very first day when he realised that he himself had nothing and would never have more than nothing unless he wrested it himself from his environment and time, and that the only weapon he would ever have to do it with would be just money.

Oh yes, sacrificed all his life for, sacrificed all the other rights and passions and hopes which make up the sum of a man and his life. Perhaps he would never, could never, have fallen in love himself and knew it: himself