Snopes: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion

That was that whole afternoon while old Mr Varner still stayed hidden or anyway invisible in Mr Snopes’s house. We didn’t even know definitely that he was actually in town, nobody had seen him; we only had Ratliff’s word that he had come in in his son’s automobile at four oclock this morning, and we didn’t know that for sure unless Ratliff had sat up all night watching the Snopes’s front door. But then Mr Varner was there, he had to be or there wouldn’t be any use for the rest of it. And Mr de Spain’s bank continued its ordinary sober busy prosperous gold-auraed course to the closing hour at three oclock, when almost at once the delivery boy from Christian’s drugstore knocked at the side door and was admitted with his ritual tray of four Coca-Colas for the two girl bookkeepers and Miss Killebrew the teller and Mr Hovis the cashier. And presently, at his ordinary hour, Mr de Spain came out and got in his car as usual and drove away to look at one of the farms which he now owned or on which the bank held a mortgage, as he always did: no rush, no panic to burst upon the ordered financial day. And some time during the day, either forenoon or afternoon, somebody claimed to have seen Mr Snopes himself, unchanged too, unhurried and unalarmed, the wide black planter’s hat still looking brand new (the tiny bow tie which he had worn for eighteen years now always did), going about his inscrutable noncommunicable affairs.

Then it was five oclock and nothing had happened; soon now people would begin to go home to eat supper and then it would be too late and at first I thought of going up to the office to wait for Uncle Gavin to walk home, only I would have to climb the stairs and then turn around right away and come back down again and I thought what a good name spring fever was to excuse not doing something you didn’t want to do, then I thought maybe spring fever wasn’t an excuse at all because maybe spring fever actually was.

So I just stood on the corner where he would have to pass, to wait for him. Then I saw Mrs Snopes. She had just come out of the beauty parlor and as soon as you looked at her you could tell that’s where she had been and I remembered how Mother said once she was the only woman in Jefferson that never went to one because she didn’t need to since there was nothing in a beauty shop that she could have lacked. But she had this time, standing there for a minute and she really did look both ways along the street before she turned and started toward me and then she saw me and came on and said, “Hello, Chick,” and I tipped my cap, only she came up and stopped and I took my cap off; she had a bag on her arm like ladies do, already opening in to reach inside.

“ ‘I was looking for you,” she said. “Will you give this to your uncle when you go home?”

“Yessum,” I said. It was an envelope.

‘ “Thank you,” she said. “Have they heard any more about the little Riddell boy?”

“I dont know’m,” I said. It wasn’t sealed. It didn’t have any name on the front either.

“Let’s hope they got him to Memphis in time,” she said. Then she said Thank you again and went on, walking like she does, not like a pointer about to make game like Linda, but like water moves somehow. And she could have telephoned him at home and I almost said You dont want me to let Mother see it before I caught myself. Because it wasn’t sealed. But then, I wouldn’t have anyway. Besides, I didn’t have to. Mother wasn’t even at home yet and then I remembered: Wednesday, she would be out at Sartoris at the meeting of the Byron Society though Mother said it had been a long time now since anybody listened to anybody read anything because they played bridge now but at least she said that when it met with Miss Jenny Du Pre they had toddies or juleps instead of just coffee or Coca-Colas.

So nothing had happened and now it was already too late, the sun going down though the pear tree in the side yard had bloomed and gone a month ago and now the mockingbird had moved over to the pink dogwood, already beginning where he had sung all night long all week until you would begin to wonder why in the world he didn’t go somewhere else and let people sleep. And nobody at home at all yet except Aleck Sander sitting on the front steps with the ball and bat. “Come on,” he said. “I’ll knock you out some flies.” Then he said, “All right, you knock out and I’ll chase um.”

So it was almost dark inside the house; I could already smell supper cooking and it was too late now, finished now: Mr de Spain gone out in his new Buick to watch how much money his cotton was making, and Mrs Snopes coming out of the beauty shop with her hair even waved or something or whatever it was, maybe for a party at her house tonight or maybe it hadn’t even begun; maybe old Mr Varner wasn’t even in town at all, not only wasn’t coming but never had aimed to and so all the Riddell boy did by catching polio was just to give us a holiday we didn’t expect and didn’t know what to do with; until I heard Uncle Gavin come in and come up the stairs and I met him in the upstairs hall with the envelope in my hand: just the shape of him coming up the stairs and along the hall until even in that light I saw his face all of a sudden and all of a sudden I said:

“You’re not going to be here for supper.”

“No,” he said. “Will you tell your mother?”

“Here,” I said and held out the envelope and he took it.

TWENTY

GAVIN STEVENS

Though you have to eat. So after I went back and unlocked the office and left the door on the latch, I drove out to Seminary Hill, to eat cheese and crackers and listen to old Mr Garraway curse Calvin Coolidge while he ran the last loafing Negroes out of the store and closed it for the night.

Or so I thought. Because you simply cannot go against a community. You can stand singly against any temporary unanimity of even a city full of human behavior, even a mob. But you cannot stand against the cold inflexible abstraction of long-suffering community’s moral point of view. Mr Garraway had been one of the first—no: the first—to move his account from Colonel Sartoris’s bank to the Bank of Jefferson, even before Flem Snopes ever thought or had reason to think of his tenant-farmer panic. He had moved it in fact as soon as we—the town and county—knew that Manfred de Spain was definitely to be president of it. Because he—Mr Garraway—had been one of that original small inflexible unreconstructible Puritan group, both Baptist and Methodist, in the county who would have moved their fiscal allegiance also from Jefferson while De Spain was mayor of it, to escape the moral contamination and express their opinion of that liaison which he represented, if there had been another fiscal town in the county to have moved it to. Though later, a year or two afterward, he moved the account back, perhaps because he was just old or maybe he could stay in his small dingy store out at Seminary Hill and not have to come to town, have to see with his own eyes and so be reminded of his county’s shame and disgrace and sin if he didn’t want to be. Or maybe once you accept something, it doesn’t really matter any more whether you like it or not. Or so I thought.

The note said ten oclock. That was all, Please meet me at your office at ten tonight. Not if convenient, let alone when could you see me at your office? but simply at ten tonight please. You see. Because in the first place, Why me? Me? To say that to all of them, all three of them—no, all four, taking De Spain with me: Why cant you let me alone? What more can you want ofme than I have already failed to do? But there would be plenty of time for that; I would have plenty of time to eat the sardines and crackers and say What a shame to the account of whatever the recent outrage the President and his party had contrived against Mr Garraway, when he—Mr Garraway—said suddenly (an old man with an old man’s dim cloudy eyes magnified and enormous behind the thick lenses of his iron-framed spectacles): “Is it so that Will Varner came in to town this morning?”