Snopes: The Hamlet, the Town, the Mansion

by William Faulkner

  It was one day; sometimes Mother let me go to town by myself now. I mean, when she wasn’t noticing enough to say Come back here. No: I mean, when she found out I had now she didn’t jump on me too hard.—it was one day, Ratliff’s voice said, “Come here.” He had traded off his buckboard and team and now he had a Model T, with the little painted house with the sewing machine in it fastened to the back in place of a back seat; what they call pickup trucks now though Ratliff and Uncle Noon Gatewood had made this one. He was sitting in it with the door already open and I got in and he shut the door and we drove right slow along the back streets around the edge of town. “How old did you say you was?” he said. I told him again: five. “Well, we cant help that, can we?”

  “Cant help what?” I said. “Why?”

  “Come to think of it, maybe you’re right at that,” he said. “So all we got to do now is jest take a short ride. So what happened to Montgomery Ward Snopes was, he quit the fighting army and went into business.”

  “What business?” I said.

  “The … canteen business. Yes, the canteen business. That’s what he done while he was with your cousin. They was at a town named Chalons, only your cousin had to stay in town to run the office, so he give Montgomery Ward, since he had the most spare time, the job of running the canteen at another little town not far away that would be more convenient for the soldiers—a kind of a shack with counters like a store where soldiers could buy the candy bars and sody pop and hand-knitted socks like your cousin told us about that time last week when they wasn’t busy fighting, you remember? Except that after a while Montgomery Ward’s canteen got to be jest about the most popular canteen the army or even the Y.M.C.A. either ever had in France or anywhere else; it got so popular that finally your cousin went his-self and looked at it and found that Montgomery Ward had cut off the back end and fixed it up as a new fresh entertainment room with a door in the back and a young French lady he happened to know in it, so that any time a soldier got tired of jest buying socks or eating chocolate bars he could buy a ticket from Montgomery Ward and go around through the back door and get his-self entertained.

  “That was what your cousin found out. Only the army and the Y.M.C.A. had some kind of a rule against entertainment; they figgered that a soldier ought to be satisfied jest buying socks and sody pop in a canteen. Or maybe it was your cousin; likely it was him. Because if the army and the Y.M.C.A. had found out about that back room, they would a fired Montgomery Ward so hard he would likely a come back to Jefferson in handcuffs—providing he never stopped off at Leavenworth, Kansas, first. Which reminds me of something I may have said to your other cousin Gowan once when likely you wasn’t present: about how some of the folks that lost Helen of Troy might some day wish they hadn’t found her to begin with.”

  “Why?” I said. “Where was I if I wasn’t there then?”

  “It was your cousin. Montgomery Ward might have even saved enough out of the back-room entertainment tickets to bought hisself out of it. But he never needed to. He had your cousin. He was the hair-shirt of your cousin’ lost love and devotion, whether he knowed it or not or cared or not. Or maybe it was Jefferson. Maybe your cousin couldn’t bear the idea of Jefferson being represented in Leavenworth prison even for the reward of one Snopes less in Jefferson itself. So likely it was him, and afterwards saying, ‘But dont never let me see your face again in France.’

  “That is, dont never bring your face to me again. Because Montgomery Ward was the hair-shirt; likely your cousin taken the same kind of proud abject triumphant submissive horror in keeping up with his doings that them old hermits setting on rocks out in the hot sun in the desert use to take watching their blood dry up and their legs swivelling, keeping up from a distance while Montgomery Ward added more and more entertaining ladies to that-ere new canteen he set up in Paris—”

  “They have chocolate bars and soda pop in canteens,” I said. “Uncle Gavin said so. Chewing gum too.”

  “That was the American army,” Ratliff said. “They had been in the war such a short time that likely they hadn’t got used to it yet. This new canteen of Montgomery Ward’s was you might say a French canteen, with only private American military connections. The French have been in enough wars long enough to find out that the best way to get shut of one is not to pay too much attention to it. In fact the French probably thought the kind of canteen Montgomery Ward was running this time was just about the most solvent and economical and you might say self-perpetuating kind he could a picked out, since, no matter how much money you swap for ice cream and chocolate candy and sody pop, even though the money still exists, that candy and ice cream and sody pop dont any more because it has been consumed and will cost some of that money to produce and replenish, where in jest strict entertainment there aint no destructive consumption at all that’s got to be replenished at a definite production labor cost: only a normal natural general overall depreciation which would have took place anyhow.”

  “Maybe Montgomery Ward wont come back to Jefferson,” I said.

  “If I was him, I wouldn’t,” Ratliff said.

  “Unless he can bring the canteen with him,” I said.

  “In that case I sholy wouldn’t,” Ratliff said.

  “Is it Uncle Gavin you keep on talking about?” I said.

  “I’m sorry,” Ratliff said.

  “Then why dont you say so?” I said.

  “I’m sorry,” Ratliff said. “Your uncle. It was your cousin Gowan (I’m right this time, aint I?) got me mixed up but I’ll remember now. I promise it.”

  Montgomery Ward didn’t come home for two years. Though I had to be older than that before I understood what Ratliff meant when he said Montgomery Ward had done the best he knew to bring an acceptable Mississippi version of his Paris canteen back home with him. He was the last Yoknapatawpha soldier to return. One of Captain McLendon’s company was wounded in the first battle in which American troops were engaged and ws him, I ck in uniform with his wound stripe in 1918. Then early in 1919 the rest of the company, except two dead from flu and a few in the hospital, were all home again to wear their uniforms too around the Square for a little while. Then in May one of Colonel Sartoris’s twin grandsons (the other one had been shot down in July last year) got home from the British Air Force though he didn’t have on a uniform at all: just a big low-slung racing car that made the little red E.M.F. that Mayor de Spain used to own look like a toy, driving it fast around town between the times when Mr Connors would have to arrest him for speeding, but mostly about once a week back and forth to Memphis while he was getting settled down again. That is, that’s what Mother said he was trying to do.

  Only he couldn’t seem to either, like the war had been too much for him too. I mean, Montgomery Ward Snopes couldn’t seem to settle down enough from it to come back home, and Bayard Sartoris came home all right but he couldn’t settle down, driving the car so fast between Sartoris Station and Jefferson that finally Colonel Sartoris, who hated automobiles almost as much as Grandfather did, who wouldn’t even lend the bank’s money to a man who was going to buy one, gave up the carriage and the matched team, to ride back and forth into town with Bayard in the car, in hopes that maybe that would make Bayard slow it down before he killed himself or somebody else.

  So when Bayard finally did kill somebody, as we (all Yoknapatawpha County grown folks) all expected he would, it was his grandfather. Because we didn’t know that either: that Colonel Sartoris had a heart condition; Doctor Peabody had told him that three years ago, and that he had no business in an automobile at all. But Colonel Sartoris hadn’t told anybody else, not even his sister, Mrs Du Pre that kept house for him: just riding in that car back and forth to town every day to keep Bayard slowed down (they even managed somehow to persuade Miss Narcissa Benbow to marry him in hopes maybe that would settle him down) until that morning they came over a hill at about fifty miles an hour and there was a Negro family in a wagon in the road and Bayard said, “Hold on, Grandfather,” and turned t
he car off into the ditch; it didn’t turn over or even wreck very bad: just stopped in the ditch with Colonel Sartoris still sitting in it with his eyes still open.

  So now his bank didn’t have a president any more. Then we found out just who owned the stock in it: that Colonel Sartoris and Major de Spain, Mayor de Spain’s father until he died, had owned two of the three biggest blocks, and old man Will Varner out in Frenchman’s Bend owned the other one. So we thought that maybe it wasn’t just Colonel Sartoris’s father’s cavalry command that got Byron Snopes his job in the bank, but maybe old Will Varner had something to do with it too. Except that we never really believed that since we knew Colonel Sartoris well enough to know that any single one of those old cavalry raids or even just one night around a bivouac fire would have been enough.

  Of course there was more of it, that much again and even more scattered around in a dozen families like the Compsons and Benbows and Peabodys and Miss Eunice Habersham and us and a hundred others that were farmers around in the county. Though it wasn’t until Mayor de Spain got elected president of it to succeed Colonel Sartoris (in fact, because of that) that we found out that Mr Flem Snopes had been buying the stock in lots anywhere from one to ten shares for several years; this, added to Mr Varner’s and Mayor de Spain’s own that he had inherited om his father, would have been enough to elect him up from vice president to president (There was so much going on that we didn’t even notice that when the dust finally settled Mr Flem Snopes would be vice president of it too.) even if Mrs Du Pre and Bayard’s wife (Bayard had finally got himself killed testing an aeroplane at an Ohio testing field that they said nobody else would fly and that Bayard himself didn’t have any business in) hadn’t voted theirs for him.

  Because Mayor de Spain resigned from being mayor and sold his automobile agency and became president of the bank just in time. Colonel Sartoris’s bank was a national bank because Ratliff said likely Colonel Sartoris knew that would sound safer to country folks with maybe an extra ten dollars to risk in a bank, let alone the female widows and orphans, since females never had much confidence in men-folks’ doings about anything, let alone money, even when they were not widows too. So with a change of presidents like that, Ratliff said the government would have to send somebody to inspect the books even if the regular inspection wasn’t about due; the two auditors waiting in front of the bank at eight o’clock that morning for somebody to unlock the door and let them in, which would have been Byron Snopes except that he didn’t show up. So they had to wait for the next one with a key: which was Mr de Spain.

  And by fifteen minutes after eight, which was about thirteen minutes after the auditors decided to start on the books that Byron kept, Mr de Spain found out from the Snopes Hotel that nobody had seen Byron since the southbound train at nine twenty-two last night, and by noon everybody knew that Byron was probably already in Texas though he probably wouldn’t reach Mexico itself for another day yet. Though it was not until two days later that the head auditor was ready to commit himself roughly as to how much money was missing; by that time they had called a meeting of the bank’s board of directors and even Mr Varner that Jefferson never saw once in twelve months had come in and listened to the head auditor for about a minute and then said, “Police hell. Send somebody out home for my pistol, then show me which way he went.”

  Which wasn’t anything to the uproar Mr de Spain himself was making, with all this time all Jefferson watching and listening, until on the third day Ratliff said, though I didn’t know what he meant then: “That’s how much it was, was it? At least we know now jest how much Miz Flem Snopes is worth. Now your uncle wont need to worry about how much he lost when he gets home because now he can know exactly to the last decimal how much he saved.” Because the bank itself was all right. It was a national bank, so whatever money Byron stole would be guaranteed whether they caught Byron or not. We were watching Mr de Spain. Since his father’s money had helped Colonel Sartoris start it and Mr de Spain had himself been vice president of it, even if he had not been promoted president of it just ahead of when the auditors decided to look at Byron Snopes’s books, we believed he would still have insisted on making good every cent of the money. What we expected to hear was that he had mortgaged his home, and when we didn’t hear that, we just thought that he had made money out of his automobile agency that was saved up and put away that we didn’t know about. Because we never expected anything else of him; when the next day they called another sudden meeting of the board of directors and announced the day after that that the stolen money had been made good by the voluntary personal efforts of the president, we were not even surprised. As Ratliff said, we were so unsurprised in factt was two or three days before anybody seemed to notice how at the same time they announced that Mr Flem Snopes was now the new vice president of it.

  And now, it was another year, the last two Jefferson soldiers came home for good or anyway temporarily for good: Uncle Gavin finally came back from rehabilitating war-torn Europe to get elected County Attorney, and a few months later, Montgomery Ward Snopes too except that he was just temporarily at home for good, like Bayard Sartoris. He wasn’t in uniform either but in a black suit and a black overcoat without any sleeves and a black thing on his head kind of drooping over one side like an empty cow’s bladder made out of black velvet, and a long limp-ended bow tie; and his hair long and he had a beard and now there was another Snopes business in Jefferson. It had a name on the window that Ratliff didn’t know either and when I went up to the office where Uncle Gavin was waiting for the first of the year to start being County Attorney and told him, he sat perfectly still for a good two seconds and then got up already walking. “Show me,” he said.

  So we went back to where Ratliff was waiting for us. It was a store on the corner by an alley, with a side door on the alley; the painter was just finishing the curlicue letters; on the glass window that said

  ATELIER MONTY

  and inside, beyond the glass, Montgomery Ward still wearing the French cap (Uncle Gavin said it was a Basque beret) but in his shirtsleeves. Because we didn’t go in then; Uncle Gavin said, “Come on now. Let him finish it first.” Except Ratliff. He said,

  “Maybe I can help him.” But Uncle Gavin took hold of my arm that time.

  “If atelier means just a studio,” I said, “why dont he call it that?”

  “Yes,” Uncle Gavin said. “That’s what I want to know too.” And even though Ratliff went in, he hadn’t seen anything either. And he sounded just like me.

  “Studio,” he said. “I wonder why he dont just call it that?”

  “Uncle Gavin didn’t know either,” I said.

  “I know,” Ratliff said. “I wasn’t asking nobody yet. I was jest kind of looking around for a place to jump.” He looked at me. He blinked two or three times. “Studio,” he said. “That’s right, you aint even up that far yet. It’s a photographing studio.” He blinked again. “But why? His war record has done already showed he aint a feller to be satisfied with no jest dull run-of-the-mill mediocrity like us stay-at-homes back here in Yoknapatawpha County has to get used to.”

  But that was all we knew then. Because the next day he had newspapers fastened on the window so you couldn’t see inside and he kept the door locked and all we ever saw would be the packages he would get out of the post office from Sears and Roebuck in Chicago and unlock the door long enough to take them inside.

  Then on Thursday when the Clarion came out, almost half of the front pagethe announcement of the formal opening, saying Ladies Especially Invited, and at the bottom: Tea. “What?” I said. “I thought it was going to be a studio.”

  “It is,” Uncle Gavin said. “You get a cup of tea with it. Only he’s wasting his money. All the women in town and half the men will go once just to see why he kept the door locked.” Because Mother had already said she was going.

  “Of course you wont be there,” she told Uncle Gavin.

  “All right,” he said. “Most of the men then.” He was ri
ght. Montgomery Ward had to keep the opening running all day long to take care of the people that came. He would have had to run it in sections even with the store empty like he rented it. But now it wouldn’t have held hardly a dozen at a time, it was so full of stuff, with black curtains hanging all the way to the floor on all the walls that when you drew them back with a kind of pulley it would be like you were looking through a window at outdoors that he said one was the skyline of Paris and another was the Seine river bridges and ks whatever they are and another was the Eiffel Tower and another Notre Dame, and sofas with black pillows and tables with vases and cups and something burning in them that made a sweet kind of smell; until at first you didn’t hardly notice the camera. But finally you did, and a door at the back and Montgomery Ward said, he said it quick and he kind of moved quick, like he had already begun to move before he had time to decide that maybe he better not.

  “That’s the dark room. It’s not open yet.”

  “I beg pardon?” Uncle Gavin said.

  “That’s the dark room,” Montgomery Ward said. “It’s not open yet.”

  “Are we expected to expect a dark room to be open to the public?” Uncle Gavin said. But Montgomery Ward was already giving Mrs Rouncewell another cup of tea. Oh yes, there was a vase of flowers too; in the Clarion announcement of the opening it said Flowers by Rouncewell and I said to Uncle Gavin, where else in Jefferson would anybody get flowers except from Mrs Rouncewell? and he said she probably paid for half the advertisement, plus a vase containing six overblown roses left over from another funeral, that she will probably take out in trade. Then he said he meant her trade and he hoped he was right. Now he looked at the door a minute, then he looked at Montgomery Ward filling Mrs Rouncewell’s cup. “Beginning with tea,” he said.