Snopes: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion

“You cant help it either, can you?” she said. “You’ve got to be a man too, haven’t you?” She just talked to Uncle Gavin then: “Just what is it about this that you cant stand? That Mrs Snopes may not be chaste, or that it looks like she picked Manfred de Spain out to be unchaste with?”

“Yes!” Uncle Gavin said. “I mean no! It’s all lies—gossip. It’s all—”

“Yes,” Mother said. “You’re right. It’s probably all just that. Saturday’s not a very good afternoon to get in the barbershop, but you might think about it when you pass.”

“Thanks,” Uncle Gavin said. “But if I’m to go on this crusade with any hope of success, the least I can do is look wild and shaggy enough to be believed. You’ll do it, then?”

“Of course,” Mother said.

“Thank you,” Uncle Gavin said. Then he was gone.

“I suppose I could be excused now,” Gowan said.

“What for now?” Mother said. She was still watching Uncle Gavin, down the walk and into the street now. “He should have married Melisandre Backus,” she said. Melisandre Backus lived on a plantation about six pases from town with her father and a bottle of whiskey. I dont mean he was a drunkard. He was a good farmer. He just spent the rest of his time sitting on the gallery in summer and in the library in winter with the bottle, reading Latin poetry. Miss Melisandre and Mother had been in school together, at high school and the Seminary both. That is, Miss Melisandre was always four years behind Mother. “At one time I thought he might; I didn’t know any better then.”

“Cousin Gavin?” Gowan said. “Him married?”

“Oh yes,” Mother said. “He’s just too young yet. He’s the sort of man doomed to marry a widow with grown children.”

“He could still marry Miss Melisandre,” Gowan said.

“It’s too late,” Mother said. “He didn’t know she was there.”

“He sees her every day she comes in to town,” Gowan said.

“You can see things without looking at them, just like you can hear things without listening,” Mother said.

“He sure didn’t just do that when he saw Mrs Snopes that day,” Gowan said. “Maybe he’s waiting for her to have another child besides Linda and for them to grow up?”

“No no,” Mother said. “You don’t marry Semiramis: you just commit some form of suicide for her. Only gentlemen with as little to lose as Mr Flem Snopes can risk marrying Semiramis.—It’s too bad you are so old too. A few years ago I could have made you come with me to call on her. Now you’ll have to admit openly that you want to come; you may even have to say ‘Please.’ ”

But Gowan didn’t. It was Saturday afternoon and there was a football game and though he hadn’t made the regular team yet you never could tell when somebody that had might break a leg or have a stroke or even a simple condition in arithmetic. Besides, he said Mother didn’t need his help anyway, having the whole town’s help in place of it; he said they hadn’t even reached the Square the next morning on the way to church when the first lady they met said brightly:

“What’s this I hear about yesterday afternoon?” and Mother said just as brightly:

“Indeed?” and the second lady they met said (she belonged to the Byron Society and the Cotillion Club too):

“I always say we’d all be much happier to believe nothing we don’t see with our own eyes, and only half of that,” and Mother said still just as brightly:

“Indeed?” They—the Byron Society and the Cotillion Club, both when possible of course though either alone in a pinch—seemed to be the measure. Now Uncle Gavin stopped talking about Snopeses. I mean, Gowan said he stopped talking at all. It was like he didn’t have time any more to concentrate on talk in order to raise it to conversation, art, like he believed was everybody’s duty. It was like he didn’t have time to do anything but wait, to get something done that the only way he knew to get it done was waiting. More than that, than just waiting: not only never missing a chance to do things for Mother, he even invented little things to do for her, so that even when he would talk a little, it was like he was killing two birds with the same stone.