Snopes: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion

“Yes,” Father said. “What were we saying? Oh yes, dancing the Christmas Cotillion.” He was talking to Uncle Gavin now. “Well by godfrey, that puts you one up on Manfred de Spain, dont it? He’s a lone orphan; he hasn’t got a wife or a twin sister who was one of the original founders of Jefferson literary and snobbery clubs; all he can do to Flem Snopes’s wife is—” Gowan said how until now Mother was always between Father and Uncle Gavin, with one hand on each of their chests to hold them apart. He said that now Mother and Uncle Gavin were both at Father, with Mother holding one hand on Father’s mouth and reaching for his, Gowan’s, ears with the other, and she and Uncle Gavin both saying the same thing, only Uncle Gavin was just using another set of words for it:

“Dont you dare!”, theight="0em">

“Go on. Say it.”

So Father didn’t. But even he didn’t anticipate what Uncle Gavin would do next: try to persuade Mother to make the Cotillion committee not invite Mr de Spain to the ball at all. “Hell fire,” Father said. “You cant do that.”

“Why cant we?” Mother said.

“He’s the mayor!” Father said.

“The mayor of a town is a servant,” Mother said. “He’s the head servant of course: the butler. You dont invite a butler to a party because he’s a butler. You invite him in spite of it.”

But Mayor de Spain got his invitation too. Maybe the reason Mother didn’t stop it like Uncle Gavin wanted her to, was simply for that reason she had already given, explained, described: that she and the Cotillion Club didn’t have to invite him because he was Mayor, and so they invited him just to show it, prove it. Only Father didn’t think that was the reason. “No sir,” he said. “You damned gals aint fooling me or anybody else. You want trouble. You want something to happen. You like it. You want two red-combed roosters strutting at one another, provided one of you hens is the reason for it. And if there’s anything else you can think of to shove them in to where one of them will have to draw blood in self-defense, you’ll do that too because every drop of that blood or every black eye or every public-torn collar or split or muddy britches is another item of revenge on that race of menfolks that holds you ladies thralled all day long day after day with nothing to do between meals but swap gossip over the telephone. By godfrey,” he said, “if there wasn’t any club to give a Christmas dance two weeks from now, you all would probably organise one just to invite Mrs Snopes and Gavin and Manfred de Spain to it. Except you are wasting your time and money this trip. Gavin dont know how to make trouble.”

“Gavin’s a gentleman,” Mother said.

“Sure,” Father said. “That’s what I said: it aint that he dont want to make trouble: he just dont know how. Oh, I dont mean he wont try. He’ll do the best he knows. But he just dont know how to make the kind of trouble that a man like Manfred de Spain will take seriously.”

But Mr de Spain did the best he could to teach Uncle Gavin how. He began the day the invitations were sent out and he got his after all. When he bought that red E.M.F. the first thing he did was to have a cut-out put on it and until he got elected mayor the first time you could hear him all the way to the Square the moment he left home. And soon after that Lucius Hogganbeck got somebody (it was Mr Roth Edmonds and maybe Mr de Spain too since Lucius’s father, old Boon Hogganbeck, had been Mr Roth’s father’s, Mr McCaslin Edmonds, and his uncle’s, Uncle Ike McCaslin, and old Major de Spain’s huntsman-doghandler-manFriday back in the time of Major de Spain’s old hunting camp) to sign a note for him to buy a Model T Ford and set up in the jitney passenger-hauling business, and he had a cut-out too and on Sunday afternoons half the men in Jefferson would slip off from their wives and go out to a straight stretch of road about two miles from town (even two miles back in town you could hear them when the wwas right) and Mr de Spain and Lucius would race each other. Lucius would charge his passengers a nickel a head to ride in the race, though Mr de Spain carried his free.

Though the first thing Mr de Spain did after he got to be mayor was to have an ordinance passed that no cut-out could be opened inside the town limits. So it had been years now since we had heard one. Then one morning we did. I mean we—Grandfather and Mother and Father and Uncle Gavin and Gowan—did, because it was right in front of our house. It was just about the time everybody would be going to school or to work and Gowan knew which car it was even before he got to the window because Lucius’s Ford made a different sound, and besides nobody but the mayor would have risked that cut-out with the cut-out law in force. It was him: the red car just going out of sight and the cut-out off again as soon as he had passed the house; and Uncle Gavin still sitting at the table finishing his breakfast just as if there hadn’t been any new noise at all.