Snopes: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion

He saw. They both did.t was not his—Snopes’s—shame any more than it was De Spain’s pride that when the final crisis of the brass came which could have destroyed him, De Spain found for ally his accuser himself. The accuser, the city official sworn and—so he thought until that moment—dedicated too, until he too proved to be vulnerable (not competent: merely vulnerable) to that same passion from which derived what should have been his—De Spain’s—ruin and desolation; the sworn and heretofore dedicated city official who found too dangerous for breathing too that same air simply because she had breathed it, walked in it while it laved and ached; the accuser, the community’s civic champion likewise blasted and stricken by that same lightning-bolt out of the old passion and the old anguish. But for him (the accuser) only the grieving without even the loss; for him not even ruin to crown the grieving: only the desolation, who was not competent for but merely vulnerable to, since it was not even for him to hold her hand.

So De Spain brazened that through too, abrogating to courage what had merely been his luck. And as if that were not temerity enough, effrontery enough: Colonel Sartoris barely dead of his heart attack in his grandson’s racing automobile (almost as though he—De Spain—had suborned the car and so contrived the accident) and the presidency of the bank barely vacant, when here he—De Spain—was again not requesting or suggesting but with that crass and brazen gall assuming, taking it for granted that he, Snopes, was downright panting for the next new chance not merely to re-compound but publicly affirm again his own cuckolding, that mutual co-violating of his wife’s bed—ay, publicly affirming her whoredom; the last clod still echoing as it were on Colonel Sartoris’s coffin when De Spain approaches, figuratively rubbing his hands, already saying, “All right, let’s get going. That little shirttail full of stock you own will help some of course. But we need a big block of it. You step out to Frenchman’s Bend tomorrow—tonight if possible—and sew up Uncle Billy before somebody else gets to him. Get moving now.” Or maybe even the true explicit words: Your kinsman—cousin—has destroyed this bank by removing a link, no matter how small or large, in the chain of its cash integrity. Which means not just the value of the stock you own in it, but the actual dolíais and cents which you worked so hard to acquire and deposit in it, and which until last night were available to you on demand, were still yours. The only way to anneal that chain is to restore that link to the last penny which your cousin stole. I will do that, but in return for it I must be president of the bank; anyone who restores that money will insist on being president in return, just as anyone to become president will have to restore that money first. That’s your choice: keep the par of your stock and the full value of your deposit through a president that you know exactly how far you can trust him, or take your chance with a stranger to whom the value of your stock and deposit may possibly mean no more than they did to your cousin Byron.

He obeyed. He had no choice. Because there was the innocence; ignorance, if you like. He had naturally taught himself all he could about banking, since he had to use them or something equivalent to keep his money in. But so far his only opportunities had been while waiting in line at a window, to peer through the grilled barricade which separated the money and the methods of handling it from the people to whom it belonged, who brought it in and relinquished it on that simple trust of one human being in another, since there was no alternative between that baseless trust and a vulnerable coffee can buriedunder a bush in the back yard.