Snopes: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion

And you, the old man, standing there while there rises to you, about you, suffocating you, the spring dark peopleand myriad, two and two seeking never at all solitude but simply privacy, the privacy decreed and created for them by the spring darkness, the spring weather, the spring which an American poet, a fine one, a woman and so she knows, called girls’ weather and boys’ luck. Which was not the first day at all, not Eden morning at all because girls’ weather and boys’ luck is the sum of all the days: the cup, the bowl proffered once to the lips in youth and then no more; proffered to quench or sip or drain that lone one time and even that sometimes premature, too soon. Because the tragedy of life is, it must be premature, inconclusive and inconcludable, in order to be life; it must be before itself, in advance of itself, to have been at all.

And now for truth was the one last chance to choose, decide: whether or not to say Why me? Why bother me? Why cant you let me alone? Why must it be my problem whether I was right and your husband just wants your lovers scalp, or Ratliff is right and your husband doesn’t care a damn about you or his honor either and just wants De Spain’s bank?—the Square empty beneath the four identical faces of the courthouse clock saying ten minutes to ten to the north and east and south and west, vacant now beneath the arclight-stippled shadows of fledged leaves like small bites taken out of the concrete paving, the drugstores closed and all still moving now were the late last homeward stragglers from the second running of picture show. Or better still, what she herself should have thought without my needing to say it: Take Manfred de Spain in whatever your new crisis is, since you didn’t hesitate to quench with him your other conflagration eighteen years ago. Or do you already know in advance he will be no good this time, since a bank is not a female but neuter?

And of course Otis Harker. “Evening, Mr Stevens,” he said. “When you drove up I almost hoped maybe it was a gang come to rob the postoffice or the bank or something to bring us a little excitement for a change.”

“But it was just another lawyer,” I said, “and lawyers dont bring excitement: only misery?”

“I dont believe I quite said that, did I?” he said. “But leastways lawyers stays awake, so if you’re going to be around a while, maybe I’ll jest mosey back to the station and maybe take a nap while you watch them racing clock-hands a spell for me.” Except that he was looking at me. No: he wasn’t looking at me at all: he was watching me, deferent to my white hairs as a “well-raised” Mississippian should be, but not my representative position as his employer; not quite servile, not quite impudent, waiting maybe or calculating maybe.

“Say it,” I said. “Except that—”

“Except that Mr Flem Snopes and Mr Manfred de Spain might cross the Square any time now with old Will Varner chasing them both out of town with that pistol.”

“Good night,” I said. “If I dont see you again.”

“Good night,” he said. “I’ll likely be somewhere around. I mean around awake. I wouldn’t want Mr Buck himself to have to get up out of bed and come all the way to town to catch me asleep.”

You see? You cant beat it. Otis Harker to, who, assuming he does keep awake all night as he is paid to do, should have been at home all day in bed asleep. But of course, he was there; he actually saw old Varner cross the Square at four this morning on his way to Flem’s house. Yes. You cant beat it: the town itself officially on record now in the voice of its night marshal; the county itself had spoken through one of its minor clowns; eighteen years ago when Manfred de Spain thought he was just bedding another loose-girdled bucolic Lilith, he was actually creating a piece of buffoon’s folklore.