Snopes: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion

“Of course you can,” she said. “It’s yours.” So he drove the car back to town and arranged with a garage to store it for ten dollars a month and removed the battery and radio and the tires and the spare wheel and sold them and took the keys and the bill of sale to Snopes’s bank and mortgaged the car for the biggest loan they would make on it. By that time progress, industrial renascence and rejuvenation had reached even rural Mississippi banks, so Snopes’s bank now had a professional cashier or working vice-president imported from Memphis six months back to give it the New Look, that is, to bring rural banks abreast of the mental condition which accepted, could accept, the automobile as a definite ineradicable part of not only the culture but the economy also; where, as Stevens knew, Snopes alone would not lend God Himself one penny on an automobile. So Stevens could have got the loan from the imported vice-president on his simple recognizance, not only for the above reason but because the vice-president was a stranger and Stevens represented one of the three oldest families in the county and the vice-president would not have dared to say No to him. But Stevens didn’t do it that way; this was to be, as the saying had it, Snopes’s baby. He waylaid, ambushed, caught Snopes himself in public, in the lobby of his bank with not only all the staff but the moment’s complement of customers, to explain in detail how he didn’t intend to sell his wife’s wedding gift but simply to convert it into war bonds for the duration of the war. So the loan was made, the keys surrendered and the lien recorded, which Stevens naturally had no intention whatever of ever redeeming, plus the ten dollars a month storage accrued to whatever moment when Snopes realised that his bank owned a brand-new though outdated Cadillac automobile complete except for battery and tires.

Though even with the six-year-old coupé which (as it were) he had got married from, the houseman still got there first to hold the door for him to get in and depart, down the long driveway lined immediately with climbing roses on the white-panelled fences where the costly pedigreed horses had once ranged in pampered idleness; gone now since there was no one on the place to ride them unless somebody paid him for it, Stevens himself hating horses even more than dogs, rating the horse an unassailable first in loathing since though both were parasites, the dog at least had the grace to be a sycophant too; itat least fawned on you and so kept you healthily ashamed of the human race. But the real reason was, though neither the horse nor the dog ever forgot anything, the dog at least forgave you, which the horse did not; and his, Stevens’s, thought was that what the world needed was more forgiving: that if you had a good sensitive quick-acting capacity for forgiving, it didn’t really matter whether you ever learned or even remembered anything or not.

Because he had no idea what Linda wanted either; he thought Because women are wonderful: it doesn’t really matter what they want or if they themselves even know what it is they think they want. At least there was the silence. She would have to organise, correlate, tell him herself, rather than have whatever it was she wanted him to know dug out of her by means of the infinitesimal legal mining which witnesses usually required; he would need only write on the tablet At least dont make me have to write out in writing whatever questions you want me to ask you so whenever you come to one of them just ask it yourself and go on from there. Even as he stopped the car he could already see her, her white dress in the portico, between two of the columns which were too big for the house, for the street, for Jefferson itself; it would be dim and probably cooler and anyway pleasant to sit there. But there was the silence; he thought how there should be a law for everybody to carry a flashlight in his car or perhaps he could ask her with the tablet to get a flashlight from the house so she could read the first sentence; except that she couldn’t read the request for the flashlight until she was inside the house.