And time was when that first president, Colonel Sartoris, had come the four miles between his ancestral symbol and his bank in a surrey and matched pair drove by a Negro coachman in a linen duster and one of the Colonel’s old plug hats; and time ain’t so was when the second president still come and went in that fire-engine-coloured E.M.F. racer until he bought that black Packard and a Negro too except in a white coat and a showfer’s cap to drive it.
This here new third president had a black automobile too even if it wasn’t a Packard, and a Negro that could drive it too even if he never had no white coat and showfer’s cap yet and even if the president didn’t ride back and forth to the bank or at least not yet. Them two previous presidents would ride around the county in the evening after the bank closed and on Sunday, in that surrey and pair or the black Packard, to look at the cotton farms they represented the mortgages on, while this new president hadn’t commenced that neither.
Which wasn’t because he jest couldn’t believe yet that he actively represented the mortgages. He never doubted that. He wasn’t skeered to believe it, and he wasn’t too meek to nor doubtful to. It was because he was watching yet and learning yet. It wasn’t that he had learned two lessons while he thought he was jest learning that single one about how he would need respectability, because he had done already brought that second lesson in from Frenchman’s Bend with him.
That was humility, the only kind of humility that’s worth a hoot: the humility to know they’s a heap of things you don’t know yet but if you jest got the patience to be humble and watchful long enough, especially keeping one eye on your back trail, you will. So now on the evenings and Sundays there was jest that house where you wasn’t invited in to see him setting in that swivel chair in that one room he used, with his hat on and chewing steady on nothing and his feet propped on that little wooden additional ledge nailed in unpainted paradox to that hand-carved and painted mantel like one of them framed mottoes you keep hanging on the wall where you work or think, saying Remember Death or Keep Smiling or -Working or God is Love to remind not jest you but the strangers that see it too, that you got at least a speaking acquaintance with the fact that it might be barely possible it taken a little something more than jest you to get you where you’re at.
But all that, footrest and all, would come later. Right now, Lawyer was free. And then — it wasn’t no three days after Linda reached New York, but it wasn’t no three hundred neither — he become, as the feller says, indeed free. He was leaning against the counter in the post office lobby with the letter already open in his hand when I come in; it wasn’t his fault neither that the lobby happened to be empty at the moment.
“His name is Barton Kohl,” he says.
“Sho now,” I says. “Whose name is?”
“That dream’s name,” he says.
“Cole,” I says.
“No,” he says. “You’re pronouncing it Cole. It’s spelled K-o-h-l.”
“Oh,” I says. “Kohl. That don’t sound very American to me.”
“Does Vladimir Kyrilytch sound very American to you?”
But the lobby was empty. Which, as I said, wasn’t his fault. “Confound it,” I says, “with one Ratliff in ever generation for them whole hundred and fifty years since your durn Yankee Congress banished us into the Virginia mountains, has had to spend half his life trying to live down his front name before somebody spoke it out loud where folks could hear it. It was Eula told you.”
“All right,” he says. “I’ll help you bury your family shame. — Yes,” he says. “He’s a Jew. A sculptor, probably a damned good one.”
“Because of that?” I says.
“Probably, but not exclusively. Because of her.”
“Linda’ll make him into a good sculptor, no matter what he was before, because she married him?”
“No. He would have to be the best of whatever he was for her to pick him out.”
“So she’s married now,” I says.
“What?” he says. “No. She just met him, I tell you.”
“So you ain’t—” I almost said safe yet before I changed it: “ — sure yet. I mean, she ain’t decided yet.”
“What the hell else am I talking about? Don’t you remember what I told you last fall? that she would love once and it would be for keeps.”
“Except that you said ‘doomed to’.”
“All right,” he says.
“Doomed to fidelity and grief, you said. To love once quick and lose him quick and for the rest of her life to be faithful and to grieve. But leastways she ain’t lost him yet. In fact, she ain’t even got him yet. That’s correct, aint it?”
“Didn’t I say all right?” he says.
That was the first six months, about. Another year after that, that-ere little footrest ledge was up on that hand-painted Mount Vernon mantel — that-ere little raw wood step like out of a scrap pile, nailed by a country carpenter on to that what you might call respectability’s virgin Matterhorn for the Al-pine climber to cling to panting, gathering his-self for that last do-or-die upsurge to deface the ultimate crowning pinnacle and peak with his own victorious initials.
But not this one; and here was that humility again: not in public where it would be a insult to any and all that held Merchants and Farmers Bank Al-pine climbing in veneration, but in private like a secret chapel or a shrine: not to cling panting to it, desperate and indomitable, but to prop his feet on it while setting at his ease.
This time I was passing the office stairs when Lawyer come rushing around the corner as usual, with most of the law papers flying along loose in his outside pockets but a few of them still in his hand too as usual. I mean, he had jest two gaits: one standing more or less still and the other like his coat-tail was on fire. “Run back home and get your grip,” he says. “We’re leaving Memphis tonight for New York.”
So we went up the stairs and as soon as we was inside the office he changed to the other gait as usual. He throwed the loose papers on to the desk and taken one of the cob pipes outen the dish and set down, only when he fumbled in his coat for the matches or tobacco or whatever it was he discovered the rest of the papers and throwed them on to the desk and set back in the chair like he had done already had all the time in the world and couldn’t possibly anticipate nothing else happening in the next hundred years neither. “For the housewarming,” he says.
“You mean the reception, don’t you? Ain’t that what they call it after the preacher has done collected his two dollars?” He didn’t say anything, jest setting there working at lighting that pipe like a jeweller melting one exact drop of platinum maybe into a watch. “So they ain’t going to marry,” I says. “They’re jest going to confederate. I’ve heard that: that that’s why they call them Grinnich Village samples dreams: you can wake up without having to jump outen the bed in a dead run for the nearest lawyer.”
He didn’t move. He jest bristled, that lively and quick he never had time to change his position. He sat there and bristled like a hedgehog, not moving of course: jest saying cold and calm, since even a hedgehog, once it has got itself arranged and prickled out, can afford a cold and calm collected voice too: “All right. I’ll arrogate the term ‘marriage’ to it then. Do you protest or question it? Maybe you would even suggest a better one? — Because there’s not enough time left,” he says. “Enough left? There’s none left. Young people today don’t have any left because only fools under twenty-five can believe, let alone hope, that there’s any left at all — for any of us, anybody alive today—”
“It don’t take much time to say We both do in front of a preacher and then pay whatever the three of you figger it’s worth.”
“Didn’t I just say there’s not even that much left if all you’ve had is just twenty-five or thirty years—”
“So that’s how old he is,” I says. “You stopped at jest twenty-five before.”
He didn’t stop at nowhere now: “Barely a decade since their fathers and uncles and brothers just finished the one which was to rid the phenomenon of government forever of the parasites — the hereditary properties, the farmers-general of the human dilemma who had just killed eight million human beings and ruined a forty-mile-wide strip down the middle of western Europe.
Yet less than a dozen years later and the same old cynical manipulators not even bothering to change their names and faces but merely assuming a set of new titles out of the shibboleth of the democratic lexicon and its mythology, not even breaking stride to coalesce again to wreck the one doomed desperate hope—” Now he will resume the folks that broke President Wilson’s heart and killed the League of
