Anyway, he gave the child a name and then moved the mother herself completely away from that old stage and scene and milieu of her shame, onto, into a new one, where at least no man could say I saw that fall but only This is what gossip said. Not that he expected gratitude from her, anymore than he did from old Will Varner, who by his (Varner’s) lights had already paid him. But he did expect from her the simple sense and discretion taught by hard experience: not gratitude toward him but simple sensibleness toward herself, as you neither expect nor care that the person you save from burning is grateful for being saved but at least you expect that from now on that person will stay away from fire.
But that was not the point, that maybe women are no more capable of sensibleness than they are of gratitude. Maybe women are capable only of gratitude, capable of nothing else but gratitude. Only, since the past no more exists for them than morality does, they have nothing which might have taught them sensibility with which to deal with the future and gratitude toward what or who saved them from the past; gratitude in them is a quality like electricity: it has to be produced projected and consumed all in the same instant to exist at all.
Which was simply saying what any and every man whose fate — doom, destiny, call it whatever you will — finally led him into marriage, long since and soon learned the hard way: his home had been violated not because his wife was ungrateful and a fool, but simply because she was a woman.
She had no more been seduced from the chastity of wifehood by the incorrigible bachelor flash and swagger of Manfred de Spain than she had been seduced from that of maidenhood by that same quality in that boy — youth — man — McCarron — back there in her virginity which he was convinced she no longer even remembered. She was seduced simply by herself: by a nymphomania not of the uterus: the hot unbearable otherwise unreachable itch and burn of the mare or heifer or sow or bitch in season, but by a nymphomania of a gland whose only ease was in creating a situation containing a recipient for gratitude, then supplying the gratitude.
Which still didn’t exculpate Manfred de Spain. He didn’t expect Manfred de Spain to have such high moral standards that they would forbid him seducing somebody else’s wife. But he did expect him to have enough sense not to, since he wasn’t a woman; to have too much sense this time, enough sense to look a little ahead into the future and refrain from seducing this wife anyway. But he hadn’t. Worse: De Spain had even tried to recompense him for the privilege of that violation and defilement; out of base fear to pay him in base and niggling coin for what he, De Spain, juxtaposing De Spain against Snopes, considered his natural and normal droit de seigneur. True, old Will Varner had paid him for marrying his damaged daughter, but that was not the same. Old Will wasn’t even trying to cover up, let alone liquidate, his daughter’s shame. The very fact of what he offered for it — that ruined and valueless plantation of which even he, with a quarter of a century to do it in, had been able to make nothing, revealed what value he held that honor at; and as for liquidating the shame, he — old Will — would have done that himself with his pistol, either in his hand or in that of his oafish troglodyte son Jody, if he had ever caught McCarron. He — old Will — had simply used that forthrightness to offer what he considered a fair price to get out of his house the daughter who had already once outraged his fireside peace and in time would very likely do it again.
But not De Spain, who without courage at all had tried to barter and haggle, using his position as mayor of the town to offer the base coinage of its power-plant superintendency and its implied privileges of petty larceny, not only to pay for the gratification of his appetite but to cover his reputation, trying to buy at the same time the right to the wife’s bed and the security of his good name from the husband who owned them both; — this, for the privilege of misappropriating a handful of brass which he — Snopes — had availed himself of not for the petty profit it brought him but rather to see what depth De Spain’s base and timorous fear would actually descend to.
He saw. They both did. It was not his — Snopes’s — shame anymore 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 shirt-tail 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 dollars 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 buried under a bush in the back yard.
Nor was it only to save his own money that he obeyed. In going out to Frenchman’s Bend to solicit the vote of old Will Varner’s stock for Manfred de Spain, he not only affirmed the fact that simple baseless unguaranteed unguaranteeable trust between man and man was
