So when Bayard finally did kill somebody, as we (all Yoknapatawpha County grown folks) all expected he would, it was his grandfather. Because we didn’t know that either: that Colonel Sartoris had a heart condition; Doctor Peabody had told him that three years ago, and that he had no business in an automobile at all.
But Colonel Sartoris hadn’t told anybody else, not even his sister, Mrs Du Pre that kept house for him: just riding in that car back and forth to town every day to keep Bayard slowed down (they even managed somehow to persuade Miss Narcissa Benbow to marry him in hopes maybe that would settle him down) until that morning they came over a hill at about fifty miles an hour and there was a Negro family in a wagon in the road and Bayard said, “Hold on, Grandfather,” and turned the car off into the ditch; it didn’t turn over or even wreck very bad: just stopped in the ditch with Colonel Sartoris still sitting in it with his eyes still open.
So now his bank didn’t have a president anymore. Then we found out just who owned the stock in it: that Colonel Sartoris and Major de Spain, Mayor de Spain’s father until he died, had owned two of the three biggest blocks, and old man Will Varner out in Frenchman’s Bend owned the other one. So we thought that maybe it wasn’t just Colonel Sartoris’s father’s cavalry command that got Byron Snopes his job in the bank, but maybe old Will Varner had something to do with it too. Except that we never really believed that since we knew Colonel Sartoris well enough to know that any single one of those old cavalry raids or even just one night around a bivouac fire would have been enough.
Of course there was more of it, that much again and even more scattered around in a dozen families like the Compsons and Benbows and Peabodys and Miss Eunice Habersham and us and a hundred others that were farmers around in the county.
Though it wasn’t until Mayor de Spain got elected president of it to succeed Colonel Sartoris (in fact, because of that) that we found out that Mr Flem Snopes had been buying the stock in lots anywhere from one to ten shares for several years; this, added to Mr Varner’s and Mayor de Spain’s own that he had inherited from his father, would have been enough to elect him up from vice president to president (There was so much going on that we didn’t even notice that when the dust finally settled Mr Flem Snopes would be vice president of it too.) even if Mrs Du Pre and Bayard’s wife (Bayard had finally got himself killed testing an aeroplane at an Ohio testing field that they said nobody else would fly and that Bayard himself didn’t have any business in) hadn’t voted theirs for him.
Because Mayor de Spain resigned from being mayor and sold his automobile agency and became president of the bank just in time. Colonel Sartoris’s bank was a national bank because Ratliff said likely Colonel Sartoris knew that would sound safer to country folks with maybe an extra ten dollars to risk in a bank, let alone the female widows and orphans since females never had much confidence in menfolks’ doings about anything, let alone money, even when they were not widows too.
So with a change of presidents like that, Ratliff said the government would have to send somebody to inspect the books even if the regular inspection wasn’t about due; the two auditors waiting in front of the bank at eight oclock that morning for somebody to unlock the door and let them in, which would have been Byron Snopes except that he didn’t show up. So they had to wait for the next one with a key: which was Mr de Spain.
And by fifteen minutes after eight, which was about thirteen minutes after the auditors decided to start on the books that Byron kept, Mr de Spain found out from the Snopes hotel that nobody had seen Byron since the south-bound train at nine twenty-two last night, and by noon everybody knew that Byron was probably already in Texas though he probably wouldn’t reach Mexico itself for another day yet.
Though it was not until two days later that the head auditor was ready to commit himself roughly as to how much money was missing; by that time they had called a meeting of the bank’s board of directors and even Mr Varner that Jefferson never saw once in twelve months, had come in and listened to the head auditor for about a minute and then said, “Police hell. Send somebody out home for my pistol, then show me which way he went.”
Which wasn’t anything to the uproar Mr de Spain himself was making, with all this time all Jefferson watching and listening, until on the third day Ratliff said, though I didn’t know what he meant then: “That’s how much it was, was it? At least we know now jest how much Miz Flem Snopes is worth. Now your uncle wont need to worry about how much he lost when he gets home because now he can know exactly to the last decimal how much he saved.” Because the bank itself was all right.
It was a national bank so whatever money Byron stole would be guaranteed whether they caught Byron or not. We were watching Mr de Spain. Since his father’s money had helped Colonel Sartoris start it and Mr de Spain had himself been vice president of it, even if he had not been promoted president of it just ahead of when the auditors decided to look at Byron Snopes’s books, we believed he would still have insisted on making good every cent of the money.
What we expected to hear was that he had mortgaged his home, and when we didn’t hear that, we just thought that he had made money out of his automobile agency that was saved up and put away that we didn’t know about.
Because we never expected anything else of him; when the next day they called another sudden meeting of the board of directors and announced the day after that that the stolen money had been made good by the voluntary personal efforts of the president, we were not even surprised. As Ratliff said, we were so unsurprised in fact that it was two or three days before anybody seemed to notice how at the same time they announced that Mr Flem Snopes was now the new vice president of it.
And now, it was another year, the last two Jefferson soldiers came home for good or anyway temporarily for good: Uncle Gavin finally come back from rehabilitating war-torn Europe to get elected County Attorney, and a few months later, Montgomery Ward Snopes too except that he was the temporarily for good one.
Like Bayard Sartoris, he wasn’t in uniform either but in a black suit and a black overcoat without any sleeves and a black thing on his head kind of drooping over one side like an empty cow’s bladder made out of black velvet, and a long limp-ended bow tie; and his hair long and he had a beard and now there was another Snopes business in Jefferson.
It had a name on the window that Ratliff didn’t know either and when I went up to the office where Uncle Gavin was waiting for the first of the year to start being County Attorney and told him, he sat perfectly still for a good two seconds and then got up already walking. “Show me,” he said.
So we went back to where Ratliff was waiting for us. It was a store on the corner by an alley, with a side door on the alley; the painter was just finishing the curlicue letters on the glass window that said
Atelier Monty
and inside, beyond the glass, Montgomery Ward still wearing the French cap (Uncle Gavin said it was a Basque beret) but in his shirt sleeves. Because we didn’t go in then; Uncle Gavin said, “Come on now. Let him finish it first.” Except Ratliff. He said,
“Maybe I can help him.” But Uncle Gavin took hold of my arm that time.
“If atelier means just a studio,” I said, “why dont he call it that?”
“Yes,” Uncle Gavin said. “That’s what I want to know too.” And even though Ratliff went in, he hadn’t seen anything either. And he sounded just like me.
“Studio,” he said. “I wonder why he dont just call it that?”
“Uncle Gavin didn’t know either,” I said.
“I know,” Ratliff said. “I wasn’t asking nobody yet. I was jest kind of looking around for a place to jump.” He looked at me. He blinked two or three times. “Studio,” he said. “That’s right, you aint even up that far yet. It’s a photographing studio.” He blinked again. “But why? His war record has done already showed he aint a feller to be satisfied with no jest dull run-of-the-mill mediocrity like us stay-at-homes back here in Yoknapatawpha County has to get used to.”
But that was all we knew then. Because the next day he had newspapers fastened on the window so you couldn’t see inside and he kept the door locked and all we ever saw would be the packages he would get out of the post office from Sears and Roebuck
