Evidently he learned that too. One day he was not in the bank anymore, and the day after that, and the day after that. On the day the bank first opened about twenty years ago Mrs Jennie Du Pre, Colonel Sartoris’s sister, had put a tremendous great rubber plant in the corner of the lobby.
It was taller than a man, it took up as much room as a privy; it was in everybody’s way and in summer they couldn’t even open the front door all the way because of it. But she wouldn’t let the colonel nor the board of directors either remove it, since she belonged to that school which believed that any room inhabited by people had to have something green in it to absorb the poison from the air.
Though why it had to be that monstrous rubber plant, nobody knew, unless perhaps she believed that nothing less than rubber and that much of it would be tough and durable and resilient enough to cope with air poisoned by the anxiety or exultation over as much money as her brother’s, a Sartoris, old Colonel Sartoris’s son’s, bank would naturally handle.
So when the days passed and Snopes was no longer to be seen taking up room in the lobby while he watched the borrowing and the lending and the paying in and the drawing out (or who did each, and how much of each, which according to Ratliff was the real reason he was there, was what he was really watching), it was as if Mrs Du Pre’s rubber tree had vanished from the lobby, abandoned it. And when still more days passed and we finally realised he was not coming back anymore, it was like hearing that the rubber tree had been hauled away somewhere and burned, destroyed for ever.
It was as if the single aim and purpose of that long series of interlocked circumstances — the bank which a sentimentalist like Colonel Sartoris founded in order that, as Ratliff said, a feller no brighter than Byron Snopes could steal from it; the racing car which Bayard Sartoris drove too fast for our country roads (the Jefferson ladies said because he was grieving so over the death in battle of his twin brother that he too was seeking death though in my opinion Bayard liked war and now that there was no more war to go to, he was faced with the horrid prospect of having to go to work) until his grandfather took to riding with him in the hope that he would slow down: as a result of which, the normal check-up of the bank for reorganization revealed the fact that Byron Snopes had been robbing it: as a result of which, to save the good name of the bank which his father had helped to found, Manfred de Spain had to allow Flem Snopes to become vice president of it; — the single result of all this apparently was to efface that checked cap from Flem Snopes and put that hot-looking black politician-preacher’s hat on him in its stead.
Because he still wore the hat. We saw that about the Square every day. But never again in the bank, his bank, the one in which he was not only a director but in whose hierarchy he had an official designated place, second-in-command. Not even to deposit his own money in it. Oh yes, we knew that; we had Ratliff’s word for that. Ratliff had to know a fact like that by now.
After this many years of working to establish and maintain himself as what he uniquely was in Jefferson, Ratliff could not afford, he did not dare, to walk the streets and not have the answer to any and every situation which was not really any of his business. Ratliff knew: that not only was Flem Snopes no longer a customer of the bank of which he was vice president, but that in the second year he had transferred his account to the other rival bank, the old Bank of Jefferson.
So we all knew the answer to that. I mean, we had been right all along. All except Ratliff of course, who had dissuaded us before against our mutually combined judgments. We had watched Flem behind the grille of his bank while he taught himself the intricacies of banking in order to plumb laboriously the crude and awkward method by which his cousin or nephew Byron had made his petty and unambitious haul; we had seen him in and out of the vault itself while he learned the tide-cycle, the rise and fall of the actual cash against the moment when it would be most worth pillaging; we believed now that when that moment came, Flem would have already arranged himself for his profit to be one hundred percent., that he himself was seeing to it in advance that he would not have to steal even one forgotten penny of his own money.
“No,” Ratliff said. “No.”
“In which case, he will defeat himself,” I said. “What does he expect to happen when the other depositors, especially the ignorant ones that know too little about banks and the smart ones that know too much about Snopeses, begin to find out that the vice president of the bank doesn’t even keep his own loose change in it?”
“No, I tell you,” Ratliff said. “You folks—”
“So he’s hoping — wishing — dreaming of starting a run on his own bank, not to loot it but to empty it, abolish it. All right. Why? For revenge on Manfred de Spain because of his wife?”
“No no, I tell you!” Ratliff said. “I tell you, you got Flem all wrong, all of you have. I tell you, he aint just got respect for money: he’s got active” (he always said active for actual, though in this case I believe his choice was better than Webster’s) “reverence for it.
The last thing he would ever do is hurt that bank. Because any bank whether it’s hisn or not stands for money, and the last thing he would ever do is to insult and degrade money by mishandling it. Likely the one and only thing in his life he is ashamed of is the one thing he wont never do again.
That was that-ere power-plant brass that time. Likely he wakes up at night right now and writhes and squirms over it. Not because he lost by it because dont nobody know yet, nor never will, whether he actively lost or not because dont nobody know yet jest how much of that old brass he might a sold before he made the mistake of trying to do it wholesale by using Tom Tom Bird and Tomey Beauchamp.
He’s ashamed because when he made money that-a-way, he got his-self right down into the dirt with the folks that waste money because they stole it in the first place and aint got nowhere to put it down where they can risk turning their backs on it.”
“Then what is he up to?” I said. “What is he trying to do?”
“I dont know,” Ratliff said. And now he not only didn’t sound like Ratliff, answering he didn’t know to any question, he didn’t even look like Ratliff: the customary bland smooth quizzical inscrutable face not quite baffled maybe but certainly questioning, certainly sober. “I jest dont know. We got to figger. That’s why I come up here to see you: in case you did know. Hoping you knowed.” Then he was Ratliff again, humorous, quizzical, invincibly … maybe the word I want is not optimism or courage or even hope, but rather of sanity or maybe even of innocence. “But naturally you dont know neither. Confound it, the trouble is we dont never know beforehand, to anticipate him.
It’s like a rabbit or maybe a bigger varmint, one with more poison or anyhow more teeth, in a patch or a brake: you can watch the bushes shaking but you cant see what it is or which-a-way it’s going until it breaks out. But you can see it then, and usually it’s in time. Of course you got to move fast when he does break out, and he’s got the advantage of you because he’s already moving because he knows where he’s going, and you aint moving yet because you dont. But it’s usually in time.”
That was the first time the bushes shook. The next time was almost a year later; he came in, he said “Good morning, Lawyer,” and he was Ratliff again, bland, smooth, courteous, a little too damned intelligent. “I figgered you might like to hear the latest news first, being as you’re a member of the family too by simple bad luck and exposure, you might say. Being as so far dont nobody know about it except the directors of the Bank of Jefferson.”
“The Bank of Jefferson?” I said.
“That’s right. It’s that non-Snopes boy of Eck’s, that other non-Snopes that blowed his-self up in that empty oil tank back while you was away at the war, wasting his time jest hunting a lost child that wasn’t even lost, jest his maw thought he was — —”
“Yes,” I said. “Wallstreet Panic.” Because I already knew about that: the non-Snopes son of a non-Snopes who had had the good fortune to discover (or
