Summary William Faulkner Mansion
William Faulkner
Mansion
For the murder of a Houston farmer Mink Snoups was sentenced to life imprisonment in the prison prison of Parchment, but he did not regret a moment that he then pulled the trigger. Houston deserved death – and not by the fact that, according to the verdict of Bill Warner, Mink spent thirty-seven days working on him only to redeem his own cow; Houston signed a death sentence when, after the work was over, from arrogant stubbornness demanded another dollar for the fact that the cow stood in his shed for an extra night.
After the trial, the lawyer explained to Mink that he could leave prison after twenty or twenty-five years, if he worked properly, did not take part in the riots and did not attempt to escape. He had to go out by all means, because Mink had only one thing left on his will, but it was very important to kill Flem Snoops, whose help he had hopelessly hoped for. Flem suspected that Mink, the most spiteful of the Snops, would
At the will Mink left, after serving thirty-eight years; he did not even suspect that during this time, two world wars had died down. The petition, thanks to which the sixty-three-year-old Mink was released just before the deadline, was signed by the prosecutor Gavin Stevens, VK Ratlif and Linda Snoups Kohl.
Kohl – the name of the Jewish sculptor with whom Linda met in Greenwich Village, and this meeting led to the fact that a year and a half after leaving Jefferson, she sent to Gavin Stevens an invitation to an event that, in conversation with WK Ratlif, he designated as “new home”, since not only about the wedding, but also about the civil registration of marriage speech did not go then. At that
At the same time, Ratliff set out to finally see those virgin hills where his distant Russian ancestor fought among the Hessian mercenaries of the English against the revolutionary American army and where he was taken prisoner, after which he forever settled in America; from this ancestor, whose name for a long time no one remembered, Ratlif and got the name of Vladimir Kirillovich – carefully concealed behind VK’s initials – which for one and a half centuries invariably got into his kind to his elder sons.
In Spain Barton Kohl died when his bomber was shot down over enemy positions; Linda got a concussion from a mine explosion and has since completely lost her hearing. In 1937, at the airport of Memphis – passenger trains through Jefferson by this time have already stopped walking – she was met by VK Ratlif, Gavin Stephen and his nephew Charles Mallison.
As soon as Ratliff and Charles saw Gavin and Linda meet after years of separation, as they looked at each other, it occurred to them both that an old bachelor and a young widow must marry without fail, that it would be calmer for everyone. It seems that it should have happened, especially since Gavin and Linda spent a lot of time alone – he was engaged with her voice, after a concussion became raspy, some duck. But in vain Charles Mallison waited, when he was sent to Harvard invitation for marriage; in the same way that the alleged connection of his uncle with Linda can not remain unformed officially, like the connection between Julia and Manfred de Spain, neither Charles nor Ratlif had doubts – Linde was clearly lacking that aura of unconditional, under no circumstances, which her mother possessed, and Gavin was by no means de deine. So, there was no connection.
In Jefferson, Linda found herself a field of activity – improving Negro schools, but soon the Negroes themselves asked her not to impose help on them, for which they did not apply. So she had to confine herself to Sunday studies, in which she told the myths of different peoples to black children. Linda’s only companions in her social and reformist aspirations were two barely speaking English Finns who had been known as Communists, but who had never found the kind proletariat in Jefferson and throughout Joknapatof.
The widow of a Jewish communist, who herself fought in Spain on the side of the Communists, and now secretly keeping a ticket of the Communist Party and keeping a black eye with the whole city, Linda met with incredulity and dislike everywhere. Sooner or later, the FBI paid close attention to her. The situation changed a little, only when the Russians and Americans were allies in the war with Hitler. In the beginning of 1942, Linda left Jefferson for Pascagoula and there she worked at the shipyard, which built transports for Russia.
Before she left, she took from Gavin a promise that in his absence he would marry, and he really married Melissandra Gariss, a girl of Becus, who had been in love with him at the dawn of his youth. Melissandra managed to marry a large gangster and give birth to two children, now adults; about the source of her husband’s considerable income, she had no idea until in the middle of the day they shot her in a New Orleans hairdresser.
In the meantime, from the moment when Flem broke the bank of Sartoris under him and, settling on his residence in the tribal nest de Speine, seemed satisfied with what was achieved, and his relatives left for prison, who went back to the French Beagle, and who further away, Jefferson remained more or less free from snows. If they appeared in the city, then somehow passing by, like Senator Clarence Snoups-Clarence, a policeman from the French Beam, old Bill Warner eventually ended up in the legislature of Mississippi, where he honestly worked out the money invested in him; However, when the senator nominated his candidacy for the United States Congress, at the pre-election picnic VK Ratlif played with him a rather malicious joke, which mocked the whole district and irrevocably deprived Snopes of hopes of a place in Congress.
Only during the war, Flem once stirred, but he did not get what he wanted: Jason Compson bought the pasture – once sold by his father, to send the money to Harvard Quentin – and with a profit foisted his Flemus, whom he managed to convince that the state will give good money for this site, because it is the best suited for the construction of an airfield; To the airfield, the grateful state will, by the way, perpetuate, name Flem Snoups. When Flem realized that he would not have any airfield on the land he had acquired, he let him in for construction.
New homes after the war were very necessary, since the returning soldiers in the majority quickly married and just as quickly started children. Money was all in plenty: someone deserved them at the front at the price of their own blood, someone due to incredible wartime earnings; the same Linda received at her shipyard as much as four dollars an hour.
Against the backdrop of the coming universal prosperity, which forced even the Finnish communists to quietly start investing extra money in stocks, and the absence of obvious social injustice – the building of a new black school, for example, by all standards exceeded the old school for whites – Linda on his return to Jefferson at first stayed idle and basically sat in the house of de Speins, drinking whiskey. But then she found out from somewhere about a parent who was languishing in Parchment and, with the help of Gavin Stevens and VK Ratlif, enthusiastically embarked on the liberation of Minka.
Gavin, as well as Ratliff, it was quite obvious what Mink would do when he went free, but he could not refuse Linde. Not wishing, however, to be complicit in the murder, Gavin agreed with the prison governor that he would release Minka with one indispensable condition: Mink on leaving will take two hundred and fifty dollars and for life will receive every year a thousand in return for swearing not to cross the borders of Mississippi.
Minka was released on Thursday, and on Friday Gavin found out that Mink had outwitted everyone – he took money from the chief, but then handed it back to the prison gatekeeper and thus was now at large with a dozen in his pocket and with the firm intention of killing Flem Snouts. However disgusting it was for him to do this, Gavin went to Flem and warned him of the danger, but the banker listened to him with a strange indifference.
Having easily guessed that Mink would need a gun and that after him he would go to Memphis, Gavin used his connections to put all the Memphis police on his feet, but that did not bring any results. Only on Wednesday, he was told by phone on the phone that, according to the police, on Monday in a mortgage bench a man, according to a description similar to Minka, sold a revolver for ten dollars, which, incidentally, was unlikely to be good for anything. But by this time Gavin already knew that the revolver was working – on the eve, on Tuesday, it worked.
Outside the gates of the prison, Minka met a world that was not much like the one he had left thirty-eight years earlier – now even a sardine bank, which, as he well remembered, could be bought anywhere for five cents, cost twenty-three; and yet all the roads became solid and black… Nevertheless, a hundred-mile way to Memphis, he overcame – not one day, but three. Then he was lucky, and he miraculously bought a revolver, not drawing the attention of the police; even more lucky in Jefferson, when he entered the house of Flemme only half an hour before his voluntary assistant sheriff had to take his nightly post under his windows.
Flem seemed to be waiting for him and did not try to do anything to save life, even when the first shot of a revolver misfired, but just silently looked at Minka with his empty eyes. When Flem fell with a shot through his head, Linda appeared on the threshold of the room and, to the surprise of the killer, quietly showed him a safe way out of the house.
After the funeral, Linda straightened the donative, according to which the house and the estate returned to Spain, and she herself was going to leave Jefferson for good. For the departure she was prepared chic “Jaguar”. When he saw it, Gavin realized that Linda knew from the beginning what the Mink would get out of prison – it took at least a couple of months to get a car out of London or at least from New York.
When Linda finally left, Ratliff shared with Gavin Stevens the hope that she had no daughter somewhere, and if the daughter existed, that she would never appear in Jefferson, for the third Yulia Warner to the sixty-year-old Gavin could not bear.
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