About ten years have passed since Flem Snopes with his wife and baby arrived in Jefferson and settled down at the restaurant counter, in which he exchanged a half share with V.K. Ratlif for a third of the abandoned estate of the Old Frenchman. Soon he was already the sole owner of this establishment, and some time later he left the restaurant and took up the hitherto absent post of superintendent of the city power station.
In this position, he quickly found an additional, in addition to a decent salary, way of enrichment: Flem caught the eye of the abundance of weighty copper parts attached or scattered here and there; he began to sell them somewhere to the side - first, slowly, and then in bulk, for which he needed to attract two Negro stokers. The blacks helped Flem without suspecting anything, but when he needed to set his assistants on each other for his own purposes, they all understood, conspired with each other and dragged the stolen parts into the tank of the city water pump. Then the auditors came in. Flem managed to hush up the scandal, covering the shortage of cash, but for many years the tank of the water pump was a monument to Snopes, or rather, not a monument, but a trace of his foot, which marked where he was and where he had moved on from.
The powerhouse overseer seat was created specifically for Flem by Mayor Jefferson Manfred de Spain. Returning from Cuba with the rank of lieutenant, with a face decorated with a scar from the blow of a Spanish blade, de Payne heralded the advent of new times in the city; he easily won the election and the first thing he did as a mayor was to buy a race car, violating the law issued by his predecessor that forbade driving in Jefferson, he simply did not give a damn about him, although he could easily cancel it.
The meeting and the subsequent romance of Manfred de Spain and Yula Snopes were destined for fate, they so indisputably embodied divine simplicity, sinless and limitless immortal passion that all, or almost all, Baptist-Methodist Jefferson - without, however, any evidence of the alleged connection - watched with delight as they instruct Flem's horns. Others were perplexed why Flem would not cover them, but he simply did not want to do this, extracting from his wife’s infidelity - and what such impotence could be - his benefits. The position of supervisor of the power plant was not the last.
Stealing at the power plant, Flem did not do anything specific for several years, but only, according to Ratlif, he bred Snopes, who were seeping in his footsteps in Jefferson. At first his place in the restaurant was taken by Ek, but as a fake Snopes, incapable of money-grubbing, he soon turned out to be a watchman with an oil tank, and the institution passed into the hands of a former teacher from the French Beams, A.O. Snopes. There was also a real teacher Snopes in the city, but he was caught with a fourteen-year-old, for which he was rolled in tar and feathers and driven away; from the unfortunate teacher, two sons remained - Byron and Virgil.
One of the few who could not calmly look at the relationship between Yula and de Spain was Gavin Stephen, a young city prosecutor. Thoughts that in front of the eyes of all Jefferson are made by a woman whose nature did not create equal, they confused him, prompted something - that he himself did not know - to take either Yula, or Jefferson from Yula and de spain. Gavin's twin sister, Margaret, advised her brother first to figure out what worries him more: that Yula is not so virtuous or that she is destroying her virtue precisely with de Spain.
Before the ball, which was held by the Cotillon Club, which united the noble ladies of Jefferson, Gavin got the idea to send a ball bouquet to Julia Snopes, but Margaret said that then it was necessary to send bouquets to all the invited ladies. Gavin did just that, and de Spain, learning about this, followed his example, but Margaret and her brother sent not one, but two festively decorated boxes to his house - Gavin found a pair of buttonholes used by a condom tied to a sharpened rake, with with the help of which his nephew at one time, when the mayor started a manner of rushing past the house of the prosecutor, mocking at the same time honking, pierced the tires of De Painin's car. The confrontation of the two men was continued at the ball: Gavin - like, perhaps, many others - it seemed that de Payne was dancing obscenely with Yula, and he yanked the gentleman; then in the courtyard they honestly fought, or rather, the mayor simply thoroughly finished off the prosecutor.
In the summer, when there were no special cases in court, prosecutor Gavin Steven brought a lawsuit against the joint-stock company and the mayor, accusing them of connivance of theft at the power plant. On the day of the meeting, he received a note from Yulia indicating to wait for it late at night in his office; when she arrived, he began to wonder and ask her why she had come, who — Flem Snopes or Manfred de Paine — had sent her to him what she wanted and what he wanted, and, completely confused by his own doubts, he made the guest for a door. Her words that she does not like when people are unhappy, and, they say, since it is easy to fix it ... - Gavin could not or did not want to. One way or another, but the next day the prosecutor dropped his charges, and after a short time he left to improve his knowledge in Heidelberg.
Before leaving, he bequeathed to Ratliff to carry a common Jefferson cross - the Snows - and to the best of his ability to protect the city from them. Gavin Stephen reappeared in Jefferson only a few years later, at the height of the war, but soon returned to Europe as an officer in the rear. He took with him Montgomery Ward Snopes, the son of A.O., who went to war not by patriotic reasons, but wishing to look around there properly, until everyone was shaved without exception.
Montgomery Ward looked around in France not bad. Soon he began to manage the quartermaster's shop, and it was very popular among American soldiers due to the fact that he placed a cute Frenchwoman in the back room. When the war ended, the ingenious Snowps moved to Paris, where he put the matter on a wider footing. In Jefferson, where he returned the last of the soldiers who had traveled to Europe, Montgomery Ward opened a photo shop and initially received clients in it as a Montmartre artist. But over time, the Jeffersons began to notice that for more than a year the photos in the window did not change, and the clientele was mainly made up of young nearby farmers who came to appear for some reason closer to night. In the end, a workshop was searched, and an album with obscene Parisian postcards was extracted into the white light.
Flem Snopes did not even think of ridding the scandalous relative from prison; he just stole material evidence from the sheriff’s office, and dragged containers to the workshop with home-made whiskey - moonshining in the eyes of normal inhabitants is much more worthy of debauchery. Having spent an impressive amount on another odious Snopes, A.O. also flew Flem away from Jefferson to French Balka.
Flem began to bake his good name from the moment when, to everyone's amazement, he got the post of vice president of Bank Sartoris, who had been robbed shortly before Byron Snopes, who served as a clerk in him. Then de Payne reimbursed the stolen from his money, thanks to which he was elected president. Flem’s appointment was on his part another pay for the tacit connivance of his wife.
Flem’s first venture in a new place was unsuccessful - he wanted to take part in the non-Sopsovsk fishing with fake Snopes, Wall (his father, Ek, died in the explosion of an oil tank, and Wall Street Panic, as he was called then, began earning money on his own as a teenager for life), whose shop flourished solely due to its industriousness and integrity. Wall rejected the cousin's offer, and for this he was refused a badly needed loan. Rescued Wall Ratlif; he got on his feet and eventually, on shares with Ratliff, opened the first real supermarket in those parts, although this was still not mentioned.
Yula Snopes' daughter, Linda, first caught the eye of Gavin Stevens when she was fourteen. She was not a copy of her mother, but she was just as radiant, unique and beautiful. Gavin, even though he was thoroughly in his thirties, was irresistibly attracted to this creation, and he decided for himself that he simply intended to shape the girl’s mind, met her almost every day after school, led him to a pharmacy, where he treated him with ice cream and Coca-Cola , entertained with conversations and gave books.
Linda grew up, and she had a younger gentleman, a boxer and a motorist, who somehow burst into Gavin’s office and broke his face in blood. In time, Linda scolded the young man, and Gavin confessed his love. After this incident, their meetings became very rare - the old bachelor was worried about the girl’s good name, because there were rumors that the opponent found him alone with Linda and beat him for it. Gavin now considered his main duty to save Linda from the Snopes, which means that she had to try to get her sent to one of the colleges in the east or in the north.
Flem Snopes was opposed: firstly, his wife and daughter were indispensable items for him at home of the bank's respectable vice president; secondly, far from home, Linda could have married without his knowledge, and this would mean for Flem to lose part of the inheritance of Yula's father, old Bill Warner; and finally, people beyond his control could reveal to Linda the truth about her birth. Yula, in turn, shocked Gavin with the words that protection from Snowes is only poetic nonsense, women are most concerned with facts, and the most significant fact is marriage, and so the best thing he can do for Linda is to marry on her.
But one day, Flem allowed his adopted daughter to leave Jefferson. He did it for a reason, but having calculated that in a fit of gratitude, Linda could refuse in his favor the share of her maternal inheritance due to her and give a receipt about it. The receipt was required for a decisive battle with de Spain for the post of president of the bank - the last thing Flem had to bring eighteen years of dishonor.
Flem drove a receipt for the French Beam; that night, Bill Warner, the holder of a third of the bank's shares, was in the house with a wholeheartedly despised and hated son-in-law, where he found out everything about Julia and de Spain. The next day, de Spain's shares were sold to Flem, now the president of the bank, and the next day he was supposed to leave Jefferson, alone or with Julia. On the evening of the same day, Yula came to Gavin Stevens for the second time in her life; she explained to Gavin that it was equally impossible for her to leave with de Spain or to stay with Snopes - because of her daughter, and she made him promise to marry Linda. He promised, but only if nothing else could be done for her. At night, Yula committed suicide.
Linda Gavin did not send to university - she outgrew all universities - but to New York, to Greenwich Village, where he had friends and where she had a lot to try and learn a lot until the bravest one meets her and strong - he himself was not like that. Flem healed a respectable widower in the mansion de Spain bought and converted into a plantatorial style. In Jefferson and Yoknapatof, everything went as usual.
