talking through the smoke.
230 WILLIAM FAULKNER
TEMPLE
Listen. How much do you know?
STEVENS
Nothing.
TEMPLE
Swear.
STEVENS
Would you believe me?
TEMPLE
No. But swear anyway.
STEVENS
All right. I swear.
TEMPLE
(crushes cigarette into tray) Then listen. Listen
carefully.
(she stands, tense, rigid,
facing him, staring at him)
Temple Drake is dead. Temple Drake will have been dead six years
longer than Nancy Mannigoe will ever be. If all Nancy Mannigoe has to
save her is Temple Drake, then God help Nancy Mannigoe. Now get out
of here.
She stares at him; another moment. Then he rises, still watching her; she
stares steadily and implacably. Then he moves.
TEMPLE
Good night.
STEVENS
Good night.
He goes back to the chair, takes up his coat and hat, then goes on to the
hall door, has put his hand on the knob.
TEMPLE
Gavin.
(he pauses, his hand on the knob, and looks back at her) Maybe I'll
have the handkerchief, after all.
(he looks at her a moment longer, then releases the knob,
takes the handkerchief from his breast pocket as he
crosses back toward her, extends it. She doesn't take it)
REQUIEM FOR A NUN 231
All right. What will I have to do? What do you suggest, then?
STEVENS Everything.
TEMPLE
Which of course I wont. I will not. You can understand that, cant you?
At least you can hear it. So let's start over, shall we? How much will
I have to tell?
STEVENS
Everything.
TEMPLE
Then I wont need the handkerchief, after all. Good night. Close the
front door when you go out, please. It's getting cold again.
He turns, crosses again to the door without stopping nor looking back,
exits, closes the door behind him. She is not watching him either now. For
a moment after the door has closed, she doesn't move. Then she makes a
gesture something like Gowan's in Scene Two, except that she merely presses
her palms for a moment hard against her face, her face calm, expressionless,
cold, drops her hands, turns, picks up the crushed cigarette from beside the
tray and puts it into the tray and takes up the tray and crosses to the
fireplace, glancing down at the sleeping child as she passes the sofa,
empties the tray into the fireplace and returns to the table and puts the
tray on it and this time pauses at the sofa and stoops and tucks the blanket
closer about the sleeping child and then goes on to the telephone and lifts
the receiver.
TEMPLE
(into the phone) Two three nine, please.
(while she stands waiting for the answer, there is a slight
movement in the darkness beyond the open door at rear, just
enough silent movement to show that something or someone is
there or has moved there. Temple is unaware of it since her
back is turned. Then she speaks into the phone)
Maggie? Temple. . . . Yes, suddenly . . . Oh, I dont know; perhaps we
got bored with sunshine.... Of course, I may drop in tomorrow. I wanted
to leave
232 WILLIAM FAULKNER
a message for Gavin ... I know; he just left here. Something I forgot .
. . If you'll ask him to call me when he comes in . . . . Yes. . . .
Wasn't it. . . . Yes. . . . If you will . . . Thank you.
(she puts the receiver down and starts to turn back into the
room when the telephone rings. She turns back, takes up the
receiver, speaks into it)
Hello . . . Yes. Coincidence again; I had my hand on it; I had just
called Maggie. . . . Oh, the filling station. I didn't think you had had
time. I can be ready in thirty minutes. Your car, or ours? . . . All
right. Listen. . . . Yes, I'm here. Gavin . . . How much will I have to
tell?
(hurriedly)
Oh, I know: you've already told me eight or ten times. But maybe I
didn't hear it right. How much will I have to tell?
(she listens a moment, quiet, frozen-faced, then slowly
begins to lower the receiver toward the stand; she speaks
quietly, without inflection)
Oh, God. Oh, God.
She puts the receiver down, crosses to the sofa, snaps off the table lamp
and takes up the child and crosses to the door to the hall, snaps off the
remaining room lights as she goes out, so that the only light in the room
now enters from the hall. As soon as she has disappeared from sight, Gowan
enters from the door at rear, dressed except for his coat, vest and tie. He
has obviously taken no sleeping pill. He goes to the phone and stands
quietly beside it, facing the hall door and obviously listening until Temple
is safely away. Now the hall light snaps off,and the stage is in complete
darkness.
GOWAN'S VOICE
(quietly)
Two three nine, please . . . Good evening, Aunt Maggie. Gowan . . . All
right, thank you . . . Su re, some time tomorrow. As soon as Uncle Gavin
comes in, will you have him call me? I'll be right here. Thank you.
(Sound of the receiver as he puts it back)
(Curtain)
Act Two
THE GOLDEN DOME (Beginning Was the Word)
JACKSON. Alt. 294 ft. Pop. (A.D. 1950) 201,092.
Located by an expedition of three Commissioners selected appointed and
dispatched for that single purpose, on a high bluff above Pearl River at
the approximate geographical center of the State, to be not a market nor
industrial town, nor even as a place for men to live, but to be a capital,
the Capital of a Commonwealth;
In the beginning was already decreed this rounded knob, this gilded
pustule, already before and beyond the steamy chiaroscuro, untimed
unseasoned winterless miasma not any one of water or earth or life yet all
of each, inextricable and indivisible; that one seethe one spawn one
mother-womb, one furious tumescence, father-mother-one, one vast incubant
ejaculation already fissionating in one boiling moil of litter from the
celestial experimental Work Bench; that one spawning crawl and creep
printing with three-toed mastodonic tracks the steamy-green swaddling
clothes of the coal and the oil, above which the pea-brained reptilian
heads curved the heavy leatherflapped air;
Then the ice, but still this knob, this pimple-dome, this buried
half-ball hemisphere; the earth lurched, heaving darkward the
long continental flank, dragging upward beneath the polar cap
that furious equatorial womb, the shutter-lid of cold severing
off into blank and heedless void one last sound, one cry, one
puny myriad indictment already fading and then no more, the
blind and tongueless earth spinning on, looping the long record
less astral orbit, frozen, tideless, yet still was there this tiny