the Chickasaw affairs; it was the United States itself which had
voluntarily offered to show
198 WILLIAM FAULKNER -
them how to transmute the inevictable lock into proofless and ephemeral
axle grease-the little scrawny childsized man, solitary unarmed
impregnable and unalarmed, not even defying them, not even advocate and
representative of the United States, but the United States, as though the
United States had said, 'Please accept a gift of fifteen dollars,' (the
town had actually paid old Alec fifteen dollars for the lock; he would
accept no more) and they had not even declined it but simply abolished it
since, as soon as Pettigrew breathed it into sound, the United States had
already forever lost it; as though Pettigrew had put the actual ponderable
fifteen gold coins intosay, Compson's or Peabody's-hands and they had
dropped them down a rathole or a well, doing no man any good, neither
restoration to the ravaged nor emolument to the ravager, leaving in fact
the whole race of man, as long as it endured, forever and irrevocably
fifteen dollars deficit, fifteen dollars in the red;
That was Ratcliffe's trouble. But they didn't even listen. They heard him
out of course, but they didn't even listen. Or perhaps they didn't even
hear him either, sitting along the shade on Holston's gallery, looking,
seeing, already a year away; it was barely the tenth of July; there was
the long summer, the bright soft dry fall until the November rains, but
they would require not two days this time but two years and maybe more,
with a winter of planning and preparation before hand. They even had an
instrument available and waiting, like providence almost: a man named
Sutpen who had come into the settlement that same spring-a big gaunt
friendless passion-worn untalkative man who walked in a fading aura of
anonymity and violence like a man just entered a warm room or at least a
shelter, out of a blizzard, bringing with him thirty-odd slaves cven
wilder and more equivocal than the native wild men, the Chickasaws, to
whom the settlement had become accustomed, who (the new Negroes) spoke no
English but instead what Compson, who had visited New Orleans, said was
the CaribSpanish-French of the Sugar Islands, and who (Sutpen) had bought
or proved on or anyway acquired a tract of land in the opposite direction
and was apparently bent on establishing a place on an even more ambitious
and grandiose scale than Grenier's; he had even brought with him a tame
Parisian architect--or captive rather, since it was said in Ratcliffe's
back room that the man slept at night in a kind of pit at the site of the
chateau he was planning, tied wrist to wrist with one of his captor's
Carib slaves; indeed, the settlement had only to see him once to know that
he was no dociler than his captor, any more than the weasel or rattlesnake
is no less un-
REQUIEM FOR A NUN 199
tame than the wolf or bear before which it gives way until completely and
hopelessly cornered:-a man no larger than Pettigrew, with humorous
sardonic undefeated eyes which had seen everything and believed none of
it, in the broad expensive hat and brocaded waistcoat and ruffled wrists
of a half-artist half-boulevardier; and they-Compson perhaps, Peabody cer-
tainly-could imagine him in his mudstained brier-slashed brocade and lace
standing in a trackless wilderness dreaming colonnades and porticoes and
fountains and promenades in the style of David, with just behind each
elbow an identical giant half-naked Negro not even watching him, only
breathing, moving each time he took a step or shifted like his shadow
repeated in two and blown to gigantic size;
So they even had an architect. He listened to them for perhaps a minute
in Ratcliffe's back room. Then he made an indescribable gesture and said,
'Bah. You do not need advice. You are too poor. You have only your hands,
and clay to make good brick. You dont have any money. You dont even have
anything to copy: how can you go wrong?' But he taught them how to mold
the brick; he designed and built the kiln to bake the brick in, plenty of
them since they had probably known from that first yellow morning too that
one edifice was not going to be enough. But although both were conceived
in the same instant and planned simultaneously during the same winter and
built in continuation during the next three years, the courthouse of
course came first, and in March, with stakes and hanks of fishline, the
architect laid out in a grove of oaks opposite the tavern and the store,
the square and simple foundations, the irrevocable design not only of the
courthouse but of the town too, telling them as much: 'In fifty years you
will be trying to change it iq the name of what you will call progress.
But you will fail; but you will never be able to get away from it.' But
they had already seen that, standing thigh-deep in wilderness also but
with more than a vision to look at since they had at least the fishline
and the stakes, perhaps less than fifty years, perhaps-who knew?-less than
twenty-five even: a Square, the courthouse in its grove the center;
quadrangular around it, the stores, two-storey, the offices of the lawyers
and doctors and dentists, the lodgerooms and auditoriums, above them;
school and church and tavern and bank and jail each in its ordered place;
the four broad diverging avenues straight as plumb-lines in the four
directions, becoming the network of roads and by-roads until the whole
county would be covered with it: the hands, the prehensile fingers clawing
dragging lightward out of the disappearing wilderness year by year as up
from the bottom of
200 WILLIAM FAULKNER
the receding sea, the broad rich fecund burgeoning fields, pushing
thrusting each year further and further back the wilderness and its
denizens-the wild bear and deer and turkey, and the wild men (or not so
wild any more, familiar now, harmless now, just obsolete: anachronism out
of an old dead time and a dead age; regrettable of course, even actually
regretted by the old men, fiercely as old Doctor Habersharn did, and with
less fire but still as irreconcilable and stubborn as old Alec Holston and
a few others were still doing, until in a few more years the last of them
would have passed and vanished in their turn too, obsolescent too: because
this was a white man's land; that was its fate, or not even fate but
destiny, its high destiny in the roster of the earth)-the veins, arteries,
life- and pulse-stream along which would flow the aggrandisement of
harvest: the gold: the cotton and the grain;
But above all, the courthouse: the center, the focus, the hub; sitting
looming in the center of the county's circumference like a single cloud
in its ring of horizon, laying its vast shadow to the uttermost rim of
horizon; musing, brooding, symbolic and ponderable, tall as cloud, solid
as rock, dominating alclass="underline" protector of the weak, judiciate and curb of the
passions and lusts, repository and guardian of the aspirations and the
hopes; rising course by brick course during that first summer, simply
square, simplest Georgian colonial (this, by the Paris architect who was
creating at Sutpen's Hundred something like a wing of Versailles glimpsed
in a Lilliput's gothic nightmare-in revenge, Gavin Stevens would say a