Requiem for a Nun

REQUIEM FOR A NUN 301

regal sweat-stained purple silk and the plumed hat, barefoot too of course

but, being a queen, with another slave to carry her slippers, putting her

cross to the paper and then driving on, vanishing slowly and terrifically

to the slow and terrific creak and squeak of the ungreased

wagon-apparently and apparently only, since in reality it was as though,

instead of putting an inked cross at the foot of a sheet of paper, she had

lighted the train of a mine set beneath a dam, a dyke, a barrier already

straining, bulging, bellying, not only towering over the land but leaning,

looming, imminent with collapse, so that it only required the single light

touch of the pen in that brown illiterate hand, and the wagon did not

vanish slowly and terrifically from the scene to the terrific sound of its

ungreased wheels, but was swept, hurled, flung not only out of Yok-

napatawpha County and Mississippi but the United States too, immobile and

intact-the wagon, the mules, the rigid shapeless old Indian woman and the

nine heads which surrounded her-like a float or a piece of stage property

dragged rapidly into the wings across the very backdrop and amid the very

bustle of the property-men setting up for the next scene and act before

the curtain had even had time to fall;

There was no time; the next act and scene itself clearing its own stage

without waiting for property-men; or rather, not even bothering to clear

the stage but commencing the new act and scene right in the midst of the

phantoms, the fading wraiths of that old time which had been exhausted,

used up, to be no more and never return: as though the mere and simple

orderly ordinary succession of days was not big enough, comprised not

scope enough, and so weeks and months and years had to be condensed and

compounded into one burst, one surge, one soundless roar filled with one

word: town: city: with a name: Jefferson; men's mouths and their in-

credulous faces (faces to which old Alec Holston had long since ceased

trying to give names or, for that matter, even to recognise) were filled

with it; that was only yesterday, and by tomorrow the vast bright rush and

roar had swept the very town one block south, leaving in the tideless

backwater of an alley on a side-street the old jail which, like the old

mirror, had already looked at too much too long, or like the patriarch

who, whether or not he decreed the conversion of the mudchinked cabin into

a mansion, had at least foreseen it, is now not only content but even

prefers the old chair on the back gallery, free of the rustle of

blueprints and the uproar of bickering architects in the already

dismantled living-room;

It (the old jail) didn't care, tideless in that backwash, in-