Requiem for a Nun

REQUIEM FOR A NUN 303

that fast: Sutpen's untameable Paris architect long since departed,

vanished (one hoped) back to wherever it was he had made that aborted

midnight try to regain and had been overtaken and caught in the swamp, not

(as the town knew now) by Sutpen and Sutpen's wild West Indian headman and

Sutpen's bear hounds, nor even by Sutpen's destiny nor even by his (the

architect's) own, but by that of the town: the long invincible arm of

Progress itself reaching into that midnight swamp to pluck him out of that

bayed circle of dogs and naked Negroes and pine torches, and stamped the

town with him like a rubber signature and then released him, not flung him

away like a squeezed-out tube of paint, but rather (inattentive too)

merely opening its fingers, its hand; stamping his (the architect's)

imprint not on just the courthouse and the jail, but on the whole town,

the flow and trickle of his bricks never even faltering, his molds and

kilns building the two churches and then that Female Academy a certificate

from which, to a young woman of North Mississippi or West Tennessee, would

presently have the same mystic significance as an invitation dated from

Windsor castle and signed by Queen Victoria would for a young female from

Long Island or Philadelphia;

That fast now: tomorrow, and the railroad did run unbroken from Memphis

to Carolina, the light-wheeled bulb-stacked wood-burning engines shrieking

among the swamps and canebrakes where bear and panther still lurked, and

through the open woods where browsing deer still drifted in pale bands

like unwinded smoke: because they-the wild animals, the beasts -remained,

they coped, they would endure; a day, and they would flee, lumber, scuttle

across the clearings already overtaken and relinquished by the hawk-shaped

shadows of mail planes; they would endure, only the wild men were gone;

indeed, tomorrow, and there would be grown men in Jefferson who could not

even remember a drunken Indian in the jail; another tomorrow-so quick, so

rapid, so fast-and not even a highwayman any more of the old true

sanguinary girth and tradition of Hare and Mason and the mad Harpes; even

Murrell, their thrice-compounded heir and apothesis, who had taken his

heritage of simple rapacity and bloodlust and converted it into a bloody

dream of outlaw-empire, was gone, finished, as obsolete as Alexander,

checkmated and stripped not even by man but by Progress, by a pierceless

front of middle-class morality which refused him even the dignity of

execution as a felon, but instead merely branded him on the hand like an

Elizabethan pickpocket-until all that remained of the old days for the

jail to incarcerate was the runaway