Requiem for a Nun

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-