Requiem for a Nun

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