Requiem for a Nun

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 all: 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

hundred years later, when Sutpen's own legend in the county would include

the anecdote of the time the architect broke somehow out of his dungeon

and tried to flee and Sutpen and his Negro head man and hunter ran him

down with dogs in the swamp and brought him back) since, as the architect

had told them, they had no money to buy bad taste with nor even anything

from which to copy what bad taste might still have been within their com-

pass; this one too still costing nothing but the labor and-the second year

now-most of that was slave since there were still more slave owners in the

settlement which had been a town and named for going on two years now,

already a town and already named when the first ones walked up on that

yellow morning two years back:-men other than Holston and the blacksmith

(Compson was one now) who owned one or two or three Negroes, besides

Grenier and Sutpen who had set up camps beside the creek in Compson's

pasture for the two gangs of their Negroes to live in until the two

buildingsthe courthouse and the jail-should be completed. But not al-

together slave, the boundmen, the unfree, because there were