Requiem for a Nun

Oh God, that was Friday too; that baseball game was Friday-

(rapidly)

You see? Dont you see? It's nowhere near enough yet. Of course he

wouldn't save her. If he did that, it would be over: Gowan could just

throw me out, which he may do yet, or I could throw Gowan out, which

I could have done until it got too late now, too late forever now, or

the judge could have thrown us both out and given Bucky to an

orphanage, and '

would be all over. But now it can go on, tomorrc.--'and tomorrow and

tomorrow, forever and forever and

forever

STEVENS

(gently tries to start her) Come on.

TEMPLE

(holding back)

Tell me exactly what he did say. Not tonight: it couldn't have been

tonight-or did he say it over the telephone, and we didn't even

need-

STEVENS

He said it a week ago-

TEMPLE

Yes, about the same time when you sent the wire. What did he say?

REQUIEM FOR A NUN 295

STEVENS

(quotes)

'Wbo am 1, to have the brazen temerity and hardihood to set the puny

appanage of my office in the balance against that simple undeviable

aim? Who am 1, to render null and abrogate the purchase she made

with that poor crazed lost and worthless life?'

TEMPLE

(wildly)

And good too-good and mellow too. So it was not even in hopes of

saving her life, that I came here at two o'clock in the morning. It

wasn't even to be told that he had already decided not to save her.

It was not even to confess to my husband, but to do it in the

hearing of two strangers, something which I bad spent eight years

trying to expiate so that my husband wouldn't have to know about it.

Dont you see? That's just suffering. Not for anything: just

suffering.

STEVENS

You came here to affirm the very thing which Nancy is going to die

tomorrow morning to postulate: that little children, as long as they

are little children, shall be intact, unanguished, untorn,

unterrified.

TEMPLE

(quietly)

All right. I have done that. Can we go home now?

STEVENS

.Wool I Yes.(she turns, moves toward the

steps, Stevens beside her. As she

reaches the first step, she falters,

seems to stumble slightly, like a

sleepwalker. Stevens steadies her

but at once she frees her arm,

and begins to descend)

TEMPLE

(on the first step: to no one, still

with that sleepwalker air)

To save my soul-if I have a soul. If there is a God to

save it-a God who wants it-

(Curtain)

Act Three

THE JAIL (Nor Even Yet Quite Relinquish-)

So, although in a sense the jail was both older and less old than the

courthouse, in actuality, in time, in observation and memory, it was older

even than the town itself. Because there was no town until there was a

courthouse, and no courthouse until (like some unsentient unweaned creature

torn violently from the dug of its dam) the floorless lean-to rabbit-hutch

housing the iron chest was reft from the log flank of the jail and

transmogrified into a by-neo-Greek-out-of-Georgian-Eng-land edifice set in

the center of what in time would be the town Square (as a result of which,

the town itself had moved one block south-or rather, no town then and yet,

the courthouse itself the catalyst: a mere dusty widening of the trace,

trail, pathway in a forest of oak and ash and hickory and sycamore and

flowering catalpa and dogwood and judas tree and persimmon and wild plum,

with on one side old Alec Holston's tavern and coaching-yard, and a little

farther along, Ratcliffe's trading-post-store and the blacksmith's, and

diagonal to all of them, en face and solitary beyond the dust, th~ log jail;

moved-the town-complete and intact, one blo( southward, so that now, a

century and a quarter later, V coaching-yard and Ratcliffe's store were gone

and old Alec tavern and the blacksmith's were a hotel and a garage, on a

main thoroughfare true enough but still a business side-street, and the jail

across from them, though transformed also now into two storeys of Georgian

brick by the hand ((or anyway pocketbooks) ) of Sartoris and Sutpen and

Louis Grenier, faced not even on a side-street but on an alley);

And so, being older than all, it had seen alclass="underline" the mutation and

the change: and, in that sense, had recorded them (indeed, as

Gavin Stevens, the town lawyer and the county amateur Cin

cinnatus, wits wont to say, if you would peruse in unbroken

ay, overlap ping-cont iriu ity the history of a community, look

not in the church registers and the courthouse records, but be

neath the successive layers of calcimine and creosote and

whitewash on the walls of the jail, since only in that forcible

296

REQUIEM FOR A NUN 297

carceration does man find the idleness in which to compose, in the gross

and simple terms of his gross and simple lusts and yearnings, the gross

and simple recapitulations of his gross and simple heart); invisible and

impacted, not only beneath the annual inside creosote-and-whitewash of

bullpen and cell, but on the blind outside walls too, first the simple

mud-chinked log ones and then the symmetric brick, not only the scrawled

illiterate repetitive unimaginative doggerel and the perspectiveless

almost prehistoric sexual picture-writing, but the images, the panorama

not only of the town but of its days and years until a century and better

had been accomplished, filled not only with its mutation and change from

a halting-place: to a community: to a settlement: to a village: to a town,

but with the shapes and motions, the gestures of passion and hope and

travail and endurance, of the men and women and children in their

successive overlapping generations long after the subjects which had

reflected the images were vanished and replaced and again replaced, as

when you stand say alone in a dim and empty room and believe, hypnotised

beneath the vast weight of man's incredible and enduring Was, that perhaps

by turning your head aside you will see from the corner of your eye the

turn of a moving limb-a gleam of crinoline, a laced wrist, perhaps even

a Cavalier plume-who knows? provided there is will enough, perhaps even

the face itself three hundred years after it was dust-the eyes, two

jellied tears filled with arrogance and pride and satiety and knowledge

of anguish and foreknowledge of death, saying no to death across twelve

generations, asking still the old same unanswerable question three

centuries after that which reflected them had learned that the answer

didn't matter, or-better still-had forgotten the asking of it-in the

shadowy fathomless dreamlike depths of an old mirror which has looked at

too much too long;

But not in shadow, not this one, this mirror, these logs: squatting in the