PARTISAN REVIEW
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 build–
ing the two churches and then that Female Academy a certificate
from which, to a young woman of North Mississippi or West Ten–
nessee, would presently have the same mystic significance as an invi–
tation dated from Windsor castle and signed by Queen Victoria
woulq 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 cane-brakes where
bear and panther still lurked, and through the open woods where
browsing deer still drifted in pale bands like unwinded smoke: be–
cause 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 girt and tradition
of Hare and Mason and the mad Harpes; even Murrell, their thrice–
compounded heir and apotheosis, who had taken his heritage of simple
rapacity and bloodlust and converted it into a bloody dream of out–
law-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 execu–
tion as a felon, but instead merely branded him on the hand like an
