512
PARTISAN REVIEW
the smoke and soot) of the Square had been temporarily roofed
and were stores and shops and offices again, and they had begun
to restore the courthouse: not temporary, this, but restored, exactly
as
it
had been, between the two columned porticoes, one north and
one south, which had been tougher than dynamite and fire, because
it was the symbol: the County and the City: and they knew how,
who had done it before; Colonel Sartoris was home now, and Gen–
eral Compson, the first Jason's son, and though a tragedy had hap–
pened to Sutpen and
his
pride-a failure not of his pride nor even
of his own bones and flesh, but of the lesser bones and flesh which he
had believed capable of supporting the edifice of
his
dream-they
still had the old plans of
his
architect and even the architect's molds,
and even more: money, (strangely, curiously) Redmond, the town's
domesticated carpetbagger, symbol of a blind rapacity almost like a
biological instinct, destined to cover the South like a migration of
locusts; in the case of this man, arriving a full year before its time
and now devoting no small portion of the fruit of his rapacity to
restoring the very building the destruction of which had rung up
the curtain for
his
appearance on the stage, had been the formal
visa on his passport to pillage; and by New Year's of '76,
this
same Redmond with his money and Colonel Sartoris and General
Compson had built a railroad from Jefferson north into Tennessee
to connect with one from Memphis to the Atlantic Ocean; nor con–
tent there either, north and south: another ten years' (Sartoris and
Redmond and Compson quarreled, and Sartoris and Redmond
bought-probably with Redmond's money-Compson's interest in
the railroad, and the next year Sartoris and Redmond had quar–
reled and the year after that, because of simple physical fear, Red–
mond killed Sartoris from ambush on the Jefferson Square and fled,
and at last even Sartoris's supporters-he had no friends: only ene–
mies and frantic admirers-- began to understand the result of that
regimental election in the fall of '62) and the railroad was a part of
that system covering the whole South and East like the veins in an
oak leaf and itself mutually adjunctive to the other intricate systems
covering the rest of the United States, so that you could get on a
train in Jefferson now and, by changing and waiting a few times,
go anywhere in North America;
