Page:Requiem for a Nun (1919) Faulkner.djvu/28

THE COURTHOUSE 27

of inevictable grit. Nobody had seen him move yet he now stood in the centre of them where Compson and Ratcliffe arid Peabody faced old Alec in the chair. You might hhve said that he had oozed there, except for that adamantine quality which might (in emergency) become invisible but never insubstantial and never in this world fluid; h^ spoke in a voice bland, reasonable and imper- scKial, then stood there being looked at, frail and child- si^d, impermeable as diamond and manifest with por- tent, bringing into that backwoods room a thousand miles deep in pathless wilderness, the whole vast incal- culable weight of federality, not just representing the government nor even himself just the government; for that moment at least, he was the United States.

‘Uncle Alec hasn’t lost arty lock,’ he said. ‘That was Uncle Sam.’

After a moment someone said, ‘What?’

‘That’s right,’ Pettigrew said. ‘Whoever put that lock of Holston’s on that mail bag cither made a volun- tary gift to the United States, and the same law covers the United States G&vemmcnt that covers minor children; you can give something to them, but you can’t take it back, or he or they done something else.’

They looked at him. Again after a while somebody said something; it was Ratcliffe. ‘What else?’ Ratcliffe said. Pettigrew answered, still bland, impersonal, headess and ghb: ‘Committed a violation of act of Congress as especially made and provided for the defacement of gov- ernment property, penalty of five thousand dollars or not less than one.year ip,a Federal jail or both. For whoever cut*them two sUts in the bag to put the lock in, act of Congress as especially made and provided for the injury