MS-BRML-NWWR-2-38

[0259] ^[[]Having waked between eleven o^'clock and midday (I eard the
angelus, recalling the incarnation, shorting after) I resolved
to go and see my mother.

[0260] I needed, before I could resol^ve to go
and see that woman, reasons of an urgent nature, and with such
reasons, since I did not know what to do, or where to go, it
was child's play for me, the play of an only child, to fill
my mind until it was rid of all other preoccupation and I ^(was?) seized
with a trembling at the mere idea of being hindered from going
there, I mean to my mother, there and then.

[0261] So I got up, adjusted
my crutches and went down to the road, where I found my bicy^cle
(I di^dn't know I had one) in the same place I must have left it.
[0262] ^[[]Which enables me to remark that, crippled though I was, I was
no mean cyclist, at that period. [0263] This is how I went about it.

[0264] I fastened my crutches to the crossbar, one on either side, I
propped the foot of my stiff leg (I forget which, now they're
both stiff) on the projecting front axle, and I pedaled with
the other. [0265] It was a ch^ainless bicycle, with a free-wheel, if
such a bicycle exists. [0266] Dear bicycle, I shall not call you
bike, you were green, like so many of your generation, I don't
know why. [0267] It is a pleasure to meet it again.^{[]] [20]}

[0268] To describe
it in detail would be a pleasure. [0269] It had a little red horn
instead of the bell fashionable in your days. [0270] To blow this
horn was for me a real pleasure, almost a vice.

[0271] I
will go further and declare that if I were obliged to record,
in a roll of honor, those activities which in the course of
my interminable existence have given me only a mild pain in
the balls,^[?] the act of blowing a rubber horn would figure among
the first. [0272] And when I had to part from my bicycle I took off