MS-BRML-NWWR-22-546

[0143] rather for what doesn't stir, or stirs so slowly that a child would
scorn it, let alone an old man. [0144] However that may be, I mean whether
he saw me or whether he didn't, I repeat I watched him recede, at
grips (myself) with the temptation to get up and follow him, perhaps
even to catch up ^to him one day, so as to know him better, be myself
less lonely.

[0145] But in spite of my soul's leap out to him, at the end
of its elastic, I saw him only darkly, because of the dark and then
because of the terrain, in the folds of which he dis^appeared from
time to time, to re-emerge further on, but most of all I think
because of other things calling me and toward which too one after ^[₰]
the other my soul was straining, unmethodical, distracted.

[0146] I mean
of course the fields, whitening under the dew, and the animals,
ceasing from wandering and settling for the night, and the sea,
^[] of which nothing, and the sharpening line of crests, and the sky
where without seeing them I felt the first stars tremble, and my
hand on my knee and above all the other wayfarer, A or C, I don't
remember, going resignedly home.

[0147] Yes, toward my hand also, which ^[₰]
my knee felt tremble and of which my eyes saw the wrist only, the
heavily^-veined back, the pallid rows of knuckles. [0148] But that is not,
I mean my hand, what I wish to speak of now, everything iⁿ due
course, but A or B returning to the town he had just left.

[0149] But
after all what was there particularly urban in his aspect? [0150] He was
^[₰]bareheaded, wore sand-shoes, smoked a cigar. [0151] He moved with a kind
of loitering indolence which rightly or wrongly seemed to me
expressive. [0152] But all that proved nothing, refuted nothing.

[0153] Perhaps
he had come from afar, from the other end of the island even, and
was approaching the town for the first time or returning to it