MS-WU-MSS008-3-48

[0143] rather for what doesn't stir, or stirs so slowly 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 on 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 disappeared from
time to time, to re-emerge farther on, but most of all I think
because of other things calling me and towards 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,
which I won't qualify, and the sharpening line of the 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 B, I don't
remember, wisely going home.

[0147] Yes, towards 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
bare-headed, 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