MS-WU-MSS008-3-50-1

[0143] 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 with 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 further 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, wildly.

[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, towards my hand alos , 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 C
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