
[0845] a white chamber-pot with a roll of toilet-paper in it.
[0846] Nothing was
being left to chance.
[0847] I recount these moments with a certain minuteness,
it is a relief from what I feel coming.
[0848] I set a pouffe against the easy
chair, sat down in the latter and on the former laid my stiff leg.
[0849] The
room was chock-full of pouffes and easy chairs, they [⁁]thronged all about me,
in the gloom.
[0850] There were also occasional tables, footstools, tallboys,
etc., in abundance.
[0851] Strange feeling of congestion that the night dispersed,
though it lit the chandelier, which I had left turned on.
[0852] My beard was
missing, when I felt for it with anguished hand.
[0853] They had shaved me, they
had shorn me of my scant beard. [0854] How had my sleep withstood such liberties?
[0855] My sleep as a rule so uneasy.
[0856] To this question I found a number of replies.
[0857] But I did not know which of them was right.
[0858] Perhaps they were all wrong.
[0859] My beard grows properly only on my chin and dewlap.
[0860] Where the pretty
bristles grow on other faces, on mine there are none.
[0861] But such as it was
they had docked my beard.
[0862] Perhaps they had dyed it too, I had no proof
they had not.
[0863] I thought I was naked, in the easy chair, but I finally
realized I was wearing a nightdress, very flimsy.
[0864] If they had come and
told me I was to be sacrificed at sunrise[₰] I would not have been taken
aback.
[0865] How foolish one can be.
[0866] It seemed to me too that I had been
perfumed, lavender perhaps.
[0868] I said, If only your poor mother could see
you now.
[0869] I am no enemy of the commonplace.
[0870] She seemed far away, my
mother, far away from me, and yet I was a little closer to her than the
night before, if my reckoning was accurate.
[0871] But was it?
[0872] If I was in the
right town, I had made progress.
[0873] But was I?
[0874] If on the other hand I was
in the wrong town, from which my mother would neccessarily be absent, then
I had lost ground.
[0875] I must have fallen asleep, for all of a sudden there
was the moon, a huge moon framed in the window.
[0876] Two bars divided it
in three [⁁]segments, of which the middle remained constant, while little by
- Segments
Molloy © 2016 Samuel Beckett Digital Manuscript Project.
Editors: Magessa O'Reilly, Dirk Van Hulle, Pim Verhulst and Vincent Neyt