MS-WU-MSS008-3-50-2

[3110] me cannot forget, in his evasions, what it is he evades. [3111] I went down to
the garden and moved about in the almost total darkness. [3112] If I had not
known my garden so well I would have blundered into my shrubberies, or my
bee-hives. [3113] My cigar had gone out ^{[⁁]unnoticed}. [3114] I shook it and
put it in my pocket, intending to discard it in the ash-tray, or in the
waste-paper basket, later on. [3115] But the next day, far from Turdy, I found
it in my pocket and indeed not without satisfaction.

[3116] For I was able to
get a few more puffs ^{[⁁]out of} it. [3117] To discover the cold cigar between my teeth,
to spit it out, to search for it in the dark, to pick it up, to wonder
what I should do with it, to shake ^{it needlessly} and put it in my pocket,
to conjure up the ^ash-tray and the waste-paper basket, these were merely
the principal stages of a sequence which I spun out for a quarter of an
hour at least.

[3118] Others concerned the dog Zulu, the perfumes sharpened
tenfold by the rain^[₰] and whose sources I amused myself exploring, in my
head and with my hands, a neighbour's light, another's noise, and so on.
[3119] My son's window was faintly lit. [3120] He liked sleeping with a night-light
beside him.

[3121] I sometimes felt it was wrong of me to let him humour this
weakness. [3122] Until quite recently he could not sleep unless he had his
woolly bear to hug. [3123] When he had forgotten the bear (Baby Jack) I would
forbid the night-light. [3124] What would I have done that day without my son
to distract me? [3125] My duty perhaps.

[3126] Finding my spirits as low in the garden as in the house, I turned to
go in, saying to myself it was one of two things, either my house had
nothing to do with the kind of nothingness in the midst of which I
stumbled or else the whole of my little property was to blame. [3127] To adopt
this latter hypothesis was to condone what I had done and, in advance,
what I was to do, pending my departure. [3128] It brought me a semblance of
pardon and a brief moment of factitious freedom. [3129] I therefore a^dopted it.