
[3258] have said, Give me your hand.
[3259] I said, Take my hand.
[3260] Strange.
[3261] But the
path was too narrow for us to walk abreast.
[3262] So I put my hand behind me and
my son grasped it, gratefully I felt [place = supralinear] [⁁]fancied.
[3263] So we came to the little wicket-gate.
It was locked.
[3264] I unlocked it and stood aside, to let my son precede me.
[3265] I turned back to look at my house.
[3266] It was partly hidden by the little wood.
The roof's serrated ridge, the single chimney-stack with its four flues,
stood out faintly against the sky spattered with a few dim stars.
[3267] I
offered my face to the black mass of fragrant vegetation that was mind [place = supralinear] e and
with which I could do as I pleased and never be gainsaid.
[3268] It was full of
songbirds, their heads under their wings, fearing nothing, for they knew
me.
[3269] My trees, my bushes, my flower-beds, my tiny lawns, I used to think
I loved them.
[3270] If I sometimes cut a branch, a flower, it was solely for
their good, that they might increase in strength and happiness.
[3271] And I
never did it without a pang.
[3272] Indeed if the truth were known, I did not do
it at all, I got Christie [place = supralinear] y to do it.
[3273] I grew no vegetables.
[3274] Not far off was
the hen-house.
[3275] When I said I had turkeys, and so on, I lied.
[3276] All I had
was a few hens.
[3277] My grey hen was there, not on the perch with the others,
but on the ground, in a corner, in the dust, at the mercy of the rats.
[3278] The
cock no longer sought her out to tread her angrily.
[3279] The day was at hand,
if she did not take a turn for the better, when the other hens would join
forces and tear her to pieces, with their beaks and claws.
[3280] All was silent.
[3281] I have an extremely sensitive ear.
[3282] Yet I have no ear for music. [3283] I could
just hear that adorable murmur of tiny feet, of quivering feathers and
feeble, smothered clucking that hen-houses make at night and dying [place = supralinear] [⁁]that dies down
long / [place = margin left] [₰] before dawn.
[3284] How often I had listened to it, entranced, in the
evening, saying, Tomorrow I am free.
[3285] And so I turned again a last time
towards my little all, before I left it, in the hope of keeping it.
[3286] In the lane, having locked the wicket-gate, I said to my son, Left.
- Segments
Molloy © 2016 Samuel Beckett Digital Manuscript Project.
Editors: Magessa O'Reilly, Dirk Van Hulle, Pim Verhulst and Vincent Neyt