 very door. He asked us to
send him the first fiacre we met on our way to town. »It's impossible to walk in
this get-up through the streets,« he remarked, with his brilliant smile.
    At this point I propose to transcribe some notes I made at the time in
little black books which I have hunted up in the litter of the past; very cheap,
common little note-books that by the lapse of years have acquired a touching
dimness of aspect, the frayed, worn-out dignity of documents.
    Expression on paper has never been my forte. My life had been a thing of
outward manifestations. I never had been secret or even systematically taciturn
about my simple occupations which might have been foolish but had never required
either caution or mystery. But in those four hours since midday a complete
change had come over me. For good or evil I left that house committed to an
enterprise that could not be talked about; which would have appeared to many
senseless and perhaps ridiculous, but was certainly full of risks, and, apart
from that, commanded discretion on the ground of simple loyalty. It would not
only close my lips but it would to a certain extent cut me off from my usual
haunts and from the society of my friends; especially of the light-hearted,
young, harum-scarum kind. This was unavoidable. It was because I felt myself
thrown back upon my own thoughts and forbidden to seek relief amongst other
lives - it was perhaps only for that reason at first that I started an
irregular, fragmentary record of my days.
    I made these notes not so much to preserve the memory (one cared not for any
to-morrow then) but to help me to keep a better hold of the actuality. I
scribbled them on shore and I scribbled them on the sea; and in both cases they
are concerned not only with the nature of the facts but with the intensity of my
sensations. It may be, too, that I learned to love the sea for itself only at
that time. Woman and the sea revealed themselves to me together, as it were: two
mistresses of life's values. The illimitable greatness of the one, the
unfathomable seduction of the other working their immemorial spells from
generation to generation fell upon my heart at last; a common fortune, an
unforgettable memory of the sea's formless might and of the sovereign charm in
that woman's form wherein there seemed to beat the pulse of divinity rather than
blood.
    I begin here with the notes written at the end of that
