ngs are to be
changed for ever. . . . You won't be what you have been from this
time forth. All the things you have done--don't matter now. To
us, at any rate, they don't matter at all. We have met, who were
separated in that darkness behind us. Tell me.

"Yes," he said; and I told my story straight and as frankly as I
have told it to you. "And there, where those little skerries of weed
rock run out to the ebb, beyond the headland, is Bungalow village.
What did you do with your pistol?"

"I left it lying there--among the barley."

He glanced at me from under his light eyelashes. "If others feel
like you and I," he said, "there'll be a lot of pistols left among
the barley to-day. . . ."

So we talked, I and that great, strong man, with the love of
brothers so plain between us it needed not a word. Our souls went
out to one another in stark good faith; never before had I had
anything but a guarded watchfulness for any fellow-man. Still I
see him, upon that wild desolate beach of the ebb tide, I see him
leaning against the shelly buttress of a groin, looking down at the
poor drowned sailor whose body we presently found. For we found a
newly drowned man who had just chanced to miss this great dawn in
which we rejoiced. We found him lying in a pool of water, among
brown weeds in the dark shadow of the timberings. You must not
overrate the horrors of the former days; in those days it was scarcely
more common to see death in England than it would be to-day. This
dead man was a sailor from the Rother Adler, the great German
battleship that--had we but known it--lay not four miles away along
the coast amidst ploughed-up mountains of chalk ooze, a torn and
battered mass of machinery, wholly submerged at high water, and
holding in its interstices nine hundred drowned brave men, all
strong and skilful, all once capable of doing fine things. . . .

I remember that poor boy very vividly. He had been drowned during
the anaesthesia of the green gas, his fair young face was quiet
and calm, but the skin of his chest had been crinkled by scalding
water and his right arm was bent queerly back. Even to this needless
death and all its tale of cruelty, beauty and dignity had come.
Everything flowed together to significance as we stood there, I,
the ill-clad, cheaply equipped proletarian, and Melmount in his
great fur-trimmed coat--he was hot with walking but he had not
thought to remove it--leaning upon the clumsy groins and pitying
t