the barren steeps behind Hampstead, they could see
the whole of London shaping itself vaguely and largely in the grey and
growing light, until the white sun stood over it and it lay at their
feet, the splendid monstrosity that it is. Its bewildering squares and
parallelograms were compact and perfect as a Chinese puzzle; an enormous
hieroglyphic which man must decipher or die. There fell upon both of
them, but upon Turnbull more than the other, because he know more what
the scene signified, that quite indescribable sense as of a sublime and
passionate and heart-moving futility, which is never evoked by deserts
or dead men or men neglected and barbarous, which can only be invoked by
the sight of the enormous genius of man applied to anything other than
the best. Turnbull, the old idealistic democrat, had so often reviled
the democracy and reviled them justly for their supineness, their
snobbishness, their evil reverence for idle things. He was right enough;
for our democracy has only one great fault; it is not democratic. And
after denouncing so justly average modern men for so many years as
sophists and as slaves, he looked down from an empty slope in Hampstead
and saw what gods they are. Their achievement seemed all the more heroic
and divine, because it seemed doubtful whether it was worth doing at
all. There seemed to be something greater than mere accuracy in making
such a mistake as London. And what was to be the end of it all? what was
to be the ultimate transformation of this common and incredible London
man, this workman on a tram in Battersea, his clerk on an omnibus in
Cheapside? Turnbull, as he stared drearily, murmured to himself
the words of the old atheistic and revolutionary Swinburne who had
intoxicated his youth:

"And still we ask if God or man
Can loosen thee Lazarus;
Bid thee rise up republican,
And save thyself and all of us.
But no disciple's tongue can say
If thou can'st take our sins away."

Turnbull shivered slightly as if behind the earthly morning he felt the
evening of the world, the sunset of so many hopes. Those words were from
"Songs before Sunrise". But Turnbull's songs at their best were songs
after sunrise, and sunrise had been no such great thing after all.
Turnbull shivered again in the sharp morning air. MacIan was also gazing
with his face towards the city, but there was that about his blind and
mystical stare that told one, so to