'I've just become the father to a bouncing baby boy
And Herbert blithering Stencil is 'is name.
'E's a card
And treats me wiv regard
Though I 'awe to change 'is nappies all the same.
I don't know where we got the time to make 'im,
Cause I've been coming 'ome drunk most every night,
But 'e's cute and fat as a kidney pie
And looks like 'is ma and that is why
Stencil's going 'ome tonight
(Just ask the milkman)
Stencil's going 'ome tonight.'
Out of the tub, dry, back in tweeds, Stencil stood at the window, looking out idly at the night.
At length came a knock at the door. It would be Maijstral. A quick twitch of eyeballs about the room to check for loose papers, anything compromising. Then to the door to admit the shipfitter who'd been described to him as looking like a stunted oak. Maijstral stood there neither aggressive nor humble, merely existing: whitening hair, unkempt mustaches. A nervous tic in the man's upper lip made the food particles trapped there vibrate disturbingly.
'He comes of noble family,' Mehemet had revealed sadly. Stencil fell into the trap, asking which family. 'Della Torre,' Mehemet replied. Delatore, informer.
'What of the Dockyard people,' Stencil asked.
'They will attack the Chronicle.' (A grievance stemming from the strike of 1917; the newspaper had published a letter condemning the strike, but had given no equal time for a reply.) 'There was a meeting a few minutes ago.' Maijstral gave him a brief digest. Stencil knew all the objections. Workers from England got a colonial allowance: local yardbirds received only normal wages. Most would like to emigrate, after hearing glowing reports from the Maltese Labour Corps and other crews from abroad of higher pay outside Malta. But the rumor had started, somehow, that the government was refusing passports to keep workers on the island, against any future requirement. 'What else can they do but emigrate?' Maijstral digressed: 'With the war the number of Dockyard workers swelled to three times what it was before. Now, with Armistice, they're already laying off. There are only so many jobs here outside the Dockyard. Not enough to keep everyone eating.'
Stencil wanted to ask: if you sympathize, why inform? He had used informers as a journeyman his tools and had never tried to understand their motives. Usually he supposed it was no more than a personal grudge, a desire for revenge. But he'd seen them before, torn: committed to some program or other, and still helping along its defeat. Would Maijstral be there in the van of the mob storming the Daily Malta Chronicle? Stencil did want to ask why, but could hardly. It being none of his affair.
Maijstral told him all he knew and left, expressionless as before. Stencil lit a pipe, consulted a map of Valletta, and five minutes later was strolling sprightly down Strada Reale, trailing Maijstral.
This was normal precaution. Of course, a certain double standard was at work; the feeling being 'If he will inform for me he will also inform against me.'
Ahead Maijstral now turned left, away from the lights of the main thoroughfare; down the hill toward Strada Stretta. Here were the borders of this city's Disreputable Quarter; Stencil looked around without much curiosity. It was all the same. What a warped idea of cities one got in this occupation! If no record of this century should survive except the personal logs of F.O. operatives, the historians of the future must reconstruct a curious landscape indeed.
Massive public buildings with characterless facades; networks of streets from which the civilian populace seems mysteriously absent. An aseptic administrative world, surrounded by an outlying vandal-country of twisting lanes, houses of prostitution, taverns; ill-lit except for rendezvous points, which stand out like sequins on an old and misused ball-gown.
'If there is any political moral to be found in this world,' Stencil once wrote in his journal, 'it is that we carry on the business of this century with an intolerable double vision. Right and Left; the hothouse and the street. The Right can only live and work hermetically, in the hothouse of the past, while outside, the Left prosecute their affairs in the streets by manipulated mob violence. And cannot live but in the dreamscape of the future.
'What of the real present the men-of-no-politics, the once-respectable Golden Mean? Obsolete; in any case, lost sight of. In a West of such extremes we can expect, at the very least, a highly 'alienated' populace within not many more years.'
Strada Stretta; Strait Street. A passage meant, one felt, to be choked with mobs. Such was nearly the case: early evening had brought to it sailors ashore from H.M.S. Egmont and smaller men-o-war; seamen from Greek, Italian and North African merchantmen; and a supporting cast of shoeshine boys, pimps, hawkers of trinkets, confections, dirty pictures. Such were the topological deformities of this street that one seemed to walk through a succession of musichall stages, each demarcated by a curve or slope, each with a different set and acting company, but all for the same low entertainment. Stencil, old soft-shoe artist, felt quite at home.
But he increased his pace through the thickening crowds; noticing with some anxiety that Maijstral had begun to disappear more and more frequently is the surgings of white and blue ahead.
To his right he became aware of a persistent image, flickering in and out of his field of vision. Tall, black, somehow conical. He risked a sidewise glance. What seemed to be a Greek pope or parish priest had been keeping abreast of him for some time. What was a man of God doing in this territory? Seeking perhaps to reclaim souls; but their glances touched and Stencil saw no merciful intention there.
'Chaire,' muttered the priest.
'Chaire, Papa,' said Stencil out of the side of his mouth, and tried to push ahead. He was restrained by the
