pope's ringed hand.
'One moment, Sidney,' said the voice. 'Come over here, out of this mob.'
That voice was damned familiar. 'Maijstral is going to the John Bull,' said the pope. 'We can catch up with him later.' They proceeded down an alley to a small courtyard. In the center was a cistern, its rim adorned with a dark sunburst of sewage.
'Presto change-ho,' and off came the holy man's black beard and calotte.
'Demivolt, you've grown crude in your old age. What sort of low comedy is this? What's the matter with Whitehall?'
'They're all right,' sang Demivolt, hopping clumsily about the courtyard. 'You're as much a surprise to me, you know.'
'What about Moffit,' Stencil said. 'As long as they're staging a reunion of the Florence crew.'
'Moffit caught it in Belgrade. I thought you'd heard.' Demivolt removed the soutane and rolled his paraphernalia in it. Underneath he wore a suit of English tweed. After quickly recombing his hair and twirling his mustache, he looked no different from the Demivolt Stencil had last seen in '99. Except for more gray in the hair, a few more lines in the face.
'God knows who all they've sent to Valletta,' said Demivolt cheerfully, as they returned to the street. 'I suspect it's only another fad - F.O. gets these fits, you know. Like a spa or watering place. The Fashionable Place To Go seems to be different every season.'
'Don't look at me. I have only a hint what's up. The natives here are as we say, restless. This chap Fairing - R.C. priest, Jesuit I suspect - thinks there will be a blood bath before very long.'
'Yes, I've seen Fairing. If his paycheck is coming out of the same pocket as ours, he shows it not.'
'Oh I doubt, I doubt,' Stencil said vaguely, wanting to talk about old times.
'Maijstral always sits out in front; we'll go across the street.' They took seats at the Cafe Phoenicia, Stencil with his back to the street. Briefly, over Barcelona beer each filled the other in on the two decades between the Vheissu affair and here, voices monotone against the measured frenzy of the street.
'Odd how paths cross.'
Stencil nodded.
'Are we meant to keep tabs on one another? Or were we meant to meet.'
'Meant?' too quickly. 'By Whitehall, of course.'
'Of course.'
As we get older we skew more toward the past. Stencil had thus become partially lost to the street and the yardbird across it. The ill-starred year in Florence - Demivolt having popped up again - now came back to him, each unpleasant detail quivering brightly in the dark room of his spy's memory. He hoped devoutly that Demivolt's appearance was merely chance, and not a signal for the reactivation of the same chaotic and Situational forces at work in Florence twenty years ago.
For Fairing's prediction of massacre, and its attendant politics, had all the earmarks of a Situation-in-the- process-of-becoming. He had changed none of his ideas on The Situation. Had even written an article, pseudonymous, and sent it to Punch: 'The Situation as an N-Dimensional Mishmash.' It was rejected.
'Short of examining the entire history of each individual participating;' Stencil wrote, 'short of anatomizing each soul, what hope has anyone of understanding a Situation? It may be that the civil servants of the future will not be accredited unless they first receive a degree in brain surgery.'
He indeed was visited by dreams in which he had shrunk to submicroscopic size and entered a brain, strolling in through some forehead's pore and into the cul-de-sac of a sweat gland. Struggling out of a jungle of capillaries there he would finally reach bone; down then through the skull, dura mater, arachnoid, pia mater to the fissure-floored sea of cerebrospinal fluid. And there he would float before final assault on the gray hemispheres: the soul.
Nodes of Ranvier, sheath of Schwann, vein of Galen; tiny Stencil wandered all night long among the silent, immense lightning bursts of nerve-impulses crossing a synapse; the waving dendrites, the nerve-autobahns chaining away to God knew where in receding clusters of end-bulbs. A stranger in this landscape, it never occurred to him to ask whose brain he was in. Perhaps his own. They were fever dreams: the kind where one is given an impossibly complex problem to solve, and keeps chasing dead ends, following random promises, frustrated at every turn, until the fever breaks.
Assume, then, a prospect of chaos in the streets, joined by every group on the island with a grudge. This would include nearly everyone but the OAG and his staff. Doubtless each would think only of his own immediate desires. But mob violence, like tourism, is a kind of communion. By its special magic a large number of lonely souls, however heterogeneous, can share the common property of opposition to what is. And like an epidemic or earthquake, the politics of the street can overtake even the most stable-appearing of governments; like death it cuts through and gathers in all ranks of society.
- The poor would seek revenge against the millers, who allegedly profiteered in bread during the war.
- The civil servants would be out looking for a fairer shake: advance notice of open competition, higher salaries, no more racial discrimination.
- The tradesmen would want repeal of the Succession and Donation Duties Ordinance. This tax was meant to bring in 5000 pounds yearly; but the actual assessments amounted to 30,000 pounds.
- Bolshevists among the yardbirds could only be satisfied with the abolition of all private property, sacred or profane.
- The anti-colonial extremists would seek of course to sweep England from the Palace forever. Damn the consequences. Though probably Italy would enter on the next crest and be even harder to dislodge. There would be blood ties, then.
