presence over whatever arete or sea's curve might be hiding it. But Valletta seemed serene in her own past, in the Mediterranean womb, in something so insulating that Zeus himself might once have quarantined her and her island for an old sin or an older pestilence. So at peace was Valletta, that with the least distance she would deteriorate to' mere spectacle. She ceased to exist as anything quick or pulsed, and was assumed again into the textual stillness of her own history.
The Villa di Sammut lay past Sliema near the sea, elevated on a small prominence, facing out toward an invisible Continent. What Stencil could see of the building was conventional enough, as villas go: white walls, balconies, few windows on the landward side, stone satyrs chasing stone nymphs about dilapidated grounds; one great ceramic dolphin vomiting clear water into a pool. But the low wall surrounding the place drew his attention. Normally insensitive to the artistic or Baedeker aspect of any city he visited, Stencil was now ready to succumb to the feathery tentacles of a nostalgia which urged him gently back toward childhood; a childhood of gingerbread witches, enchanted parks, fantasy country. It was a dream-wall, swirling and curlicuing now in the light of a quarter moon, seeming no more solid than the decorative voids - some almost like leaves or petals, some almost like bodily organs not quite human - which pierced its streaked and cobbled substance.
'Where have we seen this before,' he whispered.
One light in an upper story went out. 'Come,' said Demivolt. They vaulted the wall and crept round the villa peering in windows, listening at doors.
'Are we looking for anything particular,' Stencil asked.
A lantern came on behind them and a voice said, 'Turn round slowly. Hands away from your sides.'
Stencil had a strong stomach and all the cynicism of a non-political career and an approaching second childhood. But the face above the lantern did give him a mild shock. It is too grotesque, too deliberately, preciously Gothic to be real, he protested to himself. The upper part of the nose seemed to have slid down, giving an exaggerated saddle-and-hump; the chin cut off at midpoint to slope concave back up the other side, pulling part of the lip up in a scarred half-smile. Just under the eye socket on the same side winked a roughly circular expanse of silver. The shadows thrown by the lantern made it worse. The other hand held a revolver.
'You are spies?' the voice inquired, an English voice twisted somehow by a mouth cavity one could only infer. 'Let me see your faces.' He moved the lantern closer and Stencil saw a change begin to grow in the eyes, all that had been human in the face to begin with.
'Both of you,' the mouth said. 'Both of you then.' And tears began to squeeze from the eyes. 'Then you know it is she, and why I am here.' He repocketed the revolver, turned, slumped off toward the villa. Stencil started after him, but Demivolt put out an arm. At a door the man turned. 'Can't you let us alone? Let her make her own peace? Let me be a simple caretaker? I want nothing more from England.' The last words were spoken so weakly the sea wind nearly carried them off. The lantern and its holder vanished behind the door.
'Old running mate,' Demivolt said, 'there is a tremendous nostalgia about this show. Do you feel it? The pain of a return home.'
'Was that in Florence?'
'The rest of us were. Why not?'
'I don't like duplication of effort.'
'This occupation sees nothing else.' The tone was grim.
'Another one?'
'Oh, hardly so soon. But give it twenty years.'
Although Stencil had been face to face with her caretaker, this was the first meeting: he must have reckoned it even then as a 'first meeting.' Suspecting anyway that Veronica Manganese and he had met before, why surely they would meet again.
II
But the second meeting had to wait on the coming of a kind of false spring, where smells of the Harbour drifted to the highest reaches of Valletta and flocks of sea birds consulted dispiritedly down in the Dockyard country, aping the actions of their human co-tenants.
There had been no attack on the Chronicle. On 3 February political censorship of the Maltese press was abolished. La Voce del Popolo, the Mizzist paper, promptly began agitating. Articles praising Italy and attacking Britain; excerpts copied from the foreign press, comparing Malta to certain Italian provinces under a tyrannical Austrian rule. The vernacular press followed suit. None of it worried Stencil particularly. When the freedom to criticize a government had been suspended four years by the same government, a great deal of pent-up resentment would obviously be released in a voluminous - though not necessarily effective - torrent.
But three weeks later, a 'National Assembly' met in Valletta to draft a request for a liberal constitution. All shades of political opinion - Abstentionists, Moderates, the Comitato Patriottico - were represented. The gathering met at the club Giovine Malta, which was Mizzist-controlled.
'Trouble,' Demivolt said darkly.
'Not necessarily.' Though Stencil knew the difference between 'political gathering' and 'mob' is fine indeed. Anything might touch it off.
The night before the meeting a play at the Manoel Theatre, dealing with Austrian oppression in Italy, worked the crowd into a gloriously foul humor. The actors tossed in several topical ad libs which did little to improve the general mood. Rollickers in the street sang La Bella Gigogin. Maijstral reported that a few Mizzists and Bolshevists were doing their best to drum up enthusiasm for a riot among the Dockyard workers. The extent of their success was doubtful. Maijstral shrugged. It might only be the weather. An unofficial notice had also gone out, advising merchants to close up their establishments.
'Considerate of them,' Demivolt remarked next day as they strolled down Strada Reale. A few shops and cafes had been closed. A quick check revealed that the owners had Mizzist sympathies.
As the day progressed small bands of agitators, most of them with a holiday air (as if rioting were a healthy avocation like handicrafts or outdoor sports), roamed the streets, breaking windows, wrecking furniture, yelling at the merchants still open to close up their shops. But for some reason a spark was missing. Rain swept by in squalls at intervals throughout the day.
