'Grasp this moment,' Demivolt said, 'hold it close, examine it, treasure it. It is one of those rare occasions on which advance intelligence has proved to be correct.'
True: no one had been particularly excited. But Stencil wondered about that missing catalyst. Any minor accident: a break in the clouds, a catastrophic shivering at the first tentative blow to a shop window, the topology of an object of destruction (up a hill or down - it makes a difference) - anything might swell a merely mischievous humor to suddenly apocalyptic rage.
But all that came from the meeting was adoption of Mizzi's resolution calling for complete independence from Great Britain. La Voce del Popolo gibbered triumphantly. A new meeting of the Assembly was called for 7 June.
'Three and a half months,' Stencil said. 'It will be warmer then,' Demivolt shrugged. Whereas Mizzi, an Extremist, had been secretary of the February meeting, one Dr. Mifsud, a Moderate, would be secretary next time. The Moderates wanted to sit down and discuss the constitutional question with Hunter-Blair and the Secretary of State for the Colonies, rather than make any total break with England. And the Moderates, come June, would be in the majority.
'It seems rather a good lookout,' Demivolt protested. 'If anything was going to happen, it would have happened while Mizzi was ascendant.'
'It rained,' said Stencil. 'It was cold.'
La Voce del Popolo and the Maltese-language papers continued their attacks on the government. Maijstral reported twice a week, giving a general picture of deepening discontent among the yardbirds, but they were afflicted by a soggy lethargy which must wait for the heat of summer to dry it, the spark of a leader, a Mizzi or equivalent, to touch it into anything more explosive. As the weeks passed Stencil came to know more about his double agent. It came out that Maijstral lived near the Dockyard with his young wife Carla. Carla was pregnant, the child was due in June.
'How does she feel,' Stencil asked once with unaccustomed indiscretion, 'about your being in this occupation.'
'She will be a mother soon,' Maijstral answered, gloomy. 'That's all she thinks about or feels. You know what it is to be a mother on this island.'
Stencil's boy-romanticism seized on this: perhaps there was more than a professional element to the nighttime meetings out at the Sammut villa. He was almost tempted to ask Maijstral to spy on Veronica Manganese; but Demivolt, the voice of reason, was reluctant.
'Tip our hand that way. We have an ear already in the villa. Dupiro, the ragman, who is quite genuinely in love with a kitchen maid there.'
If the Dockyard were the only trouble spot to watch, Stencil might have fallen into the same torpor that afflicted the yardbirds. But his other contact - Father Linus Fairing, S.J., the voice whose call for help had been heard among the mass mirth of November and set a-clattering the emotional and intuitive levers, pawls or ratchets to propel Stencil across a continent and sea for solid reasons as yet unclear to him - this Jesuit saw and heard (possibly did) enough to keep Stencil moderately hagridden.
'Being a Jesuit,' said the priest, 'of course there are certain attitudes . . . we do not control the world in secret, Stencil. We have no spy net, no political nerve-center at the Vatican.' Oh, Stencil was unbiased enough. Though with his upbringing he could hardly have sidestepped exposure to a certain C. of E. leeriness toward the Society of Jesus. But he objected to Fairing's digressions; the fog of political opinion that crept in to warp what should have been clear-eyed reporting. At their initial meeting - shortly after the first trip out to Veronica Manganese's villa - Fairing had made a poor first impression. He'd tried to be chummy, even - good God - to talk shop. Stencil was reminded of certain otherwise competent Anglo-Indians in the civil service. 'We are discriminated against,' seemed to be the complaint: 'we are despised by white and Asian alike. Very well, we shall play to the hilt this false role popular prejudice believes us to play.' How many deliberate heightenings of dialect, breaches of conversational taste, gaucheries at table had Stencil seen dedicated to that intention?
So with Fairing. 'We are all spies in this together,' that was the tack he took. Stencil had been interested only in information. He wasn't about to let personality enter the Situation; this would be courting chaos. Fairing, realizing soon enough that Stencil was not, after all, a No Popery man, did give up this arrogant form of honesty far more exasperating behavior. Here, seemed to be his assumption, here is a spy who has risen above the political turmoil of his time. Here is Machiavelli on the rack, less concerned with immediacy than idea. Accordingly, the subjective fog crept in to obscure his weekly reports.
'Any tug in the direction of anarchy is anti-Christian,' he protested once, having sucked Stencil into confessing his theory of Paracletian politics. 'The Church has matured, after all. Like a young person she has passed from promiscuity to authority. You are nearly two millennia out-of-date.'
An old dame trying to cover up a flaming youth? Ha!
Actually Fairing, as a source, was ideal. Malta being, after all, a Roman Catholic island, the Father was in a position to come by enough information outside the confessional to clarify (at least) their picture of every disaffected group on the island. Though Stencil was less than happy over the quality of these reports, quantity was no problem. But what had provoked his complaint to Mungo Sheaves in the first place? What was the man afraid of?
For it was not mere love of politicking and intrigue. If he did believe in the authority of the Church, of institutions, then perhaps four years of sitting sequestered, outside the suspension of peace, which had lately convulsed the rest of the Old World, this quarantine might have brought him to some belief in Malta as a charmed circle, some stable domain of peace.
And then, with Armistice to be exposed abruptly at every level, to a daftness for overthrow among his parishioners . . . of course.
It was the Paraclete he feared. He was quite content with a Son grown to manhood.
Fairing, Maijstral, puzzlement over the identity of the hideous face above the lantern; these occupied Stencil well into March. Until one afternoon, arriving at the church early for a meeting, he saw Veronica Manganese emerge from the confessional, head bowed, face shadowed as he had seen her in Strada Stretta. She knelt at the altar rail and began to pray penance. Stencil half-knelt in the rear of the church, elbows hung over the back of the pew in front of him. Appearing to be a good Catholic, appearing to be carrying on an affair with Maijstral; nothing suspicious in either. But both at once and with (he imagined) scores of father-confessors in Valletta alone for her to choose from; it was as close to superstition as
