So, together, we found our way,

Shared a pellet, or two…

Like an evening in some café,

Wanting nothing, but you…

Autumn’s come, to Pavlovia-a-a,

Once again, I’m alone—

Finding sorrow by millivolts,

Back to neurons and bone.

And I think of our moments then,

Never knowing your name—

Nothing’s left in Pavlovia,

But the maze, and the game… .

They dance in flowing skeins. The rats and mice form circles, curl their tails in and out to make chrysanthemum and sunburst patterns, eventually all form into the shape of a single giant mouse, at whose eye Silvernail poses with a smile, arms up in a V, sustaining the last note of the song, along with the giant rodent-chorus and orchestra. One of PWD’s classic propaganda leaflets these days urges the Volksgrenadier: SETZT V-2 EIN!, with a footnote, explaining that “V-2” means to raise both arms in “honorable surrender”—more gallowshumor—and telling how to say, phonetically, “ei ssörrender.” Is Webley’s V here for victory, or ssörrender?

They have had their moment of freedom. Webley has only been a guest star. Now it’s back to the cages and the rationalized forms of death—death in the service of the one species cursed with the knowledge that it will die… . “I would set you free, if I knew how. But it isn’t free out here. All the animals, the plants, the minerals, even other kinds of men, are being broken and reassembled every day, to preserve an elite few, who are the loudest to theorize on freedom, but the least free of all. I can’t even give you hope that it will be different someday—that They’ll come out, and forget death, and lose Their technology’s elaborate terror, and stop using every other form of life without mercy to keep what haunts men down to a tolerable level—and be like you instead, simply here, simply alive… .” The guest star retires down the corridors.

Lights, all but a sprinkling, are out at “The White Visitation.” The sky tonight is deep blue, blue as a Navy greatcoat, and the clouds in it are amazingly white. The wind is keen and cold. Old Brigadier Pudding, trembling, slips from his quarters down the back stairs, by a route only he knows, through the vacant orangery in the starlight, along a gallery hung to lace dandies, horses, ladies with hard-boiled eggs for eyes, out a small entresol (point of maximum danger…) and into a lumber-room, whose stacks of junk and random blacknesses, even this far from his childhood, are good for a chill, out again and down a set of metal steps, singing, he hopes quietly, for courage:

Wash me in the water

That you wash your dirty daughter,

And I shall be whiter than the whitewash on the wall… .

at last to D Wing, where the madmen of the ’30s persist. The night attendant is asleep under the Daily Herald. He is a coarse-looking fellow, and has been reading the leader. Is it an indication of things to come, next election? Oh, dear…