There was no signature and no covering note.
Ayscue read it through three times. Then he went to his wardrobe, a standard-issue affair in imitation walnut, and took a bottle of Scotch out from among his footwear. He swallowed half a tooth-glassful neat in two goes, the first drink he had had before noon for over ten years. When he had stopped coughing he sat down again, lit a cigarette and went carefully over the physical appearance of what had been sent him.
The poem had been inexpertly typed on a sheet of the cheap lined writing-paper on sale at the canteen. The envelope, similarly typed, bore his rank, initials and name in their correct form-as they were to be seen on dozens of notice-boards and lists round the camp, and, in one corner, For the magazine. That was all there was.
It seemed important to Ayscue that he should find out who had written the poem. But for the moment he was too agitated to think coolly about this. Experience had taught him that attacks on God along these lines meant that the attacker was in urgent need of help, lest he fall into the unforgivable sin of despair. He told himself that to let his own emotions dwell on this outcome could only postpone the chance of averting it, and forced his attention on to the task of drawing deductions from the text.
He made an annotated list in his mind. Spelling excellent by modern standards but with a few illiteracies. Could indicate either a good education imperfectly absorbed or a bad one nearly transcended. 'Grans and Gramps,' and 'quick' used as an adverb. A lower social stratum? Or suggesting that the writer was aiming at this effect in order to sound down-to-earth and non-literary? Too sophisticated an idea? Raises the question of poetic approach. Somebody unused to verse? Or somebody used to it, but deciding that the theme ruled out what was conventionally poetical? No help anywhere along these lines.
Then anonymity. Again ambiguous. And the stationery. Either somebody who…
Ayscue pulled up short. These were intellectualist evasions of the central question, which he despised himself briefly for not having at once identified, and at once answered. Who had recently had an experience which could have rendered him emotionally capable of writing that poem? Signalman Pearce.
His hand went out reflexively to the telephone, then dropped: Pearce was asleep. Well, no harm could come to him in that state. Ayscue looked at his watch. Three and a half hours at least before he could hope to get into contact with the boy. And even then how was it to be done?
After some disagreeable thought he picked up the telephone after all and asked the operator to see to it that Pearce was given a message at dinnertime to the effect that the padre would like him to come along that afternoon, if he were free, and have a chat about music. It was promised that this would be conveyed. A pity, Ayscue reflected idly as he rang off, that such a message from the padre, however unmilitary its phrasing, was a summons to the presence of an officer, and a chat with the padre, however informal, was something worse, an invasion of privacy. He had once contemplated sending the Chaplain-General a memorandum saying that military churchmen ought to serve in the ranks if they had any respect for Christian tradition and any desire to be listened to. He had been deterred by reasoning that the CG would take no notice of it, if indeed it ever reached him, and moreover that the prospect of curates in inferior uniforms peeling potatoes in the cookhouse and having sergeant's swearing-or not swearing-at them was, however strong in appeal, far too funny to be worth pursuing. And further, it occurred to him now, by trying to alleviate one problem he would be exposing another and much more dismal one. It was not as officers that he and his colleagues intruded upon the men but, by and large, as parsons. Every year, it seemed almost every month, it became harder to ask the most innocent, unloaded questions without setting off the look in the eye that said, covertly or overtly, 'What's it to you?' If one were to take off one's badges of rank, that look would find words. He had joined the Army with the idea of bringing the message of Christ to those who might any day stand in special need of it. He had hoped to build something genuine and valuable on the foundation of regular spiritual communion and pastoral contact which the Army had always provided. What he had really been looking for, evidently, was a captive audience.
Self-accusation was a form of self-pity and as such to be avoided. Ayscue got up, put on his cap and made for the door. With a rolling noise midway between a growl and one of her squeaks, Nancy bounded out of her basket and followed him.
Tongue flapping, she rushed diagonally away across the meadow as if in pursuit of the most provocative cat of her life. Then, at some inaudible but equally urgent call, she thrashed and skidded to a halt on the slippery dry grass and was off again at right angles, doubling her speed with each of her first few strides and keeping her dilated light brown eye rolling at Ayscue as she crossed his path.
He took the main track that led down to the gate. The sun shone hard on the roofs of the camp buildings and the leaves of the trees, glancing off windows and the glass and metalwork of the vehicles in the transport park and stirring thick vibrant bars of heat above the roadway. A motionless veil of haze hung at the wooded horizon.
One of the D4 sentries, rounding the corner of his beat, gave Ayscue a shoddy eyes-left. He acknowledged, as usual, with his smartest salute. The man flushed and his bearing grew more soldierly for his next dozen paces. Then it relaxed again. To Ayscue the tiny incident expressed perfectly the boredom, depression and uneasiness which pervaded the camp more and more and which he had no idea how to dispel.
'Major Ayscue,' he said to the corporal of the gate guard. 'Oh… fornicational, intoxicational, desperational. Sorry, I was thinking about something else. I meant recreational.'
He walked down the lane and reached the main highway, where Nancy was waiting for him. Man and dog stood there for half a minute while traffic rumbled and rattled its way in both directions across their front. All the drivers were in shirt-sleeves and had their windows down. They seemed united by some single purpose.
Suddenly Ayscue remembered that he had left the poem in full view on his table, where Evans, in the
