THE RECRUITER.
Madingley is one of those men who are always asking you to do things for them. He will send you cheerfully on the top of a bus from the City to Hammersmith to buy tobacco for him at a particular little shop, and if you point out that he could do it much better in his own car, he says reproachfully that the car is only used for business purposes. (If so, he must have a good deal of business at Walton Heath.) "Isn't your cousin a doctor?" he'll say. "I wonder if you'd mind asking him———" And somehow you can't refuse. He beams at you with such confidence through his glasses.
However, it was apparently to tell me news that he came to see me the other day.
"I'm horribly busy," he said. "The fact is I'm going to enlist."
"They won't take you," I said. "You're blind."
"Not so blind as you are."
"Put it that we're both blind, and that our King and Country want neither of us."
"Well, I'm not so sure. There are lots of people with spectacles in the Army."
"And lots of flies in amber," I said, "but nobody seems to know how they came there."
Then Madingley got to business. His partner, who had enlisted in August, had developed lung trouble and had returned to civil life. Madingley was now free to go. He had heard from a friend that the 121st Rifles (a Territorial Regiment) had no conscientious objections to spectacles. Would I—(I thought it must be coming)—would I go and find out for him? He gave me the address of their headquarters.
"You see I'm so horribly busy, old chap—clearing up the office, and so on."
Well, of course I had to. Madingley's attitude of pained forgiveness, if one refuses him anything, is more than I can bear. After all, it didn't seem very much to do.
I began with the sentry outside.
"Can you tell me———" I said pleasantly. He scowled and jerked his head towards the door. I went in the tried another man. "Can you tell me———" I began. "Enlist?" he said. "Upstairs." I went upstairs and pushed open a door. "CAn you tell me———" I said. "This is the canteen," answered a man in an apron...
At last I found a sergeant. "Enlist?" he said briskly. "Come in." I went in.
He leant against a table and I smiled at him pleasantly.
"I just wanted to ask," I said, "whether———"
"Quite so," he said, and gave me a long explanation of what my pay would be now that I had decided to join the Army. He began with the one and a penny of a private and was working up towards the stipend of a Field Marshal when I stopped him.
"One moment———"
"Exactly," he said. "You're married."
"Y—yes," I said. "At least, no," I added, thinking of Madingley.
"Surely you know?" he asked in surprise.
I remembered suddenly the penalty for a false declaration. It would be no good explaining afterwards that I meant Madingley.
"Yes," I said. "Married."
He told me what my separation allowance would be... As a married Field Marshal with three children it came to———
I decided to be firm.
"Er—I mustn't trouble you too much," I said. "I really only wanted to know if you take men with spectacles."
"Depends how short-sighted you are. Do you always wear them?"
"No, but I ought to really." I made a desperate effort to get Madingley back into the conversation. "I really only came to find out for a———"
"Ah, well, the best thing you can do," said the sergeant, "is to pass the medical examination first. You can sign the papers afterwards. Come along."
I followed him meekly downstairs. It was obviously not Madingley's afternoon.
We plunged downstairs into what was no doubt the anti-Zeppelin cellar. Through the gloom I saw dimly two or three pink-and-white figures waiting their turn to be thumped. Down the throad of a man in the middle of the room a doctor was trying to climb. Mechanically I began to undo my tie.
The sergeant spoke to one of the doctors and then came back to me.
"It'll save time if we do your sight first," he said. "Stand over in this corner."
I stood in the corner...
For a long time nothing happened.
"Well?" said the sergeant impatiently.
"Well?" I said.
"Why don't you read?"
"What? Have we begun?" I asked in surprise. I couldn't see anything.
The medical officer came over to me and in a friendly way put his hand over my left eye. It didn't help much, but I spotted where he came from, and gathered that the card must be in that direction. Gradually it began to loom through the blackness.
"Wait a moment," I said. I removed his hand and gazed keenly at the opposite wall. "That's a B," I announced proudly. "That top one."
The doctor and the sergeant looked at each other.
"It's no good," sighed the sergeant.
"He can't even read the first two lines," groaned the doctor.
"It's all very well for you two," I broke in indignantly; "one of you lives down here and is used to it, and the other knows the card by heart. I haven't come to enlist for night operations only. Surely your regiment does things in the daylight sometimes?"
The doctor, only knowing about the daylight by hearsay, looked blank; the sergeant repeated sadly, "Not even the first two lines."
"Look here," I said, "lend me the card to-night and I'll come again tomorrow. If it's only two lines you want, I think I can promise you them."
The doctor said mournfully that he might lend me the card, but that in that case it would be his painful duty to put up a different card for me on the next day.
There seemed to be nothing more to say. I was about to go when a face which I recognised emerged from the gloom. It had a shirt underneath it and then legs. The face began to grin at me.
"Hallo," said a voice.
"Hallo, Rogers," I said; "you enlisting? I thought you couldn't get leave." Rogers is in the Civil Service, and his work is supposed to be important.
"Well, I haven't exactly got leave—yet," he said awkwardly. "The fact is, I just came here to ask about a commission for a friend, and while I was here I—er—suddenly decided to risk it. You know Madingley, by the way, don't you?"
"I used to think so," I said.
But now I see that there is more in Madingley than I thought. His job in this war is simple—and exactly suited to himself. By arrangement with the War Office he sends likely recruits to make enquiries for him—and the sergeant does the rest.
A. A. M.
"S.C.—1. The brussels-sprouts will do no harm to the apple trees."—Morning Post.
All very well, but we know what these Belgians are. As likely as not they have been plotting for years with the French beans to spring upon their inoffensive neighbours.
