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 head-quarters.
"You see I'm so horribly busy, old chap--clearing up at 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. Alter all, it
didn't seem very much to do.