Odor of Violets, Baynard Kendrick [best short novels .txt] 📗

plead guilty as I put it here for just one purpose—to make the point that not until 1917 when I was twenty-three and blindness confronted me face to face, had I ever given it a passing thought. By that time I had served in France, Egypt, and Salonica and had spent over two years in army hospitals. Subconsciously, I believe, like ninety-nine percent of the people in the world, I blotted the condition from my mind beyond relegating it to the shadowy realm of the tin cup, pencil, and street-corner school.

In the winter of 1917, when I had been marked “C-3” by a medical board (light duty), I was stationed in London working as a pay sergeant in the Canadian Pay Office at 7 Millbank. There, quite by accident, I learned that a boy with whom I had gone to school in Philadelphia had joined up with the Canadians a year after I did. I’ll call him Paul Henderson, which was not his name. He had been blinded at Vimy Ridge several months before and at that moment was in St. Dunstan’s Lodge, the hospital for blinded soldiers in London.

I took to visiting St. Dunstan’s in Regents Park regularly on Saturday afternoons to have tea and play the piano. Once having overcome my initial ingrained fear of the blind, I continued these visits for many months after Paul Henderson had been invalided back to Canada and resumed his U.S. citizenship—as I did later, in December 1918. It was on one such visit that Captain Duncan Maclain was born, although I had no inkling of it at the moment and it was twenty years later—in 1937—before he came to life in print in The Last Express. The conditions at St. Dunstan’s for the training and welfare of the blind—while modern for World War I—seemed antiquated when compared to Valley Forge, Dibble, or Avon Old Farms. Mobility was given little thought and the grounds of St. Regents Park were festooned with strings for the blinded veterans to follow, and knots marked the benches. When I was visiting there the lodge was so overcrowded with veterans and personnel that it had been necessary to move the piano out in the hall. There was little amusement since radio and talking books were unheard of—the big moments came when some noted entertainer, such as Sir Harry Lauder, Sir George Robey, or Alfred Lester, dropped in for an evening from one of the music halls.

It was on a blustery, freezing December afternoon in 1917 when I first became conscious of the fact that while a blind man might have lost his sight, he hadn’t necessarily lost his mind. I had seated myself at the piano and given my usual introduction by leading off with “Tipperary” and the coterie of blinded British Tommies quickly gathered around me. There was just one straightback chair to the right of the piano next to double doors in the vestibule (always closed since a rear entrance was used) that led out onto the grounds. I had shed my cap and greatcoat and put them on that chair.

The Tommies were packed in almost solidly around me and one British Tommy was standing with his hands lightly on my shoulders while I went through half a dozen pieces. When I had finished and some requests were made, he moved around to the right of the piano, picked up my cap and greatcoat from the chair, sat down and laid them across his knees. I noticed while I was playing that he was giving them a thorough going-over with his fingertips (“brailling,” although it turns a noun into a verb, has become the common term today).

A bell rang and I was suddenly deserted by my captive audience as they poured into an adjoining lounge for afternoon tea. Only the Tommy to the right of the piano remained. He stood up, replacing my cap and greatcoat on the chair, and started in with a preamble, as though something had been burned into his brain.

Then he said: “You certainly have been around in the Canadian army, haven’t you? You’ve been in nearly every bleeding outfit in it. You came over here in nineteen fourteen with the First Battalion, went out to France with them, were invalided back here to England and then joined up with the Fourth General Hospital from Toronto and went out to Salonica with them. You were invalided back from Salonica through Egypt and landed back here at Netley Fever Hospital at Southamption—that big pile of bricks with the corridors a quarter of a mile long.

“When you were discharged from Netley you went to 134 Shorncliffe to the C.C.A.C. [Canadian Casualty Assembly Center]. There you faced another medical board which marked you ‘C-3’ and transferred you to the Canadian Army Service Corps on light duty instead of sending you back to Canada as you had hoped. When they found out that you couldn’t even lift a Ford motor, let alone carry one around on each shoulder, the sergeant in charge of the machine shop kicked to the C.O. that he was tired of being sent walking corpses marked ‘C-3.’ So they sent you up to this cushy job with the Canadian Army Pay Corps here in London where you will stay for the duration of the war.”

I stood with my mouth hanging open, staring at him intently until I was positive that I had never seen him before. Then I blurted out, “I suppose you got all this dope from Paul Henderson who was invalided back to Canada from here a couple of months ago.”

“Never heard of him,” he said smugly. “He was before my time. I have only been in here just over a couple of weeks. I was blinded in the big tank push at Cambrai.”

“Then where the hell did you know me and get all my army history? You sound like you had taken it from a sheet in the Canadian Record Office.”

“I don’t know you, never saw you, and