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

never will,” he grinned delightedly. “Sir Arthur Pearson spoke to us here last week about how much a blind man can really see. I decided to try it out on you. Your army history that I just gave you is written all over your uniform.”

I took a closer look at his heavily bandaged eyes and decided that even if he had some vision left, it was obvious that he couldn’t see. “Okay,” I said. “Start at the beginning and spell it out. I’m certainly listening.”

“Well, first,” he said, “you have blue shoulder straps sewed on the khaki ones on your tunic.”

“Blue?”

“Sure, you’re wearing brass C-1’s—that is a ‘C’ with a bar under it and a ‘1’ attached underneath. That was your original unit, the First Battalion of Infantry, and all the infantry in the first contingent in nineteen fourteen wears those blue shoulder straps. The Medical Corps wears red. You were invalided back from France because you have a gold perpendicular wound stripe on your sleeve. Right?”

“Right! Go on.”

“Well, the metal bars on each of those blue shoulder straps just read Canada in raised letters so the infantry was your original unit. Now, take your greatcoat. It has just the regular khaki shoulder straps but the bars on each shoulder are cut out CAMC, running from back to front, and easy to feel. Over them you have ‘four’ with a small bar over a ‘G’ in brass. That shows you were overseas with the Fourth General Hospital. It came from Toronto and was the only unit from the Canadian Army which was out in Salonica. I’m no wizard but I happened to have had a cousin who was with the same outfit, the Fourth General Hospital, and most of the men from Salonica were invalided back with fever through Egypt. So I took a guess that the same thing happened to you. All the men invalided back to England from anywhere with fevers end up in Netley and then at the C.C.A.C. at Shorncliffe. But the badge on the front of your cap is Canadian Army Service Corps, indicating that was the last unit you were transferred to here in England. My cousin went through that light duty routine, only they sent him out to France again driving a lorry. Now, I know you’re stationed up here in London with a permanent pass since you are up here nearly every Saturday afternoon, playing the piano. You have sergeant’s stripes on your greatcoat so I imagine you’re working as a pay sergeant in the Canadian Pay Office. They have no emblem of their own.”

Just then, an orderly stopped in from somewhere to collect him for tea, leaving me too dumbfounded even to inquire his name. He left me with a happy smile and a wave of his hand saying, “I’ll be seeing you.” He never did, of course, and I never saw him again. It was after New Year’s of 1918 the next time I went up to St. Dunstan’s and my blind detective had gone.

It was ten years later (1927) before I came in contact with Paul Henderson again.

My father died in Philadelphia in January 1927. Banks had already closed in Florida and our family savings were going fast while I fiddled around without much success at writing. But I had tasted blood because Field and Stream had bought my first short story, “The Captain’s Lost Lake,” in 1926 for $60. I hastened up to Philadelphia from Florida to see what could be salvaged from my father’s business and the day after his funeral, Mrs. Henderson, Paul’s mother, phoned me to say that she had seen the notice of my father’s death in the newspapers. She told me her own husband had died five years before. She and Paul were still living in the old family house on Queen Lane in Germantown, and could I come to dinner. I sensed desperation in her voice and went out to see them the following evening—a filthy snowy night.

The house was a mausoleum, housing a frail invalid already feeling the effects of a cancer which killed her in 1930, and her blind, thirty-one-year-old son, who hadn’t been out of the house since his father’s death, five years before. The dinner was meager but by the time it was served none of us much cared—the bootlegger had made a delivery earlier and the orange blossom cocktails had flowed freely.

Paul’s mother, through ignorance, fear, and too much love, did practically everything for him except take him to the toilet. It helped turn Paul into an alcohol-soaked cabbage with nothing to do but sit and look at the back of his eyes and curse at the fictional Max Carrados and his fictional supernatural powers. Paul was too frightened to move from the house that had become the only world he knew—and his mother, through misdirected love, encouraged his indolence.

I sold out the Trades Publish Company that belonged to my father and went to New York, where I obtained a job as general manager of Bing & Bing Hotels. Within three months after his mother died in 1930, Paul Henderson sold the heavily mortgaged house in Germantown and sobered up long enough to catch a train to New York—purely because I was there. He hoped that I could get him a job—at anything, even making brooms. God knows I tried! But I soon realized that Paul had lost all interest in life, and I dreaded the tenth of every month when his small pension check would arrive. He’d disappear from the room I had gotten for him on Bank Street in Greenwich Village and make the rounds of speakeasies where kindly but misguided customers would buy him drinks when his money ran out. I started to think it might be better for him if he were a troublemaker and created a disturbance so the police could pick him up and tuck him safely away long enough to get off the booze. It took me more than a