Talmage Powell
Scales and Blindfold
The tall, erect man moved very easily in the darkness. He hadn’t been in this room in three years, but he knew every inch of it. It was his room, the room his mother kept readied for him whenever he should return.
He paused a moment in the moonlight that filtered through the window. The pale light touched a broad, heavy, yet young face. An open face. His gray eyes were glowing; a smile played eagerly about his broad, warm mouth.
Up here the house was silent save for the whispering of the wind through the great oaks outside and the expectant thud of the man’s pulse in his ears. In the next room he knew his son was sleeping, and in the room beyond that his mother would be alone. Silent and dark up here in this great house, yet downstairs the laughter and bubbling noise of an informal party drifted to him faintly.
The tall man stood quite still in the patch of moonlight. His whole being exuded expectant pleasure, yet there was something lonely in the tiny wrinkles at the corners of his eyes, the cast of his lips. He was thinking of a lovely, wealthy young Spanish-English girl. The girl he’d married and who had died over three years ago, taking part of him with her. He was thinking that he had been away from this huge, somehow grim house a long time. He’d missed his son. He’d seen too much tired death as a war correspondent. There is a limit to the amount of death a man can see and still not be lonely.
But he was hack now. Back like a little child with a surprise gift. The gift was himself, his presence, and it struck him that he should be embarrassed, pulling a childish trick like this. He’d crept into the house quietly. It had been very easy with the party downstairs and the silence up here. No one knew he was home; no one would know until tomorrow morning. They would sit down to breakfast, and he would walk down the sweeping stairway into the dining room. He’d pause in the doorway of the dining room, and it would be a silent moment. Then Haywood and Terry and Ida would get their dropped jaws back in place and spring from the table to envelope him with greetings. His son would fly into his arms and perhaps cry a little. His mother would touch his arm gently, unbelievingly. It would be a warm scene tomorrow morning in the dining room.
He stood in the darkness, that planned scene so vivid in his mind, widening his expectant smile. Then abruptly his eyes darkened and his smile left his face. All the expectancy he had built within himself during the long voyage home, was suddenly flat, sour. The surprise he’d planned was ruined. Or had he only imagined that someone was breathing here in the darkness of the room with him?
Perhaps it was the whisper of the wind outside. This was a house of almost silent whispers, he knew. A large, stone house, set apart from others on a broad estate, Terry Bliss’ sole inheritance from his father. Terry’s research lab adjoined the house, and Frederick had left his son and mother here because Terry, his wife Ida, and Terry’s brother Haywood were the only relatives Frederick had, his cousins.
Frederick Sole stood rigid, listening. Moonbeams danced at his feet. Faintly, he heard the gay sounds of the party downstairs, the breathing of the wind, a beam creaking distantly like the timber of a great, rugged ship. And there was something else…
He murmured, “Who’s there?”
The wind whispered a reply; the house was alive about him. Battlefield reporting had given him strange ears, tuned to death. Dryness spread in his mouth. The room was silent, starkly silent, and vet…
Then he seemed to imagine the ruffling whisper of rug nap beneath a shoe. He knew that strange quality of his ears wasn’t playing him tricks. He was quite alone — save for the presence of Death…
Elsie Sole’s knitting needles clicked with a steady rhythm. From downstairs, the gay, brittle laughter of suave people drinking and talking informally beat its way into the darkness of her everlasting night. She sat by her bed, rocking slowly, one part of her mind intent on the party downstairs, the warm, bright lights and gaiety. She was an old woman, a square peg in a round hole, a bothersome fool to Terry’s and Ida’s and Haywood’s modern, horribly efficient way of thinking. But she would stay here, she promised herself. She would stay because of Peter. A seven-year-old boy needed the warmth and understanding of his granny.
Her needles clicked again, swift, sure. She sat alone in the darkness and knitted without dropping a single stitch. After all, one learned to knit quite well after three years of utter blindness.
She had learned other things, too. The sometimes halting footsteps of Terry entering a room when his blonde, young wife. Ida, was present would tell Elsie Sole that all was not right between them. The sudden cutting tone in his voice was like a banner declaring his rebellion against her domination. But those occasions were rare. He was a meek, tubby little husband, a strange sort of person to do the things he had done in research chemistry. His one mental quirk was a rather amusing allergy to double-breasted suits. It was the one thing in which he would override Ida’s suggestions. He always insisted on single-breasted models in pin stripe material in hopes that he would appear slimmer. In her world of darkness, Elsie Sole had recognized in this Terry’s almost pathetic rebellion against his wife. Or perhaps it was simply a pathetic attempt to find an ego on Terry’s part and express it through what he hoped was an emphatic characteristic.
Haywood Bliss, Terry’s younger brother, would have been more of the man to subdue Ida, Elsie Sole thought. She remembered Haywood as a tall, powerful man with a steady gaze and firm, thin-lipped mouth. Now, since her blindness, she’d learned other things about Haywood, the latent strength when he touched an old woman to help her down the stairs, the barging, straight course with which he walked across a room.
And Ida. With her petulant way of running up stairs, the almost hidden explosiveness in every word she said. Last night young Pete had woke, afraid of the darkness in his large, almost barren, room. Elsie Sole had soothed him with gay bedtime stories. She’d broken off in the middle of a sentence as the door to Pete’s room had opened. She recognized the outraged tapping of a spike-heeled shoe. “Elsie!” Ida’s voice had been tight with impatience. “How many times must I tell you that you’re ruining the child? Utterly ruining him! Such nonsense — his being afraid of the dark!” That was Ida. So sure, so filled with answers. She didn’t know the dark, not real darkness, but Elsie Sole did. Elsie Sole knew how a child waking in darkness might feel. Yet it was Ida who had the answers.
Elsie Sole’s needles clicked, never dropping a stitch. Then with a suddenness that was jarring they stopped. She half rose, her knitting spilling to the floor, her hands, lean and old and strained, on the arms of her chair. “Frederick…!” Like that the thought of her son had come to her, like a dark cloud over the face of the sun, like a sudden roll of bursting thunder in a world of silence.
She stood, half risen, her body trembling, while dark, strange shadows played against the black curtain behind her eyes. It was unexplainable, this sudden plunging into a wild world of crazed thoughts and clammy feeling. Yet it wasn’t; for like footsteps and voices, she’d learned to tabulate everything in her world of darkness, every whisper of the house, every nuance of life about her. A quickly drawn breath, too sudden laughter, rain against the windowpanes in April bringing a travelogue of vivid green springtime to life in her mind. Now, distinctly, she had heard a groan that would have escaped other ears, a tremulous ghost of a sound finding its way down the hallway from Frederick’s room.
Then the house was the same again, with the rustle of the rising, (hill wind outside, the murmur of laughter from downstairs, the creak of a beam in the depths of the house somewhere.