The Sundial Read Free Page B

were the delights to be prepared for its inhabitants. The house must be endlessly decorated and adorned, the grounds constructed and tended with exquisite care. There were to be swans on the ornamental lake before the house, and a pagoda somewhere, and a maze and a rose garden. The walls of the house were to be painted in soft colors with scenes of nymphs and satyrs sporting among flowers and trees. There was to be a great deal of silver, a great deal of gold, much in the way of enamel and mother-of-pearl. Mr. Halloran did not care much for pictures, but conceded a certain few to the decorator; he did, however, insist upon one picture of himself—he was a practical and a vain man—to be hung over the mantel of the room the architect, inventing madly, was calling “your drawing room.” Mr. Halloran did not care for books, but he bowed to the incredulous smiles of the architect and decorator, and included a library, which was properly stocked with marble busts and ten thousand volumes, all leather-bound, which arrived by railroad and were carried carton by carton into the library and unpacked with care and set in order on the shelves by people hired to do the work. Mr. Halloran set his heart upon a sundial, and it was ordered from a particular firm in Philadelphia which was very good for that kind of thing, and Mr. Halloran himself selected the spot where it would go. He had half hoped that the inscription on the sundial—left to the discretion of the people in Philadelphia who knew so much about that kind of thing—would be “It is later than you think,” or perhaps even “The moving finger writes, and having writ,” but through the fancy of someone in Philadelphia—and no one ever knew who—the sundial arrived inscribed WHAT IS THIS WORLD? After a while Mr. Halloran quite fancied it, having persuaded himself that it was a remark about time.
    The sundial was set into place with as much care as the books had been put into the library, and properly engineered and timed, and anyone who cared to ignore the little jade clock in the drawing room or the grandfather clock in the library or the marble clock in the dining room could go out onto the lawn and see the time by the sun. From any of the windows on that side of the house, which was the garden front looking out over the ornamental lake, the people in the house could see the sundial in the middle distance, set to one side of the long sweep of the lawn. Mr. Halloran had been a methodical man. There were twenty windows to the left wing of the house, and twenty windows to the right; because the great door in the center was double, on the second floor there were forty-two windows across and forty-two on the third floor, lodged directly under the elaborate carvings on the roof edge; Mr. Halloran had directed that the carvings on the roof be flowers and horns of plenty, and there is no doubt that they were done as he said.
    On either side of the door the terrace went to the right for eighty-six black tiles and eighty-six white tiles, and equally to the left. There were a hundred and six thin pillars holding up the marble balustrade on the left, and a hundred and six on the right; on the left eight wide shallow marble steps led down to the lawn, and eight on the right. The lawn swept precisely around the blue pool—which was square—and up in a vastly long lovely movement to a summer house built like a temple to some minor mathematical god; the temple was open, with six slim pillars on either side. Although no attempt had actually been made to match leaf for leaf and branch for branch the tended trees which bordered the lawn on either side, there were four poplars, neatly spaced, around the summer house; inside, the summer house was painted in green and gold, and vines had been trained over its roof and along the pillars supporting it.
    Intruding purposefully upon the entire scene, an inevitable focus, was the sundial, set badly