The Sundial (28 page)

“Screaming and begging and pleading in a silken tent,” the schoolteacher said, rolling out the words gloriously. “Screaming and pleading to be saved from a fate worse than death!”

“Ladies—” said the captain.

“
Is
it worse than death?” asked Miss Deborah, conversationally, leaning around the captain to look at the schoolteacher. “I always wondered.”

“Ladies,” said the captain helplessly, and they swung him between them out onto the lawn and around in great circles, beginning a dance which caught up the others, moving and cavorting and shouting behind them; Mrs. Otis, who taught dancing, attempted a complicated step with Mr. Atkins, and both of them fell, laughing and struggling, onto the grass, and Miss Ogilvie, dancing along behind in a lonely complex waltz, fell over them; in the champagne tent Mr. Straus stirred to the sound of the music and laughter, and Miss Inverness, her face buried in his shoulder, hiccuped. “I never knew how fine she was,” Miss Inverness said. “Now, I could kill myself.”

Under the colored lights they moved in a great circle, leaping, howling, hurling glasses, embracing. Essex slipped down into the darkness of the crowd and joined hands with Gloria; silently they followed the pulls of other hands against theirs, turning in a great unending circle. “Dance, brothers, dance,” Mrs. Willow shouted, and Aunt Fanny, her hair down over her eyes, took hands with the youngest Watkins boy. Maryjane and Arabella ran down from the terrace, laughing, and fell into the crowd; Julia was doing a cakewalk with Mr. Peabody. “Drink, sisters, drink,” Mrs. Willow yelled, and they went around and around, trampling the grass and shattering cups and glasses under their feet; “Repent, children, repent,” Mrs. Willow howled, and the dance caught her up and she whirled and kicked, holding a champagne bottle under each arm.

On the terrace Mrs. Halloran in her great chair, and Fancy on the step below her, watched in indulgent silence.

_____

Suddenly Miss Ogilvie broke from the dance, and threw herself up the terrace steps. “I don’t
want
them to go,” she said wildly, “they’re kind and nice and they’re happy and you
can’t
let them go.” She held out her arms to Mrs. Halloran, and Mrs. Halloran laughed and shrugged. “
Please
let them come with us,” Miss Ogilvie begged, and Mrs. Halloran laughed. “You can’t, you can’t, you
can’t
,” Miss Ogilvie said, her voice breaking, and then, turning suddenly, she held up her arms; the music was silenced and the dancers hesitated and then, seeing Miss Ogilvie, turned their faces to her and waited.

“My dear dear dear friends,” Miss Ogilvie said, “
please
listen to me, please
please
listen. You are going away from here tonight to a dreadful and terrible catastrophe and none of you will live unless you stay here with us, you will
die
; please
please
stay. Believe me, I beg of you—how can I make you believe me? It is too late now to repent or change your ways or find another place to hide;
we
have let things go most miserably—can any of you
believe
me?” Briefly, there was a little scatter of applause. “No,” Miss Ogilvie said, more softly, “will you just
trust
me? I don’t want to see you die, not any of you, and you just simply will
not
understand and how can I tell you? It was even hard for
me
to believe at first, and how can I begin to tell you?”

Below, on the lawn, people stirred restlessly, and spoke among themselves, and then Julia, calling from the crowd, said, “Come on, everyone,
we
want to dance.”

“Please,
please
listen,” Miss Ogilvie said, but Mrs. Halloran said “Music,” to the little orchestra, and the music began again.

“But you must not
go
,” Miss Ogilvie cried, and Mrs. Halloran, laughing, said to Fancy, “I have known hostesses like this, who could not bear to see the end of their parties.”

_____

“Dance, brothers,” Mrs. Willow called. “Tomorrow we’ll be sober!” The circle went round and round, hands joined, voices raised in what might have been song, feet tangling and slipping, and Mrs. Willow was drinking champagne out of the bottles she carried. On the terrace Mrs. Halloran sat silently. Then, without warning, it was finished. The dancers stopped, wondering at one another, pushing back their hair, gasping now for breath. People began to look for one another, and speak of going home; around the circle went a whisper about the time. Someone found Miss Inverness asleep in a corner of the champagne tent, her pocketbook beside her and her wide hat thrown over her, and carried her charitably to a car to drive her home. Miss Deborah, giggling wildly and clinging to the captain, was pried away and taken with her sister. Julia and the schoolteacher, saying goodnight tearfully to one another, were parted. The guests departed swiftly, melting around the corner of the terrace to the entrance front where their cars were parked, moving in the darkness with a sudden shocking recollection of where they were. Not one of the villagers said goodbye to Mrs. Halloran.

16

The sundial showed no hours at night. Thanks to the champagne, Mrs. Willow slept soundly, her dreams untroubled save for a certain buried nagging anticipation of illness in the morning. Julia cried herself to sleep, railing at the cruelty which afflicted her young life. Arabella and Maryjane put their hair up together, took each a sleeping pill, and dreamed jointly of tall dark handsome men. Fancy slept with the exquisite sleep of a child; Miss Ogilvie, determined to meet the new world clean, washed out her underwear and stockings, inefficiently because of the champagne, and finally fell into bed fully dressed. Aunt Fanny sat by her window, wearing her mother’s diamonds, and looked with grief and longing at the garden by night. Essex and the captain sat very late in the library, telling lies about themselves and confessing long-forgotten sins. Mrs. Halloran, her crown set in its case on her dressing table, was unable to compose herself for sleep. She went once around the house, nodding to Essex and the captain in the library, opening the door upon Mr. Halloran sleeping fitfully and calling on his nurse. Finally, she sat down at her desk to straighten out her last few accounts, looking over bills she would never pay, adding debts she would never collect.

During the night the wind rose, although it was still very hot. There was a strong sense of thunder in the air, and the wind, increasing toward dawn, swept freely down the great lawn of the house and tangled the wires on which the japanese lanterns swung wildly. By a quarter to seven the rose garden was swept bare, and the hot wind carried with it a freight of bruised and torn rose petals. Far off, by the lake, the water was whipped into waves which beat restlessly against the shore, and even washed the floor of the grotto where the swans cowered.

In the secret garden a statue swayed, and fell, crashing through the flowers and cracking in half as it hit the ground. One of the empty arms of Anna-in-the-maze caught a flying branch, and comforted and rocked it. At seven Mrs. Halloran dressed herself and came downstairs, to meet Aunt Fanny in the breakfast room. Because Mrs. Halloran had been anxious for the servants to make an early start on their holiday, the house was already awake, and in the breakfast room the sound of the wind was lessened by the indoor sounds of activity. What had been left overnight of the party was now cleared, although the japanese lanterns were hopelessly tangled and the tents had been turned by the wind into live flying monsters; the barbecue pit had been cleaned, the dishes used by the villagers had been washed and sterilized in the electric dishwashers, and the breakfast coffee awaited Mrs. Halloran and Aunt Fanny at the table.

“Good morning, Aunt Fanny.”

“Good morning, Orianna. Did you notice the wind?”

“Certainly. I confess it frightens me a little.”

Aunt Fanny contemplated her grapefruit. “Strange,” she said, “How one’s mind insists upon noticing only small things; I daresay it will be long enough before I see another grapefruit, tamed and cut.”

“Do you think to tear fruit from the trees and sink your teeth into it?”

“Probably. We never know how pagan we may be. The wind does not frighten me, exactly; I only know that I cannot bring myself to think of how it will be later.”

“Yes,” Mrs. Halloran said. “I thought of it a good deal during the night, hearing the wind rising and trying to understand that this time it would not die down. It is an ominous, almost unbearable thought, this realization that a state of weather we would ordinarily regard without unusual fear will this time not subside as it always has before, but will increase and finally—”

“Be still, Orianna. The servants are still here. And in any case the prospect sickens me.”

Mrs. Halloran and Aunt Fanny took toast, and eggs, and bacon, and coffee; with small glances at one another and both thinking, without saying, that a last quiet breakfast, prepared for them and served daintily in colored porcelain and silver, was something to be dwelt on and cherished; they both sat longer over their food than usual, and certainly longer than they would before have spent in one another’s presence. Once, looking at her heavy silver fork, Mrs. Halloran found tears in her eyes; what use will this be to me tomorrow? she was thinking, and she made no attempt to hide her tears from Aunt Fanny.

“My father will be here,” Aunt Fanny said softly. “I have perfect faith in him.”

While Mrs. Halloran and Aunt Fanny lingered, Arabella came downstairs, in curlers and housecoat, to say that Mrs. Willow was ill, and might she have, please, a tray with only coffee, tomato juice, and a bottle of aspirin. Mrs. Halloran instructed that the tomato juice be fortified with raw egg and worcestershire sauce; “It would not suit us to have your mother ill today,” she told Arabella. Arabella carried up her mother’s tray, and returned shortly, dressed, with her hair combed; by then Fancy had come to breakfast, and Gloria, and shortly afterward, Maryjane and the captain. Mrs. Halloran and Aunt Fanny sat on at the breakfast table, drinking coffee, and no one spoke. Miss Ogilvie, looking most unwell, came to breakfast, and refused with unusual vehemence Mrs. Halloran’s offer of tomato juice with raw egg and worcestershire sauce; “It’s the wind,” Miss Ogilvie said, whimpering, “I think the wind will drive me out of my mind.”

“It’s hideous,” the captain said.

Essex and Julia, the last to reach the breakfast table, found the others sitting in subdued silence, listening to the distant sounds of the wind. “Our own little coven, waiting together,” said Essex in a tone of some strain, and Julia said, her voice only barely controlled, “I wish it would stop, I wish it would stop.”

“Well,” the captain said, “it won’t.”

The breakfast room was meant to be delightfully bright and lit with early morning sun, so it had tall glass doors opening out over the garden; even though the noise of the wind was muffled here, they sat at the table and could see the darkening of the sky. Slowly, over the farthest trees in the garden, the clouds moved, and the room grew dim, and the reflections on the silver coffeepot were greyed and dull.

“It’s going to storm,” said Julia, and began to giggle hysterically.

_____

By noon Mrs. Halloran, oppressed now by the driving wind into an urgent sense of haste, had seen the servants off in the two station wagons; Mr. Halloran’s nurse was reluctant to leave, believing that she ought to give up her holiday in case the oppressive weather should trouble Mr. Halloran unduly, but Mrs. Halloran insisted, almost raising her voice, and the nurse went with the others. When the two station wagons had gone down the driveway Mrs. Halloran took a deep breath.

“Now,” she said, “we must search the house carefully to make sure that there is
no one
left; I assure you that I checked the servants carefully, but I should not like to find a drunken villager asleep in some corner. On Miss Ogilvie’s invitation.” Her eyes turned briefly on Miss Ogilvie, who winced, and made a repudiating gesture.

Fancy was sent to sit with her grandfather while the rest searched the house, and she told him “Peter Rabbit” and “The Three Bears,” which he enjoyed hugely.

“The house is so empty,” Essex said to Maryjane, meeting her in an upstairs hallway. “Somehow you never realize how many people there actually were in it, before.”

“I don’t mind
this
part so much,” Maryjane said, and shivered. “This is like a game, hide and seek, or murder, or something. It’s what is coming later that I think I am going to mind.”

“At least, up here you can’t hear the wind,” Essex said.

When they reassembled in the drawing room Mrs. Halloran, assured that they were now alone in the house, said, speaking loudly over the rising noise of the wind, “I urge you all, most earnestly, to take a glass of sherry before lunch; we have a great deal still to do, and, I need hardly tell you, we need all the courage we can muster.”

“We must have complete faith,” Aunt Fanny said. “My father has given me his word. Anyway,” she added vaguely, “it’s too late now.”

“I don’t think I will be able to stand it,” Julia said; her lips were trembling and she had trouble speaking.

“This is final.” Mrs. Halloran’s voice seemed to echo, now, in the big drawing room; although the weather outside was hotter than it had been for months, perhaps years, there was a chill and a kind of dampness over everything in the big room, and the people in it gathered closer together before the empty fireplace. “This is final,” Mrs. Halloran said. “We have no time now, and certainly no patience, for hysteria or panic. We have all known about this coming day and night for many weeks, and we know, too, what we shall see tomorrow morning. Any one of you—and I mean you, Julia, particularly—who provokes or indulges in any emotional outburst, will be shut in a closet and kept there by force, if I find it necessary. You are my people,” she went on more gently, “and I must bring you safely through this unbelievable experience; trust me.”

“My father—”