H G Wells

The Door in the Wall H G Wells

One confidential evening, not three months ago, Lionel Wallace told me this story of the Door inthe Wall. And at the time I thought that so far as he was concerned it was a true story. He told it me with such a direct simplicity of conviction that I could not do otherwise thanbelieve in him. But in the morning, in my own flat, I woke to a different atmosphere, and as I lay inbed and recalled the things he had told me, stripped of the glamour of his earnest slow voice, denuded of the focussed shaded table light, the shadowy atmosphere that wrapped about him andthe pleasant bright things, the dessert and glasses and napery of the dinner we had shared, makingthem for the time a bright little world quite cut off from every-day realities, I saw it all as franklyincredible. "He was mystifying!" I said, and then: "How well he did it!. . . . . It isn't quite the thing Ishould have expected him, of all people, to do well."Afterwards, as I sat up in bed and sipped my morning tea, I found myself trying to account forthe flavour of reality that perplexed me in his impossible reminiscences, by supposing they did insome way suggest, present, convey-I hardly know which word to use-experiences it wasotherwise impossible to tell. Well, I don't resort to that explanation now. I have got over my intervening doubts. I believenow, as I believed at the moment of telling, that Wallace did to the very best of his ability strip thetruth of his secret for me. But whether he himself saw, or only thought he saw, whether he himselfwas the possessor of an inestimable privilege, or the victim of a fantastic dream, I cannot pretend toguess. Even the facts of his death, which ended my doubts forever, throw no light on that. Thatmuch the reader must judge for himself. I forget now what chance comment or criticism of mine moved so reticent a man to confide inme. He was, I think, defending himself against an imputation of slackness and unreliability I hadmade in relation to a great public movement in which he had disappointed me. But he plungedsuddenly. "I have" he said, "a preoccupation-""I know," he went on, after a pause that he devoted to the study of his cigar ash, "I have beennegligent. The fact is-it isn't a case of ghosts or apparitions-but-it's an odd thing to tell of, Redmond-I am haunted. I am haunted by something-that rather takes the light out of things, thatfills me with longings . . . . ."He paused, checked by that English shyness that so often overcomes us when we would speak ofmoving or grave or beautiful things. "You were at Saint Athelstan's all through," he said, and for amoment that seemed to me quite irrelevant. "Well"-and he paused. Then very haltingly at first, butafterwards more easily, he began to tell of the thing that was hidden in his life, the haunting memoryof a beauty and a happiness that filled his heart with insatiable longings that made all the interestsand spectacle of worldly life seem dull and tedious and vain to hi