I
One confidential evening, not three months ago, Lionel Wallace told me
this story of the Door in the 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 than believe in him. But in the morning, in my
own flat, I woke to a different atmosphere, and as I lay in bed and
recalled the things he had told me, stripped of the glamour of his
earnest slow voice, denuded of the focused, shaded table light, the
shadowy atmosphere that wrapped about him and me, and the pleasant
bright things, the dessert and glasses and napery of the dinner we had
shared, making them for the time a bright little world quite cut off
from everyday realities, I saw it all as frankly incredible. ‘He was
mystifying!’ I said, and then: ‘How well he did it!... It isn’t quite
the thing I should 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 for the flavour of reality that perplexed me in his
impossible reminiscences, by supposing they did in some way suggest,
present, convey--I hardly know which word to use--experiences it was
otherwise impossible to tell.
Well, I don’t resort to that explanation now. I have got over my
intervening doubts. I believe now, as I believed at the moment of
telling, that Wallace did to the very best of his ability strip the
truth of his secret for me. But whether he himself saw, or only
thought he saw, whether he himself was the possessor of an inestimable
privilege or the victim of a fantastic dream, I cannot pretend to
guess. Even the facts of his death, which ended my doubts for ever,
throw no light on that.
That much the reader must judge for himself.
I forget now what chance comment or criticism of mine moved so reticent
a man to confide in me. He was, I think, defending himself against an
imputation of slackness and unreliability I had made in relation to a
great public movement, in which he had disappointed me. But he plunged
suddenly. ‘I have,’ he said, ‘a preoccupation----
‘I know,’ he went on, after a pause, ‘I have been negligent. 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, that fills me with longings....’
He paused, checked by that English shyness that so often overcomes
us when we would speak of moving or grave or beautiful things. ‘You
were at Saint Æthelstan’s all through,’ he said, and for a moment
that seemed to me quite irrelevant. ‘Well,’--and he paused. Then very
haltingly at first, but afterwards more easily, he began to tell of the
thing that was hidden in his life, the haunting memory of a beauty and
a happiness that filled his heart with insatiable longings, that made
all the interests and spectacle of worldly life seem dull and tedious
and vain to him.
Now that I have the clue to it, the thing seems written visibly in his
face. I have a photograph in which that look of detachment has been
caught and intensified. It reminds me of what a woman once said of
him--a woman who had loved him greatly. ‘Suddenly,’ she said, ‘the
interest goes out of him. He forgets you. He doesn’t care a rap for
you--under his very nose....’
Yet the interest was not always out of him, and when he was holding
his attention to a thing Wallace could contrive to be an extremely
successful man. His career, indeed, is set with successes. He left me
behind him long ago: he soared up over my head, and cut a figure in the
world that I couldn’t cut--anyhow. He was still a year short of forty,
and they say now that he would have been in office and very probably in
the new Cabinet if he had lived. At school he always beat me without
effort--as it were by nature. We were at school together at Saint
Æthelstan’s College in West Kensington for almost all our school-time.
He came into the school as my co-equal, but he left far above me, in a
blaze of scholarships and brilliant performance. Yet I think I made a
fair average running. And it was at school I heard first of the ‘Door
in the Wall’--that I was to hear of a second time only a month before
his death.
To him at least the Door in the Wall was a real door, leading through a
real wall to immortal realities. Of that I am now quite assured.
And it came into his life quite early, when he was a little fellow
between five and six. I remember how, as he sat making his confession
to me with a slow gravity, he reasoned and reckoned the date of it.
‘There was,’ he said, ‘a crimson Virginia creeper in it--all one bright
uniform crimson, in a clear amber sunshine against a white wall. That
came into the impression somehow, though I don’t clearly remember how,
and there were horse-chestnut leaves upon the clean pavement outside
the green door. They were blotched yellow and green, you know, not
brown nor dirty, so that they must have been new fallen. I take it that
means October. I look out for horse-chestnut leaves every year and I
ought to know.
‘If I’m right in that, I was about five years and four months old.’
He was, he said, rather a precocious little boy--he learnt to talk at
an abnormally early age, and he was so sane and ‘old-fashioned,’ as
people say, that he was permitted an amount of initiative that most
children scarcely attain by seven or eight. His mother died when he was
two, and he was under the less vigilant and authoritative care of a
nursery governess. His father was a stern, preoccupied lawyer, who gave
him little attention, and expected great things of him. For all his
brightness he found life a little gray and dull, I think. And one day
he wandered.
He could not recall the particular neglect that enabled him to get
away, nor the course he took among the West Kensington roads. All that
had faded among the incurable blurs of memory. But the white wall and
the green door stood out quite distinctly.
As his memory of that childish experience ran, he did at the very
first sight of that door experience a peculiar emotion, an attraction,
a desire to get to the door and open it and walk in. And at the same
time he had the clearest conviction that either it was unwise or it was
wrong of him--he could not tell which--to yield to this attraction.
He insisted upon it as a curious thing that he knew from the very
beginning--unless memory has played him the queerest trick--that the
door was unfastened, and that he could go in as he chose.
I seem to see the figure of that little boy, drawn and repelled. And it
was very clear in his mind, too, though why it should be so was never
explained, that his father would be very angry if he went in through
that door.
Wallace described all these moments of hesitation to me with the
utmost particularity. He went right past the door, and then, with
his hands in his pockets and making an infantile attempt to whistle,
strolled right along beyond the end of the wall. There he recalls a
number of mean dirty shops, and particularly that of a plumber and
decorator with a dusty disorder of earthenware pipes, sheet lead,
ball taps, pattern books of wall paper, and tins of enamel. He stood
pretending to examine these things, and _coveting_, passionately
desiring, the green door.
Then, he said, he had a gust of emotion. He made a run for it, lest
hesitation should grip him again; he went plump with outstretched hand
through the green door and let it slam behind him. And so, in a trice,
he came into the garden that has haunted all his life.
It was very difficult for Wallace to give me his full sense of that
garden into which he came.
There was something in the very air of it that exhilarated, that gave
one a sense of lightness and good happening and well-being; there
was something in the sight of it that made all its colour clean and
perfect and subtly luminous. In the instant of coming into it one was
exquisitely glad--as only in rare moments, and when one is young and
joyful one can be glad in this world. And everything was beautiful
there....
Wallace mused before he went on telling me. ‘You see,’ he said, with
the doubtful inflection of a man who pauses at incredible things,
‘there were two great panthers there.... Yes, spotted panthers. And I
was not afraid. There was a long wide path with marble-edged flower
borders on either side, and these two huge velvety beasts were playing
there with a ball. One looked up and came towards me, a little curious
as it seemed. It came right up to me, rubbed its soft round ear very
gently against the small hand I held out, and purred. It was, I tell
you, an enchanted garden. I know. And the size? Oh! it stretched far
and wide, this way and that. I believe there were hills far away.
Heaven knows where West Kensington had suddenly got to. And somehow it
was just like coming home.
‘You know, in the very moment the door swung to behind me, I forgot
the road with its fallen chestnut leaves, its cabs and tradesmen’s
carts, I forgot the sort of gravitational pull back to the discipline
and obedience of home, I forgot all hesitations and fear, forgot
discretion, forgot all the intimate realities of this life. I became
in a moment a very glad and wonder-happy little boy--in another world.
It was a world with a different quality, a warmer, more penetrating
and mellower light, with a faint clear gladness in its air, and wisps
of sun-touched cloud in the blueness of its sky. And before me ran
this long wide path, invitingly, with weedless beds on either side,
rich with untended flowers, and these two great panthers. I put my
little hands fearlessly on their soft fur, and caressed their round
ears and the sensitive corners under their ears, and played with them,
and it was as though they welcomed me home. There was a keen sense of
home-coming in my mind, and when presently a tall, fair girl appeared
in the pathway and came to meet me, smiling, and said “Well?” to me,
and lifted me, and kissed me, and put me down, and led me by the hand,
there was no amazement, but only an impression of delightful rightness,
of being reminded of happy things that had in some strange way been
overlooked. There were broad red steps, I remember, that came into
view between spikes of delphinium, and up these we went to a great
avenue between very old and shady dark trees. All down this avenue, you
know, between the red chapped stems, were marble seats of honour and
statuary, and very tame and friendly white doves....
‘Along this cool avenue my girl-friend led me, looking down--I
recall the pleasant lines, the finely-modelled chin of her sweet kind
face--asking me questions in a soft, agreeable voice, and telling me
things, pleasant things I know, though what they were I was never able
to recall.... Presently a little Capuchin monkey, very clean, with a
fur of ruddy brown and kindly hazel eyes, came down a tree to us and
ran beside me, looking up at me and grinning, and presently leapt to my
shoulder. So we two went on our way in great happiness.’
He paused.
‘Go on,’ I said.
‘I remember little things. We passed an old man musing among laurels,
I remember, and a place gay with paroquets, and came through a broad
shaded colonnade to a spacious cool palace, full of pleasant fountains,
full of beautiful things, full of the quality and promise of heart’s
desire. And there were many things and many people, some that still
seem to stand out clearly and some that are a little vague; but all
these people were beautiful and kind. In some way--I don’t know how--it
was conveyed to me that they all were kind to me, glad to have me
there, and filling me with gladness by their gestures, by the touch of
their hands, by the welcome and love in their eyes. Yes----’
He mused for a while. ‘Playmates I found there. That was very much to
me, because I was a lonely little boy. They played delightful games
in a grass-covered court where there was a sun-dial set about with
flowers. And as one played one loved....
‘But--it’s odd--there’s a gap in my memory. I don’t remember the games
we played. I never remembered. Afterwards, as a child, I spent long
hours trying, even with tears, to recall the form of that happiness. I
wanted to play it all over again--in my nursery--by myself. No! All I
remember is the happiness and two dear playfellows who were most with
me.... Then presently came a sombre dark woman, with a grave, pale
face, and dreamy eyes, a sombre woman, wearing a soft long robe of pale
purple, who carried a book, and beckoned and took me aside with her
into a gallery above a hall--though my playmates were loath to have me
go, and ceased their game and stood watching as I was carried away.
“Come back to us!” they cried. “Come back to us soon!” I looked up at
her face, but she heeded them not at all. Her face was very gentle and
grave. She took me to a seat in the gallery, and I stood beside her,
ready to look at her book as she opened it upon her knee. The pages
fell open. She pointed, and I looked, marvelling, for in the living
pages of that book I saw myself; it was a story about myself, and in it
were all the things that had happened to me since ever I was born....
‘It was wonderful to me, because the pages of that book were not
pictures, you understand, but realities.’
Wallace paused gravely--looked at me doubtfully.
‘Go on,’ I said. ‘I understand.’
‘They were realities--yes, they must have been; people moved and things
came and went in them; my dear mother, whom I had near forgotten;
then my father, stern and upright, the servants, the nursery, all the
familiar things of home. Then the front door and the busy streets, with
traffic to and fro. I looked and marvelled, and looked half doubtfully
again into the woman’s face and turned the pages over, skipping this
and that, to see more of this book and more, and so at last I came to
myself hovering and hesitating outside the green door in the long white
wall, and felt again the conflict and the fear.
‘“And next?” I cried, and would have turned on, but the cool hand of
the grave woman delayed me.
‘“Next?” I insisted, and struggled gently with her hand, pulling up her
fingers with all my childish strength, and as she yielded and the page
came over she bent down upon me like a shadow and kissed my brow.
‘But the page did not show the enchanted garden, nor the panthers, nor
the girl who had led me by the hand, nor the playfellows who had been
so loath to let me go. It showed a long gray street in West Kensington,
in that chill hour of afternoon before the lamps are lit, and I was
there, a wretched little figure, weeping aloud, for all that I could
do to restrain myself, and I was weeping because I could not return to
my dear playfellows who had called after me, “Come back to us! Come
back to us soon!” I was there. This was no page in a book, but harsh
reality; that enchanted place and the restraining hand of the grave
mother at whose knee I stood had gone--whither had they gone?’
He halted again, and remained for a time staring into the fire.
‘Oh! the woefulness of that return!’ he murmured.
‘Well?’ I said, after a minute or so.
‘Poor little wretch I was!--brought back to this gray world again!
As I realised the fullness of what had happened to me, I gave way
to quite ungovernable grief. And the shame and humiliation of that
public weeping and my disgraceful home-coming remain with me still. I
see again the benevolent-looking old gentleman in gold spectacles who
stopped and spoke to me--prodding me first with his umbrella. “Poor
little chap,” said he; “and are you lost then?”--and me a London boy
of five and more! And he must needs bring in a kindly young policeman
and make a crowd of me, and so march me home. Sobbing, conspicuous, and
frightened, I came back from the enchanted garden to the steps of my
father’s house.
‘That is as well as I can remember my vision of that garden--the
garden that haunts me still. Of course, I can convey nothing of that
indescribable quality of translucent unreality, that _difference_
from the common things of experience that hung about it all; but
that--that is what happened. If it was a dream, I am sure it was a
daytime and altogether extraordinary dream.... H’m!--naturally there
followed a terrible questioning, by my aunt, my father, the nurse, the
governess--every one....
‘I tried to tell them, and my father gave me my first thrashing for
telling lies. When afterwards I tried to tell my aunt, she punished
me again for my wicked persistence. Then, as I said, every one
was forbidden to listen to me, to hear a word about it. Even my
fairy-tale books were taken away from me for a time--because I was too
“imaginative.” Eh? Yes, they did that! My father belonged to the old
school.... And my story was driven back upon myself. I whispered it to
my pillow--my pillow that was often damp and salt to my whispering lips
with childish tears. And I added always to my official and less fervent
prayers this one heartfelt request: “Please God I may dream of the
garden. Oh! take me back to my garden!” Take me back to my garden! I
dreamt often of the garden. I may have added to it, I may have changed
it; I do not know.... All this, you understand, is an attempt to
reconstruct from fragmentary memories a very early experience. Between
that and the other consecutive memories of my boyhood there is a gulf.
A time came when it seemed impossible I should ever speak of that
wonder glimpse again.’