For a time my friend stared silently into the red heart of the fire.
Then he said: ‘I never saw it again until I was seventeen.
‘It leapt upon me for the third time--as I was driving to Paddington on
my way to Oxford and a scholarship I had just one momentary glimpse.
I was leaning over the apron of my hansom smoking a cigarette, and no
doubt thinking myself no end of a man of the world, and suddenly there
was the door, the wall, the dear sense of unforgettable and still
attainable things.
‘We clattered by--I too taken by surprise to stop my cab until we were
well past and round a corner. Then I had a queer moment, a double and
divergent movement of my will: I tapped the little door in the roof of
the cab, and brought my arm down to pull out my watch. “Yes, sir!” said
the cabman, smartly. “Er--well--it’s nothing,” I cried. “_My_ mistake!
We haven’t much time! Go on!” And he went on....
‘I got my scholarship. And the night after I was told of that I sat
over my fire in my little upper room, my study, in my father’s house,
with his praise--his rare praise--and his sound counsels ringing in
my ears, and I smoked my favourite pipe--the formidable bulldog of
adolescence--and thought of that door in the long white wall. “If I had
stopped,” I thought, “I should have missed my scholarship, I should
have missed Oxford--muddled all the fine career before me! I begin to
see things better!” I fell musing deeply, but I did not doubt then this
career of mine was a thing that merited sacrifice.
‘Those dear friends and that clear atmosphere seemed very sweet to me,
very fine but remote. My grip was fixing now upon the world. I saw
another door opening--the door of my career.’
He stared again into the fire. Its red light picked out a stubborn
strength in his face for just one flickering moment, and then it
vanished again.
‘Well,’ he said and sighed, ‘I have served that career. I have
done--much work, much hard work. But I have dreamt of the enchanted
garden a thousand dreams, and seen its door, or at least glimpsed
its door, four times since then. Yes--four times. For a while this
world was so bright and interesting, seemed so full of meaning
and opportunity, that the half-effaced charm of the garden was by
comparison gentle and remote. Who wants to pat panthers on the way to
dinner with pretty women and distinguished men? I came down to London
from Oxford, a man of bold promise that I have done something to
redeem. Something--and yet there have been disappointments....
‘Twice I have been in love--I will not dwell on that--but once, as I
went to some one who, I knew, doubted whether I dared to come, I took a
short cut at a venture through an unfrequented road near Earl’s Court,
and so happened on a white wall and a familiar green door. “Odd!”
said I to myself, “but I thought this place was on Campden Hill. It’s
the place I never could find somehow--like counting Stonehenge--the
place of that queer daydream of mine.” And I went by it intent upon my
purpose. It had no appeal to me that afternoon.
‘I had just a moment’s impulse to try the door, three steps aside
were needed at the most--though I was sure enough in my heart that it
would open to me--and then I thought that doing so might delay me on
the way to that appointment in which I thought my honour was involved.
Afterwards I was sorry for my punctuality--I might at least have peeped
in, I thought, and waved a hand to those panthers, but I knew enough
by this time not to seek again belatedly that which is not found by
seeking. Yes, that time made me very sorry....
‘Years of hard work after that, and never a sight of the door. It’s
only recently it has come back to me. With it there has come a sense
as though some thin tarnish had spread itself over my world. I
began to think of it as a sorrowful and bitter thing that I should
never see that door again. Perhaps I was suffering a little from
overwork--perhaps it was what I’ve heard spoken of as the feeling of
forty. I don’t know. But certainly the keen brightness that makes
effort easy has gone out of things recently, and that just at a
time--with all these new political developments--when I ought to be
working. Odd, isn’t it? But I do begin to find life toilsome, its
rewards, as I come near them, cheap. I began a little while ago to want
the garden quite badly. Yes--and I’ve seen it three times.’
‘The garden?’
‘No--the door! And I haven’t gone in!’
He leant over the table to me, with an enormous sorrow in his voice as
he spoke. ‘Thrice I have had my chance--_thrice!_ If ever that door
offers itself to me again, I swore, I will go in, out of this dust
and heat, out of this dry glitter of vanity, out of these toilsome
futilities. I will go and never return. This time I will stay.... I
swore it, and when the time came--_I didn’t go_.
‘Three times in one year have I passed that door and failed to enter.
Three times in the last year.
‘The first time was on the night of the snatch division on the Tenants’
Redemption Bill, on which the Government was saved by a majority of
three. You remember? No one on our side--perhaps very few on the
opposite side--expected the end that night. Then the debate collapsed
like eggshells. I and Hotchkiss were dining with his cousin at
Brentford; we were both unpaired, and we were called up by telephone,
and set off at once in his cousin’s motor. We got in barely in time,
and on the way we passed my wall and door--livid in the moonlight,
blotched with hot yellow as the glare of our lamps lit it, but
unmistakable. “My God!” cried I. “What?” said Hotchkiss, “Nothing!” I
answered, and the moment passed.
‘“I’ve made a great sacrifice,” I told the whip as I got in. “They all
have,” he said, and hurried by.
‘I do not see how I could have done otherwise then. And the next
occasion was as I rushed to my father’s bedside to bid that stern old
man farewell. Then, too, the claims of life were imperative. But the
third time was different; it happened a week ago. It fills me with hot
remorse to recall it. I was with Gurker and Ralphs--it’s no secret now,
you know, that I’ve had my talk with Gurker. We had been dining at
Frobisher’s, and the talk had become intimate between us. The question
of my place in the reconstructed Ministry lay always just over the
boundary of the discussion. Yes--yes. That’s all settled. It needn’t be
talked about yet, but there’s no reason to keep a secret from you....
Yes--thanks! thanks! But let me tell you my story.
‘Then, on that night things were very much in the air. My position was
a very delicate one. I was keenly anxious to get some definite word
from Gurker, but was hampered by Ralphs’ presence. I was using the
best power of my brain to keep that light and careless talk not too
obviously directed to the point that concerned me. I had to. Ralphs’
behaviour since has more than justified my caution.... Ralphs, I knew,
would leave us beyond the Kensington High Street, and then I could
surprise Gurker by a sudden frankness. One has sometimes to resort to
these little devices.... And then it was that in the margin of my field
of vision I became aware once more of the white wall, the green door
before us down the road.
‘We passed it talking. I passed it. I can still see the shadow of
Gurker’s marked profile, his opera hat tilted forward over his
prominent nose, the many folds of his neck wrap going before my shadow
and Ralphs’ as we sauntered past.
‘I passed within twenty inches of the door. “If I say good-night to
them, and go in,” I asked myself, “what will happen?” And I was all
a-tingle for that word with Gurker.
‘I could not answer that question in the tangle of my other
problems. “They will think me mad,” I thought. “And suppose I vanish
now!--Amazing disappearance of a prominent politician!” That weighed
with me. A thousand inconceivably petty worldlinesses weighed with me
in that crisis.’
Then he turned on me with a sorrowful smile, and, speaking slowly,
‘Here I am!’ he said.
‘Here I am!’ he repeated, ‘and my chance has gone from me. Three times
in one year the door has been offered me--the door that goes into
peace, into delight, into a beauty beyond dreaming, a kindness no man
on earth can know. And I have rejected it, Redmond, and it has gone----’
‘How do you know?’
‘I know. I know. I am left now to work it out, to stick to the
tasks that held me so strongly when my moments came. You say I have
success--this vulgar, tawdry, irksome, envied thing. I have it.’ He
had a walnut in his big hand. ‘If that was my success,’ he said, and
crushed it, and held it out for me to see.
‘Let me tell you something, Redmond. This loss is destroying me. For
two months, for ten weeks nearly now, I have done no work at all,
except the most necessary and urgent duties. My soul is full of
inappeasable regrets. At nights--when it is less likely I shall be
recognised--I go out. I wander. Yes. I wonder what people would think
of that if they knew. A Cabinet Minister, the responsible head of that
most vital of all departments, wandering alone--grieving--sometimes
near audibly lamenting--for a door, for a garden!’