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 focussed shaded table light, the
shadowy atmosphere that wrapped about him 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
every-day 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 forever,
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 that he devoted to the study of his
cigar ash, “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 Athelstan’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
Athelstan’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 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 learned 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
born, 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 grey 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 remote 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 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 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 . . . . .
“And along this 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 . . . And 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 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 awhile. “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 loth 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 loth to let me go. It showed a long grey street in West Kensington,
on 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 play-fellows 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 have they gone?”
He halted again, and remained for a time, staring into the fire.
“Oh! the wretchedness of that return!” he murmured.
“Well?” I said after a minute or so.
“Poor little wretch I was—brought back to this grey world again! As I
realised the fulness 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 homecoming 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
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 day-time and
altogether extraordinary dream . . . . . . H’m!—naturally there
followed a terrible questioning, by my aunt, my father, the nurse, the
governess—everyone . . . . . .
“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, everyone 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.”