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 lights 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 someone who, I know, 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 day dream 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 leaned 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 concerns 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!”