The Door in the Wall by H.G. Wells | Short Story Audiobook

0:00 Gates of Imagination presents: "The Door in the Wall" by Herbert George Wells.

0:07 Read by Arthur Lane.

0:11 Chapter 1.

0:14 One confidential evening, not three months ago,

0:16 Lionel Wallace told me this story of the Door in the Wall.

0:20 And at the time I thought that so far as he was concerned it was a true story.

0:25 He told it me with such a direct simplicity of conviction

0:28 that I could not do otherwise than believe in him.

0:31 But in the morning, in my own flat, I woke to a different atmosphere,

0:36 and as I lay in bed and recalled the things he had told me,

0:41 stripped of the glamour of his earnest slow voice,

0:44 denuded of the focussed shaded table light,

0:47 the shadowy atmosphere that wrapped about him and the pleasant bright things,

0:51 the dessert and glasses and napery of the dinner we had shared,

0:55 making them for the time a bright

0:57 little world quite cut off from every-day realities,

1:01 I saw it all as frankly incredible.

1:04 “He was mystifying!” I said, and then: “How well he did it!...

1:08 It isn’t quite the thing I should have expected him, of all people,

1:13 to do well.” Afterwards, as I sat up in bed and sipped my morning tea,

1:18 I found myself trying to account for the flavour

1:21 of reality that perplexed me in his impossible reminiscences,

1:24 by supposing they did in some way suggest, present,

1:29 convey—I hardly know which word to use—experiences

1:33 it was otherwise impossible to tell.

1:35 Well, I don’t resort to that explanation now.

1:39 I have got over my intervening doubts.

1:42 I believe now, as I believed at the moment of telling,

1:45 that Wallace did to the very best of his ability

1:48 strip the truth of his secret for me.

1:51 But whether he himself saw, or only thought he saw,

1:55 whether he himself was the possessor of an inestimable privilege,

2:00 or the victim of a fantastic dream, I cannot pretend to guess.

2:05 Even the facts of his death,

2:07 which ended my doubts forever, throw no light on that.

2:11 That much the reader must judge for himself.

2:14 I forget now what chance comment or criticism of mine

2:17 moved so reticent a man to confide in me.

2:20 He was, I think, defending himself against

2:23 an imputation of slackness and unreliability I

2:25 had made in relation to a great public movement in which he had disappointed me.

2:30 But he plunged suddenly.

2:33 “I have” he said, “a preoccupation—” “I know,” he went on, after

2:38 a pause that he devoted to the study of his cigar ash, “I have been negligent.

2:43 The fact is—it isn’t a case of ghosts or apparitions—but—it’s

2:46 an odd thing to tell of, Redmond—I am haunted.

2:51 I am haunted by something—that rather takes the light out of things,

2:57 that fills me with longings...” He paused,

3:00 checked by that English shyness that so often overcomes us

3:03 when we would speak of moving or grave or beautiful things.

3:08 “You were at Saint Athelstan’s all through,” he said,

3:12 and for a moment that seemed to me quite irrelevant.

3:17 “Well”—and he paused.

3:18 Then very haltingly at first, but afterwards more easily,

3:22 he began to tell of the thing that was hidden in his life,

3:27 the haunting memory of a beauty and a happiness

3:30 that filled his heart with insatiable longings

3:33 that made all the interests and spectacle of worldly

3:37 life seem dull and tedious and vain to him.

3:40 Now that I have the clue to it, the thing seems written visibly in his face.

3:46 I have a photograph in which that look

3:49 of detachment has been caught and intensified.

3:52 It reminds me of what a woman once

3:55 said of him—a woman who had loved him greatly.

3:59 “Suddenly,” she said, “the interest goes out of him.

4:02 He forgets you.

4:03 He doesn’t care a rap for you—under his very

4:07 nose...” Yet the interest was not always out of him,

4:10 and when he was holding his attention to a thing

4:13 Wallace could contrive to be an extremely successful man.

4:16 His career, indeed, is set with successes.

4:19 He left me behind him long ago; he soared up over my head,

4:24 and cut a figure in the world that I couldn’t cut—anyhow.

4:27 He was still a year short of forty,

4:30 and they say now that he would have been in office

4:32 and very probably in the new Cabinet if he had lived.

4:35 At school he always beat me without effort—as it were by nature.

4:39 We were at school together at Saint Athelstan’s College

4:43 in West Kensington for almost all our school time.

4:46 He came into the school as my co-equal,

4:48 but he left far above me, in a blaze of scholarships and brilliant performance.

4:52 Yet I think I made a fair average running.

4:55 And it was at school I heard first of the Door in the Wall—that

5:00 I was to hear of a second time only a month before his death.

5:05 To him at least the Door in the Wall was

5:07 a real door leading through a real wall to immortal realities.

5:09 Of that I am now quite assured.

5:12 And it came into his life early,

5:14 when he was a little fellow between five and six.

5:18 I remember how, as he sat making his confession to me with a slow gravity,

5:23 he reasoned and reckoned the date of it.

5:26 “There was,” he said, “a crimson Virginia creeper in it—all one bright uniform

5:31 crimson in a clear amber sunshine against a white wall.

5:36 That came into the impression somehow, though I don’t clearly remember how,

5:40 and there were horse-chestnut leaves upon

5:43 the clean pavement outside the green door.

5:45 They were blotched yellow and green, you know,

5:48 not brown nor dirty, so that they must have been new fallen.

5:52 I take it that means October.

5:54 I look out for horse-chestnut leaves every year, and I ought to know.

6:00 “If I’m right in that, I was about five years and four months old.” He was,

6:06 he said, rather a precocious little boy—he

6:08 learned to talk at an abnormally early age,

6:11 and he was so sane and “old-fashioned,” as people say,

6:15 that he was permitted an amount of initiative

6:17 that most children scarcely attain by seven or eight.

6:21 His mother died when he was born, and he was under the less vigilant

6:26 and authoritative care of a nursery governess.

6:29 His father was a stern, preoccupied lawyer,

6:32 who gave him little attention, and expected great things of him.

6:37 For all his brightness he found life a little grey and dull I think.

6:42 And one day he wandered.

6:44 He could not recall the particular neglect that enabled him to get away,

6:48 nor the course he took among the West Kensington roads.

6:51 All that had faded among the incurable blurs of memory.

6:55 But the white wall and the green door stood out quite distinctly.

7:00 As his memory of that remote childish experience ran,

7:03 he did at the very first sight of that door experience a peculiar emotion,

7:07 an attraction, a desire to get to the door and open it and walk in.

7:13 And at the same time he had the clearest conviction that either it was

7:17 unwise or it was wrong of him—he

7:19 could not tell which—to yield to this attraction.

7:22 He insisted upon it as a curious thing that he knew from the very

7:27 beginning—unless memory has played him

7:29 the queerest trick—that the door was unfastened,

7:32 and that he could go in as he chose.

7:36 I seem to see the figure of that little boy, drawn and repelled.

7:40 And it was very clear in his mind, too,

7:43 though why it should be so was never explained,

7:46 that his father would be very angry if he went through that door.

7:51 Wallace described all these moments of hesitation

7:54 to me with the utmost particularity.

7:56 He went right past the door, and then, with his hands in his pockets,

8:01 and making an infantile attempt to whistle,

8:03 strolled right along beyond the end of the wall.

8:06 There he recalls a number of mean, dirty shops,

8:10 and particularly that of a plumber and decorator,

8:13 with a dusty disorder of earthenware pipes, sheet lead ball taps,

8:18 pattern books of wall paper, and tins of enamel.

8:22 He stood pretending to examine these things,

8:26 and coveting, passionately desiring the green door.

8:29 Then, he said, he had a gust of emotion.

8:32 He made a run for it, lest hesitation should grip him again,

8:35 he went plump with outstretched hand through

8:38 the green door and let it slam behind him.

8:41 And so, in a trice, he came into the garden that has haunted all his life.

8:47 It was very difficult for Wallace to give me

8:49 his full sense of that garden into which he came.

8:52 There was something in the very air of it that exhilarated,

8:55 that gave one a sense of lightness and good happening and well being;

8:59 there was something in the sight of it that made

9:03 all its colour clean and perfect and subtly luminous.

9:06 In the instant of coming into it one was exquisitely glad—as only in rare

9:12 moments and when one is young and joyful one can be glad in this world.

9:18 And everything was beautiful there...

9:20 Wallace mused before he went on telling me.

9:23 “You see,” he said, with the doubtful inflection

9:26 of a man who pauses at incredible things,

9:30 “there were two great panthers there...

9:33 Yes, spotted panthers.

9:35 And I was not afraid.

9:37 There was a long wide path with marble-edged flower borders on either side,

9:42 and these two huge velvety beasts were playing there with a ball.

9:47 One looked up and came towards me, a little curious as it seemed.

9:51 It came right up to me, rubbed its soft round ear very gently against

9:56 the small hand I held out and purred.

9:59 It was, I tell you, an enchanted garden.

10:02 I know.

10:03 And the size?

10:04 Oh!

10:04 it stretched far and wide, this way and that.

10:08 I believe there were hills far away.

10:10 Heaven knows where West Kensington had suddenly got to.

10:16 And somehow it was just like coming home.

10:20 “You know, in the very moment the door swung to behind me,

10:24 I forgot the road with its fallen chestnut leaves,

10:27 its cabs and tradesmen’s carts, I forgot the sort of gravitational pull

10:32 back to the discipline and obedience of home,

10:36 I forgot all hesitations and fear, forgot discretion,

10:39 forgot all the intimate realities of this life.

10:43 I became in a moment a very glad and wonder-happy little boy—in another world.

10:49 It was a world with a different quality,

10:52 a warmer, more penetrating and mellower light,

10:55 with a faint clear gladness in its air,

10:59 and wisps of sun-touched cloud in the blueness of its sky.

11:03 And before me ran this long wide path, invitingly,

11:07 with weedless beds on either side,

11:10 rich with untended flowers, and these two great panthers.

11:13 I put my little hands fearlessly on their soft fur,

11:18 and caressed their round ears and the sensitive corners under their ears,

11:22 and played with them, and it was as though they welcomed me home.

11:27 There was a keen sense of home-coming in my mind, and when presently a tall,

11:33 fair girl appeared in the pathway and came to meet me,

11:37 smiling, and said Well?’ to me, and lifted me,

11:41 and kissed me, and put me down, and led me by the hand, there was no amazement,

11:49 but only an impression of delightful rightness,

11:53 of being reminded of happy things that had in some strange way been overlooked.

11:58 There were broad steps, I remember,

12:00 that came into view between spikes of delphinium,

12:03 and up these we went to a great avenue between very old and shady dark trees.

12:09 All down this avenue, you know, between the red chapped stems,

12:14 were marble seats of honour and statuary,

12:17 and very tame and friendly white doves...

12:20 “And along this avenue my girl-friend led me,

12:24 looking down—I recall the pleasant lines,

12:26 the finely-modelled chin of her sweet kind face—asking me questions in a soft,

12:31 agreeable voice, and telling me things, pleasant things I know,

12:34 though what they were I was never able to recall...

12:37 And presently a little Capuchin monkey, very clean,

12:40 with a fur of ruddy brown and kindly hazel eyes,

12:44 came down a tree to us and ran beside me,

12:47 looking up at me and grinning, and presently leapt to my shoulder.

12:51 So we went on our way in great happiness...” He paused.

12:56 “Go on,” I said.

12:57 “I remember little things.

12:59 We passed an old man musing among laurels,

13:03 I remember, and a place gay with paroquets,

13:06 and came through a broad shaded colonnade to a spacious cool palace,

13:11 full of pleasant fountains, full of beautiful things,

13:14 full of the quality and promise of heart’s desire.

13:17 And there were many things and many people,

13:21 some that still seem to stand out clearly and some that are a little vague,

13:26 but all these people were beautiful and kind.

13:29 In some way—I don’t know how—it was conveyed

13:33 to me that they all were kind to me, glad to have me there,

13:38 and filling me with gladness by their gestures,

13:41 by the touch of their hands, by the welcome and love in their eyes.

13:46 Yes—” He mused for awhile.

13:49 “Playmates I found there.

13:51 That was very much to me, because I was a lonely little boy.

13:56 They played delightful games in a grass-covered court

13:59 where there was a sun-dial set about with flowers.

14:03 And as one played one loved...

14:06 “But—it’s odd—there’s a gap in my memory.

14:09 I don’t remember the games we played.

14:12 I never remembered.

14:13 Afterwards, as a child, I spent long hours trying,

14:16 even with tears, to recall the form of that happiness.

14:20 I wanted to play it all over again—in my nursery—by myself.

14:25 No!

14:26 All I remember is the happiness and two

14:29 dear playfellows who were most with me...

14:31 Then presently came a sombre dark woman,

14:33 with a grave, pale face and dreamy eyes,

14:36 a sombre woman wearing a soft long robe of pale purple,

14:40 who carried a book and beckoned and took me aside with her into a gallery

14:44 above a hall—though my playmates were loth to have me go,

14:48 and ceased their game and stood watching as I was carried away.

14:52 ‘Come back to us!’ they cried.

14:54 ‘Come back to us soon!’ I looked up at her face, but she heeded them not at all.

15:02 Her face was very gentle and grave.

15:04 She took me to a seat in the gallery, and I stood beside her, ready to look

15:09 at her book as she opened it upon her knee.

15:13 The pages fell open.

15:15 She pointed, and I looked, marvelling,

15:18 for in the living pages of that book I saw myself; it was a story about myself,

15:24 and in it were all the things that had happened to me since ever I was born...

15:30 “It was wonderful to me, because the pages of that book were not pictures,

15:33 you understand, but realities.” Wallace paused gravely—looked at me doubtfully.

15:41 “Go on,” I said.

15:44 “I understand.” “They were realities—yes, they must have been;

15:50 people moved and things came and went in them; my dear mother,

15:55 whom I had near forgotten; then my father, stern and upright,

15:59 the servants, the nursery, all the familiar things of home.

16:03 Then the front door and the busy streets,

16:07 with traffic to and fro: I looked and marvelled,

16:10 and looked half doubtfully again into the woman’s

16:14 face and turned the pages over,

16:16 skipping this and that, to see more of this book, and more,

16:20 and so at last I came to myself hovering

16:23 and hesitating outside the green door in the long white wall,

16:27 and felt again the conflict and the fear.

16:30 “‘And next?’ I cried,

16:32 and would have turned on, but the cool hand of the grave woman delayed me.

16:38 “‘Next?’ I insisted, and struggled gently with her hand,

16:42 pulling up her fingers with all my childish strength,

16:45 and as she yielded and the page came over she

16:49 bent down upon me like a shadow and kissed my brow.

16:53 “But the page did not show the enchanted garden, nor the panthers,

16:55 nor the girl who had led me by the hand,

16:58 nor the playfellows who had been so loth to let me go.

17:01 It showed a long grey street in West Kensington,

17:04 on that chill hour of afternoon before the lamps are lit,

17:08 and I was there, a wretched little figure, weeping aloud,

17:12 for all that I could do to restrain myself,

17:15 and I was weeping because I could not return to my dear

17:19 play-fellows who had called after me, ‘Come back to us!

17:22 Come back to us soon!’ I was there.

17:25 This was no page in a book, but harsh reality;

17:29 that enchanted place and the restraining hand of the grave mother

17:34 at whose knee I stood had gone—whither have they gone?” He halted again,

17:40 and remained for a time, staring into the fire.

17:43 “Oh!

17:44 the wretchedness of that return!” he murmured.

17:49 “Well?” I said after a minute or so.

17:52 “Poor little wretch I was—brought back to this grey world again!

17:55 As I realised the fulness of what had happened to me,

17:59 I gave way to quite ungovernable grief.

18:01 And the shame and humiliation of that public

18:04 weeping and my disgraceful homecoming remain with me still.

18:07 I see again the benevolent-looking old gentleman in gold spectacles

18:12 who stopped and spoke to me—prodding me first with his umbrella.

18:17 ‘Poor little chap,’ said he;

18:19 ‘and are you lost then?’—and me a London boy of five and more!

18:23 And he must needs bring in a kindly young policeman and make a crowd of me,

18:29 and so march me home.

18:31 Sobbing, conspicuous and frightened,

18:33 I came from the enchanted garden to the steps of my father’s house.

18:38 “That is as well as I can remember

18:40 my vision of that garden—the garden that haunts me still.

18:44 Of course, I can convey nothing

18:46 of that indescribable quality of translucent unreality,

18:49 that difference from the common things of experience that hung about it all;

18:54 but that—that is what happened.

18:56 If it was a dream, I am sure

19:00 it was a day-time and altogether extraordinary dream...

19:05 H’m!—naturally there followed a terrible questioning,

19:08 by my aunt, my father, the nurse, the governess—everyone...

19:13 “I tried to tell them,

19:15 and my father gave me my first thrashing for telling lies.

19:19 When afterwards I tried to tell my aunt,

19:22 she punished me again for my wicked persistence.

19:25 Then, as I said, everyone was forbidden to listen to me,

19:28 to hear a word about it.

19:29 Even my fairy tale books were taken away

19:32 from me for a time—because I was ‘too imaginative.’ Eh?

19:38 Yes, they did that!

19:40 My father belonged to the old school...

19:43 And my story was driven back upon myself.

19:46 I whispered it to my pillow—my pillow that was often

19:50 damp and salt to my whispering lips with childish tears.

19:54 And I added always to my official

19:57 and less fervent prayers this one heartfelt request:

20:00 ‘Please God I may dream of the garden.

20:03 Oh!

20:03 take me back to my garden!

20:05 Take me back to my garden!’ “I dreamt often of the garden.

20:09 I may have added to it, I may have changed it; I do not know...

20:14 All this you understand is an attempt

20:16 to reconstruct from fragmentary memories a very early experience.

20:20 Between that and the other consecutive memories of my boyhood there is a gulf.

20:26 A time came when it seemed impossible I should ever

20:31 speak of that wonder glimpse again.” I asked an obvious question.

20:36 “No,” he said.

20:37 “I don’t remember that I ever attempted to find

20:40 my way back to the garden in those early years.

20:43 This seems odd to me now, but I think that very probably a closer watch was kept

20:48 on my movements after this misadventure to prevent my going astray.

20:53 No, it wasn’t until you knew me that I tried for the garden again.

20:57 And I believe there was a period—incredible as it seems now—when I forgot

21:02 the garden altogether—when I was about eight or nine it may have been.

21:07 Do you remember me as a kid at Saint Athelstan’s?” “Rather!” “I didn’t show

21:14 any signs did I in those days of having a secret dream?” Chapter 2.

21:21 He looked up with a sudden smile.

21:24 “Did you ever play North-West Passage with me?...

21:27 No, of course you didn’t come my way!” “It was the sort

21:31 of game,” he went on, “that every imaginative child plays all day.

21:35 The idea was the discovery of a North-West Passage to school.

21:39 The way to school was plain enough;

21:42 the game consisted in finding some way that wasn’t plain,

21:45 starting off ten minutes early in some almost hopeless direction,

21:49 and working one’s way round through unaccustomed streets to my goal.

21:53 And one day I got entangled among some rather

21:56 low-class streets on the other side of Campden Hill,

21:59 and I began to think that for once the game would

22:02 be against me and that I should get to school late.

22:05 I tried rather desperately a street that seemed a cul de sac,

22:09 and found a passage at the end.

22:11 I hurried through that with renewed hope.

22:14 ‘I shall do it yet,’ I said, and passed a row of frowsy little shops

22:19 that were inexplicably familiar to me, and behold!

22:21 there was my long white wall and the green

22:24 door that led to the enchanted garden!

22:26 “The thing whacked upon me suddenly.

22:28 Then, after all, that garden, that wonderful garden, wasn’t a dream!”...

22:33 He paused.

22:34 “I suppose my second experience with the green

22:37 door marks the world of difference there

22:40 is between the busy life of a schoolboy and the infinite leisure of a child.

22:46 Anyhow, this second time I didn’t for a moment think of going in straight away.

22:52 You see...

22:52 For one thing my mind was full of the idea of getting

22:56 to school in time—set on not breaking my record for punctuality.

22:59 I must surely have felt some little desire at least to try the door—yes,

23:03 I must have felt that...

23:05 But I seem to remember the attraction of the door mainly

23:07 as another obstacle to my overmastering determination to get to school.

23:12 I was immediately interested by this discovery I had made,

23:15 of course—I went on with my mind full of it—but I went on.

23:18 It didn’t check me.

23:19 I ran past tugging out my watch, found I had ten minutes still to spare,

23:23 and then I was going downhill into familiar surroundings.

23:26 I got to school, breathless, it is true, and wet with perspiration, but in time.

23:31 I can remember hanging up my coat and hat...

23:35 Went right by it and left it behind me.

23:38 Odd, eh?” He looked at me thoughtfully.

23:41 “Of course, I didn’t know then that it wouldn’t always be there.

23:45 School boys have limited imaginations.

23:47 I suppose I thought it was an awfully jolly thing to have it there,

23:51 to know my way back to it, but there was the school tugging at me.

23:56 I expect I was a good deal distraught and inattentive that morning,

24:00 recalling what I could of the beautiful

24:02 strange people I should presently see again.

24:05 Oddly enough I had no doubt in my mind that they would be glad to see me...

24:10 Yes, I must have thought of the garden that morning just as a jolly sort

24:14 of place to which one might resort

24:17 in the interludes of a strenuous scholastic career.

24:20 “I didn’t go that day at all.

24:22 The next day was a half holiday, and that may have weighed with me.

24:26 Perhaps, too, my state of inattention brought down impositions upon

24:30 me and docked the margin of time necessary for the detour.

24:34 I don’t know.

24:35 What I do know is that in the meantime the enchanted garden was

24:40 so much upon my mind that I could not keep it to myself.

24:45 “I told—What was his name?—a ferrety-looking youngster we

24:49 used to call Squiff.” “Young Hopkins,” said I.

24:53 “Hopkins it was.

24:54 I did not like telling him, I had a feeling that in some way it

24:58 was against the rules to tell him, but I did.

25:01 He was walking part of the way home with me; he was talkative,

25:05 and if we had not talked about the enchanted

25:08 garden we should have talked of something else,

25:10 and it was intolerable to me to think about any other subject.

25:15 So I blabbed.

25:16 “Well, he told my secret.

25:18 The next day in the play interval I

25:21 found myself surrounded by half a dozen bigger boys,

25:24 half teasing and wholly curious to hear more of the enchanted garden.

25:29 There was that big Fawcett—you remember him?—and Carnaby and Morley Reynolds.

25:34 You weren’t there by any chance?

25:37 No, I think I should have remembered if you were...

25:41 “A boy is a creature of odd feelings.

25:43 I was, I really believe, in spite of my secret self-disgust,

25:47 a little flattered to have the attention of these big fellows.

25:52 I remember particularly a moment of pleasure caused

25:55 by the praise of Crawshaw—you remember Crawshaw major,

25:58 the son of Crawshaw the composer?—who said it

26:01 was the best lie he had ever heard.

26:04 But at the same time there was a really painful undertow

26:07 of shame at telling what I felt was indeed a sacred secret.

26:11 That beast Fawcett made a joke about the girl in green—.”

26:17 Wallace’s voice sank with the keen memory of that shame.

26:21 “I pretended not to hear,” he said.

26:24 “Well, then Carnaby suddenly called me a young liar

26:27 and disputed with me when I said the thing was true.

26:30 I said I knew where to find the green door,

26:34 could lead them all there in ten minutes.

26:36 Carnaby became outrageously virtuous,

26:38 and said I’d have to—and bear out my words or suffer.

26:43 Did you ever have Carnaby twist your arm?

26:46 Then perhaps you’ll understand how it went with me.

26:49 I swore my story was true.

26:51 There was nobody in the school then to save a chap

26:54 from Carnaby though Crawshaw put in a word or so.

26:58 Carnaby had got his game.

27:00 I grew excited and red-eared, and a little frightened,

27:04 I behaved altogether like a silly little chap, and the outcome of it all was

27:10 that instead of starting alone for my enchanted garden,

27:13 I led the way presently—cheeks flushed, ears hot, eyes smarting,

27:17 and my soul one burning misery and shame—for a party of six mocking,

27:24 curious and threatening school-fellows.

27:26 “We never found the white wall and the green

27:29 door...” “You mean?—” “I mean I couldn’t find it.

27:33 I would have found it if I could.

27:35 “And afterwards when I could go alone I couldn’t find it.

27:39 I never found it.

27:40 I seem now to have been always looking for it through my school-boy days,

27:46 but I’ve never come upon it

27:48 again.” “Did the fellows—make it disagreeable?” “Beastly...

27:52 Carnaby held a council over me for wanton lying.

27:55 I remember how I sneaked home and upstairs to hide the marks of my blubbering.

28:00 But when I cried myself to sleep at last

28:02 it wasn’t for Carnaby, but for the garden,

28:04 for the beautiful afternoon I had hoped for, for the sweet friendly women

28:08 and the waiting playfellows and the game I had hoped to learn again,

28:13 that beautiful forgotten game...

28:15 “I believed firmly that if I had not told...

28:19 I had bad times after that—crying at night and wool-gathering by day.

28:23 For two terms I slackened and had bad reports.

28:26 Do you remember?

28:28 Of course you would!

28:29 It was you—your beating me in mathematics that brought

28:32 me back to the grind again.” Chapter 3.

28:39 For a time my friend stared silently into the red heart of the fire.

28:45 Then he said: "I never saw it again until I was seventeen.

28:49 "It leapt upon me for the third time—as I was

28:52 driving to Paddington on my way to Oxford and a scholarship.

28:55 I had just one momentary glimpse.

28:57 I was leaning over the apron of my hansom smoking a cigarette,

29:02 and no doubt thinking myself no end of a man of the world,

29:06 and suddenly there was the door, the wall,

29:10 the dear sense of unforgettable and still attainable things.

29:14 "We clattered by—I too taken by surprise to stop

29:17 my cab until we were well past and round a corner.

29:21 Then I had a queer moment, a double and divergent movement of my will:

29:26 I tapped the little door in the roof of the cab,

29:29 and brought my arm down to pull out my watch.

29:32 'Yes, sir!' said the cabman, smartly.

29:36 'Er—well—it's nothing,' I cried.

29:38 'My mistake!

29:39 We haven't much time!

29:41 Go on!' And he went on....

29:45 "I got my scholarship.

29:46 And the night after I was told of that I

29:48 sat over my fire in my little upper room, my study, in my father's house,

29:54 with his praise—his rare praise—and his sound counsels ringing in my ears,

29:59 and I smoked my favourite pipe—the formidable bulldog of adolescence—and

30:03 thought of that door in the long white wall.

30:07 'If I had stopped,' I thought, 'I should have missed my scholarship,

30:12 I should have missed Oxford—muddled all the fine career before me!

30:16 I begin to see things better!' I fell musing deeply,

30:22 but I did not doubt then this career of mine was a thing that merited sacrifice.

30:27 "Those dear friends and that clear atmosphere seemed very sweet to me,

30:32 very fine but remote.

30:34 My grip was fixing now upon the world.

30:37 I saw another door opening—the door

30:40 of my career." He stared again into the fire.

30:43 Its red light picked out a stubborn strength

30:46 in his face for just one flickering moment, and then it vanished again.

30:51 "Well," he said and sighed, "I have served that career.

30:56 I have done—much work, much hard work.

30:59 But I have dreamt of the enchanted garden a thousand dreams,

31:03 and seen its door, or at least glimpsed its door, four times since then.

31:08 Yes—four times.

31:09 For a while this world was so bright and interesting,

31:13 seemed so full of meaning and opportunity,

31:16 that the half-effaced charm of the garden was by comparison gentle and remote.

31:21 Who wants to pat panthers on the way

31:24 to dinner with pretty women and distinguished men?

31:27 I came down to London from Oxford,

31:30 a man of bold promise that I have done something to redeem.

31:35 Something—and yet there have been disappointments....

31:39 "Twice I have been in love—I will not dwell on that—but once,

31:43 as I went to someone who, I knew, doubted whether I dared to come,

31:48 I took a short cut at a venture through an unfrequented road near Earl's Court,

31:53 and so happened on a white wall and a familiar green door.

31:58 'Odd!' said I to myself, 'but I thought this place was on Campden Hill.

32:03 It's the place I never could find

32:05 somehow—like counting Stonehenge—the place of that queer

32:09 daydream of mine.' And I went by it intent upon my purpose.

32:14 It had no appeal to me that afternoon.

32:17 "I had just a moment's impulse to try the door,

32:20 three steps aside were needed at the most—though I was sure

32:23 enough in my heart that it would open to me—and then

32:27 I thought that doing so might delay me on the way

32:29 to that appointment in which I thought my honour was involved.

32:33 Afterwards I was sorry for my punctuality—might

32:35 at least have peeped in, I thought, and waved a hand to those panthers,

32:40 but I knew enough by this time not to seek

32:43 again belatedly that which is not found by seeking.

32:48 Yes, that time made me very sorry....

32:52 "Years of hard work after that, and never a sight of the door.

32:56 It's only recently it has come back to me.

32:59 With it there has come a sense as though

33:02 some thin tarnish had spread itself over my world.

33:06 I began to think of it as a sorrowful

33:09 and bitter thing that I should never see that door again.

33:13 Perhaps I was suffering a little from overwork—perhaps it was

33:17 what I've heard spoken of as the feeling of forty.

33:20 I don't know.

33:21 But certainly the keen brightness that makes

33:23 effort easy has gone out of things recently, and that just at a time—with all

33:28 these new political developments—when I ought to be working.

33:32 Odd, isn't it?

33:33 But I do begin to find life toilsome, its rewards, as I come near them, cheap.

33:39 I began a little while ago to want the garden quite badly.

33:44 Yes—and I've seen it three times." "The garden?" "No—the door!

33:49 And I haven't gone in!" He leant over the table to me,

33:54 with an enormous sorrow in his voice as he spoke.

33:57 "Thrice I have had my chance—thrice!

33:59 If ever that door offers itself to me again, I swore,

34:04 I will go in, out of this dust and heat,

34:07 out of this dry glitter of vanity, out of these toilsome futilities.

34:11 I will go and never return.

34:14 This time I will stay...

34:16 I swore it, and when the time came—I didn't go.

34:21 "Three times in one year have I passed that door and failed to enter.

34:25 Three times in the last year.

34:30 "The first time was on the night

34:32 of the snatch division on the Tenants' Redemption Bill,

34:35 on which the Government was saved by a majority of three.

34:39 You remember?

34:40 No one on our side—perhaps very few

34:43 on the opposite side— expected the end that night.

34:46 Then the debate collapsed like eggshells.

34:49 I and Hotchkiss were dining with his cousin at Brentford; we were both unpaired,

34:54 and we were called up by telephone, and set off at once in his cousin's motor.

34:59 We got in barely in time,

35:01 and on the way we passed my wall and door—livid in the moonlight,

35:05 blotched with hot yellow as the glare of our lamps lit it, but unmistakable.

35:12 'My God!' cried I.

35:14 'What?' said Hotchkiss.

35:16 'Nothing!' I answered, and the moment passed.

35:19 "'I've made a great sacrifice,' I told the whip as I got in.

35:24 'They all have,' he said, and hurried by.

35:26 "I do not see how I could have done otherwise then.

35:29 And the next occasion was as I rushed

35:31 to my father's bedside to bid that stern old man farewell.

35:35 Then, too, the claims of life were imperative.

35:38 But the third time was different; it happened a week ago.

35:43 It fills me with hot remorse to recall it.

35:46 I was with Gurker and Ralphs—it's no secret now,

35:49 you know, that I've had my talk with Gurker.

35:52 We had been dining at Frobisher's, and the talk had become intimate between us.

35:58 The question of my place in the reconstructed Ministry

36:00 lay always just over the boundary of the discussion.

36:03 Yes—yes.

36:03 That's all settled.

36:05 It needn't be talked about yet,

36:07 but there's no reason to keep a secret from you....

36:12 Yes—thanks!

36:12 thanks!

36:13 But let me tell you my story.

36:17 "Then, on that night things were very much in the air.

36:20 My position was a very delicate one.

36:22 I was keenly anxious to get some definite word from Gurker,

36:27 but was hampered by Ralphs' presence.

36:29 I was using the best power of my brain to keep that light

36:32 and careless talk not too obviously directed to the point that concerned me.

36:37 I had to.

36:38 Ralphs' behaviour since has more than justified my caution....

36:42 Ralphs, I knew, would leave us beyond the Kensington High Street,

36:47 and then I could surprise Gurker by a sudden frankness.

36:50 One has sometimes to resort to these little devices....

36:53 And then it was that in the margin of my field

36:57 of vision I became aware once more of the white wall,

37:01 the green door before us down the road.

37:04 "We passed it talking.

37:06 I passed it.

37:07 I can still see the shadow of Gurker's marked profile,

37:10 his opera hat tilted forward over his prominent nose,

37:15 the many folds of his neck wrap going

37:18 before my shadow and Ralphs' as we sauntered past.

37:22 "I passed within twenty inches of the door.

37:24 'If I say good-night to them, and go in,' I asked myself,

37:28 'what will happen?' And I was all a-tingle for that word with Gurker.

37:33 "I could not answer that question in the tangle of my other problems.

37:37 'They will think me mad,' I thought.

37:39 'And suppose I vanish now!—-Amazing disappearance

37:43 of a prominent politician!' That weighed with me.

37:47 A thousand inconceivably petty worldlinesses weighed with me in that crisis."

37:54 Then he turned on me with a sorrowful smile,

37:57 and, speaking slowly, "Here I am!" he said.

38:01 "Here I am!" he repeated, "and my chance has gone from me.

38:05 Three times in one year the door has

38:08 been offered me—the door that goes into peace,

38:11 into delight, into a beauty beyond dreaming,

38:14 a kindness no man on earth can know.

38:17 And I have rejected it, Redmond, and it has gone" "How do you know?" "I know.

38:23 I know.

38:24 I am left now to work it out,

38:26 to stick to the tasks that held me so strongly when my moments came.

38:31 You say I have success—this vulgar, tawdry, irksome, envied thing.

38:35 I have it." He had a walnut in his big hand.

38:40 "If that was my success," he said, and crushed it,

38:43 and held it out for me to see.

38:46 "Let me tell you something, Redmond.

38:48 This loss is destroying me.

38:50 For two months, for ten weeks nearly now,

38:53 I have done no work at all, except the most necessary and urgent duties.

38:58 My soul is full of inappeasable regrets.

39:02 At nights—when it is less likely I shall be recognised—I go out.

39:08 I wander.

39:10 Yes.

39:10 I wonder what people would think of that if they knew.

39:14 A Cabinet Minister, the responsible head of that most vital of all departments,

39:20 wandering alone—grieving—sometimes near audibly lamenting— for a door,

39:25 for a garden!" Chapter 4.

39:29 I can see now his rather pallid face,

39:31 and the unfamiliar sombre fire that had come into his eyes.

39:35 I see him very vividly to-night.

39:38 I sit recalling his words, his tones,

39:42 and last evening's Westminster Gazette still lies on my sofa,

39:45 containing the notice of his death.

39:47 At lunch to-day the club was busy with his death.

39:51 We talked of nothing else.

39:53 They found his body very early yesterday morning

39:56 in a deep excavation near East Kensington Station.

39:58 It is one of two shafts that have been

40:01 made in connection with an extension of the railway southward.

40:04 It is protected from the intrusion of the public

40:08 by a hoarding upon the high road,

40:10 in which a small doorway has been cut for the convenience

40:13 of some of the workmen who live in that direction.

40:16 The doorway was left unfastened through a misunderstanding between two gangers,

40:21 and through it he made his way....

40:25 My mind is darkened with questions and riddles.

40:29 It would seem he walked all the way from the House

40:32 that night—he has frequently walked home during the past

40:35 Session—and so it is I figure his dark form

40:38 coming along the late and empty streets, wrapped up, intent.

40:42 And then did the pale electric lights near the station

40:47 cheat the rough planking into a semblance of white?

40:51 Did that fatal unfastened door awaken some memory?

40:55 Was there, after all, ever any green door in the wall at all?

40:59 I do not know.

41:01 I have told his story as he told it to me.

41:04 There are times when I believe that Wallace was no more than the victim

41:09 of the coincidence between a rare but not

41:11 unprecedented type of hallucination and a careless trap,

41:14 but that indeed is not my profoundest belief.

41:18 You may think me superstitious, if you will, and foolish; but, indeed,

41:22 I am more than half convinced that he had,

41:25 in truth, an abnormal gift, and a sense,

41:28 something—I know not what—-that in the guise

41:31 of wall and door offered him an outlet, a secret and peculiar passage of escape

41:36 into another and altogether more beautiful world.

41:38 At any rate, you will say, it betrayed him in the end.

41:43 But did it betray him?

41:45 There you touch the inmost mystery of these dreamers,

41:48 these men of vision and the imagination.

41:51 We see our world fair and common, the hoarding and the pit.

41:57 By our daylight standard he walked out

42:01 of security into darkness, danger, and death.

42:04 But did he see like that?

42:10 Thank you for listening.

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