Stories of Ourselves: "The Door in the Wall" by H.G. Wells

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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 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.

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.

He stood pretending to examine these things, and coveting, passionately desiring, the green door.

He made a run for it, lest hesitation should grip him again, he went plumb with outstretched hand through the green door and let it slam behind him.

‘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...'

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.

Presently a 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 leaped to my shoulder.

We passed an old man musing among laurels, I remember, and a place gay with parakeets, 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.

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.

Sobbing, conspicuous, and frightened, I came back from the enchanted garden to the steps of my father’s house.

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.

And I added always to my official and less fervent prayers this one heartfelt request: “Please God I may dream of the garden. O! take me back to my garden.”

This seems odd to me now, but I think that very probably a closer watch was kept on my movements after this misadventure to prevent my going astray.

“I shall do it yet,” I said, and passed a row of frowsy little shops that were inexplicably familiar to me, and behold! there was my long white wall and the green door that led to the enchanted garden!

Yes, I must have thought of the garden that morning just as a jolly sort of place to which one might resort in the interludes of a strenuous scholastic career.

Perhaps, too, my state of inattention brought down impositions upon me, and docked the margin of time necessary for the détour.

But at the same time there was a really painful undertow of shame at telling what I felt was indeed a sacred secret.

Carnaby held a council over me for wanton lying.

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

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.

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.

I was keenly anxious to get some definite word from Gurker, but was hampered by Ralphs’ presence.

A thousand inconceivable petty worldlinesses weighed with me in that crisis.

You say I have success – this vulgar, tawdry, irksome, envied thing.

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!

I can see now his rather pallid face, and the unfamiliar sombre fire that had come into his eyes.

And then did the pale electric lights near the station cheat the rough planking into a semblance of white?

There are times when I believe that Wallace was no more than the victim of the coincidence between a rare but not unprecedented type of hallucination and a careless trap, but that indeed is not my profoundest belief.

You may think me superstitious, if you will, and foolish; but, indeed, I am more than half convinced that he had, in truth, an abnormal gift, and a sense, something – I know not what – that in the guise of a wall and door offered him an outlet, a secret and peculiar passage of escape into another and altogether more beautiful world.