THE DOOR IN THE WALL

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.