The Door in the Wall And Other Stories by H. G. Wells Contents THE DOOR IN THE WALL THE STAR A DREAM OF ARMAGEDDON THE CONE A MOONLIGHT FABLE THE DIAMOND MAKER THE LORD OF THE DYNAMOS THE COUNTRY OF THE BLIND 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. âHe was mystifying!â I said, and then: âHow well he did it!. . . . . It isnât quite the thing I should have expected him, of all people, to do well.â 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, conveyâI hardly know which word to useâexperiences it was otherwise impossible to tell. Well, I donât 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. âI haveâ he said, âa preoccupationââ âI know,â he went on, after a pause that he devoted to the study of his cigar ash, âI have been negligent. The fact isâit isnât a case of ghosts or apparitionsâbutâitâs an odd thing to tell of, RedmondâI am haunted. I am haunted by somethingâthat rather takes the light out of things, that fills me with longings . . . . .â He paused, checked by that English shyness that so often overcomes us when we would speak of moving or grave or beautiful things. âYou were at Saint Athelstanâs all through,â he said, and for a moment that seemed to me quite irrelevant. âWellââand 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 himâa woman who had loved him greatly. âSuddenly,â she said, âthe interest goes out of him. He forgets you. He doesnât care a rap for youâunder his very nose . . . . .â 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 couldnât cutâanyhow. 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 effortâas it were by nature. We were at school together at Saint Athelstanâs 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 Wallâthat 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. âThere was,â he said, âa crimson Virginia creeper in itâall one bright uniform crimson in a clear amber sunshine against a white wall. That came into the impression somehow, though I donât 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. âIf Iâm right in that, I was about five years and four months old.â He was, he said, rather a precocious little boyâhe learned to talk at an abnormally early age, and he was so sane and âold-fashioned,â 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 himâhe could not tell whichâto yield to this attraction. He insisted upon it as a curious thing that he knew from the very beginningâunless memory has played him the queerest trickâthat 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 gladâas 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. âYou see,â he said, with the doubtful inflection of a man who pauses at incredible things, âthere 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. âYou know, in the very moment the door swung to behind me, I forgot the road with its fallen chestnut leaves, its cabs and tradesmenâs 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 boyâin 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?â 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 . . . . . âAnd along this avenue my girl-friend led me, looking downâI recall the pleasant lines, the finely-modelled chin of her sweet kind faceâasking 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 . . . .â He paused. âGo on,â I said. âI 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 heartâs 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 wayâI donât know howâit 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. Yesââ He mused for awhile. âPlaymates 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 . . . . âButâitâs oddâthereâs a gap in my memory. I donât 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 againâin my nurseryâby 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 hallâthough my playmates were loth to have me go, and ceased their game and stood watching as I was carried away. âCome back to us!â they cried. âCome back to us soon!â 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 . . . . âIt was wonderful to me, because the pages of that book were not pictures, you understand, but realities.â Wallace paused gravelyâlooked at me doubtfully. âGo on,â I said. âI understand.â âThey were realitiesâyes, 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 womanâs 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. ââAnd next?â I cried, and would have turned on, but the cool hand of the grave woman delayed me. ââNext?â 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. âBut 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, âCome back to us! Come back to us soon!â 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 goneâwhither have they gone?â He halted again, and remained for a time, staring into the fire. âOh! the wretchedness of that return!â he murmured. âWell?â I said after a minute or so. âPoor little wretch I wasâbrought 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 meâprodding me first with his umbrella. âPoor little chap,â said he; âand are you lost then?ââand 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 fatherâs house. âThat is as well as I can remember my vision of that gardenâthe 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 thatâthat is what happened. If it was a dream, I am sure it was a day-time and altogether extraordinary dream . . . . . . Hâm!ânaturally there followed a terrible questioning, by my aunt, my father, the nurse, the governessâeveryone . . . . . . âI 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 timeâbecause I was âtoo imaginative.â 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 pillowâmy 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: âPlease God I may dream of the garden. Oh! take me back to my garden! Take me back to my garden!â âI 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.â I asked an obvious question. âNo,â he said. âI donât remember that I ever attempted to find my way back to the garden in those early years. 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. No, it wasnât until you knew me that I tried for the garden again. And I believe there was a periodâincredible as it seems nowâwhen I forgot the garden altogetherâwhen I was about eight or nine it may have been. Do you remember me as a kid at Saint Athelstanâs?â âRather!â âI didnât show any signs did I in those days of having a secret dream?â II He looked up with a sudden smile. âDid you ever play North-West Passage with me? . . . . . No, of course you didnât come my way!â âIt was the sort of game,â he went on, âthat every imaginative child plays all day. The idea was the discovery of a North-West Passage to school. The way to school was plain enough; the game consisted in finding some way that wasnât plain, starting off ten minutes early in some almost hopeless direction, and working oneâs way round through unaccustomed streets to my goal. And one day I got entangled among some rather low-class streets on the other side of Campden Hill, and I began to think that for once the game would be against me and that I should get to school late. I tried rather desperately a street that seemed a _cul de sac_, and found a passage at the end. I hurried through that with renewed hope. âI shall do it yet,â 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! âThe thing whacked upon me suddenly. Then, after all, that garden, that wonderful garden, wasnât a dream!â . . . . He paused. âI suppose my second experience with the green door marks the world of difference there is between the busy life of a schoolboy and the infinite leisure of a child. Anyhow, this second time I didnât for a moment think of going in straight away. You see . . . For one thing my mind was full of the idea of getting to school in timeâset on not breaking my record for punctuality. I must surely have felt _some_ little desire at least to try the doorâyes, I must have felt that . . . . . But I seem to remember the attraction of the door mainly as another obstacle to my overmastering determination to get to school. I was immediately interested by this discovery I had made, of courseâI went on with my mind full of itâbut I went on. It didnât check me. I ran past tugging out my watch, found I had ten minutes still to spare, and then I was going downhill into familiar surroundings. I got to school, breathless, it is true, and wet with perspiration, but in time. I can remember hanging up my coat and hat . . . Went right by it and left it behind me. Odd, eh?â He looked at me thoughtfully. âOf course, I didnât know then that it wouldnât always be there. School boys have limited imaginations. I suppose I thought it was an awfully jolly thing to have it there, to know my way back to it, but there was the school tugging at me. I expect I was a good deal distraught and inattentive that morning, recalling what I could of the beautiful strange people I should presently see again. Oddly enough I had no doubt in my mind that they would be glad to see me . . . 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. âI didnât go that day at all. The next day was a half holiday, and that may have weighed with me. Perhaps, too, my state of inattention brought down impositions upon me and docked the margin of time necessary for the detour. I donât know. What I do know is that in the meantime the enchanted garden was so much upon my mind that I could not keep it to myself. âI toldâWhat was his name?âa ferrety-looking youngster we used to call Squiff.â âYoung Hopkins,â said I. âHopkins it was. I did not like telling him, I had a feeling that in some way it was against the rules to tell him, but I did. He was walking part of the way home with me; he was talkative, and if we had not talked about the enchanted garden we should have talked of something else, and it was intolerable to me to think about any other subject. So I blabbed. âWell, he told my secret. The next day in the play interval I found myself surrounded by half a dozen bigger boys, half teasing and wholly curious to hear more of the enchanted garden. There was that big Fawcettâyou remember him?âand Carnaby and Morley Reynolds. You werenât there by any chance? No, I think I should have remembered if you were . . . . . âA boy is a creature of odd feelings. I was, I really believe, in spite of my secret self-disgust, a little flattered to have the attention of these big fellows. I remember particularly a moment of pleasure caused by the praise of Crawshawâyou remember Crawshaw major, the son of Crawshaw the composer?âwho said it was the best lie he had ever heard. But at the same time there was a really painful undertow of shame at telling what I felt was indeed a sacred secret. That beast Fawcett made a joke about the girl in greenâ.â Wallaceâs voice sank with the keen memory of that shame. âI pretended not to hear,â he said. âWell, then Carnaby suddenly called me a young liar and disputed with me when I said the thing was true. I said I knew where to find the green door, could lead them all there in ten minutes. Carnaby became outrageously virtuous, and said Iâd have toâand bear out my words or suffer. Did you ever have Carnaby twist your arm? Then perhaps youâll understand how it went with me. I swore my story was true. There was nobody in the school then to save a chap from Carnaby though Crawshaw put in a word or so. Carnaby had got his game. I grew excited and red-eared, and a little frightened, I behaved altogether like a silly little chap, and the outcome of it all was that instead of starting alone for my enchanted garden, I led the way presentlyâcheeks flushed, ears hot, eyes smarting, and my soul one burning misery and shameâfor a party of six mocking, curious and threatening school-fellows. âWe never found the white wall and the green door . . .â âYou mean?ââ âI mean I couldnât find it. I would have found it if I could. âAnd afterwards when I could go alone I couldnât find it. I never found it. I seem now to have been always looking for it through my school-boy days, but Iâve never come upon it again.â âDid the fellowsâmake it disagreeable?â âBeastly . . . . . Carnaby held a council over me for wanton lying. I remember how I sneaked home and upstairs to hide the marks of my blubbering. But when I cried myself to sleep at last it wasnât for Carnaby, but for the garden, for the beautiful afternoon I had hoped for, for the sweet friendly women and the waiting playfellows and the game I had hoped to learn again, that beautiful forgotten game . . . . . âI believed firmly that if I had not toldâ . . . . . I had bad times after thatâcrying at night and wool-gathering by day. For two terms I slackened and had bad reports. Do you remember? Of course you would! It was _you_âyour beating me in mathematics that brought me back to the grind again.â III For a time my friend stared silently into the red heart of the fire. Then he said: âI never saw it again until I was seventeen. âIt leapt upon me for the third timeâas 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. âWe clattered byâI 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. âYes, sir!â said the cabman, smartly. âErâwellâitâs nothing,â I cried. â_My_ mistake! We havenât much time! Go on!â and he went on . . . âI 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 fatherâs house, with his praiseâhis rare praiseâand his sound counsels ringing in my ears, and I smoked my favourite pipeâthe formidable bulldog of adolescenceâand thought of that door in the long white wall. âIf I had stopped,â I thought, âI should have missed my scholarship, I should have missed Oxfordâmuddled all the fine career before me! I begin to see things better!â I fell musing deeply, but I did not doubt then this career of mine was a thing that merited sacrifice. âThose 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 openingâthe door of my career.â 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. âWellâ, he said and sighed, âI have served that career. I have doneâmuch 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. Yesâfour 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. Somethingâand yet there have been disappointments . . . . . âTwice I have been in loveâI will not dwell on thatâbut 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 Earlâs Court, and so happened on a white wall and a familiar green door. âOdd!â said I to myself, âbut I thought this place was on Campden Hill. Itâs the place I never could find somehowâlike counting Stonehengeâthe place of that queer day dream of mine.â And I went by it intent upon my purpose. It had no appeal to me that afternoon. âI had just a momentâs impulse to try the door, three steps aside were needed at the mostâthough I was sure enough in my heart that it would open to meâand 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 punctualityâI 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 . . . . . âYears of hard work after that and never a sight of the door. Itâs 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 overworkâperhaps it was what Iâve heard spoken of as the feeling of forty. I donât 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 developmentsâwhen I ought to be working. Odd, isnât 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. Yesâand Iâve seen it three times.â âThe garden?â âNoâthe door! And I havenât gone in!â He leaned over the table to me, with an enormous sorrow in his voice as he spoke. âThrice I have had my chanceâ_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 cameâ_I didnât go_. âThree times in one year have I passed that door and failed to enter. Three times in the last year. âThe first time was on the night of the snatch division on the Tenantsâ Redemption Bill, on which the Government was saved by a majority of three. You remember? No one on our sideâperhaps very few on the opposite sideâexpected 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 cousinâs motor. We got in barely in time, and on the way we passed my wall and doorâlivid in the moonlight, blotched with hot yellow as the glare of our lamps lit it, but unmistakable. âMy God!â cried I. âWhat?â said Hotchkiss. âNothing!â I answered, and the moment passed. ââIâve made a great sacrifice,â I told the whip as I got in. They all have,â he said, and hurried by. âI do not see how I could have done otherwise then. And the next occasion was as I rushed to my fatherâs 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 Ralphsâitâs no secret now you know that Iâve had my talk with Gurker. We had been dining at Frobisherâs, 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. Yesâyes. Thatâs all settled. It neednât be talked about yet, but thereâs no reason to keep a secret from you . . . . . Yesâthanks! thanks! But let me tell you my story. âThen, 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 Ralphsâ 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. Ralphsâ 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. âWe passed it talking. I passed it. I can still see the shadow of Gurkerâs marked profile, his opera hat tilted forward over his prominent nose, the many folds of his neck wrap going before my shadow and Ralphsâ as we sauntered past. âI passed within twenty inches of the door. âIf I say good-night to them, and go in,â I asked myself, âwhat will happen?â And I was all a-tingle for that word with Gurker. âI could not answer that question in the tangle of my other problems. âThey will think me mad,â I thought. âAnd suppose I vanish now!âAmazing disappearance of a prominent politician!â That weighed with me. A thousand inconceivably petty worldlinesses weighed with me in that crisis.â Then he turned on me with a sorrowful smile, and, speaking slowly; âHere I am!â he said. âHere I am!â he repeated, âand my chance has gone from me. Three times in one year the door has been offered meâthe 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 goneââ âHow do you know?â âI 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 successâthis vulgar, tawdry, irksome, envied thing. I have it.â He had a walnut in his big hand. âIf that was my success,â he said, and crushed it, and held it out for me to see. âLet 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 nightsâwhen it is less likely I shall be recognisedâI 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 aloneâgrievingâsometimes near audibly lamentingâfor a door, for a garden!â IV I can see now his rather pallid face, and the unfamiliar sombre fire that had come into his eyes. I see him very vividly to-night. I sit recalling his words, his tones, and last eveningâs _Westminster Gazette_ still lies on my sofa, containing the notice of his death. At lunch to-day the club was busy with him and the strange riddle of his fate. They found his body very early yesterday morning in a deep excavation near East Kensington Station. It is one of two shafts that have been made in connection with an extension of the railway southward. It is protected from the intrusion of the public by a hoarding upon the high road, in which a small doorway has been cut for the convenience of some of the workmen who live in that direction. The doorway was left unfastened through a misunderstanding between two gangers, and through it he made his way . . . . . My mind is darkened with questions and riddles. It would seem he walked all the way from the House that nightâhe has frequently walked home during the past Sessionâand so it is I figure his dark form coming along the late and empty streets, wrapped up, intent. And then did the pale electric lights near the station cheat the rough planking into a semblance of white? Did that fatal unfastened door awaken some memory? Was there, after all, ever any green door in the wall at all? I do not know. I have told his story as he told it to me. 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, somethingâI know not whatâthat in the guise of wall and door offered him an outlet, a secret and peculiar passage of escape into another and altogether more beautiful world. At any rate, you will say, it betrayed him in the end. But did it betray him? There you touch the inmost mystery of these dreamers, these men of vision and the imagination. We see our world fair and common, the hoarding and the pit. By our daylight standard he walked out of security into darkness, danger and death. But did he see like that? THE STAR It was on the first day of the New Year that the announcement was made, almost simultaneously from three observatories, that the motion of the planet Neptune, the outermost of all the planets that wheel about the sun, had become very erratic. Ogilvy had already called attention to a suspected retardation in its velocity in December. Such a piece of news was scarcely calculated to interest a world the greater portion of whose inhabitants were unaware of the existence of the planet Neptune, nor outside the astronomical profession did the subsequent discovery of a faint remote speck of light in the region of the perturbed planet cause any very great excitement. Scientific people, however, found the intelligence remarkable enough, even before it became known that the new body was rapidly growing larger and brighter, that its motion was quite different from the orderly progress of the planets, and that the deflection of Neptune and its satellite was becoming now of an unprecedented kind. Few people without a training in science can realise the huge isolation of the solar system. The sun with its specks of planets, its dust of planetoids, and its impalpable comets, swims in a vacant immensity that almost defeats the imagination. Beyond the orbit of Neptune there is space, vacant so far as human observation has penetrated, without warmth or light or sound, blank emptiness, for twenty million times a million miles. That is the smallest estimate of the distance to be traversed before the very nearest of the stars is attained. And, saving a few comets more unsubstantial than the thinnest flame, no matter had ever to human knowledge crossed this gulf of space, until early in the twentieth century this strange wanderer appeared. A vast mass of matter it was, bulky, heavy, rushing without warning out of the black mystery of the sky into the radiance of the sun. By the second day it was clearly visible to any decent instrument, as a speck with a barely sensible diameter, in the constellation Leo near Regulus. In a little while an opera glass could attain it. On the third day of the new year the newspaper readers of two hemispheres were made aware for the first time of the real importance of this unusual apparition in the heavens. âA Planetary Collision,â one London paper headed the news, and proclaimed Duchaineâs opinion that this strange new planet would probably collide with Neptune. The leader writers enlarged upon the topic; so that in most of the capitals of the world, on January 3rd, there was an expectation, however vague of some imminent phenomenon in the sky; and as the night followed the sunset round the globe, thousands of men turned their eyes skyward to seeâthe old familiar stars just as they had always been. Until it was dawn in London and Pollux setting and the stars overhead grown pale. The Winterâs dawn it was, a sickly filtering accumulation of daylight, and the light of gas and candles shone yellow in the windows to show where people were astir. But the yawning policeman saw the thing, the busy crowds in the markets stopped agape, workmen going to their work betimes, milkmen, the drivers of news-carts, dissipation going home jaded and pale, homeless wanderers, sentinels on their beats, and in the country, labourers trudging afield, poachers slinking home, all over the dusky quickening country it could be seenâand out at sea by seamen watching for the dayâa great white star, come suddenly into the westward sky! Brighter it was than any star in our skies; brighter than the evening star at its brightest. It still glowed out white and large, no mere twinkling spot of light, but a small round clear shining disc, an hour after the day had come. And where science has not reached, men stared and feared, telling one another of the wars and pestilences that are foreshadowed by these fiery signs in the Heavens. Sturdy Boers, dusky Hottentots, Gold Coast Negroes, Frenchmen, Spaniards, Portuguese, stood in the warmth of the sunrise watching the setting of this strange new star. And in a hundred observatories there had been suppressed excitement, rising almost to shouting pitch, as the two remote bodies had rushed together; and a hurrying to and fro, to gather photographic apparatus and spectroscope, and this appliance and that, to record this novel astonishing sight, the destruction of a world. For it was a world, a sister planet of our earth, far greater than our earth indeed, that had so suddenly flashed into flaming death. Neptune it was, had been struck, fairly and squarely, by the strange planet from outer space and the heat of the concussion had incontinently turned two solid globes into one vast mass of incandescence. Round the world that day, two hours before the dawn, went the pallid great white star, fading only as it sank westward and the sun mounted above it. Everywhere men marvelled at it, but of all those who saw it none could have marvelled more than those sailors, habitual watchers of the stars, who far away at sea had heard nothing of its advent and saw it now rise like a pigmy moon and climb zenithward and hang overhead and sink westward with the passing of the night. And when next it rose over Europe everywhere were crowds of watchers on hilly slopes, on house-roofs, in open spaces, staring eastward for the rising of the great new star. It rose with a white glow in front of it, like the glare of a white fire, and those who had seen it come into existence the night before cried out at the sight of it. âIt is larger,â they cried. âIt is brighter!â And, indeed the moon a quarter full and sinking in the west was in its apparent size beyond comparison, but scarcely in all its breadth had it as much brightness now as the little circle of the strange new star. âIt is brighter!â cried the people clustering in the streets. But in the dim observatories the watchers held their breath and peered at one another. â_It is nearer_,â they said. â_Nearer!_â And voice after voice repeated, âIt is nearer,â and the clicking telegraph took that up, and it trembled along telephone wires, and in a thousand cities grimy compositors fingered the type. âIt is nearer.â Men writing in offices, struck with a strange realisation, flung down their pens, men talking in a thousand places suddenly came upon a grotesque possibility in those words, âIt is nearer.â It hurried along wakening streets, it was shouted down the frost-stilled ways of quiet villages; men who had read these things from the throbbing tape stood in yellow-lit doorways shouting the news to the passersby. âIt is nearer.â Pretty women, flushed and glittering, heard the news told jestingly between the dances, and feigned an intelligent interest they did not feel. âNearer! Indeed. How curious! How very, very clever people must be to find out things like that!â Lonely tramps faring through the wintry night murmured those words to comfort themselvesâlooking skyward. âIt has need to be nearer, for the nightâs as cold as charity. Donât seem much warmth from it if it _is_ nearer, all the same.â âWhat is a new star to me?â cried the weeping woman kneeling beside her dead. The schoolboy, rising early for his examination work, puzzled it out for himselfâwith the great white star shining broad and bright through the frost-flowers of his window. âCentrifugal, centripetal,â he said, with his chin on his fist. âStop a planet in its flight, rob it of its centrifugal force, what then? Centripetal has it, and down it falls into the sun! And thisâ! âDo _we_ come in the way? I wonderââ The light of that day went the way of its brethren, and with the later watches of the frosty darkness rose the strange star again. And it was now so bright that the waxing moon seemed but a pale yellow ghost of itself,
{'title': 'The Door in the Wall, and Other Stories by H. G. Wells', 'source': 'Project Gutenberg', 'lang': 'en'}