The Country of the Blind, and Other Stories
communication analogous to our books. So far their action has been a
steady progressive settlement, involving the flight or slaughter of every
human being in the new areas they invade. They are increasing rapidly in
numbers, and Holroyd at least is firmly convinced that they will finally
dispossess man over the whole of tropical South America.
And why should they stop at tropical South America?
Well, there they are, anyhow. By 1911 or thereabouts, if they go on as
they are going, they ought to strike the Capuarana Extension Railway, and
force themselves upon the attention of the European capitalist.
By 1920 they will be half-way down the Amazon. I fix 1950 or '60 at the
latest for the discovery of Europe.
XXXI.
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 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. "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 for ever, 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, "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
Aethelstan'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.
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 him--a woman
who had loved him greatly. "Suddenly," she said, "the interest goes out of
him. He forgets you. He doesn't care a rap for you--under his very
nose..."
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
couldn't cut--anyhow. 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 effort--as it were by
nature. We were at school together at Saint Aethelstan's College in West
Kensington for almost all our school-time. He came into the school as my
coequal, 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 Wall"--that 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 quite 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. "There was," he
said, "a crimson Virginia creeper in it--all one bright uniform crimson,
in a clear amber sunshine against a white wall. That came into the
impression somehow, though I don't 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.
"If I'm right in that, I was about five years and four months old."
He was, he said, rather a precocious little boy--he learnt 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. His mother died when he was two, 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 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 him--
he could not tell which--to yield to this attraction. He insisted upon it
as a curious thing that he knew from the very beginning--unless memory has
played him the queerest trick--that 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 in 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
glad--as 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. "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.
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.
"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. I became in a moment a very glad and
wonder-happy little boy--in 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?' 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 red 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...
"Along this cool avenue my girl-friend led me, looking down--I recall the
pleasant lines, the finely-modelled chin of her sweet kind face--asking 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...
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