The Door in the Wall and Other Stories | Page 4

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
Athelstan's 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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