The Door in the Wall and Other Stories | Page 3

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THE DOOR IN THE WALL And Other Stories
BY H. G. WELLS

CONTENTS
The Door in the Wall 5 The Star 27 A Dream of Armageddon 43 The
Cone 75 A Moonlight Fable 91 The Diamond Maker 99 The Lord of
the Dynamos 111 The Country of the Blind 125

THE DOOR IN THE WALL AND OTHER STORIES

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.
Now that I