The Door in the Wall
H. G. Wells
"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 focused, 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." . . .
