| 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 |
One confidential evening, not three months ago, Lionel Wallace told me thisstory of the Door in the Wall. And at the time I thought that so far as he wasconcerned it was a true story.
He told it me with such a direct simplicity of conviction that I could not dootherwise than believe in him. But in the morning, in my own flat, I woke to adifferent atmosphere, and as I lay in bed and recalled the things he had toldme, stripped of the glamour of his earnest slow voice, denuded of the focussedshaded table light, the shadowy atmosphere that wrapped about him and thepleasant bright things, the dessert and glasses and napery of the dinner we hadshared, making them for the time a bright little world quite cut off fromevery-day realities, I saw it all as frankly incredible. “He wasmystifying!” I said, and then: “How well he did it!. . . . . Itisn’t quite the thing I should have expected him, of all people, to dowell.”
Afterwards, as I sat up in bed and sipped my morning tea, I found myself tryingto account for the flavour of reality that perplexed me in his impossiblereminiscences, by supposing they did in some way suggest, present,convey—I hardly know which word to use—experiences it was otherwiseimpossible to tell.
Well, I don’t resort to that explanation now. I have got over myintervening doubts. I believe now, as I believed at the moment of telling, thatWallace did to the very best of his ability strip the truth of his secret forme. But whether he himself saw, or only thought he saw, whether he himself wasthe 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 doubtsforever, 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 manto confide in me. He was, I think, defending himself against an imputation ofslackness and unreliability I had made in relation to a great public movementin 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 ofhis cigar ash, “I have been negligent. The fact is—it isn’t acase of ghosts or apparitions—but—it’s an odd thing to tellof, Redmond—I am haunted. I am haunted by something—that rathertakes the light out of things, that fills me with longings . . . . .”
He paused, checked by that English shyness that so often overcomes us when wewould speak of moving or grave or beautiful things. “You were at SaintAthelstan’s all through,” he said, and for a moment that seemed tome quite irrelevant. “Well”—and he paused. Then veryhaltingly at first, but afterwards more easily, he began to tell of the thingthat was hidden in his life, the haunting memory of a beauty and a happinessthat filled his heart with insatiable longings that made all