The Door in the Wall

One confidential evening, not three months ago, Lionel Wallace told me this story of the Door inthe 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 thanbelieve in him. But in the morning, in my own flat, I woke to a different atmosphere, and as I lay inbed 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 andthe pleasant bright things, the dessert and glasses and napery of the dinner we had shared, makingthem for the time a bright little world quite cut off from every-day realities, I saw it all as franklyincredible. "He was mystifying!" I said, and then: "How well he did it!. . . . . It isn't quite the thing Ishould 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 forthe flavour of reality that perplexed me in his impossible reminiscences, by supposing they did insome way suggest, present, convey-I hardly know which word to use-experiences it wasotherwise impossible to tell.Well, I don't resort to that explanation now. I have got over my intervening doubts. I believenow, as I believed at the moment of telling, that Wallace did to the very best of his ability strip thetruth of his secret for me. But whether he himself saw, or only thought he saw, whether he himselfwas the possessor of an inestimable privilege, or the victim of a fantastic dream, I cannot pretend toguess. Even the facts of his death, which ended my doubts forever, throw no light on that. Thatmuch the reader must judge for himself