This entry and this entry got me thinking about a story I haven't read in a long time.

Most people with at least a passing interest in literature or science fiction will have heard of H.G. Wells' better-known works such as The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds (does anyone remember the prog-rock album inspired by it?). While I enjoyed both, the Wells story that really "got" me was the short story, The Door in the Wall.

(The "Door in the Wall" link leads to the full text of the short story. Go ahead and look -- it's a pretty quick read.)

In The Door in the Wall, Lionel Wallace is an Englishman of high standing -- "A Cabinet Minister, the responsible head of that most vital of all departments", as he describes himself. Redmond, the narrator, describes Wallace:

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.

In spite of all this, Wallace is not a happy man. He is a haunted man, consumed with regret.

When he was a child, he wandered away from home and got lost in West Kensington, where he chanced upon a green door set into a white wall. He felt strangely compelled to pass through the door, which led him to a magical garden filled with friendly panthers, happy playmates and wonderful games. After playing for some time, he was appraoched by a woman who showed him an unusual book:

"She took me to a seat in the gallery, and I stood beside her, ready to look at her book as she opened it upon her knee. The pages fell open. She pointed, and I looked, marvelling, for in the living pages of that book I saw myself; it was a story about myself, and in it were all the things that had happened to me since ever I was born . . . ."

"It was wonderful to me, because the pages of that book were not pictures, you understand, but realities."

The page immediately after the one that showed him wondering whether to go through the green door did not show him playing in the garden. Instead, it transported him back to the grey streets of West Kensington.

He tells Redmond that he has seen the door a number of times throughout his life, but never went through it again. Each time he had seen the door, he had some kind of pressing appointment: school, a lady, an important vote in parliament. Each time, to his eternal regret, he chose ignore the door. After telling his story to Redmond, he vowed that the next time he saw the door, he would not ignore it.

He is found dead in a tubeway construction site the day after he saw Redmond. He had apparently gone through a door set in a wall surrounding the site and plunged into the excavation to his death.

Was the door and the garden just the product of a bright but stifled child's imagination, or did Wallace actually discover some kind of gateway to another world? I don't think it matters. Regardless of whether it was a magical portal or ordinary door, if he had tried the door at least once after his first encounter, he wouldn't have lived a life of hollow victories, of "if only" and "what could have been", and he might not have fallen to his death as a result of desperation.

Do you keep walking past your door in the wall?