THE DOOR IN THE WALL

AND OTHER STORIES

THE DOOR IN THE WALL

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."

The Door in the Wall And Other Stories