Music Welcome to snoozecast. The podcast designed to help you fall asleep. newscast.com. This episode is brought to you by Enchanted Gardens. Tonight we'll read The Door in the Wall, a short story written in 1911 by H.G. Wells. Considered to be one of his finest short stories, it explores the tension between the rational

and the fans of experiences in life. Let's get cozy. Close your eyes. Relax your body and at the softness of your eyes.

Relax your body and at the softness of your breath.

Now, take a few deep breaths. 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 to 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. De-neuded of the focused, 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 for them the time of bright little worlds quite could off from everyday realities. I saw it all as frankly incredible. Afterwards as I sat up in bed and sipped my morning tea, I found myself trying to account for the flavor of reality that perplexed me in his impossible reminiscence by supposing they did in some way suggest, present, convey, 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, stripped 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. I forget now what chance, comment, or criticism of mine moved so reticent a man to confide in me. He was, I think, defending himself against an imputation of slackness and unreliability I had made in relation to a great public movement in which he had disappointed me. But he plunged suddenly. I have, he said, a pre-occupation. I know. He went on after a pause that he devoted to the study of his cigar ash. I have been negligent. The fact is, it isn't a case of ghosts or apparitions, but it's an odd thing to tell of. Redmond, I am haunted. I am haunted by something that rather takes the light out of things. That fills me with longings. He paused, checked by that English shyness that so often overcomes us when we would speak of moving or grave or beautiful things. You were at St. Athel stands all through, he said, and for a moment that seemed to me He quite irrelevant. Well, and he paused, then very haltingly at first, but afterwards more easily, he began to tell of the thing that was hidden in his life, the haunting memory of a beauty and happiness that filled his heart with insatiable longings that made all the interests and spectacle of worldly life seem dull and tedious and vain to him. Now that I have the clue to it, the thing seems written visibly in his face. I have a photograph in which that look of detachment has been caught and intensified. It reminds me of what a woman once said of him, a woman who had loved him greatly. Suddenly, she said, the interest goes out of him. He forgets you. Yet the interest was not always out of him, and when he was holding his attention to a thing Wallace could contrive to be an extremely successful man. His career, indeed, is set with successes. He left me behind him long ago. 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 40 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 if it were by nature. We were at school together at St. Athelstrand'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. Yet I think I made a fair average running, and it was at school I heard first of the door in the wall. To him at least, the door in the wall was a real door leading through a real wall to immortal realities. Of that, I am now quite assured. and it came into his life early when he was a little fellow between five and six. I remember how, as he sat making his confession to me with a slow gravity, he reasoned and reckoned the date of it. There was, he said, a crimson Virginia creeper in it, all one bright uniform crimson in a clear amber sunshine against a white wall. That came into the impression somehow, though I don't clearly remember how, and there were horse-chestnut leaves upon the clean pavement outside the green door. They were blotched, yellow and green, you know, not brown or dirty, so that they must have been new fallen. I take it that means October. I look out for horse chestnut leaves every year, and I ought to know. If I am right in that, I was about five years and four months old. He was, he said. Rather a percusious little boy, he learned to talk at an abnormally early age, and he was so sane and old fashioned, as people say, that he was permitted at a mount of initiative that most children scarcely attain by seven or eight. For all his brightness, he found life a little gray and dull, I think. And one day, he wandered. He could not recall the particular neglect that enabled him to get away, nor the course he took among the West Kensington Roads all that had faded among the incurable blurs of memory. But the white wall and the green door stood out quite distinctly. As his memory of that remote childish experience ran, he did, at the very first sight of that door, experience a peculiar emotion, an attraction, a desire to get to the door and open it and walk in. And at the same time, he had the clearest conviction that either it was unwise, it was wrong of him, he could not tell which to yield to this attraction. He insisted upon it as a curious thing that he knew from the very beginning, unless memory has played him the strangest trick that the door door was unfassant, and that he could go in as he chose. Wallace described all these moments of hesitation to me, with the utmost particularity. He went right past the door, and then, with his hands and his pockets, and making an infantile attempt to whistle, stroled right along beyond the end of the wall. There he recalls a number of mean dirty shops, and particularly that of a plumber and decorator, with a dusty disorder of earth and wear pipes, sheet-led bowl taps, patterned books of wallpaper, and tins of an amel. He stood, pretending to examine these things and coveting passionately, desiring the green door. Then, he said he had a gust of emotion.

He made a run for it. Lest hesitation should grip him again. He went plump without stretched hand through the green door and let it slam behind him. And so, in a trice, he came into the garden that has haunted all his life. It was very difficult for Wallace to give me his full sense of that garden into which he came. There was something in the very air of it that exhilarated, that gave one a sense of lightness and good happening and well-being. There was something in the sight of it that made all its color clean and perfect and subtly luminous. In the instant of coming into it one was exquisitely glad, as only in rare moments, and when one is young and joyful, one can be glad in this world, and everything was beautiful there. Wallace mused before he went on telling me, you see, he said, with the doubtful inflection of a man who pauses at incredible things. There were two great panthers there. Yes, spotted panthers, and I was not afraid. There was a long wide path with marble-edged flower borders on either side, and these two huge velvety beasts were playing there with a ball. One looked up and came towards me, a little curious as it seemed. It came right up to me, rubbed its soft round ear very gently against the small hand I held out and purred. It was, I tell you, an enchanted garden, I know, and the size, it stretched far and wide. This way and that, I believe there were hills far away. Heaven knows where West Kensington had suddenly got to, and somehow it was just like coming home.

You know, in the very moment the door swung to behind me, I forgot the road was its fallen chestnut leaves, its cabs and tradesmen's carts.

I forgot this sort of gravitational pull back to the discipline and obedience of home. I forgot all hesitations and fear. Forgot discretion. Forgot all the intimate realities of this life. I became in a moment a very glad and wonder happy little boy in another world. It was a world with a different quality, a warmer, more penetrating and mellower light, with a faint, clear gladness in its air and whips of sun-touched cloud in the blueness of its sky. before me ran this long wide path, invitingly, with weedless beds on either side, rich with untended flowers, and these two great panthers. I've put my little hands fearlessly on their soft fur, and caressed their round ears and the sensitive corners under their ears and played with them. And it was as though they welcomed me home. There was a keen sense of home coming in my mind, and when presently a tall, fair girl appeared in the pathway and came to meet me smiling and said,

Well. A tall, fair girl appeared in the pathway, and came to meet me, smiling, and said, Well, to me, and lifted me, and kissed me, and put me down, and led me by the hand, there was no amazement, but only an impression of delightful rightness, of being reminded of happy things that had in some strange way been overlooked. There were broad steps, I remember, that came into view between spikes of delphinium, and up these went to a great avenue between very old and shady dark trees. down this avenue, you know, between the red-chapped stems, were marble seats of honor and statuary, and very tame and friendly white doves. And along this avenue, my girl friend led me. Looking down, I recall the pleasant lines, the finely-modeled chin of her sweet kind face, asking me questions in a soft, agreeable voice, and telling me things, pleasant things I know. Though what they were, I was never able to recall. Presently,, a little monkey, very clean, with a fur of ready brown and kindly hazel eyes, came down a tree to us, and ran beside me, looking up at me and grinning, and presently leapt to my shoulder. So he went on our way in great happiness. He paused. "'Go on,' I said. "'I remember little things. We passed an old man using among laurels. I remember, and a place, cheery, with parakeets, and came through a broad shaded colonnade to a spacious, cooled palace full of pleasant fountains, full of beautiful things, full of the quality and promise of heart's desire. And there were many things and many people, some that still seemed to stand out clearly, and some that are a little vague, but all these people were beautiful and kind. In some way, I don't know how. It was conveyed to me that they were all kind to me.

Glad to have me there.

And filling... away. I don't know how. It was conveyed to me that they were all kind to me. Glad to have me there, and filling me with gladness by their gestures, by the touch of their hands, by the welcome and love in their eyes. Yes, he used for a while. Playmates I found there. That was very much to me because I was a lonely little boy. They played delightful games in a grass-covered court where there was a sundial set about with flowers and as one played, one loved.

But it's odd. There's a gap in my memory. I don't remember the games we played. I never remembered. Afterwards as a child, I spent long hours trying, even with tears, to recall the form of that happiness. I wanted to play it all over again in my nursery.

Bye. tears to recall the form of that happiness. I wanted to play it all over again in my nursery

by myself. No, all I remember is the happiness in my two dear playfellows who are most with me. Then presently came a somber woman, with a grave pale face, and a dreamy eye, a somber woman wearing a soft long robe of pale purple, who carried a book and beckoned and took me aside with her into a gallery above a hall. Though my playmates were loathe to have me go and cease their game and stood watching as I was carried away, come back to us, they cried, come back to us soon. I looked up at her face, but she heated them not at all. Her face was very gentle and grave. He 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, marveling, 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. Wallace paused gravely, looked at me doubtfully. Go on, I said, I understand. They were realities, yes, they must have been. People moved and things came and went in them. My dear mother, whom I had near forgotten, then my father, stern and upright, the nursery, all the familiar things of home, then the front door and the busy streets. With traffic, two in throw, I looked and marveled, and looked half doubtfully again into the woman's face, and turned the pages over, skipping this and that to see more of this book. In more, and so at last I came to myself hovering and hesitating outside the green door in a long white wall. And next, I cried, and would have turned on, but the cool hand of the grave woman delayed me. Next, I insisted and struggled gently with her hand, pulling up her fingers with all my childish strength, and as she yielded, and the page came over, she bent down upon me like a shadow and kissed my brow. But the page did not show the enchanted garden, nor the panthers, nor the girl who had led me by the hand, nor the play-fellows who had been so low to let me go. It showed a long grey street in West Kensington on that chill hour of afternoon before the lamps are lit. And I was there, a wretched little figure, and I was weeping because I could not return to my dear play-fellows who had called after me. Come back to us, come back to us soon, I was there.

He halted again and remained for a time, staring into the fire. Well, I said, after a minute or so, poor little Rhatch I was, brought back to this gray world again, then I came from the enchanted garden to the steps of my father's house. That is as well as I can remember my vision of that garden. The garden that haunts me still. Of course, I can convey nothing of that indescribable quality of translucent unreality. That difference from the common things of experience that hung about it all. But that, that is what happened. If it was a dream, I am sure it was a daytime and altogether extraordinary dream. Naturally, they're followed a terrible questioning by my aunt, my father, the nurse, the governess, and everyone. I tried to tell them, even my fairy tale books were taken away from me for a time, because I was too imaginative. Yes, they did that. My father belonged to the old school, and my story was driven back upon myself. I whispered it to my pillow. pillow that was often damp and salt to my whispering lips with childish tears. I dreamt often of the garden. I may have added to it, I may have changed it, I do not know. All this you understand is an attempt to reconstruct for fragmentary memories a very early experience. Between that and the other consecutive memories of my boyhood, there is a gulf. A time came when it seemed impossible I should ever speak of that wonder glimpse again. I asked an obvious question. He looked up with a sudden smile. Did you ever play Northwest passage with me? No, of course. You didn't come my way. It was this sort of game he went on that every imaginative child plays all day. The idea was the discovery of a Northwest passage to school. The way to school was plain enough. The game consisted in finding some way that wasn't plain. Starting off 10 minutes early in some almost hopeless direction, and working one's way round through on a custom streets to my goal. In one day, I got entangled among some rather low-class streets on the other side of Camden Hill, and I began to think that for once the game would be against me, and that I should get to school late. I tried rather desperately a street that seemed to call the sack and found a passage at the end. I hurried through that with renewed hope. I shall do it yet, I said, and passed a row of frowsy little shops that were inexplicably familiar to me, and behold, there was my long white wall in the green door that led to the enchanted garden. The thing whacked upon me suddenly, then, after all, that garden, that wonderful garden, wasn't a dream. He paused. I suppose my second experience with the green door marks the world of difference there is between the busy life of a schoolboy and the infinite leisure of a child. Anyhow, the second time I didn't for a moment think of going in straight away. You see, for one thing, my mind was full of the idea of getting to school on time. Set on not breaking my record for punctuality. I must surely have felt some little desire

at least to try the door, yes. I must have felt that. But I seem to remember the attraction

of the door, mainly as another obstacle to my overmastering determination to get to school.

I was immediately interested by this discovery I had made, of course. I went on with my mind full of it, but I went on. It didn't check me. I ran past, tugging out my watch. Found I had ten minutes still to spare, and then I was going downhill into familiar surroundings. I got to school, breathless, it is true, and wet with perspiration, but in time. I can remember hanging up my coat and hat, Went right by it and left it behind me. Odd, eh? He looked at me thoughtfully. Of course, I didn't know then that it would always be there. Schoolboys have limited imaginations. I suppose I thought it was an awfully jolly thing to have it there, to know my way back to it, but there was the school tugging at me. I expect I was a good deal to strut and inattentive that morning, recalling what I could of the beautiful strange people I should presently see again. Oddly enough, I had no doubt in my mind that they would be glad to see me, yes, I must have thought of the garden that morning, just as jolly sort of place to which one might resort in the interludes of a strenuous, scholastic career. I didn't go that day at all. The next day was a half holiday, and that may have weighed with me. Perhaps too, my state of inattention brought down impositions upon me and docked the margin of time necessary for the detour. I don't know. What I do know is that in the meantime, the enchanted garden was so much upon my mind that I could not keep it to myself. I told him what was his name? Atherity looking youngster we used to call Squiff. A young Hopkins said, I, Hopkins it was. I did not like telling him. I had a feeling that in some way it was against the rules to tell him. But I did. He was walking part of the way home with me. He was talkative. and if we had not talked about the enchanted garden, we would have talked about something else. And it was intolerable to me to think about any other subject. So I plabbed. Well, he told my secret. The next day in the play interval, I found myself surrounded by half a dozen bigger boys, half teasing and wholly curious to hear more of the enchanted garden. Wallace's voice sank with the keen memory of that shame, and I pretended not to hear, he said. I said I knew where to find the green door, could leave them all there in ten minutes. Carnaby became outrageously virtuous, and said I'd have to, and bear out my words or suffer. Carnaby had got his game. I grew excited and ready-eared. We never found the white wall in the green door. You mean I mean I couldn't find it? I would have found it if I could. And afterwards, when I could go alone, I couldn't find it, I never found it. I seem now to have been always looking for it through my schoolboy days, but I've never come upon it again. For a time, my friend stared silently into the red heart of the fire. Then he said, I never saw it again until I was seventeen. It left upon me for the third time, as I was driving to Paddington on my way to Oxford and a scholarship. I had just one momentary glimpse. I was leaning over the apron of my handsome smoking a cigarette and no doubt thinking myself no end of a man of the world. And suddenly there was the door, the wall, the dear sense of unforgettable and still attainable things. We clattered by, I too taken by surprise to stop my cab until we were well past and round to corner.

Then I had a strange moment, a double and divergent movement of my will. I tapped the little door in the roof of the cab and brought my arm down to pull out my watch. Yes, sir. Said the cabman, smartly. Err...

Oh, it's nothing. I cried. My mistake. We haven't much time. Go on, and he went on. I got my scholarship, and the night after I was told of that, I sat over my fire in my little upper room, my study, in my father's house, with his praise, his rare praise, and his sound councils ringing in my ears, and I smoked my favorite pipe, the formidable bulldog of adolescence, and thought of that door in the long white wall.

If I had stopped, I thought I should have missed my scholarship. I should have missed Oxford. Muddled all the fine career before me. I begin to see things better. I fell, musing deeply. But I did not doubt then this career of mine was a thing that merited sacrifice. Those dear friends in that clear atmosphere seemed very sweet to me. Very fine but remote. My grip was fixing now upon the world. I saw another door opening, the door of my career. He stared again into the fire. Its red lights picked out a stubborn strength in his face for just one flickering moment. And it vanished again. Well, he said inside. I have served that career. I have done much work. Much hard work. But I have dreamt of the enchanted garden a thousand dreams and seen its door, or at least glimpsed its door four times since then, yes four times. For a while this world was so bright and interesting, seemed so full of meaning and opportunity that the half-a-faced charm of the garden was by comparison gentle and remote. Who wants to pat panthers on the way to dinner with pretty women and distinguished men? Twice I have been in love. I will not dwell on that, but once, as I went to someone who, I know, doubted whether I dared to come. I took a shortcut at adventure through an unfrequent and road near Earl's court. And so happened on a white wall, and a familiar green door. I Odd said hi to myself, but I thought this place was on Camden Hill. It's the place I never could find somehow. Like counting stonehenge, the place of that strange daydream of mine. And I went by an intent upon my purpose. It had no appeal to me that afternoon. I had just a moment's impulse to try the door. Three steps aside were needed at the most, though I was sure enough in my heart that it would open to me. And then I thought that doing so might delay me on the way to that appointment in which I thought my honor was involved. Afterwards I was sorry for my punctuality. Years of hard work after that had never a sight of the door. It's only recently it has come back to me. Perhaps I was suffering a little from overwork. Perhaps it was what I've heard spoken of as the feeling of forty. I don't know, but certainly the keen brightness that makes effort easy has gone out of things recently, and that just at a time with all these new political developments, when I ought to be working. Odd, isn't it? But I do begin to find life toilsome. It's rewards as I come near them cheap. I began a little while ago to want the garden quite badly. Yes, and I've seen it three times. The garden? No, the door. I haven't gone in. Three times in one year have I passed the door and failed to enter three times in the last year. I and Hodgkis were dining with his cousin at Brentford. We were both unpaired and we were called up by telephone and set off at once in his cousin's motor. We got in barely in time. And on the way, we passed my wall and door. We lived in the moonlight, blotched with hot yellow as the glare of our lamps lit it. But unmistakable, my God cried high. Why said Hodgkis? Nothing, I answered, and the moment passed. I do not see how I could have done otherwise then. And the next occasion was as I rushed to my father's bedside to bid that stern old man farewell. Then, too, the claims of life were imperative, but the third time was different. It happened a week ago. It fills me with hot remorse to recall it. Then on that night things were very much in the air. My position was a very delicate one. I was using the best power of my brain to keep that light and careless talk, not too obviously directed to the point that concerns me. I had to. And then it was that in that margin of my field of vision, I became aware once more of the white wall, the green door before us down the road. We passed it talking, I passed it. I can still see the shadow of Gerkers marked profile. His opera tilted forward over his prominent nose. The many folds of his neckwrap going before my shadow and ralphs as we sonnered past. I passed within 20 inches of the door. If I say goodnight to them and go in, I asked myself what will happen. And I was all a tingle for that word with Gercour. I could not answer that question in the tingle of my other problems. They will think me mad, I thought,

and suppose I vanish now, amazing disappearance of a prominent politician. That weighed with me. Here I am, he repeated, and my chance has gone from me three Three times in one year, the door has been offered me, the door that goes into peace, into delight, into a beauty beyond dreaming, a kindness no man on earth can know. And I have rejected it Redmond.

And it has gone.

...