The Door in the wall

The Door in the Wall is a short story by H. G. Wells, first published in the Daily Chronicle in 1906. A successful politician's secret reaches the reader through a confession framed by doubt.

Lionel Wallace tells his old school friend Redmond that, as a lonely child, he passed through a green door in a white wall and entered an enchanted garden. Its welcome and beauty became a lost vision of happiness against which ordinary life seemed diminished.

The door appears again at decisive moments, but Wallace repeatedly passes it to meet the demands of school, love, and public advancement. Each refusal helps build his brilliant career while ambition repeatedly wins over the possibility of return.

After Wallace's death, Redmond cannot decide whether the garden was supernatural, imagined, or a fatal misreading of the city. Wells preserves that uncertainty while making the cost of postponed wonder emotionally clear.

"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."