The Country of the Blind

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 leapt 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 hansom 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 a corner.  Then I had a queer 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.  ‘Er—­well—­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 counsels ringing in my ears, and I smoked my favourite 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 and 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 light picked out a stubborn strength in his face for just one flickering moment, and then it vanished again.

“Well,” he said and sighed, “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-effaced 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?  I came down to London from Oxford, a man of bold promise that I have done something to redeem.  Something—­and yet there have been disappointments…

“Twice I have been in love—­I will not dwell on that—­but once, as I went to someone who, I knew, doubted whether I dared to come, I took a short cut at a venture through an unfrequented road near Earl’s Court, and so happened on a white wall and a familiar green door.  ‘Odd!’ said I to myself, ’but I thought this place was on Campden Hill.  It’s the place I never could find somehow—­like counting Stonehenge—­the place of that queer daydream of mine.’  And I went by it 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 honour was involved.  Afterwards I was sorry for my punctuality—­might at least have peeped in, I thought, and waved a hand to those panthers, but I knew enough by this time not to seek again belatedly that which is not found by seeking.  Yes, that time made me very sorry…

“Years of hard work after that, and never a sight of the door.  It’s only recently it has come back to me.  With it there has come a sense as though some thin tarnish had spread itself over my world.  I began to think of it as a sorrowful and bitter thing that I should never see that door again.  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, its 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!  And I haven’t gone in!”

He leant over the table to me, with an enormous sorrow in his voice as he spoke.  “Thrice I have had my chance—­thrice!  If ever that door offers itself to me again, I swore, I will go in, out of this dust and heat, out of this dry glitter of vanity, out of these toilsome futilities.  I will go and never return.  This time I will stay…  I swore it, and when the time came—­I didn’t go.

“Three times in one year have I passed that door and failed to enter.  Three times in the last year.

“The first time was on the night of the snatch division on the Tenants’ Redemption Bill, on which the Government was saved by a majority of three.  You remember?  No one on our side—­perhaps very few on the opposite side—­ expected the end that night.  Then the debate collapsed like eggshells.  I and Hotchkiss 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—­livid in the moonlight, blotched with hot yellow as the glare of our lamps lit it, but unmistakable.  ‘My God!’ cried I.  ‘What?’ said Hotchkiss.  ‘Nothing!’ I answered, and the moment passed.

“‘I’ve made a great sacrifice,’ I told the whip as I got in.  ’They all have,’ he said, and hurried by.

“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.  I was with Gurker and Ralphs—­it’s no secret now, you know, that I’ve had my talk with Gurker.  We had been dining at Frobisher’s, and the talk had become intimate between us.  The question of my place in the reconstructed Ministry lay always just over the boundary of the discussion.  Yes—­yes.  That’s all settled.  It needn’t be talked about yet, but there’s no reason to keep a secret from you…  Yes—­thanks! thanks!  But let me tell you my story.

“Then, on that night things were very much in the air.  My position was a very delicate one.  I was keenly anxious to get some definite word from Gurker, but was hampered by Ralphs’ presence.  I was using the best power of my brain to keep that light and careless talk not too obviously directed to the point that concerned me.  I had to.  Ralphs’ behaviour since has more than justified my caution…  Ralphs, I knew, would leave us beyond the Kensington High Street, and then I could surprise Gurker by a sudden frankness.  One has sometimes to resort to these little devices…  And then it was that in the 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 Gurker’s marked profile, his opera hat tilted forward over his prominent nose, the many folds of his neck wrap going before my shadow and Ralphs’ as we sauntered past.

“I passed within twenty inches of the door.  ’If I say good-night to them, and go in,’ I asked myself, ‘what will happen?’ And I was all a-tingle for that word with Gurker.

“I could not answer that question in the tangle 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.  A thousand inconceivably petty worldlinesses weighed with me in that crisis.”

Then he turned on me with a sorrowful smile, and, speaking slowly, “Here I am!” he said.

“Here I am!” he repeated, “and my chance has gone from me.  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——­”

“How do you know?”

“I know.  I know.  I am left now to work it out, to stick to the tasks that held me so strongly when my moments came.  You say I have success—­this vulgar, tawdry, irksome, envied thing.  I have it.”  He had a walnut in his big hand.  “If that was my success,” he said, and crushed it, and held it out for me to see.

“Let me tell you something, Redmond.  This loss is destroying me.  For two months, for ten weeks nearly now, I have done no work at all, except the most necessary and urgent duties.  My soul is full of inappeasable regrets.  At nights—­when it is less likely I shall be recognised—­I go out.  I wander.  Yes.  I wonder what people would think of that if they knew.  A Cabinet Minister, the responsible head of that most vital of all departments, wandering alone—­grieving—­sometimes near audibly lamenting—­ for a door, for a garden!”