The Door in the Wall and Other Stories

by H. G. (Herbert George) Wells

  "Once more, and as it were only for a few instants. I seemed to have suddenly awakened out of a great apathy, to have risen into a sitting position, and the body lay there on the stones beside me.

  A gaunt body. Not her, you know. So soon--it was not her . . . .

  "I may have heard voices. I do not know. Only I knew clearly that men were coming into the solitude and that that was a last outrage.

  "I stood up and walked through the temple, and then there came into sight--first one man with a yellow face, dressed in a uniform of dirty white, trimmed with blue, and then several, climbing to the crest of the old wall of the vanished city, and crouching there.

  They were little bright figures in the sunlight, and there they hung, weapon in hand, peering cautiously before them.

  "And further away I saw others and then more at another point in the wall. It was a long lax line of men in open order.

  "Presently the man I had first seen stood up and shouted a command, and his men came tumbling down the wall and into the high weeds towards the temple. He scrambled down with them and led them. He came facing towards me, and when he saw me he stopped.

  "At first I had watched these men with a mere curiosity, but when I had seen they meant to come to the temple I was moved to forbid them. I shouted to the officer.

  "'You must not come here,' I cried, '_I_ am here. I am here with my dead.'

  "He stared, and then shouted a question back to me in some unknown tongue.

  "I repeated what I had said.

  "He shouted again, and I folded my arms and stood still. Presently he spoke to his men and came forward. He carried a drawn sword.

  "I signed to him to keep away, but he continued to advance. I told him again very patiently and clearly: 'You must not come here. These are old temples and I am here with my dead.'

  "Presently he was so close I could see his face clearly. It was a narrow face, with dull gray eyes, and a black moustache. He had a scar on his upper lip, and he was dirty and unshaven. He kept shouting unintelligible things, questions, perhaps, at me.

  "I know now that he was afraid of me, but at the time that did not occur to me. As I tried to explain to him, he interrupted me in imperious tones, bidding me, I suppose, stand aside.

  "He made to go past me, and I caught hold of him.

  "I saw his face change at my grip.

  "'You fool,' I cried. 'Don't you know? She is dead!'

  "He started back. He looked at me with cruel eyes. I saw a sort of exultant resolve leap into them--delight. Then, suddenly, with a scowl, he swept his sword back--SO--and thrust."

  He stopped abruptly.

  I became aware of a change in the rhythm of the train. The brakes lifted their voices and the carriage jarred and jerked. This present world insisted upon itself, became clamourous. I saw through the steamy window huge electric fights glaring down from tall masts upon a fog, saw rows of stationary empty carriages passing by, and then a signal-box hoisting its constellation of green and red into the murky London twilight, marched after them. I looked again at his drawn features.

  "He ran me through the heart. It was with a sort of astonishment--no fear, no pain--but just amazement, that I felt it pierce me, felt the sword drive home into my body. It didn't hurt, you know. It didn't hurt at all."

  The yellow platform lights came into the field of view, passing first rapidly, then slowly, and at last stopping with a jerk. Dim shapes of men passed to and fro without.

  "Euston!" cried a voice.

  "Do you mean--?"

  "There was no pain, no sting or smart. Amazement and then darkness sweeping over everything. The hot, brutal face before me, the face of the man who had killed me, seemed to recede. It swept out of existence--"

  "Euston!" clamoured the voices outside; "Euston!"

  The carriage door opened admitting a flood of sound, and a porter stood regarding us.

  The sounds of doors slamming, and the hoof-clatter of cab-horses, and behind these things the featureless remote roar of the London cobble-stones, came to my ears. A truckload of lighted lamps blazed along the platform.

  "A darkness, a flood of darkness that opened and spread and blotted out all things."

  "Any luggage, sir?" said the porter.

  "And that was the end?" I asked.

  He seemed to hesitate. Then, almost inaudibly, he answered, "NO."

  "You mean?"

  "I couldn't get to her. She was there on the other side of the temple-- And then--"

  "Yes," I insisted. "Yes?"

  "Nightmares," he cried; "nightmares indeed! My God! Great birds that fought and tore."

  The Cone

  The night was hot and overcast, the sky red, rimmed with the lingering sunset of midsummer. They sat at the open window, trying to fancy the air was fresher there. The trees and shrubs of the garden stood stiff and dark; beyond in the roadway a gas- lamp burnt, bright orange against the hazy blue of the evening. Farther were the three lights of the railway signal against the lowering sky. The man and woman spoke to one another in low tones.

  "He does not suspect?" said the man, a little nervously.

  "Not he," she said peevishly, as though that too irritated her. "He thinks of nothing but the works and the prices of fuel. He has no imagination, no poetry."

  "None of these men of iron have," he said sententiously. "They have no hearts."

  "HE has not," she said. She turned her discontented face towards the window. The distant sound of a roaring and rushing drew nearer and grew in volume; the house quivered; one heard the metallic rattle of the tender. As the train passed, there was a glare of light above the cutting and a driving tumult of smoke; one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight black oblongs--eight trucks--passed across the dim grey of the embankment, and were suddenly extinguished one by one in the throat of the tunnel, which, with the last, seemed to swallow down train, smoke, and sound in one abrupt gulp.

  "This country was all fresh and beautiful once," he said; "and now--it is Gehenna. Down that way--nothing but pot-banks and chimneys belching fire and dust into the face of heaven . . . . . But what does it matter? An end comes, an end to all this cruelty . . . . . TO-MORROW." He spoke the last word in a whisper.

  "TO-MORROW," she said, speaking in a whisper too, and still staring out of the window.

  "Dear!" he said, putting his hand on hers.

  She turned with a start, and their eyes searched one another's. Hers softened to his gaze.

  "My dear one!" she said, and then: "It seems so strange --that you should have come into my life like this--to open--" She paused.

  "To open?" he said.

  "All this wonderful world--" she hesitated, and spoke still more softly--"this world of LOVE to me."

  Then suddenly the door clicked and closed. They turned their heads, and he started violently back. In the shadow of the room stood a great shadowy figure--silent. They saw the face dimly in the half-light, with unexpressive dark patches under the penthouse brows. Every muscle in Raut's body suddenly became tense. When could the door have opened? What had he heard? Had he heard all? What had he seen? A tumult of questions.

  The new-comer's voice came at last, after a pause that seemed interminable. "Well?" he said.

  "I was afraid I had missed you, Horrocks," said the man at the window, gripping the window-ledge with his hand. His voice was unsteady.

  The clumsy figure of Horrocks came forward out of the shadow. He made no answer to Raut's remark. For a moment he stood above them.

  The woman's heart was cold within her. "I told Mr. Raut it was just possible you might come back," she said, in a voice that never quivered.

  Horrocks, still silent, sat down abruptly in the chair by her little work-table. His big hands were clenched; one saw now the fire of his eyes under the shadow of his brows. He was trying to get his breath. His eyes went from the woman he had trusted to the friend he had trusted, and then back to the woman.

  By this time and for the moment all three half und
erstood one another. Yet none dared say a word to ease the pent-up things that choked them.

  It was the husband's voice that broke the silence at last.

  "You wanted to see me?" he said to Raut.

  Raut started as he spoke. "I came to see you," he said, resolved to lie to the last.

  "Yes," said Horrocks.

  "You promised," said Raut, "to show me some fine effects of moonlight and smoke."

  "I promised to show you some fine effects of moonlight and smoke," repeated Horrocks in a colourless voice.

  "And I thought I might catch you to-night before you went down to the works,"

  proceeded Raut, "and come with you."

  There was another pause. Did the man mean to take the thing coolly? Did he after all know? How long had he been in the room? Yet even at the moment when they heard the door, their attitudes . . . . Horrocks glanced at the profile of the woman, shadowy pallid in the half-light. Then he glanced at Raut, and seemed to recover himself suddenly. "Of course," he said, "I promised to show you the works under their proper dramatic conditions. It's odd how I could have forgotten."

  "If I am troubling you--" began Raut.

  Horrocks started again. A new light had suddenly come into the sultry gloom of his eyes.

  "Not in the least," he said.

  "Have you been telling Mr. Raut of all these contrasts of flame and shadow you think so splendid?" said the woman, turning now to her husband for the first time, her confidence creeping back again, her voice just one half-note too high. "That dreadful theory of yours that machinery is beautiful, and everything else in the world ugly. I thought he would not spare you, Mr. Raut. It's his great theory, his one discovery in art."

  "I am slow to make discoveries," said Horrocks grimly, damping her suddenly. "But what I discover . . . . ." He stopped.

  "Well?" she said.

  "Nothing;" and suddenly he rose to his feet.

  "I promised to show you the works," he said to Raut, and put his big, clumsy hand on his friend's shoulder. "And you are ready to go?"

  "Quite," said Raut, and stood up also.

  There was another pause. Each of them peered through the indistinctness of the dusk at the other two. Horrocks' hand still rested on Raut's shoulder. Raut half fancied still that the incident was trivial after all. But Mrs. Horrocks knew her husband better, knew that grim quiet in his voice, and the confusion in her mind took a vague shape of physical evil. "Very well", said Horrocks, and, dropping his hand, turned towards the door.

  "My hat?" Raut looked round in the half-light.

  "That's my work-basket," said Mrs. Horrocks, with a gust of hysterical laughter. Their hands came together on the back of the chair. "Here it is!" he said. She had an impulse to warn him in an undertone, but she could not frame a word. "Don't go!" and "Beware of him!" struggled in her mind, and the swift moment passed.

  "Got it?" said Horrocks, standing with the door half open.

  Raut stepped towards him. "Better say good-bye to Mrs. Horrocks," said the ironmaster, even more grimly quiet in his tone than before.

  Raut started and turned. "Good-evening, Mrs. Horrocks," he said, and their hands touched.

  Horrocks held the door open with a ceremonial politeness unusual in him towards men.

  Raut went out, and then, after a wordless look at her, her husband followed. She stood motionless while Raut's light footfall and her husband's heavy tread, like bass and treble, passed down the passage together. The front door slammed heavily. She went to the window, moving slowly, and stood watching--leaning forward. The two men appeared for a moment at the gateway in the road, passed under the street lamp, and were hidden by the black masses of the shrubbery. The lamp-light fell for a moment on their faces, showing only unmeaning pale patches, telling nothing of what she still feared, and doubted, and craved vainly to know. Then she sank down into a crouching attitude in the big arm-chair, her eyes wide open and staring out at the red lights from the furnaces that flickered in the sky. An hour after she was still there, her attitude scarcely changed.

  The oppressive stillness of the evening weighed heavily upon Raut. They went side by side down the road in silence, and in silence turned into the cinder-made by-way that presently opened out the prospect of the valley.

  A blue haze, half dust, half mist, touched the long valley with mystery. Beyond were Hanley and Etruria, grey and dark masses, outlined thinly by the rare golden dots of the street lamps, and here and there a gaslit window, or the yellow glare of some late-working factory or crowded public-house. Out of the masses, clear and slender against the evening sky, rose a multitude of tall chimneys, many of them reeking, a few smokeless during a season of "play." Here and there a pallid patch and ghostly stunted beehive shapes showed the position of a pot-bank, or a wheel, black and sharp against the hot lower sky, marked some colliery where they raise the iridescent coal of the place.

  Nearer at hand was the broad stretch of railway, and half invisible trains shunted--a steady puffing and rumbling, with every run a ringing concussion and a rhythmic series of impacts, and a passage of intermittent puffs of white steam across the further view.

  And to the left, between the railway and the dark mass of the low hill beyond, dominating the whole view, colossal, inky-black, and crowned with smoke and fitful flames, stood the great cylinders of the Jeddah Company Blast Furnaces, the central edifices of the big ironworks of which Horrocks was the manager. They stood heavy and threatening, full of an incessant turmoil of flames and seething molten iron, and about the feet of them rattled the rolling-mills, and the steam hammer beat heavily and splashed the white iron sparks hither and thither. Even as they looked, a truckful of fuel was shot into one of the giants, and the red flames gleamed out, and a confusion of smoke and black dust came boiling upwards towards the sky.

  "Certainly you get some fine effects of colour with your furnaces," said Raut, breaking a silence that had become apprehensive.

  Horrocks grunted. He stood with his hands in his pockets, frowning down at the dim steaming railway and the busy ironworks beyond, frowning as if he were thinking out some knotty problem.

  Raut glanced at him and away again. "At present your moonlight effect is hardly ripe," he continued, looking upward. "The moon is still smothered by the vestiges of daylight."

  Horrocks stared at him with the expression of a man who has suddenly awakened.

  "Vestiges of daylight? . . . . Of course, of course." He too looked up at the moon, pale still in the midsummer sky. "Come along," he said suddenly, and, gripping Raut's arm in his hand, made a move towards the path that dropped from them to the railway.

  Raut hung back. Their eyes met and saw a thousand things in a moment that their eyes came near to say. Horrocks' hand tightened and then relaxed. He let go, and before Raut was aware of it, they were arm in arm, and walking, one unwillingly enough, down the path.

  "You see the fine effect of the railway signals towards Burslem," said Horrocks, suddenly breaking into loquacity, striding fast, and tightening the grip of his elbow the while. "

  Little green lights and red and white lights, all against the haze. You have an eye for effect, Raut. It's a fine effect. And look at those furnaces of mine, how they rise upon us as we come down the hill. That to the right is my pet--seventy feet of him. I packed him myself, and he's boiled away cheerfully with iron in his guts for five long years. I've a particular fancy for HIM. That line of red there--a lovely bit of warm orange you'd call it, Raut--that's the puddlers' furnaces, and there, in the hot light, three black figures--did you see the white splash of the steam-hammer then?--that's the rolling mills. Come along!

  Clang, clatter, how it goes rattling across the floor! Sheet tin, Raut, --amazing stuff. Glass mirrors are not in it when that stuff comes from the mill. And, squelch!--there goes the hammer again. Come along!"

  He had to stop talking to catch at his breath. His arm twisted into Raut's with benumbing tightness. He had come striding down the black path towards the rai
lway as though he was possessed.

  Raut had not spoken a word, had simply hung back against Horrocks' pull with all his strength.

  "I say," he said now, laughing nervously, but with an undernote of snarl in his voice,

  "why on earth are you nipping my arm off, Horrocks, and dragging me along like this?"

  At length Horrocks released him. His manner changed again. "Nipping your arm off?" he said. "Sorry. But it's you taught me the trick of walking in that friendly way."

  "You haven't learnt the refinements of it yet then," said Raut, laughing artificially again.

  "By Jove! I'm black and blue."

  Horrocks offered no apology. They stood now near the bottom of the hill, close to the fence that bordered the railway. The ironworks had grown larger and spread out with their approach. They looked up to the blast furnaces now instead of down; the further view of Etruria and Hanley had dropped out of sight with their descent. Before them, by the stile rose a notice-board, bearing still dimly visible, the words, "BEWARE OF THE

  TRAINS," half hidden by splashes of coaly mud.

  "Fine effects," said Horrocks, waving his arm. "Here comes a train. The puffs of smoke, the orange glare, the round eye of light in front of it, the melodious rattle. Fine effects!

  But these furnaces of mine used to be finer, before we shoved cones in their throats, and saved the gas."

  "How?" said Raut. "Cones?"

  "Cones, my man, cones. I'll show you one nearer. The flames used to flare out of the open throats, great--what is it?--pillars of cloud by day, red and black smoke, and pillars of fire by night.

  Now we run it off in pipes, and burn it to heat the blast, and the top is shut by a cone.

  You'll be interested in that cone."

  "But every now and then," said Raut, "you get a burst of fire and smoke up there."

  "The cone's not fixed, it's hung by a chain from a lever, and balanced by an equipoise.

  You shall see it nearer. Else, of course, there'd be no way of getting fuel into the thing.

  Every now and then the cone dips, and out comes the flare."