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From THE DOOR IN THE WALL – H G Wells

 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 Saint Athelstan's all through," he said, and for a moment that seemed to me 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 a 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..

We were at school together at Saint Athelstan'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--that I was to hear of a second time only a month before his death.

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 nor 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'm right in that, I was about five years and four months old."…………..

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 or 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 queerest trick--that the door was unfastened, and that he could go in as he chose.

…. he went plump with outstretched 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 colour 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?  Oh! 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.