The Open Door

by E. L. White

 

THE OPEN DOOR.

For five weeks, Mark Collier had been a happily blinded Samson—unconscious of his infirmity. It was not until he stood in the chancel of the church, awaiting his bride, that his sight was suddenly returned to him, in a bewildering shaft of light.

The truth was appalling. He realized, with merciless clarity, that he did not love the woman he was about to make his wife, that the whole idea had been a ghastly mistake—that the mere thought of marriage with her was sacrilege of his finest instincts.

The shock of the discovery was like a physical blow. He caught his breath quickly, and closed his eyes for a moment. When he opened them again, everything seemed to have undergone a subtle transformation.

He marked each detail of his surroundings, photographing every object on his sensitized brain, with the fidelity of a dying man, who yearns to carry with him, into the Unknown, some dim remembrance of the dear and familiar. He noticed the smudge of footmarks on the red carpet, the cloud of floating motes, the slight powder of dust on the palms, that formed part of the stereotyped decorations.

The light that streamed in through the stained-glass windows had dyed the faces of some of the congregation with patches of color. The nose of his future mother-in-law was stamped with a violet lozenge. The eldest daughter—a beauty of her year, who, faithful to the family traditions, had married a rich husband, displayed delicate cheeks barred after the fashion of an Indian squaw, with orange and vermilion streaks. The bald head of an august uncle was speckled with vivid green splashes,

The change was merely the effect of a sudden ray of sunlight. Yet as Collier looked at them—the ghastly truth still paralyzing his senses—he shuddered involuntarily. The unnatural decoration of the faces of his future relatives united them with a tribal likeness, and flashed on his excited mind some suggestion of rites—savage, inchoate, alien to civilization.

The ray of sunshine died, blown out by the lips of the wind. The church again shrank back into neutral shadows. With the departure of the light, sensation left Collier. He remained dulled and quiescent, his turgid mind dimly conscious of some muffled misery. A narcotic-steeped hand was clasped on his brain.

He found himself trying to remember a dream. The night before his wedding-day he had been visited by one that had left him vaguely troubled and perplexed, like a King of old.

Ordinarily, he was obsessed by no nocturnal fancies; when he closed his eyes, he simply went out—like the flame of a candle.

He groped after the recollection. What was the unpleasant impression that had undermined the entrenchments of repose, thrown up quickly by Nature for the protection of his slumbering Ego?

Somewhere, at the back of his consciousness, a spark fused; all along the train laid to some remote brain- cell he could feel the faint crackling. At any second would come ignition.

It came. Then he remembered.

He had dreamed of the interior of a prison—a sunken mud-plastered hole, strengthened with ribs of stone. The sole ray of light that cut the darkness was thickly clogged with atoms of decomposition. By this dusty illumination, he saw the prisoner.

No definite terms could describe him. He was pure negation. His face was gray, as though covered with the deposit of the ashes of burnt-out passions. Yet one last fire flickered through the clogging layers, for in the prisoner's eyes glimmered a poignant memory of past freedom.

In his,dream, Collier asked questions, which were answered by some shadowy companion.

“Has he been here long?”

“A lifetime.”

“Does he never hope to be free?”

“Never.”

It was then that he noticed a door at the back of the prison, which seemed to be outlined with a luminous blue pencil. It was the blessed outside daylight, cleaving the fissures.

“Look!” He stammered in his excitement. “The door! Surely it is open?”

The quiet voice answered.

“It has been open for years.”

“But the prisoner? Does he not know?”

“He knows. But he has lost the will to step outside. That is the true servitude.”

With a start, Collier realized that he was no longer dreaming, but standing in the church, in full view of the scented, fashionably dressed throng. The organist was dreamily plucking at the keys of his instrument, shelling each note for the honey that lay at its core. Salut d' Amour. At any moment, the bride would appear.

Collier shot a hunted glance around him. In every direction it seemed that some smartly garbed form barred his way. A knowledge was growing upon bim that was cramp of the soul.

He—and he alone—was the prisoner.

He was the last to realize this truth, which was the common property of the world. Some men had given jocose warnings; some women had murmured cryptic utterances. Others had merely looked at him with eyes of pity and wonder. All recurred to him now—the spoken word and the unspoken sympathy.

His capture had been inevitable. For years, he had lived in solitudes so deep that he could hear the humming of the globe as it spun round on its axle; where the heavens, at night, were so perforated with constellations, that they almost seemed the canopy of day, pinpricked with stars of blackness. He had learned, through constant observation and companionship with the wild creatures of the woods, his relationship to the brute—and then the bar to affinity in the sure knowledge of his soul.

He had returned from the wilds—an elemental organism, stripped of any shell of worldly experience—to fall an instant victim to a pretty face, a sartorial instinct, and the spell of juxtaposition.

To a woman, marriage is generally a question of alternatives; to a man, in the main, it is a question of choice. Yet looking back, Collier could trace no signs of conscious volition on his part. There had never been one moment of genuine attraction—one step taken on his own initiative. He had merely followed a lure.

A lure. The word bore some similitude to her name. Laura. He pictured her as she would appear in a moment or so—in shimmering bridal array. The scent of orange-blossom filled his nostrils with its promise; and he saw its fulfilment in a barrow-load of unripened fruit under the flaring glare of naphtha lights. All thought of this marriage filled him with sick terror. He had been trapped. He was the prisoner.

A pang of overwhelming poignancy rent his whole being, to be swiftly followed by the nausea that rides hard at the heels of pain. He tried to clench his hands inside his tight gloves.

“I cannot marry this woman. I will not!”

The words, bursting from his heart, died on the threshold of his lips, in abortive silence.

A woman's face, feline in type, with the ghost of a smile in her light hazel eyes, smirked at him from the congregation. It was the last face to be distinctly impressed upon his vision. Dimly he became aware, when he shifted his eyes from hers, that a furtive smile slipped before his gaze, in fugitive manner, ever eluding him, end broken and flickering like the film of a cinema. The smart congregation had noticed his plight. It was amused by the visible mental disquiet of the bridegroom.

The knowledge stung him to anger. In these scented, simpering units, congregated to gloat over the struggles of the victim, he recognized some part of the social system that was collected to insure finality of his doom. Escape from some deserted City church—some registry-office might be barely possible. Not here. “Gathered together here in the sight of God”—the man who had known God in the wilderness dared not follow the thought—“and in the face of this congregation.”

He felt his sleeve plucked. His best man was speaking. Part of the flickering smile was concentrated on his grinning lips. “Buck up! She's overdue. The bolt will be shot now before you know where you are.”

Collier nodded. The aridity of his throat forbade speech. The old stale attempt at humor that compares a bridegroom to a condemned criminal, on this occasion redeemed itself through its aptness. He felt the agonized pang of the soul born under the curse of Cain—the sense of futility of escape—the hopeless waiting for the final doom, At any moment—comparatively remote or perilously near, but alike in being inevitable—the solid globe would slip from under his feet—roll away like an orange, and leave him—Where?

His head swum in the grip of vertigo, as the memory of a past illness, when his life had been in danger, recurred to him. One day, to beguile his convalescence, the nurse had shown him his temperature-chart, with its black dots, connected by neatly ruled lines. As he scanned the series of mountain peaks and valleys, he noticed a gap, where the black line shot down, far below the level of the others. The nurse explained. “That was your relapse. You just sank as low as was humanly possible. Collapse. The least bit lower, and you'd have slipped through our fingers.”

The thought gripped him. Had the dot been a hairbreadth lower where would he have fallen? He was assailed with the sudden giddiness of one who looks down into space, at the mere sight of two inches of blank paper at the bottom of the chart.

Where? He was still asking himself the question, when he heard a rustle at the church door—caught some glimpse of shimmering white. He could not see plainly. He seemed to be standing on a thin crust over nothingness. Was it Laura? The tension was growing unbearable—akin to mental and spiritual vivisection. At any moment the end might come.

“The bridesmaids!”

In the best man's husky whisper came the tidings of momentary reprieve. Collier felt his brow break into beads of moisture. As he put up his hand to wipe them away, he was conscious that some one was watching him with scornful amusement.

The discovery led to another. A sinister change had taken place within the building. The faces of the congregation had run into each other, until they blended into one gigantic face—painted, coiffured, hatted. It was the face of the fashionable crowd, and on its colossal lips the fugitive smile had settled, like some homing bird of prey.

The transformation appalled him. He had lost the touch of humanity. He felt himself alone—fettered—the victim of some sacrificial rite. A prisoner with no hope of escape—the prisoner of whom he had dreamed.

It was in this second of blank despair, that the incredible thing happened. He found himself staring at it, in incredulous surprise.

Before him, was the open door.

It was set in the wall, not ten paces away. Evidently not often used as a means of egress, for the large-leaved ivy that clustered round it was cobwebbed and compressed. And through it, he saw a stormy blue sky, rocking under the impact of tumultuous clouds. The wind slammed them together, as it tore through space, in a mad orgy of freedom.

Collier inflated his lungs, as a man who had been long submerged. He rose from the depths. Here was the way of escapes Even now it was not too late!

In imagination, he made the trial flight, his heart beating like a pioneer aeronaut relying on the power of untested apparatus. His course was simplicity itself. A few swift paces would bring him to the door. He had but to pass the portals, to find himself in the tiny paved yard—and then...

Then into the thick of the traffic surging round the church—into the heart of the struggling mass of that humanity that he had lost in the sacred building—that offered a human warren to the human quarry. The crowd would swallow him up, would shield him and hide him.

His thoughts winged swifter. The first vehicle would whirl him into the current of traffic—like a stray leaf sucked into the maelstrom. He seemed to see a mighty roaring river raging along in the grooved channel of the roadway, and fed on every side by trickling streamlets. Taxis were transmuted from mere petrol-fed mechanisms, suggestive of industrial unrest, to symbols of the magic of motion. First came the spin to the railway station—then the mighty engine dashing to the quay, where the impatient ocean licked its stones. Last of all, the steamer ploughing her way through the foaming billows, tearing out the heart of each emerald wave—her nose pointed towards far horizons Outside! The whole world lay outside. It opened its mighty arms to him. It spoke of width, of depth, of breadth. It showed him its secrets—hamlets and valleys tucked away in its mighty heart—where a hunted man could hide for ever. It shouted to him to break free—to be free!

Three minutes passed. Collier realized that he was still standing in his place, his heels clamped to the red carpet. He stared at his feet, encased in their tight boots, as though they were objects for curiosity or wonder. Shapeless, unwieldy lumps of leather! Would they never move?

It is so simple—the parallel of bathing in Jordan in preference to a pilgrimage to mighty rivers. Only a few steps—no feat of difficulty—merely the action of a moment. He would count. One. Two. Three. There was the magical number that should find him outside the door.

He moistened his lips. One. He felt himself panting under the strain of some mighty effort—the tugging at interlaced roots, at deeply buried fibres. Two. The shock of sudden upheaval—a mad rush through space—an ecstasy. Three...

He gazed about him stupidly. He was still standing in his place. He had not moved an inch.

His chin sank lower, at the knowledge of his failure. His will was atrophied. His limbs, like paralyzed members, awaited the spur of mental volition. He was a prisoner.

Confronting him, were two truths. Or rather, both appeared truths. Yet, since one was the converse of the other, one of the two must be falsehood, masquerading as one of the eternal verities.

He faced them squarely. The truth that it was never too late to withdraw, even at the eleventh hour. The truth that it was too late, for this reason.

No man had done it before.

He realized that a life-sentence of imprisonment was compressed into that creed of negation. No men had chosen to exercise his privilege of free-will. It was the victory of passivity over activity.

The minutes passed. He stayed in his place, staring at the open door.

Presently, he became aware that some part of the scrutiny of the spectator had become relaxed. The focussing power of the gigantic orb of the face played with diminished pressure. The congregation, on its part, was feeling some sense of discomfort, proceeding from overstrained and dissatisfied curiosity.

The bride was unusually late. Collier realized the fact from the impatient manner in which the best man consulted his watch. The organist, seeking fresh inspiration, availed himself freely of the privileges granted by the letters D.C. Everyone was growing weary.

A rush of wild hope shot through the veins of the prisoner. Men had been saved before by a miracle. Was it conceivable that a miracle was to be wrought on his behalf?

He snatched greedily at the crazy notion, half-fearful to entertain it. Familiarity with it, however, engendered fresh confidence. It was possible for Laura to fail him. Woman—the bound and cloistered sex—was not a prisoner. Many a bride had drawn back at the eleventh hour, and radiated in the limelight of newspaper publicity. He knew now that Laura did not love him. The certainty that she merely respected his wealth became his, with the recognition of the knowledge that he did not love her.

His eyes brightened, and he drew himself together. His best man looked at him in involuntary admiration.

“Awfully annoying for you, old man. I'll slip down and find out what's keeping her.”

The prisoner smiled at the receding back of his personal gaoler. He was lapped in placidity. He believed in the miracle with the steadfast credulity of a Lourdes pilgrim. He had called up a force—he had evoked the mighty name of freedom

Freedom! He looked through the open door.

There was no sense of repose outside. Everywhere was a strenuous, moving, fighting world. For one moment the sun tunnelled through the piled-up purple mounds that banked the sky—in a sweeping ray. The next—it recoiled in momentary shadow, as the wind pelted its face with hurled balls of clouds. No still lagoons of swimming space. The whole air seemed full—crammed to overflowing. Leaves, straws, twigs, scraps of paper were whirled aloft in the aerial currents. Birds skimmed and swooped. Wireless messages, shrilling through space, met in solid syllabic tangles—parts of speech strayed from context, broken free from syntax. The vault of Heaven hummed with crazy spinning motion. All the prison doors were opened. One heard the clang of iron barriers slamming outwards. Freedom.

The face of the prisoner glowed. His eyes blazed.... Suddenly, the candle in his face was blown out. He stood mute, blank, empty. The best man had returned and whispered a few words.

“All right! Some important bit of her finery never turned up. She'll be here now, any minute!”

The prisoner nodded. Involuntarily he looked again towards the door, It was still open.

“Buck up!” The best man was offering sympathy. “A man only goes through it once.”

Again Collier nodded. Some of the light came back to his face. He experienced a sudden revulsion of feeling. The trite words had brought comfort.

He saw now that the whole of his anguish admitted an explanation. His sensations throughout had been purely normal, analogous with those of one who takes an anesthetic for the first time, or who has beer within an ace of being drowned. He was merely feeling what every son of Adam has felt, when he stands before the altar—the shrinking from the sentence of finality. This psychic discomfort, which ordinarily affects an average person so slightly as merely to express itself in self-consciousness or nerves—was felt by him—a glutton in sensation—in its full elemental severity.

He told himself that he loved Laura. He had loved her the whole time. And she loved him. He welcomed the thought of marriage.

Primed with fresh confidence and hope, he withdrew his eyes from the door—to fix them upon a girl, who sat near, a few paces away. He wondered why her features also had not been welded into the face. Scrutiny of her plain working-dress, however, revealed the reason. She was no part of the fashionable congregation. Possibly a typist, or a milliner's assistant, who had strayed into the church for a few minutes.

He continued to look at her. Her eyes were brown in color—brown as a clear peaty pool in the hollow of a hillside. The warm fires of honesty, affection, and truth glowed within their depths. They were akin to the eyes of the primitive women he had known in the old days of freedom and solitude—women of the prairie and forest—women brown and white—with their souls scoured by the winds and their hearts warmed by the sun.

He looked again. The eyes vanished and he was gazing into the peaty pool, hearing the limpid gurgle of the sweet water—feeling the cool air stirring in his hair. Woman or pool—he knew not which was which. For both were Nature.

He was roused by the blare of the Wedding March. In the gloom of the aisle he saw a tall white figure, leaning on her father's arm. She advanced with slow grace. His bride was coming.

His eyes, still washed with the brown waters of the peaty pool, received but a blurred and misty vision.

He shrank back, in instinctive recoil. His mind, thrown out of gear by shock, worked madly, at furious pressure, like a derailed engine with wheels still revolving in the air. Free! He must be free! What force kept him standing there, awaiting a woman, whom he knew he would grow to loathe. Morality? When every vow would be mere lip-effort, uttered within the walls of a sacred building—the ineffable Name itself invoked as withess. He was horror-stricken with the sense of sheer blasphemy.

What kept him? While the door was Still open? Merely the shell of an empty convention, homage to the precedent of the stereotyped. While a man might protect itself from the menace of death, he was forbidden—if the formalities be infringed—to protect himself from the sacrifice of his life.

The bride drew nearer in her stately advance. It was the culminating moment of her life; it marked the apex of achievement.

Collier stared at her, with the cold speculative eyes of one stranger who challenges another. He saw her features distinctly—as distinctly as he had seen those of the brown-eyed working-girl. He had expected to see them melt into a state of flux and run into the gigantic lineaments of the composite countenance. Such a transformation seemed inevitable in one who represented the very essence of conventional Society.

But no change took place. Rather a revelation. For, as the bridal procession drew nearer, Collier stared at her with hypnotized fascination. At last he knew her—as she really was. For he saw that the face of Laura was, in miniature, the replica of the gigantic face of the congregation—inhuman—artificial—appalling.

It was the quintessence of realization. Like a wild creature, enslaved in the snare, he strove impotently to escape. Something, older than Adam, freer than the wind, blinder than instinct, raged within him. Even now—even while the bride advanced—it was not too late. The open door...

He turned, as in mute appeal—towards the brown-eyed girl. To his dismay he saw that she had left her seat, and was moving towards the door in the wall. It was evident that the call of duty, together with the unpunctuality of the bride, was to cheat her of a spectacle.

A desolating feeling of desertion swept over Collier. He was an infant that sees itself abandoned by its natural protector. Bereft of her presence, he was something ineffably weak and feeble. Sorrow was merged into a sense of unbearable tension. What if she closed the door behind her? It stood to him as a symbol of freedom. He tried involuntarily to cry out in warning.

It seemed to him that her journey towards the exit was life-long. Her protracted progress drained the exhausted reserves of his self-control. Unable to bear the suspense of watching, once more he turned towards his bride.

He was just in time to see the change. It came swiftly, without warning, bearing its message of finality. Collier knew that the end had really come.

Like a jam of frozen waters that splits into fragments before thaw, the composite face cracked—shivered—and then broke up into hundreds of units—each perfect and complete. Once again Collier saw the familiar features of friend and acquaintance. They seemed to close round him—to hem him in on all sides.

The congregation was waiting. The bride stood at his elbow.

The clergyman cleared his throat.

Yet, ere the opening words were intoned—the prisoner turned his head—and saw.

The door was swinging to.

The Cornhill Magazine. E. L. White.