THE NEVER-NEVER LAND
Dusk had fallen that evening when John Valiant's Panhard turned into
a cross-street and circled into the yawning mouth of his garage. Here,
before he descended, he wrote a check on his knee with a slobbering
fountain-pen.
"Lars," he said to the chauffeur, "as I dare say you've heard, things
have not gone exactly smoothly with me lately, and I'm uncertain
about my plans. I've made arrangements to turn the car over to the
manufacturers, and take back the old one. I must drive myself hereafter.
I'm sorry, but you must look for another place."
The dapper young Swede touched his cap gratefully as he looked at the
check's figures. Embarrassment was burning his tongue. "I--I've heard,
sir. I'm sure it's very kind, sir, and when you need another...."
"Thank you, Lars," said Valiant, as he shook hands, "and good luck. I'll
remember."
Lars, the chauffeur, looked after him. "Going to skip out, he is! I
thought so when he brought that stuff out of the safe-deposit. Afraid
they'll try to take the boodie away from him, I guess. The papers seem
to think he's rotten, but he's been a mighty good boss to me. He's a
dead swell, all right, anyhow," he added pridefully, as he slid the car
to its moorings, "and they'll have to get up early to catch him asleep!"
A little later John Valiant, the bulldog at his heels, ascended the
steps of his club, where he lodged--he had disposed of his bachelor
apartment a fortnight ago. The cavernous seats of the lounge were all
occupied, but he did not pause as he strode through the hall. He took
the little pile of letters the boy handed him at the desk and went
slowly up the stairway.
He wandered into the deserted library and sat down, tossing the letters
on the magazine-littered table. He had suddenly remembered that it was
his twenty-fifth birthday.
In the reaction from the long strain he felt physically spent. He
thought of what he had done that afternoon with a sense of satisfaction.
A reversal of public judgment, in his own case, had not entered his
head. He knew his world--its comfortable faculty of forgetting, and
the multitude of sins that wealth may cover. To preserve at whatever
personal cost the one noble monument his father's genius had reared, and
to right the wrong that would cast its gloomy shadow on his name--this
had been his only thought. What he had done would have been done no
matter what the outcome of the investigation. But now, he told himself,
no one could say the act had been wrung from him. That, he fancied,
would have been his father's way.
Fancied--for his recollections of his father were vague and fragmentary.
They belonged wholly to his pinafore years. His early memories of his
mother were, for that matter, even more unsubstantial. They were of a
creature of wonderful dazzling gowns, and more wonderful shining jewels,
who lived for the most part in an over-sea city as far away as the
moon (he was later to identify this as Paris) and who, when she came
home--which was not often--took him driving in the park and gave him
chocolate macaroons. He had always held her in more or less awe and had
breathed easier when she had departed. She had died in Rome a year later
than his father. He had been left then without a near relative in the
world and his growing years had been an epic of nurses and caretakers, a
boys' school on the continent, and a university course at home. As far
as his father was concerned, he had had only his own childish
recollections.
He smiled--a slow smile of reminiscence--for there had come to him at
that moment the dearest of all those memories--a play of his childhood.
He saw himself seated on a low stool, watching a funny old clock with a
moon-face, whose smiling lips curved up like military mustachios, and
wishing the lazy long hands would hurry. He saw himself stealing down
a long corridor to the door of a big room strewn with books and papers,
that through some baleful and mysterious spell could not be made to open
at all hours. When the hands pointed right, however, there was the "Open
Sesame"--his own secret knock, two fierce twin raps, with one little
lonesome one afterward--and this was unfailing. Safe inside, he saw
himself standing on a big, polar-bear-skin rug, the door tight-locked
against all comers, an expectant baby figure, with his little hand
clasped in his father's. The white rug was the magic entrance to the
Never-Never Country, known only to those two.
He could hear his own shrill treble:
"Wishing-House, Wishing-House, where are you?"
Then the deeper voice (quite unrecognizable as his father's) answering:
"Here I am, Master; here I am!"
And instantly the room vanished and they were in the Never-Never Land,
and before them reared the biggest house in the world, with a row of
white pillars across its front a mile high.
Valiant drew a deep breath. Some magic of time and place was repainting
that dead and dusty infancy in sudden delicate lights and filmy colors.
What had been but blurred under-exposures on the retina of his brain
became all at once elfin pictures, weird and specter-like as the
dissolving views of a camera obscura.
He and his father had lived alone in Wishing-House. No one else had
possessed the secret. Not his mother. Not even the more portentous
person whom he had thought must own the vast hotel in which they lived
(in such respect did she seem to be held by the servants), who wore
crackling black silk and a big bunch of keys for a sole ornament, and
who had called him her "lamb." No, in the Never-Never Land there had
been only his father and he!
Yet they were anything but lonely, for the country was inhabited by
good-natured friendly savages, as black as a lump of coal, most of them
with curly white hair. These talked a queer language, but of course his
father and he could understand them perfectly. These savages had many
curious and enthralling customs and strange cuddling songs that made one
sleepy, and all these his father knew by heart. They lived in little
square huts around Wishing-House, made of sticks, and had dozens and
dozens of children who wore no clothes and liked to dance in the sun and
eat cherries. They were very useful barbarians, too, for they chopped
the wood and built the fires and made the horses' coats shine--for he
and his father would have scorned to walk, and went galloping like the
wind everywhere. The forests about were filled with small brown cats,
tremendously furry, with long whiskers and sharp, beedy black eyes, and
sometimes they would hunt these on horseback; but they never caught
them, because the cats could run just a little bit faster than the
horses.
Christmas time at home was not so very exciting, but at Wishing-House
what a time they had! Then all the savages and their wives and children
received presents, and he and his father had a dreadfully scary shivery
time remembering them all, because some had so many children they ran
out of names and had to use numbers instead. So there was always the
harrowing fear that one might inadvertently be left out, and sometimes
they couldn't remember the last one till the very final minute. After
the Christmas turkey, the oldest and blackest savage of all would come
in where his father and he sat at the table, with a pudding as big as
the gold chariot in the circus, and the pudding, by some magic spell,
would set itself on fire, while he carried it round the table, with all
the other savages marching after him. This was the most awe-inspiring
spectacle of all. Christmases at other places were a long way apart, but
they came as often as they were wanted at Wishing-House, which, he
recalled, was very often indeed.
John Valiant felt an odd beating of the heart and a tightening of
the throat, for he saw another scene, too. It was the one hushed and
horrible night, after the spell had failed and the door had refused to
open for a long time, when dread things had been happening that he could
not understand, when a big man with gold eye-glasses, who smelled of
some curious sickish-sweet perfume, came and took him by the hand and
led him into a room where his father lay in bed, very gray and quiet.
The white hand on the coverlet had beckoned to him and he had gone close
up to the bed, standing very straight, his heart beating fast and hard.
"John!" the word had been almost a whisper, very tense and anxious, very
distinct. "John, you're a little boy, and father is going away."
"To--to Wishing-House?"
The gray lips had smiled then, ever so little, and sadly. "No, John."
"Take me with you, father! Take me with you, and let us find it!" His
voice had trembled then, and he had had to gulp hard.
"Listen, John, for what I am saying is very important. You don't know
what I mean now, but sometime you will." The whisper had grown strained
and frayed, but it was still distinct. "I can't go to the Never-Never
Land. But you may sometime. If you ... if you do, and if you find
Wishing-House, remember that the men who lived in it ... before you and
me ... were gentlemen. Whatever else they were, they were always that.
Be ... like them, John ... will you?"
"Yes, father."
The old gentleman with the eye-glasses had come forward then, hastily.
"Good-night, father--"
He had wanted to kiss him, but a strange cool hush had settled on the
room and his father seemed all at once to have fallen asleep. And he had
gone out, so carefully, on tiptoe, wondering, and suddenly afraid.