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 [Pg 24]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 [Pg 25]retina of his brain became all at once elfin pictures, weird and specter-like as the dissolving views of a camera obscura.