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Title: Floor Games Author: H.G. Wells * A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook * eBook No.: 1500561h.html Language: English Date first posted: May 2015 Most recent update: May 2015 This eBook was produced by Roy Glashan. Project Gutenberg of Australia eBooks are created from printed editions which are in the public domain in Australia, unless a copyright notice is included. We do NOT keep any eBooks in compliance with a particular paper edition. Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the copyright laws for your country before downloading or redistributing this file. This eBook is made available at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg of Australia License which may be viewed online at http://gutenberg.net.au/licence.html To contact Project Gutenberg of Australia go to http://gutenberg.net.auGO TO Project Gutenberg Australia HOME PAGE
"Floor Games," Frank Palmer, London, 1911
A general view of the Wonderful Islands, showing Captain
F.R.W.'s ship at anchor.
It must be a floor covered with linoleum or cork carpet, so that toy
soldiers and such-like will stand up upon it, and of a color and surface that
will take and show chalk marks; the common green-colored cork carpet without
a pattern is the best of all. It must be no highway to other rooms, and well
lit and airy.
Occasionally, alas! it must be scrubbed—and then a truce to Floor
Games.
Upon such a floor may be made an infinitude of imaginative games, not only
keeping boys and girls happy for days together, but building up a framework
of spacious and inspiring ideas in them for after life. The men of tomorrow
will gain new strength from nursery floors. I am going to tell of some of
these games and what is most needed to play them; I have tried them all and a
score of others like them with my sons, and all of the games here illustrated
have been set out by us. I am going to tell of them here because I think what
we have done will interest other fathers and mothers, and perhaps be of use
to them (and to uncles and such-like tributary sub-species of humanity) in
buying presents for their own and other people's children.
Also there are certain minor objects—tin ships, Easter eggs, and the
like—of which I shall make incidental mention, that like the kiwi and
the duck-billed platypus refuse to be classified.
These we arrange and rearrange in various ways upon our floor, making a
world of them. In doing so we have found out all sorts of pleasant facts, and
also many undesirable possibilities; and very probably our experience will
help a reader here and there to the former and save him from the latter.
For instance, our planks and boards, and what one can do with them, have
been a great discovery. Lots of boys and girls seem to be quite without
planks and boards at all, and there is no regular trade in them.
The toyshops, we found, did not keep anything of the kind we wanted, and
our boards, which we had to get made by a carpenter, are the basis of half
the games we play.
The planks and boards we have are of various sizes. We began with three of
two yards by one; they were made with cross pieces like small doors; but
these we found unnecessarily large, and we would not get them now after our
present experience.
The best thickness, we think, is an inch for the larger sizes and
three-quarters and a half inch for the smaller; and the best sizes are a yard
square, thirty inches square, two feet, and eighteen inches square—one
or two of each, and a greater number of smaller ones, 18 x 9, 9 x 9, and 9 x
4½. With the larger ones we make islands and archipelagos on our floor while
the floor is a sea, or we make a large island or a couple on the Venice
pattern, or we pile the smaller on the larger to make hills when the floor is
a level plain, or they roof in railway stations or serve as bridges, in such
manner as I will presently illustrate. And these boards of ours pass into our
next most important possession, which is our box of bricks.
(But I was nearly forgetting to tell this, that all the thicker and larger
of these boards have holes bored through them. At about every four inches is
a hole, a little larger than an ordinary gimlet hole. These holes have their
uses, as I will tell later, but now let me get on to the box of
bricks.)
This, again, wasn't a toy-shop acquisition. It came to us by gift from two
generous friends, unhappily growing up and very tall at that; and they had it
from parents who were one of several families who shared in the benefit of a
Good Uncle.
I know nothing certainly of this man except that he was a Radford of
Plymouth. I have never learned nor cared to learn of his commoner
occupations, but certainly he was one of those shining and distinguished
uncles that tower up at times above the common levels of humanity.
At times, when we consider our derived and undeserved share of his
inheritance and count the joys it gives us, we have projected half in jest
and half in earnest the putting together of a little exemplary book upon the
subject of such exceptional men: Celebrated Uncles, it should be called; and
it should stir up all who read it to some striving at least towards the
glories of the avuncular crown.
What this great benefactor did was to engage a deserving unemployed
carpenter through an entire winter making big boxes of wooden bricks for the
almost innumerable nephews and nieces with which an appreciative circle of
brothers and sisters had blessed him. There are whole bricks 4-½ inches x 2-¼
x 1-⅛; and there are quarters—called by those previous owners
(who have now ascended to, we hope but scarcely believe, a happier life near
the ceiling) "piggys."
You note how these sizes fit into the sizes of the boards, and of each
size—we have never counted them, but we must have hundreds. We can pave
a dozen square yards of floor with them.
How utterly we despise the silly little bricks of the toyshops! They are
too small to make a decent home for even the poorest lead soldiers, even if
there were hundreds of them, and there are never enough, never nearly enough;
even if you take one at a time and lay it down and say, "This is a house,"
even then there are not enough.
We see rich people, rich people out of motor cars, rich people beyond the
dreams of avarice, going into toyshops and buying these skimpy, sickly,
ridiculous pseudo-boxes of bricklets, because they do not know what to ask
for, and the toyshops are just the merciless mercenary enemies of youth and
happiness—so far, that is, as bricks are concerned.
Their unfortunate under-parented offspring mess about with these gifts,
and don't make very much of them, and put them away; and you see their
consequences in after life in the weakly-conceived villas and silly suburbs
that people have built all round big cities.
A view showing the Island of the Temple and the
invasion of the Indian territory by Captain G.P.W.
So much now for the bricks. I will tell later how we use cartridge paper
and cardboard and other things to help in our and of the decorative make of
plasticine.
Of course, it goes without saying that we despise those foolish,
expensive, made-up wooden and pasteboard castles that are sold in
shops— playing with them is like playing with somebody else's dead game
in a state of rigor mortis.
Let me now say a little about toy soldiers and the world to which they
belong.
Toy soldiers used to be flat, small creatures in my own boyhood, in
comparison with the magnificent beings one can buy to-day. There has been an
enormous improvement in our national physique in this respect.
Now they stand nearly two inches high and look you broadly in the face,
and they have the movable arms and alert intelligence of scientifically
exercised men. You get five of them mounted or nine afoot in a box for a
small price.
We three like those of British manufacture best; other makes are of
incompatible sizes, and we have a rule that saves much trouble, that all red
coats belong to G.P.W., and all other colored coats to F.R.W., all gifts,
bequests, and accidents notwithstanding. Also we have sailors; but, since
there are no red-coated sailors, blue counts as red.
Then we have "beefeaters,"* Indians, Zulus, for whom there are special
rules.
(* The warders in the Tower of London are called
"beefeaters"; the origin of the term is obscure.)
We find we can buy lead dogs, cats, lions, tigers, horses, camels, cattle,
and elephants of a reasonably corresponding size, and we have also several
boxes of railway porters, and some soldiers we bought in Hesse-Darmstadt that
we pass off on an unsuspecting home world as policemen.
But we want civilians very badly. We found a box of German from an
exaggerated curse of militarism, and even the grocer wears epaulettes.
This might please Lord Roberts and Mr. Leo Maxse, but it certainly does
not please us. I wish, indeed, that we could buy boxes of tradesmen: a blue
butcher, a white baker with a loaf of standard bread, a merchant or so; boxes
of servants, boxes of street traffic, smart sets, and so forth.
We could do with a judge and lawyers, or a box of vestrymen. It is true
that we can buy Salvation Army lasses and football players, but we are cold
to both of these.
We have, of course, boy scouts. With such boxes of civilians we could have
much more fun than with the running, marching, swashbuckling soldiery that
pervades us.
They drive us to reviews; and it is only emperors, kings, and very silly
small boys who can take an undying interest in uniforms and reviews.
And lastly, of our railways, let me merely remark here that we have always
insisted upon one uniform gauge and everything we buy fits into and develops
our existing railway system.
Nothing is more indicative of the wambling sort of parent and a coterie of
witless, worthless uncles than a heap of railway toys of different gauges and
natures in the children's playroom.
And so, having told you of the material we have, let me now tell you of
one or two games (out of the innumerable many) that we have played. Of
course, in this I have to be a little artificial. Actual games of the kind I
am illustrating here have been played by us, many and many a time, with joy
and happy invention and no thought of publication. They have gone now, those
games, into that vaguely luminous and iridescent into which happiness have
tried out again points in world of memories all love-engendering must go. But
we our best to set them and recall the good points in them here.
A close view of the temple, whose portals are guarded by
grotesque plasticine monsters.
IN this game the floor is the sea. Half—rather the
larger half because of some instinctive right of primogeniture—is
assigned to the elder of my two sons (he is, as it were, its Olympian), and
the other half goes to his brother. We distribute our boards about the sea in
an archipelagic manner. We then dress our islands, objecting strongly to too
close a scrutiny of our proceedings until we have done. Here, in the
illustration, is such an archipelago ready for its explorers, or rather on
the verge of exploration.
There are altogether four islands, two to the reader's right and two to
the left, and the nearer ones are the more northerly; it is as many as we
could get into the camera.
The northern island to the right is most advanced in civilization, and is
chiefly temple. That temple has a flat roof, diversified by domes made of
half Easter eggs and cardboard cones.^
These are surmounted by decorative work of a flamboyant character in
plasticine, designed by G P.W. An oriental population crowds the courtyard
and pours out upon the roadway.
Note the grotesque plasticine monsters who guard the portals, also by
G.P.W., who had a free hand with the architecture of this remarkable specimen
of eastern religiosity. They are nothing, you may be sure, to the gigantic
idols inside, out of the reach of the sacrilegious camera. To the right is a
tropical thatched hut. The thatched roof is really that nice ribbed paper
that comes round bottles—a priceless boon to these games. All that
comes into the house is saved for us. The owner of the hut lounges outside
the door. He is a dismounted cavalry-corps man, and he owns one cow. His
fence, I may note, belonged to a little wooden farm we bought in Switzerland.
Its human inhabitants are scattered; its beasts follow a precarious living as
wild guinea-pigs on the islands to the south.
Your attention is particularly directed to the trees about and behind the
temple, which thicken to a forest on the further island to the right.
These trees we make of twigs taken from trees and bushes in the garden,
and stuck into holes in our boards. Formerly we lived in a house with a
little wood close by, and our forests were wonderful.
Now we are restricted to our garden, and we could get nothing for this set
out but jasmine and pear. Both have wilted a little, and are not nearly such
spirited trees as you can make out of fir trees, for instance. It is for
these woods chiefly that we have our planks perforated with little
holes.
No tin trees can ever be so plausible and various and jolly as these. With
a good garden to draw upon one can make terrific sombre woods, and then lie
down and look through them at lonely horsemen or wandering beasts.
That further island on the right is a less settled country than the island
of the temple. Camels, you note, run wild there; there is a sort of dwarf
elephant, similar to the now extinct kind of which one finds skeletons in
Malta, pigs, a red parrot, and other such creatures, of lead and wood. The
pear-trees are fine. It is those which have attracted white settlers (I
suppose they are), whose thatched huts are to be seen both upon the beach and
in-land. By the huts on the beach lie a number of pear-tree logs; but a raid
of negroid savages from the to the left is in the only settler is the man in
a adjacent island progress, and clearly visible rifleman's uniform running
inland for help. Beyond, peeping out among the trees, are the supports he
seeks.
These same negroid savages are as bold as they are ferocious. They cross
arms of the sea upon their rude canoes, made simply of a strip of cardboard.
Their own island, the one to the south-left, is a rocky wilderness containing
caves. Their chief food is the wild-goat, but in pursuit of these creatures
you will also sometimes find the brown bear, who sits—he is small but
perceptible to the careful student—in the mouth of his cave. Here, too,
you will distinguish small guinea pig-like creatures of wood, in happier days
the inhabitants of that Swiss farm. Sunken rocks off this island are
indicated by a white foam which takes the form of letters, and you will also
note a whirlpool between the two islands to the right.
A view showing the raid of the Negroid savages upon the
white settlers of Pear Tree Island.
The rocks on this island, let me remark, have great mineral wealth. Among
them are to be found not only sheets and veins of silver paper, but great
nuggets of metal, obtained by the melting down of hopelessly broken soldiers
in an iron spoon. Note, too, the peculiar and romantic shell beach of this
country. It is an island of exceptional interest to the geologist and
scientific explorer. The Indians, you observe, have domesticated one leaden
and one wooden cow.
This is how the game would be set out. Then we build ships and explore
these islands, but in these pictures the ships are represented as already
arriving.
The ships are built out of our wooden bricks on flat keels made of two
wooden pieces of 9 x 4-½ inches, which are very convenient to push about over
the floor.
Captain F.R.W. is apparently at anchor between his northern and southern
islands. His ship is of a slightly more pacific type. I note on his deck a
lady and a gentleman (of German origin) with a bag, two of our all too rare
civilians.
No doubt the bag contains samples and a small conversation dictionary in
the negroid dialects. (I think F.R W. may turn out to be a Liberal.)
Perhaps he will sail on and rescue the raided huts, perhaps he will land
and build a jetty, and begin mining among the rocks to fill his hold with
silver. Perhaps the natives will kill and eat the gentleman with the bag. All
that is for Captain F.R.W. to decide.
You see how the game goes on. We land and alter things, and build and
rearrange, and hoist paper flags on pins, and subjugate populations, and
confer all the blessings of civilization upon these lands. We keep them going
for days. And at last, as we begin to tire of them, comes the scrubbing
brush, and we must burn our trees and dismantle our islands, and put our
soldiers in the little nests of drawers, and stand the island boards up
against the wall, and put everything away. Then perhaps, after a few days, we
begin upon some other such game, just as we feel disposed. But it is never
quite the same game, never. Another time it may be wildernesses for example,
and the boards are hills, and never a drop of water is to be found except for
the lakes and rivers we may mark out in chalk. But after one example others
are easy, and next I will tell you of our way of making towns.
A general view of Chamois City, showing the Cherry Tree
Inn and the shopping quarter.
It is an undesirable thing to have other people bulging over one's houses,
standing in one's open spaces, and, in extreme cases, knocking down and even
treading on one's citizens. It leads at times to explanations that are
afterwards regretted.
We always have twin cities, or at the utmost stage of coalescence a city
with two wards, Red End and Blue End; we mark the boundaries very carefully,
and our citizens have so much local patriotism (Mr. Chesterton will learn
with pleasure) that they stray but rarely over that thin little streak of
white that bounds their municipal allegiance. Sometimes we have an election
for mayor; it is like a census but very abusive, and Red always wins. Only
citizens with two legs and at least one arm and capable of standing up may
vote, and voters may poll on horseback; boy scouts and women and children do
not vote, though there is a vigorous agitation to remove these disabilities.
Zulus and foreign-looking persons, such as East Indian cavalry and American
Indians, are also disfranchised.
So are riderless horses and camels; but the elephant has never attempted
to vote on any occasion, and does not seem to desire the privilege. It
influences public opinion quite sufficiently as it is by nodding its
head.
We have set out and I have photographed one of our cities
to illustrate more clearly the amusement of the game.
Red End is to the reader's right, and includes most of the hill on which
the town stands, a shady zoological garden, the town hall, a railway tunnel
through the hill, a museum (away in the extreme right-hand corner), a church,
a rifle range, and a shop.
Blue End has the railway station, four or five shops, several homes, a
hotel, and a farm-house, close to the railway station. The boundary drawn by
me as overlord (who also made the hills and tunnels and appointed the trees
to grow) runs irregularly between the two shops nearest the cathedral, over
the shoulder in front of the town hall, and between the farm and the rifle
range.
The nature of the hills I have already explained, and this time we have
had no lakes or ornamental water. These are very easily made out of a piece
of glass—the glass lid of a box for example—laid upon silver
paper.
Such water becomes very readily populated by those celluloid seals and
swans and ducks that are now so common. Paper fish appear below the surface
and may be peered at by the curious. But on this occasion we have nothing of
the kind, nor have we made use of a green-colored tablecloth we sometimes use
to drape our hills. Of course, a large part of the fun of this game lies in
the witty incorporation of all sorts of extraneous objects. But the
incorporation must be witty, or you may soon convert the whole thing into an
incoherent muddle of half-good ideas.
I have taken two photographs, one to the right and one to the left of this
agreeable place. I may perhaps adopt a kind of guide-book style in reviewing
its principal features: I begin at the railway station. I have made a rather
nearer and larger photograph of the railway station, which presents a
diversified and entertaining scene to the incoming visitor. Porters (out of a
box of porters) career here and there with the trucks and light baggage.
Quite a number of our all-too-rare civilians parade the platform.
The seat on which he sprawls is a broken piece of some toy whose nature I
have long forgotten, the station clock is a similar fragment, and so is the
metallic pillar which bears the name of the station. So many toys, we find,
only become serviceable with a little smashing. There is an allegory in
this—as Hawthorne used to write in his diary.
("What is he doing, the great god Pan, Down in the reeds by the
river?")
The fences at the ends of the platforms are pieces of wood belonging to
the game of Matador—that splendid and very educational construction
game, hailing, I believe, from Hungary. There is also, I regret to say, a
blatant advertisement of Jab's "Hair Color," showing the hair. (In the
photograph the hair does not come out very plainly.) This is by G. P. W., who
seems marked out by destiny to be the advertisement-writer of the next
generation. He spends much of his scanty leisure inventing and drawing
advertisements of imaginary commodities.
The railway station at Blue End.
"Returning from the station," as the guide-books say, and﹃giving one more
glance﹄at the passengers who are waiting for the privilege of going round
the circle in open cars and returning in a prostrated condition to the
station again, and "observing" what admirable platforms are made by our 9 x
4-½ pieces, we pass out to the left into the village street. A motor omnibus
(a one-horse hospital cart in less progressive days) stands waiting for
passengers; and, on our way to the Cherry Tree Inn, we remark two nurses, one
in charge of a child with a plasticine head. The landlord of the inn is a
small grotesque figure of plaster; his sign is fastened on by a pin. No doubt
the refreshment supplied here has an enviable reputation, to judge by the
alacrity with which a number of riflemen move to-wards the door. The inn, by
the by, like the station and some private houses, is roofed with stiff
paper.
These stiff-paper roofs are one of our great inventions. We get After the
game is over, we put these roofs inside one another and stick them into the
bookshelves. The roof one folds and puts away will live to roof another
day.
Proceeding on our way past the Cherry Tree, and resisting cosy invitation
of its portals, we come to the shopping quarter of the town.
The stock in windows is made by hand out of plasticine. We note the meat
and hams of "Mr. Woddy," the cabbages and carrots of "Tod & Brothers,"
the general activities of the "Jokil Co." shopmen. It is de rigueur with our
shop assistants that they should wear white helmets. In the street, boy
scouts go to and fro, a wagon clatters by; most of the adult population is
about its business, and a red-coated band plays along the roadway.
Contrast this animated scene with the mysteries of sea and forest, rock
and whirlpool, in our previous game. Further on is the big church or
cathedral. It is built in an extremely debased Gothic style; it reminds us
most of a church we once surveyed during a brief visit to Rotterdam on our
way up the Rhine. A solitary boy scout, mindful of the views of Lord Haldane,
enters its high portal. Passing the cathedral, we continue to the museum.
This museum is no empty boast; it contains mineral specimens,
shells—such great shells as were found on the beaches of our previous
game—the Titanic skulls of extinct rabbits and cats, and other such
wonders. The slender curious may lie down on the floor and peep in at the
windows.
"We now," says the guide-book, "retrace our steps to the shops, and then,
turning to the left, ascend under the trees up the terraced hill on which
stands the Town Hall. This magnificent building is surmounted by a colossal
statue of a chamois, the work of a Wengen artist; it is in two stories, with
a battlemented roof, and a crypt (entrance to right of steps) used for the
incarceration of offenders. It is occupied by the town guard, who wear
'beefeater' costumes of ancient origin."
Note the red parrot perched on the battlements; it lives tame in the
zoological gardens, and is of the same species as one we formerly observed in
our archipelago. Note, too, the brisk cat-and-dog encounter below. Steps
descend in wide flights down the hillside into Blue End. The two couchant
lions on either side of the steps are in plasticine, and were executed by
that versatile artist, who is also mayor of Red End, G. P. W. He is present.
Our photographer has hit upon a happy moment in the history of this town, and
a conversation of the two mayors is going on upon the terrace before the
palace. F. R. W., mayor of Blue End, stands on the steps in the costume of an
admiral; G. P. W. is on horseback (his habits are equestrian) on the terrace.
The town guard parades in their honor, and up the hill a number of musicians
(a little hidden by trees) ride on gray horses towards them.
We enter the gardens, which are protected by a bearded janitor, and remark
at once a band of three performing dogs, who are, as the guide-book would
say, "discoursing sweet music." In neither ward of the city does there seem
to be the slightest restraint upon the use of musical instruments. It is no
place for neurotic people.
The gardens contain the inevitable elephants, camels (which we breed, and
which are therefore in considerable numbers), a sitting bear, brought from
last game's caves, goats from the same region, tamed and now running loose in
the gardens, dwarf elephants, wooden nondescripts, and other rare creatures.
The keepers wear a uniform not unlike that of railway guards and porters. We
wander through the gardens, return, descend the hill by the school of
musketry, where soldiers are to be seen shooting at the butts, pass through
the paddock of the old farm, and so return to the railway station, extremely
gratified by all we have seen, and almost equally divided in our minds
between the merits and attractiveness of either ward. A clockwork train comes
clattering into the station, we take our places, somebody hoots or whistles
for the engine (which can't), the signal is knocked over in the excitement of
the moment, the train starts, and we "wave a long, regretful farewell to the
salubrious cheerfulness of Chamois City."
The terraced hill on which stands the Town Hall. Behind
can be seen the Zoological Gardens.
You see now how we set out and the spirit in which we set out our towns.
It demands but the slightest exercise of the imagination to devise a hundred
additions and variations of the scheme. You can make
picture-galleries—great fun for small boys who can draw; you can make
factories; you can plan out flower-gardens—which appeals very strongly
to intelligent little girls; your town hall may become a fortified castle; or
you may put the whole town on boards and make a Venice of it, with ships and
boats upon its canals, and bridges across them. We used to have some very
serviceable ships of cardboard, with flat bottoms; and then we used to have a
harbor, and the ships used to sail away to distant rooms, and even into the
garden, and return with the most remarkable cargoes, loads of nasturtium-stem
logs, for example.
"I say, Daddy," said one of us in a quiet corner, wistfully, as one who
speaks knowingly against the probabilities of the case, and yet with a faint,
thin hope, "couldn't we play just for a little with these sacks... until
somebody comes?"
Of course the setting-out of the city is half the game. Then you devise
incidents. As I wanted to photograph the particular set-out for the purpose
of illustrating this account, I took a larger share in the arrangement than I
usually do.
It was necessary to get everything into the picture, to ensure a light
background that would throw up some of the trees, prevent too much
overlapping, and things like that. When the photographing was over, matters
became more normal. I left the schoolroom, and when I returned I found that
the group of riflemen which had been converging on the publichouse had been
sharply recalled to duty, and were trotting in a disciplined, cheerless way
towards the railway station. The elephant had escaped from the zoo into the
Blue Ward, and was being marched along by a military patrol. The originally
scattered boy scouts were being paraded. G.P.W. had demolished the shop of
the Jokil Company, and was building a Red End station near the bend. The
stock of the Jokil Company had passed into the hands of the adjacent
storekeepers. Then the town hall ceremonies came to an end and the guard
marched off. Then G.P.W. demolished the rifle-range, and ran a small branch
of the urban railway uphill to the town hall door, and on into the zoological
gardens. This was only the beginning of a period of enterprise in transit, a
small railway boom.
A number of halts of simple construction sprang up. There was much making
of railway tickets, of a size that enabled passengers to stick their heads
through the middle and wear them as a Mexican does his blanket. Then a
battery of artillery turned up in the High Street and there was talk of
fortifications. Suppose wild Indians were to turn up across the plains to the
left and attack the town! Fate still has toy drawers untouched...
So things will go on till putting-away night on Friday. Then we shall pick
up the roofs and shove them away among the books, return the clockwork
engines very carefully to their boxes, for engines are fragile things, stow
the soldiers and civilians and animals in their nests of drawers, burn the
trees again—this time they are sweet-bay; and all the joys and sorrows
and rivalries and successes of Blue End and Red End will pass, and follow
Carthage and Nineveh, the empire of Aztec and Roman, the arts of Etruria and
the palaces of Crete, and the plannings and contrivings of innumerable
myriads of children, into the limbo of games exhausted... it may be, leaving
some profit, in thoughts widened, in strengthened apprehensions; it may be,
leaving nothing but a memory that dies.
The School of Musketry. On the terrace the Town Guard
parades in honour of the two mayors.
There are times when islands cease somehow to dazzle, and towns and cities
are too orderly and uneventful and cramped for us, and we want
something—something to whizz. Then we say:﹃Let us make a funicular.
Let us make a funicular more than we have ever done. Let us make one to reach
up to the table.﹄We dispute whether it isn't a mountain railway we are
after. The bare name is refreshing; it takes us back to that unforgettable
time when we all went to Wengen, winding in and out and up and up the
mountain side—from slush, to such snow and sunlight as we had never
seen before. And we make a mountain railway. So far, we have never got it up
to the table, but some day we will, Then we will have a station there on the
flat, and another station on the floor, with shunts and sidings to each.
The peculiar joy of the mountain railway is that, if it is properly made,
a loaded car—not a toy engine; it is too rough a game for delicate,
respectable engines—will career from top to bottom of the system, and
go this way and that as your cunningly-arranged switches determine; and
afterwards—and this is a wonderful and distinctive discovery—you
can send it back by 'lectric.
What is a 'lectric? You may well ask. 'Lectrics were invented almost by
accident, by one of us, to whom also the name is due. It came out of an
accident to a toy engine; a toy engine that seemed done for and that was yet
full of life.
Now, sometimes an engine gets its clockwork out of order, and then it is
over and done for; but sometimes it is merely the outer semblance that is
injured—the funnel bent, the body twisted. You remove the things and,
behold! you have bare clockwork on wheels, an apparatus of almost malignant
energy, soul without body, a kind of metallic rage.
Well, when we have got chairs and boxes and bricks, and graded our line
skilfully and well, easing the descent, and being very careful of the joining
at the bends for fear that the descending trucks and cars will jump the
rails, we send down first an empty truck, then trucks loaded with bricks and
lead soldiers, and then the 'lectric; and then afterwards the sturdy 'lectric
shoves up the trucks again to the top, with a kind of savagery of purpose and
a whizz that is extremely gratifying to us.
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