Wings and the Child; Or, The Building of Magic Cities Part 6

When I had built my first three or four magic cities this idea of getting into the city--being, of course, correct citizen-size--lived with me so much that I wrote a story-book about it called _The Magic City_,[A] in which a boy and girl do really become the right size and enter into the city they have built. They have there all the adventures whose wraiths danced before me when I was building courts and making palm trees and finding out the many fine and fair uses of cowries and fir-cones.

This book, _The Magic City_, produced a curious effect. I hope I shall not look conceited (because really I am only proud) when I say that about my books I have had the dearest letters from children, saying pretty things about the stories in the prettiest way. It is one of the most heart-warming things in the world to get these letters and to answer them. And if I had letters like these I should have been only pleased and not disturbed. But the letters about the Magic City, though they were full of the pretty, awkward, delicious things that children write to the author of the books they like, held something else--a demand, severe and almost unanimous, to know how magic cities were built, and whether "children like us" could build one, and, if so, how?

I got so many of these letters that I decided to build a magic city where any child, in London at any rate, could come and see it. And I built it at the Children's Welfare Exhibition which the _Daily News_ arranged last year at Olympia. The history of that building would make a largish and intimate volume. The difficulties that beset a home-dweller when she goes out into the world, the anguish of misunderstandings which arise between the builder of magic cities and the people who lay linoleum and put up electric lights, the confusion which results from having packed in boxes and all mixed up the building materials which you are accustomed to look for as you need them in your own home, the extraordinary ma.s.s of people, the extraordinary kindness of people; for after all, it is the kindness which stands out. It is true that the gentleman who, very much isolated, fixed the electric lights, behaved exactly like an earthquake, upsetting two temples, a palace, and a tank with an educated seal in it. But then how more than a brother was the man who did the whitewash! It is true that the dictator with the linoleum--but I will not remember these things. Let me remember how many good friends I found among the keepers of the stalls, how a great personage of the _Daily News_ came with his wife at the last despairing moment, and lent me the golden and ruby lamps from their dining-table, how the Boy Scouts "put themselves in four" to get me some cocoa-nuts for roofs of cottages, how their Scout Master gave me fourteen beautiful little ivory fishes with black eyes, to put in my silver paper ponds, how the basket-makers on the one side and the home hobbies on the other were to me as brothers, how the Cherry Blossom Boot Polish lady gave me hairpins and the wardens of Messrs. W. H. Smith's bookstall gave me friendship, how the gifted boy-sculptor for the Plasticine stall, moved by sheer loving-kindness, rushed over one day and dumped a gorgeous prehistoric beast, modelled by his own hands, in the sands about my Siberian tomb, how the Queen of Portugal came and talked to me for half an hour in the most flattering French, while the Deity from the _Daily News_ looked on benign.

These are things I can never forget. When the show opened I was feeling like a snail who has inadvertently come out without his sh.e.l.l. Think how all this kindness comforted and protected me. And then came the long stream of visitors--crowds of them--I don't know how many thousands, who came and looked at my magic city and asked questions, and looked and looked at it, looked and said things. It is because of what they said that I am writing about that show at all. They all liked the city except two, and I cannot think that those two were, in other respects, really nice people. And more than half of them asked whether I would not write a book about the magic city which I had built there, and which lay looking so real and romantic under the soft glow of the tinted lamps: not a story-book, but a book to tell other people how to make such cities. And I said I would tell all I knew in a book. And when I came to write I found that there were many other things that I wanted to write about children, and other things than magic cities, and I wrote them, and this is the book.

And the reason I am telling you all this is that my big magic city at Olympia showed me, more than anything else could have done, that the building of magic cities interests practically every one, young or old.

It is very difficult to say all this and yet not to feel that you will think that I am boasting about my magic city. But I want you to believe that it was very beautiful, and that you can build one just as beautiful or much more beautiful if you care to try it. It is such an easy game.

Every one can play it. And every one likes it--even quite old people. By the way, I have been asked to build another city at Olympia in April, and I hope that it will be a prettier one even than the other which I loved so.

FOOTNOTE:

[A] Macmillans.

CHAPTER III

Bricks--and Other Things

IT is a mistake when you are going to build a city to make too large a collection of building materials before you begin to build. If it is natural to you to express yourself by pencil lines on paper you might perhaps draw an outline of the ma.s.ses of your city as you see them in the architect's vision or illumination which should precede all building, either of magic cities or munic.i.p.al cab-shelters. Having roughly indicated on paper the general shape of your city as you look at it from the front--the shape it would have against the western sky at dusk (I think architects call this the elevation, don't they?)--you proceed to collect such material as will roughly indicate that shape on the table or other building-place. And here let me once more warn the builder new to his business not to be trapped by the splendid obvious bait of floor's wide s.p.a.ce. To build palaces while p.r.o.ne on the stomach may be natural and easy to extreme youth. To grown-up people it is agonising and impossible. The floor has only two qualifications as a building site. It is large--larger at least than any of the pieces of furniture which stand on it--and it is flat. And when you have said that you have said all. Whereas the inconveniences of the floor as a place for building are innumerable. The floor is draughty, it is inaccessible, except from the att.i.tude of the serpent, and the serpent's att.i.tude, even if rich in a certain lax comfort, is most unfavourable for the steady use of both hands. If you want to see how unfavourable a.s.sume that att.i.tude and try to build a card-house on the floor. You cannot do it. If you kneel--well, you know how hard the floor gets if you kneel on it for quite a little time; if you sit or squat your dress or your coat-tails insist on playing at earthquakes with your building. Also the city on the floor is liable to hostile invasion by cats or dogs or servants: to the crushing and scattering by short-sighted outsiders or people who rush into the room to look for something in a hurry. Think of a playful elephant in some Eastern court of carved pearl and ivory lattice; an elephant co-inciding with one of the more fanciful volcanic eruptions, and your conception will pale into placidity in the face of the spectacle of a normal puppy in a floor-built city. And on the floor things not only get broken, they get lost. Cotton reels roll under sofas, draughts bowl away into obscurity and are only found next day by the housemaid when she moves the fender, and not then, as often as not; chess kings are walked on and get their crowns chipped; card counters disappear for ever, and it is quite impossible for you to keep an eye on your materials when you are grovelling among them. Therefore build on a table--or tables. Tables of different shapes, heights, and sizes make beautiful sites for cities. And bureaux are good, if you may take the drawers out and empty the pigeon-holes. I remember a wonderful city we made once: it was called the "City of the Thousand Lights," and it was built on a bureau, two large tables and three other smaller ones, all connected by bridges in the handsomest way. (The lids of the brick boxes make excellent bridges and you can adorn them to your fancy, and make impressive gate-houses at each end.) The bureau was the Temple of Mung, and we sacrificed a pale pink animal from the Noah's Ark at the shrine of this, the most mysterious of the G.o.ds of Pegana. The thousand lights--there were not a thousand, really, but there were many luminous towers, with windows of a still brighter glow. You make them by putting a night-light in a tumbler--a little water first by way of fire insurance--and surrounding the tumbler by a sheet of paper with windows and battlements and fixed to a cylindrical shape by pins. The paper cylinders are, of course, fitted on outside the tumblers so that there is no danger of fire. All the same it is better to let a grown-up do the luminous towers.

[Ill.u.s.tration: GUARDED ARCH.]

Having chosen your site and blocked out the ma.s.s of your buildings, you begin to collect the building material. For my own part I see the city I am going to build in the eye of the mind--or of the heart--so vividly and consistently that I never need to make notes of it on paper. I know when what I am building is not in accord with the vision, and then I pull it down. Truly in accord it never really is, but it approximates.

Now when you have seen the silhouette of your city and begin to look for stuff to build with, you will instantly find that everything you can lay your hands on is too small. The bricks, even the boxes which contained them, are suited for the detailed building which is to come later, but now you want something at once bigger and less conventionally proportioned. Now is the time to look for boxes--not the carved sandal-wood boxes in which aunts keep their pins, nor the smooth cedarwood boxes in which uncles buy their cigars, though both these are excellent when you come to the details of your work, but for the ma.s.s you want real big boxes; if you have a large table, or tables, Tate's sugar boxes are not too large. Also there are the boxes in which starch is packed, and cocoa, and the flatter boxes which the lady at the sweet-shop will give you if she likes you, and sell to you for a penny anyhow. The boxes in which your father gets his collars, and the boxes in which your mother gets her chocolates, though not really large, should be collected at the same time, because they need the same treatment. I am a.s.suming now that you are not building a city for an afternoon's amus.e.m.e.nt, but one for which you have found a safe resting place--a city that may take days to build and will not be disturbed for days. If you can once found your city in a safe place, and you are working at it day after day, you will go on thinking of more and more things to be added to it, and it will grow in beauty under your hands as naturally as a flower under the hand of summer.

[Ill.u.s.tration: BOXES.]

You have now your collection of boxes--but they are of plain, rough wood, and probably disfigured by coa.r.s.e coloured printed papers telling what the boxes once held. These papers you wash off, and when the boxes are clean and dry, you paint or colour-wash them to suit your requirements. Now your requirements are large blocks of colours to match your bricks, and bricks are of three colours--white, terra-cotta, and stone colour.

The stone bricks are stone colour and terra-cotta--oak bricks are very nearly stone colour--and there are white-wood bricks. To these three I would add a dark brown; and as this dark brown is not sold in boxes at the shops, you had better colour some of your bricks with it for yourself. Dark wood in a city gives a wonderful richness and helps the lighter colours more than you would think possible. A city in which some buildings are of dark wood will have an air of reality never achieved by a city where all is red or white or stone colour. By the way, among the stone bricks there are some blue ones, but you will always have enough of them, for they are the last things you will ever want to use.

Your boxes then must be coloured either white, red, stone colour, or dark brown. In the white use either white paint--flat, not shining, or if that cost too much trouble and money, whitewash made of whitening, size, hot water and a pinch of yellow ochre or chrome powder to give it a pleasant ivory creaminess. There should be a good deal of size so that the whitewash does not come off on every thing.

The red boxes can be painted to match the red bricks, or colour-washed (whitewash as before, but red ochre for colour).

Stone colour is not a very satisfactory tint and too much of it makes for gloom. The lids and bottoms of the brick boxes will generally give you as much of it as you want. But if you desire stone colour you can make it by putting a pinch of raw umber in the whitewash. Or you can paint your boxes with this uninteresting tint--resembling the doors of back kitchens. With these paints or colour-washes you can make your odd many-shaped boxes into smooth-surfaced blocks to match your bricks: and not only wooden, but cardboard boxes can be treated in this way. All these colours can be bought in gigantic penn'orths at the oil-shops. But when I come to the dark brown, which I confess is my favourite colour, no cardboard box will serve your turn. You must choose clean, smooth wood, because the brown colouring is transparent, and the grain will show through. Your bricks will be smooth enough, and if the boxes are not smooth a little sand-paper will soon subdue their rough exterior. I suppose you know how to use sand-paper? If you just rub with your fingers you hurt your fingers and don't make much progress; the best way is to wrap the sand-paper round a flat piece of wood--a wooden brick will do--and rub with that.

When your wood is all smooth you mix your stain. And here I make a present to all housewives of the best floor stain in the world. Get a tin of Brunswick black--the kind you put on stoves--and some turpentine.

Mix a little of the black and a little of the turpentine in a pot and try it on the wood with a smooth brush--a flat brush is the best--till you have the colour you want, always remembering that it will be a little lighter when it is dry. When you have decided on the colour, paint your bricks and boxes on five out of their six sides lightly and smoothly, keeping to the grain of the wood, and not going over the same surface twice if you can help it. This is why a flat brush is the best: it will go right down the side of a brick and colour it at one sweep.

Then stand each brick up on end to dry. When it is dry you can paint the under bit on which it has been standing. While you have stains and colours going it is well to colour some of your arches, and also such things as cotton-reels, and the little wooden pill-boxes that you get at the chemist's. Before colouring these boxes fill them with sand or stones and stick the lids on with glue. Otherwise they will not be heavy enough to build with happily.

This painting or colouring should be done out of doors, or in an out-house, if possible. If you have to do it in the house spread several thicknesses of newspaper before you begin, and make a calm resting place for your painted things where they can dry at leisure and not be scarred with the finger-marks of her who "clears away."

The earnest builder will keep a watchful eye on any carpentering that may go on in the house, and annex the smaller blocks of wood cut off the end of things, which, to an alien eye, are so much rubbish, but which are to the builder stores of price.

If there are a few shillings to spare, the carpenter will, for those few shillings, cut you certain shapes which you cannot buy in shops--arches of a comfortable thickness and of satisfying curves, and slabs of board for building steps. These should be of varying lengths and thicknesses and made in sets of twelve steps, with two boards to each step, twenty-four slabs to a set. The biggest might be 1 in. thick and the bottom and largest slabs 12 by 6 in., lessening to 6 by 1 in. The next set might be in., and of corresponding proportions, then in., then in. The two basic slabs of the in. would be 9 by 4 in., and those of the in. would be 6 by 3 in. A set with in. steps (the basic slabs 3 by 1 in.) would complete the set. Flights of steps of many varying heights and sizes could be built with these slabs. Ask the carpenter--if the shillings are forthcoming--to save for you the curved pieces of wood which come out of the arches. They are very useful for the bases of pillars, for towers and for the pedestals of statues or vases. Some of the arches, steps, and blocks should be coloured to match the red, white, and brown bricks.

[Ill.u.s.tration: ARCHES AND PILLARS.]

Some of the boxes, particularly the larger ones, should have doorways sawn in them on opposite sides--it is pleasant to look _through_ a building and see the light beyond; and if you are a thorough builder you can make a pillared interior which will delight the eyes of those who stoop down and peer through the doorway. A few narrow, oblong windows, high up, will also be useful. You need not show them unless you wish: you can always conceal them by a facade of bricks.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PILLARED COURT.]

Another pleasant use of a big box is to cut out the top and sides and make a columned court of it, which, when cream-washed, dignifies your city with almost all the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome. The columns are cut from broom-handles--twopence each at the oil-shop, or, in the case of smaller boxes, from those nice round smooth wooden sticks which cost a penny and are used in ordinary life to thread window-blinds on.

If you are going to make a city which is to stand for some time, a little thin glue is a good help to stability. If it is only a here-to-day-and-gone-to-morrow city, Plasticine is good--the least touch of it seeming to make things safe which otherwise might totter to their ruin. But except as mortar Plasticine should be shunned. It is not good as a building material.

Having now your bricks, boxes, arches, steps, and rounds, you may begin to block out your building. Quite soon you will begin to find that everything is too rectilinear. Even the arches and the rounds and the pillars and the pill-boxes cannot satisfy your desire for curves. This is the moment when you will begin to look about you for domes. And the domes, on the instant of their imposition in your building, will call out for minarets. It is then that you will wander about the house seeking eagerly for things that are like other things. Your search will be magnificently successful, if only the lady of the house has given you a free hand, and you have been so fortunate as to secure the sympathies of the kitchen queen.

CHAPTER IV

The Magic City

THE only magic in the city is the magic of imagination, which is, after all, the best magic in the world. The idea of it came to me when I was dissatisfied with the materials provided for children to build with, and I think it must be a really true idea, because wherever I have applied it, it has worked, and that, I am told, is in accordance with the philosophy of pragmatism and a characteristic of all great discoveries.

You may build magic cities in homes of modest comfort, using all the pretty things you can lay your hands on. You may build them in the mansions of the rich, if the rich are nice people and love cities, and if the butler will let you have the silver candlesticks for pillars, and the silver-gilt rose-bowls for domes; and you could build one in the houses of the very poor, if the very poor had any s.p.a.ce for building--build them there and not use a single thing that could not be begged or borrowed by an intelligent child, no matter how poor.

Children love to build. I still think with fond affection, and I am afraid speak with tiresome repet.i.tion, of those big oak bricks which we had when we were children. They disappeared when we left the old London house where I was born. It was in Kennington, that house--and it had a big garden and a meadow and a cottage and a laundry, stables and cow-house and pig-styes, elm-trees and vines, tiger lilies and flags in the garden, and chrysanthemums that smelt like earth and hyacinths that smelt like heaven. Our nursery was at the top of the house, a big room with a pillar in the middle to support the roof. "The post," we called it: it was excellent for playing mulberry bush, or for being martyrs at.

The skipping rope did to bind the martyrs to the stake. When we left that house we went to Brighton, where there was a small and gritty garden, where nothing grew but geraniums and calceolarias. And we did not have our bricks any more. Perhaps they were too heavy to move.

Perhaps the Brighton house was too small for the chest. I think I must have clamoured for the old bricks, for I remember very well the advent of a small box of deal bricks made in Germany, which had indeed two arches and four pillars, and a square of gla.s.s framed in wood daubed with heavy, ugly body colour, and called a window. But you could not build with those bricks. So there was no building at Brighton except on the beach. Sand is as good as anything in the world to build with--but there is no sand on the beach at Brighton, only sandiness. There are stones--pebbles you call them, but they are too round to be piled up into buildings. The only thing you can play with them is dolls' dinner parties. There are plenty of oyster sh.e.l.ls and flat bits of slate and tile for dishes and plates--and it is quite easy to find stones the proper shape and colour for boiled fowls and hams and roast legs of mutton, German sausages, ribs of beef, mince pies, pork pies, roast hare or calf's head. But building is impossible.

In the courtyard of our house in France there was an out-house with a sloping roof and a flat parapet about four feet high. We used to build little clay huts along this, and roof them with slates, leaving a hole for a chimney. The huts had holes for windows and doors, and we used to collect bits of candle and put them in our huts after dark and enjoy the lovely spectacle of our illuminated buildings till some one remembered us and caught us, and sent us to bed. That was the curse of our hut-building--the very splendour of the result attracted the attention one most wished to avoid. But clay was our only building material, and after the big bricks were lost I never had any more bricks till I had children of my own who had bricks of their own. And then I played with them and theirs. And even then I never thought of building magic cities till the Indian soldiers came.

They were very fine soldiers with turbans and swords and eyes that gleamed in quite a lifelike way, riding on horses of a violently active appearance: they came to my little son when he was getting well after measles or some such sorrow, and he wanted a fort built for them. So we rattled all the bricks out of their boxes on to the long cutting-out table in the work-room and began to build. But do what we would our fort would not look like a fort--at any rate not like an Eastern fort. We pulled it down and tried again, and then again, but no: regardless of our patient energy our fort quietly but persistently refused to look like anything but a factory--a building wholly unworthy of those military heroes with the prancing steeds and the coloured turbans, and the eyes with so much white in them. So then I wondered what was needed to give a hint of the gorgeous East to the fort, and I perceived that what was wanted was a dome--domes.

So I fetched some bra.s.s finger-bowls and l.u.s.tre basins off the dresser in the dining-room and inverted one on the chief tower of our fort, and behold! the East began to sparkle and beckon. Domes called for minarets, and chessmen on pillars supplied the need. One thing led to another, and before the day was over the Indian hors.e.m.e.n were in full charge across a sanded plain where palm trees grew--a sanded plain bounded only by the edges of the table, along three sides of which were buildings that never rose beside the banks of Thames, but seemed quite suitable piles to reflect their fair proportions in the Ganges or the Sutlej, especially when viewed by eyes which had not had the privilege of gazing on those fair and distant streams.

I learned a great deal in that my first day of what I may term romantic building, but what I learned was the merest shadow-sketch of the possibilities of my discovery. My little son, for his part, learned that a bowl one way up is a bowl, a thing for a little boy to eat bread and milk out of; the other way up it is a dome for a king's palace. That books are not only things to read, but that they will make marble slabs for the building of temples. That chessmen are not only useful for playing that difficult and tedious game on which grown-ups are so slowly and silently intent, or even for playing all those other games, of soldiers, which will naturally occur to any one with command of the pleasant turned pieces. Chessmen, he learned, had other and less simple uses. As minarets of delicate carved work they lightened the ma.s.s of buildings and conferred elegance and distinction, converting what had been a block of bricks into a pavilion for a sultan or a tomb for a sultan's bride.

[Ill.u.s.tration: MATERIALS FOR THE GUARD-ROOM.]

There was a little guard-room, I remember, at the corner of our first city, and there has been a little guard-room at the corner of every city we have built since. In simple beauty, that little guard-room seemed to us then to touch perfection. And really, you know, I have not yet been able to improve on it. The material was simplicity itself: six books, five chessmen, and a basin; and you see here how the guard-room looked when it was done.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE GUARD-ROOM.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE DOMINO DOOR.]

There was a black box, I remember, standing on another box, with domino steps. It needed a door, and we made it a door of ivory with the double blank of the dominoes, and a portico of three cigarettes--two for pillars and one to lie on the top of the pillars and complete the portico. You have no idea how fine the whole thing looked--like a strong little house of ebony and ivory--a little sombre in appearance perhaps, and like a house that has a secret to keep, but quite fine. The palm trees we made out of pieces of larch and yew fastened by Plasticine to the tops of elder twigs--and elder twigs have a graceful carriage, not too upright and yet not drooping. They look very like the trunks of tropical trees. But if you have not elders and larches and yew trees to command, you can make trees for your city in other ways. For little trees in tubs we had southernwood stuck in cotton reels--these make enchanting tubs, and there are a good many different shapes, so that your flower tubs are pleasantly varied. Fir cones we found useful, too; they made magnificent _chevaux de frise_.

[Ill.u.s.tration: LARCH PALM.]