SECTION IV
FUNICULARS, MARBLE TOWERS, CASTLES AND WAR GAMES, BUT VERY LITTLE OF WAR
GAMES
I have now given two general types of floor game; but these are only
just two samples of delightful and imagination-stirring variations that
can be contrived out of the toys I have described. I will now glance
rather more shortly at some other very good uses of the floor, the
boards, the bricks, the soldiers, and the railway system--that pentagram
for exorcising the evil spirit of dulness from the lives of little boys
and girls. And first, there is a kind of lark we call Funiculars. 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.
You know, perhaps, what a toy engine is like. It has the general
appearance of a railway engine; funnels, buffers, cab, and so forth. All
these are very elegant things, no doubt; but they do not make for
lightness, they do not facilitate hill-climbing. 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. This it was that our junior member instantly knew for a 'lectric, and loved from the moment of its stripping.
(I have, by the by, known a very serviceable little road 'lectric made
out of a clockwork mouse.)
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. We make switches in these lines; we make them have level-crossings, at which collisions are always being just averted; the lines go over and under each other, and in and out of tunnels.
The marble tower, again, is a great building, on which we devise devious
slanting ways down which marbles run. I do not know why it is amusing to
make a marble run down a long intricate path, and dollop down steps, and
come almost but not quite to a stop, and rush out of dark places and
across little bridges of card: it is, and we often do it.