Wings and the Child; Or, The Building of Magic Cities Part 7

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE MAGIC CITY.

152]]

On the first day of building what we soon came to call magic cities we trusted to inspiration; there was no time for thought. And this day was perhaps the most interesting day of all--for we had everything to learn.

One of the things which I learned was that this magic city game was an excellent training for eye and hand, as well as for the imagination and the more soothing of the domestic virtues. The eye is trained to perceive likenesses and differences in the shapes and colours of things--to notice, as I said, that a bowl is a dome wrong way up, and that cigarettes are like white pillars. A beautiful yet sinister temple might be built with cigars for pillars and cigar-boxes for pediments, if cigars were the sort of things you were ever allowed to play with.

You see that yew and larch and elder can be made to look like palm trees, and that shrubs in tubs are really like sprigs of southernwood in cotton reels. You go about with eyes newly opened to form and colour: you look at every object in a new light, trying to see whether it is or is not like something else--something that can be used in your magic city. You notice that a door is much the same shape as auntie's mother-of-pearl card-case, and your architectural instinct, already beginning to develop, a.s.sures you that a pearly door would be a beautiful thing for a temple, if only auntie sees things in the same light as you do. You perceive that a cribbage board is straight and narrow, as a path leading to such a door might be, and that if you stick tiny tufts of southernwood or veronica into the holes along the ivory sides of your path, your path will run between two little green hedges.

You will notice that books make colonnades darkly mysterious if the lids of the brick boxes are laid along the back and along the top, and that based on these solidly built colonnades your bricks and arches will rise in galleries of unexpected dignity and charm. The building itself, the placing of bricks and dominoes, and books and chessmen and bowls, with exactness and neatness, is in itself a lesson in firm and delicate handling, such a lesson as is impossible if you are building with bricks alone. The call on the imagination is strong and clear. A house--the meanest hut--cannot be built without a plan or without an architect, though the architect may be only a little child and the plan may be only a little child's dream. To build without a plan is to heap bricks one on another, to make a cairn, not a house. The plan for the magic city, then, gets itself dreamed--the child's imagination learns to know what the bowl will look like when it is upside down, and, presently, what sort of bowls and books and bricks are needed to give to the cloud-capped palace of its desire some shadow in solid fact perceptible to the senses. To create in the image of his dream is the hope and the despair of every artist. And even though the image be distorted--as in all works of art, even the greatest, it always must be--yet it is joy even to have created the poorest image of a dream.

And in the labour of creation will blossom those domestic virtues which best adorn the home; patience--for it is not often that for the young architect dream and image even vaguely coincide at the first effort, or the second or the third; good temper, for no one can build anything in a rage. The spirit of anger is the enemy of the spirit of architecture.

And besides, being angry may make your hand shake, and then nothing is any good. Perseverance too, without which patience is a mere pa.s.sive endurance. All these grow strong while you build your cities and try to make visible your dream.

I do not mean that a child building a city sees all of it at once--in every detail; I don't suppose even the heaviest of architects does that.

But I mean that he sees the ma.s.ses of it with the eye of the mind and arrives by experiment at the details that best suit those ma.s.ses. If the gla.s.s ash-tray will not do, the tea-cup without a handle will--or perhaps the flower-pot saucer, or the lid of a cocoa-tin... . One must look about, and find something that _will_ do, something which when it is put in its place will seem the only possible thing. I don't know how real architects work, but this is how you work with magic cities.

CHAPTER V

Materials

YOU wander round the house seeking beautiful things which look like other beautiful things. Let us suppose that you have the run of a house where beautiful things are. I will tell you afterwards what to do in the house where beautiful--or at any rate costly--things are not. It is best when the owner of the house is an enthusiastic member of the building party; then she will grudge nothing.

In the drawing-room you will find silver candlesticks and a silver inkstand. The candlesticks are like pillars. Put the inkstand across the pillars and you have a gateway of unexampled splendour. If there be a silver-backed blotting-book, take it. It will make the great door of your greatest temple. Silver bowls should not be pa.s.sed by, nor bronzes.

A vase of j.a.panese bronze set up between two ebony elephants crowns a flat pillared building with splendour. There may be Chinese dragons or Egyptian G.o.ds that have lain a thousand years safe in their bronze amid the sands of the desert, cast aside by the foot of the camel, unseen in the shadow of the tent, and now decking the mantelpiece of the room you are looting. Little silver figures of knights in armour and what not--take them if you get the chance. Chessmen, too, as many as you can get, the carved ivory ones, of red and white, and the black and brown kind where the heads of the kings and queens are so like marbles and those of the p.a.w.ns like boot-b.u.t.tons; draughts too, and spillikins, and those little metal animals, heavy and coloured life-like, which you see on gla.s.s shelves in the fancy shop: take them too. They will serve other uses than those to which you will dedicate your Noah's Ark animals. Card counters, especially the golden and mother-of-pearl kinds, and dominoes, and the willow-pattern pots and a blue cup or so from the gla.s.s-fronted cupboard. Take all these, always giving preference to the things that you will not be asked to put back the same day. Little j.a.panese cabinets, tea-caddies of tortoisesh.e.l.l or wood or silver, silver boxes--and boxes of all beautiful kinds. Do not take the playing cards that people play bridge with: these are never quite the same after they have been used in magic cities, and the Queen of Hearts always gets lost. You can usually acquire odd packs of cards that n.o.body wants.

Those with black and gold backs are the best. They make gorgeous paG.o.das, and a touch of Plasticine keeps each card where it should be.

In the dining-room you may acquire perhaps, at least you can in mine, bra.s.s finger-bowls, and the lids of urns and kettles from the dresser--egg-cups and mugs and basins of l.u.s.tre and of blue. Also those very little pewter liqueur-cups from Liberty's, and the tumblers for your towers of light, if you are going to have any. The library will yield you books and atlases--very useful for roofs these last, if they do not slope too much from back to edge; if they do, you can get even with them by wedges of paper laid in on the thin side.

But the kitchen will be your happiest hunting-ground, and here you will make a good bag even in those houses where you are not allowed any of the treasures from the drawing-room or the dining-room.

Tins--tins of all kinds and shapes, from the tin that once held Bath Olivers and its lesser brother where coffee once lived to the square smaller tins designed for cocoa, mustard, pepper, and so forth.

[Ill.u.s.tration: HONESTY PILLARS.]

A flour-dredger and a pepper-pot, a potato-cutter, patty pans, and those little tall tins that you bake castle puddings in, the round wooden moulds with which dairy-maids imprint cows and swans upon pats of b.u.t.ter, the kitchen mortar, especially the big marble one, so heavy that cook does not care to use it, brown earthenware bowls and stewing-pots, the lids of tea-pots, clothes-pegs, jars that have held ginger, and jars that have held jam--especially the brownish corrugated kind of jar--all these things and many more you may glean in a kitchen whose Queen is kind.

One of the most beautiful buildings I have ever made was built of kitchen things, and bricks and the boxes of bricks, a few sh.e.l.ls, and a few chessmen.

The three tall towers are two cocoa tins and a Bath Oliver tin, very brightly polished; the windows and doors and crenellations are of black _pa.s.se-partout_, that nice gummed paper which you buy in reels for binding pictures and gla.s.s together when you don't want to have picture-frames. On the tops of the tins are the lids of a silver urn, a silver b.u.t.ter dish, and a silver jam-jar. A salt-cellar (wrong way up, with a white chess knight on it) and a pepper-pot with _pa.s.se-partout_ doors and windows stand at the base of the tower, and turrets are made of round bricks and draughts, with the chess castles on the top. The porch is a big potato-cutter, with a white chess king on it, and on each side two books with a binding of white and pale gold. Along the top of the porch run the lids of two domino-boxes; on these are two rounds that happened when the arches were being cut out. On these little pearl sh.e.l.ls are glued, and little roofs of blue tiles complete the porch.

Behind these more books, white and pale gold with marbled sides, lead up to the platform on which the great tin towers rise up against the snowy background (linen sheets over the backs of chairs). The lower building is of the boxes of bricks faced with bricks and bearing a large blue jar crowned with a silver egg-cup, a flour-dredger, and a pepper-pot, and some blue and white tiles. An Egyptian G.o.d stands at the corner of the upper and the lower building, and two green trees with white roses grow out of a tomb at the left. The pathway is of tiles edged with fir cones, and two rose-trees within tubs (cotton reels) stand at its beginning; the whole thing was blue and silver and black, and I wish I could show you a coloured picture of it, or, better still, build the thing up for you to see.

The lower platform on the right is a box faced with silver seed-vessels of honesty, and the arches and court are red. The steps are made of blocks of sugar. The tank is edged with red bricks and the water where the seal swims is silver paper. In front is a pavement made of mother-of-pearl card counters, and the inside of the court is made of one large red tile with a pattern of white on it. (You can do this with a square board painted red, and counters laid on it.) The fountain in the middle is a bra.s.s match-box and the waters that rise from it are silver paper; but in the picture the water of the fountain seems to have been blown aside by the wind, which no doubt is severe in "those desolate regions of snow." You can build just such another tower and castle with the things you have, but when once you start building you will most likely think of some other way, quite different from mine, and just as good.

Tiles, by the way, are most useful, and if you have an uncle who is an architect he will have any number sent to him as samples, and he will be rather glad to get rid of them. If your uncles are all eminent in other walks of life it is a pity, but you are probably friends with the man who papers and paints your house, or the man who comes when the pipes burst at Christmas, or the man who comes about the gas, or the man who knows all the sullen secrets of the kitchen range. It will be strange if none of these can get you a few coloured tiles when once they know you want them. It is well, if you are a child with a taste for building, to take pains to become acquainted with all the men who come to your house to do interesting things with tools and wood and iron and lead. Quite apart from the joy of watching their slow and mysterious processes, and thinking how easy it would be to be a plumber or a paperhanger yourself, there are all sorts of things left over from their work which are of no use to them, but may be of much use to you. All sorts of screws and nails, for instance, these generous men will now and then bestow--little screws of dry colour, little pieces of bra.s.s, door-k.n.o.bs and finger-plates, thick red earthenware pipe, good for towers, lengths of pleasantly coloured wall-paper--the wrong side of which, being plain, can be used for all sorts of purposes. Lead piping is useful too, especially if you get it cut into 2-in. lengths--and cut _straight_. The sections make excellent and stable flower-pots for cities. Bits of bra.s.s tubing are useful too--in fact, bra.s.s objects of all sorts deserve your careful consideration. Because, if a city is to look handsome, it must have a good deal of metal about it, as the cities in Atlantis did.

As I write I see more and more clearly that a sharp distinction must be drawn between cities built and demolished in an afternoon, and cities that can be kept going and added to day by day for weeks. You may often be fortunate enough to raid drawing-room and dining-room and to use the spoils for a building that only lasts a day, but no one will strip her rooms of all the pretty things you want and let you keep them for weeks.

Therefore if you are going to build a city that is to go on, you must collect the materials of your own, and the odds and ends that amiable workmen will readily give you will take a useful place in your collection. If you let it be known that you want odds and ends of pretty and simple shapes, your friends will save them for you, and you will gradually ama.s.s the things you need. I know well enough that there will have to be a place to keep them, but the toy-cupboard, if you clear out all the toys you never play with, will hold a good deal, and many of the things you collect will do for other purposes as well as for the building of cities.

CHAPTER VI

Collections

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

FIRST in your building collection will be the boxes, arches, and steps of which I have spoken. Dominoes and draughts and chessmen you probably have. Odd chessmen--quite beautiful ones can often be bought for a few pence--are very valuable for our purpose. The black and red halma men are very useful too, but the yellow and green always look cheap and nasty. Card counters are useful, and so is silver paper. Gla.s.s drops off old chandeliers are good for fountains, and pieces of green cloth for gra.s.s plots. The back of green wall-paper does for this, too; and very realistic gra.s.s lawns can be made by chopping up the long green gra.s.s that people sell for fire screens. It is really sedge finely split up, and dyed. You cut it up as finely as you can with scissors, and when you have about a teacupful you take a square of stiff cardboard and cover it all over with glue; then quickly, before the glue has time to cool, you sprinkle your chopped gra.s.s thickly all over it and leave it to dry.

Next day, _not before_, spread a newspaper and turn the cardboard over so that the loose gra.s.s falls away on to the paper. Fasten down your gra.s.s plot in a suitable place in your city and build a little red brick wall round it with a little arched gateway, and you will have a neat and charming enclosed garden. For garden beds dark-coloured tobacco makes good mould, and shows up your little rose-trees. You can make standard rose-trees of loofah--dyed green, and the stalks of long matches painted brown. The roses, which are stuck on with glue, are red or white immortelles, and the whole effect is just what you are trying for. Large trees can be made of sprigs of box or veronica, with immortelles glued on, and they will last fresh and pretty about a week. Palm trees can be made of elder stems and larch or of the sedge gra.s.s.

Lay the gra.s.s evenly and, beginning about half-way down, wind brown wool or silk thread round and round closely and, very like splicing a cricket bat, work downwards towards the thick part of the gra.s.s stalk. Fasten the end very strongly. Then stick the stem in a cotton reel or a lead piping pot, cut off, evenly, the loose ends of the gra.s.s, fold them back level, cut the stem.

For the city of a day sprigs of southernwood, lavender, thyme, or marjoram make charming little trees.

Sh.e.l.ls are extremely useful for decoration and produce the effect of carving. Almost all sh.e.l.ls will be useful in one way or another, but I have found the most satisfaction in the gray and pearly sh.e.l.ls which you find among the thick seaweed ridges on the beach below the grey cliffs of Cornwall, and the little yellow periwinkly sh.e.l.ls that lie on the rocks below the white cliffs of Kent. If you glue these sh.e.l.ls strongly on arches and pillars you will find them very handsome adornments.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THICK ARCHES.]

Keep your sh.e.l.ls in boxes. There are always plenty of boxes in the world, and if not boxes, little bags will do to hold the different kinds of sh.e.l.ls. It is well worth while to keep the different kinds separate.

The work of sorting out the sh.e.l.ls is very damping to the eager enthusiast anxious to execute a decorative design. Indeed, it is well to keep all your building materials sorted each according to its kind, the wooden things together and the metal things and, above all, the crockery things. Keep the Noah's Ark animals in their Ark, and the bricks in their boxes, and when you are going to build don't get everything out at once and make a rubbish heap of it on the floor.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FAN WINDOW.]

As you grow more accustomed to building, you will find that sometimes you build a temple or palace that charms you so much that you wish to build it again; and you will soon learn what are the materials needed, and just take out those and a few more from your store. I say a few more, because you will never build your temple or your palace twice _exactly_ the same: you are sure to think of some improvement, however small.

I have made beautiful windows with the sticks of an old ivory fan, framed in dark wood bricks, and ornamented the dark wall above with elephant tusk sh.e.l.ls and others, and below with carved ivory card counters.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE ELEPHANT TEMPLE.]

There is a certain Elephant Temple which I have built many times. Its floor is a red and white chessboard, and its roof is supported on a double row of white pillars. White pillars surround the altar--a wooden box--on which the ebony elephant stands. On each side of him are red fairy lights, hidden by b.u.t.tresses from the human eye which peeps through the brazen gates into that shadowy interior, and falling full on the elephant on his pillared shrine. The walls are of big red books--_Sheridan's Plays_, _Tom Jones_, and Boswell's _Life of Johnson_.

The roof is a flat square lid, once the lid of a packing case, stained a dark brown like the bricks. On the side are the windows made of the ivory fan, and the dark bricks and the elephant tusk sh.e.l.ls. There is a door, too, a mother-of-pearl one; in a former life it was the card-case of a much-loved aunt, who n.o.bly contributed it to the Temple. Above this door is a white animal from the Noah's Ark.

And all the rest of that wall is built up of dark-stained brown wooden bricks. The other side shows between dark b.u.t.tresses the red of the books, and towards the back of this side are small square buildings--wooden boxes stained brown--with bra.s.s domes and mysterious doorways. I think the priests and attendants of the Temple live here.

The front of the Temple shows a little of the red between dark b.u.t.tresses, which, here, are ornamented with delicate dark carved chessmen. The gate is of pierced bra.s.s--two finger-plates for a door, and the brazen pillars of the portico are two candlesticks, which support a bra.s.s inkstand, on which stand two yellowish wooden chessmen.

On the middle of the roof is a big lacquered wooden bowl--the kind that nice grocers put in their windows full of prunes or coffee. Above is a bra.s.s rose-bowl, on that a finger-bowl of inlaid bra.s.s, crowned with a black chess king. There are two dark arches with bed-k.n.o.bs on them, and round the roof are various towers and turrets, and tall minarets made of dark bricks with chessmen on the top.

In front of the pillars at the gate two black elephants stand on wooden plinths, and the fore-court of the Temple and the s.p.a.ce at the side are paved with mother-of-pearl.

I know the main things that are needed for this Temple, but its details are changed a little every time I build it.

If you cannot get mother-of-pearl card counters you can make a beautiful pavement by pasting the s.h.i.+ning pods of honesty in a pattern on a piece of dark brown cardboard, or dark brown paper pasted on cardboard; but if you do this you must build a little dark-wood brick wall all round to hide the brown paper edges. Build gatehouses in your wall, little ones, to show off, by contrast, the ma.s.sive splendour of your Temple. These honesty pods are a most useful subst.i.tute for mother-of-pearl. You can paste them on square pillars or on the fronts of boxes (houses I mean) or make sloping roofs of them by sticking them on folded cardboard fastened at the proper angle by tapes glued about a third of the way up.

But as a rule sloping roofs are not good in Eastern cities. A gra.s.s garden with paths of honesty, or a sh.e.l.l-built fountain basin in the middle, will add a charm to any city square. And by the way, don't be afraid of open s.p.a.ces. Have as many buildings as you like, and ma.s.s them together as you choose, but let there be open s.p.a.ces. They will be to your building as mounts are to pictures or margins to books. And for frame or binding, let there be a wall all round your city. It gives a neatness and a completeness which enhance a hundred-fold all the qualities your city may possess.

[Ill.u.s.tration: HONESTY ROOF.]