第5章 THE SECOND(2)

My games upon the floor must have spread over several years and developed from small beginnings, incorporating now this suggestion and now that.They stretch, I suppose, from seven to eleven or twelve.I played them intermittently, and they bulk now in the retrospect far more significantly than they did at the time.Iplayed them in bursts, and then forgot them for long periods;through the spring and summer I was mostly out of doors, and school and classes caught me early.And in the retrospect I see them all not only magnified and transfigured, but fore-shortened and confused together.A clockwork railway, I seem to remember, came and went;one or two clockwork boats, toy sailing ships that, being keeled, would do nothing but lie on their beam ends on the floor; a detestable lot of cavalrymen, undersized and gilt all over, given me by a maiden aunt, and very much what one might expect from an aunt, that I used as Nero used his Christians to ornament my public buildings; and I finally melted some into fratricidal bullets, and therewith blew the rest to flat splashes of lead by means of a brass cannon in the garden.

I find this empire of the floor much more vivid and detailed in my memory now than many of the owners of the skirts and legs and boots that went gingerly across its territories.Occasionally, alas! they stooped to scrub, abolishing in one universal destruction the slow growth of whole days of civilised development.I still remember the hatred and disgust of these catastrophes.Like Noah I was given warnings.Did I disregard them, coarse red hands would descend, plucking garrisons from fortresses and sailors from ships, jumbling them up in their wrong boxes, clumsily so that their rifles and swords were broken, sweeping the splendid curves of the Imperial Road into heaps of ruins, casting the jungle growth of Zululand into the fire.

Well, Master Dick," the voice of this cosmic calamity would say, "you ought to have put them away last night.No! I can't wait until you've sailed them all away in ships.I got my work to do, and do it I will."And in no time all my continents and lands were swirling water and swiping strokes of house-flannel.

That was the worst of my giant visitants, but my mother too, dear lady, was something of a terror to this microcosm.She wore spring-sided boots, a kind of boot now vanished, I believe, from the world, with dull bodies and shiny toes, and a silk dress with flounces that were very destructive to the more hazardous viaducts of the Imperial Road.She was always, I seem to remember, fetching me; fetching me for a meal, fetching me for a walk or, detestable absurdity!

fetching me for a wash and brush up, and she never seemed to understand anything whatever of the political Systems across which she came to me.Also she forbade all toys on Sundays except the bricks for church-building and the soldiers for church parade, or a Scriptural use of the remains of the Noah's Ark mixed up with a wooden Swiss dairy farm.But she really did not know whether a thing was a church or not unless it positively bristled with cannon, and many a Sunday afternoon have I played Chicago (with the fear of God in my heart) under an infidel pretence that it was a new sort of ark rather elaborately done.

Chicago, I must explain, was based upon my father's description of the pig slaughterings in that city and certain pictures I had seen.

You made your beasts--which were all the ark lot really, provisionally conceived as pigs--go up elaborate approaches to a central pen, from which they went down a cardboard slide four at a time, and dropped most satisfyingly down a brick shaft, and pitter-litter over some steep steps to where a head slaughterman (ne Noah)strung a cotton loop round their legs and sent them by pin hooks along a wire to a second slaughterman with a chipped foot (formerly Mrs.Noah) who, if I remember rightly, converted them into Army sausage by means of a portion of the inside of an old alarum clock.

My mother did not understand my games, but my father did.He wore bright-coloured socks and carpet slippers when he was indoors--my mother disliked boots in the house--and he would sit down on my little chair and survey the microcosm on the floor with admirable understanding and sympathy.

It was he gave me most of my toys and, I more than suspect, most of my ideas."Here's some corrugated iron," he would say, "suitable for roofs and fencing," and hand me a lump of that stiff crinkled paper that is used for packing medicine bottles.Or, "Dick, do you see the tiger loose near the Imperial Road?--won't do for your cattle ranch." And I would find a bright new lead tiger like a special creation at large in the world, and demanding a hunting expedition and much elaborate effort to get him safely housed in the city menagerie beside the captured dragon crocodile, tamed now, and his key lost and the heart and spring gone out of him.