Marian’s grandmothers had known how to spin and weave, and as a little girl she herself had seen the old wheels and looms of her ancestors and had had their workings explained to her. But her childish mind had understood little, and the intervening years had wiped out much of that. Still, there remained a little, a wavering memory that she called up now and caused to supplement her grown-up knowledge of how such things must needs be worked out.
“I need two wheels, Delbert,” she said, “and a band to go from one to the other as on mother’s sewing-machine. One wheel must be small, and I think this spool will do. Jennie, you can wind off what’s left of the thread on to this little stick instead. But where can I get the other wheel? It must be big.”
“There’s the bottom of the old barrel,” suggested Delbert. “We can make something else to put on the Muggywah to carry things in.”
“That’s so,” said Marian; “I could burn a hole through the center to run an axle through and another one to stick a handle in near the edge to turn it by.”
“But doesn’t the wheel have to have a groove on it? Mamma’s machine wheel did,—grooved, you know, so the band couldn’t slip off.”
“No, if I remember rightly, the big wheel on grandma’s spinning-wheel was very wide, or had a wide tire, and the band was so narrow there was no danger of its getting off. There probably was a groove on the little wheel, and our spool will fix that, you see, as well as if it had been made specially; but I don’t see my way clear yet to making that barrel-bottom carry the band. Maybe I can char the edge and make a groove in it.”
Investigation proved the bottom of the barrel to be made of two pieces which would come apart as soon as the pressure of the staves was removed. That, however, was remedied by nailing two bits of boards across the two pieces.
Where did she get the nails? Well, she had been saving them up for a long time. Two of them had been in Davie’s apron pockets when they came to the Island, and one had chanced to be lying in the bottom of the lunch-basket. The others had been picked up one time and another in bits of driftwood on the beaches. Most of these were too crooked and rusty to be good for much, but there were enough good ones to fasten the pieces of the barrel-bottom securely together. Then they knocked off the hoops and staves and released the round piece, and burned the center hole, and another near the rim to put a handle in to turn it by, as Marian had said.
By this time she had abandoned the idea of charring the edge and making a groove. She gathered a lot of little straight pieces about five inches long and varying in width, some round but most little flat pieces, and in the center of each she cut a V-shaped notch and pounded them down tight on the edge of the wheel till she had circled it entirely, in that manner, then tied two strings round near the ends of the little sticks to bind them so they would not loosen up and come off.
She decided to use the same iron bar for an axle for the wheel to turn on that she had used to burn the holes in it with, and she pounded it into a crack in the rock wall of the wickiup. The outer end of the bar had a sort of knob on it,—it might once have been a nut,—so that the wheel would not slip off, and to keep it from wandering in the other direction up to the wall she twisted a bit of rope round the bar and tied it to make a good-sized knot on that side.
She was not quite satisfied with the rim of her wheel, and she worked a long while, weaving and winding fiber in and out till she had it all smooth with no chance of any of the little pieces being knocked loose. For the rest of her apparatus she had to do some searching for materials. She spent a full half-day up in the pasture before she found what she had decided she must have,—a straight little tree that divided into two branches about three feet up. She cut it close to the ground and trimmed off the top, leaving the forks about six inches long.
A piece of driftwood flat on one side was taken for the base, and a hole was burned in the middle of it and enlarged till the forked stick could be inserted and made snug by driving in little pegs where it did not fit tight. Two little holes were burned through the two forks. She used a big old nail to do that, for she did not want such big holes as the bar would have made,—besides, the bar was tight in the wall now with the big wheel swung on it. A little round stick that fitted snug into the spool was then made into a spindle. It turned nicely in the two little burned holes in the forks.
However, the standard was not heavy enough of itself to stand as firmly as would be required, so one end of the driftwood base was slipped under a rock projection, and then Delbert tugged in as big a rock as he could lift and set it down on the other end.
Now all that was lacking was a band to connect the two wheels. Marian crocheted this out of fiber, just wide enough to fit the spool.
Any of the children could turn the big wheel. Even Davie would be able to when he got up. This left Marian’s hands free to manipulate her cotton at the spindle.
Probably no spinning-wheel that was ever built was just like that one, but that did not disturb Marian’s equanimity so long as her wheel would spin, and that it certainly did. True, her yarn was always lumpy; she never did get so she could make it nice and smooth, but she was convinced that that was the fault of the manipulation of the cotton, for the wheel itself went quite swiftly and smoothly.
After she had spun up all their cotton, which included that from the wild cotton-tree, which she mixed in with that of the now flourishing bushes in the garden, she got out the little bundle of the combings of their hair, which she had saved ever since about the first of their being on the island, and she finally got that all spun into yarn too. It took as much time to prepare her material for spinning as it did to spin it, but the children helped with the cotton. They all, Davie included, got to be quite expert at picking out cotton seeds.
The next problem was weaving. Delbert was unexpectedly helpful at that. He knew nothing of his grandmother’s loom, but once upon a time he had seen a woman weaving a rag carpet, and on that never-to-be-forgotten trip with Clarence and his father he had seen an old Indian weaving on a loom.
As, however, the son of the old Indian had been blest with a number of fighting cocks which he was very desirous of showing off to the Americans, the small boy had bestowed most of his attention on the pugnacious birds instead of on the sober and less interesting loom; with the result that of the two processes that of rag-carpet weaving was really the clearer in his mind, though it had been witnessed earlier.
“There were two rollers,” he told Marian. “One had the threads and one had the carpet, and there were two little frame things something like in a beehive, only with strings across, and when one jerked up it lifted up every other thread, and she’d throw the thing through and then the other would jerk up and that lifted the other every other thread, and she’d throw it back again and pound it down with a stick.”
Marian drew a long breath. “Delbert,” she said, “it sounds just like a nightmare.”
Delbert stared. “Why,” he said, “I can see it just as plain as can be, only I can’t remember how it was made.”
“Probably we couldn’t make one just like it, anyway,” she consoled him.
Indeed, after much cogitating, she decided that an actual loom was beyond their resources, just at that time, at least, and concluded to weave by the simple method followed by the Indians in weaving the fajas,[6] or narrow sashes the men wear. They had seen this done by an Indian woman at the Port.
This calls for two pairs of forks set in the ground and two round sticks laid across the forks. The thread for the warp is wound round these sticks, from one to the other, over both and then under both, across and across, till the sticks are full.
A thin flat stick is then woven in under one thread and over the next of the top layer of threads, and then turned up on edge. This makes a space to pass the shuttle through, and the shuttle, by the way, is simply a slender stick with the filling wound on it.
Then the flat stick is pulled out and woven in again and the process repeated again and again. As fast as is needed, the round sticks are turned over, thus turning the woven cloth underneath till all but a few inches of the warp has been woven. These threads are then cut and form the fringe on the ends of the faja.
Marian changed the plan a little. Two little crotches were set in the floor of the wickiup just at the right height to be handy to work at. They had to dig up the floor to get them set right, but when they were set, the children smoothed things over and packed the seaweed carpet down again.
A smooth round stick about as big as Marian’s wrist was laid across the crotches. The other roller was much smaller around, and instead of being put on a pair of crotches was fastened to the side of the house with loops of rope, being just loose enough to turn easily in the loops.
Then came the task of wrapping the warp round the two rollers. It had to be very even and snug, and every once in a while a thread would break and have to be tied, and altogether it called for a good deal of patience.
“I remember,” said Delbert, “that on the carpet the lady wove, this part was all red and green. She had a wide stripe of red in the middle and a wide stripe of green out a little way from it on both sides, and in between were narrow stripes, but, on the very outside, on each edge, there was a stripe of red just half as wide as the one in the center, and she explained it to me. She said it was so that when the carpet was all sewed together it would make a red stripe just the same size as the one in the middle. The rags that she put in the other way were all kinds of colors.”
“How came you to remember all that?” asked Jennie.
“Dunno, but I do.”
When the warp was all ready, Marian tried weaving in the cross-thread with her darning-needle, as she would have mended a sock; but that was altogether too long and tedious a process, so she hunted for a thin flat stick such as the Indians have, to weave in and turn up on edge to hold the threads apart, while she slipped through a shuttle which she made of a weed stalk. That did better, but was not wholly satisfactory, and Delbert kept thinking and thinking, trying to remember how that part of the work had been done on the carpet-loom. He could not get it entirely clear in his head, but he finally evolved a plan that answered the purpose.
He arranged a pair of harnesses—though neither he nor Marian knew that that was their name—of two sticks wound with thread that looped down round the threads of the warp. These harnesses were connected by a rope that ran over a spool pulley that he fixed in the roof. Marian pulled this rope a little; and that lifted one of the harnesses and with it every other thread of the warp; she thrust through her weed-stalk shuttle, then pulled that harness down, which released the upheld threads, at the same time lifting the harness and with it all the other threads.
With this device she could accomplish two or three times as much in the same space of time, and she was not at all niggardly in her praise. Delbert glowed in consequence and, of course, Esther glowed with him. Even Jennie, who was most apt to be a little skeptical of Delbert’s abilities, had nothing but the most respectful remarks to offer on the subject.
With this crude loom they could weave a piece of cloth about a foot wide by six feet long, and the children were all so interested and eager to work at it, and it was such a simple process, that they all easily learned; so Marian did not have all the weaving to do.
Marian had kept Davie’s leg bandaged till she was very sure that it must be well knit together, and then she would not have him bear his weight on it for almost a week after. She was so very ignorant as to how such things should be attended to that she simply did not know what might happen. So she would undo it every day and bathe and rub and work with it and then do it up again, leaving it more and more loose and finally gave him permission to walk on it a little, but even then she kept the splints on it and provided him with a sort of a crutch.
When at last she discarded all bindings and allowed him to go free, they watched him most jealously. There was a queer little half-limp that Marian saw immediately. She hoped it would pass off in a week or so, and it did get better, but it never entirely disappeared. In spite of all her care, something had not been just right, and little King David never walked quite straight again.
Marion felt much worse about it than he did. As long as he could walk and run and swim, what did he care if one leg was a trifle shorter than the other? He could roam the Island wilds with the rest of them now, and that was joy enough.
Marian hoped his experience would teach him wisdom, and she did her best to impress it upon his mind that when she was not there Delbert’s authority came next; that, as Delbert was the oldest, it was his duty to take care of the younger ones, and they must obey him.
Davie admitted that he had not really needed to look for panales, that he could plainly see he would have saved himself a great deal of pain and trouble if he had minded Delbert, and he even went so far as to say of his own accord that he wished he had. Also, at Marian’s request, he promised to be “more good” in the future.
This was all she could hope for in that direction, and she took pains to instruct Delbert, when the others were not present, that, while she fully intended to back up his authority, at the same time he must take care not to issue orders that were not really necessary. She did not worry about his having trouble with the girls, for Esther would think anything Delbert wanted was the thing to do, anyway, and Jennie was growing into such a sensible little woman that her judgment could be depended upon as well as Delbert’s own; but Delbert was to take care that he came pretty near letting Davie have his own way in the minor, unimportant things and only issue orders to him when there was some reason for it.
She also privately instructed the little girls to use their influence whenever they could to keep Davie within bounds and see that he gave Delbert as little trouble as possible. And there she had to leave the matter, trusting for the best, for she could not always go with them now, the spinning and weaving and the making of their clothes took up so much of her time. The children would go off of a morning and sometimes not be back till nearly noon, coming in laden with fish, or maybe clams, or with great armloads of wood.
While they were gone, Marian would clean up the wickiup and work a while among the great mass of poppies and nasturtiums she had growing about the house and paths; but the wheel and loom were the principal things. She spun her cotton and hair-combings as fine as she could, so as to make them go as far as possible, and then she was always looking for new material. She learned to work in a great deal of fiber without spinning, especially in the filling, and many and many a morning was spent in cleaning out banana fiber to be used in her cloth. Oh, there was always plenty to keep her busy till the children came back at noon. They would be hungry, and there would be dinner to eat, and then lessons, and afterwards they would help with whatever she had in hand.
And for the lessons she took up another labor, that of making books of rabbit-skins. She had Delbert bring her some new skins, and she used part of the old skin clothes, which had been promptly discarded as fast as she had made new ones. She would trim her pages to the desired size and sew them together with fiber or hair. She used her little buttonhole scissors for the cutting, and of course she had real needles, though she thought that she could have made shift with thorns if she had had to. Her ink was brown.
Her pens were made of quills, and she could not write very nicely with them. Fine lines and graceful curves were not easy to achieve with them, so she discarded script and “printed” her books, as little children do before they have learned to write.
I think in time she would have worked out a printing-press to print her books on. Indeed, she did take the first step; she began to make type. It began accidentally almost. A pen had gone bad, and in fixing it her knife slipped and spoiled it altogether. Then, her mind on something else, she began toying with it idly and presently cut it square across and, pressing it down on her wrist, noted the neat o it printed there. Then it struck her that if it were inked it would make a better o than she could with a pen. She tried it, and it worked.
A second quill cut across and a section taken out made a c. It gave her an idea. Why not make a lot of type? It could not all be made with quills, but it would be amusing to see what she could do. She whittled out from bits of wood a capital A, and a W, and a D. She needed an ink-pad, and made it by padding a chip with cotton and then covering it with one of her last scraps of lawn.
Her type worked well enough, but it would be too much bother to whittle out the whole alphabet. The little letters would be beyond her skill, anyway, and it would be slower printing one type at a time than it was writing them. But by that time she had thought of a way whereby she might make a few types serve for the whole alphabet, as all letters are composed of curves and straight lines.
The curves she could make of quills, which were finer than anything she could whittle out, and the straight lines she made on the end of a little bone, two of them,—one for long lines, one for short ones. Four quills properly cut furnished her with an assortment of curves, and she could hold all six in her left hand between the first and middle fingers, which was better than laying them down and picking them up each time she wished to change. It was too much bother to change with every letter, too, so she would take one and make all she wanted of that kind clear across the page, then she would change and make all of another kind, and so on. She soon learned to gauge her distances properly.
It was no quicker than writing, but she could put her lines closer together, thus getting more on a page, and her letters were more uniform, and there were no more blots. It used the ink up faster than plain writing, for it dried out from the pad, but, as it chanced, there were plenty of ink materials.
The children were delighted; it was easier to read than the old-time script, and it looked so neat and businesslike.
In those soft skin books Marian put every poem or set of verses that she could remember. She began with Mother Goose rhymes and graded on up to “The Charge of the Light Brigade” and “Thanatopsis,” which she had learned to speak at school. Into one book went Bible verses and several whole chapters from the holy book, notably the twenty-third Psalm and the thirteenth chapter of First Corinthians.
Anything and everything pleased the children. They learned to read everything and to repeat a great deal by heart. Esther especially was a perfect little parrot and could reel off all kinds of lofty sentiment of the meaning of which she had no conception. Jennie and Delbert always had to study longer on a thing, and Davie, where lessons were concerned, was a little lazybones. Davie never learned anything that he did not have to, and Marian had such a time getting the fundamentals well rooted in his memory that she never tried to plant anything there that was not necessary. He was as quick and keen as any of them in other things, though, and it filled Marian’s heart with pride to see how fearless he was in the water and how little he was behind the others in that element.
As fast as she could, Marian replaced the rabbit-skin clothes with the newer, better ones, but the style of making was the same,—low-necked, sleeveless dresses with rather scant, short skirts, for material was scarce. Delbert still clung to his “loin-cloth,” and Marian was more than willing, it was so much simpler than trousers. Even David, for the sake of wearing some of the product of their combined labor, consented to be clothed like Delbert, and as he found a loin-cloth did not impede his actions in any way, he continued to sport one from then on. There was one thing in favor of the new clothes: they certainly wore well; there was no shoddy in them.
Gradually Jennie spent more and more time at the wickiup. For one thing, the children did not like to go off and leave Marian alone all the morning, and as Davie was growing so big that he could help appreciably, there was really no need for so many of them on the morning excursions.
So Jennie stayed with Marian. Her particular forte was making baskets. Jennie could make beautiful baskets. She wove them of straws and tough weeds and palm-leaf. Her only teachers were her memories of certain kindergarten lessons, the big basket they had brought their lunch in, and a rather blurry picture down in one corner of the old newspaper of a half-dozen Indian baskets with strange designs. For the rest she taught herself, and when she once got interested in the work she wanted to do nothing else.
It was Jennie who made a basket of split palm-leaves to take the place of the old barrel on the Muggywah. She would sit for hours on the seaweed carpet of the wickiup, leaning against the pile of bedding, and weave and weave, the work growing much faster under her slim brown fingers than it did under Marian’s. Indeed, after Jennie took to making baskets, Marian and the rest quit. What was the use of their wasting their time when Jennie could do it so much better and quicker?
She made big baskets to carry wood and clams in; she made little ones to hang up in the wickiup to drop little pieces of moss and seashells into. She loved the little ones best. She made them in patterns. She colored some of her material a dull red with juice from the cactus fruit and some of it brown with Marian’s ink. She used some kinds of seaweed, and she made one basket with a row of starfish around the edge and over the handle, and she made some with lids. When Marian’s hat wore out, Jennie made her a new one, weaving it as she did her baskets and trimming it with sprays of seaweed and shells.
The ordinary rains did not inconvenience them, but when they were very severe the wickiup leaked a little down the rock wall. They had not been able to make the roof perfectly tight there, and the water, when the wind blew hard, would find its way down; then they would have to remove whatever was hanging or leaning against that side, and Marian would turn back the seaweed carpet so that it should not get wet, and the water would run down the wall and soak into the sand and rocks of the floor. They enjoyed the big rains, though. They could always keep warm and dry, and the wickiup was big enough to allow each one to move about a little and follow whatever occupation he or she chose.
It was on a rainy day that Marian conceived the idea of weaving up the old rags that had been their clothes into new cloth, though the task was not finished on that one day by any means, nor in two. She had used up everything she had on hand in the way of thread; so she made the warp out of new hair clipped from her own and the children’s heads with the buttonhole scissors; and with the same sharp little instrument she cut the old rags into strips, as narrow as she could and have them hold together at all, and wove them in as rag carpets are woven; and lo! she had new towels, and they needed new towels very much.
So time passed, rainy season and cold weather and rainy season again. Often at night they built brush fires out on the rocks where they could be seen a long way off. Their signal flag had been blown down one stormy night and lost altogether.
Sometimes, far out, they saw canoes and started out in the Muggywah to intercept them, but the canoes always went on their way too fast and too far to be overtaken.
Once, when the children were gone in the Muggywah after eggs, Marian sighted a canoe and started to swim out to it with only a piece of driftwood to help keep her afloat. She got so close to them that it seemed as if they must surely have seen or heard her, but they put up their sail, and, despairing, she had to see them depart. Giving up the chase, she rested a little before battling her way slowly back, but she arrived so tired that she could scarcely drag herself out of the water and across the beach, to find the children returned and hunting desperately for her.
Then one day they hauled the Muggywah up on the beach for repairs. Two of the sticks driven through the burnt holes had broken, and they were going to put in new ones. They took it apart and rolled the logs up beyond the soft sand into the shade of a mesquite tree that grew at the foot of the hill.
The next day they found the material they had got was not so good as they had thought it was, and so they spent the day hunting for something better. And that night came the second big storm.