WHEREWITHAL SHALL WE BE CLOTHED?
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.
[Illustration: THE SPINNING-WHEEL]
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.
[6] Pronounced _fahʹhahss_.
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.
[Illustration: THE LOOM]
“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.
[Illustration: IT SEEMED AS IF THEY MUST SURELY HAVE SEEN OR HEARD HER]
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.