CHAPTER XI.
One morning not long after we had found the footprint, I woke up smelling smoke. The house was full of smoke that blew in through the door, and I thought that the woods must be on fire. I jumped up, and after feeling in Mr. Crusoe’s bunk to see if he was there, and finding that he was not, I rushed out to get a breath of air.
Mr. Crusoe was standing close to a big bonfire, and stirring it up with a long pole to make it blaze. The bonfire was made of clothes, and my best flannel shirt and trousers were blazing on the top of it. A little ways off was a pile of broken glass and crockery, so big that I should never have thought that we had crockery enough to make such a pile.
Mr. Crusoe had got up early, and broken every bit of glass and crockery that we owned except a few bottles, and he had made a bonfire of every stitch of our clothes except the goat-skins. It was too late to save anything, and even if it hadn’t been too late I couldn’t have interfered very well, for Mr. Crusoe had his revolver in his belt, and I believehe would have shot me in a minute if I had tried to interfere with him.
I sat down on a log without saying anything, and watched the fire burn. Mr. Crusoe kept getting his eyes full of smoke, and nearly choked to death two or three times, but I could see that he was enjoying himself for all that. After a while he thought that the fire would burn well enough without any more help, so he came and sat down. He didn’t very often sit down, because it was hard work to make his goat-skin trousers bend, so I knew that he must mean to be particularly friendly to me, otherwise he would not have sat down by me.
“You see, Friday,” he remarked, “we don’t need any civilized clothes. My grandfather lived for years without them, and found that goat-skin was much more healthy and stylish than flannel or cotton; so I thought I would just burn up all that rubbish and get rid of it.”
“So I see,” said I.
“Then my grandfather made his own dishes out of clay, and we ought to do the same. We are getting lazy, living as we do in the lap of luxury, and so long as we have everything we want, we shall never improve ourselves by inventing new things to supply our necessities. You see,Friday, that I was quite right in breaking the china, don’t you?”
Of course I didn’t venture to say that I didn’t see, so I just muttered something that he didn’t understand, though it seemed to satisfy him.
“Now,” said he, getting on his feet with a good deal of difficulty, because his stiff trousers tried their best to throw him down, “we’ll have breakfast, for I’m awfully hungry.”
I made the coffee, and opened a can of salmon, but when I told Mr. Crusoe that breakfast was ready, and he came up and said, “Pour me a cup of coffee, like a good fellow,” I asked him where his coffee-cup was.
I knew very well that he had broken all the cups, but I wanted to see what he would do.
Mr. Crusoe looked disappointed and puzzled, for I could see he was trying to think of something that he could use for a cup, but he didn’t succeed. “Never mind,” he said, presently; “give me the coffee-pot and I’ll drink out of the spout.” But after he had tried this, and burnt his tongue, and nearly dropped the coffee-pot, he gave it up, and went without his coffee.
He suffered a good deal trying to eat his salmon without a plate. He had to eat it out of the can, and I could see thathe didn’t like it because I did the same; but he wasn’t quite mean enough to tell me that I couldn’t have any salmon. When I was ready for my coffee I hunted up an empty peach can and used it for a cup. Mr. Crusoe thought that this was a fine idea, and so he found an empty can and poured himself a cup of coffee. But the ragged edge of the can cut his tongue and caught in his beard, and he spilled his coffee all over his legs, and then marched into the house in a rage.
I didn’t care so very much about the broken crockery, but it did amuse me to see Mr. Crusoe suffering from his own foolishness. He had spoiled his own breakfast, and I knew that he would find it harder yet to eat his dinner without any dishes.
After Mr. Crusoe had got over being angry about his coffee, he told me that we must make some dishes at once. We went down to the edge of the creek, where there was a bed of clay, and Mr. Crusoe told me to make a few platters, and said that he would make a pot.
We worked over those dishes for the rest of the day, and Mr. Crusoe got himself all covered with clay. The gnats and flies kept biting him on the face, and whenever he slapped his face he pasted a lot of clay over it. The clay would stick to his face and hair as firm as anybody could havewanted it to, but we could not make our dishes stick together. Mr. Crusoe’s pot kept falling to pieces as fast as he tried to make it; and though I once or twice got a plate to stick together while it was wet, it would crack and crumble as soon as the sun began to dry it.
But Mr. Crusoe wasn’t discouraged. He said that all the dishes wanted was to be baked in a fire. He gave up making a pot for that day, but he managed to make two cups, and then we built a fire and put the cups and a plate that I had made on to bake. They crumbled in the fire quicker than they did in the sun, and we had to give it up and eat our supper out of old tin cans.
Mr. Crusoe must have felt a little ashamed of having broken up the crockery, for he stuck to making dishes out of clay almost as well as the clay stuck to him. He remembered that his grandfather glazed his dishes with lead, and so he tried to do the same thing. But he didn’t know how to glaze dishes any more than I did, and the only thing he succeeded in doing was to burn himself all over with melted lead. I gave the whole thing up long before he did, and told him that I would wait till he found out how to make clay dishes before I would try it again. He kept at work a day after this, but finally he had to give it up.
Then he had another bright idea, and that was to make glass dishes out of sand. He said that sand was about the same thing as glass, and that we could melt sand and pour it into moulds, and have elegant glass dishes. But he could never get his fire hot enough to melt the sand. Besides, I knew very well that sand wasn’t glass, for there never were broken windows and tumblers enough in the whole world to make as much sand as there was on the island.
We had rather hard work to get along with no crockery except tin cans. We could use them well enough for cups and things to hold soup, but we couldn’t cut up meat on the bottom of a tin can as if it was a plate. I made some plates by splitting the tin cans and hammering the pieces out flat, but Mr. Crusoe hated to use them, because he said that he didn’t like the taste of tin, and because every now and then his dinner would slide off his tin plate into his lap.
After he had decided that he couldn’t make clay or glass dishes, he gathered together some pieces of broken crockery and tried to stick them together with some glue that was in the ship’s stores; but he had broken the crockery into such little pieces that he could only find a very few that were large enough to stick together. And then the glue wouldn’thold the pieces together long enough for him to eat off of his mended plate, so he had to give this plan up too.
Mr. Crusoe became very much discouraged about his crockery, and I am sure that he was awfully sorry that he had broken it all up. When he thought how comfortable he used to be with good clothes to wear and nice crockery, it stands to reason that he must have wished that he hadn’t been so foolish as to destroy them all. But he wasn’t the kind of man to admit anything of the kind. All he did was to undress and go to bed, and have me bring his meals to him. He said he was sick, and perhaps he thought he was, but it is my opinion that he stayed in bed because he was sick of wearing goat-skin clothes. His goat-skin trousers had worn all the skin off of his knees, but he had nothing else to put on, and had either to go to bed or to stand the pain of the trousers.
While he was in bed I made myself some very decent plates and cups out of wood, but I did not mention it to Mr. Crusoe for fear that he would burn them up on the pretence that his grandfather never made any wooden dishes. I don’t believe he ever did, and I am sure he never made any clay dishes either. Crockery is white, or else it has figures painted on it with blue paint—portraits of Chinamen,and bridges, and ponds full of fish and such. How could anybody make such crockery out of nasty blue clay? Of course I didn’t tell Mr. Crusoe that his grandfather never made crockery, but I wasn’t a bit taken in by that story, and I knew when we started to make crockery out of clay that it couldn’t be done.
All this time, whether he was breaking crockery, or covering himself with clay, or lying in bed, Mr. Crusoe was worrying about the cannibals. He made me go down every morning to the beach on the other side of the island, where we had found the footprint, to see if the cannibals had landed again. I was very willing to go, for I hoped to meet a Sunday-school picnic, and get the teachers to take me and Mr. Crusoe to some civilized country with them.
Now that I had found out that Sunday-school picnics came to our island, I knew we must be very near to some civilized place, and that the land which we could see at a great distance, and that Mr. Crusoe called the main-land, and pretended that it was inhabited by cannibals and a lot of Spanish prisoners, was probably the coast of Australia or some such place where there are white people.
It would have been easy enough for us to run across to the land with the canoe, but Mr. Crusoe, of course, wouldnot listen to it because his grandfather had never done it. According to his account the old man had built a splendid boat as big as a ship’s long-boat, and he was able to sail it anywhere, but for all that he stayed on the island and never tried to get away. I wasn’t imposed on by any such nonsense. Old Mr. Crusoe was not a sailor-man, and he couldn’t have built a decent boat if he had tried. Most likely he knocked together a raft and called it a boat.
Sometimes when I looked at Mr. Crusoe I felt almost like leaving him again, he was so aggravating; but I had given my word that I wouldn’t leave him, and then, with all his faults, he had been kind to me. Besides, the poor man was looking more like a sick man than he had ever looked before. He stayed in bed for about a week after he had broken the crockery, and when he got up, and had me help him build his goat-skin clothes around him again, he was so thin and weak that I was glad the trousers were stiff enough to hold him up in case he should have fainted away.
He lost his appetite almost entirely after he had lost his dishes, and he hardly ate enough to keep him alive. Then he couldn’t sleep at night, and after lying three or four hours in bed he would get up and wrap a blanket aroundhim, and walk up and down the beach. One night he walked into an old goat that was troubled, like him, with want of sleep, and the goat either didn’t know him in the blanket, or else he wanted a little exercise to warm himself, and the consequence was that by the time Mr. Crusoe’s yells had waked me up he had been knocked over a good deal of the island, and would probably have been killed if I hadn’t driven the goat away with a club.