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castaway at heart."
    'I
reflected long on these words, but they remained dark to me. When I
passed the terraces and saw this man, no longer young, labouring in
the heat of the day to lift a great stone out of the earth or
patiently chopping at the grass, while he waited year after year for
some saviour castaway to arrive in a boat with a sack of corn at his
feet, I found it a foolish kind of agriculture. It seemed to me he
might occupy his time as well in digging for gold, or digging graves.
first for himself and Friday and then if he wished for all the
castaways of the future history of the island, and for me too.
    'Time
passed with increasing tediousness. When I had exhausted my questions
to Cruso about the terraces, and the boat he would not build, and the
journal he would not keep, and the tools he would not save from the
wreck, and Friday's tongue, there was nothing left to talk of save
the weather. Cruso had no stories to tell of the life he had lived as
a trader and planter before the shipwreck. He did not care how I came
to be in Bahia or what I did there. When I spoke of England and of
all the things I intended to see and do when I was rescued, he seemed
not to hear me. It was as though he wished his story to begin with
his arrival on the island, and mine to begin with my arrival, and the
story of us together to end on the island too. Let it not by any
means come to pass that Cruso is saved, I reflected to myself; for
the world expects stories from its adventurers, better stories than
tallies of how many stones they moved in fifteen years, and from
where, and to where; Cruso rescued will be a deep disappointment to
the world; the idea of a Cruso on his island is a better thing
than the true Cruso tight-lipped and sullen in an alien England.
    'I
spent my days walking on the cliffs or along the shore, or else
sleeping. I did not offer to join Cruso in his work on the terraces,
for I held it a stupid labour. I made a cap with flaps to tic over my
cars; I wore this, and sometimes closed my ears with plugs too, to
shut out the sound of the wind. So I became deaf, as Friday was mute;
what difference did it make on an island where no one spoke? The
petticoat I had swum ashore in was in tatters. My skin was as brown
as an Indian's. I was in the flower of my life, and now this had
befallen me. I did not weep; but sometimes I would find myself
sitting on the bare earth with my hands over my eyes, rocking back
and forth and moaning to myself, and would not know how I had got
there. When Friday set food before me I took it with dirty fingers
and bolted it like a dog. I squatted in the garden, heedless of who
saw me. And I watched and watched the horizon. It mattered not who
came, Spaniard or Muscovite or cannibal, so long as I escaped.
    'This
was the darkest time for me, this time of despair and lethargy; I was
as much a burden on Cruso now as he had been on me when he raved with
fever.
    'Then
step by step I recovered my spirits and began to apply myself again
to little tasks. Though my heart was no warmer towards Cruso, I was
grateful he had suffered my moods and not turned me out.
    'Cruso
did not use me again. On the contrary, he held himself as
distant as if nothing had passed be-tween us. For this I was not
sorry. Yet I will confess, had I been convinced I was to spend the
rest of my days on the island, I would have offered myself to him
again, or importuned him, or done whatever was necessary to conceive
and bear a child; for the morose silence which he impressed upon our
lives would have driven me mad, to say nothing of the prospect of
passing my last years alone with Friday.
    'One
day I asked Cruso whether there were laws on his island, and what
such laws might be; or whether he preferred to follow his inner
dictates, trusting his heart to guide him on the path of
righteousness.
    '"Laws
are made for one purpose only," he told me: "to hold us in
check when our desires grow immoderate. As long as our desires are
moderate