whole lot of life, an’ somehow I’ve seen a whole lot more of it
Martin Eden
41
than most of them that was with me. I like to see, an’ I want to
see more, an’ I want to see it different.
“But I ain’t got to the point yet. Here it is. I want to make my
way to the kind of life you have in this house. There’s more in
life than booze, an’ hard work, an’ knockin’ about. Now, how am I
goin’ to get it? Where do I take hold an’ begin? I’m willin’ to
work my passage, you know, an’ I can make most men sick when it
comes to hard work. Once I get started, I’ll work night an’ day.
Mebbe you think it’s funny, me askin’ you about all this. I know
you’re the last person in the world I ought to ask, but I don’t
know anybody else I could ask – unless it’s Arthur. Mebbe I ought
to ask him. If I was – ”
His voice died away. His firmly planned intention had come to a
halt on the verge of the horrible probability that he should have
asked Arthur and that he had made a fool of himself. Ruth did not
speak immediately. She was too absorbed in striving to reconcile
the stumbling, uncouth speech and its simplicity of thought with
what she saw in his face. She had never looked in eyes that
expressed greater power. Here was a man who could do anything, was
the message she read there, and it accorded ill with the weakness
of his spoken thought. And for that matter so complex and quick
was her own mind that she did not have a just appreciation of
simplicity. And yet she had caught an impression of power in the
very groping of this mind. It had seemed to her like a giant
writhing and straining at the bonds that held him down. Her face
was all sympathy when she did speak.
“What you need, you realize yourself, and it is education. You
should go back and finish grammar school, and then go through to
high school and university.”
“But that takes money,” he interrupted.
“Oh!” she cried. “I had not thought of that. But then you have
relatives, somebody who could assist you?”
He shook his head.
“My father and mother are dead. I’ve two sisters, one married, an’
the other’ll get married soon, I suppose. Then I’ve a string of
brothers, – I’m the youngest, – but they never helped nobody.
They’ve just knocked around over the world, lookin’ out for number
one. The oldest died in India. Two are in South Africa now, an’
another’s on a whaling voyage, an’ one’s travellin’ with a circus –
he does trapeze work. An’ I guess I’m just like them. I’ve taken
care of myself since I was eleven – that’s when my mother died.
I’ve got to study by myself, I guess, an’ what I want to know is
where to begin.”
“I should say the first thing of all would be to get a grammar.
Your grammar is – ” She had intended saying “awful,” but she
amended it to “is not particularly good.”
He flushed and sweated.
Martin Eden
42
“I know I must talk a lot of slang an’ words you don’t understand.
But then they’re the only words I know – how to speak. I’ve got
other words in my mind, picked ’em up from books, but I can’t
pronounce ’em, so I don’t use ’em.”
“It isn’t what you say, so much as how you say it. You don’t mind
my being frank, do you? I don’t want to hurt you.”
“No, no,” he cried, while he secretly blessed her for her kindness.
“Fire away. I’ve got to know, an’ I’d sooner know from you than
anybody else.”
“Well, then, you say, ‘You was’; it should be, ‘You were.’ You say
‘I seen’ for ‘I saw.’ You use the double negative – ”
“What’s the double negative?” he demanded; then added humbly, “You
see, I don’t even understand your explanations.”
“I’m afraid I didn’t explain that,” she smiled. “A double negative
is – let me see – well, you say, ‘never helped nobody.’ ‘Never’ is
a negative. ‘Nobody’ is another negative. It is a rule that two
negatives make a positive. ‘Never helped nobody’ means that, not
helping nobody, they must have helped somebody.”
“That’s pretty clear,” he said. “I never thought of it before.
But it don’t mean they MUST have helped somebody, does it? Seems
to me that ‘never helped nobody’ just naturally fails to say
whether or not they helped somebody. I never thought of it before,
and I’ll never say it again.”
She was pleased and surprised with the quickness and surety of his
mind. As soon as he had got the clew he not only understood but
corrected her error.
“You’ll find it all in the grammar,” she went on. “There’s
something else I noticed in your speech. You say ‘don’t’ when you
shouldn’t. ‘Don’t’ is a contraction and stands for two words. Do
you know them?”
He thought a moment, then answered, “‘Do not.'”
She nodded her head, and said, “And you use ‘don’t’ when you mean
‘does not.'”
He was puzzled over this, and did not get it so quickly.
“Give me an illustration,” he asked.
“Well – ” She puckered her brows and pursed up her mouth as she
thought, while he looked on and decided that her expression was
most adorable. “‘It don’t do to be hasty.’ Change ‘don’t’ to ‘do
not,’ and it reads, ‘It do not do to be hasty,’ which is perfectly
absurd.”
He turned it over in his mind and considered.
“Doesn’t it jar on your ear?” she suggested.
Martin Eden
43
“Can’t say that it does,” he replied judicially.
“Why didn’t you say, ‘Can’t say that it do’?” she queried.
“That sounds wrong,” he said slowly. “As for the other I can’t
make up my mind. I guess my ear ain’t had the trainin’ yours has.”
“There is no such word as ‘ain’t,'” she said, prettily emphatic.
Martin flushed again.
“And you say ‘ben’ for ‘been,'” she continued; “‘come’ for ‘came’;
and the way you chop your endings is something dreadful.”
“How do you mean?” He leaned forward, feeling that he ought to get
down on his knees before so marvellous a mind. “How do I chop?”
“You don’t complete the endings. ‘A-n-d’ spells ‘and.’ You
pronounce it ‘an’.’ ‘I-n-g’ spells ‘ing.’ Sometimes you pronounce
it ‘ing’ and sometimes you leave off the ‘g.’ And then you slur by
dropping initial letters and diphthongs. ‘T-h-e-m’ spells ‘them.’
You pronounce it – oh, well, it is not necessary to go over all of
them. What you need is the grammar. I’ll get one and show you how
to begin.”
As she arose, there shot through his mind something that he had
read in the etiquette books, and he stood up awkwardly, worrying as
to whether he was doing the right thing, and fearing that she might
take it as a sign that he was about to go.
“By the way, Mr. Eden,” she called back, as she was leaving the
room. “What is BOOZE? You used it several times, you know.”
“Oh, booze,” he laughed. “It’s slang. It means whiskey an’ beer –
anything that will make you drunk.”
“And another thing,” she laughed back. “Don’t use ‘you’ when you
are impersonal. ‘You’ is very personal, and your use of it just
now was not precisely what you meant.”
“I don’t just see that.”
“Why, you said just now, to me, ‘whiskey and beer – anything that
will make you drunk’ – make me drunk, don’t you see?”
“Well, it would, wouldn’t it?”
“Yes, of course,” she smiled. “But it would be nicer not to bring
me into it. Substitute ‘one’ for ‘you’ and see how much better it
sounds.”
When she returned with the grammar, she drew a chair near his – he
wondered if he should have helped her with the chair – and sat down
beside him. She turned the pages of the grammar, and their heads
were inclined toward each other. He could hardly follow her
outlining of the work he must do, so amazed was he by her
Martin Eden
44
delightful propinquity. But when she began to lay down the
importance of conjugation, he forgot all about her. He had never
heard of conjugation, and was fascinated by the glimpse he was
catching into the tie-ribs of language. He leaned closer to the
page, and her hair touched his cheek. He had fainted but once in
his life, and he thought he was going to faint again. He could
scarcely breathe, and his heart was pounding the blood up into his
throat and suffocating him. Never had she seemed so accessible as
now. For the moment the great gulf that separated them was