His voice died away. Ruth did not speak immediately. She had never looked in eyes that expressed greater power. Here was a man who could do anything. Her face was all sympathy when she began to 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 have two sisters, one married, and the other’ll get married soon, I suppose. I have brothers, – I’m the youngest, – but they never helped anybody. The oldest died in India. Two are in South Africa now, and another is travelling with a circus – he does trapeze work. All what I want to know is where to begin.”
“I should say the first thing of all is the grammar. Your grammar is – ” She wanted to say “awful,” but she finished, “is not particularly good.”
He flushed and sweated.
“I know I talk a lot of slang and 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, I found them from books, but I can’t pronounce them, so I don’t use them.”
“It isn’t what you say, so much as how you say it. I can be frank, can’t I? I don’t want to hurt you.”
“No, no,” he cried, while he secretly blessed her for her kindness. “‘You was right! I want to know these things from you than from anybody else.”
“Well, then, you say, ‘You was’; it is not correct. You must say, ‘You were.’ You often say ‘I seen’ instead of ‘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 they helped somebody.”
“That’s pretty clear,” he said. “I never thought of it before. 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.
“You’ll find it all in the grammar,” she went on. “There’s something else I noticed in your speech.”
Martin flushed again.
“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. “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.’ T-h-e-m’ spells ‘them.’ You pronounce it – oh, well, what you need is the grammar. I’ll get one and show you how to begin.”
She arose, and he stood up awkwardly, worrying as to whether he was doing the right thing.
When she returned with the grammar, she sat down beside him. She turned the pages of the grammar, and their heads were inclined toward each other. He could scarcely breathe, and his heart was pounding the blood up into his throat and suffocating him.
Chapter 8
Several weeks went by, during which Martin Eden studied his grammar, and reviewed the books on etiquette. He forgot about his friends. The girls of the Lotus Club[41] wondered what had become of him[42] and worried everybody with questions. Martin made another discovery in the library. He found books that helped him to learn metre and construction and form.
During those several weeks he saw Ruth six times, and each time was an inspiration. She helped him with his English, corrected his pronunciation, and started him on arithmetic. But their intercourse was not all devoted to elementary study. They were talking about the last poetry he had read, the latest poet she had studied. And when she read aloud to him her favorite passages, he delighted a lot. Never, in all the women, had he heard a voice like hers. The least sound of it was a stimulus to his love, and he thrilled and throbbed with every word she uttered.
The situation was obscured to Ruth. She had never had any experiences of the heart.[43] Her knowledge of love was purely theoretical, her idea of love was not clear. She did not dream of the volcanic convulsions of love. She knew neither her own powers, nor the powers of the world; and the deeps of life were to her seas of illusion.
Strength! Strength was what she needed, and he gave it to her in generous measure. To come into the same room with him, or to meet him at the door, was to take heart of life.[44] And when he had gone, she returned to her books with fresh store of energy.
Her interest in Martin increased, and she wanted to rebuild his life.
“There is Mr. Butler,[45]” she said one afternoon, when grammar and arithmetic and poetry had been put aside.[46]
“He had comparatively no advantages at first. His father was a bank cashier, but he died in Arizona, so that when he was dead, Mr. Butler found himself alone in the world. His father had come from Australia, you know, and so he had no relatives in California. He went to work in a printing-office, and he got three dollars a week, at first. His income today is at least thirty thousand a year. How did he do it? He was honest, and faithful, and industrious, and economical. He denied himself the enjoyments[47] that most boys like. He saved some coins every week. Of course, he was soon earning more than three dollars a week, and he saved more and more.
“He worked in the daytime, and at night he went to night school. He always thought about the future. Later on he went to night high school. When he was only seventeen, he had a good salary, but he was ambitious. He wanted a career, not a livelihood. He entered father’s office as an office boy – think of that! – and got only four dollars a week. But he had learned how to be economical.”
She paused for breath, and to note how Martin was receiving it. His face was lighted up with interest in the youthful struggles of Mr. Butler; but there was a frown upon his face as well.
“Poor young fellow,” he remarked. “Four dollars a week! How could he live on it? Like a dog, I guess. The food he ate – ”
“He cooked for himself,” she interrupted, “on a little kerosene stove.”
“The food he ate was very bad, I suppose, worse than what a sailor gets.”
“But think of him now!” she cried enthusiastically. “Think of what his income affords him.”
Martin looked at her sharply.
“There’s one thing I’ll tell you,” he said, “Mr. Butler has had no joy for years, hasn’t he? I think his stomach is not very good now. I’ll bet[48] he’s got dyspepsia right now!”
“Yes, he has,” she confessed; “but – ”
“And I bet,” Martin continued, “that he isn’t joyful when others have a good time. Am I right?”
She nodded her head in agreement, and hastened to explain:
“But he is not that type of man. By nature he is sober and serious. He always was that.”