Jack London - Martin Eden

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.

"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.

"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 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 bridged. But there was no diminution in the loftiness of his feeling for her. She had not descended to him. It was he who had been caught up into the clouds and carried to her. His reverence for her, in that moment, was of the same order as religious awe and fervor. It seemed to him that he had intruded upon the holy of holies, and slowly and carefully he moved his head aside from the contact which thrilled him like an electric shock and of which she had not been aware.