Martin Eden

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.
    “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