She did not know she desired him; but with him it was different. He knew that he loved her, and he desired her as he had never before desired anything in his life. He had loved poetry for beautys sake; but since he met her the gates to the vast field of love-poetry had been opened wide. She had given him understanding even more than Bulfinch and Gayley. There was a line that a week before he would not have favored with a second thought-"Gods own mad lover dying on a kiss"; but now it was ever insistent in his mind. He marvelled at the wonder of it and the truth; and as he gazed upon her he knew that he could die gladly upon a kiss. He felt himself Gods own mad lover, and no accolade of knighthood could have given him greater pride. And at last he knew the meaning of life and why he had been born.
As he gazed at her and listened, his thoughts grew daring. He reviewed all the wild delight of the pressure of her hand in his at the door, and longed for it again. His gaze wandered often toward her lips, and he yearned for them hungrily. But there was nothing gross or earthly about this yearning. It gave him exquisite delight to watch every movement and play of those lips as they enunciated the words she spoke; yet they were not ordinary lips such as all men and women had. Their substance was not mere human clay. They were lips of pure spirit, and his desire for them seemed absolutely different from the desire that had led him to other womens lips. He could kiss her lips, rest his own physical lips upon them, but it would be with the lofty and awful fervor with which one would kiss the robe of God. He was not conscious of this transvaluation of values that had taken place in him, and was unaware that the light that shone in his eyes when he looked at her was quite the same light that shines in all mens eyes when the desire of love is upon them. He did not dream how ardent and masculine his gaze was, nor that the warm flame of it was affecting the alchemy of her spirit. Her penetrative virginity exalted and disguised his own emotions, elevating his thoughts to a star-cool chastity, and he would have been startled to learn that there was that shining out of his eyes, like warm waves, that flowed through her and kindled a kindred warmth. She was subtly perturbed by it, and more than once, though she knew not why, it disrupted her train of thought with its delicious intrusion and compelled her to grope for the remainder of ideas partly uttered. Speech was always easy with her, and these interruptions would have puzzled her had she not decided that it was because he was a remarkable type. She was very sensitive to impressions, and it was not strange, after all, that this aura of a traveller from another world should so affect her.
The problem in the background of her consciousness was how to help him, and she turned the conversation in that direction; but it was Martin who came to the point first.
"I wonder if I can get some advice from you," he began, and received an acquiescence of willingness that made his heart bound. "You remember the other time I was here I said I couldnt talk about books an things because I didnt know how? Well, Ive ben doin a lot of thinkin ever since. Ive ben to the library a whole lot, but most of the books Ive tackled have ben over my head. Mebbe Id better begin at the beginnin. I aint never had no advantages. Ive worked pretty hard ever since I was a kid, an since Ive ben to the library, lookin with new eyes at books-an lookin at new books, too-Ive just about concluded that I aint ben reading the right kind. You know the books you find in cattle-camps an focsls aint the same youve got in this house, for instance. Well, thats the sort of readin matter Ive ben accustomed to. And yet-an I aint just makin a brag of it-Ive ben different from the people Ive herded with. Not that Im any better than the sailors an cow-punchers I travelled with, I was cow-punchin for a short time, you know, but I always liked books, read everything I could lay hands on, an-well, I guess I think differently from most of em.
"Now, to come to what Im drivin at. I was never inside a house like this. When I come a week ago, an saw all this, an you, an your mother, an brothers, an everything-well, I liked it. Id heard about such things an read about such things in some of the books, an when I looked around at your house, why, the books come true. But the thing Im after is I liked it. I wanted it. I want it now. I want to breathe air like you get in this house-air that is filled with books, and pictures, and beautiful things, where people talk in low voices an are clean, an their thoughts are clean. The air I always breathed was mixed up with grub an house-rent an scrappin an booze an thats all they talked about, too. Why, when you was crossin the room to kiss your mother, I thought it was the most beautiful thing I ever seen. Ive seen a whole lot of life, an somehow Ive seen a whole lot more of it 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 aint got to the point yet. Here it is. I want to make my way to the kind of life you have in this house. Theres 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? Im willin to work my passage, you know, an I can make most men sick when it comes to hard work. Once I get started, Ill work night an day. Mebbe you think its funny, me askin you about all this. I know youre the last person in the world I ought to ask, but I dont know anybody else I could ask-unless its 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. Ive two sisters, one married, an the otherll get married soon, I suppose. Then Ive a string of brothers, Im the youngest, but they never helped nobody. Theyve just knocked around over the world, lookin out for number one. The oldest died in India. Two are in South Africa now, an anothers on a whaling voyage, an ones travellin with a circus-he does trapeze work. An I guess Im just like them. Ive taken care of myself since I was eleven-thats when my mother died. Ive 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."
"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 dont understand. But then theyre the only words I know-how to speak. Ive got other words in my mind, picked em up from books, but I cant pronounce em, so I dont use em."
"It isnt what you say, so much as how you say it. You dont mind my being frank, do you? I dont want to hurt you."
"No, no," he cried, while he secretly blessed her for her kindness. "Fire away. Ive got to know, an Id 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-"
"Whats the double negative?" he demanded; then added humbly, "You see, I dont even understand your explanations."
"Im afraid I didnt 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."
"Thats pretty clear," he said. "I never thought of it before. But it dont 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 Ill 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.
"Youll find it all in the grammar," she went on. "Theres something else I noticed in your speech. You say dont when you shouldnt. Dont 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 dont 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 dont do to be hasty. Change dont 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.
"Doesnt it jar on your ear?" she suggested.
"Cant say that it does," he replied judicially.
"Why didnt you say, Cant say that it do?" she queried.
"That sounds wrong," he said slowly. "As for the other I cant make up my mind. I guess my ear aint had the trainin yours has."
"There is no such word as aint," 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 dont 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. Ill 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. "Its slang. It means whiskey an beer-anything that will make you drunk."
"And another thing," she laughed back. "Dont use you when you are impersonal. You is very personal, and your use of it just now was not precisely what you meant."
"I dont just see that."
"Why, you said just now, to me, whiskey and beer-anything that will make you drunk-make me drunk, dont you see?"
"Well, it would, wouldnt 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.
CHAPTER VIII
Several weeks went by, during which Martin Eden studied his grammar, reviewed the books on etiquette, and read voraciously the books that caught his fancy. Of his own class he saw nothing. The girls of the Lotus Club wondered what had become of him and worried Jim with questions, and some of the fellows who put on the glove at Rileys were glad that Martin came no more. He made another discovery of treasure-trove in the library. As the grammar had shown him the tie-ribs of language, so that book showed him the tie-ribs of poetry, and he began to learn metre and construction and form, beneath the beauty he loved finding the why and wherefore of that beauty. Another modern book he found treated poetry as a representative art, treated it exhaustively, with copious illustrations from the best in literature. Never had he read fiction with so keen zest as he studied these books. And his fresh mind, untaxed for twenty years and impelled by maturity of desire, gripped hold of what he read with a virility unusual to the student mind.
When he looked back now from his vantage-ground, the old world he had known, the world of land and sea and ships, of sailor-men and harpy-women, seemed a very small world; and yet it blended in with this new world and expanded. His mind made for unity, and he was surprised when at first he began to see points of contact between the two worlds. And he was ennobled, as well, by the loftiness of thought and beauty he found in the books. This led him to believe more firmly than ever that up above him, in society like Ruth and her family, all men and women thought these thoughts and lived them. Down below where he lived was the ignoble, and he wanted to purge himself of the ignoble that had soiled all his days, and to rise to that sublimated realm where dwelt the upper classes. All his childhood and youth had been troubled by a vague unrest; he had never known what he wanted, but he had wanted something that he had hunted vainly for until he met Ruth. And now his unrest had become sharp and painful, and he knew at last, clearly and definitely, that it was beauty, and intellect, and love that he must have.