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.
