Chapter IX

CHAPTER IX

Back from sea Martin Eden came, homing for California with a
lover's desire. His store of money exhausted, he had shipped
before the mast on the treasure-hunting schooner; and the Solomon
Islands, after eight months of failure to find treasure, had
witnessed the breaking up of the expedition. The men had been paid
off in Australia, and Martin had immediately shipped on a deep-
water vessel for San Francisco. Not alone had those eight months
earned him enough money to stay on land for many weeks, but they
had enabled him to do a great deal of studying and reading.

His was the student's mind, and behind his ability to learn was the
indomitability of his nature and his love for Ruth. The grammar he
had taken along he went through again and again until his unjaded
brain had mastered it. He noticed the bad grammar used by his
shipmates, and made a point of mentally correcting and
reconstructing their crudities of speech. To his great joy he
discovered that his ear was becoming sensitive and that he was
developing grammatical nerves. A double negative jarred him like a
discord, and often, from lack of practice, it was from his own lips
that the jar came. His tongue refused to learn new tricks in a
day.

After he had been through the grammar repeatedly, he took up the
dictionary and added twenty words a day to his vocabulary. He
found that this was no light task, and at wheel or lookout he
steadily went over and over his lengthening list of pronunciations
and definitions, while he invariably memorized himself to sleep.
"Never did anything," "if I were," and "those things," were
phrases, with many variations, that he repeated under his breath in
order to accustom his tongue to the language spoken by Ruth. "And"
and "ing," with the "d" and "g" pronounced emphatically, he went
over thousands of times; and to his surprise he noticed that he was
beginning to speak cleaner and more correct English than the
officers themselves and the gentleman-adventurers in the cabin who
had financed the expedition.

The captain was a fishy-eyed Norwegian who somehow had fallen into
possession of a complete Shakespeare, which he never read, and
Martin had washed his clothes for him and in return been permitted
access to the precious volumes. For a time, so steeped was he in
the plays and in the many favorite passages that impressed
themselves almost without effort on his brain, that all the world
seemed to shape itself into forms of Elizabethan tragedy or comedy
and his very thoughts were in blank verse. It trained his ear and
gave him a fine appreciation for noble English; withal it
introduced into his mind much that was archaic and obsolete.

The eight months had been well spent,