“Again,” said Schliemann, and gave the man another glass of spirits to induce him to repeat the lines.
Even then the grocer’s boy was not satisfied. He fumbled in his pocket and produced his last coppers, the only wealth he owned in the world, and with them bought a third glass of spirits so that he might hear the lines from Homer once more. Imagine the tragedy of it, a grocer’s boy giving everything he possessed just to hear a drunken miller—the son of a clergyman—recite Homer to him in Greek. One clergyman’s son a grocer, weeping because he loved Homer and could not speak Greek, the other clergyman’s son drinking to drown his misery because he knew Greek and Homer, and was condemned to be a miller.
Bitter tears flowed down the boy’s face. He hungered for learning, but his intellect was starved. Every night, utterly wearied with the day’s work, he went down on his knees beside his bed, and prayed to God that he might live to learn Greek. To the poor grocer’s boy, life could hold no greater boon.
What at the time seemed his crowning misfortune proved in the end to be his way of escape. Straining one day to lift a big cask, a sharp fit of coughing brought his exertions to a sudden end. There was blood on his lips and despair in his heart. Work in the shop was no longer possible.
The lad knew not what to do. Ill, without money, he drifted to Hamburg. No one would employ him in his weak state, and at last in desperation he shipped as a cabin boy in a vessel bound for Venezuela. A storm brought the ship to disaster, and for hours the crew faced death in an open boat before being cast on the Dutch coast.
The darkest days in Schliemann’s life followed, days when he was compelled to beg to keep body and soul together. A poorly paid situation in an office revived hope in the breast of the shipwrecked lad. Renting a garret at eighteenpence a week, he nearly starved himself in order to buy books for study. Less than a shilling a day sufficed to pay his rent and keep him alive.
No longer could his hunger for education be denied. Always he had a book with him, every minute found him studying. If he waited in a shop, out would come his book from his pocket; had he to walk on an errand down the street, then he walked with an open book in his hand. In six months he learned English; during the next six months he mastered French.
He was mad to learn. His whole soul craved for knowledge. All the unknown powers of his undeveloped brain began to awaken. He possessed a genius for learning languages which was almost unparalleled. With every language he learned, the next came easier. In the following six months he mastered Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish and Italian. His memory, which previously was bad, became remarkably retentive, as is proved by this wonderful feat.
He did not stop to rest. His thoughts turned to Russian, and his method of learning it was not without a touch of humour. A better-paid post provided money to pay a teacher, so he scoured the city on his quest. He hunted here, there and everywhere. In all Amsterdam was not a single teacher of Russian, not a soul who understood a word of the language.
Schliemann, thrown back on himself, unearthed an old Russian grammar and dictionary and began to study the language alone. In less than a week he learned the alphabet, and soon he was writing simple exercises in Russian. Somehow his progress did not please him, he felt the monotony of working alone. To lessen this monotony he hit on the plan of hiring some one to listen to his Russian recitations for the sum of sixpence a night. Every evening he declaimed in Russian to the listener. The listener, understanding not a word, sat and was shouted at by Schliemann.