What did love have to do with Ruth’s divergent views on art, right conduct, the French Revolution, or equal suffrage?
They were mental processes, but love was beyond reason; it was superrational.
He could not belittle love.
He worshipped it.
Love lay on the mountain-tops beyond the valley-land of reason.
It was a sublimates condition of existence, the topmost peak of living, and it came rarely.
Thanks to the school of scientific philosophers he favored, he knew the biological significance of love; but by a refined process of the same scientific reasoning he reached the conclusion that the human organism achieved its highest purpose in love, that love must not be questioned, but must be accepted as the highest guerdon of life.
Thus, he considered the lover blessed over all creatures, and it was a delight to him to think of "God’s own mad lover," rising above the things of earth, above wealth and judgment, public opinion and applause, rising above life itself and "dying on a kiss."
Much of this Martin had already reasoned out, and some of it he reasoned out later.
In the meantime he worked, taking no recreation except when he went to see Ruth, and living like a Spartan.
He paid two dollars and a half a month rent for the small room he got from his Portuguese landlady, Maria Silva, a virago and a widow, hard working and harsher tempered, rearing her large brood of children somehow, and drowning her sorrow and fatigue at irregular intervals in a gallon of the thin, sour wine that she bought from the corner grocery and saloon for fifteen cents.
From detesting her and her foul tongue at first, Martin grew to admire her as he observed the brave fight she made.
There were but four rooms in the little house-three, when Martin’s was subtracted.
One of these, the parlor, gay with an ingrain carpet and dolorous with a funeral card and a death-picture of one of her numerous departed babes, was kept strictly for company.
The blinds were always down, and her barefooted tribe was never permitted to enter the sacred precinct save on state occasions.
She cooked, and all ate, in the kitchen, where she likewise washed, starched, and ironed clothes on all days of the week except Sunday; for her income came largely from taking in washing from her more prosperous neighbors.
Remained the bedroom, small as the one occupied by Martin, into which she and her seven little ones crowded and slept.
It was an everlasting miracle to Martin how it was accomplished, and from her side of the thin partition he heard nightly every detail of the going to bed, the squalls and squabbles, the soft chattering, and the sleepy, twittering noises as of birds.
Another source of income to Maria were her cows, two of them, which she milked night and morning and which gained a surreptitious livelihood from vacant lots and the grass that grew on either side the public side walks, attended always by one or more of her ragged boys, whose watchful guardianship consisted chiefly in keeping their eyes out for the poundmen.
In his own small room Martin lived, slept, studied, wrote, and kept house.
Before the one window, looking out on the tiny front porch, was the kitchen table that served as desk, library, and type-writing stand.
The bed, against the rear wall, occupied two-thirds of the total space of the room.
The table was flanked on one side by a gaudy bureau, manufactured for profit and not for service, the thin veneer of which was shed day by day.
This bureau stood in the corner, and in the opposite corner, on the table’s other flank, was the kitchen-the oil-stove on a dry-goods box, inside of which were dishes and cooking utensils, a shelf on the wall for provisions, and a bucket of water on the floor.
Martin had to carry his water from the kitchen sink, there being no tap in his room.
On days when there was much steam to his cooking, the harvest of veneer from the bureau was unusually generous.
Over the bed, hoisted by a tackle to the ceiling, was his bicycle.
At first he had tried to keep it in the basement; but the tribe of Silva, loosening the bearings and puncturing the tires, had driven him out.
Next he attempted the tiny front porch, until a howling southeaster drenched the wheel a night-long.
Then he had retreated with it to his room and slung it aloft.
A small closet contained his clothes and the books he had accumulated and for which there was no room on the table or under the table.
Hand in hand with reading, he had developed the habit of making notes, and so copiously did he make them that there would have been no existence for him in the confined quarters had he not rigged several clothes-lines across the room on which the notes were hung.
Even so, he was crowded until navigating the room was a difficult task.
He could not open the door without first closing the closet door, and vice versa .
It was impossible for him anywhere to traverse the room in a straight line.
To go from the door to the head of the bed was a zigzag course that he was never quite able to accomplish in the dark without collisions.
Having settled the difficulty of the conflicting doors, he had to steer sharply to the right to avoid the kitchen.
Next, he sheered to the left, to escape the foot of the bed; but this sheer, if too generous, brought him against the corner of the table.
With a sudden twitch and lurch, he terminated the sheer and bore off to the right along a sort of canal, one bank of which was the bed, the other the table.
When the one chair in the room was at its usual place before the table, the canal was unnavigable.
When the chair was not in use, it reposed on top of the bed, though sometimes he sat on the chair when cooking, reading a book while the water boiled, and even becoming skilful enough to manage a paragraph or two while steak was frying.
Also, so small was the little corner that constituted the kitchen, he was able, sitting down, to reach anything he needed.
In fact, it was expedient to cook sitting down; standing up, he was too often in his own way.
In conjunction with a perfect stomach that could digest anything, he possessed knowledge of the various foods that were at the same time nutritious and cheap.
Pea-soup was a common article in his diet, as well as potatoes and beans, the latter large and brown and cooked in Mexican style.
Rice, cooked as American housewives never cook it and can never learn to cook it, appeared on Martin’s table at least once a day.
Dried fruits were less expensive than fresh, and he had usually a pot of them, cooked and ready at hand, for they took the place of butter on his bread.
Occasionally he graced his table with a piece of round-steak, or with a soup-bone.
Coffee, without cream or milk, he had twice a day, in the evening substituting tea; but both coffee and tea were excellently cooked.
There was need for him to be economical.