Lust For Life, page 26
As the hard winter slipped into a grudging spring, Vincent’s condition went from bad to worse. His debts increased. Because he could not give his stomach the right food, it went back on him. He could not swallow a bite. The ills of his stomach went to his teeth. He lay awake at night with the pain. The ache from his teeth went to his right ear, and all day it twitched jumpily.
Christine’s mother began coming to the house, smoking and drinking with her daughter. She no longer thought Christine fortunate to be married. Once Vincent found her brother there, but he dodged out of the door as soon as Vincent entered.
“Why did he come here?” demanded Vincent. “What does he want of you?”
“They say you are going to throw me out.”
“You know I’ll never do that, Sien. Not as long as you want to stay.”
“Mother wants me to leave. She says it ain’t good for me to stay here without something to eat.”
“Where would you go?”
“Home, of course.”
“And take the children into that house?”
“It’s better than starving here. I can work and earn my own living.”
“What would you work at?”
“Well . . . something.”
“As a charwoman? At the tubs?”
“. . . I guess.”
He saw immediately that she was lying.
“So that’s what they’re trying to persuade you to do!”
“Well . . . it ain’t so bad . . . you make a living.”
“Listen, Sien, if you go back to that house you’re lost. You know your mother will send you on the streets again. Remember what the doctor at Leyden said. If you go back to that life, it will kill you!”
“It ain’t going to kill me. I feel all right now.”
“You feel well because you have been living carefully! But if you go back . . .!”
“Jesus Christ, who’s going back? Unless you send me.”
He sat on the arm of her wicker chair and put his hand on her shoulder. Her hair was uncombed. “Then believe me, Sien, I will never abandon you. As long as you are willing to share what I have, I will keep you with me. But you must stay away from your mother and brother. They’ll destroy you! Promise me, for your own sake, that you won’t see them any more.”
“I promise.”
Two days later, when he came back from sketching at the alms house, the studio was empty. There was no sign of supper. He found Christine at her mother’s, drinking.
“I told you I love my mother,” she protested when they got home. “I guess I can see her all I want. You don’t own me. I got a right to do as I please.”
She fell into all the familiar, slovenly habits of her former life. When Vincent tried to correct them and explain that she was estranging herself from him, she would answer, “Yes, I know it quite well, you don’t want me to stay with you.” He showed her how dirty the house was, and how neglected. She answered, “Well, I am lazy and good-for-nothing; I always was that way and it can’t be helped.” If he tried to show her to what ultimate end her slothfulness was taking her she would reply, “I’m nothing but an outcast, that’s true, and I’ll end up by throwing myself in the river!”
The mother came to the studio nearly every day now, and took from Vincent the companionship he had so valued in Christine. The house fell into chaos. Meals became fitful. Herman was allowed to go around ragged and dirty, and stay away from school. The less Christine did, the more she smoked and drank her gin. She would not tell Vincent where she got the money for these things.
Summer came. Vincent went out of doors to paint again. This meant new outlays for paints, brushes, canvas, frames, bigger easels. Theo reported improved condition on his “patient,” but serious problems in his relationship with her. What was he to do with the woman, now that she was better?
Vincent shut his eyes to everything in his personal life and continued to paint. He knew that his house was crashing about his ears, that he was being drawn into the abysmal sloth that had recaptured Christine. He tried to bury his despair in his work. Each morning when he set out on a new project, he hoped that this canvas would be so beautiful and perfect that it would sell immediately and establish him. Each night he returned home with the sad realization that he was still many years from the mastery he longed for.
His only relief was Antoon, the child. He was a miracle of vitality, and swallowed all kinds of eatables with much laughing and cooing. He often sat with Vincent in the studio, on the floor in a corner. He would crow at Vincent’s drawings and then sit quietly looking at the sketches on the walls. He was growing up to be a pretty and vivacious child. The less attention Christine paid to the baby, the more Vincent loved him. In Antoon he saw the real purpose and reward for his actions of last winter.
Weissenbruch looked in only once. Vincent showed him some of the sketches of the year before. He had become frightfully dissatisfied with them.
“Don’t feel that way,” said Weissenbruch. “After a good many years you will look back on these early pieces of work and realize that they were sincere and penetrating. Just plug on, my boy, and don’t let anything stop you.”
What finally did stop him was a smash in the face. During the spring he had taken a lamp to the crockery man to have it repaired. The merchant had insisted that Vincent take some new dishes with him.
“But I have no money to pay for them.”
“It doesn’t matter. There is no hurry. Take them and pay me when you get the money.”
Two months later he banged on the door of the studio. He was a burly chap with a neck as thick as his head.
“What do you mean by lying to me?” he demanded. “What do you take my goods for and not pay me when you got money all the time?”
“At the moment I am absolutely flat. I will pay you as soon as I receive money.”
“That’s a lie! You just gave money to my neighbour, the shoemaker.”
“I am at work,” said Vincent, “and I don’t care to be disturbed. I’ll pay you when I get the money. Please get out.”
“I’ll get out when you give me that money, and not before!”
Vincent indiscreetly pushed the man toward the door. “Get out of my house,” he commanded.
That was just what the tradesman was waiting for. As soon as he was touched, he smashed over his right fist into Vincent’s face and sent him crashing into the wall. He struck Vincent again, knocked him to the floor, and walked out without another word.
Christine was at her mother’s. Antoon crawled across the floor and patted Vincent’s face, crying. After a few minutes Vincent came back to consciousness, dragged himself up the stairs to the attic and lay over the bed.
The blows had not hurt his face. He felt no pain. He had not injured himself when he had fallen heavily to the floor. But those two blows had broken something within him and defeated him. He knew it.
Christine came back. She went upstairs to the attic. There was neither money nor dinner in the house. She often wondered how Vincent managed to keep alive. She saw him lying across the bed, head and arms dangling over one side, feet over the other.
“What’s the matter?” she asked.
After a long time he found the strength to twist about and put his head on the pillow. “Sien, I’ve got to leave The Hague.”
“. . . yes . . . I know.”
“I must get away from here. Out to the country somewhere. To Drenthe, maybe. Where we can live cheaply.”
“You want me to come with you? It’s an awful hole, Drenthe. What will I do when you ain’t got no money and we don’t eat?”
“I don’t know, Sien. I guess you won’t eat.”
“Will you promise to use the hundred and fifty francs to live on? Not to spend it on models and paints?”
“I can’t, Slen. Those things come first.”
“Yes, to you!”
“But not to you. Why should they?”
“I got to live too, Vincent. I can’t live without eating.”
“And I can’t live without painting.”
“Well, it’s your money . . . you come first . . . I understand. Have you a few centimes? Let’s go over to the wine café across from the Ryn station.”
The place smelled of sour wine. It was late afternoon, but the lamps had not yet been lit. The two tables where they had first sat near each other were empty. Christine led the way to them. They each ordered a glass of sour wine. Christine toyed with the stem of her glass. Vincent remembered how he had admired her worker’s hands when she made that identical gesture at the table almost two years before.
“They told me you’d leave me,” she said in a low voice. “I knew it, too.”
“I don’t want to desert you, Sien.”
“It ain’t desertion, Vincent. You never done me nothing but good.”
“If you are still willing to share my life, I’ll take you to Drenthe.”
She shook her head without emotion. “No, there ain’t enough for two of us.”
“You understand, don’t you, Sien? If I had more, I’d give you anything. But when I must choose between feeding you and feeding my work . . .”
She laid her hand over his; he could feel the rough parchment of her skin. “It’s all right. You don’t got to feel bad about it. You done all you could for me. I guess it’s just time we was through . . . that’s all.”
“Do you want us to be, Sien? If it will make you happy, I’ll marry you and take you with me.”
“No. I belong with my mother. We all got to live our own lives. It’ll be all right; my brother’s going to take a new house for his girl and me.”
Vincent drained his glass, tasting the bitter dregs at the bottom.
“Sien, I’ve tried to help you. I loved you and gave you all the kindness I had in me. In return I want you to do one thing for me, just one thing.”
“What?” she asked dully.
“Don’t go back on the streets again. It will kill you! For the sake of Antoon, don’t go back to that life.”
“Have we enough left for another glass of wine?”
“Yes.”
She swallowed half the contents in a single gulp and then said, “I only know that I can’t earn enough, ’specially when I got to pay for all the children. So if I walk the street it will be because I must, not because I want to.”
“If you get enough work you’ll promise me, won’t you, not to go back to that?”
“Sure, I promise.”
“I’ll send you money, Sien, every month. I’ll always pay for the baby. I want you to give the little fellow a chance.”
“He’ll be all right . . . same as the rest.”
Vincent wrote to Theo of his intention to go to the country and sever his connection with Christine. Theo answered by return mail with an extra hundred franc note to pay off his debts, and a strong word of approval. “My patient disappeared the other night,” he wrote. “She’s completely well now, but we couldn’t seem to find any relationship to fit ourselves into. She took everything with her and left me no address. It’s better that way. Now you and I are both unencumbered.”
Vincent stored all the furniture in the attic. He wanted to come back to The Hague sometime. The day before he was to leave for Drenthe he received a letter and a package from Nuenen. In the package was some tobacco, and one of his mother’s cheese cakes wrapped in oil paper.
“When are you coming home to paint those wooden crosses in the churchyard?” his father asked.
He knew at once that he wanted to go home. He was ill, starved, desperately nervous, fatigued and discouraged. He would go home to his mother for a few weeks and recover his health and spirits. A feeling of peace that he had not known for many months came over him when he thought of his Brabant countryside, the hedges and dunes and diggers in the field.
Christine and the two children accompanied him to the station. They all stood on the platform, unable to speak. The train came in and Vincent boarded it. Christine stood there with the baby at her breast, holding Herman by the hand. Vincent watched them until his train pulled out into the glaring sunlight, and the woman was lost forever in the grimy blackness of the station.
BOOK FOUR
NUENEN
1
THE VICARAGE AT Nuenen was a two-storey, whitewashed, stone building with a tremendous garden in the back. There were elms, hedges, flower beds, a pond, and three pollard oaks. Although Nuenen had a population of twenty-six hundred, only one hundred of them were Protestant. Theodorus’s church was tiny; Nuenen was a step down from the prosperous little market town of Etten.
Nuenen was in reality only a small cluster of houses that lined both sides of the road from Eindhoven, the metropolis of the district. Most of the people were weavers and peasants whose huts dotted the heath. They were God fearing, hard working people who lived according to the manners and customs of their ancestors.
On the front of the vicarage, over the door, were the black iron figures A° 1764. The entrance door led straight off the road and admitted to a wide hall which split the house in two. On the left-hand side, dividing the dining room and kitchen, was a rude stairway which led up to the bedrooms. Vincent shared the one over the living room with his brother Cor. When he awoke in the morning he could see the sun rise over the fragile tower of his father’s church, and gently lay pastel shades on the pool. At sunset, when the tones were deeper than at dawn, he would sit in a chair by the window and watch the colour being thrown over the pool like a heavy blanket of oil, and then slowly dissolving into the dusk.
Vincent loved his parents; his parents loved him. All three made desperate resolves that the relationship was to be kept friendly and agreeable. Vincent ate a great deal, slept a great deal, walked sometimes on the heath. He talked, painted, and read not at all. Everyone in the house was elaborately courteous to him, as he was to them. It was a self-conscious relationship; before they spoke they had to say to themselves, “I must be careful! I don’t want to disrupt the harmony!”
The harmony lasted as long as Vincent’s illness. He could not be comfortable in the same room with people who did not think as he thought. When his father remarked, “I am going to read Goethe’s ‘Faust.’ It has been translated by the Reverend Ten Kate, so it cannot be so very immoral,” Vincent felt his gorge rise.
He had come home only for a two week vacation, but he loved the Brabant and wanted to stay on. He wished to paint simply and quietly from nature, trying to say nothing but what he saw. He had no other desire than to live deep in the heart of the country, and paint rural life. Like good Father Millet, he wanted to live with, understand, and paint the peasants. He had the firm conviction that there were a few people who, having been drawn into the city and bound up there, yet retained unfading impressions of the country, and remained homesick all their lives for the fields and the peasants.
He had always known that he would come back to the Brabant some day and remain for ever. But he could not stay in Nuenen if his parents did not want him.
“A door must be either open or shut,” he said to his father. “Let us try to come to an understanding.”
“Yes, Vincent, I want that very much. I see that your painting is going to come to something after all, and I am pleased.”
“Very well, tell me frankly whether you think we can all live here in peace. Do you want me to stay?”
“Yes.”
“For how long?”
“As long as you wish. This is your home. Your place is with us.”
“And if we disagree?”
“Then we must not get upset about it. We must try to live calmly and abide with each other.”
“But what am I to do about a studio? You don’t want me working in the house.”
“I have been thinking about that. Why not take the wrangle room, out in the garden? You can have it all to yourself. No one need bother you.”
The wrangle room was just off the kitchen, but there was no connecting door. It was a cubicle of a room, with one small window, high up, looking out on to the garden. The floor was of clay, always damp in winter.
“We’ll light a big fire in here, Vincent, and dry the place out. Then we’ll put down a plank floor so that you can be perfectly comfortable. What do you say?”
Vincent looked about. It was a humble room, very much like the peasants’ huts on the heath. He could turn it into a real rural studio.
“If that window is too small,” said Theodorus, “I have a little spare money now and we can make it larger.”
“No, no, it’s perfect just as it is. I’ll get the same amount of light on the model that I would get if I were doing him in his own hut.”
They brought in a perforated barrel and lit a big fire. When all the dampness had dried out of the walls and roof, and the clay floor was hard, they laid down the wooden planks. Vincent carried in his little bed, a table, a chair and his easels. He tacked up his sketches, brushed a rough GOGH into the whitewashed wall next to the kitchen, and settled down to become a Dutch Millet.
2
THE MOST INTERESTING people around Nuenen were the weavers. They dwelt in little thatched, clay and straw huts, generally of two rooms. In the one room, with a tiny patch of window letting in just a sliver of light, the family lived. There were square recesses in the walls, about three feet off the ground, for beds; a table, a few chairs, a peat stove, and a rough cabinet for the dishware and pots. The floor was of uneven clay, the walls of mud. In the adjoining room, about a third the size of the living room, and with half its height cut off by sloping eaves, was the loom.
A weaver who worked steadily could weave a piece of sixty yards in a week. While he weaved, a woman had to spool for him. On that piece of cloth the weaver made a net profit of four and a half frances a week. When he took it to the manufacturer, he often got the message that not before one or two weeks had passed could he take another piece home, Vincent found that they had a different spirit from the miners of the Borinage; they were quiet, and nowhere was there to be heard anything resembling rebellious speeches. But they looked as cheerful as cab horses, or the sheep transported by steamer to England.
