“Tell me, Doctor,” he said, “why do the men never talk to each other? Some of them seem intelligent enough, when they are well.”
“They can’t talk, Vincent, for the minute they begin to talk, they argue, get excited, and bring a seizure upon themselves. So they’ve learned that the only way they can live is by remaining utterly quiet.”
“They might just as well be dead, mightn’t they?”
Peyron shrugged. “That, my dear Vincent, is a matter of opinion.”
“But why don’t they at least read? I should think that books . . .”
“Reading starts their minds churning, Vincent, and the first thing we know, they have a violent attack. No, my friend, they must inhabit the closed world of their own. There is no need to feel sorry for them. Don’t you remember what Dryden said? ‘There is pleasure, sure, in being mad, which none but madmen know.’”
A month passed. Not once did Vincent have the least desire to be elsewhere. Nor did he notice in any of the others a definite wish to get away. He knew this came from the feeling that they were all too thoroughly shattered for the life outside.
And over the ward hung the fetid odour of decaying men.
Vincent held the spirit of himself together rigidly, against that day when the desire and strength to paint should return to him. His fellow inmates vegetated in idleness, thinking only of their three meals a day. In order to discipline himself against this surrender, Vincent refused to eat any of the stale and slightly spoiled food. He swallowed only a little black bread and soup. Theo sent him a one-volume edition of Shakespeare; he read “Richard II,” “Henry IV,” and “Henry V,” projecting his mind to other days and other places.
He fought valiantly to keep grief from gathering in his heart like water in a swamp.
Theo was now married. He and his wife Johanna wrote to Vincent often. Theo’s health was poor. Vincent worried more about his brother than he did about himself. He begged Johanna to give Theo wholesome Dutch food once more, after ten years of restaurant fare.
Vincent knew that work distracted him infinitely better than anything else, and that if he could only throw himself into it with all his strength, it might possibly be the best remedy. The men in the ward had nothing to save them from a rotting death; he had his painting which would take him out of the asylum a well and happy man.
At the end of the sixth week, Doctor Peyron gave Vincent a little room for a studio. It was done in greenish-grey paper, and had two curtains of sea-green with a design of very pale roses. The curtains, and an old armchair covered with an upholstery splashed like a Monticelli, had been left behind by one of the wealthier inmates who had died. The room looked out on a slanting cornfield, and freedom. There were thick black bars across the window.
Vincent promptly painted the landscape that he saw from the window. In the foreground was a field of corn ruined and dashed to the ground after a storm. A boundary wall ran down a slope, and beyond the grey foliage of a few olive trees were some huts and hills. At the top of the canvas Vincent put a great grey and white cloud drowned in the azure.
He returned to the ward at supper time, exultant. His power had not left him. He had come face to face with nature again. The feeling for work had held him and forced him to create.
The insane asylum could not kill him now. He was on the road to recovery. In a few months he would be out. He would be free to return to Paris and his old friends. Life was beginning for him once more. He wrote Theo a long, tumultuous letter, with demands for pigments, canvas, brushes, and interesting books.
The next morning the sun came out, yellow and hot. The cicadas in the garden began to sing with a harsh cry, ten times stronger than that of the crickets. Vincent took his easel out and painted the pine trees, the bushes and the walks. His ward mates came to look over his shoulder, but remained perfectly silent and respectful.
“They have better manners than the good people of Arles,” murmured Vincent to himself.
Late that afternoon he went to see Doctor Peyron. “I am feeling perfectly well, Doctor, and I should like your permission to go outside the grounds to paint.”
“Yes, you are certainly looking better, Vincent. The baths and quiet have helped you. But don’t you think it a bit dangerous to go out so soon?”
“Dangerous? Why, no. How?”
“Suppose you . . . had an attack . . . in the fields . . .?”
Vincent laughed. “No more attacks for me, Doctor. I’m through with them. I feel better than I did before they began.”
“No, Vincent, I’m afraid . . .”
“Please, Doctor. If I can go wherever I wish, and paint the things I love, don’t you see how much happier I will be?”
“Well, if work is what you need . . .”
And so the gate was unlocked for Vincent. He loaded his easel on his back and went in search of pictures. He spent whole days in the hills behind the asylum. The cypress trees about St. Remy began to occupy his thoughts. He wanted to make something of them, like his sunflower canvases. It astonished him that they had not yet been painted as he saw them. He found them as beautiful in line and proportion as an Egyptian obelisk; splashes of black in a sunny landscape.
The old habits of the Arlesian days returned. Each morning at sunrise he trudged out with a blank canvas; each sundown saw it transcribed from nature. If there was any lessening of his power and ability, he could not perceive it. Every day he felt stronger, more sensitive, surer of himself.
Now that he was again master of his own destiny, he no longer feared eating at the asylum board. He devoured his food avidly, even the cockroach soup. He needed food for his working strength. He had nothing to fear now. He was in complete control of himself.
When he had been in the asylum three months, he found a cypress motif that lifted him out of his troubles, beyond all the suffering he had endured. The trees were massive. The foreground was low with brambles and brushwood. Behind were some violet hills, a green and rose sky with a decrescent moon. He painted the clump of brambles in the foreground very thick, with touches of yellow, violet, and green. When he looked at his canvas that night he knew that he had come up out of the pit and was standing once more on solid earth, his face to the sun.
In his overwhelming joy he saw himself once again a free man.
Theo sent some extra money, so Vincent secured permission to go to Arles and recover his pictures. The people in the Place Lamartine were courteous to him, but the sight of the yellow house made him very ill. He thought he was going to faint. Instead of visiting Roulin and Doctor Rey, as he had planned, he went in search of the landlord, who had his pictures.
Vincent did not return to the asylum that night as he had promised. The following day he was found between Tarascon and St. Remy, lying face downward in a ditch.
3
FEVER CLOUDED HIS mind for three weeks. The men in the ward, whom he had pitied because their attacks were recurrent, were very patient with him. When he recovered sufficiently to realize what had happened, he kept repeating to himself.
“It is abominable. It is abominable!”
Toward the end of the third week, when he was beginning to walk about the barren, corridor-like room for a little exercise, the sisters brought in a new patient. He allowed himself to be led to his bed very docilely, but once the sisters were gone, he broke into a violent rage. He ripped all the clothes off his body and tore them to shreds, shouting at the top of his voice all the time. He clawed his bed to pieces, smashed the box nailed to the wall, pulled down the curtains, broke the frame, and kicked his valise into a shapeless mass.