“Do not cover him too much with lace, little sister.”
Johanna closed the door quietly behind her. Vincent, looking down at the child once more, felt the awful pang of barren men whose flesh leaves no flesh behind, whose death is death eternal.
Theo read his thoughts.
“There is still time for you, Vincent. Some day you will find a wife who will love you and share the hardships of your life.”
“Ah no, Theo, it’s too late.”
“I found a woman only the other day who would be perfect for you.”
“Not really! Who was she?”
“She was the girl in ‘Terre Vierge,’ by Turgenev. Remember her?”
“You mean the one who works with the nihilists, and brings the compromising papers across the frontier?”
“Yes. Your wife would have to be somebody like that, Vincent; somebody who had gone through life’s misery to the very bottom . . .”
“. . . And what would she want with me? A one-eared man?”
Little Vincent awakened, looked up at them and smiled. Theo lifted the child out of the cradle and placed him in Vincent’s arms.
“So soft and warm, like a little puppy,” said Vincent, feeling the baby against his heart.
“Here, clumsy, you don’t hold a baby like that.”
“I’m afraid I’m more at home holding a paint brush.”
Theo took the child and held him against his shoulder, his head touching the baby’s brown curls. To Vincent they looked as though they had been carved out of the same stone.
“Well, Theo boy,” he said resignedly, “each man to his own medium. You create in the living flesh . . . and I’ll create in paint.”
“Just so, Vincent, just so.”
A number of Vincent’s friends came to Theo’s that night to welcome him back. The first arrival was Aurier, a handsome young man with flowing locks and a beard which sprouted out of each side of his chin, but conjured up no hair in the middle. Vincent led him to the bedroom, where Theo had hung a Monticelli bouquet.
“You said in your article, Monsieur Aurier, that I was the sole painter to perceive the chromatism of things with a metallic, gem-like quality. Look at this Monticelli. ‘Fada’ achieved it years before I even came to Paris.”
At the end of an hour Vincent gave up trying to persuade Aurier, and presented him instead with one of the St. Remy cypress canvasses in appreciation for his article.
Toulouse-Lautrec blew in, winded from six flights of stairs, but still as hilarious and ribald as ever.
“Vincent,” he exclaimed, while shaking hands, “I passed an undertaker on the stairs. Was he looking for you or me?”
“For you, Lautrec! He couldn’t get any business out of me.”
“I’ll make you a little wager, Vincent. I’ll bet your name comes ahead of mine in his little book.”
“You’re on. What’s the stake?”
“Dinner at the Café Athens, and an evening at the Opéra.”
“I wish you fellows would make your jokes a trifle less macabre,” said Theo, smiling faintly.
A strange man entered the front door, looked at Lautrec, and sank into a chair in a far corner. Everyone waited for Lautrec to present him, but he just went on talking.
“Won’t you introduce your friend?” asked Vincent.
“That’s not my friend,” laughed Lautrec. “That’s my keeper.”
There was a moment of pained silence.
“Hadn’t you heard, Vincent? I was non compos mentis for a couple of months. They said it was from too much liquor, so now I’m drinking milk. I’ll send you an invitation to my next party. There’s a picture on it of me milking a cow from the wrong end!”
Johanna passed out refreshments. Everyone talked at the same time and the air grew thick with tobacco smoke. It reminded Vincent of the old Paris days. “How is Georges Seurat getting along?” Vincent asked Lautrec.
“Georges! Mean to tell me you don’t know about him?”
“Theo didn’t write anything,” said Vincent. “What is it?”
“Georges is dying of consumption. The doctor says he won’t last beyond his thirty-first birthday.”
“Consumption! Why, Georges was strong and healthy. How in the . . .?”
“Overwork, Vincent,” said Theo. “It’s been two years since you’ve seen him? Georges drove himself like a demon. Slept two and three hours a day, and worked himself furiously all the rest of the time. Even that good old mother of his couldn’t save him.”
“So Georges will be going soon,” said Vincent, musingly.
Rousseau came in, carrying a bag of home-made cookies for Vincent. Père Tanguy, wearing the same round straw hat, presented Vincent with a Japanese print and a sweet speech about how glad they were to welcome him back to Paris.
At ten o’clock Vincent insisted upon going down and buying a litre of olives. He made everyone eat them, even Lautrec’s guardian.
“If you could once see those silver-green olive groves in Provence,” he exclaimed, “you would eat olives for the rest of your life.”
“Speaking of olive groves, Vincent,” said Lautrec, “how did you find the Arlesiennes?”
The following morning Vincent carried the perambulator down to the street for Johanna so that the baby might have his hour of sunshine on the private trottoir. Vincent then went back to the apartment and stood about in his shirt sleeves, looking at the walls. They were covered with his pictures. In the dining room over the mantelpiece was the Potato Eaters, in the living room the Landscape from Arles, and Night View on the Rhône, in the bedroom, Blooming Orchards. To the despair of Johanna’s femme de ménage, there were huge piles of unframed canvases under the beds, under the sofa, under the cupboard, and stacked solid in the spare room.
While rummaging for something in Theo’s desk, Vincent came across large packages of letters tied with heavy cord. He was amazed to find that they were his own letters. Theo had carefully guarded every line his brother had written to him since that day, twenty years before, when Vincent had left Zundert for Goupils in The Hague. All in all, there were seven hundred letters. Vincent wondered why in the world Theo had saved them.
In another part of the desk he found the drawings that he had been sending to Theo for the past ten years, all ranged neatly in periods; here were the miners and their wives from the Borinage period, leaning over their terril: here the diggers and sowers in the fields near Etten; here the old men and women from the Hague, the diggers in the Geest, and the fishermen of Scheveningen; here the potato eaters and weavers of Nuenen; here the restaurants and street scenes of Paris; here the early sunflower and orchard sketches from Arles; and here the garden of the asylum at St. Remy.
“I’m going to have an exhibition all my own!” he exclaimed.
He took all the pictures off the walls, threw down the packages of sketches, and pulled piles of unframed canvases from under every piece of furniture. He sorted them out very carefully into periods. Then he selected the sketches and oils which best caught the spirit of the place in which he had been working. In the foyer, where one entered from the hallway of the house, he pinned up about thirty of his first studies, the Borains coming out of the mines, leaning over their oval stoves, eating supper in their little shacks.
“This is the charcoal room,” he announced to himself.
He looked about the rest of the house and decided that the bathroom was the next least important place. He stood on a chair and tacked a row of Etten studies about the four walls in a straight line, studies of the Brabant peasants.