But at the base of everything lay the overwhelming fear of what epilepsy would eventually do to him. Now he was sane and rational; he could do with his life what he wished. But suppose his next attack should convert him into a raving maniac. Suppose his brain should crack under the strain of the seizure. Suppose he became a hopeless, drivelling idiot. What would poor Theo do then? Lock him in an asylum for the lost ones?
He presented Doctor Gachet with two more of his canvases and wormed the truth out of him.
“No, Vincent,” said the doctor, “you are all through with your attacks. You’ll find yourself in perfect health from now on. But not all epileptics are that fortunate.”
“What eventually happens to them, Doctor?”
“Sometimes, when they have had a number of crises, they go out of their minds completely.”
“And there is no possible recovery for them?”
“No. They’re finished. Oh, they may linger on for some years in an asylum, but they never come back to their right minds.”
“How can they tell, Doctor, whether they will recover from the next attack, or whether it will crack their brains?”
“There is no way of telling, Vincent. But come, why should we discuss such morbid questions? Let’s go up to the workshop and make some etchings.”
Vincent did not leave his room at Ravoux’s for the next four days. Madame Ravoux brought him his supper every evening.
“I’m well now, and sane,” he kept repeating to himself. “I am master of my own destiny. But when the next seizure catches me . . . if it cracks my skull . . . I won’t know enough to kill myself . . . and I’ll be lost. Oh, Theo, Theo, what should I do?”
On the afternoon of the fourth day he went to Gachet’s. The doctor was in the living room. Vincent walked to the cabinet where he had put the unframed Guillaumin nude some time before. He picked up the canvas.
“I told you to have this framed,” he said.
Doctor Gachet looked at him in surprise.
“I know, Vincent. I’ll order a stick frame from the joiner in Auvers next week.”
“It must be framed now! Today! This minute!”
“Why, Vincent, you’re talking nonsense!”
Vincent glared at the doctor for a moment, took a menacing step toward him, then put his hand in his coat pocket. Doctor Gachet thought he saw Vincent grip a revolver and point it at him through the coat.
“Vincent!” he exclaimed.
Vincent trembled. He lowered his eyes, pulled his hand from his pocket, and ran out of the house.
The next day he took his easel and canvas, walked down the long road to the station, climbed the hill past the Catholic church, and sat down in the yellow cornfield, opposite the cemetery.
About noon, when the fiery sun was beating down upon his head, a rush of blackbirds suddenly came out of the sky. They filled the air, darkened the sun, covered Vincent in a thick blanket of night, flew into his hair, his eyes, his nose, his mouth, buried him in a black cloud of tight, airless, flapping wings.
Vincent went on working. He painted the birds above the yellow field of corn. He did not know how long he wielded his brush, but when he saw that he had finished, he wrote Crows Above a Cornfield in one corner, carried his easel and canvas back to Ravoux’s, threw himself across the bed and went to sleep.
The following afternoon he went out again, but left the Place de la Mairie from the other side. He climbed the hill past the chateau. A peasant saw him sitting in a tree.
“It is impossible!” he heard Vincent say. “It is impossible!”
After a time he climbed down from the tree and walked in the ploughed field behind the chateau. This time it was the end. He had known that in Arles, the very first time, but he had been unable to make the clean break.
He wanted to say good-bye. In spite of all, it had been a good world that he had lived in. As Gauguin said, “besides the poison, there is the antidote.” And now, leaving the world, he wanted to say good-bye to it, say good-bye to all those friends who had helped mould his life; to Ursula, whose contempt had wrenched him out of a conventional life and made him an outcast; to Mendes da Costa, who had made him believe that ultimately he would express himself, and that expression would justify his life; to Kay Vos, whose “No, never! never!” had been written in acid on his soul; to Madame Denis, Jacques Verney and Henri Decrucq, who had helped him love the despised ones of the earth; to the Reverend Pietersen, whose kindness had transcended Vincent’s ugly clothes and boorish manners; to his mother and father, who had loved him as best they could; to Christine, the only wife with which fate had seen fit to bless him; to Mauve, who had been his master for a few sweet weeks; to Weissenbruch and De Bock, his first painter friends; to his Uncles Vincent, Jan, Cornelius Marius, and Stricker, who had labelled him the black sheep of the Van Gogh family; to Margot, the only woman who had ever loved him, and who had tried to kill herself for that love; to all his painter friends in Paris; Lautrec, who had been shut up in an asylum again, to die; Georges Seurat, dead at thirty-one from overwork; Paul Gauguin, a mendicant in Brittany; Rousseau, rotting in his hole near the Bastille; Cezanne, a bitter recluse on a hilltop in Aix; to Père Tanguy and Roulin, who had shown him the salt in the simple souls of the earth; to Rachel and Doctor Rey, who had been kind to him with the kindness he needed; to Aurier and Doctor Gachet, the only two men in the world who had thought him a great painter, and last of all, to his good brother Theo, long suffering, long loving, best and dearest of all possible brothers.
But words had never been his medium. He would have to paint good-bye.
One cannot paint good-bye.
He turned his face upward to the sun. He pressed the revolver into his side. He pulled the trigger. He sank down, burying his face in the rich, pungent loam of the field, a more resilient earth returning to the womb of its mother.
4
FOUR HOURS LATER he staggered through the gloom of the café. Madame Ravoux followed him to his room and saw blood on his clothes. She ran at once for Doctor Gachet.
“Oh, Vincent, Vincent, what have you done!” groaned Gachet, when he entered the room.
“I think I have bungled it; what do you say?”
Gachet examined the wound.
“Oh, Vincent, my poor old friend, how unhappy you must have been to do this! Why didn’t I know? Why should you want to leave us when we all love you so? Think of the beautiful pictures you have still to paint for the world.”
“Will you be so kind as to give me my pipe from my waistcoat pocket?”
“But certainly, my friend.”
He loaded the pipe with tobacco, then placed it between Vincent’s teeth.
“A light, if you please,” said Vincent.
“But certainly, my friend.”
Vincent puffed quietly at his pipe.
“Vincent, it is Sunday and your brother is not at the shop. What is his home address?”
“That I will not give you.”
“But, Vincent, you must! It is urgent that we reach him!”
“Theo’s Sunday must not be disturbed. He is tired and worried. He needs the rest.”
No amount of persuasion could get the Cite Pigalle address out of Vincent. Doctor Gachet stayed with him until late that night, tending the wound. Then he went home for a little rest, leaving his son to care for Vincent.
Vincent lay there wide-eyed all night, never uttering a word to Paul. He kept filling his pipe and smoking it constantly.
When Theo arrived at Goupils the following morning, he found Gachet’s telegram awaiting him. He caught the first train for Pontoise, then dashed in a carriage to Auvers.