He walked the twelve kilometres home in a leisurely fashion. The sun was setting over the pyramid-dotted horizon and lit up the outer fringe of some floating clouds with a delicate shell pink. Vincent noticed how the little stone houses of Cuesmes fell into natural etching designs, and how peaceful the green valley lay below him when he gained the top of a hill. He felt happy, and wondered why.
The following day he went to the terril behind Marcasse and sketched the girls and women as they leaned over the slope, digging specks of black gold out of the mountainside. After dinner he said, “Please do not leave the table for a moment, Monsieur, Madame Denis. I wish to do something.”
He ran to his room, brought back the drawing pad and charcoal, and quickly planted a likeness of his friends on the paper. Madame Denis came around to look over his shoulder and exclaimed, “But Monsieur Vincent, you are an artist!”
Vincent was embarrassed. “No,” he said, “I am only amusing myself.”
“But it is nice,” said Madame Denis. “It almost looks like me.”
“Almost,” laughed Vincent, “but not quite.”
He did not write home to tell them what he was doing because he knew they would say, and rightly, “Oh, Vincent is at one of his fads again. When will he settle down and do something useful?”
Besides, this new activity had a curious special quality; it was his and nobody else’s. He could not bring himself to talk or write about his sketches. He felt a reticence about them that he had not felt for anything before, a disinclination to let strange eyes see his work. They were, in some crude and incomprehensible way, sacred, even though they might be wretchedly amateurish in every last detail.
Once more he entered the miners’ huts, but this time he carried drawing paper and crayon instead of a Bible. The miners were not any the less glad to see him. He sketched the children playing on the floor, the wives bending over their oval stoves, the family at supper when the day’s work was done. He sketched Marcasse with its tall chimneys, the black fields, the pine woods across the ravine, the peasants ploughing down around Paturages. If the weather was bad, he remained in his room, copying the prints on the walls and the rough drafts he had done the day before. When he went to bed at night, he felt that perhaps one or two of the things he had done that day were not so bad. He awakened the next morning to find he had slept off the intoxication of creative effort and that the drawings were wrong, all wrong. He threw them away without a qualm.
He had put down the beast of pain within him, and he was happy because he no longer thought of his unhappiness. He knew he ought to feel ashamed to keep on taking his father’s and brother’s money when he made no effort to support himself, but it did not seem to matter and he just went on sketching.
After a few weeks, when he had copied all the prints on the wall a great many times, he realized that if he was to make any progress he would have to have more to copy, and those of the masters. Despite the fact that Theo had not written to him for a year, he hid his pride under a pile of poor drawings and wrote to his brother.
Dear Theo:
If I am not mistaken you must still have “Les Travaux des Champs” by Millet. Would you be so kind as to lend them to me for a short time and send them by mail?
I must tell you that I am copying large drawings after Bosboom and Allebé. Well, perhaps if you saw them you would not be altogether dissatisfied.
Send me what you can and do not fear for me. If I can only continue to work, that will somehow or other set me right again.
I write to you while I am busy drawing and I am in a hurry to get back to it, so good night, and send me the prints as soon as possible.
Slowly a new hunger grew upon him, the desire to talk to some artist about his work, and find out just where he was going right and where he was going wrong. He knew that his drawings were bad, but he was too close to them to see exactly why. What he needed was the ruthless eye of a stranger who was not blinded by the creative pride of the parent.
To whom could he go? It was a hunger more cogent than any he suffered the winter before when he had lived for days on dry bread. He simply had to know and feel that there were other artists in the world, men of his own kind who were facing the same technical problems, thinking in the same terms; men who would justify his efforts by showing their own serious concern with the elements of the painter’s craft. There were people in the world, he remembered, men like Maris and Mauve, who gave their whole lives to painting. That seemed almost unbelievable here in the Borinage.
One rainy afternoon, as he was copying in his room, there flashed before his mind the picture of the Reverend Pietersen standing in his studio in Brussels and saying, “But don’t tell my confréres about it!” He knew that he had his man at last. He looked over the original sketches he had done, selected the figures of a miner, a wife bending over her oval stove, and an old woman gathering terril. He set out for Brussels.
He had only a little over three francs in his pocket, so he could not afford to take a train. The distance on foot was some eighty kilometres. Vincent walked that afternoon, all that night, and most of the following day, getting within thirty kilometres of Brussels. He would have gone straight on except that his thin shoes had worn through and he had pushed his toes through the top of one of them. The coat he had used all the previous year in Petit Wasmes was covered with a layer of dust, and since he had not taken even a comb or change of shirt with him, he could do little more than throw cold water over his face the next morning.
He put cardboard inside the soles of his shoes and started out very early. The leather began to cut him where his toes stuck through at the top; soon his foot was covered with blood. The cardboard wore out, water blisters took its place, changed to blood blisters, and then broke. He was hungry, he was thirsty, he was tired, but he was as happy as a man could be.
He was actually going to see and talk to another artist!
He reached the outskirts of Brussels that afternoon without a centime in his pockets. He remembered very distinctly where Pietersen lived and walked rapidly through the streets. People moved aside quickly as he passed, and then stared after him, shaking their heads. Vincent did not even notice them, but made his way along as fast as his crippled feet would permit him.
The Reverend’s young daughter answered the bell. She took one horrified look at Vincent’s dirty, sweat-streaked face, his uncombed, matted hair, filthy coat, mud-caked trousers and black, bloody feet, and ran screaming down the hall. The Reverend Pietersen came to the door, peered at Vincent for a moment without recognizing him, and then broke into a hearty smile of recognition.
“Well, Vincent my son,” he exclaimed, “how good it is to see you again. Come right in, come right in.”
He led Vincent into the study and drew up a comfortable chair for him. Now that he had made his objective, the cable of will broke within Vincent, and all at once he felt the eighty kilometres that he had tramped in the last two days on bread and a little cheese. The muscles of his back relaxed, his shoulders slumped, and he found it curiously difficult to breathe.
“A friend of mine nearby has a spare room, Vincent,” said Pietersen. “Wouldn’t you like to clean up and rest after your journey?”