Vincent noticed that his father’s hair had grown whiter and that the right lid drooped still lower over his eye. Age seemed to be shrinking his features; he grew no beard to make up for the loss, and the expression on his face had changed from “This is me,” to “Is this me?”
In his mother Vincent found greater strength and attractiveness than before. Age built her up rather than tore her down. The smile engraved in curved lines between her nostrils and chin forgave one’s errors before they were committed; the broadness and wideness and goodness of her face were an eternal “Yea” to the beauty of life.
For several days the family stuffed Vincent with revivifying food and affection, ignoring the fact that he had no fortune and no future. He walked on the heath among the cottages with the thatched roofs, watched the woodcutters who were busy on a piece of ground where a pine wood had been cut down, strolled leisurely on the road to Roozendaal, past the Protestant barn with the mill right opposite in the meadow and the elm trees in the churchyard. The Borinage receded, his health and strength came back with a rush, and within a short time he was eager to begin his work.
One rainy morning Anna Cornelia descended to the kitchen at an early hour to find the stove already glowing red, and Vincent sitting before it, his feet propped up on the grate, with a half finished copy after “Les Heures de la Journée” in his lap.
“Why son, good morning,” she exclaimed.
“Good morning, Mother.” He kissed her broad cheek fondly.
“What makes you get up so early, Vincent?”
“Well, Mother, I wanted to work.”
“Work?”
Anna Cornelia looked at the sketch in his lap, then at the glowing stove. “Oh, you mean get the fire started. But you mustn’t get up for that.”
“No, I mean my drawing.”
Once again Anna Cornelia glanced over her son’s shoulder at the copy. It looked to her like a child’s efforts to reproduce something from a magazine during a play hour.
“You are going to work at drawing things, Vincent?”
“Yes.”
He explained his decision and Theo’s efforts to help him. Contrary to his expectations, Anna Cornelia was pleased. She walked quickly into the living room and returned with a letter.
“Our cousin, Anton Mauve, is a painter,” she said, “and he makes a great deal of money. I had this letter from my sister only the other day—Mauve married her daughter Jet, you know—and she writes that Mijnheer Tersteeg at Goupils sells everything Anton does for five and six hundred guilders.”
“Yes, Mauve is becoming one of our important painters.”
“How long does it take to make one of those pictures, Vincent?”
“That depends, Mother. Some canvases take a few days, some a few years.”
“A few years! Oh, my!”
Anna Cornelia thought for a moment and then asked, “Can you draw people so that it looks like them?”
“Well, I don’t know. I have some sketches upstairs. I’ll show them to you.”
When he returned, his mother had on her white kitchen cap and was placing kettles of water on the broad stove. The shining blue and white tiles of the wall gave the room a cheerful air.
“I’m fixing your favourite cheese bake, Vincent,” said Anna Cornelia. “Do you remember?”
“Do I remember! Oh, Mother!” He threw his arm about her shoulder roughly. She looked up at him with a wistful smile. Vincent was her eldest child and her favourite; his unhappiness was the only thing in life that grieved her.
“Is it good to be home with your mother?” she asked.
He pinched her fresh, wrinkled cheek playfully.
“Yes, sweetheart,” he answered.
She took the sketches of the Borains and studied them carefully.
“But Vincent, what has happened to their faces?”
“Nothing. Why?”
“They haven’t any.”
“I know. I was only interested in the figure.”
“But you can draw people’s faces, can’t you? I’m sure lots of women here in Etten would like to have their portraits painted. There’s a living in that.”
“Yes, I suppose so. But I’ll have to wait until my drawing is right.”
His mother was breaking eggs into a pan of sour cheese she had strained the day before. She paused with half the shell of an egg in each hand and turned from the stove.
“You mean you have to make your drawing right so the portraits will be good enough to sell?”
“No,” replied Vincent, sketching rapidly with his pencil, “I have to make my drawing right so that my drawing will be right.”
Anna Cornelia stirred the yolks into the white cheese thoughtfully and then said, “I’m afraid I don’t understand that, son.”
“Neither do I,” said Vincent, “but anyway it’s so.”
Over the fluffy golden cheese bake at breakfast, Anna Cornelia broke the news to her husband. They had been doing a great deal of uneasy speculating about Vincent in private.
“Is there a future in that, Vincent?” asked his father. “Will you be able to support yourself?”
“Not just at first. Theo is going to help me until I get on my feet. After my drawing becomes accurate, I should be able to make money. Draftsmen in London and Paris earn from ten to fifteen francs a day, and the men who do illustrations for the magazines make good money.”
Theodorus was relieved to find that Vincent had something—anything in mind, and was not going to drift idly as he had all these years.
“I hope, if you begin this work, Vincent, you will keep on with it. You’ll never get anywhere changing from pillar to post.”
“This is the end, Father. I’ll not change again.”
2
AFTER A TIME the rain stopped and warm weather set in. Vincent took his drawing material and easel out of doors and began exploring the country. He liked best to work on the heath, near Seppe, though he often went to a big swamp in the Passievaart to draw the water lilies. Etten was a small, closely knit town and its people looked at him askance. The black velvet suit was the first of its kind to be seen in the village; never before had the natives known a full grown man to spend his days in the open fields with nothing but pencil and drawing paper. He was courteous to his father’s parishioners in a rough, disinterested sort of way, but they wanted to have nothing to do with him. In this tiny, provincial settlement he was a freak, a sport; everything about him was bizarre; his clothes, his manner, his red beard, his history, the fact that he did not work, his incessant sitting in the fields and looking at things. They mistrusted and were afraid of him because he was different, even though he did them no harm and asked only to be let alone. Vincent had no idea the people did not like him.
He was doing a large study of the pine wood that was being cut down, concentrating on a lone tree at the border of a creek. One of the labourers who was clearing away would come and watch him draw, looking over his shoulder with a vacant grin, and occasionally breaking into a loud snigger. The sketch took Vincent some time. Each day the peasant’s guffaws grew louder. Vincent decided to find out just what amused the man.
“You find it funny,” he asked politely, “that I draw a tree?”
The man roared. “Yes, yes, it is so funny. You must be fou!”
Vincent deliberated for a moment and then asked, “Would I be fou if I planted a tree?”
The peasant sobered up instantly. “Oh, no, certainly not.”
“Would I be fou if I tended the tree and took care of it?”