“Of course, Sien. Stay as often as you like. You know I’m glad to have you.”
Although he never asked her to do anything, she acquired the habit of washing his linen, mending his clothes, and doing his little marketing.
“You don’t know how to take care of yourselves, you men,” she said. “You need a woman around. And I’m sure they cheat you at the market.”
She was by no means a good housekeeper; the many years of sloth in her mother’s house had destroyed most of the will to cleanliness and order. She took care of things sporadically, in sudden bursts of energy and determination. It was the first time she was keeping house for anyone she liked, and she enjoyed doing things . . . when she remembered them. Vincent was delighted to find that she wanted to do anything at all; he never even thought of reproving her. Now that she was no longer dead tired day and night, her voice lost some of its roughness; the vile words dropped out of her vocabulary one by one. She had learned to exercise very little control over her emotions, and when something displeased her, she would fly into a passionate rage, dropping back into her rough voice and using obscene words that Vincent had not heard since he was a young boy at school.
At such moments he saw Christine as a caricature of himself; he sat by quietly until the storm subsided. Christine was equally tolerant. When his drawing went all wrong, or she forgot everything he had taught her and posed awkwardly, he would burst into a fit of rage that fairly shook the walls. She let him speak his piece; in a very few moments calm was restored. Fortunately they never became angry at identical moments.
After he had sketched her often enough to become familiar with the lines of her body, he decided to do a real study. It was a sentence from Michelet that set him on the track: Comment se fait-il qu’il y ait sur la terre une femme seule désespérée? He posed Christine naked on a jow block of wood near the stove. He turned the block of wood into a tree stump, put in a little vegetation, and transposed the scene to the out-of-doors. Then he drew Christine, gnarled hands on her knees, the face buried in the scraggy arms, the thin hair covering the spine a short way down, the bulbous breasts drooping to meet the lean shanks, the flat feet insecurely on the ground. He called it Sorrow. It was the picture of a woman from whom had been squeezed all the juice of life. Under it he wrote the line from Michelet.
The study took a week and exhausted his supply of money; there were still ten days to go until the first of March. There was enough black bread in the house to last for two or three days. He would have to stop working from the model altogether and that would set him back some more.
“Sien,” he said, “I’m afraid I can’t have you any more until after the first of the month.”
“What’s the matter?”
“I have no more money.”
“You mean for me?”
“Yes.”
“I ain’t got nothing else to do. I’ll come anyway.”
“But you must have money, Sien.”
“I can get some.”
“You can’t do any washing, if you’re here all day.”
“. . . well . . . don’t worry . . . I’ll get some.”
He let her come for three more days, until his bread ran out. It was still a week to the first. He told Sien that he was going to Amsterdam to visit his uncle and that he would call at her house when he got back. He did some copying in his studio for three days on water without feeling much pain. On the third afternoon he went to De Bock’s, hoping to be served tea and cake.
“Hello, old fellow,” said De Bock, standing at his easel, “make yourself comfortable. I’m going to work straight through until my dinner engagement. There are some magazines over on the table. Just dig in.”
But not a word about tea.
He knew Mauve would not see him, and he was ashamed to beg from Jet. He would rather have died of starvation than ask Tersteeg for anything after the latter had spoken against him to Mauve. No matter how desperate he became, it never occurred to him that he might earn a few francs at some craft other than his own. His old foe the fever came up, his knees developed rickets and he stayed in bed. Though he knew it was impossible, he kept hoping for the miracle that would send Theo’s hundred francs a few days early. Theo did not get paid until the first.
Christine walked in the afternoon of the fifth day without knocking. Vincent was asleep. She stood over him, looking at the furrowed lines in his face, the paleness of the skin under his red beard, the parchment roughness of his lips. She placed a hand lightly on his forehead and felt the fever. She searched the shelf on which the supplies were usually kept. She saw that there was not a crumb of dry, black bread or a lone bean of coffee. She went out.
About an hour later Vincent began having dreams of his mother’s kitchen in Etten and the beans she used to prepare for him. He awakened to find Christine mixing things in pots over the stove.
“Sien,” he said.
She went over to the bed and put her cool hand on his cheek; the red beard was on fire. “Don’t be proud no more,” she said. “And don’t tell no more lies. If we’re poor, it ain’t our fault. We got to help each other. Didn’t you help me the first night we met down the wine cellar?”
“Sien,” he said.
“Now you lay there. I went home and got some potatoes and string beans. They’re all ready.”
She mashed the potatoes on the plate, put some green beans alongside, sat on his bed and fed him. “Why did you give me your money every day if you didn’t have enough? It ain’t no good if you go hungry.”
He could have stood the privation until Theo’s money arrived, even if it had been weeks. It was always the unexpected piece of kindness that broke his back. He decided to see Tersteeg. Christine washed his shirt, but there was no iron to smooth it with. The next morning she gave him a little breakfast of bread and coffee. He set out to walk to the Plaats. One heel was off his muddy boots, his trousers were patched and dirty. Theo’s coat was many sizes too small. He had an old necktie askew at the left side of his neck. On his head was one of the outlandish caps that he had a perfect genius for picking up, no one knew where.
He walked along the Ryn railroad tracks, skirted the edge of the woods and the station where the steam cars left for Scheveningen, and made for town. The feeble sun made him sensitive to his own anaemia. At the Plein he caught sight of himself in the window glass of a shop. In one of his rare moments of clarity he saw himself as the people of The Hague saw him: a dirty, unkempt tramp, belonging nowhere, wanted by no one, ill, weak, uncouth and déclassé.
The Plaats opened on a broad triangle to meet the Hofvijver alongside of the castle. Only the richest shops could afford to keep establishments there. Vincent was afraid to venture into the sacred triangle. He had never before realized how many millions of miles of caste he had put between himself and the Plaats.
The clerks in Goupils were dusting. They stared at him with unabashed curiosity. This man’s family controlled the art world of Europe. Why did he go about so foully?
Tersteeg was at his desk in the upstairs office. He was opening mail with a jade handled paper knife. He noticed Vincent’s small, circular ears that came below the line of his eyebrows, the oval of his face that tapered down through the jaws and then flattened out at the square chin, the head that was going smooth of hair above the left eye, the green-blue eyes that stared through him so probingly and yet without comment, the full, red mouth made redder by the beard and moustache in which it was set. He could never make up his mind whether he thought Vincent’s face and head ugly or beautiful.