“Wait a minute!”
“You don’t mean to tell me you’re going to be a coward and weaken?” asked Vincent harshly.
“Look here, Van Gogh, I’m no miser; I’m acting on principle. If I thought you were a fool, I’d give you twenty-five francs to get rid of you. But I respect you as a fellow craftsman. I’m going to give you something you couldn’t buy for all the money in the world. And there’s not another man in The Hague, except Mauve, that I’d give it to. Come over here. Adjust that curtain on the skylight. That’s better. Have a look at this study. Here’s how I’m going to work out the design and apportion my material. For Christ’s sake, how do you expect to see it if you stand in the light?”
An hour later Vincent left, exhilarated. He had learned more in that short time than he could have in a year at art school. He walked some distance before he remembered that he was hungry, feverish, and ill, and that he had not a centime in the world.
9
A FEW DAYS later he encountered Mauve in the dunes. If he had any hopes of a reconciliation, he was disappointed.
“Cousin Mauve, I want to beg your pardon for what happened in your studio. It was stupid of me. Can’t you see your way clear to forgive me? Won’t you come and see my work some time and talk things over?”
Mauve refused point blank. “I will certainly not come to see you, that is all over.”
“Have you lost faith in me so completely?”
“Yes. You have a vicious character.”
“If you will tell me what I have done that is vicious, I will try to mend my ways.”
“I am no longer interested in what you do.”
“I have done nothing but eat and sleep and work as an artist. Is that vicious?”
“Do you call yourself an artist?”
“Yes.”
“How absurd. You never sold a picture in your life.”
“Is that what being an artist means—selling? I thought it meant one who was always seeking without absolutely finding. I thought it means the contrary from ‘I know it, I have found it.’ When I say I am an artist, I only mean ‘I am seeking, I am striving, I am in it with all my heart.’”
“Nevertheless, you have a vicious character.”
“You suspect me of something—it is in the air—you think I am keeping something back. ‘Vincent is hiding something that cannot stand the light.’ What is it, Mauve? Speak to me frankly.”
Mauve went back to his easel and began applying paint. Vincent turned away and walked slowly over the sand.
He was right. There was something in the air. The Hague had learned about his relation to Christine. De Bock was the one to break the news. He blew in with a naughty smile on his bud-like mouth. Christine was posing, so he spoke in English.
“Well, well, Van Gogh,” he said, throwing off his heavy black overcoat and lighting a long cigarette. “It’s all over town that you’ve taken a mistress. I heard it from Weissenbruch, Mauve and Tersteeg. The Hague is up in arms about it.”
“Oh,” said Vincent, “so that’s what it’s all about.”
“You should be more discreet, old fellow. Is she some model about town? I thought I knew all the available ones.”
Vincent glanced over at Christine knitting by the fire. There was a homely sort of attractiveness about her as she sat there, sewing in her merino and apron, her eyes upon the little garment she was making. De Bock dropped his cigarette to the floor and jumped up.
“My God!” he exclaimed, “You don’t mean to tell me that’s your mistress?”
“I have no mistress, De Bock. But I presume that’s the woman they’re talking about.”
De Bock wiped some imaginary perspiration from his forehead and looked Christine over carefully. “How the devil can you bring yourself to sleep with her?”
“Why do you ask that?”
“My dear old chap, She’s a hag! The commonest sort of a hag! What can you be thinking about? No wonder Tersteeg was shocked. If you want a mistress, why don’t you pick up one of the neat little models about town? There are plenty of them around.”
“As I told you once before, De Bock, this woman is not my mistress.”
“Then what . . .?”
“She’s my wife!”
De Bock closed his tiny lips over his teeth with the gesture of a man tucking a buttonhole around a button.
“Your wife!”
“Yes. I intend to marry her.”
“My God!”
De Bock threw one last look of horror and repulsion at Christine, and fled without even putting on his coat.
“What were you saying about me?” asked Christine.
Vincent crossed and looked down at her for a moment. “I told De Bock that you are going to be my wife.”
Christine was silent for a long time, her hands working busily. Her mouth hung slightly open and her tongue would dart quickly, like the tongue of a snake, to moisten the rapidly drying lips.
“You would really marry me, Vincent? Why?”
“If I don’t marry you, it would have been kinder of me to let you alone. I want to go through the joys and sorrows of domestic life in order to paint it from my own experience. I was in love with a woman once, Christine. When I went to her house, they told me I disgusted her. My love was true and honest and strong, Christine, and when I came away I knew it had been killed. But after death there is a resurrection; you were that resurrection.”
“But you can’t marry me! What about the children? And your brother may stop sending the money.”
“I respect a woman who is a mother, Christine. We’ll keep the new baby and Herman here with us, the others can stay with your mother. As for Theo . . . yes . . . he may cut off my head. But when I write him the full truth I do not think he will abandon me.”
He sat on the floor by her feet. She was looking so much better than when he had first met her. There was a little touch of happiness in her melancholy brown eyes. A new spirit of life had come to her whole personality. Posing had not been easy for her, but she had worked hard and patiently. When he first met her, she had been coarse and ill and miserable; now her whole manner was more quiet. She had found new health and life. As he sat there looking up into her crude, marked face into which a slight note of sweetness had come, he thought once again of the line from Michelet: “Comment se fait-il qu’il y ait sur la terre une femme seule désespérée?”
“Sien, we’ll skimp and be as saving as possible, won’t we? I fear there will come a time when I shall be quite without means. I shall be able to help you until you go to Leyden, but when you come back I don’t know how you will find me, with or without bread. What I have I will share with you and the child.”
Christine slipped off the chair, on to the floor beside him, put her arms about his neck and laid her head on his shoulder.
“Just let me stay with you, Vincent. I don’t ask for much. If there’s nothing but bread and coffee, I don’t complain. I love you, Vincent. You’re the first man’s ever been good to me. You don’t got to marry me if you don’t want. I’ll pose and work hard and do whatever you tell me. Only let me stay with you! It’s the first time I ever been happy, Vincent. I don’t want things. I’ll just share what you have and be happy.”
He could feel the swelling child against him, warm and living. He ran his fingertips gently over her homely face, kissing the scars one by one. He let her hair fall down her back, smoothing out the thin strands with tender strokes of his hand. She laid her flushed, happy cheek on his beard and rubbed softly against the grain.
“You do love me, Christine?”
“Yes, Vincent, I do.”