THE FOLLOWING DAY they met at an appointed place some distance from the village. Margot had on a charming, high necked, white cambric dress and was carrying a summer hat in her hand. Although still nervous in his company, she seemed more self-possessed than she had been the day before. Vincent laid down his palette when she came. She had not even a fraction of Kay’s delicate beauty, but compared to Christine, she was a very attractive woman.
He rose from his stool, not knowing what to do. Ordinarily he was prejudiced against women who wore dresses; his territory was more those who wore jackets and petticoats. The so-called respectable class of Dutch women was not particularly attractive to paint or look at. He preferred the ordinary servant girls; they were often very Chardin-like.
Margot leaned up and kissed him, simply, possessively, as though they had been sweethearts for a long time, then held herself to him, trembling for a moment. Vincent spread his coat on the ground for her. He sat on his stool; Margot leaned against his knee and looked up at him with an expression that he had never seen before in the eyes of a woman.
“Vincent,” she said, just for the pure joy of uttering his name.
“Yes, Margot.” He did not know what to do or say.
“Did you think bad things of me last night?”
“Bad things? No. Why should I have?”
“You may find it difficult to believe, but, Vincent, when I kissed you yesterday, it was the first time I had ever kissed a man.”
“But why? Have you never been in love?”
“No.”
“What a pity.”
“Isn’t it?” She was silent for a moment. “You have loved other women, haven’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Many of them?”
“No. Just . . . three.”
“And did they love you?”
“No, Margot, they didn’t.”
“But they must have.”
“I’ve always been unfortunate in love.”
Margot moved closer to him and rested her arm on his lap. She ran the fingers of her other hand over his face playfully, touching his high ridged, powerful nose, the full, open mouth, the hard, rounded chin. A curious shiver ran through her; she took her fingers away.
“How strong you are,” she murmured. “Everything about you; your arms and chin and beard. I’ve never known a man like you before.”
He cupped her face in his hands roughly. The love and excitement that throbbed there made it appealing.
“Do you like me a little?” she asked anxiously.
“Yes.”
“And will you kiss me?”
He kissed her.
“Please don’t think ill of me, Vincent. I couldn’t help myself. You see, I fell in love . . . with you . . . and I couldn’t keep away.”
“You fell in love with me? You really fell in love with me? But why?”
She leaned up and kissed him on the corner of the mouth. “That’s why,” she said.
They sat quietly. A little way off was the Cimetière des Paysans. For ages the peasants had been laid to rest in the very fields which they dug up when alive. Vincent was trying to say on his canvas what a simple thing death was, just as simple as the falling of an autumn leaf, just a bit of earth dug up, a wooden cross. The fields around, where the grass of the churchyard ended beyond the little wall, made a last line against the sky, like the horizon of the sea.
“Do you know anything about me, Vincent?” she asked softly.
“Very little.”
“Have they . . . has anyone told you . . . my age?”
“No.”
“Well, I’m thirty-nine. In a very few months I shall be forty. For the last five years I have been telling myself that if I did not love someone before I left my thirties, I should kill myself.”
“But it is easy to love, Margot.”
“Ah, you think so?’”
“Yes. It’s only being loved in return that is difficult.”
“No. In Nuenen it is very hard. For over twenty years I have wanted desperately to love someone. And I never have been able to.”
“Never?”
She glanced away. “Once . . . when I was a girl . . . I liked a boy.”
“Yes?”
“He was a Catholic. They drove him away.”
“They?”
“My mother and sisters.”
She rose to her knees in the deep loam of the field, soiling her pretty white dress. She placed both elbows on his thighs and rested her face in her hands. His knees touched her sides, gently.
“A woman’s life is empty if she has no love to fill it, Vincent.”
“I know.”
“Every morning, when I awakened, I said to myself, ‘Today, surely, I shall find someone to love! Other women do, so why shouldn’t I?’ Then night would come and I would be alone and miserable. An endless row of empty days, Vincent. I have nothing to do at home—we have servants—and every hour was filled up with longing for love. With each night I said to myself, ‘You might just as well have been dead today, for all that you have lived.’ I kept bolstering myself up with the thought that some day, somehow, a man must come along whom I could love. My birthdays passed, the thirty-seventh, and eighth, and ninth. I could not have faced forty without ever having loved. Then you came along, Vincent.
