It was a cry of triumph, as though she had gained a great victory. She leaned up, holding her mouth to be kissed. He stroked her soft hair back from her ears. She flung her arms about his neck and kissed him in a thousand wandering nibbles. Sitting there on his little painter’s stool, his palette at his side, and the Cimetière des Paysans just in front, holding the kneeling woman close to him, and engulfed in the flow of her welled-up passion, Vincent felt for the first time in his life the luscious, healing balm of a woman’s outpoured love. And he trembled, for he knew that he was on sacred ground.
Margot sat on the earth between his legs, her head back on his knee. There was colour in her cheeks and lustre in her eyes; she was breathing deeply and with effort. In the flush of her love she looked not more than thirty. Vincent, unable to feel anything at all, ran his fingers over the soft skin of her face until she clasped his hand, kissed it, and held the palm against her burning cheek. After a time she spoke.
“I know that you don’t love me,” she said quietly. “That would be asking too much. I only prayed to God to let me fall in love. I never even dreamed it would be possible for anyone to love me. It’s loving that’s important, isn’t it, Vincent, not being loved.”
Vincent thought of Ursula and Kay. “Yes,” he replied.
She rubbed the back of her head against his knee, looking up at the blue sky. “And you’ll let me come with you? If you don’t want to talk, I’ll just sit by quietly and never say a word. Only let me be near you; I promise not to disturb you or interfere with your work.”
“Of course you can come. But tell me, Margot, if there were no men in Nuenen, why didn’t you go away? At least for a visit? Didn’t you have the money?”
“Oh, yes, I have plenty of money. My grandfather left me a good income.”
“Then why didn’t you go to Amsterdam or The Hague? You would have met some interesting men.”
“They didn’t want me to.”
“None of your sisters are married, are they?”
“No, dear, all five of us are single.”
A flash of pain went through him. It was the first time a woman had ever called him dear. He had known before how miserable it was to love and not be loved in return, but he had never suspected the utter sweetness of having a good woman love him with the whole of her being. He had looked upon Margot’s love for him as a sort of curious accident to which he was no party. That one, simple word, spoken so quietly and fondly by Margot, changed his entire mental state. He gathered Margot to him and held her quivering body against his.
“Vincent, Vincent,” she murmured, “I love you so.”
“How queer that sounds, to hear you say you love me so.”
“I don’t mind now that I’ve had to go all these years without love. You were worth waiting for, my very own dear. In all my dreams of love I never imagined that I could feel about anyone the way I do about you.”
“I love you too, Margot,” he said.
She drew away from him slightly. “You don’t have to say that, Vincent. Maybe after a while you will come to like me a little. But now all I ask is that you let me love you!”
She slipped out of his arms, put his coat off to one side, and sat down. “Go to work, dear,” she said. “I must not get in your way. And I love to watch you paint.”
NEARLY EVERY DAY Margot accompanied him when he went out to paint Oftentimes he would walk ten kilometres to reach the exact spot on the heath that he wanted to work with, and they would both arrive tired and exhausted by the heat. But Margot never complained. The woman had undergone a startling metamorphosis. Her hair, which had been a mouse brown, took on a live blonde tint. Her lips had been thin and parched; now her mouth went full and red. Her skin had been dry and almost wrinkled; now it was smooth and soft and warm. Her eyes seemed to grow larger, her breasts swelled out, her voice took on a new lilt, and her step became strong and vigorous. Love had opened some strange spring within her, and she was constantly being bathed in its elixir of love. She brought surprise lunches to please him, sent to Paris for some prints that he had mentioned with admiration, and never intruded on his work. When he painted, she sat perfectly still at his side, bathing in the same luxuriant passion that he flung at his canvases.
Margot knew nothing about painting, but she had a quick and sensitive intelligence, and a faculty for saying the right thing at the right moment. Vincent found that, without knowing, she understood. She gave him the impression of a Cremona violin that had been spoiled by bungling repairers.
“If I had only met her ten years ago!” he said to himself.
One day she asked him, as he was preparing to attack a new canvas, “How can you be sure that the spot you choose will come out right on the canvas?”
Vincent thought for a moment and then replied, “If I want to be active, I must not be afraid of failures. When I see a blank canvas staring at me with a certain imbecility, I just dash something down.”
