“You certainly do dash. I never saw anything grow as fast as your canvases.”
“Well, I have to. I find paralysing the stare of a blank canvas which says to me, ‘You don’t know anything!’”
“You mean it’s a sort of challenge?”
“Exactly. The blank canvas stares at me like an idiot, but I know that it is afriad of the passionate painter who dares, who once and for all has broken the spell of that ‘you cannot.’ Life itself turns towards a man an infinitely vacant, discouraging, hopelessly blank side on which nothing is written, Margot, no more than on this blank canvas.”
“Yes, doesn’t it.”
“But the man of faith and energy is not frightened by that blankness; he steps in, he acts, he builds up, he creates, and in the end the canvas is no longer blank but covered with the rich pattern of life.”
Vincent enjoyed having Margot in love with him. She never looked upon him with critical eyes. Everything he did she thought right. She did not tell him that his manners were crude, that his voice was rough, that there were harsh lines in his face. She never condemned him for not earning money, or suggested that he do anything but paint. Walking home through the quiet dusk, his arm about her waist, his voice soft from her sympathy, he told her all of the things he had done, of why he preferred painting the
Vincent was unable to get used to his new position. Every day he waited for the relationship to break, for Margot to become unkind and cruel, and confront him with his failures. Her love increased with the ripening of the summer; she gave him that fullness of sympathy and adoration which only a mature woman can bestow. Unsatisfied that she did not turn against him of her own accord, he tried to goad her into condemnation by painting his failures as black as he could. She saw them not as failures, but as simple accounts of why he did what he had to do.
He told her the story of his fiasco in Amsterdam and the Borinage. “Surely that was a failure,” he said. “Everything I did there was wrong, now wasn’t it?”
She smiled up at him indulgently. “The king can do no wrong.”
He kissed her.
Another day she said to him, “My mother tells me you are a wicked man. She has heaid that you lived with loose women in The Hague. I told them it was vicious scandal.”
Vincent related the tale of Christine. Margot listened with some of the brooding melancholy in her eyes that had been there before love dissipated it.
“You know, Vincent, there’s something Christ-like about you. I’m sure my father would have thought so, too.”
“And that’s all you can find to say to me when I tell you I lived for two years with a prostitute?”
“She wasn’t a prostitute; she was your wife. Your failure to save her was not your fault, any more than was your failure to save the Borains. One man can do very little against a whole civilization.”
“It’s true, Christine was my wife. I told my brother Theo, when I was younger, ‘If I cannot get a good wife, I shall take a bad one. Better a bad one than none at all.’”
There was a slightly strained silence; the subject of marriage had not come up between them. “There is only one thing I regret about the Christine affair,” said Margot. “I wish I could have had those two years of your love for myself.”
He gave up trying to break her love for him, and accepted it. “When I was younger, Margot,” he said, “I thought that things depended on chance, on small accidents or misunderstandings that had no reason. But getting older, I begin to see deeper motives. It is the plight of most people that by a kind of fatality they have to seek a long time for light.”
“As I had to seek for you!”
They had reached the low door of a weaver’s house. Vincent pressed her hand warmly. She gave him a smile of such sweet surrender that he wondered why fate had seen fit to keep love from him all these years. They entered the thatched hut. Summer had passed into fall and the days were growing dark. A suspension lamp hung over the loom. A piece of red cloth was being woven. The weaver and his wife were arranging the threads; dark, bent figures against the light, standing out against the colour of the cloth, casting big shadows on the laths and beams of the loom. Margot and Vincent exchanged an understanding smile; he had taught her to catch the underlying beauty in ugly places.
