“I’m doing an article on the subject for my paper in Paris. It was this German article that gave me the idea.”
He pulled a magazine out of his pocket and shoved it across the table to Vincent.
“These doctors have made a study of the cases of several hundred men who suffered from nervous maladies which looked like epilepsy, but which never resulted in fits. You’ll see by these charts how they have mapped the rising curve of nervousness and excitement; what the doctors call volatile tension. Well, in every last one of these cases the subjects have gone along with increasing fever until they reached the age of thirty-five to thirty-eight. At the average age of thirty-six they burst into a violent epileptic fit. After that it’s a case of a half dozen more spasms and, within a year or two, good-bye.”
“That’s much too young to die,” said Vincent. “A man is only beginning to get command of himself by that time.”
The journalist put the magazine back in his pocket.
“Are you going to stop at this hotel for some time?” he asked. “My article is almost finished; I’ll mail you a copy as soon as it’s published. My point is this: Aries is an epileptoidal city. It’s pulse has been mounting for centuries. It’s approaching its first crisis. It’s bound to happen. And soon. When it does, we’re going to witness a frightful catastrophe. Murder, arson, rape, wholesale destruction! This country can’t go on forever in a whipped, tortured state. Something must and will happen. I’m getting out before the people start foaming at the mouth! I advise you to come along!”
“Thanks,” said Vincent, “I like it here. I think I’ll turn in now. Will I see you in the morning? No? Then good luck to you. And don’t forget to send me a copy of the article.”
EVERY MORNING VINCENT arose before dawn, dressed, and tramped several kilometres down the river or into the country to find a spot that stirred him. Every night he returned with a finished canvas, finished because there was nothing more he could do with it. Directly after supper he went to sleep.
He became a blind painting machine, dashing off one sizzling canvas after another without even knowing what he did. The orchards of the country were in bloom. He developed a wild passion to paint them all. He no longer thought about his painting. He just painted. All his eight years of intense labour were at last expressing themselves in a great burst of triumphal energy. Sometimes, when he began working at the first crack of dawn, the canvas would be completed by noon. He would tramp back to town, drink a cup of coffee and trudge out again in another direction with a new canvas.
He did not know whether his painting was good or bad. He did not care. He was drunk with colour.
No one spoke to him. He spoke to no one. What little strength he had left from his painting, he spent in fighting the mistral. Three days out of every week he had to fasten his easel to pegs driven into the ground. The easel waved back and forth in the wind like a sheet on a clothes line. By night he felt as buffeted and bruised as though he had been given a severe beating.
He never wore a hat. The fierce sun was slowly burning the hair off the top of his head. When he lay on his brass bed in the little hotel at night he felt as though his head were encased in a ball of fire. The sun struck him completely blind. He could not tell the green of the fields from the blue of the sky. But when he returned to his hotel he found that the canvas was somehow a glowing, brilliant transcription of nature.
One day he worked in an orchard of lilac ploughland with a red fence and two rose-coloured peach trees against a sky of glorious blue and white.
“It is probably the best landscape I have ever done,” he murmured to himself.
When he reached his hotel he found a letter telling him that Anton Mauve had died in The Hague. Under his peach trees he wrote, “Souvenir de Mauve. Vincent and Theo,” and sent it off immediately to the house on the Uileboomen.
The following morning he found an orchard of plum trees in blossom. While he was at work, a vicious wind sprang up, returning at intervals like waves of the sea. In between, the sun shone, and all the white flowers sparkled on the trees. At the risk every minute of seeing the whole show on the ground, Vincent went on painting. It reminded him of the Scheveningen days when he used to paint in the rain, in sandstorms, and with the storm-spray of the ocean dashing over him and his easel. His canvas had a white effect with a good deal of yellow in it, and blue and lilac. When he finished he saw something in his picture that he had not meant to put there, the mistral.
“People will think I was drunk when I painted this,” he laughed to himself.
A line from Theo’s letter of the day before came back to him. Mijnheer Tersteeg, on a visit to Paris, had stood before a Sisley and murmured to Theo, “I cannot help thinking that the artist who painted this was a bit tipsy.”
