Yes! Yes! He must have Gauguin with him here in Arles. The hot Provence sun would burn all the illness out of him, just as it had out of Vincent. Soon they would have a working studio going full blaze. Theirs would be the very first studio in the South. They would carry on the tradition of Delacroix and Monticelli. They would drench painting in sunlight and colour, awaken the world to riotous nature
Gauguin had to be saved!
Vincent turned, broke into a dog-trot and ran all the way back to the Place Lamartine. He let himself into the yellow house, dashed up the red brick stairs, and began excitedly planning the rooms.
“Paul and I will each have a bedroom up here. We’ll use the rooms on the lower floor for studios. I’ll buy beds and mattresses and bedclothes and chairs and tables, and we’ll have a real home. I’ll decorate the whole house with sunflowers and orchards in blossom.
“Oh, Paul, Paul, how good it will be to have you with me again!”
IT WAS NOT so easy as he had expected. Theo was willing to add fifty francs a month to the allowance in return for a Gauguin canvas, but there was the matter of the railroad fare which neither Theo nor Gauguin could provide. Gauguin was too ill to move, too much in debt to get out of Pont-Aven, too sick at heart to enter into any schemes with enthusiasm. Letters flew thick and fast between Aries, Paris, and Pont-Aven.
Vincent was now desperately in love with his yellow house. He bought himself a table and a chest of drawers with Theo’s allowance.
“At the end of the year,” he wrote to Theo, “I shall be a different man. But don’t think I’m going to leave here then. By no means. I’m going to spend the rest of my life in Aries. I’m going to become the painter of the South. And you must consider that you have a country house in Aries. I am keen to arrange it all so that you will come here always to spend your holidays.”
He spent a minimum for the bare necessities of life, and sunk all the rest into the house. Each day he had to make a choice between himself and the yellow house. Should he have meat for dinner, or buy that majolica jug? Should he buy a new pair of shoes, or get that green quilt for Gauguin’s bed? Should he order a pine frame for his new canvas, or buy those rush-bottom chairs?
Always the house came first.
The yellow house gave him a sense of tranquillity, because he was working to secure the future. He had drifted too much, knocked about without rhyme or reason. But now he was never going to move again. After he was gone, another painter would find a going concern. He was establishing a permanent studio which would be used by generation after generation of painters to interpret and portray the South. He became obsessed with the idea of painting such decorations for the house as would be worthy of the money spent on him during the years in which he had been unproductive.
He plunged into his work with renewed energy. He knew that looking at a thing a long time ripened him and gave him a deeper understanding. He went back fifty times to Montmajour to study the field at its base. The mistral made it hard for him to get his brush work connected and interwoven with feeling, with the easel waving violently before him in the wind. He worked from seven in the morning until six at night without stirring. A canvas a day!
“Tomorrow will be a scorcher,” said Roulin one evening, very late in the fall. They were sitting over a bock in the Café Lamartine. “And after that, winter.”
“What is winter like in Arles?” asked Vincent.
“It’s mean. Lots of rain, a miserable wind, and a biting cold. But winter is very short here. Only a couple of months.”
“So tomorrow will be our last nice day. Then I know the very spot I want to do. Imagine an autumn garden, Roulin, with two cypresses, bottle green, shaped like bottles, and three little chestnut trees with tobacco and orange coloured leaves. There is a little yew with pale lemon foliage and a violet trunk, and two little bushes, blood-red, and scarlet purple leaves. And some sand, some grass, and some blue sky.”
“Ah, Monsieur, when you describe things, I see that all my life I have been blind.”
The next morning Vincent arose with the sun. He was in high spirits. He trimmed his beard with a pair of scissors, combed down what little hair the Arlesian sun had not burned off his scalp, put on his only whole suit of clothes, and as a special fond gesture of farewell to the sun, wore his rabbit-fur bonnet from Paris.
