Two full months passed this way, drawing from dawn to dark and then copying by the light of the lamp. Once again there came over him the desire to see and talk to another artist, to find out how he was getting on, for although he thought he had made some progress, achieved a little more plasticity of hand and judgment, he could not be sure. But this time he wanted a master, someone who would take him under his wing and teach him slowly and carefully the rudiments of the great craft. There was nothing he would not do in return for such instruction; he would black the man’s boots and sweep the floor of his studio ten times a day.
Jules Breton, whose work he had admired since the early days, lived in Courrieres, a distance of a hundred and seventy kilometres. Vincent rode on the train until his money ran out, and then walked for five days, sleeping in hay ricks and begging his bread in exchange for a drawing or two. When he stood among the trees of Courrieres and saw that Breton had just built a fine new studio of red brick and generous proportion, his courage fled. He hung about the town for two days, but in the end, the chilly and inhospitable appearance of the studio defeated him. Then, weary, abysmally hungry, without a centime in his pocket, and the Reverend Pietersen’s shoes wearing dangerously thin beneath him, he began the hundred and seventy kilometre walk back to the Borinage.
He arrived at the miner’s cabin ill and despondent. There was no money or mail waiting for him. He went to bed. The miners’ wives nursed him and gave him what tiny portions of food they could spare from the mouths of their husbands and children.
He had lost many pounds on the trip, the hollows were in his checks again, and fever ignited the bottomless pools of his green-black eyes. Sick as he was, his mind retained its clarity, and he knew that he had reached the point where a decision was imminent.
What was he to do with his life? Become a school teacher, book-seller, art dealer, mercantile clerk? Where was he to live? Etten, with his parents? Paris, with Theo? Amsterdam, with his uncles? Or just in the great void wherever chance might dump him down, working at whatever fortune dictated?
One day, when his strength had returned a little and he was sitting propped up in bed copying “Le Four dans les Landes” by Theodore Rousseau, and wondering how much longer he would have to indulge in this harmless little pastime of drawing, someone opened the door without knocking and walked in.
It was his brother Theo.
WHEN VINCENT DECIDED he had better return to Petit Wasmes, the Reverend Pietersen gave him a pair of his old shoes to replace the broken ones, and railroad fare back to the Borinage. Vincent took them in the full spirit of friendship which knows that the difference between giving and taking is purely temporal.
On the train Vincent realized two important things; the Reverend Pietersen had not once referred to his failure as an evangelist, and he had accepted him on equal terms as a fellow artist. He had actually liked a sketch well enough to want it for his own; that was the crucial test.
“He has given me my start,” said Vincent to himself. “If he liked my work. other people will, too.”
At the Denises’ he found that “Les Travaux des Champs” had arrived from Theo, although no letter accompanied them. His contact with Pietersen had refreshed him, so he dug into Father Millet with gusto. Theo had enclosed some large sized sketch paper, and within a few days Vincent copied ten pages of “Les Travaux,” finishing the first volume. Then, feeling that he needed work on the nude, and being quite certain he could never get anyone to pose for him that way in the Borinage, he wrote to his old friend Tersteeg, manager of the Goupil Galleries in The Hague, asking him if he would lend the “Exercises au Fusain” by Bargue.
In the meanwhile he remembered Pietersen’s counsel and rented a miner’s hut near the top of the rue Petit Wasmes for nine francs a month. This time the hut was the best he could find, not the worst. It had a rough plank floor, two large windows to let in light, a bed, table, chair, and stove. It was sufficiently large enough for Vincent to place his model at one end and get far enough away for complete perspective. There was not a miner’s wife or child in Petit Wasmes who had not been helped in some way the winter before by Vincent, and no one ever turned down his request to come and pose. On Sundays the miners would throng to his cabin and let him make quick sketches of them. They thought it great fun. The place was always full of people looking over Vincent’s shoulder with interest and amazement.
The “Exercises au Fusain” arrived from The Hague and Vincent spent the next two weeks copying the sixty studies, working from early morning to night. Tersteeg also sent the “Cours de Dessin” by Bargue; Vincent tackled this with tremendous vitality.
