He did not take the time to answer the question, but crossed the Plaats and entered Goupil and Company. The place was beautifully decorated; he had forgotten. He suddenly felt cheap and shoddy in his workingman’s suit of rough black velvet. The street level of the gallery was a long salon hung in rich beige drapes; three steps above that was a smaller salon with a glass roof, and to the rear of that, a few steps higher still, a tiny, intimate exhibition room for the initiate. There was a broad staircase leading to the second floor where Tersteeg had his office and living quarters. The walls going up were pyramided with pictures.
The gallery smacked of great wealth and culture. The clerks were well-groomed men with polished manners. The canvases on the walls were hung in expensive frames, set against costly hangings. Thick, soft rugs sank under Vincent’s feet and the chairs, set so modestly in the corners, he remembered as priceless antiques. He thought of his drawings of the tattered miners coming out of the shaft, of their wives bent over the
It did not seem very likely.
He stood gazing in awkward admiration at a sheep’s head by Mauve. The clerks who were chatting softly behind a table of etchings took one look at his clothes and posture and did not even bother to ask if there was something he wished. Tersteeg, who had been in the intimate gallery arranging an exhibition, came down the steps into the main salon. Vincent did not see him.
Tersteeg stopped at the bottom of the few steps and studied his former clerk. He took in the short cropped hair, the red stubble on his face, the peasant’s boots, the workingman’s coat buttoned up around his neck with no necktie concealed beneath it, the clumsy bundle he was carrying under his arm. There was something so altogether
“Well, Vincent,” said Tersteeg, walking noiselessly across the soft rug. “I see you are admiring our canvases.”
Vincent turned. “Yes, they are fine, aren’t they? How are you, Mijnheer Tersteeg? I bring you compliments from my mother and father.”
The two men shook hands across the unbridgeable chasm of eight years.
“You are looking very well, Mijnheer. Even better than when I last saw you.”
“Ah, yes, living agrees with me, Vincent. It keeps me young. Won’t you come up to my office?”
Vincent followed him up the broad staircase, stumbling all over himself because he could not tear his eyes from the paintings on the wall. It was the first time he had seen good work since that brief hour in Brussels with Theo. He was in a daze. Tersteeg opened the door of his office and bowed Vincent in.
“Will you sit down, Vincent?” he asked.
Vincent had been gawking at a canvas by Weissenbruch, whose work he had never seen before. He sat down, dropped his bundle, picked it up again, and then crossed to Tersteeg’s highly polished desk.
“I’ve brought back the books you so kindly lent me, Mijnheer Tersteeg.”
He unwrapped his bundle, pushed a shirt and pair of socks to one side, took out the series of “Exercises au Fusain,” and laid them on the table.
“I worked on the drawings very hard, and you have done me a great service by lending them to me.”
“Show me your copies,” said Tersteeg, getting to the point.
Vincent shuffled about in the pile of papers and extricated the first series he had drawn in the Borinage. Tersteeg maintained a stony silence. Vincent then quickly showed the second copies he had made when he settled at Etten. This group elicited an occasional “Hummmm” but nothing more. Vincent then showed the third copies, the ones he had finished shortly before leaving. Tersteeg was interested.
“That’s a good line,” he said once. “I like the shading,” he contributed another time. “You almost got that!”
“I felt it wasn’t bad, myself,” said Vincent.
He finished the pile and turned to Tersteeg for judgement.
“Yes, Vincent,” said the older man, laying his long, thin hands out flat on the desk, with the fingers tapering upward, “you have made a little progress. Not much, but a little. I was afraid when I looked at your first copies . . . Your work shows at least that you have been struggling.”
“Is that all? Just struggle? No ability?”
He knew he shouldn’t have asked that question, but he could not keep it down.
“Isn’t it too early for us to speak of that, Vincent?”
“Perhaps so. I’ve brought some of my original sketches along. Would you care to see them?”
“I should be delighted.”
