“I like you too, Christine. When you picked up my burned hand . . . that was the first kind word a woman has said to me in I can’t remember how long.”
“That’s funny. You ain’t bad to look at. You got a nice way.”
“I’m just unlucky in love.”
“Yes, that’s how it is, ain’t it? Can I have another glass of gin and bitters?”
“Listen, you and I need not make ourselves drunk to feel something for each other. Just put in your pocket what I can spare. I’m sorry it isn’t more.”
“You look like you need it worse than me. You can come anyway. After you go, I’ll find some other guy for the two francs.”
“No. Take the money. I can spare it. I borrowed twenty-five francs from a friend.”
“All right. Let’s get out of here.”
On their way home, threading their way through the dark streets, they chatted easily, like old friends. She told him of her life, without sympathy for herself, without complaint.
“Have you ever posed as a model?” Vincent asked her.
“When I was young.”
“Then why not pose for me? I can’t pay you much. Not even a franc a day. But after I begin selling, I’ll pay you two francs. It will be better than washing clothes.”
“Say, I’d like that. I’d bring my boy. You can paint him for nothing. When you get tired of me you can have my mother. She’d like to make an extra franc now and then. She’s a charwoman.”
At length they reached her house. It was a rough stone building of one floor and a court. “You don’t got to see anyone,” said Christine. “My room’s in front.”
It was a modest, simple little room in which she lived; the plain paper on the wall gave it a quiet, grey tone, like a picture by Chardin, thought Vincent. On the wooden floor there was a mat and a piece of old crimson carpet. An ordinary kitchen stove was in one corner, a chest of drawers in another, and in the centre a large bed. It was the interior of a real working woman’s home.
When Vincent awoke in the morning and found himself not alone, but saw there in the twilight a fellow creature beside him, it made the world look so much more friendly. The pain and aloneness were gone from him and in their place had come a deep feeling of peace.
IN THE MORNING post he received a note from Theo with the hundred francs enclosed. Theo had been unable to send it until several days after the first. He rushed out, found a little old woman digging in her front garden nearby, and asked if she wouldn’t come and pose for him for fifty centimes. The old woman assented gladly.
In the studio he placed the woman against a drowsy background, sitting next to the chimney and stove with a little tea-kettle off to one side. He was seeking tone; the old woman’s head had a great deal of light and life in it. He made three fourths of the water-colour in a green soap style. The corner where the woman sat he treated tenderly, softly, and with sentiment. For some time his work had been hard, dry, brittle; now it flowed. He hammered his sketch on the paper and expressed his idea well. He was grateful to Christine for what she had done for him. Lack of love in his life could bring him infinite pain, but it could do him no harm; lack of sex could dry up the well springs of his art and kill him.
“Sex lubricates,” he murmured to himself as he worked with fluidity and ease. “I wonder why Papa Michelet never mentioned that.”
There was a knock on the door. Vincent admitted Mijnheer Tersteeg. His striped trousers were creased painstakingly. His round, brown shoes were as bright as a mirror. His beard was carefully barbered, his hair parted neatly on the side, and his collar was of impeccable whiteness.
Tersteeg was genuinely pleased to find that Vincent had a real studio and was hard at work. He liked to see young artists become successful; that was his hobby as well as his profession. Yet he wanted that success to be arrived at through systematic and preordained channels; he found it better for a man to work through the conventional means and fail, than break all the rules and succeed. For him the rules of the game were far more important than the victory. Tersteeg was a good and honourable man; he expected everyone else to be equally good and honourable. He admitted no circumstancs which could change evil into good or sin into salvation. The painters who sold their canvases to Goupils knew that they had to toe the mark. If they violated the dictates of genteel behaviour Tersteeg would refuse to handle their canvases even though they might be masterpieces.
“Well, Vincent,” he said, “I am glad to surprise you at work. That is how I like to come in on my artists.”
“It is good of you to come all this way to see me, Mijnheer Tersteeg.”
“Not at all. I have been meaning to see your studio ever since you moved here.”
Vincent looked about at the bed, table, chairs, stove, and easel.
“It isn’t much to look at.”
