“You don’t know how to take care of yourselves, you men,” she said. “You need a woman around. And I’m sure they cheat you at the market.”
She was by no means a good housekeeper; the many years of sloth in her mother’s house had destroyed most of the will to cleanliness and order. She took care of things sporadically, in sudden bursts of energy and determination. It was the first time she was keeping house for anyone she liked, and she enjoyed doing things . . . when she remembered them. Vincent was delighted to find that she wanted to do anything at all; he never even thought of reproving her. Now that she was no longer dead tired day and night, her voice lost some of its roughness; the vile words dropped out of her vocabulary one by one. She had learned to exercise very little control over her emotions, and when something displeased her, she would fly into a passionate rage, dropping back into her rough voice and using obscene words that Vincent had not heard since he was a young boy at school.
At such moments he saw Christine as a caricature of himself; he sat by quietly until the storm subsided. Christine was equally tolerant. When his drawing went all wrong, or she forgot everything he had taught her and posed awkwardly, he would burst into a fit of rage that fairly shook the walls. She let him speak his piece; in a very few moments calm was restored. Fortunately they never became angry at identical moments.
After he had sketched her often enough to become familiar with the lines of her body, he decided to do a real study. It was a sentence from Michelet that set him on the track:
The study took a week and exhausted his supply of money; there were still ten days to go until the first of March. There was enough black bread in the house to last for two or three days. He would have to stop working from the model altogether and that would set him back some more.
“Sien,” he said, “I’m afraid I can’t have you any more until after the first of the month.”
“What’s the matter?”
“I have no more money.”
“You mean for me?”
“Yes.”
“I ain’t got nothing else to do. I’ll come anyway.”
“But you must have money, Sien.”
“I can get some.”
“You can’t do any washing, if you’re here all day.”
“. . . well . . . don’t worry . . . I’ll get some.”
He let her come for three more days, until his bread ran out. It was still a week to the first. He told Sien that he was going to Amsterdam to visit his uncle and that he would call at her house when he got back. He did some copying in his studio for three days on water without feeling much pain. On the third afternoon he went to De Bock’s, hoping to be served tea and cake.
“Hello, old fellow,” said De Bock, standing at his easel, “make yourself comfortable. I’m going to work straight through until my dinner engagement. There are some magazines over on the table. Just dig in.”
But not a word about tea.
He knew Mauve would not see him, and he was ashamed to beg from Jet. He would rather have died of starvation than ask Tersteeg for anything after the latter had spoken against him to Mauve. No matter how desperate he became, it never occurred to him that he might earn a few francs at some craft other than his own. His old foe the fever came up, his knees developed rickets and he stayed in bed. Though he knew it was impossible, he kept hoping for the miracle that would send Theo’s hundred francs a few days early. Theo did not get paid until the first.
Christine walked in the afternoon of the fifth day without knocking. Vincent was asleep. She stood over him, looking at the furrowed lines in his face, the paleness of the skin under his red beard, the parchment roughness of his lips. She placed a hand lightly on his forehead and felt the fever. She searched the shelf on which the supplies were usually kept. She saw that there was not a crumb of dry, black bread or a lone bean of coffee. She went out.
About an hour later Vincent began having dreams of his mother’s kitchen in Etten and the beans she used to prepare for him. He awakened to find Christine mixing things in pots over the stove.
“Sien,” he said.
