A week later his father arrived. His blue eyes were fading, his step becoming slower. The last time they had been together, Theodorus had ordered his oldest son from the house. In the interim they had exchanged friendly letters. Theodorus and Anna Cornelia had sent several bundles of underwear, outer clothing, cigars, homemade cake, and an occasional ten franc note. Vincent did not know how his father would take to Christine. Sometimes men were understanding and generous, sometimes they were blind and vicious.
He did not think his father could remain indifferent and raise objections—near a cradle. A cradle was not like anything else; there was no fooling with it. His father would have to forgive whatever there might have been in Christine’s past.
Theodorus had a large bundle under his arm. Vincent opened it, drew out a warm coat for Christine, and knew that everything was all right. After she had gone upstairs to the attic bedroom, Theodorus and Vincent sat together in the studio.
“Vincent,” said his father, “there was one thing you did not mention in your letter. Is the baby yours?”
“No. She was carrying it when I met her.”
“Where is its father?”
“He deserted her.” He did not think it necessary to explain the child’s anonymity.
“But you will marry her, Vincent, won’t you? It’s not right to live this way.”
“I agree. I want to go through the legal ceremony as soon as possible. But Theo and I decided that it would be better to wait until I am earning a hundred and fifty francs a month through my drawing.”
Theodorus sighed. “Yes, perhaps that would be the best. Vincent, your mother would like you to come home for a visit sometime. And so should I. You will enjoy Nuenen, son; it is one of the most lovely villages in all the Brabant. The little church is so tiny, and looks like an Eskimo’s igloo. It seats less than a hundred people, imagine! There are hawthorn hedges around the parsonage, Vincent, and behind the church is a flower filled yard with sand mounds and old wooden crosses.”
“With wooden crosses!” said Vincent. “White ones?”
“Yes. The names are in black, but the rain is washing them away.”
“Is there a nice tall steeple on the church, Father?”
“A delicate, fragile one, Vincent, but it goes way, way up into the sky. Sometimes I think it almost reaches God.”
“Throwing a thin shadow over the graveyard.” Vincent’s eyes were sparkling. “I’d like to paint that.”
“There’s a stretch of heath and pine woods close by, and peasants digging in the fields. You must come home soon for a visit, son.”
“Yes, I must see Nuenen. The little crosses, and the steeple and the diggers in the field. I guess there will always be something of the Brabant about me.”
Theodorus returned home to assure his wife that things were not so bad with their boy as they had imagined. Vincent plunged into his work with an even greater zeal. More and more he found himself going back to Millet:
The owner of the lumber yard sent him as models all the men who came for work and could not get it. As his pocketbook emptied his portfolio filled. He drew the baby in the cradle by the stove many, many times. When the fall rains came he worked outdoors on oil torchon and captured the effects he wanted. He quickly learned that a colourist is one who, seeing a colour in nature, knows at once how to analyse it and say. “That grey-green is yellow with black, and hardly any blue.”
Whether he was drawing the figure or landscape, he wished to express not sentimental melancholy but serious sorrow. He wanted to reach out so far that people would say of his work, “He feels deeply, he feels tenderly.”
He knew that in the eyes of the world he was a good-for-nothing, an eccentric and disagreeable man, someone who had no position in life. He wanted to show in his work just what there was in the heart of such an eccentric man, of such a nobody. In the poorest huts, in the dirtiest corners, he saw drawings and pictures. The more he painted, the more other activities lost their interest. The more he got rid of them the quicker his eye grasped the picturesque qualities of life. Art demanded persistent work, work in spite of everything, and a continuous observation.
