Vincent loved his parents; his parents loved him. All three made desperate resolves that the relationship was to be kept friendly and agreeable. Vincent ate a great deal, slept a great deal, walked sometimes on the heath. He talked, painted, and read not at all. Everyone in the house was elaborately courteous to him, as he was to them. It was a self-conscious relationship; before they spoke they had to say to themselves, “I must be careful! I don’t want to disrupt the harmony!”
The harmony lasted as long as Vincent’s illness. He could not be comfortable in the same room with people who did not think as he thought. When his father remarked, “I am going to read Goethe’s ‘Faust.’ It has been translated by the Reverend Ten Kate, so it cannot be so very immoral,” Vincent felt his gorge rise.
He had come home only for a two week vacation, but he loved the Brabant and wanted to stay on. He wished to paint simply and quietly from nature, trying to say nothing but what he saw. He had no other desire than to live deep in the heart of the country, and paint rural life. Like good Father Millet, he wanted to live with, understand, and paint the peasants. He had the firm conviction that there were a few people who, having been drawn into the city and bound up there, yet retained unfading impressions of the country, and remained homesick all their lives for the fields and the peasants.
He had always known that he would come back to the Brabant some day and remain for ever. But he could not stay in Nuenen if his parents did not want him.
“A door must be either open or shut,” he said to his father. “Let us try to come to an understanding.”
“Yes, Vincent, I want that very much. I see that your painting is going to come to something after all, and I am pleased.”
“Very well, tell me frankly whether you think we can all live here in peace. Do you want me to stay?”
“Yes.”
“For how long?”
“As long as you wish. This is your home. Your place is with us.”
“And if we disagree?”
“Then we must not get upset about it. We must try to live calmly and abide with each other.”
“But what am I to do about a studio? You don’t want me working in the house.”
“I have been thinking about that. Why not take the wrangle room, out in the garden? You can have it all to yourself. No one need bother you.”
The wrangle room was just off the kitchen, but there was no connecting door. It was a cubicle of a room, with one small window, high up, looking out on to the garden. The floor was of clay, always damp in winter.
“We’ll light a big fire in here, Vincent, and dry the place out. Then we’ll put down a plank floor so that you can be perfectly comfortable. What do you say?”
Vincent looked about. It was a humble room, very much like the peasants’ huts on the heath. He could turn it into a real rural studio.
“If that window is too small,” said Theodorus, “I have a little spare money now and we can make it larger.”
“No, no, it’s perfect just as it is. I’ll get the same amount of light on the model that I would get if I were doing him in his own hut.”
They brought in a perforated barrel and lit a big fire. When all the dampness had dried out of the walls and roof, and the clay floor was hard, they laid down the wooden planks. Vincent carried in his little bed, a table, a chair and his easels. He tacked up his sketches, brushed a rough GOGH into the whitewashed wall next to the kitchen, and settled down to become a Dutch Millet.
THE MOST INTERESTING people around Nuenen were the weavers. They dwelt in little thatched, clay and straw huts, generally of two rooms. In the one room, with a tiny patch of window letting in just a sliver of light, the family lived. There were square recesses in the walls, about three feet off the ground, for beds; a table, a few chairs, a peat stove, and a rough cabinet for the dishware and pots. The floor was of uneven clay, the walls of mud. In the adjoining room, about a third the size of the living room, and with half its height cut off by sloping eaves, was the loom.
A weaver who worked steadily could weave a piece of sixty yards in a week. While he weaved, a woman had to spool for him. On that piece of cloth the weaver made a net profit of four and a half frances a week. When he took it to the manufacturer, he often got the message that not before one or two weeks had passed could he take another piece home, Vincent found that they had a different spirit from the miners of the Borinage; they were quiet, and nowhere was there to be heard anything resembling rebellious speeches. But they looked as cheerful as cab horses, or the sheep transported by steamer to England.
Vincent quickly made friends with them. He found the weavers to be simple souls, asking only for enough work to earn the potatoes, coffee, and occasional strip of bacon on which they lived. They did not mind his painting while they worked; he never came without a bit of sweet for the child of the family, or a bag of tobacco for the old grandfather.
