This time it was Pietersen who walked quickly to the easel. He threw the sketch he had perfected into the wastebasket with a “You don’t mind, do you, I’ve ruined it anyway,” and placed the second woman there all by herself. He rejoined Vincent and they sat down. The Reverend started to speak several times but the words did not quite form. At last he said, “Vincent, I hate to admit it, but I really believe I almost like that woman. I thought she was horrible at first, but something about her grows on you.”

“Why do you hate to admit it?” asked Vincent.

“Because I ought not to like it. The whole thing is wrong, dead wrong I Any elementary class in art school would make you tear it up and begin all over again. And yet something about her reaches out at me. I could almost swear I have seen that woman somewhere before.”

“Perhaps you have seen her in the Borinage,” said Vincent artlessly.

Pietersen looked at him quickly to see if he was being clever and then said, “I think you’re right. She has no face and she isn’t any one particular person. Somehow she’s just all the miners’ wives in the Borinage put together. That something you’ve caught is the spirit of the miner’s wife, Vincent, and that’s a thousand times more important than any correct drawing. Yes, I like your woman. She says something to me directly.”

Vincent trembled, but he was afraid to speak. Pietersen was an experienced artist, a professional; if he should ask for the drawing, really like it enough to . . .

“Could you spare her, Vincent? I would like very much to put her on my wall. I think she and I could become excellent friends.”

20

WHEN VINCENT DECIDED he had better return to Petit Wasmes, the Reverend Pietersen gave him a pair of his old shoes to replace the broken ones, and railroad fare back to the Borinage. Vincent took them in the full spirit of friendship which knows that the difference between giving and taking is purely temporal.

On the train Vincent realized two important things; the Reverend Pietersen had not once referred to his failure as an evangelist, and he had accepted him on equal terms as a fellow artist. He had actually liked a sketch well enough to want it for his own; that was the crucial test.

“He has given me my start,” said Vincent to himself. “If he liked my work. other people will, too.”

At the Denises’ he found that “Les Travaux des Champs” had arrived from Theo, although no letter accompanied them. His contact with Pietersen had refreshed him, so he dug into Father Millet with gusto. Theo had enclosed some large sized sketch paper, and within a few days Vincent copied ten pages of “Les Travaux,” finishing the first volume. Then, feeling that he needed work on the nude, and being quite certain he could never get anyone to pose for him that way in the Borinage, he wrote to his old friend Tersteeg, manager of the Goupil Galleries in The Hague, asking him if he would lend the “Exercises au Fusain” by Bargue.

In the meanwhile he remembered Pietersen’s counsel and rented a miner’s hut near the top of the rue Petit Wasmes for nine francs a month. This time the hut was the best he could find, not the worst. It had a rough plank floor, two large windows to let in light, a bed, table, chair, and stove. It was sufficiently large enough for Vincent to place his model at one end and get far enough away for complete perspective. There was not a miner’s wife or child in Petit Wasmes who had not been helped in some way the winter before by Vincent, and no one ever turned down his request to come and pose. On Sundays the miners would throng to his cabin and let him make quick sketches of them. They thought it great fun. The place was always full of people looking over Vincent’s shoulder with interest and amazement.

The “Exercises au Fusain” arrived from The Hague and Vincent spent the next two weeks copying the sixty studies, working from early morning to night. Tersteeg also sent the “Cours de Dessin” by Bargue; Vincent tackled this with tremendous vitality.

All five of the former failures were wiped completely from his mind. Not even serving God had brought such sheer ecstasy and constant, lasting satisfaction as creative art could give him. When for eleven days he had not one centime in his pocket and had to live off the few loaves he could borrow from Madame Denis, he did not once complain—even to himself—of his hunger. What did the hunger of his belly matter, when his spirit was being so well fed?

Every morning for a week he went to the gate of Marcasse at two-thirty and made a large drawing of the miners: men and women going to the shaft, through the snow by a path along a hedge of thorns; shadows that passed, dimly visible in the crepuscule. In the background he drew the large constructions of the mine, with the heaps of clinkers standing out vaguely against the sky. He made a copy of the sketch when it was finished and sent it in a letter to Theo.