The beginnings were full of promise, and he decided to stake everything on it. But for so realistic a representation of Hyde Park Corner he needed to make a great many sketches on the spot. So, through the friendly offices of an amiable acquaintance, he obtained access to a convenient window in Grosvenor Place, and made free use of the privilege. The master of the house, a nobleman of the old school, who at first sight seemed stately as the portraits in his own dining-room, proved on acquaintance to be singularly bluff and genial, sometimes almost slap-dash. He had made Wyndham welcome and at his ease, bidding him come and go as he pleased, and "never to mind a bit about turning the room into a studio." And this charming nobleman had likewise a charming daughter, who sometimes came for a minute or two to talk to Wyndham and interest herself in the sketches. Lady Betty was a brilliant figure of a girl; had travelled a good deal and knew the world. She was sunny and friendly, yet naturally on a pedestal. She was clear-headed and capable; in the home supreme mistress. Wyndham was the subject of many graceful little attentions. If he came in the morning she saw that his glass of sherry and biscuit was never neglected; in the afternoon she presided over tea in the drawing-room and expected him to appear there.
Of course poor Wyndham never dared tell himself that he was in love with her. A girl like that must naturally be reserved for a great match, as regards both position and fortune. He could not think of her save as presiding over a plurality of palaces or voyaging in a magnificent yacht. Palaces and yachts were not the rewards of painters, so Wyndham kept his mind sternly fixed on the purpose for which he was there. Even so, the intervals between his appearances grew wider and wider. And when, after some couple of years of toil, discipline, searching, it had come home to him that in this terrible picture he had undertaken a task beyond his strength and experience, he found himself too shamefaced to "abuse" further the courtesy that had been extended to him. The consciousness, too, of his growing poverty was becoming acuter and acuter. Already he was drawing back into his shell, and, once he had ceased going to Grosvenor Place for the sake of his work, he had not the heart to continue his visits as an ordinary acquaintance. More than a year afterwards he read of Lady Betty's engagement in the papers—it was the very match one would naturally look for. Yet the news "shattered him to bits"—absurdly enough, he told himself, since he had known her at best irregularly, and not in the ordinary course of social intimacy. He was really half-surprised at receiving an invitation to the wedding. He could not prevail on himself to go; but, remembering she had once admired one of his Academy pictures, he sent her a photograph of it on a miniature silver easel as a trifling wedding gift. She wrote back a gracious acknowledgment, which had since remained one of his treasures.
Meanwhile he had been struggling on with the picture, determined to conquer. But its difficulties and problems were endless. After all his toil it stood on his easel in a terribly unfinished condition, though he had stinted his own body to lavish his money on it. At last, gulping down the humiliation, he was forced to accept of Mary's little store of savings to pay his rent and his models. It was his first step of the kind, and he paid the full proverbial cost of it. But he had still the hope of returning the loan a thousandfold. Was not his success to redeem her life as well as his?
Certainly Mary believed in him and the picture, and looked forward to its scoring a great triumph. The whole heart and hope of the sister centred on that vast canvas. She sometimes ran across town to see it, though—poor child!—Hyde Park Corner always looked the same to her at every stage of its long creation. But the picture was Wyndham's backbone; it was his stock-in-trade before his world. He was more and more of a recluse now, refusing all invitations, discouraging his friends from coming to interrupt him—as he put it. Certainly Wyndham would rather have died than confess to failure after all the magnificent trumpeting. Even as it was, the time came soon enough when the big picture no longer served to protect his dignity. He imagined half-pitying glances and ironic smiles, and so eventually he found himself avoiding everybody without exception.
It was only on Lady Betty's wedding day, after more than three years of futile striving, that he had the resolution to remove the great canvas from the easel and stand it with its face to the wall.
He was tired now, but he must make an effort to emancipate himself from Mary's exchequer. Till then he could not hold his head up. So he painted some smaller and pleasanter pictures, but again he could do nothing with them. The Academy sent them back, the minor galleries sent them back, the Salon sent them back the following year. The dealers offered less than the cost of the frames. Meantime he had ceased to count up the five-pound notes Mary had starved herself to keep for him. He knew he was a coward and dared not. He had reached that stage of moral confusion which Nietzsche registers as in the natural history of the artist-type, and which may not be eyed too harshly from the point of vantage of ordered and organised existence in this outer universe. One idea stood clear beyond all others; grew into his mind; grew till it became his mind. He must cling to his studio, hold desperately to this atmosphere of paint and canvasses.
He was getting on in years now—past thirty-three. It was like the striking of a pitiless clock, this adding of swift year after year to his unsuccessful life. His hand began to fail him. The necessity of now doing his own house-work; of bothering with coals and cinders, preparing his makeshift monotonous meals, pouring oil into lamps, and boiling kettles, and washing plates and teacups, had begun by encroaching on his time and energies, and ended by absorbing them altogether. The care of ministering to his own primary needs had at last superseded art as his profession. Even so, the cobwebs multiplied and the dust lay thick.
Months now slipped by, he scarcely knew how; he was astonished to realise how time might elude one, how a colourless day might be trifled away without appearing to hold the possibility of even a morsel of achievement. Yet he still grasped the hope that something would "arrive"—an unexpected magazine commission, a request from a dealer. Ideas for a new start would teem in his head as he lay tossing on the narrow iron bed up in the gallery at the end of the studio. Why not do some pretty little things—to fetch ten guineas apiece, say—Cupids playing amid wreathed flowers with pale Doric structures in the background? If Mary could manage just another few pounds for him, he would have time to turn out a number of such decorative trifles. Such things were in constant demand and were a sure source of livelihood. He had stood out long enough, much longer indeed than he had had the right. He had consistently worked on a basis of high endeavour, but now he must withdraw his dignity and enter on the pot-boiler phase. Better that than this abominable leech-like existence. Continued misfortune had befogged his wits, and this last year certainly he had been half mad.
So be it! He must wake up now, and no longer lose his days in this stupid pottering about!
Every dog had his day, and his own turn would come in time. He was an artist. He felt it in his bones and blood. Art was his life and destiny. He had blundered in attempting too big a feat too early in his career, but he did not intend that that should wreck his existence. No, no! he would never throw up the sponge. He would rather die than admit defeat, with all those who knew him looking on at the game.