Part 11

“Now you can hardly call that a characteristic or even a particularly interesting letter,” continued Whymper, “but the writing appears to have given the poet some trouble, for the present Lord Tennyson tells me that, after his father’s death, he found several drafts of it, I think he said six, in a blotting pad. It was, as I say, one of the last, if not the very last letter Tennyson ever wrote, and one of two things about it is true. Either his approaching end had so affected his powers that he found it difficult to frame even an ordinary letter of acknowledgment, or else, realising that his letters would one day inevitably be collected and printed, he was too fastidious an artist to let even a casual note of thanks come from his pen without striving to impart to it some touch of distinction and originality, some turn of a phrase which would give a hint of the power and the personality of the writer. What’s _your_ solution of the problem?”

As I had no solution to offer, Whymper told me another story of Tennyson, which by this time may or may not--I do not know--have got into print.[B] But even if so--since I first heard it when it was quite new, and since stories of the sort get varied in the telling--there is some probability that Whymper’s version is the correct one. I set it down, as nearly as I can recollect, as he told it.

[B] Since this was written, I have told the story in a brief sketch of Whymper that was published in a monthly magazine.

At a garden party, a rather gushing young girl went up to the hostess and said: “Oh, is that really, as I’m told, Lord Tennyson sitting there by himself smoking on that rustic seat?” “Yes, my dear, that is he,” was the reply. “He occasionally does me the honour of calling to see me, and dropped in, not knowing that I was entertaining to-day.” “Oh, I should so like to meet him. Do introduce me,” said the girl. “My dear, Lord Tennyson hates to be bothered by strangers,” answered the hostess. “And one reason perhaps why he comes to see me is that he knows I never exploit him in that way.” “Oh, but I should love to be able to say I’ve met him,” persisted the other. “Well, _say_ you have met him and leave it at that,” was the answer. “Here you are and there he is, so it won’t be altogether untrue. He won’t trouble to contradict it if he ever heard it, which is not likely, and I’m sure I shan’t.”

The girl, however, would take no refusal. Nothing would content her but actually meeting and speaking to Tennyson, so losing patience her hostess said: “Very well. If he is rude to you--as he can be to people who force themselves upon him--your blood be upon your own head. You can’t say I haven’t warned you. Come along.” “Lord Tennyson,” said the hostess when the two had walked together to the seat where the Laureate was smoking, “this is Miss B----, daughter of an old friend of mine, who is very, very anxious to have the honour of saying How-do-you-do to you.” “How-d’you-do?” responded Tennyson gruffly, and scarcely looking up.

Seating herself beside him the girl attempted awkwardly to carry on some sort of conversation, but, as all she got in reply was an occasional “Humph!” or else stony silence, she lost her nerve and began, schoolgirl-wise, to wriggle and fidget in her seat. Then the Great Man spoke. “You’re like the rest of them,” he grunted, “you’re laced too tightly. I can hear your stays creak.” Abashed and embarrassed the girl withdrew. Later in the afternoon Tennyson came behind her, and laying a hand on her shoulder, said kindly, “I was wrong just now, young lady. It wasn’t your stays I heard creaking, but my braces. They’re hitched up too tightly. Sorry.” And he lounged away.

The story may not be new and may not be true, but Whymper found huge enjoyment in the telling of it, possibly because he had himself the reputation of sharing Tennyson’s dislike to the intrusive stranger. To speak plainly indeed, Whymper could be very rude, as witness the following incident. He invited me once to accompany him to a lecture given by a great climber. Soon after we had entered the hall and before the lecture commenced, a man, whom Whymper told me later he was sure he had never set eyes on, bustled up to where we were sitting, and extending a hand said effusively:

“Oh, how-do-you-do, Mr. Whymper? You won’t remember me, but I had the pleasure of meeting you in Switzerland.”

“No, I certainly don’t remember having had the pleasure of meeting you,” was Whymper’s caustic reply. “And I assure you my memory is of the best.”

“Ah, I was afraid you wouldn’t remember me,” answered the other still unabashed. “It was at Zermatt. I knew your friend Leslie Stephen very well.”

“Possibly,” answered Whymper drily. “The question is whether my friend Mr. Leslie Stephen would be equally sure that he knew _you_.”

III

If ever a man carried out in practice the precept: “To know yourself is wisdom; not to know your neighbours is genius,” that man was Edward Whymper.

He had, it is true, a knack of scraping and continuing acquaintance with neighbours and fellow residents entirely out of his own station. From a barber, a bird stuffer, a boatman or a net-mender he would acquire a lot of out-of-the-way information, and indeed would chat to them by the hour, if not exactly with joviality, at least without the somewhat pompous precision which at other times and in other company he affected. But during the thirteen years in which I was living at Westcliff and Whymper was living at Southend, I was, I believe, the only neighbour or fellow resident whose home he ever entered or who was invited to visit his house. If I use the word “house” rather than “home” of the building in which he passed much of his life, it is not merely because he had chambers at St. Martin’s House, Ludgate Hill, but because a more unhomelike place than Whymper’s Southend residence can hardly be imagined. To ensure solitude and quiet he had made an arrangement by which he took practically the whole of what is called an “apartment house.” It was a tall building with basement rooms below and at least three storeys above. In the top storey Whymper himself lived, and in the very bottom, the basement in fact, his housekeeper or landlady and her family had their rooms. All the intervening storeys were by Whymper’s command left vacant. The windows, except the basement, were curtainless, and Whymper’s own room was carpetless and barrack-bare except for a few necessary pieces of furniture, and photographs of his own taking--peaks he had climbed, mountain wastes and wildernesses he had explored, scenes on the Canadian Pacific Railway and the like. On the floor was a rolled-up mattress, to which he pointed. “That,” he said, with a queer smile twisting at the turned-down corners of his mouth, “is my bed. The rugs and pillow are inside. At night I unroll the thing, and there I am. What could be simpler?”

And here I may remark that his habits in the matter of sleeping were, like his habits in the matter of meals, unusual. Four o’clock in the afternoon was his favourite and not unfrequent hour for dining, after which he would sometimes go to bed, getting up again late in the evening for the nocturnal rambles which he loved. I have often heard him expatiate eloquently on the joys of finding himself afoot and alone when more conventional folk were abed, and I have known him extend his tramps from past midnight till day was breaking.

That he and I came eventually to know each other well, and to see each other frequently was due, I am convinced, entirely to the fact that after our introduction, except to nod when we passed in the street or met at the railway station or in the train, I left him severely alone. That, as I now know, though I was unaware of it at the time, was the surest passport to his favour. Rude even to bearishness as he could on occasion be, Whymper would sometimes go out of his way to show courtesy and even to enter into conversation with an entire stranger. But in all such cases _the advance must come from him_. If it came from the other, he was at once on his dignity, withdrawing as instantly into his shell as an alarmed snail. No curled hedgehog could present a more prickly front than when in a train, in a club, or elsewhere, some representative of the lion-hunting fraternity, or of that class of person who dearly loves to claim acquaintance with a celebrity, made overtures to him; whereas, left to himself, it often happened that, like the hedgehog, he would of his own accord uncurl.

It was so in my own case. Instead of merely nodding when we met, he took to stopping to exchange a few words, telling me on one occasion that I had very much alarmed him.

“How?” I inquired.

“I have been reading a little book of yours, called _A Book of Strange Sins_,” he answered. “From the moment I first heard of it I was in terror lest my own most secret and dearest sin had been exposed and laid open to the light of day. But in searching its pages anxiously and fearfully, I was relieved, not to say reprieved, to find that my particular vices have escaped your notice.”

Then, finding that though making no claim to be a mountaineer I had done some small amount of climbing in Switzerland and elsewhere, and finding, moreover, that I made no further advances, he took to joining me on my way backward and forward to the station, becoming more and more friendly at each meeting, and finally he got in the habit of looking out for me that he and I might travel up and down together. Then he wrote:

“Come and crack a flask with me on Sunday next any time you like after 8.30 p.m.”

I accepted the invitation, of which he again reminded me when I met him in the street next day.

“Don’t forget,” he said, “that you are supping with me on Sunday any time that suits you after half-past eight.”

At half-past eight on Sunday I was with him.

“I know you are a smoker,” he said, producing a parcel of fat and long Manilla cigars, each carefully cased in silver paper.

They had been in his possession, he told me (I could well believe it), for twenty-five years, and better cigars I have never smoked. Then, as he happened to be in the mood for talking and I am a good listener, he talked incessantly, incisively and brilliantly till nine, ten, eleven had come and gone, when frankly I began to feel hungry, and no sign of supper. Twelve and half-past twelve came, and I fear my attention wandered, for I was trying to recall the condition of the joint which had done duty among my own hungry family some twelve hours before. Should the same joint have reappeared at the table for the usual Sunday night “cold supper,” the chances were that on returning home I should be reduced to piratical raids upon the larder in search of bread and cheese.

“And now, what do you say to supper?” said Whymper, laying down the pipe at which he had been puffing with curious and rhythmic regularity.

In smoking, as in everything else, he was methodical, and had one counted the seconds that passed between each puff, the intervals would have been nearly identical.

Had I answered him truthfully I should have replied, “Say? What can I say except ‘Thank heaven!’ and that I’m starving?” instead of which I answered with apparent politeness but hidden irony:

“Thank you. When you’re quite ready.”

I regretted it the next moment, for, taking me too literally at my word, he resumed his pipe, relighted it, and pointing the stem at a photograph of himself upon the mantelshelf, remarked:

“I’m extraordinarily particular about small matters. Does anything strike you in that portrait?”

“It’s a very good likeness,” I sighed, with a strange sinking of the inner man, “and very characteristic, inasmuch as you are smoking, if I mistake not, that very pipe.”

He smiled cryptically.

“Does nothing else strike you? Look again!”

I groaned inwardly, but looked.

“And the same suit?”

“Anything else?”

“Well,” I said desperately, “you look so cheerful, so well fed and so happy, that I can only suppose you had just had your supper. Now as I lunched at one o’clock and haven’t had as much as a sup of tea since, I’m horribly hungry, and in want of mine.”

Saying no more than a mere “Come along,” and carrying the pipe and the photograph in his hand, he led the way into the next room, where supper--all cold--was upon the table. But such a supper! Anchovies, chicken, calves’ foot jelly, clotted Devonshire cream and other delicacies, with rare old Burgundy and the best of champagne.

When I had been abundantly helped, Whymper took up the photograph, and again pointing at it with the pipe-stem, said:

“What I wondered was whether you’d notice that the smoke coming from the bowl of the pipe has been painted-in upon the negative. There was no smoke visible in the original picture. When you get to know me better you’ll find that I’m slow and methodical but minutely accurate, even about little things. I think you told me once that you set some store by the many signed portraits that have been given to you by your literary friends. Since the portrait was the cause of keeping you from your supper, and if you’d care to add so uncouth a face as mine to your gallery, I’ll give it you. But I’ll sign it first.”

It was well that he had warned me that he was slow and methodical. Never was there such a business as the signing of that portrait. First he carefully washed and examined his pen, trying it at least half a dozen times upon a sheet of note-paper. Then the ink did not run as freely as it should, and further protracted operations of a cleansing and refilling nature were necessary. Next a book on which to rest the picture and a blotting-pad had to be found and placed in position. Then, after further and repeated trial-trips of his pen upon the harbour waters of a sheet of note-paper, he launched his craft upon the big seas and settled down seriously to the business of signing the photograph. Had it been a death-warrant or a cheque for £100,000 to which he was momentously affixing a signature, he could not have gone to work more carefully. In a round, neat, clerkly hand he slowly and laboriously penned his name “Edward Whymper” with the date beneath the portrait--and the deed was done.

I have described thus lengthily the slow and methodical way in which he set about signing this photograph for the reason that, trivial as the incident may seem, it is illustrative of the character and methods of the man. He walked slowly, thought slowly, worked slowly, and talked slowly, not because of any sluggishness of brain or body, but because every word, every action, was calculated and deliberate. It was because he was so slow that he was so sure. Just as in mountaineering he never moved a step until he was certain of the foothold in front of him, so in conversation he never spoke before he thought.

Artist as he originally was by profession, lecturer and mountaineer as, either by chance or by circumstance, he afterwards became, by temperament he was essentially a man of science; and even in casual conversation he hated what was slipshod, random, or inexact. He was an admirable listener to anyone who was speaking from knowledge; and I have often admired the courtly, if somewhat stately, attention he would accord to those who spoke, and with authority upon some subject on which Whymper himself was not an expert. But when the conversation was mainly in his hands, he liked to feel that he was chairman as well as principal speaker at the meeting, and would never allow the talk to run off at a tangent. If his companion ventured an opinion upon some side issue which the conversation had suggested, Whymper would pull him up magisterially by interposing, “You were saying just now that you thought so and so. We will, if you please, confine ourselves to that side of the matter before opening up another.” Courteously as he phrased it, his “if you please” was peremptory rather than persuasive, and so in a sense was merely formally polite.

IV

Of all the men I have ever known, none so habitually refrained from talking shop as Whymper. Hence of Whymper the mountaineer--and mountaineering was in a sense with him a profession--as well as of Whymper the artist and the lecturer, I have nothing of interest to say. One reason perhaps is that of mountaineering I know comparatively nothing and of art even less. Of Whymper the lecturer I am more competent to speak, as for ten years I was his fellow lecturer, constantly either preceding or following him upon the same platform all over the country. We were both in the hands of the same agent, I might say the only agent, for Mr. Gerald Christy may be said to control the lecture field and practically to be without a rival. Hence as a fellow Christy minstrel (as Mr. Christy’s lecturers, musicians and entertainers are sometimes called) Whymper and I might be supposed occasionally to compare notes. But though he was interested to hear of my lecturing experiences he rarely spoke of his own.

Of one provincial platform and Press experience, however, he was incontinently communicative and explosive. He lectured for a Young Men’s Society (not the Y.M.C.A. as was stated in some subsequent Press notices) at the Claughton Music Hall, Birkenhead. At either side of the platform was a door leading into a small room for the use of artistes. In the room on the right a cheerful fire had been hospitably lit, by order of the committee, the unoccupied room on the left being without a fire and in total darkness. Between these two rooms and leading out of each, was a flight of stairs, meeting in the centre and then continuing in one flight down to the ground floor of the building, where was a back exit. Whymper, who was given to “exploring” on a small scale, as well as a vast one, must needs find out what was in the unlighted room as well as in the lighted and fire-warmed room which had been placed at his disposal. (“Please bear in mind,” the secretary of the society subsequently wrote to me, “that he had no business to be poking into the place at all.”)

Having examined, so far as he could in the dark, the unoccupied room, Whymper then opened the door leading out to the stairs, the flare of the fire on the opposite side throwing into shadow the staircase which lay between the two rooms. Thinking that there was a level passage from one room to the other, he made to walk along it, and fell head first down the stairs, severely injuring his shoulder. So severe indeed was the injury, that the lecture had to be abandoned, and Whymper to be taken in a cab to his hotel and put to bed, where he remained a week. He was extremely angry and exasperated with the committee and the secretary, who were in no way to blame, but his exasperation then was as nothing to his fury when in a newspaper he read a notice of the incident. It was headed “One of Life’s Little Ironies,” and was to the effect that “though Mr. Whymper, who had made the first ascent of the Matterhorn when four of his companions had lost their lives, had probably climbed more dangerous peaks than any man living or dead, and without any serious mishap to himself, it was surely one of life’s little ironies that he should receive his most serious hurt by falling off a platform while peacefully and presumably safely addressing a Y.M.C.A. audience in the provinces.”

In one of Mr. W. W. Jacobs’s delightful books he tells of a bargee whose language in hospital was so awful that “they fetched one of the sisters and the clergyman to hear it.” As an Irishman who dearly enjoys the spectacle of “wigs on the green,” I could have wished that the secretary and some of the committee of the Young Men’s Society in question could have been present as I was when the newspaper paragraph quoted first came to Mr. Whymper’s notice. The secretary humorously suggests that the fact that Whymper demanded payment of his doctor’s bill and hotel expenses from the society, only to be politely told that the accident was no affair of theirs, probably played some part in adding to the irritation and explosiveness with which Whymper read the paragraph and commentary upon the accident.

One other accident that befell him--though not in connection with lecturing--I may relate. He was, as every one knows, a keen naturalist as well as an entomologist, and when returning from Canada brought with him a squirrel, which in the seclusion of his cabin he used often to set free that he might study its ways as he studied the ways of all creatures whether free or in captivity. Aboard ship he was less able to indulge his eccentricities in the matter of unconventional hours for meals and for work than when on shore, but even there he would often read or work far into the night, making up for the consequent loss of sleep by snatching a nap at an hour when the majority of his fellow passengers were most wide awake. On one such occasion Whymper forgot to return the squirrel to its cage; and in frolicking round the cabin, and leaping from floor to berth, the little creature, having no fear of its master, scampered along his prostrate form, and in passing scratched slightly the sleeper’s face. Apparently the squirrel had picked up some poisonous matter in the curve of its sharp claw, which getting into the scratch poisoned Whymper’s face, so that for weeks, as he said, he was hideous to behold, and had, I believe, to cancel certain lecturing engagements.

“All my worse hurts,” he said to me when describing the incident and waxing warm at the memory of the lecturing accident, to which I have already referred, “came to me from some trivial cause. When there is real danger ahead, no one is more careful, more wary, or watchful than I. Luckily there was no member of the Young Men’s Society present on this occasion, or the reptilian who sent paragraphs to the Press: ‘Edward Whymper, the Great Mountaineer, falls off a lecturing platform and seriously injures himself,’ would have earned a scurrilous half-dollar by paragraphing the Press with an announcement headed, ‘Edward Whymper badly wounded by a squirrel.’”

I assured him that it was the nimble journalist, not any member of the Young Men’s Society, who was responsible for the paragraph in question, but his wrath at the memory of the incident was not to be appeased, and, to whatever deserving institutions he may have left legacies, I do not anticipate that the Society in question was among them.