Part 12

Whymper, as I have said, never or rarely talked shop, but he did talk--though never egotistically--of himself. He told me that he came of a Suffolk family, but could trace his descent, though he still had hopes of doing so, no farther back than his great-great-grandfather. The men of his race rarely married. When they did marry they were nearly always the fathers of girls. His brother Frank was, he told me, Postmaster-General of India. Speaking of his own extraordinary physical activity and stamina, he said that he had actually walked the entire length of the Canadian-Pacific Railway, being nearly killed once while doing so. I gathered that he had made more money out of certain businesses in which he was interested, especially a colour-printing process, than from either lecturing or books, though his books and guide-book have of course had a great sale, and early editions of his mountaineering works fetch high sums among collectors. Unlike some authors, so far from having any grievance against publishers, he said that of Mr. John Murray he could not speak too highly, and that “going one better,” as he put it, than Mrs. Bishop, the great traveller--who left in her will her copyrights in token of her appreciation and gratitude to Mr. Murray--he proposed while he was alive to make Mr. Murray a present of the copyright of some of his books. This purpose he did not, I now understand, carry into effect during his lifetime, but I believe I am correct in saying that at his death his copyrights were bequeathed to Mr. Murray. Speaking of his own career, he said that not mountaineering, nor exploring, nor authorship so fascinated him and gratified him as his discoveries in geology.

One of his geological anecdotes concerned a fossil forest in Greenland, which, when Whymper heard of it, he at once set out to explore. There he found a large fossil cone which he was at great pains to split into two halves, that he might the better examine it. It was sent to a certain famous German professor, an expert of world-wide reputation in fossil flora, who wrote saying that he attached much importance to the find, and asked Whymper to come to see him, which Whymper did. Producing the split cone, the professor pronounced it a magnolia, in fact two magnolias and of different species. “No, no,” said Whymper. “One magnolia. There can’t be any doubt about that.” “You are mistaken,” said the professor curtly, annoyed at being contradicted. “I have put both under the microscope, and I assert positively that they are of a different species.” “One,” repeated Whymper. “Two,” insisted the other. Then Whymper joined the two halves.

Next to geology Whymper seemed most interested in aneroids. It was a subject on which he--by no means a boastful man--claimed to be an expert and on which he purchased every book that was issued. Especially prized by him were two books on aneroids, one bought in Rouen, the other in Geneva by a Monsieur Pascal, whom Whymper said was generally believed to be the writer Blaise Pascal, but was in reality only a relative.

Of his mountaineering experiences he said but little, and never once during the thirteen years that I knew him did he of his own accord refer to the historic Matterhorn tragedy. He did, however, tell me of the circumstances under which he became a mountaineer.

“It was purely accidental,” he said. “The idea of climbing had never occurred to me, one reason being, as you who have done some climbing yourself will readily appreciate, that it costs money; and I was then a young fellow with all his way to make in the world, and was looking out for a means to make money, not to spend it, and was in fact rather at my wits’ end to know how to earn a livelihood. The profession I was supposed to follow was art, and even thus early my draughtmanship and woodcut work were, I think I may say, creditable. Anyhow, more than one person who was competent to judge thought so, and in fact said so. It was owing to somebody saying so that I got the job which led to my becoming a mountaineer. There was a feeling among climbers that the record of their work required illustrating. They’re human like the rest of the world, and some of them fancied that it would add to the éclat, the importance, and the heroism of their achievements if they could be depicted crossing a crevasse that yawned like a blue hell below them, holding on for dear life and like a fly to a wall against a perpendicular rock, with a sheer abyss and drop of a thousand feet beneath them, or skyed upon some heaven-piercing and hitherto inaccessible peak that made unclimbing folk turn sick and giddy to think of.

“You know the sort of thing--Professor Tyndall crossing the Great Crevasse, on this or that mountain, Mr. Leslie Stephen negotiating the most difficult and dangerous pass on t’other one, or somebody else setting the British flag on a hitherto unsurmounted peak. The question was how to do it and whom to get to do it. To-day they’d do it by photography; but photography wasn’t then what it is now, and it was evident that their man would have to be a capable draughtsman, and that he’d have to be a man of nerve, stamina and power of endurance, as he also would have to do some climbing. Well, to cut a long story short, some one who had chanced to see my work in art and to think well of it, suggested me as a likely man. I was glad of a job and jumped at it, but once having started climbing, as I necessarily had to, in six months I had climbed peaks that no one else had ever attempted; and that is the history in brief, if not the whole story, of how I became a climber.”

V

Edward Whymper was a man of few friends, I had almost written of no friends, for though he was upon what, in the case of another man, would be described as terms of friendship with many of the world’s most distinguished workers, and though he enjoyed their company and their intercourse as they enjoyed his, I should describe the bond which held him and them together as “liking” and interest in each other and in each other’s achievements rather than as friendship in the closer sense of the word. The mould into which he was cast was austere, stern, and could be forbidding. He was a “marked” man wherever he went; and in all companies a man of masterful personality, who inspired attention and respect in every one, and something like fear in a few, but who, except in the case of children, rarely inspired affection. That he was aware his manner was not always conciliatory--was in fact at times forbidding--seems likely from a story which I have heard him tell on several occasions and always with infinite gusto.

“I was walking up Fleet Street one day,” he began, pursing his lips, mouthing and almost smacking them over his words as if the flavour were pleasant to the palate, “when I chanced to see a sixpence lying upon the ground. Now according to the law of the land, anything we find in the street is in a public place and must be taken to the nearest police station. I wasn’t going to be at the bother of picking up a sixpence merely to take myself and it to the police station, so I cast an eye around and walking just behind me I saw a poor ragged devil without so much as a shirt to his back or a pair of shoes to his feet. I didn’t require to speak or even to point to the sixpence. I just caught the fellow’s eyes and looked with my own two eyes at the sixpence upon the pavement. That was quite enough. He followed my glance, saw the coin lying there, knew that my glance meant ‘You can have it if you like,’ and my good fellow was down on it in a moment. Well, I didn’t stop to let the fellow thank me, but just walked on. It so happens, however, that I’m peculiarly sensitive to outside impressions. If I’m in the street and some one is taking stock of me, even though I can’t see them, I’m conscious of it in a moment. If I’m in a hall, listening, say, to a lecture, and some one behind me has recognised me, or is interested in me for any reason, I’m just as aware of it as if I had eyes in the back of my head. Well, I passed up Fleet Street, and along the Strand till, approaching Charing Cross, I became suddenly aware that some one behind was watching me as if for a purpose. I turned, and there was my ragged, shirtless, bootless devil of a tramp, who had followed me all that way, poor devil, I supposed to thank me. So I thought it decent to slow my pace, and when he was just alongside of me I half turned to give him the chance to speak, and waited to hear what he had to say. What do you think it was? To express his thanks? Not a bit. When he was level with me, he hissed, almost spat in my ear, ‘You blank, blank, blankey blank, blank! too blanky proud blank, are you? to pick up a sixpence--blank you!’

“That, I said to myself at the time,” continued Whymper, “is all the thanks you get for trying to do a good turn to the British vagrant. But, on thinking it over, I’ve come to the conclusion that there was something unintentionally offensive or shall we say patronising, in the way I looked at the man and then at the sixpence--something which he resented so bitterly that he had to follow me all that way to spit it out.”

Another incident, which amused him at the time, happened when he and I had walked out from Southend to Shoeburyness, a distance of some four miles. It was on a Sunday morning, and when we arrived at Shoeburyness he remarked:

“I had some very salt bloaters for breakfast. Do you mind if, Sunday morning as it is, I call at the first inn to slake my thirst?”

“Of course not,” I replied.

As it was within the prohibited hours when inns are closed except to _bona fide_ travellers--by which is meant those who have travelled three miles from the place where they slept the previous night--we found the inn door closed. Whymper knocked sharply and loudly at it in his usual masterful way, and, when it was opened by a frowsy looking fellow in shirt sleeves, said dryly, in more senses than one:

“I am thirsty and want a drink, please.”

“Are you _bona fide_ travellers?” inquired the fellow.

“Well,” remarked Whymper partly to the fellow and partly to me, “there was a time early in my career when some doubts were cast upon my qualifications as a mountaineer and even, upon my word, in regard to my statement as to what had happened, but, this is the first time I have been challenged in regard to my being a _bona fide_ traveller. I’ll say nothing about the qualification of my friend here, but considering that since the last time I passed this hostelry I have travelled some seven or eight thousand miles, I think I’m entitled to describe myself as a traveller in a very _bona fide_ sense. As a matter of fact, we have come from Southend this morning, which I believe is outside the statutory three miles. Do I look, my good fellow, like a man who’d tell you a lie about a thing like that?”

“I don’t know,” replied the man looking Whymper very hard in the face, “but I’ll tell you what you do look like if you wish. You look to me like a man who if he’d made up his mind to have a drink would have it whether he was a _bona fide_ traveller or not, and wouldn’t let no one else stop him from having it, and that’s more.”

“I observe, my man,” said Whymper sententiously, as the door was opened to admit us, “that you are no indifferent judge of character, but I am curious also to know whether you are disposed to have a drink yourself.”

The man’s answer, in Parliamentary parlance, was in the affirmative.

VI

At what I am now about to say of Edward Whymper, he would himself either have hooted with cynical ridicule or else would have heard with a slow and cold smile of amused scorn, but to me his was a sad, gloomy, if not indeed a pathetic figure. I do not say this because he was a lonely man--and in all life I have met no one who was quite as lonely as he--but because he walked always in the shadow of self. I am not implying that he was selfish, for he was not. In his business transactions--albeit not an easy man to “best,” and not above driving a hard bargain with those whom he distrusted--he was not only as good as his word, but was the soul of integrity and honour. Prepared as he was to fulfil his share of the contract to the letter, he expected and required that others should do the same. Yet when dealing with those who had treated him handsomely he could be quixotically generous. Even to those to whom he owed nothing, he did many unselfish kindnesses for which he expected no gratitude, and was prepared to go unrequited. While the professional mendicant was sternly and mercilessly shown the door, the deserving poor he was always, if stealthily and secretly, ready to help.

Yet, looking back on him as I knew him all those years, I ask myself whether there was really one being in the world who really “mattered” to Edward Whymper, or by whose death his serenity would have been disturbed. It was Robert Montgomery, I believe, who wrote a poem in which he pictured the tragic loneliness of “the last man” left alone in the world.

Had it been possible, by some such universal cataclysm as, say, a world-wide earthquake, for every living creature, with one exception, to perish off the face of the earth, and had Edward Whymper been that one exception, I verily believe that, whistling softly to himself at the wonder of it all, he would, with untrembling fingers, calmly have filled and lit his pipe, and have sat down, were anything left to sit upon, to contemplate the ruins of a world, and then, first of all, to consider how to get his next meal, and, after that, to think out how to accommodate himself to the unusual and inconvenient circumstances in which he found himself. Nor would he have forgotten, with such instruments as happened to be within reach, to take such astronomical and meteorological bearings as he thought would prove valuable in the interests of science.

It is of course preposterous and inconceivable to suppose any such situation as I have imagined, and some of my readers may reasonably suppose that I am either laughing at them or wishing them to laugh at Whymper or myself. I assure them I am doing nothing of the sort, for, with no inconsiderable knowledge of the man, I honestly believe that in such circumstances he would have behaved exactly as I have said. They are magnificent, those qualities of absolute self-dependence, self-containment and self-contentment which Whymper possessed, but to me at least and at times they seemed almost superhuman. He walked, as I have said, in the shadow of self; was content so to walk, and apparently had no conception of and no wish to live a life to the happiness or sorrow of which it was in the power of others to contribute. A man who can so isolate himself is possibly to be envied, even if it never occurred to him that he is also to be pitied. Yet in spite of the fact that he was perfectly satisfied with his lot in life, and in living that life according to the cut-and-dried system by which he ordered it, and in spite, too, of the fact that he would have assured one that he was, and indeed believed himself to be, a happy man, Edward Whymper was, as I have said, not only the loneliest but the most pathetic human creature I have ever known.

VII

Whymper’s comments upon his contemporaries and their work were always exceedingly penetrative. Of some he spoke very generously but never effusively, of others critically and of a few sarcastically. I well remember the cynical smile with which he called my attention to an inscription in a presentation volume. It had been sent to him by a well-known writer, of whom I say no more than that he had once held a very distinguished position in the Society of Authors. The inscription ran: “To Edward Whymper, Esq. with the author’s complements,” and as I write, I seem to see Whymper’s squarish finger stubbed under the guilty “e” in compliments. No one did he seem to hold in greater respect and regard than Mr. Edward Clodd, of whom he once spoke to me as “not only a profound thinker and scholar and brilliant writer, but a loyal and true friend and the intimate associate of many of the great men of our time.” I remember once inviting Whymper to be my guest at a dinner in town, and mentioning that Clodd was to be of the party.

“You know,” said he, “how generally I hum and ha when anyone asks me to a function or a dinner, and that I’d rather at any time dine on bread and cheese and in pyjamas (which he often wore in the house) here in Southend than be at the trouble of getting into a black coat and journeying up to London to eat a ten-course dinner. But, if Clodd is to be one of your guests, I’m your man.”

I had only three guests, Whymper, Mr. Clodd, and Mr. Warwick Deeping, and the two older men who had not met for a very long time had so much to say about celebrities who were the friends of both, and of historic former meetings, that Deeping (always a silent man by choice) and myself (host though I was) were content for the most part to listen. Apart from his wish to see an old friend whom he held in great respect, Whymper had, if I am not mistaken, another and more personal reason for accepting my invitation to meet Clodd at dinner, which is why I refer to that otherwise unimportant function.

And this brings me to a somewhat painful incident of which, when Whymper was alive, I was occasionally reminded, always to his disparagement, by literary friends. If I touch briefly upon it here, it is not because I wish to rake up an old story, which, inasmuch as it concerns two distinguished men who are both dead, might very well be forgotten, but because since Whymper’s death it has again been going the rounds, and because I have an explanation to put forward in regard to what happened.

Whymper was on a certain occasion--it is no use mincing matters--unpardonably rude to one whom Sir Arthur Conan Doyle once described to me as “the most modest, the most unassuming, and at the same time the most learned man I have ever known”--the late Grant Allen. It was my privilege to know and to be the guest of Grant Allen in his home, and I am of opinion that he was not only the most modest, most unassuming, and most learned, but also the gentlest, most generous, and most lovable of men. Meeting Whymper at a dinner--I was not present, but in common, I expect, with some of my readers I have heard the story often--Allen quite innocently, and never dreaming that the question could give offence, asked Whymper concerning the historic accident on the Matterhorn, to be told curtly that the accident was his own business, and he did not choose to discuss it.

Unpardonably rude, as I have said, as such a reply was, and to such a man as Allen, that rudeness is, I fancy, capable of explanation. To those who knew Whymper only slightly and--overlooking the sensitive breathing nostrils, so wide and circular at the opening--saw only the cold hardness of his face and eyes, the rat-trap-like snap of mouth and jaw, he seemed a man of iron; and this impression the story of his indomitable courage, his dogged determination to succeed where others had failed, went far to confirm. That such a man, a man rough-hewn as he seemed out of block granite, and with sinews of steel, could be cognisant of the fact that he had “nerves,” much less could suffer from them, would occur to no one. None the less, I happen to know that the shock of that tragedy in early life among the Alps, when, powerless to help them, he had to stand inactively by and see his companions hurled to certain death, left its mark upon him to the end of his life, and was sometimes re-enacted in his dreams. In his later years, when his iron constitution began to weaken and when his nerves were less steady than of old, any sudden reference to that early tragedy would, in his more irritable moments, annoy and anger him, and I am convinced that it was in such conditions his rude and surly rebuff to Grant Allen was spoken. That Whymper afterwards regretted it I have reason to know. I believe that it was because Clodd was the close and devoted friend of Allen, and had, moreover, been present when the rebuff was administered, and had been pained by it, that Whymper was anxious to meet Clodd, either for the reason that--indifferent as he generally was to what others thought of him--he was for once anxious to efface any bad impression that the incident had created, or because he hoped to have some opportunity of speaking of Allen (he was too proud a man to have written to Allen direct) in such a way as to mend matters.

That this is not mere surmise on my part I am convinced from what I have myself heard Whymper say and from the way he afterwards spoke of Allen. He was, as I say, a proud man, a taciturn man, and sometimes a rude man, but at heart he was just; and unnecessarily and undeservedly to have given pain to another troubled him as much, if not more, than anything _could_ trouble one whom few things outside himself could affect.

Since writing the above I ventured to submit a draft of this paper to my friend Mr. Clodd, whose very interesting reply I have permission to quote as written:

MY DEAR KERNAHAN,

I read the enclosed last night. Like Cromwell, Whymper would say, “Paint me, warts and wrinkles and all,” and you have done as he would have wished, producing a faithful and withal sympathetic portrait.

I have just queried an obscure sentence here and there, but have not touched the punctuation, which I presume has had your attention in the original.

I don’t know whether the Tennyson story has appeared in print. Edmund Gosse told it to me years back. Of course the son wouldn’t admit anything conveying an idea of his father’s gruffness. When I referred to the _Life_ as a Biography, Meredith said to me, “Don’t call it that: ’tis only a Eulogy.” What I now remember about the Allen rebuff is that Whymper had been lecturing in various places, and that Allen--who was thinking of making money that way--asked him about his fees. And this Whymper wouldn’t tell him. On the same occasion, Hardy being of the company, Whymper narrated in detail the Matterhorn catastrophe, which gave Hardy the impetus to a sonnet. Whymper was the only man Hardy ever expressed the desire to meet again--hence their coming to me in the Easter of 1910.

You truly assess him as a lonely man, but there was a soft place under a hard shell, and this comes out in the tenderness towards children and all helpless things of which you speak. I am glad to have your witness to his liking for me. His visits to me remain a cherished memory.

Yours sincerely, EDWARD CLODD.