I

Though I head this article “Edward Whymper as I Knew Him,” I prefer first to write of Edward Whymper as he was before I knew him—or rather before he knew me. In the town where he and I were then living he had been dubbed “Bradlaugh turned Baedeker” by one resident who insisted on Whymper’s likeness to the late Charles Bradlaugh, and was aware that the Great Mountaineer had written various “Guides.” Another name by which he was known was “The Sphinx,” possibly because of his silence, his aloofness, and the mystery with which he was supposed to surround himself. To the good folk of the town he was indeed always something of an enigma. In the street he stalked straightforwardly along, looking only in front of him, set of mouth, stony of eye and severe of brow, if anyone either spoke to, or stared at him. On the journey up to London, when most people read their morning paper, he was rarely seen with a newspaper in his hand, but stared, pipe in mouth, out of the window, except when going through proofs or working at papers which he produced from a black leather bag, without which he was never seen in the train. On the journey down, when work for the day was done, his would-be sociable fellow passengers found Whymper taciturn and reticent, responding, or rather not responding, to any conversational advance, if possible, in a monosyllable.

The town in question was Southend, where he lived in Cliff Town Parade, and I, ten minutes’ walk away at Westcliff. Though he contended that there was no place within fifty miles of London with such fine air, and though he never wearied (like Robert Buchanan, who, as well as his brother poet, Sir Edwin Arnold, was at one time a resident of Southend) of extolling the atmospheric effects of sunshine and shadow upon the saltings, and though (again like Buchanan, who had said as much to me) he vowed that nowhere else in England were there to be seen more glorious pageants of sunrise and sunset—to the people of Southend, especially to his fellow travellers on the railway, he had taken an implacable dislike. When in London I was first introduced to him, he and I fell out upon the subject. Hearing that I lived at Southend, he asked me whether I did not agree with him that nowhere else would one meet such objectionable folk as those who journeyed backward and forward to town.

I replied that though Southend had no claim to be the home of rank and fashion (overrun as it was and is, during the summer months, by swarming hordes of East End trippers), I had found my fellow travellers and the residents generally—of the middle classes as they admittedly were—cordial, sociable, and kindly, and that for my part, so far from feeling as he did, I liked them and had many friends among them.

This for some reason exasperated Whymper, who launched out in fierce abuse of his unoffending fellow townsmen.

“My good sir,” he stormed, “I ask you where else in England, where else in God’s world if you like, will you come across such a collection and crew of defaulting solicitors, bagmen, undischarged bankrupts, shady stockbrokers and stock jobbers, potmen, pawnbrokers and publicans as on that particular railway which you and I use?”

I did not agree with him, and told him so plainly if courteously, whereupon, seeing that I was more amused than annoyed by his storming, he suddenly turned good-tempered, diverted the conversation into other channels, and when we parted was quite friendly.

His attitude on this occasion, as I afterwards discovered, was characteristically Whymperian. He could respect a man who stood up to him and was undismayed by his storming; he had “no use,” as the Americans say, for one who was ready cheaply and insincerely to profess himself entirely in agreement. He would at any time rather be bearded than humoured, and the fact that on our first meeting I refused to be browbeaten was, I now believe, one of the reasons why he and I thereafter became good friends.

One picture of Edward Whymper, as I saw him many times, is vivid in my memory. The morning train to town is on the point of starting, the guard has waved his flag, blown his whistle, and is urging late comers to “hurry up.” Along the platform, indifferent to the guard’s frantic arm-waving, never lengthening his step by so much as one inch, never quickening his pace by as much as by one second, but strolling as leisurely as if the train were not to start for an hour, and looking at each carriage for the face he is seeking, walks a closely-knit, sturdily-built man of middle height. His dress is unusual, as he is well aware, accounting for it once by reminding me of a great nobleman who, equally eccentric in the matter of dress, remarked, “Where I live, every one knows who and what I am, so it doesn’t matter what I wear. In London no one knows who and what I am, so I am equally free to please myself.”

More often than not Whymper, when going to town, wore a black greatcoat over a woollen sweater, and had a brown seal fur cap with lapels pulled down over the ears and fastened under the chin, for, like many who have spent much time in Canada, he felt colder in the damp and foggy climate of England, even when the temperature is moderate, than he did in the drier, clearer atmosphere of the Great Dominion, and when the thermometer stands at 40 degrees below zero.

But unusual as are a fur cap and sweater, when worn as I have seen Whymper wear them even when journeying to London, at the height of the season, they struck one as less incongruous than the ill-brushed, out-of-date silk hat in which, with black leather or cloth leggings, he occasionally weirdly arrayed himself. He sees my face at the window, stops, and, as leisurely as he had walked, enters the carriage and seats himself opposite to me, his back to the engine. To me he merely nods, or if on that occasion inclined to be loquacious, goes so far as to say “Good morning,” but never another word. The other occupants of the compartment he either entirely ignores or favours with a baleful glare. Then he puts his bag upon his knee, produces a packet of biscuits, and, looking out of the window all the time, munches them with jaws that move as rhythmically and methodically as if run by clockwork. His breakfast of dry biscuits finished, he dives into his bag for a flask, solemnly unscrews the stopper, as solemnly lifts the flask to his mouth, takes a drink, smacks his lips, replaces the stopper in the flask and then the flask in the bag, snaps the lock and puts the bag at his side. This done, he fishes in his pocket for pipe, tobacco and matches, charges and lights his pipe, takes with evident enjoyment two or three long draws at it, sniffing possibly with relish and with open nostrils at the smoke which rises from the bowl, settles himself comfortably in his corner, and then, and not till then, turns to me with a cheery “Well, and how are you this morning?” I reply with equal cheeriness, and probably the whole way up to town we talk—only we two—incessantly.

But had I, before he had munched his biscuits, swigged at his flask, replaced the latter in his bag, lit his pipe and settled himself in the corner, addressed him in any way, I should have had the shortest of answers, and the chances are that for the rest of the journey he would have remained silent. That was Edward Whymper’s way, and a man who liked more to have his own way I never met. My liking was for himself, not for his ways; but since it was his whim to be let alone, to speak to no one and to be spoken to by no one until he had breakfasted and lit his pipe, I was quite willing so to let him go his own way, knowing that soon the oracle would speak of its own accord, and would say many things which were well worth anyone’s attention and hearing.

II

“In the Memoir of Tennyson by his son, there will be a letter—only one—to myself,” said Whymper to me in 1897. “Except for the fact that it was one of the last, if indeed not the very last letter Tennyson penned, it doesn’t strike me as being important enough for inclusion. But it has a curious history. I had sent Tennyson a copy of one of my books, Travels among the Great Andes of the Equator. Here is his reply. I’ll read it to you:

‘Dear Sir,

‘Accept my thanks for your most interesting volume. I don’t think I have been higher than about 7000 feet, and so I look on your Chimborazos and Cotopaxis with all the greater veneration.

‘Yours very truly,
Tennyson.’

“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.

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.

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.

I was under the impression, before receiving Mr. Clodd’s very interesting letter, and from what Grant Allen told me of the rebuff, that it was the latter’s question about the Matterhorn which caused the trouble. But the incident happened under Mr. Clodd’s roof, and his memory is not likely to fail him. Possibly Allen had already annoyed Whymper by asking to be told the story of the Matterhorn, and the inquiry about lecture fees following upon that provoked Whymper’s ready wrath. That he should thereafter voluntarily have described the ice accident to Mr. Thomas Hardy (at mention of whose honoured name I stand respectfully at salute) in no way surprises me, and in fact confirms what I have said in an earlier section of this paper to the effect that “the advance must always come from Whymper himself,” that he was not indisposed to talk when left to himself, but was quick to suspect any appearance of being “exploited” or “drawn.” That he resented having questions about the Matterhorn catastrophe suddenly sprung upon him I have reason to know, for I have more than once heard him snub, almost savagely, a tactless inquirer. Allen’s question about fees (he was the last man in the world to be impertinent) may seem to some readers unwarrantable, but none of us in Mr. Christy’s list made any secret of the matter, as Allen—himself a lecturer, but not for Mr. Christy—was aware. On the contrary, Whymper asked me, soon after I first met him, what fees I received, telling me in return what his own handsome payments were.

There we will leave the comparatively trivial incident of his rudeness to Allen. I should not have written thus lengthily of it, but for the receipt of Mr. Clodd’s letter, and because my picture of Whymper depends, for any faithfulness it has, not upon bold strokes of the brush, but upon the slow and careful painting in of comparatively unimportant but none the less cumulative details.

Edward Whymper was a man whom it was easy to misjudge, and was so misjudged of many if only for the reason that he would go out of his way to flatter, to please, or to pay court to none, or to be other than his natural self to all those with whom he was brought into contact. Rank and title, great social position, the power of the purse and the power of the Press, nor his own self-interests, could ever move Edward Whymper to seek the favour of those who for their own sake, or for the sake of what they have done, he did not already respect. Secure in the knowledge of his own just and honourable dealings with all men, and seeking only the approval of his conscience, he was content to go his own way in the world, a strange, strong, lonely, but in many respects a remarkable man—I think in force of character and determination the most remarkable man I have ever known. To me, as to many others of whom I am aware, he did many kindnesses and showed constant friendliness, and if in the opinion of my readers I seem but ill to have requited these kindnesses and that friendliness, by drawing a faithful rather than a flattering picture of the man as I knew him, it is because he was too sincere, too honest, too genuine, too fearless to wish it otherwise. Let me, however, in concluding this sketch, give one more picture of him as I often saw him—a picture which I have purposely kept to the last for the reason that it shows him in a light which is probably all unknown to those who did not see him in his home and in his daily life, and because it is a memory of him upon which I like to linger.

Born bachelor as he always seemed to me—I left Westcliff shortly before his marriage, and did not know him and cannot imagine him as a married man—he was extremely fond of and invariably kind to children. With children he was another being, and, grim as he could be to grown-ups, children invariably liked and trusted him. My earliest experience of this was on the evening after my first supper with him. He had been to town, and, as I was walking towards the station to purchase an evening paper, I saw him stalking in front of me, arrayed in a black greatcoat and top hat and black leather leggings. In one hand he carried his bag, and by the other he clasped the hand of a tiny girl-child, poorly clad and hatless, whom he stooped to comfort as tenderly as could any woman, and in fact took out his own handkerchief to wipe away her tears. The little mite, who hailed from East London, had been sent by some charitable person for a week by the sea to one of the many Holiday Homes for the Poor in Southend. How she had become lost I do not remember, but lost she certainly was, learning which Whymper had comforted, quieted, and coaxed her into telling him where her temporary home was, and when I met him he was on his way to take her there. My own stepson, then a lad of twelve and a cadet on H.M.S. Worcester, was devoted to him, being especially proud that the greatest of mountaineers was at the trouble of giving him lessons in climbing. Up and down the cliff slopes of Southend, Whymper marched the lad, impressing upon him the importance of always going at one steady and uniform rate, never, except under exceptional circumstances when haste was absolutely necessary, forcing the pace or indulging in sprinting; teaching him to walk from the hips mechanically and machine wise, so that no strain was put upon the heart and lungs, and instructing him in the control and use of the breath. When after the holiday the boy went back to the Worcester, he sent Whymper his autograph book, asking him to inscribe his name therein. In it, the man whom some people thought grim, surly, and morose, wrote: “I have been dying to see you again. When are you coming along? Edward Whymper. Feb. 24, 1905.”

The boy whom Whymper always spoke of as his “friend” is at this moment serving his King and country in France as a soldier, throwing up his post in Canada directly war was declared. He is too young to feel—as some of us who are young no longer now, alas, feel, as has been said, that old friends are the best, and it is to the grave we must go to find them; but he is only one of many to whom, when they were children, the dead man showed constant kindness, and who will to their life’s end hold the name of the great mountaineer, who was also a true child-lover, in honour, gratitude, and affection.