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!”