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.