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.