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.”