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.