“Oh, how-do-you-do, Mr. Whymper? You won’t remember me, but I had the pleasure of meeting you in Switzerland.”
“No, I certainly don’t remember having had the pleasure of meeting you,” was Whymper’s caustic reply. “And I assure you my memory is of the best.”
“Ah, I was afraid you wouldn’t remember me,” answered the other still unabashed. “It was at Zermatt. I knew your friend Leslie Stephen very well.”
“Possibly,” answered Whymper drily. “The question is whether my friend Mr. Leslie Stephen would be equally sure that he knew you.”
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.