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.