in good company 23

in good company 23

‘DEAR SIR,

 

‘Accept my thanks for your most interesting volume. I don’t think

I have been higher than about 7000 feet, and so I look on your

Chimborazos and Cotopaxis with all the greater veneration.

 

‘Yours very truly,

TENNYSON.’

 

“Now you can hardly call that a characteristic or even a particularly

interesting letter,” continued Whymper, “but the writing appears to

have given the poet some trouble, for the present Lord Tennyson tells

me that, after his father’s death, he found several drafts of it, I

think he said six, in a blotting pad. It was, as I say, one of the

last, if not the very last letter Tennyson ever wrote, and one of two

things about it is true. Either his approaching end had so affected

his powers that he found it difficult to frame even an ordinary

letter of acknowledgment, or else, realising that his letters would

one day inevitably be collected and printed, he was too fastidious an

artist to let even a casual note of thanks come from his pen without

striving to impart to it some touch of distinction and originality,

some turn of a phrase which would give a hint of the power and the

personality of the writer. What’s _your_ solution of the problem?”

 

As I had no solution to offer, Whymper told me another story of

Tennyson, which by this time may or may not--I do not know--have

got into print.[B] But even if so--since I first heard it when it

was quite new, and since stories of the sort get varied in the

telling--there is some probability that Whymper’s version is the

correct one. I set it down, as nearly as I can recollect, as he told

it.

 

[B] Since this was written, I have told the story in a brief

sketch of Whymper that was published in a monthly magazine.

 

At a garden party, a rather gushing young girl went up to the hostess

and said: “Oh, is that really, as I’m told, Lord Tennyson sitting

there by himself smoking on that rustic seat?” “Yes, my dear, that is

he,” was the reply. “He occasionally does me the honour of calling to

see me, and dropped in, not knowing that I was entertaining to-day.”

“Oh, I should so like to meet him. Do introduce me,” said the girl.

“My dear, Lord Tennyson hates to be bothered by strangers,” answered

the hostess. “And one reason perhaps why he comes to see me is that

he knows I never exploit him in that way.” “Oh, but I should love to

be able to say I’ve met him,” persisted the other. “Well, _say_ you

have met him and leave it at that,” was the answer. “Here you are and

there he is, so it won’t be altogether untrue. He won’t trouble to

contradict it if he ever heard it, which is not likely, and I’m sure

I shan’t.”

 

The girl, however, would take no refusal. Nothing would content her

but actually meeting and speaking to Tennyson, so losing patience

her hostess said: “Very well. If he is rude to you--as he can be

to people who force themselves upon him--your blood be upon your

own head. You can’t say I haven’t warned you. Come along.” “Lord

Tennyson,” said the hostess when the two had walked together to the

seat where the Laureate was smoking, “this is Miss B----, daughter of

an old friend of mine, who is very, very anxious to have the honour

of saying How-do-you-do to you.” “How-d’you-do?” responded Tennyson

gruffly, and scarcely looking up.

 

Seating herself beside him the girl attempted awkwardly to carry

on some sort of conversation, but, as all she got in reply was an

occasional “Humph!” or else stony silence, she lost her nerve and

began, schoolgirl-wise, to wriggle and fidget in her seat. Then

the Great Man spoke. “You’re like the rest of them,” he grunted,

“you’re laced too tightly. I can hear your stays creak.” Abashed and

embarrassed the girl withdrew. Later in the afternoon Tennyson came

behind her, and laying a hand on her shoulder, said kindly, “I was

wrong just now, young lady. It wasn’t your stays I heard creaking,

but my braces. They’re hitched up too tightly. Sorry.” And he lounged

away.

 

The story may not be new and may not be true, but Whymper found huge

enjoyment in the telling of it, possibly because he had himself the

reputation of sharing Tennyson’s dislike to the intrusive stranger.

To speak plainly indeed, Whymper could be very rude, as witness the

following incident. He invited me once to accompany him to a lecture

given by a great climber. Soon after we had entered the hall and

before the lecture commenced, a man, whom Whymper told me later

he was sure he had never set eyes on, bustled up to where we were

sitting, and extending a hand said effusively:

 

“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.

 

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.”