in good company 24

in good company 24

In smoking, as in everything else, he was methodical, and had one

counted the seconds that passed between each puff, the intervals

would have been nearly identical.

 

Had I answered him truthfully I should have replied, “Say? What can I

say except ‘Thank heaven!’ and that I’m starving?” instead of which I

answered with apparent politeness but hidden irony:

 

“Thank you. When you’re quite ready.”

 

I regretted it the next moment, for, taking me too literally at my

word, he resumed his pipe, relighted it, and pointing the stem at a

photograph of himself upon the mantelshelf, remarked:

 

“I’m extraordinarily particular about small matters. Does anything

strike you in that portrait?”

 

“It’s a very good likeness,” I sighed, with a strange sinking of the

inner man, “and very characteristic, inasmuch as you are smoking, if

I mistake not, that very pipe.”

 

He smiled cryptically.

 

“Does nothing else strike you? Look again!”

 

I groaned inwardly, but looked.

 

“And the same suit?”

 

“Anything else?”

 

“Well,” I said desperately, “you look so cheerful, so well fed and so

happy, that I can only suppose you had just had your supper. Now as I

lunched at one o’clock and haven’t had as much as a sup of tea since,

I’m horribly hungry, and in want of mine.”

 

Saying no more than a mere “Come along,” and carrying the pipe and

the photograph in his hand, he led the way into the next room, where

supper--all cold--was upon the table. But such a supper! Anchovies,

chicken, calves’ foot jelly, clotted Devonshire cream and other

delicacies, with rare old Burgundy and the best of champagne.

 

When I had been abundantly helped, Whymper took up the photograph,

and again pointing at it with the pipe-stem, said:

 

“What I wondered was whether you’d notice that the smoke coming from

the bowl of the pipe has been painted-in upon the negative. There

was no smoke visible in the original picture. When you get to know

me better you’ll find that I’m slow and methodical but minutely

accurate, even about little things. I think you told me once that

you set some store by the many signed portraits that have been given

to you by your literary friends. Since the portrait was the cause of

keeping you from your supper, and if you’d care to add so uncouth

a face as mine to your gallery, I’ll give it you. But I’ll sign it

first.”

 

It was well that he had warned me that he was slow and methodical.

Never was there such a business as the signing of that portrait.

First he carefully washed and examined his pen, trying it at least

half a dozen times upon a sheet of note-paper. Then the ink did not

run as freely as it should, and further protracted operations of a

cleansing and refilling nature were necessary. Next a book on which

to rest the picture and a blotting-pad had to be found and placed in

position. Then, after further and repeated trial-trips of his pen

upon the harbour waters of a sheet of note-paper, he launched his

craft upon the big seas and settled down seriously to the business of

signing the photograph. Had it been a death-warrant or a cheque for

£100,000 to which he was momentously affixing a signature, he could

not have gone to work more carefully. In a round, neat, clerkly hand

he slowly and laboriously penned his name “Edward Whymper” with the

date beneath the portrait--and the deed was done.

 

I have described thus lengthily the slow and methodical way in which

he set about signing this photograph for the reason that, trivial

as the incident may seem, it is illustrative of the character and

methods of the man. He walked slowly, thought slowly, worked slowly,

and talked slowly, not because of any sluggishness of brain or body,

but because every word, every action, was calculated and deliberate.

It was because he was so slow that he was so sure. Just as in

mountaineering he never moved a step until he was certain of the

foothold in front of him, so in conversation he never spoke before he

thought.

 

Artist as he originally was by profession, lecturer and mountaineer

as, either by chance or by circumstance, he afterwards became, by

temperament he was essentially a man of science; and even in casual

conversation he hated what was slipshod, random, or inexact. He was

an admirable listener to anyone who was speaking from knowledge; and

I have often admired the courtly, if somewhat stately, attention

he would accord to those who spoke, and with authority upon some

subject on which Whymper himself was not an expert. But when the

conversation was mainly in his hands, he liked to feel that he was

chairman as well as principal speaker at the meeting, and would

never allow the talk to run off at a tangent. If his companion

ventured an opinion upon some side issue which the conversation had

suggested, Whymper would pull him up magisterially by interposing,

“You were saying just now that you thought so and so. We will, if you

please, confine ourselves to that side of the matter before opening

up another.” Courteously as he phrased it, his “if you please” was

peremptory rather than persuasive, and so in a sense was merely

formally polite.

 

 

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

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