WILLIAM SHARP (FIONA MACLEOD) A MEMOIR COMPILED BY HIS WIFE ELIZABETH A. SHARP by ELIZABETH A. SHARP (best ebook reader ubuntu txt) 📖

on the resources of

his imagination to fill the long hours. One snowy day, when he was

five years old, and he was tired of playing with his baby sisters, who

could not sufficiently rise to the occasion and play the distressed

damsels to his deeds of knightly chivalry, he determined to sally forth

in search of adventure. He buckled his sword above his kilt—it was

afternoon and the light was waning—stole downstairs and out of the

house, hatless, with flying curls, and marched down the street to lay

siege to the nearest castle. A short distance away stood the house of

a friend of his father, and upon that the besieger turned his attack.

It loomed in his mind as the castle of his desire. He strode resolutely

up to the door, with great difficulty, on tiptoe, reached the handle

of the bell, pulled a long peal, and then demanded of the maid that

she and all within should surrender to him and deliver up the keys of

the castle. The maid fell in with his humour, was properly frightened,

and begged to be allowed to summon her mistress, who at once promised

submission, led the victor into her room, and by a blazing fire gave

him the keys in the form of much coveted sweets, held him in her lap

till in the warmth he fell asleep, rolled him up in a blanket, and

carried him home.

 

The other story is indicative not of the restless adventure-loving side

of him, but of the poet dreamer.

 

During the child’s sixth year his father had taken a house for the

summer months on the shores of Loch Long; the great heather-clad

hills, peak behind peak, the deep waters of the winding loch, were a

ceaseless delight to the boy. But above all else there lay an undefined

attraction in a little wood, a little pine belt nestling on the

hillside above the house. It was an enchanted land to him, away from

the everyday world, where human beings never came, but where he met

his invisible playmates, visible to him. “I went there very often,”

he wrote later. “I thought that belt of firs had a personality as

individual as that of any human being, a sanctity not to be disturbed

by sport or play.” It was a holy place to him. The sense of the

Infinite touched him there. He had heard of God in the church, and as

described from the pulpit that Being was to him remote and forbidding.

But here he seemed conscious of a Presence that was benign, beautiful.

He felt there was some great power (he could not define the feeling to

himself) behind the beauty he saw; behind the wind he did not see, but

heard; behind the wonder of the sunshine and sunset and in the silences

he loved, that awoke in him a desire to belong to it. And so, moved

to express his desire in some way, he built a little altar of stones,

rough stones, put together under a swaying pine, and on it he laid

white flowers in offering.

 

The three influences that taught him most in childhood were the wind,

the woods, and the sea. Water throughout his life had an irresistible

charm for him—the sea, the mountain-loch, or the rushing headlong

waters of the hill-burns. To watch the play of moving waters was an

absorbing fascination, and he has told me how one bright night he had

crept on to a ledge of wet rocks behind a hill water-fall and had

lain there so that he might watch the play of moonlight through the

shimmering veil of waters.

 

“When I was a child,” he wrote later, “I used to throw offerings—small

coins, flowers, shells, even a newly caught trout, once a treasured

flint arrow-head—into the sea-loch by which we lived. My Hebridean

nurse had often told me of Shony, a mysterious sea-god, and I know I

spent much time in wasted adoration: a fearful worship, not unmixed

with disappointment and some anger. Not once did I see him. I was

frightened time after time, but the sudden cry of a heron, or the snort

of a pollack chasing the mackerel, or the abrupt uplifting of a seal’s

head became over-familiar, and I desired terror, and could not find

it by the shore. Inland, after dusk, there was always the mysterious

multitude of shadow. There, too, I could hear the wind leaping and

growling. But by the shore I never knew any dread, even in the darkest

night. The sound and company of the sea washed away all fears.”

 

But the child was not a dreamer only. He was a high-spirited little

chap, who loved swimming and fishing and climbing; and learned at an

early age to handle the oar and the tiller, and to understand the ways

and moods of a sailing boat; afraid of nothing and ready for any

adventure that offered.

 

My first recollections of him go back to my childhood. We were cousins;

my father was his father’s older brother. My mother was the daughter

of Robert Farquharson, of Breda and Allargue. In 1863 my Uncle David

had a house at Blairmore on the Gare-loch for the summer, and my mother

took her children to the neighbouring village of Strone, so that the

cousins might become acquainted. My impression of “Willie” is vivid:

a merry, mischievous little boy in his eighth year, with bright-brown

curly hair, blue-gray eyes, and a laughing face, and dressed in a tweed

kilt; eager, active in his endless invention of games and occupations,

and a veritable despot over his sisters in their play. He interested

his London cousins in showing them how to find crabs and spouting fish,

birds’ nests, and brambles; terrified them with tales of snakes in the

grass on the hills, and of the ghostly things that flitted about the

woods at night. But his chief delight was his punt. A great part of the

day he spent on and in the water, shouting with delight as he tossed

on the waves in the wake of a steamer, and he occasionally startled us

by being apparently capsized into the water, disappearing from sight,

and then clambering into the punt dripping and happy. But I remember

that with all his love of fun and teasing, he seemed to feel himself

different from the other children of his age, and would fly off alone

to the hillside or to the woods to his many friends among the birds

and the squirrels and the rabbits, with whose ways and habitations he

seemed so familiar.

 

About the dream and vision side of his life he learned early to be

silent. He soon realised that his playmates understood nothing of the

confused memories of previous lives that haunted him, and from which

he drew materials to weave into stories for his school-fellows in the

dormitory at nights. To his surprise he found they saw none of the

denizens of the other worlds—tree spirits and nature spirits, great and

small—so familiar to him, and who he imagined must be as obvious to

others as to himself. He could say about them as Lafcadio Hearn said

about ghosts and goblins, that he believed in them for the best of

possible reasons, because he saw them day and night.

 

He found, as have other imaginative psychic children, that he had an

inner life, a curious power of vision unshared by any one about him;

so that what he related was usually discredited. But the psychic side

of his nature was too intimately a part of himself to be killed by

misunderstanding. He learned early to shut it away—keep it as a thing

apart—a mystery of his own, a mystery to himself. This secrecy had two

direct results: he needed from time to time to get away alone, from

other people, so as again and again to get into touch with “the Green

Life,” as he called it, for spiritual refreshment; and it developed in

him a love not only of mystery for its own sake, but of mystification

also that became a marked characteristic, and eventually was one of the

factors which in his literary work led to the adoption of the pseudonym.

 

Once only, as far as I know, in the short psychic tale called “The Four

Winds of the Spirit,” did he, in his writings, make any reference to

his invisible playmates. I have often heard him speak of a beautiful,

gentle white Lady of the Woods, about whom he once wrote in a letter:

“For I, too, have my dream, my memory of one whom as a child I called

Star-Eyes, and whom later I called ‘Baumorair-na-mara,’ the Lady of the

Sea, and whom at least I knew to be no other than the woman who is in

the heart of women. I was not more than seven when one day, by a well,

near a sea-loch in Argyll, just as I was stooping to drink, my glancing

eyes lit on a tall woman standing among a mist of wild hyacinths under

three great sycamores. I stood, looking, as a fawn looks, wide-eyed,

unafraid. She did not speak, but she smiled, and because of the

love and beauty in her eyes I ran to her. She stooped and lifted

blueness out of the flowers, as one might lift foam out of a pool,

and I thought she threw it over me. When I was found lying among the

hyacinths dazed, and, as was thought, ill, I asked eagerly after the

lady in white, and with hair all shiny-gold like buttercups, but when I

found I was laughed at, or at last, when I passionately persisted, was

told I was sun-dazed and had been dreaming, I said no more—but I did

not forget.”

 

This boy dreamer began his education at home under a governess, and of

those early days I know little except that he was tractable, easily

taught, and sunny-natured.

 

He has given an account of his first experiences at school in a paper,

“In the Days of my Youth,” which he was asked to contribute to _M. A.

P._

 

“The first tragedy in my life was when I was captured for the sacrifice

of school. At least to me it seemed no less than a somewhat brutal

and certainly tyrannical capture, and my heart sank when, at the age

of eight (I did not know how fortunate I was to have escaped the

needless bondage of early schooling till I was eight years old), I

was dispatched to what was then one of the chief boarding-schools

in Scotland, Blair Lodge, in Polmont Woods, between Falkirk and

Linlithgow. It was beautifully situated, and though I then thought the

woods were forests and the Forth and Clyde canal a mighty stream, I was

glad some years ago, on revisiting the spot, to find that my boyish

memories were by no means so exaggerated as I feared. I am afraid I was

much more of a credit to my shepherd and fisher and gipsy friends than

to my parents or schoolmasters.

 

“On the very day of my arrival a rebellion had broken out, and by

natural instinct I was, like the Irishman the moment he arrived in

America, ‘agin the Government.’ I remember the rapture with which I

evaded a master’s pursuing grip, and was hauled in at a window by

exultant rebels. In that temporary haven the same afternoon I insulted

a big boy, whose peculiar physiognomy had amazed me to delighted

but impolite laughter, and forthwith experienced my first school

thrashing. Later in the day I had the satisfaction of coming out victor

in an equal combat with the heir of an Indian big-wig, whom, with

too ready familiarity, I had addressed as ‘Curry.’ As I was a rather

delicate and sensitive child, this was not a bad beginning, and I

recollect my exhilaration (despite aching bones and smarting spots) in

the thought that ‘school’ promised to be a more lively experience than

I had anticipated.

 

“I ran away three times, and I doubt if I learned more indoors than

I did on these occasions and in my many allowed and stolen outings.

The first flight for freedom was an ignominious failure. The second

occasion two of us were Screaming Eagle and Sitting Bull, and we had

a smothered fire o’ nights and ample provender (legally and illegally

procured), and we might have become habitual woodlanders had I not

ventured to a village and rolled downhill before me a large circular

cheese, for which, alas! I now blush to say, I forgot to pay or

even to leave my name and address. That cheese was our undoing. The

third time was nearly successful, and but for a gale my life, in all

probability, would have had an altogether different colour and accent.

We reached the port of Grangemouth, and were successful in our plot to

hide ourselves as stowaways. We slept that night amid smells, rats,

cockroaches, and a mysterious