An incident showed me that his malaise was curable by one method only. A telegram had come for him that morning, and I took it to his study. I could get no answer. I knocked, louder, then louder,—at last he opened the door with a curiously dazed look in his face. I explained. He answered “Ah, I could not hear you for the sound of the waves!” It was the first indication to me, in words, of what troubled him.
That evening he started for Glasgow en route for Arran, where I knew he would find peace.
“The following morning we (for a kinswoman was with me) stood on the Greenock pier waiting for the Hebridean steamer and before long were landed on an island, almost the nearest we could reach that I loved so well.... That night, with the sea breaking less than a score of yards from where I lay, I slept, though for three nights I had not been able to sleep. When I woke the trouble was gone.”
There is a curious point in his telling of this episode. Although the essay is written over the signature of “Fiona Macleod” and belongs to that particular phase of work, nevertheless it is obviously “William Sharp” who tells the story, for the “we” who stood on the pier at Greenock is himself in his dual capacity; “his kinswoman” is his other self.
He wrote to me on reaching his destination:
Corrie, Isle of Arran,
20: 2: 1895.
“You will have had my telegram of my safe arrival here. There was no snow to speak of along the road from Brodick (for no steamer comes here)—so I had neither to ride nor sail as threatened: indeed, owing to the keen frost (which has made the snow like powder) there is none on the mountains except in the hollows, though the summits and flanks are crystal white with a thin veil of frozen snow.
It was a most glorious sail from Ardrossan. The sea was a sheet of blue and purple washed with gold. Arran rose above all like a dream of beauty. I was the sole passenger in the steamer, for the whole island! What made the drive of six miles more beautiful than ever was the extraordinary fantastic beauty of the frozen waterfalls and burns caught as it were in the leap. Sometimes these immense icicles hung straight and long, like a Druid’s beard: sometimes in wrought sheets of gold, or magic columns and spaces of crystal.
Sweet it was to smell the pine and the heather and bracken, and the salt weed upon the shore. The touch of dream was upon everything, from the silent hills to the brooding herons by the shore.