Ever sincerely yours
William Sharp.
From Edinburgh he and his secretary-sister Mary went to Lismore, so that he might “feel the dear West once more.” From Oban he reported to Mr. W. J. Robertson on a post card addressed to “Ri Willeam Iain MacRiobeart mhic Donnach aidh”——
“Awful accident in a lonely Isle of the West.
A distinguished stranger was observing the vasty deep, and had laid a flask-filled cup on a rock beside him when a tamned gull upset it and at same time carried off a valuable Indian cheroot. Deep sympathy is everywhere expressed, for the distinguished stranger, the lost cheroot, and above all for the spilt cup and abruptly emptied flask. A gloom has been cast over the whole island.
Verb: Sap:”
From Lismore he wrote to me:
“April 19. It was sweet to fall asleep last night to the sound of the hill-wind and the swift troubled waters. We had a lovely walk in the late afternoon, and again in the sombre moonlit night. It came on too stormy for me to go round to the Cavern later, however. I’ll try again. I was there about first dusk, with Mary. To my chagrin there was neither sound nor sight of the sea-woman, but she must be there for MacC. has twice heard her sobbing and crying out at him when he passed close in the black darkness. There was only a lapwing wailing near by, but both Mary and I heard a singular furtive sound like something in a trailing silk dress whispering to itself as it slid past in the dusk—but this, I think, was a curious echo of what’s called ‘a sobbing wave’ in some narrow columnar hidden hollow opening from the sea. Mary got the creeps, and loathed a story I told her about a midianmara that sang lovely songs but only so as to drown the listener and suck the white warm marrow out of his spine.
Later I joined MacC. for a bit over the flickering fireflaucht. I got him to tell me all over again and more fully about the Maighdeann Mhara. The first time he heard ‘something’ was before his fright last November. ‘There was cèol then’ he said....
I asked in Gaelic ‘were songs sung?’ He said ‘Yes, at times.’ Mrs. MacC. was angry at him he said, and said he hadn’t the common-sense of a jenny-cluckett (a clucking hen)—but (and there’s a world of difference in that) she hadn’t heard what he had heard. So to cheer him up I told him a story about a crab that fed on the brains of a drowned man, and grew with such awful and horrible wisdom that it climbed up the stairway of the seaweed and on to a big rock and waved its claws at the moon and cursed God and the world, and then died raving mad. Seeing how it worked upon him, I said I would tell him another, and worse, about a lobster—but he was just as bad as Mary, and said he would wait for the lobster till the morning, and seemed so absurdly eager to get safely to bed that the pleasant chat had to be abruptly broken off....