William Sharp (Fiona Macleod): A Memoir Compiled by His Wife Elizabeth A. Sharp

by Elizabeth A. Sharp

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 congregation of ballast and cargo, hoping to wake to the sound of waves. Alas! a storm swept the Forth from west to the east. The gale lasted close on three days. On the morning of the third, three pale and wretched starvelings were ignominiously packed back to Blair Lodge, where the admiration of comrades did not make up for punishment fare and a liberal flogging.

“A fourth attempt, however, proved successful, though differently for each of us. One of the three, a rotund, squirrel-eyed boy, named Robinson, was shipped off as an apprentice in an Indiaman. A few years later he went to his dreamed-of South Seas, was killed in a squabble with hostile islanders, and, as was afterward discovered, afforded a feast (I am sure a succulent one) to his captors. The second of the three is now a dean in the Anglican Church. I have never met him, but once at a big gathering I saw the would-be pirate in clerical garb, with a protuberant front, and bald. I think Robinson had the better luck. As for the third of the three, he has certainly had his fill of wandering, if he has never encountered cannibals and if he is neither a dean nor bald.”

When their son was twelve years old, William’s parents left Paisley and took a house in Glasgow (India Street), and he was sent as a day scholar to the Glasgow Academy. In his sixteenth year he was laid low with a severe attack of typhoid fever. It was to that summer during the long months of convalescence in the West that many of his memories of Seumas Macleod belong. Of this old fisherman he wrote: “When I was sixteen I was on a remote island where he lived, and on the morrow of my visit I came at sunrise upon the old man standing looking seaward with his bonnet removed from his long white locks; and upon my speaking to Seumas (when I saw he was not ‘at his prayers’) was answered, in Gaelic of course, ‘Every morning like this I take my hat off to the beauty of the world.’ Although I was sent to the Academy at Glasgow, and afterward to the University, I spent much of each year in boating, sailing, hill-climbing, wandering, owing to the unusual freedom allowed to me during our summer residence in the country and during the other vacations. From fifteen to eighteen I sailed up every loch, fjord, and inlet in the Western Highlands and islands, from Arran and Colonsay to Skye and the Northern Hebrides, from the Rhinns of Galloway to the Ord of Sutherland. Wherever I went I eagerly associated myself with fishermen, sailors, shepherds, gamekeepers, poachers, gipsies, wandering pipers, and other musicians.” In this way he made many friends, especially among the fishermen and shepherds, stayed with them in their houses, and, ‘having the Gaelic,’ talked with them, gained their confidence, and listened to tales told by old men, and old mothers by the fireside during the long twilight evenings, or in the herring-boats at night.

“At eighteen I ‘took to the heather,’ as we say in the north, for a prolonged period....” Up the Gare-loch, close to Ardentinny, there was a point of waste land running into the water, frequently used as camping ground by roving tinkers and gipsies. Many a time he sailed there in his little boat to get in touch with these wandering folk. One summer he found there an encampment of true gipsies, who had come over from mid-Europe, a fine, swarthy, picturesque race. The appeal was irresistible, strengthened by the attraction of a beautiful gipsy girl. He made friends with the tribe, and persuaded the ‘king’ to let him join them; and so he became ‘star-brother’ and ‘sun-brother’ to them, and wandered with them over many hills and straths of the West Highlands. To him, who at all times hated the restrictions and limitations of conventional life, to whom romance was a necessity, this free life ‘on the heather’ was the realisation of many dreams. In those few months he learned diverse things; much wood-lore, bird-lore, how to know the ways of the wind, and to use the stars as compass. I do not know exactly how long he was with the camp; two months, perhaps, or three. For to him they were so full of wonder, so vivid, that in later life, when he spoke of them, he lost all count of time, and on looking back to those days, packed with new and keen experiences so wholly in keeping with his temperament, weeks seemed as months, and he ceased to realise that the experience was compressed into one short summer. He never wove these memories into a sequent romance, though in later time he thought of so doing. For one thing, the present was the absorbing actuality to him, and the future a dream to realise; whether in life or in work the past was past, and he preferred to project himself toward the future and what it might have in store for him. But traces of the influence of those gipsy days are to be seen in Children of To-morrow, in the character of Annaik in Green Fire, and in the greater part of the story of “The Gipsy Christ,” published later in the collection of short stories entitled Madge o’ the Pool. He also had projected a romance to be called The Gipsy Trail, but it was never even begun.