Those who try to be artists use, time after time, the matter of their
recollections, setting and resetting little coloured memories of men and
scenes, rigging up (it may be) some especial friend in the attire of a
buccaneer, and decreeing armies to manœuvre, or murder to be done, on the
playground of their youth. But the memories are a fairy gift which
cannot be worn out in using. After a dozen services in various tales,
the little sunbright pictures of the past still shine in the mind’s eye
with not a lineament defaced, not a tint impaired. _Glück und Unglück
wird Gesang_, if Goethe pleases; yet only by endless avatars, the
original re-embodying after each. So that a writer, in time, begins to
wonder at the perdurable life of these impressions; begins, perhaps, to
fancy that he wrongs them when he weaves them in with fiction; and
looking back on them with ever-growing kindness, puts them at last,
substantive jewels, in a setting of their own.
One or two of these pleasant spectres I think I have laid. I used one
but the other day: a little eyot of dense, freshwater sand, where I once
waded deep in butterburrs, delighting to hear the song of the river on
both sides, and to tell myself that I was indeed and at last upon an
island. Two of my puppets lay there a summer’s day, hearkening to the
shearers at work in riverside fields and to the drums of the gray old
garrison upon the neighbouring hill. And this was, I think, done
rightly: the place was rightly peopled—and now belongs not to me but to
my puppets—for a time at least. In time, perhaps, the puppets will grow
faint; the original memory swim up instant as ever; and I shall once more
lie in bed, and see the little sandy isle in Allan Water as it is in
nature, and the child (that once was me) wading there in butterburrs; and
wonder at the instancy and virgin freshness of that memory; and be
pricked again, in season and out of season, by the desire to weave it
into art.
There is another isle in my collection, the memory of which besieges me.
I put a whole family there, in one of my tales; and later on, threw upon
its shores, and condemned to several days of rain and shellfish on its
tumbled boulders, the hero of another. The ink is not yet faded; the
sound of the sentences is still in my mind’s ear; and I am under a spell
to write of that island again.
I
The little isle of Earraid lies close in to the south-west corner of the
Ross of Mull: the sound of Iona on one side, across which you may see the
isle and church of Columba; the open sea to the other, where you shall be
able to mark, on a clear, surfy day, the breakers running white on many
sunken rocks. I first saw it, or first remembered seeing it, framed in
the round bull’s-eye of a cabin port, the sea lying smooth along its
shores like the waters of a lake, the colourless clear light of the early
morning making plain its heathery and rocky hummocks. There stood upon
it, in these days, a single rude house of uncemented stones, approached
by a pier of wreckwood. It must have been very early, for it was then
summer, and in summer, in that latitude, day scarcely withdraws; but even
at that hour the house was making a sweet smoke of peats which came to me
over the bay, and the bare-legged daughters of the cotter were wading by
the pier. The same day we visited the shores of the isle in the ship’s
boats; rowed deep into Fiddler’s Hole, sounding as we went; and having
taken stock of all possible accommodation, pitched on the northern inlet
as the scene of operations. For it was no accident that had brought the
lighthouse steamer to anchor in the Bay of Earraid. Fifteen miles away
to seaward, a certain black rock stood environed by the Atlantic rollers,
the outpost of the Torran reefs. Here was a tower to be built, and a
star lighted, for the conduct of seamen. But as the rock was small, and
hard of access, and far from land, the work would be one of years; and my
father was now looking for a shore station, where the stones might be
quarried and dressed, the men live, and the tender, with some degree of
safety, lie at anchor.
I saw Earraid next from the stern thwart of an Iona lugger, Sam Bough and
I sitting there cheek by jowl, with our feet upon our baggage, in a
beautiful, clear, northern summer eve. And behold! there was now a pier
of stone, there were rows of sheds, railways, travelling-cranes, a street
of cottages, an iron house for the resident engineer, wooden bothies for
the men, a stage where the courses of the tower were put together
experimentally, and behind the settlement a great gash in the hillside
where granite was quarried. In the bay, the steamer lay at her moorings.
All day long there hung about the place the music of chinking tools; and
even in the dead of night, the watchman carried his lantern to and fro in
the dark settlement and could light the pipe of any midnight muser. It
was, above all, strange to see Earraid on the Sunday, when the sound of
the tools ceased and there fell a crystal quiet. All about the green
compound men would be sauntering in their Sunday’s best, walking with
those lax joints of the reposing toiler, thoughtfully smoking, talking
small, as if in honour of the stillness, or hearkening to the wailing of
the gulls. And it was strange to see our Sabbath services, held, as they
were, in one of the bothies, with Mr. Brebner reading at a table, and the
congregation perched about in the double tier of sleeping bunks; and to
hear the singing of the psalms, “the chapters,” the inevitable Spurgeon’s
sermon, and the old, eloquent lighthouse prayer.
In fine weather, when by the spy-glass on the hill the sea was observed
to run low upon the reef, there would be a sound of preparation in the
very early morning; and before the sun had risen from behind Ben More,
the tender would steam out of the bay. Over fifteen sea-miles of the
great blue Atlantic rollers she ploughed her way, trailing at her tail a
brace of wallowing stone-lighters. The open ocean widened upon either
board, and the hills of the mainland began to go down on the horizon,
before she came to her unhomely destination, and lay-to at last where the
rock clapped its black head above the swell, with the tall iron barrack
on its spider legs, and the truncated tower, and the cranes waving their
arms, and the smoke of the engine-fire rising in the mid-sea. An ugly
reef is this of the Dhu Heartach; no pleasant assemblage of shelves, and
pools, and creeks, about which a child might play for a whole summer
without weariness, like the Bell Rock or the Skerryvore, but one oval
nodule of black-trap, sparsely bedabbled with an inconspicuous fucus, and
alive in every crevice with a dingy insect between a slater and a bug.
No other life was there but that of sea-birds, and of the sea itself,
that here ran like a mill-race, and growled about the outer reef for
ever, and ever and again, in the calmest weather, roared and spouted on
the rock itself. Times were different upon Dhu-Heartach when it blew,
and the night fell dark, and the neighbour lights of Skerryvore and
Rhu-val were quenched in fog, and the men sat prisoned high up in their
iron drum, that then resounded with the lashing of the sprays. Fear sat
with them in their sea-beleaguered dwelling; and the colour changed in
anxious faces when some greater billow struck the barrack, and its
pillars quivered and sprang under the blow. It was then that the foreman
builder, Mr. Goodwillie, whom I see before me still in his rock-habit of
undecipherable rags, would get his fiddle down and strike up human
minstrelsy amid the music of the storm. But it was in sunshine only that
I saw Dhu-Heartach; and it was in sunshine, or the yet lovelier summer
afterglow, that the steamer would return to Earraid, ploughing an
enchanted sea; the obedient lighters, relieved of their deck cargo,
riding in her wake more quietly; and the steersman upon each, as she rose
on the long swell, standing tall and dark against the shining west.
But it was in Earraid itself that I delighted chiefly. The lighthouse
settlement scarce encroached beyond its fences; over the top of the first
brae the ground was all virgin, the world all shut out, the face of
things unchanged by any of man’s doings. Here was no living presence,
save for the limpets on the rocks, for some old, gray, rain-beaten ram
that I might rouse out of a ferny den betwixt two boulders, or for the
haunting and the piping of the gulls. It was older than man; it was
found so by incoming Celts, and seafaring Norsemen, and Columba’s
priests. The earthy savour of the bog-plants, the rude disorder of the
boulders, the inimitable seaside brightness of the air, the brine and the
iodine, the lap of the billows among the weedy reefs, the sudden
springing up of a great run of dashing surf along the sea-front of the
isle, all that I saw and felt my predecessors must have seen and felt
with scarce a difference. I steeped myself in open air and in past ages.
“Delightful would it be to me to be in _Uchd Ailiun_
On the pinnacle of a rock,
That I might often see
The face of the ocean;
That I might hear the song of the wonderful birds,
Source of happiness;
That I might hear the thunder of the crowding waves
Upon the rocks:
At times at work without compulsion—
This would be delightful;
At times plucking dulse from the rocks
At times at fishing.”
So, about the next island of Iona, sang Columba himself twelve hundred
years before. And so might I have sung of Earraid.
And all the while I was aware that this life of sea-bathing and
sun-burning was for me but a holiday. In that year cannon were roaring
for days together on French battlefields; and I would sit in my isle (I
call it mine, after the use of lovers) and think upon the war, and the
loudness of these far-away battles, and the pain of the men’s wounds, and
the weariness of their marching. And I would think too of that other war
which is as old as mankind, and is indeed the life of man: the unsparing
war, the grinding slavery of competition; the toil of seventy years,
dear-bought bread, precarious honour, the perils and pitfalls, and the
poor rewards. It was a long look forward; the future summoned me as with
trumpet calls, it warned me back as with a voice of weeping and
beseeching; and I thrilled and trembled on the brink of life, like a
childish bather on the beach.
There was another young man on Earraid in these days, and we were much
together, bathing, clambering on the boulders, trying to sail a boat and
spinning round instead in the oily whirlpools of the roost. But the most
part of the time we spoke of the great uncharted desert of our futures;
wondering together what should there befall us; hearing with surprise the
sound of our own voices in the empty vestibule of youth. As far, and as
hard, as it seemed then to look forward to the grave, so far it seems now
to look backward upon these emotions; so hard to recall justly that loath
submission, as of the sacrificial bull, with which we stooped our necks
under the yoke of destiny. I met my old companion but the other day; I
cannot tell of course what he was thinking; but, upon my part, I was
wondering to see us both so much at home, and so composed and sedentary
in the world; and how much we had gained, and how much we had lost, to
attain to that composure; and which had been upon the whole our best
estate: when we sat there prating sensibly like men of some experience,
or when we shared our timorous and hopeful counsels in a western islet.