Some of my happiest meanderings in Scotland have been taken under the
lead of a book. Indeed, for travel in a strange country there can be no
better courier. Not a guide-book, I mean, but a real book, and, by
preference, a novel.
Fiction, like wine, tastes best in the place where it was grown. And the
scenery of a foreign land (including architecture, which is artificial
landscape) grows less dreamlike and unreal to our perception when we
people it with familiar characters from our favourite novels. Even on a
first journey we feel ourselves among old friends. Thus to read _Romola_
in Florence, and _Les Misérables_ in Paris, and _Lorna Doone_ on Exmoor,
and _The Heart of Midlothian_ in Edinburgh, and _David Balfour_ in the
Pass of Glencoe, and _The Pirate_ in the Shetland Isles, is to get a new
sense of the possibilities of life. All these things have I done with
much inward contentment; and other things of like quality have I yet in
store; as, for example, the conjunction of _The Bonnie Brier-Bush_ with
Drumtochty, and _The Little Minister_ with Thrums, and _The Raiders_
with Galloway. But I never expect to pass pleasanter days than those I
spent with _A Princess of Thule_ among the Hebrides.
For then, to begin with, I was young; which is an unearned increment of
delight sure to be confiscated by the envious years and never regained.
But even youth itself was not to be compared with the exquisite felicity
of being deeply and desperately in love with Sheila, the clear-eyed
heroine of that charming book. In this innocent passion my gray-haired
comrades, Howard Crosby, the Chancellor of the University of New York,
and my father, an ex-Moderator of the Presbyterian General Assembly,
were ardent but generous rivals.
How great is the joy and how fascinating the pursuit of such an ethereal
affection! It enlarges the heart without embarrassing the conscience. It
is a cup of pure gladness with no bitterness in its dregs. It spends the
present moment with a free hand, and yet leaves no undesirable mortgage
upon the future. King Arthur, the founder of the Round Table, expressed
a conviction, according to Tennyson, that the most important element in
a young knight’s education is “the maiden passion for a maid.” Surely
the safest form in which this course in the curriculum may be taken is
by falling in love with a girl in a book. It is the only affair of the
kind into which a young fellow can enter without responsibility, and out
of which he can always emerge, when necessary, without discredit. And as
for the old fellow who still keeps up this education of the heart, and
worships his heroine with the ardour of a John Ridd and the fidelity of
a Henry Esmond, I maintain that he is exempt from all the penalties of
declining years. The man who can love a girl in a book may be old, but
never aged.
So we sailed, lovers all three, among the Western Isles, and whatever
ship it was that carried us, her figurehead was always the Princess
Sheila. Along the ruffled blue waters of the sounds and lochs that wind
among the roots of unpronounceable mountains, and past the dark hills of
Skye, and through the unnumbered flocks of craggy islets where the
sea-birds nest, the spell of the sweet Highland maid drew us, and we
were pilgrims to the _Ultima Thule_ where she lived and reigned.
The Lewis, with its tail-piece, the Harris, is quite a sizable island to
be appended to such a country as Scotland. It is a number of miles long,
and another number of miles wide, and it has a number of thousand
inhabitants—I should say as many as three-quarters of an inhabitant to
the square mile—and the conditions of agriculture and the fisheries are
extremely interesting and quarrelsome. All these I duly studied at the
time, and reported in a series of intolerably dull letters to the
newspaper which supplied a financial basis for my sentimental journey.
They are full of information; but I have been amused to note, after
these many years, how wide they steer of the true motive and interest of
the excursion. There is not even a hint of Sheila in any of them. Youth,
after all, is a shamefaced and secretive season; like the fringed
polygala, it hides its real blossom underground.
It was Sheila’s dark-blue dress and sailor hat with the white feather
that we looked for as we loafed through the streets of Stornoway, that
quaint metropolis of the herring-trade, where strings of fish alternated
with boxes of flowers in the windows, and handfuls of fish were spread
upon the roofs to dry just as the sliced apples are exposed upon the
kitchen-sheds of New England in September, and dark-haired women were
carrying great creels of fish on their shoulders, and groups of
sunburned men were smoking among the fishing-boats on the beach and
talking about fish, and sea-gulls were floating over the houses with
their heads turning from side to side and their bright eyes peering
everywhere for unconsidered trifles of fish, and the whole atmosphere of
the place, physical, mental, and moral, was pervaded with fish. It was
Sheila’s soft, sing-song Highland speech that we heard through the long,
luminous twilight in the pauses of that friendly chat on the balcony of
the little inn where a good fortune brought us acquainted with Sam
Bough, the mellow Edinburgh painter. It was Sheila’s low sweet brow, and
long black eyelashes, and tender blue eyes, that we saw before us as we
loitered over the open moorland, a far-rolling sea of brown billows,
reddened with patches of bell-heather, and brightened here and there
with little lakes lying wide open to the sky. And were not these
peat-cutters, with the big baskets on their backs, walking in silhouette
along the ridges, the people that Sheila loved and tried to help; and
were not these crofters’ cottages with thatched roofs, like beehives,
blending almost imperceptibly with the landscape, the dwellings into
which she planned to introduce the luxury of windows; and were not these
Standing Stones of Callernish, huge tombstones of a vanished religion,
the roofless temple from which the Druids paid their westernmost
adoration to the setting sun as he sank into the Atlantic—was not this
the place where Sheila picked the bunch of wild flowers and gave it to
her lover? There is nothing in history, I am sure, half so real to us as
some of the things in fiction. The influence of an event upon our
character is little affected by considerations as to whether or not it
ever happened.
There were three churches in Stornoway, all Presbyterian, of course, and
therefore full of pious emulation. The idea of securing an American
preacher for an August Sabbath seemed to fall upon them simultaneously,
and to offer the prospect of novelty without too much danger. The
brethren of the U. P. congregation, being a trifle more gleg than the
others, arrived first at the inn, and secured the promise of a morning
sermon from Chancellor Howard Crosby. The session of the Free Kirk came
in a body a little later, and to them my father pledged himself for the
evening sermon. The senior elder of the Established Kirk, a snuff-taking
man and very deliberate, was the last to appear, and to his request for
an afternoon sermon there was nothing left to offer but the services of
the young probationer in theology. I could see that it struck him as a
perilous adventure. Questions about “the fundamentals” glinted in his
watery eye. He crossed and uncrossed his legs with solemnity, and blew
his nose so frequently in a huge red silk handkerchief that it seemed
like a signal of danger. At last he unburdened himself of his
hesitations.
“Ah’m not saying that the young man will not be orthodox—ahem! But ye
know, sir, in the Kirk, we are not using hymns, but just the pure Psawms
of Daffit, in the meetrical fairsion. And ye know, sir, they are ferry
tifficult in the reating, whatefer, for a young man, and one that iss a
stranger. And if his father will just be coming with him in the pulpit,
_to see that nothing iss said amiss, that will be ferry comforting to
the congregation_.”
So the dear governor swallowed his laughter gravely and went surety for
his son. They appeared together in the church, a barnlike edifice, with
great galleries half-way between the floor and the roof. Still higher
up, the pulpit stuck like a swallow’s nest against the wall. The two
ministers climbed the precipitous stair and found themselves in a box so
narrow that one must stand perforce, while the other sat upon the only
seat. In this “ride and tie” fashion they went through the service. When
it was time to preach, the young man dropped the doctrines as discreetly
as possible upon the upturned countenances beneath him. I have forgotten
now what it was all about, but there was a quotation from the Song of
Solomon, ending with “Sweet is thy voice, and thy countenance is
comely.” And when it came to that, the probationer’s eyes (if the truth
must be told) went searching through that sea of faces for one that
should be familiar to his heart, and to which he might make a personal
application of the Scripture passage—even the face of Sheila.
There are rivers in the Lewis, at least two of them, and on one of these
we had the offer of a rod for a day’s fishing. Accordingly we cast lots,
and the lot fell upon the youngest, and I went forth with a tall,
red-legged gillie, to try for my first salmon. The Whitewater came
singing down out of the moorland into a rocky valley, and there was a
merry curl of air on the pools, and the silver fish were leaping from
the stream. The gillie handled the big rod as if it had been a fairy’s
wand, but to me it was like a giant’s spear. It was a very different
affair from fishing with five ounces of split bamboo on a Long Island
trout-pond. The monstrous fly, like an awkward bird, went fluttering
everywhere but in the right direction. It was the mercy of Providence
that preserved the gillie’s life. But he was very patient and
forbearing, leading me on from one pool to another, as I spoiled the
water and snatched the hook out of the mouth of rising fish, until at
last we found a salmon that knew even less about the niceties of
salmon-fishing than I did. He seized the fly firmly, before I could pull
it away, and then, in a moment, I found myself attached to a creature
with the strength of a whale and the agility of a flying-fish. He led me
rushing up and down the bank like a madman. He played on the surface
like a whirlwind, and sulked at the bottom like a stone. He meditated,
with ominous delay, in the middle of the deepest pool, and then, darting
across the river, flung himself clean out of water and landed far up on
the green turf of the opposite shore. My heart melted like a snowflake
in the sea, and I thought that I had lost him forever. But he rolled
quietly back into the water with the hook still set in his nose. A few
minutes afterwards I brought him within reach of the gaff, and my first
salmon was glittering on the grass beside me.
Then I remembered that William Black had described this very fish in _A
Princess of Thule_. I pulled the book from my pocket, and, lighting a
pipe, sat down to read that delightful chapter over again. The breeze
played softly down the valley. The warm sunlight was filled with the
musical hum of insects and the murmur of falling waters. I thought how
much pleasanter it would have been to learn salmon-fishing, as Black’s
hero did, from the Maid of Borva, than from a red-headed gillie. But,
then, his salmon, after leaping across the stream, got away; whereas
mine was safe. A man cannot have everything in this world. I picked a
spray of rosy bell-heather from the bank of the river, and pressed it
between the leaves of the book in memory of Sheila.