The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson – Swanston Edition. Volume 23

MY DEAR CHERLS, – I am well but have a little over-tired myself which is disgusting. This is a heathenish place near delightful places, but inhabited, alas! by a wholly bestial crowd.

ON SOME GHOSTLY COMPANIONS AT A SPA

I had an evil day when I
To Strathpeffer drew anigh,
For there I found no human soul,
But Ogres occupied the whole.
They had at first a human air
In coats and flannel underwear.
They rose and walked upon their feet
And filled their bellies full of meat,
Then wiped their lips when they had done —
But they were ogres every one.
Each issuing from his secret bower
I marked them in the morning hour.
By limp and totter, list and droop,
I singled each one from the group.
Detected ogres, from my sight
Depart to your congenial night
From these fair vales: from this fair day
Fleet, spectres, on your downward way,
Like changing figures in a dream
To Muttonhole and Pittenweem!
Or, as by harmony divine
The devils quartered in the swine,
If any baser place exist
In God’s great registration list —
Some den with wallow and a trough —
Find it, ye ogres, and be off!

    Yours, R. L. S.

To Isobel Strong

Further letters from Scotland during these months are lacking. The next was written, in answer to an inquiry from his stepdaughter at San Francisco, on the second day after his arrival at Davos.

    Hotel Belvedere, Davos, November 1880.

No my che-ild – not Kamschatka this trip, only the top of the Alps, or thereby; up in a little valley in a wilderness of snowy mountains; the Rhine not far from us, quite a little highland river; eternal snow-peaks on every hand. Yes; just this once I should like to go to the Vienna gardens[28 - In San Francisco.] with the family and hear Tweedledee and drink something and see Germans – though God knows we have seen Germans enough this while back. Naturally some in the Customs House on the Alsatian frontier, who would have made one die from laughing in a theatre, and provoked a smile from us even in that dismal juncture. To see them, big, blond, sham-Englishmen, but with an unqualifiable air of not quite fighting the sham through, diving into old women’s bags and going into paroxysms of arithmetic in white chalk, three or four of them (in full uniform) in full cry upon a single sum, with their brows bent and a kind of arithmetical agony upon their mugs. Madam, the diversion of cock-fighting has been much commended, but it was not a circumstance to that Custom House. They only opened one of our things: a basket. But when they met from within the intelligent gaze of Woggs, they all lay down and died. Woggs is a fine dog…

God bless you! May coins fall into your coffee and the finest wines and wittles lie smilingly about your path, with a kind of dissolving view of fine scenery by way of background; and may all speak well of you – and me too for that matter – and generally all things be ordered unto you totally regardless of expense and with a view to nothing in the world but enjoyment, edification, and a portly and honoured age. – Your dear papa,

    R. L. S.

To A. G. Dew-Smith

This, from the same place and about the same date, is addressed by way of thanks to a friend at Cambridge, the late Mr. A. G. Dew-Smith, who had sent him a present of a box of cigarettes. Mr. Dew-Smith, a man of fine artistic tastes and mechanical genius, with a silken, somewhat foreign, urbanity of bearing, was the original, so far as concerns manner and way of speech, of Attwater in the Ebb-Tide.

    [Hotel Belvedere, Davos, November 1880].

Figure me to yourself, I pray —
A man of my peculiar cut —
Apart from dancing and deray,[29 - “The whole front of the house was lighted, and there were pipes and fiddles, and as much dancing and deray within as used to be in Sir Robert’s house at Pace and Yule, and such high seasons.” – See Wandering Willie’s Tale in Redgauntlet, borrowed perhaps from Christ’s Kirk of the Green.]
Into an Alpine valley shut;

Shut in a kind of damned Hotel,
Discountenanced by God and man;
The food? – Sir, you would do as well
To cram your belly full of bran.

The company? Alas, the day
That I should dwell with such a crew,
With devil anything to say,
Nor any one to say it to!

The place? Although they call it Platz,
I will be bold and state my view;
It’s not a place at all – and that’s
The bottom verity, my Dew.

There are, as I will not deny,
Innumerable inns; a road;
Several Alps indifferent high;
The snow’s inviolable abode;

Eleven English parsons, all
Entirely inoffensive; four
True human beings – what I call
Human – the deuce a cipher more;

A climate of surprising worth;
Innumerable dogs that bark;
Some air, some weather, and some earth;
A native race – God save the mark! —

A race that works, yet cannot work,
Yodels, but cannot yodel right,
Such as, unhelp’d, with rusty dirk,
I vow that I could wholly smite.

A river[30 - The Davoser Landwasser.] that from morn to night
Down all the valley plays the fool;
Not once she pauses in her flight,
Nor knows the comfort of a pool;

But still keeps up, by straight or bend,
The selfsame pace she hath begun —
Still hurry, hurry, to the end —