After spending the months of June and July 1880 in the rough Californian
mountain quarters described in the _Silverado Squatters_, Stevenson took
passage with his wife and young stepson from New York on the 7th of
August, and arrived on the 17th at Liverpool, where his parents and I
were waiting to meet him. Of her new family, the Mrs. Robert Louis
Stevenson brought thus strangely and from far into their midst made an
immediate conquest. To her husband's especial happiness, there sprang up
between her and his father the closest possible affection and
confidence. Parents and friends--if it is permissible to one of the
latter to say as much--rejoiced to recognise in Stevenson's wife a
character as strong, interesting, and romantic almost as his own; an
inseparable sharer of all his thoughts and staunch companion of all his
adventures; the most open-hearted of friends to all who loved him; the
most shrewd and stimulating critic of his work; and in sickness, despite
her own precarious health, the most devoted and most efficient of
nurses.
From Liverpool the Stevenson party went on to make a stay in Scotland,
first at Edinburgh, and afterwards for a few weeks at Strathpeffer,
resting at Blair Athol on the way. It was now, in his thirtieth year,
among the woods of Tummelside and under the shoulder of Ben Wyvis, that
Stevenson acknowledged for the first time the full power and beauty of
the Highland scenery, which in youth, with his longings fixed ever upon
the South, he had been accustomed to think too bleak and desolate. In
the history of the country and its clans, on the other hand, and
especially of their political and social transformation during the
eighteenth century, he had been always keenly interested. In
conversations with Principal Tulloch at Strathpeffer this interest was
now revived, and he resolved to attempt a book on the subject, his
father undertaking to keep him supplied with books and authorities; for
it had quickly become apparent that he could not winter in Scotland. The
state of his health continued to be very threatening. He suffered from
acute chronic catarrh, accompanied by disquieting lung symptoms and
great weakness; and was told accordingly that he must go for the winter,
and probably for several succeeding winters, to the mountain valley of
Davos in Switzerland, which within the last few years had been coming
into repute as a place of recovery, or at least of arrested mischief,
for lung patients. Thither he and his wife and stepson travelled
accordingly at the end of October. Nor must another member of the party
be forgotten, a black thoroughbred Skye terrier, the gift of Sir Walter
Simpson. This creature was named, after his giver, Walter--a name
subsequently corrupted into Wattie, Woggie, Wogg, Woggin, Bogie, Bogue,
and a number of other affectionate diminutives which will be found
occurring often enough in the following pages. He was a remarkably
pretty, engaging, excitable, ill-behaved little specimen of his race,
the occasion of infinite anxiety and laughing care to his devoted
master and mistress until his death six years later.
The Davos of 1880, approached by an eight-hours' laborious drive up the
valley of the Praettigau, was a very different place from the extended
and embellished Davos of to-day, with its railway, its modern shops, its
electric lighting, and its crowd of winter visitors bent on outdoor and
indoor entertainment. The Stevensons' quarters for the first winter were
at the Hotel Belvedere, then a mere nucleus of the huge establishment it
has since become. Besides the usual society of an invalid hotel, with
its mingled tragedies and comedies, they had there the great advantage
of the presence, in a neighbouring house, of an accomplished man of
letters and one of the most charming of companions, John Addington
Symonds, with his family. Mr. Symonds, whose health had been desperate
before he tried the place, was a living testimony to its virtues, and
was at this time engaged in building the chalet which became his home
until he died fourteen years later. During Stevenson's first season at
Davos, though his mind was full of literary enterprises, he was too ill
to do much actual work. For the Highland history he read much, but
composed little or nothing, and eventually this history went to swell
the long list of his unwritten books. He saw through the press his first
volume of collected essays, _Virginibus Puerisque_, which came out early
in 1881; wrote the essays _Samuel Pepys_ and _The Morality of the
Profession of Letters_, for the Cornhill and the Fortnightly Review
respectively, and sent to the Pall Mall Gazette the papers on the life
and climate of Davos, posthumously reprinted in _Essays of Travel_.
Beyond this, he only amused himself with verses, some of them afterwards
published in _Underwoods_. Leaving the Alps at the end of April 1881,
he returned, after a short stay in France (at Fontainebleau, Paris, and
St. Germain), to his family in Edinburgh. Thence the whole party again
went to the Highlands, this time to Pitlochry and Braemar.
During the summer Stevenson heard of the intended retirement of
Professor AEneas Mackay from the chair of History and Constitutional Law
at Edinburgh University. He determined, with the encouragement of the
outgoing professor and of several of his literary friends, to become a
candidate for the post, which had to be filled by the Faculty of
Advocates from among their own number. The duties were limited to the
delivery of a short course of lectures in the summer term, and Stevenson
thought that he might be equal to them, and might prove, though
certainly a new, yet perhaps a stimulating, type of professor. But
knowing the nature of his public reputation, especially in Edinburgh,
where the recollection of his daft student days was as yet stronger than
the impression made by his recent performances in literature, he was
well aware that his candidature must seem paradoxical, and stood little
chance of success. The election took place in the late autumn of the
same year, and he was defeated, receiving only three votes.
At Pitlochry Stevenson was for a while able to enjoy his life and to
work well, writing two of the strongest of his short stories of Scottish
life and superstition, _Thrawn Janet_ and _The Merry Men_, originally
designed to form part of a volume to be written by himself and his wife
in collaboration. At Braemar he made a beginning of the nursery verses
which afterwards grew into the volume called _The Child's Garden_, and
conceived and half executed the fortunate project of _Treasure Island_,
the book which was destined first to make him famous. But one of the
most inclement of Scottish summers had before long undone all the good
gained in the previous winter at Davos, and in the autumn of the year
1881 he repaired thither again.
This time his quarters were in a small chalet belonging to the
proprietors of the Buol Hotel, the Chalet am Stein, or Chalet Buol, in
the near neighbourhood of the Symonds's house. The beginning of his
second stay was darkened by the serious illness of his wife;
nevertheless the winter was one of much greater literary activity than
the last. A Life of Hazlitt was projected, and studies were made for it,
but for various reasons the project was never carried out. _Treasure
Island_ was finished; the greater part of the _Silverado Squatters_
written; so were the essays _Talk and Talkers_, _A Gossip on Romance_,
and several other of his best papers for magazines. By way of whim and
pastime he occupied himself, to his own and his stepson's delight, with
a little set of woodcuts and verses printed by the latter at his toy
press--"The Davos Press," as they called it--as well as with mimic
campaigns carried on between the man and boy with armies of lead
soldiers in the spacious loft which filled the upper floor of the
chalet. For the first and almost the only time in his life there awoke
in him during these winters in Davos the spirit of lampoon; and he
poured forth sets of verses, not without touches of a Swiftean fire,
against commercial frauds in general, and those of certain local
tradesmen in particular, as well as others in memory of a defunct
publican of Edinburgh who had been one of his butts in youth
(_Casparidea_ and _Brashiana_, both unpublished: see pp. 14, 15, 38 in
vol. 24 of the present edition). Finally, much revived in health by the
beneficent air of the Alpine valley, he left it again in mid-spring of
1882, to return once more to Scotland, and to be once more thrown back
to, or below, the point whence he had started. After a short excursion
from Edinburgh into the Appin country, where he made inquiries on the
spot into the traditions concerning the murder of Campbell of Glenure,
his three resting-places in Scotland during this summer were Stobo Manse
near Peebles, Lochearnhead, and Kingussie. At Stobo the dampness of the
season and the place quickly threw him again into a very low state of
health, from which three subsequent weeks of brilliant sunshine in
Speyside did but little to restore him. In spite of this renewed
breakdown, when autumn came he would not face the idea of returning for
a third season to Davos. He had himself felt deeply the austerity and
monotony of the white Alpine world in winter; and though he had
unquestionably gained in health there, his wife on her part had suffered
much. So he made up his mind once again to try the Mediterranean coast
of France, and Davos knew him no more.