The poet having ceased to write poetry, a vast part of the house of
the brain now lay dark and tenantless, its emptiness accentuated by a
memory of the lost spirit whose poetic vitality had once filled the
mansion. A wildness of wandering now seized the boy; he was trying to
fill the haunted, echoing rooms as best he could, and like the king in
the parable, he sought his guests on the roads. He goes to Stuttgart to
study German; he crosses the St. Gothard pass on foot and visits Italy;
he pays his lodging with casual labor as he goes. And always searching,
searching, searching with growing exasperation in his tone.
Then Charleville, and a winter picking up Arabian and Russian,—he is
trying to house the intellect in a room once inhabited by something
of the very essence of the spirit,—then a journey through Belgium and
Holland, and a meeting with a Dutch recruiting sergeant who persuaded
him to join the Dutch colonial army. On May 19th, 1876, he signs an
engagement for six years, receives 600 francs as a gratuity, sails for
Java, disembarks at Batavia, serves for three weeks, deserts, and returns
to Europe on an English ship.
Returning to Charleville, he remained there but a short time, and then
hurried to Cologne. A strange new guest had arrived unsought in his
mind’s house, the money-saving instinct, for it is deeper than reason,
of the provident French mind. Its first manifestation was not exactly
a sympathetic one; in fact, the poet’s part in it has a sniff of the
bounder, Latin style. Envying the easy commissions of the sergeant who
had enlisted him, this deserter so loudly sang the praises of the Dutch
Colonial army that he induced a dozen young Germans to accompany him to
Holland and enlist. Rimbaud then pocketed the enlistment commission, and
escaped to Hamburg.
At Hamburg a circus is in need of an interpreter, and the sometime
poet of hallucinations is given the post. With the circus he goes to
Copenhagen, and then flies from it to Stockholm.
The winter of ’78 and ’79 found him in the isle of Cyprus as foreman of
a quarry. The work proved unhealthy, Rimbaud caught typhoid, and in the
summer of 1879 he wandered home to recover. His friend Delahaye, finding
him at the farm of Roche, ventured to ask him if he still had an interest
in literature. Rimbaud shook his head with a smile, as if his thoughts
had suddenly turned to something childish, and answered quietly, “I no
longer concern myself with it.”
In the spring of 1880, the poet being then twenty-six years old, he
returned to Africa and the East, there to spend his last eleven years.
In August, 1880, he was at Aden on the Red Sea, as an employee of the
French trading house of Mazaran, Viannay and Bardey. The town is one of
the most singular and utterly terrible places of the earth.
“You could never come to imagine the place,” wrote Rimbaud. “There is
not a single tree, not even a shrivelled one, not a single blade of
grass, not a rod of earth, not a drop of fresh water. Aden lies in the
crater of an extinct volcano which the sea has filled with sand. One sees
and touches only lava and sand incapable of sustaining the tiniest spear
of vegetation. The surrounding country is an arid desolation of sand. The
sides of the crater prevent the entry of any wind, and we bake at the
bottom of the hole as if in a lime kiln. One must be indeed a victim of
circumstance to seek employment in such hells!”
The house by which Rimbaud was employed traded in Abyssinian ivory, musk,
coffee, and gold, and their Abyssinian station was at Harrar. Rimbaud
having developed a marvellous facility for native languages, he was
presently put in charge of the Abyssinian branch. Harrar stood on an
elevation, and the climate was fair enough, though in the spring rains
it was often damp and cold. The poet wandered about fearlessly, buying
gums and ostrich plumes. It was a busy, confused, uncertain career, and
Rimbaud wrote of it with a snarl. Here he was, buried in a world of
natives, and “obliged to talk their gibberish languages, to eat their
filthy dishes, and undergo a thousand worries rising from their laziness,
their treachery, and their stupidity. And this is not the worst of it;
there is the fear of becoming animalized oneself, isolated as remote as
one is from all intellectual companionship.”
The month of July, 1884, saw the house of Mazaran, Viannay and Bardey
vanish from the scene, and emerge as the property of Bardey. In October,
1885, the poet’s contract with this new Maison Bardey expired, and he
refused to renew it after a “violent scene.” He had spent five years as
a trading agent in Arabia and Abyssinia; he knew the country and its
languages as did no other European, and he thought it time to go into
business for himself. At Aden dwelt another French agent, one Pierre
Labutut, and with this man Rimbaud presently founded a new company.
Old Menelik of Abyssinia wanted guns; he paid fancy prices for rifles,
and Rimbaud and Labutut determined to run in rifles on a grand scale.
They would secure rifles of a disused model in Europe, ship them to Aden,
transfer them to a caravan gathered at Tadjourah on the Somali coast, and
then take them to Choa, and sell them to Menelik. At Liége in Belgium
or at French military depots, old rifles might be had at seven or eight
francs apiece; they would sell them to Menelik for forty francs and the
freight.
It was a difficult and complicated task. There were a thousand things to
be thought of—provisions, salaries, camel hire, extortions, tips, taxes,
impositions, buying and maintenance. The caravan would have to spend
fifty days in a “desert country” among unfriendly tribes.
“The natives along the caravan route are Dankalis,” said Rimbaud; “they
are Bedouin shepherds and Moslem fanatics and they are to be feared.
It is true that we are armed with rifles while the Bedouins have only
lances. Nevertheless, all caravans are attacked.”
A difficulty with the French foreign office over the matter of gun
running now intervened, and then came a serious blow. Labutut died,
deeply in debt, and leaving the weight of the whole complicated
enterprise on Rimbaud’s shoulders. In spite of these checks, however, the
poet went ahead with his scheme and led his caravan to Choa.
The caravan arrived, but the scheme was a failure. “My venture has taken
the wrong turn,” wrote Arthur to Bardey. The huge expenses had not only
eaten up all the expected profits, but had even consumed the little
sum Arthur had managed to amass in the previous years. Yet he paid all
Labutut’s debts and gave a sum to his partner’s young son. “His very
generous and discreet charity,” said Bardey, “was probably one of the
very few things he did without snarling or shrill complaints.”
Then to Cairo with what money he has in a money belt about him. He
“cannot” return to Europe because he would certainly die in the cold
winter, he is too accustomed to a “wandering, free and open life” and
because he has “no position.” That French touch at the end! Presently he
re-establishes himself at Harrar, and manages to gain a modest living.
One sees him at his little trading station cautiously receiving small
shipments of rifles, weighing coffee in scales, and estimating the worth
of his ivory,—a lean, sun-browned French trader in his early thirties. In
1889 he received a letter which must have put a strange look on his face.
It was from a Parisian journalist.
“Sir,” it ran, “living so far away from us, you are doubtless unaware
that in a very small group at Paris, you have become a legendary
personage. Literary reviews of the Latin quarter have published you, and
your first efforts have even been gathered into a book.”
In 1891 an infection of the knee obliged him to return to Europe, an
operation failed to check the malady, and in November he found that
timelessness which he once pictured as “the sea fled with the sun.”
As a personage, Rimbaud remains the most mysterious of all vagabonds.
The ceaseless, embittered, eager search for something that was his
life,—what shall be its last interpretation? Did he seek something which
had fled him, or something to replace the thing which had fled? From the
Latin quarter of the 80’s, with its book shops, its old dank houses, and
drizzling rain of the cloudy Parisian spring to the lifeless oven of
Aden, his mind had known but one aim, and that an aim unlike any other
sought by the great vagabonds. No answer may be found by scanning the
poetry, for Rimbaud the poet and Rimbaud the Somali trader were two men.
Active, nervous, intellectual, difficult and often utterly unpleasant
and unsympathetic, he wanders about his bales of goods in the warehouse
shadows, a mysterious and intriguing figure. After all, though he did
not find the answer he sought—who does?—he found activity, and for him
activity was the soul’s rest.