Part 10

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.

FOOTNOTES

[1] Nootka Sound, Vancouver Island.

[2] A type of Russian carriage.

[3] Tip money.