Part 9

The struggle ends in the crushing defeat of Ras Michael, the wild Galla tribes pour into Gondar, and the old Ruler goes to his palace to await the end. Alone in the turmoil, but master of himself and unconfused, Yagoube, the tall Scot, makes his way to the deserted palace of the once all powerful lord of Abyssinia.

The lives of vagabonds are full of romantic scenes, but there are few which so stir the imagination as the last meeting of the Laird of Kinnaird and the able, despotic old man who held kings in the hollow of his hand. The forest city was still; the great warriors with the mystical names,—Heart of Christ, Servant of the Holy Ghost, Shield of Jesus, were dead; the people waited to hear the war cries of the victorious factions in the streets. Bruce entered the palace unchallenged by a sentry. The throne room was “hung with mirrors brought at great expense from Venice by way of Arabia and the Red Sea; they were mostly broken; their copper gilt frames had been made by some Greek filigrane workers from Cairo.” And in this empty room of the broken mirrors, magnificently clad in his robes of scarlet and heavy golden thread, and throned in the seat of power, sat old Ras Michael silently waiting the arrival of his murderers.

The next morning, Galla savages occupied the palace, and Bruce saw them grimacing into the mirrors, breaking them, and grinding them to powder. Ras Michael had been led away. None could tell Bruce of the fate of Ozoro Esther.

One feels the approaching close of a drama. His old friends dead or in exile, the court dispersed, and himself heavily in debt, Bruce presently sought permission to leave Abyssinia. The new rulers were well disposed to him, and he might have stayed on, and retained his honours, but his world had been too violently re-made, and the European in him had awakened. Poor young Balugani had died of dysentery; the long and perilous journey home would have to be made alone.

The permission to depart was given unwillingly, and only after repeated entreaty. Once more the Abyssinian forest gathers the laird and his native escort into its greenery.

Suddenly Bruce sees another cavalcade approaching through the leafy quiet, and from the dress of the riders knows them to be nobles of the land. Are they partisans of the victors riding forth to visit the new lands they have been given, or friends of the old kingdom riding to silence and exile? The tall laird suddenly reins in his horse with a start,—the cavalcade is the train of Ozoro Esther. This meeting in the forest was the last sight tall Yagoube had of his Biblical queen.

Ozoro Esther! Bruce remembered the day when she rose from beside Ayto Consu’s bed of sickness, and turned to him, superb in her dark and stately beauty. “But now,” she had said, “if I am not as good a friend to Yagoube who saved my children as I am a steady enemy to the Galla,—then say Esther is not a Christian, and I forgive you.” The great lady of the palace of the broken mirrors was on her way to Jerusalem to pray for Ras Michael.

“The troops of Begemder have taken away my husband, Ras Michael, God knows where,” said she.

A romantic episode enough, this meeting in the wood, yet it ends in a lighter key. Tecla Miriam, a young noblewoman who had chosen to follow the beautiful Ozoro, turned to Yagoube with a jest. The tall Scot seems to have been a favourite with the ladies.

“But tell me truly, Yagoube,” said Tecla Miriam, “you that know everything while peering and poring through those long glasses, did you not learn by the stars that we were to meet you here?”

“Madam,” answered the laird, “if there was one star in the firmament that had announced to me such agreeable news, I should have relapsed into the old idolatry of this country, and worshipped that star for the rest of my life.”

Instead of returning to Europe by the caravan route to the ports of the Red Sea, Bruce was on his way down the west slope of the Abyssinian plateau. At the foot of the wooded mountain slope lay the desert country of Senaar, and at the edge of the desert lay the Nile. The way proved long and dangerous. A simoon half smothered Bruce and his faithful Abyssinian followers, a scoundrelly Arab sheikh abused them and would have cut their throats and robbed them, and finally the camels began to die.

In order to save his notes, his observations and his scientific instruments, Bruce dismounted, and trudged the sand. “In this whole desert,” he wrote, “there is neither worm, fly, nor anything that has the breath of life.... My face was so swelled as scarcely to permit me to see, my neck covered with blisters, my feet swelled and inflamed and bleeding with many wounds.”

Now came a water shortage, and Bruce and his followers killed two camels to drink the camel water stored in their bodies. “We drew four gallons of camel water,” runs the account; “it was indeed vapid and of a bluish cast, but had neither taste nor smell.” Their strength still continuing to fail (Bruce had “three large wounds on the right foot, and two large wounds on the left which continued open”) they determined to save their lives by throwing away the quadrant, telescopes, and time-keeper and ride the camels alternately.

On the 28th of November they consumed the last of their black bread and dirty water, and at seven o’clock in the morning they saw the distant roofs of Egyptian Assouan. At a quarter to ten, on the 29th of November, 1772, James Bruce, Laird of Kinnaird, and late Lord of Geesh in Abyssinia, “arrived in a grove of palm trees” by the Nile. Here friendly souls helped him, and he even regained his abandoned goods.

IV

The strange things that befall vagabonds on their return! The Laird of Kinnaird found himself a rich man on his arrival in Stirlingshire. Coal had been discovered on his properties.

A Scots laird and a travelled gentleman riding about his property on that largest horse ever seen in Scotland, marrying again and happily, and bringing up a family. He must have often wondered what became of all the great folk to whom he had once been Yagoube the counsellor. Ras Michael,—what of him? Did he ever know that the old man fought his way back to power, and died still holding the kingdom in his hand? And Ayto Consu, the young prince with whom he had sworn eternal friendship in the Abyssinian phrase—“by the heart of an elephant”? And Ozoro Esther whom he had last seen in the forest going to Jerusalem to pray for Ras Michael, taken from her by the troops of Begemder?

His story, when he came to tell it, was but half believed. The fierce, magnificent, passionate revelation offended the eighteenth century mind. What had a century of laces, gallantry and candles, a century trying to live by something known as “reason,” to do with this kingdom of the old, dark deities? The offence to the spirit of the age presently bred a spirit of denial. “Pshaw,” said the bewigged gentleman, “but does the dog think to fool us all with his Abyssinian folderol?” Even wise old Johnson took sides against “the Abyssinian.” It was “Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia” against the reality.

The episode of the repast of living flesh became a thing of derision. Lord This refused to believe it; Lady That shuddered prettily, the coffee house wits wrote mocking poetry.

“Nor have I been where men, (what loss, alas!) Kill half a cow, and turn the rest to grass.”

sang that dull rhymester Peter Pindar, in a tedious epistle to Bruce full of a stay-at-home’s easy jocosity. Bruce’s one official honour was a presentation to the king; all other possible glories sank from view in a rising tide of offended disbelief.

A lesser man, a man less able to see life as a whole, would have borne the world a sour grudge. Not so the Laird of Kinnaird. He lived out his years in good temper and unshaken composure. But in his later portraits there is a look which tells the whole story of his attitude to the polite world of disbelievers; the words can almost be heard—words not said angrily or sneeringly, but with well-founded and humorous conviction—“what incredible fools!”

_Six_: ARTHUR RIMBAUD

_Six_: ARTHUR RIMBAUD

I

In the Paris of the late eighties, when men of letters met for a _p’tit verre_ or a glass of coffee at a boulevard café, a question was often asked that had no answer but a shrug—what in heaven’s name had become of Arthur Rimbaud, the poet? The older men remembered him well, this overgrown, unmannerly whelp of eighteen who had suddenly appeared among them from some dull town in the Ardennes, and had made his way into the literary heart of things; they remembered the sensation which had followed Verlaine’s publication of his poetry.

What liberties the boy had taken with the spirit and the forms of verse; the young wipe-nose-on-his-sleeve had disordered the whole world of poetry with his free rhymes, his poems in prose, his prose in poems, and his raving sonnets on the colours of vowels. “I accustomed myself,” he had said, “to direct hallucination, and managed quite easily to see a mosque where stood a factory, a school of drums kept by angels, wagons on the roads of heaven, a drawing room at the bottom of a lake; monsters and mysteries, a whole vaudeville, in fact, lifted heads of terror before me.” He had written of a day in spring, “Lying sprawled in the valley one feels that the earth is nuptial and overbrims with blood.” A strange eighteen-year-old! Some remembered the boy in his square-cut, double-breasted jacket of the seventies, his little, flat, pancake hat, pipe, and long, womanish hair hiding the back of his collar and touching his shoulders.

And now the younger generation were reading him with enthusiasm, copying his mood and manner, and annoying their elders with questions about him. Tell us of Arthur Rimbaud. Is he still alive? Did he ever actually exist? Is he simply a ghost whose name Verlaine has chosen as a pseudonym?

“Dead crazy, or king of a desert island,” said the bookish Vanier to a young student stirred by the reading of Rimbaud’s _Illuminations_. “On several occasions there have been rumors of his death,” said Paul Verlaine. “We can not confirm the news, and would be saddened by finding it the truth.”

What had become of the runaway boy from the Ardennes, the boy with the sulky mouth and hostile, insolent, and splendid eyes, the boy who ran away from home to live like a strolling ragamuffin, cheeked his elders, wrote astounding verses, and first made use of the new and alarming freedoms of modern poetry?

Had an angel suddenly descended to the boulevards of Paris, grasped a meditating literary nabob by the hair, and whisked him from his marble table and his café au lait to the burning beach of French Somaliland, the man of letters would have found a trader adding up the wriggling figures of a French account. There would not have been a book about to suggest literature; the trader was not interested in literature,—a silly business; he was interested in figures and trade like any sensible Frenchman with his life to gain. Figures, snaky French fives and sevens written down in purple ink under the Somali sun, notes about coffee and hides and firearms. The trader was M. Arthur Rimbaud. Had the nabob rushed to tell him that all young Paris was buzzing with his name, he probably would have been greeted with a rather unpleasant laugh.

No account exists in English of the mysterious last years of Rimbaud turned vagabond and African trader, for the material is difficult to assemble, and the tale has to be pieced out from notes in stray letters, reports of the Colonial office, and even the proceedings of British learned societies. Moreover, there exists no study of the purely vagabond side of his unique career.

Arthur Rimbaud was born in Charleville in French Flanders on October 20th, 1854. It is a dull industrial town in a dull region given over to a Victorian industrialism of weeds, rust, broken windows, and little brick workshops, an industrialism without any dignity of power.

His father, an army officer, having a roving disposition, and his mother “an authoritative air,” they agreed to separate, and the boy was brought up by the mother. The family was not rich exactly, yet was comfortably off in the careful French way; there were brothers and sisters for Arthur to grow up with, and things went well enough till Arthur’s fifteenth year. Then came to pass in that plain bourgeois house a situation quite without a parallel. Arthur, having grown into a lank, gawky, sulky boy with large hands and a provincial twang to his speech, began to develop into a genius with the ripened intellect of an adult, and this sulky child with the amazing grown-up mind remained subject to the purse strings and parental direction of a common-place, ill-educated, middle-aged woman who lacked acuteness of mind to see the change.

Much has been written of Mme. Rimbaud’s “domination” of the prodigy, and its effect on the boy’s mind. Yet the mother does not appear to have been unduly harsh or unfeeling; she simply was incapable of understanding the mind of her son. Moreover, she was not without that sense of terror and exasperation which consumes parents who find the children of their flesh developing alien minds and alien ways.

From so grotesque and abnormal a situation, the boy on whom genius had descended, escaped by running away. He accompanied his mother and sisters for a walk, pretended to wish to go home to get a book, and disappeared.

This first vagabondage, undertaken in the disordered war-year of 1870, landed him in the jail for strays and political suspects at Mazas. His one understanding friend, the young schoolmaster Izambard, then rescued him, and sent him back to his mother. Mme. Rimbaud was naturally quite upset. “I fear the little fool will get himself arrested a second time,” she wrote to Izambard; “he need never then return, for I swear that never in my life should I ever receive him again. How is it possible to understand the foolishness of the child, he who is so good and quiet ordinarily?”

She did not want her Arthur to be a vagabond. The word has a far different connotation in French than it has in English. In English, it has acquired something of a poetic flavour; in French it is still decidedly a term of reproach. The French, who plan their lives and their children’s lives with a minuteness Englishmen and Americans can never understand, see nothing romantic in a high road wanderer without a definite place in life or a definite goal. The sense of the definite goal is keen in France.

Imagine, then, the anger and despair of Mme. Rimbaud, good Frenchwoman that she was, when her sixteen-year-old genius took to sleeping in barns and following the road. She felt the same way about it an English mother might feel about a son’s inclination to take spoons. There is still another element in the relation of Arthur and his mother which escapes the English or American student of Rimbaud’s life, and that is the supreme place of the parent in the hierarchy of the French family. Arthur’s escapades were a blow to Mme. Rimbaud’s authority and prestige; in the eyes of the French neighbourhood Arthur’s vagabondage shamed the mother as well as the son.

After his first return, the boy endured the old, impossible situation for a week, and then fled once more from Charleville. Brussels sees him, and Paris, a boy with worn, dusty clothes staring into the windows of bookshops. At Paris he joined the Communist army for a while. Having been given no uniform, he escaped the general massacre of the insurrectionary troops, and went eastward over the road to Rheims and Château-Thierry. He had no money, but he had youth, his dreams, and a colossal impudence. On occasion he would invade houses while the owners were away in the fields, and go to bed in the best bed. The manœuvre was not always as successful as the boy might have hoped.

There rises before the mind’s eye a picture of the gawky, impudent, runaway stripling with the insolent eyes trudging the white roads of France with their fine, sharp surface dust and underbody hard and relentless as a ribbon of solid stone; one sees him pass the haycocks in the fields, the yellow-green of river meadows, the opaque, greenish streams, the poplars, and village chimneys curling up wood smoke into the rosy, humid dawn.

The boy enjoyed the bohemian adventure, and found a place in his mind for its sordid side.

Through 1870 and most of 1871 he comes and goes; he writes, he sulks, he listens to impressive lectures about the heavy necessity of beginning to think of a profession or a career. Arthur, sulkily imprisoned in his abominated Charleville,—“my native town leads in imbecility among small provincial towns”—had a horror of dull labour. He saw too much of it about him. “Masters and workmen, yokels all of them, all ignoble. The hand with the pen is worth the hand with the plough. What a century of hands!” Said Verlaine, “He had a high disdain for whatever he did not wish to do or be.”

Presently comes the great change and the first real opportunity. He sends a sheaf of poems to Paul Verlaine, and Verlaine replies inviting him to be his guest in Paris.

From an abnormal situation the boy thus advanced to an absurd one. The Verlaines were poor, and the poet and his seventeen-year-old wife were living with the wife’s parents in order to save money. They may have been prepared for the coming of a young man, even a very young man, but this gawky, queer, unmanageable seventeen-year-old boy...! It is clear that he soon came to be regarded as an inconvenient intruder by the practical ladies of the poet’s family.

In spite of his difficulties, many of his own making, the year 1871-’72 was Rimbaud’s great year. He perfected his theory that the maker of poetry should be a _seer_, and practise “the long, immense, and reasoned disordering of the senses,” and give to the world “the supreme exaltation arrived at through things unheard of and unnameable.” The Parisian literary world, not knowing what to make of art so disorderly and personal, Rimbaud took his familiar refuge in rudeness. A consciousness of his genius strengthened the wings of his pride. In odds and ends of time, in order to gain a little money, he hawked key rings under the arcades of the Rue de Rivoli. Paris beginning to bore him, he actually returned for a little time to Charleville.

While Rimbaud was at Charleville, Verlaine, beset by family troubles, wrote to him begging him to join him in a vagabond tour. Rimbaud, whose consciousness was melting in the flame of hallucinations and poetic ecstasies, accepted at once, and in July, 1872, the two poets set off together. “I sought the sea, as if it were to cleanse me from a stain,” wrote Rimbaud. A curious pair and a curious pilgrimage. One has a glimpse of mean lodgings, gutters, roadsides, empty pockets, visions, exaltations, absinthe, dirt and debt. From Belgium, they went to England, where each gathered a few pence teaching French. Returning to Brussels in July, 1873, Verlaine, while in some kind of mental state best studied by psychopathologists, shot his fellow poet in the wrist with a pistol, and was promptly imprisoned by the Belgian authorities. The wound was not serious.

Mme. Rimbaud owned a kind of farm and country house at Roche, and later in the same month of July she suddenly saw Arthur coming towards the gate with his arm in a sling. Now comes a problem to be answered by those who study genius; Rimbaud ceased writing poetry forever. The verse which was to stir France and mould a world style was thus the work of a boy in his eighteenth year. What had taken place? Had his capricious genius flown away to another bough? Had his poetry of visions and hallucinations begun to uncover mysteries beyond the power of the human spirit to endure? Had some intense satisfaction he had known in the composition of poetry begun to fade?

Such is the tale of Arthur Rimbaud’s bizarre career as a poet. Is it a wonder that the younger generation wished to know what had become of the man?

II

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!”