GALLANT VAGABONDS.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 21244, 27 January 1931, Page 12

GALLANT VAGABONDS.

WRITERS WHO HATED THE WORLD. KEABLE AND R.L.S. IN THE SOUTH SEAS. It is not very long ago that, having crossed the Kalahari Desert in Africa for the first time, I and my companions came up against a solitary hut. It was a pathetic attempt at a home made with a few sticks and some earth. All around was the sand and scrub, the flat horizon and haunting mirages that had made this land one of mystery and excited speculation, says W. J. Makin, in John o’ London’s Weekly.” To our profound astonishment, there stepped from the hut a white man. He was dressed in ludicrous Dickensian fashion, stiff Micawber collar and a bright cravat. To our travel-stained and unshaven selves, he was as unreal as the mirages. A HATER OF CIVILISATION. “ Good morning, gentlemen,” he said, gravely, as though he received visitors evei\y day. We. must have been the first white men he had seen for years. “ Good morning,” we replied, each receiving a little ceremonious bow. It took nearly an hour before the lonely white man would satisfy our curiosity and talk about himself. But even then, he hesitated. It was not until we reached an outpost, over a hundred miles away, that we heard from others the story of. his solitary existence. He was a writer. For-years he had endured the daily routine of a schoolmaster in an English city. Then, like the shopwalker in the O, Henry story, he revolted suddenly against civilisation and fled to the wilds. With a few books and some precious paper he settled in this, the most desolate part of Africa. He began- to write. A pile of manuscript lies heaped up in that lonely hut. But I doubt whether anyone will read it until the one-time schoolmaster dies. Even then, some prowling hyena or jackal may destroy it before it is discovered. A few bushmen live around, that hut, and upon these natives the white man depends for his food and water. What he has written may never be worth reading, although a man could not live such a solitary existence without discovering a good deal about himself. He is a hater of civilisation, and sought solitude to express himself. ROBERT KEABLE AND GAUGUIN. There are many such literary exiles up and down the world. They do not form themselves into little coteries, and sit in city drawing-rooms drawling purple nonsense about the latest vogue in literary reputations. They are queer, solitary fellows, many of them with ideals as well as ideas. Nearly all have a lust for sunshine lands and glinting seas, and prefer, infinitely, to talk with a rascally trader or a blasphemous sailor than to listen to the meanderings of a Bloomsbury intellectual. They are the gallant vagabonds of the world of letters. Sometimes, like Robert Louis Stevenson, they have been “ ordered south ” because of their health. The rigours of the English climate are not for Jhem. They must perforce scribble their thoughts in lands of eternal sunshine where too often it would appear folly even to think. When I was in the South Seas I marvelled at' 'the industry that possessed Robert Eeable, an industry that kept him writing day after day while the lazy fall of surf on white beaches called one away to loaf in the glorious sunshine. Robert Keable died in that lotus-eating land ns did Gauguin the French painter. Both were held captive by hibiscus and a paradise of the primitive. Both were gallant vagabonds from civilisation. Nowadays, if you visit Honolulu, a skyscraper city in the South Seas, you are sure to be lured-’ away to the famous Waikiki Beach. There, in a luxurious hotel, you may dance on a floor that stretches towards the sea, the surf lapping gently at one end of the dance room. Many millionaires possess bungalows on Waikiki Beach, for the whole island has been seized by the real estate merchant. One day I glimpsed a desolate, tumb'edown bungalow, half-sunken in the sand and about 200 yards away from the sea. “ That bungalow seems romantic enough for a South Seas adventurer of the old days,” I said to an American friend. “ It’s an eyesore,” he replied. “ A feller named Stevenson used to have that bungalow and write in it. I guess it will be cleared away in a few weeks and another 50,000 dollar home built there.” In Samoa, where Stevenson is buried, the grave is now “ one of the sights.” A good many people who visit the grave are sure to 'write an article, or perhaps a book, on “ Robert Louis Stevenson in Samoa,” aiding the story with the discovery of an old Samoan chief who remembers Thsitala as he lived among them. Only one writer, a friend of mine, had the courage to set down his true experiences in Samoa. He asked one or two old natives, if they remembered R. L. S. One said, “Stevenson! Him the fella keep motor garage, I think.” / RIMBAUD, POET AND GUNRUNNER. So it is that when chance has flung me into Aden —no one ever visits Aden by choice—l try to visualise the hell that Arthur Rimbaud, the French poet, must have endured there. When he ran away from that tragic friendship with Verlaine, he was also running away from himself, the esoteric mind that had driven him towards every vice and every perversity in verse.

Most people who greet you in Aden want to whisk you away in a fast motor car to the water tanks in the desert beyond. I usually prefer to wander through the bazaar and peer into those queer trading stores where Arthur Rimbaud once sweated and worked as a trader’s clerk. It was, indeed, ironical for a young literary man to be swept away from a marble-topped table and absinthe in Paris to these mountains of burnt sienna crumbling in the fierce heat of the sun. Instead of writing exquisite poems under the influence of hashish, he grappled with figures, snaky French fives and sevens written down in purple ink under an African sun. He made notes about coffee hides, and firearms. And this gallant vagabond could laugh harshly when a letter was brought to him in his exile, telling of a group in Paris who had exalted him into a legendary genius. At the moment he was engaged in gun-running for an Arab chief. The venture failed, and he returned to Paris to die miserably and unknown in a hospital.