Fountains in the Sand: Rambles Among the Oases of Tunisia Part 5

"_Tiens_! I never saw this. And printed in Paris a fortnight ago! But it may be lying somewhere about the house. I only returned at midday, you know. Not exactly a flattering likeness...."

The doc.u.ment was handed round. It was a French journal devoted to mining interests, and contained a long article dealing with the phosphate industry of Metlaoui, near Gafsa, with views of the works and portraits of its princ.i.p.al representatives. Beneath that of the speaker were printed the words--

"PAUL DUFRESNOY, Ingenieur civil des mines,"

and some other t.i.tles.

An odd coincidence, this meeting, on the eve of my departure.

I pa.s.sed over to his table and mentioned that I possessed an introductory letter to him.

"How? And you are leaving to-morrow for the Djerid? You are not coming to see me?"

I replied that I would gladly give myself that pleasure. His family, he explained, was away just now, but if I could arrange to delay my departure for a little while he would accompany me as far as Metlaoui, which lies on the Tozeur route, and show me over the mines. He was to return to his work there in a week or so. The proposal was too tempting to be refused.

We spoke of the spirit of irritation and discontent that seemed rife among the Europeans in Gafsa.

"Yes, the wind," he said; "or perhaps Africa generally. I've often noticed that men, and women too, put on new faces and characters hereabouts. This contact with an inferior race upsets their nervous equilibrium. The lack of comfort and the need of abrupt action makes them discard gentleness and other external husks of civilization. The mildest of us are liable to become brusque; and harsh ones, brutal. Only the native remains resigned."

Thereupon I propounded my hypothesis of the _Mektoub_ or resignation doctrine: the intellectual burnous of the Arabs.

The theory, he thought, was so good that there must be something wrong with it. His work brought him into daily contact with the natives, and, so far as he could judge, _Mektoub_ was only one aspect of their general way of looking at things. It was bound up, for instance, with that idea of impenitence. Unlike ourselves, who approve of self-abas.e.m.e.nt, the Arab regards repentance as only fit for slaves. He does not hunt for his own sins; he hunts for yours, and hits you on the head when he finds them.

There was something in the notion, he thought, for surely remorse was rather a provincial sensation; it implies that a man has really done something wrong, or that he thinks he has; in either case, what was there to boast of? He had little time for studies, nowadays, but it seemed to him that the trend of feeling was in the direction of Old Testamentary ideals. Men were growing tired of offering their other cheek to be smitten; they found it degrading, as do the Arabs. Why not import some of these sterner conceptions into our morality, as we import their peppery curries and kouskous and pilaffs into our cuisine?

He was inclined to say amiable things about the English race. The Anglo-Saxon, he thought, with his "const.i.tutional non-morality," had come nearest to discovering a sensible working system of conduct--as a nation.

It is his highest racial virtue to lead the Cosmic Life--to take all he can get, and ask for more. That is why every one, in his heart of hearts, envies and admires him. His chief defect, he thought, was a disdain of a knowledge of general principles, justifiable enough in the times of unsound teleological theorizings, but not nowadays, when we have at last set foot upon earth.

"And what do you say," I asked, "to our so-called national hypocrisy?"

"Well, we others are apt to stand aside and marvel whether you have succeeded by reason of it, or in spite of it. Of course it annoys us beyond words! But there is a form of it which is highly laudable: the Anglo-Saxon, it seems to me, often acts in apparently hypocritical fas.h.i.+on out of consideration for what he conceives to be the opinions of the majority. Profoundly self-respecting, he is equally careful not to impinge upon the feelings of others, however wrong-headed he may think them. In such cases, his hypocrisy is only a proof of civilization and genuine politeness. Hence also that shyness and reserve which I have often noticed in your countrymen--they are not signs of awkwardness or indecision, but of strength systematically controlled."

"That is very gratifying. And what of our sn.o.bbishness?"

"The English sn.o.bbishness," he replied, "may not be beautiful, but its origins are sufficiently venerable to inspire respect. It testifies to long political stability; it is rooted in Magna Charta. We foreigners, who upset our Governments and annihilate our aristocracies every ten years, will never attain that mellow stage. One may dislike it; one dislikes the by-products of many excellent inst.i.tutions. Your Government, for example, does extraordinarily little to foster art or literature or research. Taken by itself, that is an evil. But as a by-product of the English cult of the individual--of that avoidance of pestilential State interference in everything which is the curse of continental Europe--it may be gladly endured, if not admired."

He added:

"When one lives out of Europe, Monsieur, one learns to know England better. To see things at their true perspective one must take up a stand at a proper distance from them. England only begins to show its true proportions at a point where other lands cease to be visible. Austria, for instance, can only be examined on the spot. Once you have crossed the insignificant Mediterranean, this immense and fertile country, with its long history of rulers and battles, has already faded into air. _ca n'existe plus_. Your Gladstone explained the phenomenon correctly: Austria has never done good to the world."

I gathered that the Metlaoui phosphate company had modelled its principles on those of the "Anglo-Saxon." There is little "pestilential State interference" in its management; the board of directors takes all it can get, and asks for more. It is a paying concern, and consequently the shareholders admire it unreservedly--in the rest of mankind, this feeling is tinctured with a strong dose of envy.

_Chapter VIII_

_POST-PRANDIAL MEDITATIONS_

One dines early in Gafsa, and afterwards there is nothing, absolutely nothing, to do. Cafes become tedious with their card-games, cowboy politics and persistent allusions to "la femme," that protean fetich which dominates and saturates the Gallic mind, oozing out, so to speak, at every pore of their social and national life. They never seem to grow out of the _Ewig-weibliche_ stage. If only, like the Maltese, they would talk less and do more in certain respects, the "comite du peuplement" might close its doors. But such recklessness would ill comport with the ant-like hiving quality which paid back, within I forget how few years, the German war indemnity.

After dinner, therefore, a short promenade about the streets and oasis, to court that illusive phantom, sleep, and to replenish the mind with new and peaceful images. I found a cloudless and relatively warm night. The wind had died down, and there was a brilliant comet (the Johannesburg comet) in the sky. Knots of natives were gazing at it with disfavour: I listened, and heard one of them attributing the Franco-Tripolitan frontier incident to its baleful fires. "And there is more to come," he added, "unless it goes away." Townspeople, of course; the cultivators are asleep long ago.

Why don't you settle down and make yourselves at home? With those words Dufresnoy had put his finger on the spot. The same idea must occur to every one who compares the French method of colonization with that pursued in English dependencies. Even our most ephemeral civil servants take pleasure in "settling down"; they acquire local interests in golf, or native folklore, or b.u.t.terflies; they manage to surround themselves with an atmosphere of home. Among the _colons_ of Tunisia you may find a home establishment of the most comfortable type, but Government employes regard the Regency in the light of an exile; they never try to make their life more endurable, as they easily could do, with a little co-operation.

In Gafsa, for example, where the summer temperature is 100, no ice can be procured unless you drive to fetch it from the station settlement where the phosphate company has its servants; if you want good vegetables, you must telegraph _inland_ for them to Metlaoui, whither they are brought from the sea-coast, via Gafsa, for the consumption of the "company"; fresh fish, which are caught in fabulous quant.i.ties at Sfax, and could be transported by every over-night train, are hardly ever visible in the Gafsa market. There is no chemist's shop in the place, not even the humblest drug-store, where you can procure a pennyworth of boric acid or court-plaster. So they live on, indulging all the time in a luxury of lamentation.

There would be better shops in places like Gafsa if foreign commercial settlers were not discouraged from establis.h.i.+ng themselves. French ones, needless to say, refuse to "settle."

The hotels in the country places, too, would be better. At present they exist on a system of monopolism and favouritism; it is quite beyond the ambitions of their managers to collect a clientele; most of these concerns are palpably run on the following principle: to keep the guest in such a state of chattering starvation, that he is _ready to eat anything_. How often have I yearned, in these "Grand Hotels"--they are all _grand hotels_--for the material comforts and the decent fare of some little wayside hostelry in Finland, or a rest-house in the jungle of Ceylon!

Why do French travellers not complain oftener?

Well, the Frenchman is a patriotic creature and congenitally kind-hearted; the proprietors of these establishments are country-people of his; they are poor devils who have got stranded, somehow or other, in Tunisia; one must have patience with them. Sometimes, however, your self-respecting Gaul is strained beyond the point of patriotic endurance by the concoctions of these Locustas and Borgias; then he unsheathes that dagger-like Neanderthal manner which he carries about with him for rare occasions of self-defence; and it warms the c.o.c.kles of one's heart to hear how pertinently he discourses d.a.m.nation to the cringing host. For we non-Frenchmen, be it understood, are all "des desequilibres" who demand toast, hot water and such-like exotics; our complaints need not be taken seriously; besides, foreigners are bound to pay in any case. But when a countryman begins to find fault there is not only a possibility that something, after all, may not be quite right with the cuisine or drainage, but even a chance that one or two items will be coldly struck off the reckoning. And that hurts!

They will tell you that there is nothing to be procured in the market; but if you proceed to the spot, you will at least see succulent legs of mutton exposed for sale. The _chef_ of the establishment, however, when making his morning purchases, pa.s.ses by these with scorn, and betakes himself to a little booth whose table is strewn with dubious sc.r.a.ps of skin and bones, which have already been fingered and contemptuously thrown aside by fifty dirty Arabs (I speak as an eye-witness); he buys a few handfuls of these horrors for three or four sous, and forthwith--hey, presto!--they are transformed into a "ragout a la bretonne" for the famished traveller.

Tunisia is a sheep-rearing country--there are sixty thousand sheep in the _controle_ of Gafsa alone--but you may live there a lifetime before seeing a leg of mutton at a country table d'hote. For all the "gigots" that ever appear at my host's entertainment, one might really think that the muttons of Africa were a peculiar species, a species without legs: crawling, maybe, on their bellies, like Nebuchadnezzar.

"Je m'en f--de vot' bon-homme," said one of these gentlemen to me, referring to Baedeker, with whose sacred pages I had threatened him. "And as for the tourists, they'll come just the same."

And so they do! But they all end in discovering that even the worm will turn, when suffering from the torments of _dyspepsia tunesina veridica sine qua non_ ...

A good deal of amateurish talking is done, in Gafsa, in regard to the profits that would be gained were the oasis to be given over to Sicilian cultivators. Apart from the fact that the wealthy Kaid of Gafsa, who is the chief owner of it, would have something to say on the subject, these advantages would be limited to pruning the trees and grafting some of them; introducing, possibly, a few more vegetables, and having the ground more parsimoniously tended than at present. The magnesia in the water is hostile to the majority of delicate European growths. Something, no doubt, could be done in the way of improvement, but as a set-off to a visionary project of this kind, which is averse to the whole spirit of French rule in Tunisia, there would be a great rise in prices: Italians would form their inevitable ring. The extent of the gardens has almost doubled since 1880, without their help.

As to the Arabs----

If the French looked to their prison system they would soon arrive at better results. For childish thefts and such-like trespa.s.ses, committed nearly always at the instigation of their parents, boys of ten and twelve are now locked up with hardened criminals, often for considerable periods: what is this but a State-aided manufacture of crime? Go to the prison of Sfax, and you will realize that there may be some reason for the absinthe-drinker's remark as to the "organized bands of a.s.sa.s.sins" at that place. I speak of what I have seen with my eyes. I found the prison of Souk-el-Arba, for instance, so tightly packed with men and young boys that there was not room for all of them to lie down at night, and such furious fights used to occur for the possession of places near the wall (the room was in pitch-darkness) that the warder was obliged to enter, every now and then, and restore order by beating those nearest the door about the head with a club.

The Arab boy, they will tell you, is full of guile, and must be repressed.

Granted, but----

A colony, furthermore, is _not an orchid_.

Granted.

Q.E.D.

_Chapter IX_

_SOME OF OUR GUESTS_

I shall be glad to leave for Metlaoui and the Djerid. Gafsa is losing its flavour; the novelty and pungency are gone. The same old faces, the same old _bouts de conversation_; quickly, indeed, does one live oneself into a place and learn, or think to learn, all its little secrets.