Monsieur?" asked one of the clients. He is a wizened old nondescript with
satyr-like beard, a kind of Thersites, who is understood to have
established, from the days of Abdelkader and "for certain reasons," his
headquarters at Gafsa, where he sips absinthes past all computation,
exercising his wit upon everybody and everything with a fluent and rather
diverting pessimism. "You will probably perish on the road to Tozeur, in a
sandstorm."
"Ah, those sandstorms: they interest me. Have you ever been to Tozeur?"
"God forbid! Gafsa is quite bad enough for me. Or you may be strangled by
the Arabs; such things occur every day. You smile? Read the papers! At
some places, like Sfax, there are regular organized bands of assassins,
the police being doubtless in their pay. Be sure to hold your revolver in
readiness--better carry it in your jacket pocket, like this.... No
revolver! (To the company at large) _He has no revolver_! In that case,
don't dream of going out after sunset, here or anywhere else in this
country. And read the papers."
It was always "read the papers."
I mentioned that I had walked home, at midnight on the previous evening,
from the station.
"Then don't do it again, if you value your life. Not long ago a lieutenant
was attacked on that very road, and almost beaten to death. He managed to
crawl back to barracks, and is now a wreck, incapacitated from further
service. By a miracle he was able to identify one of his assailants. They
gave him--what do you think?--two years' imprisonment! Why not the _Legion
d'Honneur_ while we are about it? Then there was the Italian--a
respectable Italian, for a wonder--who went out for a walk and was never
heard of again. The country was scoured for two months, but not so much as
a button was ever found--not a button! They had buried his body in the
sand. That's their usual system, cheap and effective. And the guide-books
say that Tunisia is as safe as the heart of France--ha, ha, ha! I wonder
how much they are paid for making that statement, and who pays it?"
"The hotel proprietors, with an occasional subsidy from the Government."
This from a bloodthirsty young extremist in gaiters and riding-breeches,
who had once been a _colon_, a farmer, but had given it up in disgust. "We
cherish these savages," he went on, "as if they were our uncles and aunts;
everywhere, that is, save in those districts which are still under
military rule. There you should see the natives stand up and salute you! I
am anti-military myself; but I maintain that this salute should be kept
up, as demonstrating the gulf that exists between ourselves and them. But
the moment you leave that zone the gulf is systematically bridged over, to
make it more pleasant for the poor, misused Arab. Let me tell you what I
think. I think that the Sicilians would have managed things better than we
have done. And I also think that our _controlleurs_, they are not
Frenchmen, but Arabs."
"_Voyons, voyons!_" said a clear voice from another table--a new-comer,
apparently. "These are the criticisms to which we are exposed, because we
introduce an enlightened and progressive policy."
"Progressive policy be damned! We have held Gafsa for the last thirty
years, and what have we done to improve the place? Nothing."
"Pardon me! We have planted twenty-seven pepper trees. Tunisia exists for
needy people in search of work. If you can't make it pay, leave it alone.
You have every facility for buying land, for importing this and that--why
don't you settle down and make yourselves at home? A colony, my friend, is
not an orchid."
"And as for those Sicilians," interposed the faun-like wooer of the Green
Fairy, "I think you're all wrong. I admit that they are more flexible than
we are, if you like to put it that way. They will do things that no
Frenchman can do; they will establish themselves in places where no
Frenchman could live; they will eat things which no Frenchman could
swallow; they will oust the very Arabs out of the country in course of
time, by sheer number of progeny and animal vitality. Oh, yes; it's clear
the Sicilians can lower their standard to any extent. But they can never
raise it. They are the cancer of Tunisia. Wherever they go, they bring
their filth, their _mafia_, roguery and corruption. Every Sicilian is a
potential Arab, the difference between them being merely external; the
true African variety wears less clothes and keeps his house cleaner. I
know them! A race of sinister buffoons and cut-throats, incapable of any
ennobling thought, whose highest virtues are other men's vices, whose only
method of reasoning is the knife.... Don't accuse me, Messieurs, of
prejudice, when I am trying to state the case impartially."
You will often hear it put as baldly as that. The alien inhabitants of
Tunisia are well hated by a certain type of Frenchmen. The country has
been compared to a wine-bottle that bears some high-flown label indicative
of fine stuff within--the French administration--but is filled,
unfortunately, with a poisonous mixture from round the corner, the Jews,
Sicilians, Maltese, and Corsicans.
It is as difficult for a tourist to arrive at a just opinion on this
subject as for the average Frenchman. The traveller will not find it easy
to acquire the necessary first-hand data, while the other is warped by his
congenital xenophobia.
In 1900 there were 80,000 Italians, mostly Sicilians, in the Regency, as
opposed to 20,000 Frenchmen, one-half of whom were Government servants.
This great predominance of a foreign stock scared some good folks, and a
"Comité du peuplement français" was organized, to study ways and means of
populating Tunisia with French citizens.
If Sicilians could obtain grants of land under the same conditions as
Frenchmen, large tracts, now waste, would be converted into gardens, to
the profit of the exchequer. Is it worth while? No, thinks the Government;
and with reason. French rule in Northern Africa is a politico-moral
experiment on a large scale, with what might be called an idealistic
background, such as only a civilized nation can conceive. Italians might
improve the land, but they could never improve the Arab; they are
themselves not sufficiently wise, or even well-intentioned.
The Anti-Semitic agitation has died a natural death: you may curse the
Jews, but you cannot crush them. They make good citizens, and are for ever
trying to gain more political influence, which is surely to their credit,
though it annoys a certain class in Tunis. As intermediaries between the
Arab and the white man they are invaluable, their plasticity allowing them
to ascend or descend in either direction, while their broad and active
tolerance, fruit of bitter experience in the past, has honeycombed the
land with freemasonry and scientific charity and liberalism. So far as I
can see, their dirt does not detract from their astuteness--perhaps it
aids it, by removing one source of mental preoccupation, cleanliness. The
old distinction between Livornese and Tunisian Jews is slowly becoming
effaced.
If there is one class of these immigrants whom the ordinary French employé
hates more than another it is his own countrymen, the Corsicans. They have
the gift of climbing into small but lucrative posts of administration, and
there, once established, they sit fast like limpets, to the dismay of
competing French office-seekers. Eject them? You might as well propose to
uproot Atlas or Ararat. Not only can they never be displaced, but from
year to year, by every art, good or evil, they consolidate their position.
That done, they begin to send for their relations. One by one new
Corsicans arrive from over the sea, each forming a centre in his turn,
where he sits tight, with a pertinacious solidarity that borders on the
superhuman.
Cave-hunting savages at heart, and enemy to every man save their own blood
relations, the Corsicans are the nightmare of the Arabs on account of
their irreclaimable avarice and brutality. They would flay the native
alive, if they dared, and sell his skin for boot-leather. They can play at
being _plus arabes que les arabes_, and then, if the game goes against
them, they invoke their rights of French citizenship in the grand manner.
The Frenchman knows it all; he regrets that such creatures should be his
own compatriots--regrets, maybe, that he is not possessed of the same
primordial pushfulness and insensibility; and shrugs his shoulders in
civilized despair.
As for the Maltese, they would be all very well if--if they were not
British subjects. But such being the case, you never know! It is
disheartening to find such babble in the mouth of respectable officials
and writers.
I am well aware that there is a Sicilian _in fabula_ who is not "mafioso";
that the crude banditism which sits in every Corsican's bones has raised
him to the elysium of martyrs and heroes and not, where he ought to have
gone, to the gallows; that the Maltese are not merely cantankerous and
bigoted (Catholic) Arabs, but also sober, industrious, and economical. I
have lived with all these races in their own countries and--apart from a
fatal monkey-like apprehensibility which passes for intelligence but, as a
matter of fact, precludes it--have found chiefly this to admire in them,
that they are prolific and kind to their offspring.
Small praise? Not altogether. The same may apply to cats and dogs, but it
does not always apply to civilized races of men. The Scotchman, for
instance, can produce children, but is often unkind to them (_Read the
papers!_); the Frenchman is kind to children, but often cannot produce
them. It would seem that chiefly in half-cultured people are these two
qualities, twin roots of racial and domestic virtues, to be met with side
by side.
Whatever may be the cause of it--better food, a different legislation or
climate, or contact with other nations--the suggestive fact remains, that
the more objectionable idiosyncrasies of the Maltese, Corsicans and
Sicilians become diluted on African soil. Can it be the mere change from
an island to a continent? There may be some truth in Bourget's "oppression
des îles." _Insulani semper mali_, says an old Latin proverb....
"Do you know," the gaitered young ex-farmer was saying--"do you know how
many French _colons_ there are in the whole regency? Eight or nine
hundred, drowned in an ocean of Arabs, who own the land. And that's what
we call settling a country. The Americans knew better when they cleared
out the redskins! And how do the English manage in India? Why, they shoot
them--_piff-paff_: it's done! That's the way to colonize (looking
approvingly at me)--_supprimez l'indigène_! A nation cannot condescend to
the idealistic ravings of an individual."
I observed that I had never heard of that method being actually adopted in
India.
"You say that, Monsieur, because you fear it sounds a little drastic. But
we are not in Paris or London just now; we can say what we think. Or
better still" (glowing with enthusiasm), "they tie them to the mouth of a
big gun, and then--_Boum ... houpla!! Biftek à la tartare_."
"You are misinformed, my friend," said the voice from the other table.
"That Indian cannon business was merely an administrative experiment."
I looked at the speaker, who was smiling mirthfully to himself. He was a
fair-complexioned man of about forty-five, rather carefully dressed,
blue-eyed, with a short, well-groomed beard--evidently an old acquaintance
of the company.
"It's all right for you," the other retorted, "with your comfortable
offices and your fat, ever-increasing salaries. You are not a harassed
agriculturist, skulking in fear of his life, or a public servant, starving
on four francs a day. Behold!" he went on, extracting a newspaper out of
his pocket, "behold the latest portrait of yourself and your
colleagues--you have an air of revolting prosperity. And your whole
biography, too, in black and white; your wife, your children, your past
career ... what it is to be a capitalist!"
"_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 document 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 principal representatives. Beneath that of the speaker were printed
the words--
"PAUL DUFRESNOY,
Ingenieur civil des mines,"
and some other titles.
An odd coincidence, this meeting, on the eve of my departure.
I passed 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-abasement, 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 "constitutional 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 fashion
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 snobbishness?"
"The English snobbishness," 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 institutions. 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. _Ça
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. Cafés 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 "comité 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 butterflies; 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 employés 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 quantities 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 establishing 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 clientèle; 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 cockles of one's heart to hear
how pertinently he discourses damnation to the cringing host. For we
non-Frenchmen, be it understood, are all "des désequilibrés" 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, passes by these with scorn, and betakes himself to
a little booth whose table is strewn with dubious scraps 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 à la bretonne" for the famished traveller.
Tunisia is a sheep-rearing country--there are sixty thousand sheep in the
_contrôle_ of Gafsa alone--but you may live there a lifetime before seeing
a leg of mutton at a country table d'hôte. 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_ ...