them considerable tolerance in matters of religion. They are the least
bigoted Orientals one could wish to meet. Only fifteen in a hundred,
perhaps even less, perform the devotions prescribed by the Prophet. And it
is part of their charming heterodoxy to be dog-eaters. They will catch and
devour each other's dogs; they even breed them for the market, though they
dare not expose the meat publicly, any more than that of swine, which they
eat with relish. But up to a few days ago they had never ventured to touch
the dog of a foreigner. On Wednesday evening, however, a fox-terrier
belonging to a French official was found in the street, dead, with its
throat cut. A stream of blood was traced from that spot to the door of a
native eating-shop, and enquiries from the neighbours elicited the fact
that the cook of the establishment had caught the beast and cut its
throat; that the miserable creature, in its dying struggles, had escaped
from his grasp and run in the direction of home, only to stagger by the
roadside and expire from loss of blood.
There was a wild excitement over this little episode. The dog of a
Frenchman killed, for culinary purposes, by an Arab; it was the _comble_
of temerity! The owner of the animal, on hearing the news, buckled on his
revolver and repaired to the shop with the avowed intention of shooting
his man, whom the police, fortunately, had already conjured into some safe
place of custody. If he is wise he will languish in prison for some days
longer.
Gafsa lies high, and I ask myself whether its fierce shiftings of heat and
cold, its nocturnal radiation that splits the very rocks and renders life
impossible for many plants (outside the cultivated zone, which equalizes
these extremes)--whether all this has not had a numbing and stupefying
influence on the character of the inhabitants. Would not a man, under such
perennial vexations, end in bowing his head and letting things take their
course? I notice the climatic effect upon myself is a growing incapacity
for mental effort. It is time to depart for the Djerid, where the sun,
they say, still exhales a certain amount of warmth.
Add to this, Arab frugality and the cheapness of native living throughout
the country, which removes all stimulus to work. A middle-class citizen
tells me that he has just returned from Tunis, where a lawsuit had kept
him for two years. He went there with an overland caravan which cost next
to nothing; he slept in a _zaouiah_, where he also obtained a bath gratis;
he spent on his food four sous a day, neither more nor less, and by way of
amusement took coffee with his friends or strolled down to the harbour to
look at the ships. Six pounds in two years! And natives in authority, who
are generally the richest, pay nothing whatever for their nourishment.
Like the Kaid of Gafsa, they simply requisition it in the market; the
sellers grumble, but conform to custom.
How quickly their looks can improve is shown by those who join the army.
In a few months they grow fat, cheerful, and bright-complexioned, thanks
to the hygienic life and better food. As it is, I have noticed single
individuals among the poorest classes who look remarkably well as compared
with their fellows. "They drink milk," was the explanation given me.
There is vitality enough among the young boys who play hockey--these ball
games are non-Arabic, a relic of Berberism--and keep up the sport till
late at night amid a good deal of ill-tempered fighting and pulling about.
Their mothers' milk is still inside them; they have not yet succumbed to
the ridiculous diet, clothing, and life-habits of their elders. But soon
manhood descends upon them like a cataclysm; it tears them with a frenzy
which is anything but divine and thereafter absorbs them, to the exclusion
of every other interest. Hockey-sticks are thrown away....
That witchery of Orientalism, with its immemorial customs, its wondrous
hues of earth and sky--it exists, chiefly, for the delectation of
hyperborean dreamers. The desert life and those many-tinted, mouldering
cities have their charms, but the misery at intermediate places like Gafsa
(and there are hundreds of them) is too great, too irremediable to be
otherwise than an eyesore. They have not solved the problem of the simple
life, these shivering, blear-eyed folk. Their daily routine is the height
of discomfort; they are always ailing in health, often from that disease
of which they plaintively declare that "whoever has not had it, cannot
enter the kingdom of Heaven," and which, unlike ourselves, they contract
by their patriarchal habit of eating and drinking out of a common dish.
They die like flies. Naturally enough; for it is not too much to say, of
the poorer classes, that they eat dirt, and that only once a day. A fresh
shirt in the year is their whole tailor's bill; two or three sous a day
will feed them; sunshine, and the stone floor of a mosque or coffee-house
by night, is all they ask for, and more than they sometimes get.
An old Arab song contains words to this effect: "Kafsa is miserable; its
water is blood; its air is poison; you may live there a hundred years
without making a friend." No doubt the plethoric Sicilian mason at the
Leila fountain would thoroughly endorse this statement with his "Ah,
signore--these Saracens!"... But one learns to like the people none the
less. They are merely depressed; they are not deficient in mother-wit or
kindliness; a little good food would work wonders.
The oasis people are milk-drinkers, and would be healthier than the
townsmen but for the agues, fevers and troublesome "Gafsa boil" to which
they are subject.
I go to these plantations at night-time, after dinner, when the moon plays
wonderful tricks of light and shadow with the over-arching foliage. The
smooth sandy stretches at the outskirts of the gardens shine like water at
rest, on which the leaves of an occasional sparse tuft of palms are etched
with crystalline hardness of delineation.
This untilled region is most artistic, the isolated clumps shooting up
like bamboos out of the bare soil. The whole grove is still wrapped in its
wintry sleep, and one can look through the naked branches of the fruit
trees into its furthest reaches. Only the palm leaves overhead and the
ground at one's feet are green; the middle spaces bleak and brown. But, do
what he will, a man who has lived in the tropics becomes rather _blasé_ in
the matter of palms. Besides, there are no flints to be found here....
[ILLUSTRATION: Olives in the Oasis]
Yet such is the abundance of water that these Gafsa gardens have a
character different from most African plantations. They are more artlessly
furnished, with rough, park-like districts and a not unpleasing impression
of riot and waste--waste in the midst of plenty.
Then there is a charming Theocritean bit of country--the temperate region
at the tail-end of the grove. Only olives grow here; seventy-five thousand
of them. Beside their silvery-grey trunks you may see herds of the small
but brightly-tinted oxen reposing; the ground is pied with daisies and
buttercups, oleanders border the streamlets, and the plaintive notes of
the _djouak_, the pastoral reed of the nomads, resound from some hidden
copse.
There will be nothing of this kind, I fear, in the carefully-tended oases
of the Djerid.
_Chapter XI_
_A HAVEN OF REFUGE_
The cold being past all endurance and belief, I was tempted to fulfil my
promise and call upon Monsieur Dufresnoy. What kind of man was this that
managed to survive it?
They led me to his house, which is one of the few two-storied buildings of
the town and lies in a squalid street of mud-dwellings. Villainously dirty
walls surround a massive entrance-gate studded with nails and bands of
iron, intervolved in artful designs. No bell, no knocker, no door-handle;
only an impressive lock. At the sight of this doorway I paused--it was
grim, claustral, almost menacing; there was an air of enchantment about
the mansion, as if once in a hundred years its forbidding portals might
turn on their rusty hinges.
Finally, I fled away altogether, in a kind of godly panic.
M. Dufresnoy, on his way homewards, almost ran into me. I tried to explain
the sensations his domicile had aroused in my mind; he laughed at first,
and then admitted that he had often felt the same thing. The house was apt
to look like that, he said, when his wife was away.
The inside appearance, once that portal has been passed, is quite
different, and I was glad to have an opportunity of seeing the place, as
it is one of the surprises of Gafsa, one of the few remaining town-houses
that date from better days, being built originally for some Turkish
grandee or governor--for him, I daresay, who drove the god-fearing widow
to the sylvan seclusion of Leila. You step through the gate into an open
square patio, surrounded, on the sides not abutting on the street, by an
arched passage that reposes on old Roman columns. This covered loggia,
running round three fronts of the court, is the feature of the house:
wonderful how a few arcades and pillars will impart an air of distinction
and even luxury! Almost nothing has been done to change the old appearance
of this small but well-proportioned patio; the walls have been freshly
whitewashed, the original mud-flooring replaced by tiles, a bright
flower-bed set in the centre--nothing more.
The five or six lower rooms to which the loggia gives access must be
delightfully cool in summer, but they are dark and chilly at this season.
Luckily, the mansion possesses an upper story where the family resides
during the winter, in rooms that are actually floored with wood. From
here, looking out of the windows, there is a wondrous view over a
wilderness of decayed Arab dwellings upon the oasis beyond, and the
distant purple mountains.
There is an irresistible air of geniality about this home: can it be the
house itself? For a subtle influence, no doubt, penetrates to the heart of
man from the mere form and disposition of inanimate things. I was prepared
to be smothered in a profusion of local effects; of saddle-cloths, silk
hangings, water-pipes, daggers and match-locks, dim nooks with divans, and
those other decorations that suggest the glamour of the Orient to certain
Western minds. Or again, I said to myself, this European wife will have
imported certain tastes from over the sea; the house will be replete with
trifles carefully disposed in negligent fashion, silver photograph frames
and flower vases reposing on diminutive tables, and such-like indications
of what our novelists call the "tender but indefinable touches of a
woman's hand."
Nothing of the kind. The place is simply comfortable: it appeals to one's
sense of propriety. There are carpets and genuine arm-chairs--unique
phenomena in this part of the world; best of all, fire-places wherein
ample logs of olive-wood glimmer and glister all day long.
And so the last few days have passed. Mentally, too, I am thawing once
more; the hotel life and solitary walks of Gafsa had begun to affect me
disagreeably. Such things are endurable and perhaps stimulating in youth
and in the plenitude of health; but there comes a period when one lives
less in future dreamings than in the experiences of the past--unpleasant
company, for the most part; when one craves to see the faces and hear the
opinions of rational fellow-creatures; when one requires, in short, to be
distracted. This is the age, too, at which a man begins to realize the
significance of those once-despised material comforts. Tunisian hotels can
only be inhabited by young hopefuls.
The house contains a considerable library of local literature--mostly
technical and dealing with Dufresnoy's Metlaoui district, but some of it
intelligible to a simple traveller like myself. From certain books I have
begun to make extracts concerning the places I am likely to visit:
Metlaoui, the Djerid oases, and the Chott country.
Dufresnoy is essentially a mining engineer. He evidently knows his
business thoroughly; he has been employed in various parts of the French
dominions and likes the work; all of which has not prevented him from
becoming a man of the world and keeping his other intellectual pores open.
There is nothing of the professional in his conversation. He is rather
undemonstrative, for a Frenchman.
He told me an odd thing about the native rising in Thala in 1896, when a
marabout preached death to all foreigners, with the result that several
white men were murdered (it was a hastily collected band of Italian
tradesmen who put down the insurrection). They caught him, and in due time
he died (?) in prison--they were probably afraid to execute him: perhaps
he killed himself--and the odd thing is this: that although the necessary
sum has been contributed for erecting a monument to these unhappy victims
of native ferocity, yet the Franco-Tunisian authorities are averse to the
plan, on the ground that such a public monument might offend Arab
susceptibilities. This struck me as overdoing the "pacific penetration"
policy; and he thought so too, more especially as there is a commemorative
stone to some preposterous native bigot at the very place....
I shall be sorry to leave Dufresnoy at Metlaoui. In him I often admire
that fine trait of his race: the clarifying instinct. He possesses--with
no pretension at knowledge beyond his mining sphere--an innate rigour of
judgment in every matter of the mind; he avoids crooked thinking by a
process of ratiocination so swift and sure as to appear intuitive. Even as
a true collector of antiques has quite a peculiar way of handling some
rare snuff-box or Tanagra statuette and, though unacquainted with that
particular branch of art, yet straightway classes it correctly as to its
merits, so, to him, an idea of whatever kind is an _objet de vertu_, to be
appraised with unfailing accuracy. He is a connoisseur of abstractions.
What the Goth carves out grotesquely after a painful labour of mental
elimination, the right deposited, as residue, after a thousand
wrongs--what the Latin smothers under a deluge of mere words: this your
Frenchman of such a type will nimbly disentangle from all its
unessentials; he presents it to your inspection in reasonable and
convincing shape--purified, clipped, pruned. What is this gift, this
distinguishing mark?
Discipline of the mind, culminating in intellectual chastity--in what may
be called a horror of perverse or futile reasoning.
He mentioned, incidentally, the case of suicides among the natives to
prove that the _Mektoub_ doctrine is not wholly pernicious. Suicides were
quite unusual, he said; the Arabs do not seem to be able to fall in with
the idea, preferring to bear the greatest evils rather than take an active
part in the undoing of themselves. That was _Mektoub_: to bow the head,
dumbly resisting. And were they not right? Did not the great majority of
European cases of suicide imply a neurotic condition--such as when men of
business have suffered reverses on Exchange or lost some trivial
appointment? How easily things could be bridged over, or repaired, or even
endured! The most hopeless invalid could testify to the fact that some
pleasure can still be extracted out of a maimed or crippled existence; a
man, however impoverished, might still live in dignified and fairly
cheerful fashion.
He thought that in the matter of suicides, as in that of remorse, we were
too "spectacular and altruistic"; that we lived in a rather unwholesome
atmosphere of self-created and foolish ideas concerning honour and duty;
that the _Mektoub_ practice of the Arabs pointed to an underlying
primitive sanity which we would do well to foster within us.
_Chapter XII_
_THE MYSTERIOUS COUNT_
Gafsa, even Gafsa, has its enigmas.
I climbed this afternoon to the summit of the Rogib hill, which lies near
the railway station, on the further side of the Oued Baiesh. This,
presumably, is the site where Marius halted for the last time before
attacking the town; and the spot was also interesting to me on account of
its flint implements....
A sad and barren range of hills. There was no sunshine, for a
scirocco-storm raised clouds of dust and obscured the sky; the wind was
bitterly cold. Finding it impossible to attune my phantasy to the picture
of Marius and his soldiers, I descended once more.
On the station turnpike I overtook a solitary foot-passenger, who plodded
slowly along. It was the Polish Count. He had been absent from the hotel
for several days, and now appeared to be in the gloomiest of humours.
Where had he been?
For a promenade, he said. It was too dreary sitting indoors, all alone. He
had left the hotel. The place was too noisy: the dogs barked incessantly.
He had taken rooms with a Jew, and arranged to have his meals at a small
Italian _trattoria_.
This was a half-truth, I felt sure. The dogs of Gafsa, no doubt, are past
all endurance; they are worse than in any Turkish village where they howl
at least in unison, and so continuously through the night that one ceases
to take note of them; but the man's real reason for this change of
domicile was probably another one.
"You must find that much quieter," I said, "and cheaper as well. These
hotels are rather pretentious."
"Pretentious and dear. Here I am, stranded in an unknown place, without
friends; remittances are due to me, and they never come"--he broke into
the subject without reserve--"and it is hard, I assure you, to deprive
oneself of things, of trifles, if you like to call them so, to which one
is nevertheless accustomed and entitled, so to speak, by birthright. But I
am talking to the winds, no doubt. You, Monsieur, are one of the fortunate
ones; you don't know--you don't know----"
"Yes I do," I replied, trying to think of something to say in the way of
consolation. "I know quite well----"
"How do you know?" he interrupted. And next, with needless vehemence:
"_What_ do you know?"
I was surprised at his sudden change of tone. It was awkward, all this. I
gave utterance to such commonplaces on the instability of human affairs as
occurred to me, and ended up by offering, I hope with sufficient delicacy,
to assist him to the small extent that lay in my power.
"Ah!"
He seemed infinitely relieved by my words: he evidently expected some
answer of quite another import. Turning his back to the wind, and pausing
for a moment to adjust his clothing, he replied, with ambassadorial
deliberation:
"You may be certain, Monsieur, that I would not easily forget a kindness
of this nature; my lot in life has been far too unhappy to make me
undervalue what you, a stranger, have just offered me. But I will decline:
what are a few francs to me? Pray don't think me ungrateful, however. You
have caught me in an almost delirious moment, and your friendly words just
now, when I felt myself so abandoned and in so critical a state of mind,
with this dreadful desert wind moaning and everything, as it seems,
hostile to me: your kind words, I say, touched me more deeply than I can
express." (Here he wiped away a genuine tear.) "But my luck may yet turn,
and then, be sure, I will make you forget all my childish querulousness."
And he went on, almost gaily:
"I never could keep money! And the worst of it is, I hate work; I was not
brought up to it, and you will admit that I am too old to begin life anew.
Yet I object on principle to so-called charity, being intelligent enough
to know that there is only one kind of charity, and Justice is its name.
But what is justice? I suppose we all possess some kind of natural rights,
according to our stations; justice, I take it, would consist in our being
permitted to enjoy those rights. If this is correct, then--ah, Monsieur,
the demoralizing effects of poverty, of non-justice, on a man like myself;
how it lowers your self-respect and makes you capable of actions that you
would reprobate, in your right mind--"
"In your right mind? Is a poor man, then, insane?"
"How can I make you understand? Tell me, is not poverty a kind of madness,
an obsession that haunts you night and day? To puzzle, at every hour, how
to meet this demand and how to shun that one; to deny yourself the
necessities of life, and your friends those poor little pleasures that you
are yearning to bestow upon them--is it not a mental malady, a fever; is
it not damnation itself? The thousand meannesses: how they degrade you;
how they suck away your strength, your ambition, your faith! To see no
openings before you, save ever darker gulfs of despair! I cannot hope to
make you conceive such a hell: one must have been there oneself. But note
this, Monsieur: never judge an impoverished man by your own standards of
right and wrong--never! For the old-established meanings of things shift
for him--they shift; and his temptations become formidably subtle beyond
belief. When rich, he says calmly _Non; ça ne va pas_. But to forego an
advantage, when poor, is the same as if--let me see ... as if one asked
you to leave lying some fascinating flint in the desert waste."
"That simile, surely, is all wrong, Count. Nobody can be injured by my
flint-mania, whereas----"
"I know, I know; I am not trying to excuse things; I am only explaining
how they happen. But how explain to others? We always talk of putting
ourselves in our neighbours' place; idlest of phrases! since we cannot
possibly avoid bringing our personal apparatus to bear on their problems.
There is a gulf between man and man. You will hardly believe that I used
to take an interest--quite superficial, you know, but none the less
real--in all those questions of the day that absorb the ordinary man of
ease, in politics and art and whatnot; but nowadays all my interests are
centred on one single point. On what point, do you think? On keeping up
the external appearance, and the manners, of well-being. I have no energy
left for anything else; and even this effort quite exhausts me. Art and
politics! What, in the name of heaven, do I care for art and politics,
with the knife at my throat? I only utilize these things; yes, I utilize
them for conversational purposes, in order to deceive others as to my
true, incessant and miserable preoccupations. Laughable, is it not? Why
don't you smile, Monsieur--you, who have never known the bitterness?"
We were crossing the broad Oued Baiesh, a stretch of yellow sand and
stones. To obviate damage by sudden floods, the French have covered this
tract of the road with a coating of asphalt; but the busy life here, the
droves of camels and sheep, the Arab folk laughing over their laundry-work
in the shallow streamlet that trickles through the waste--all these things
were gone for the moment.
But for the torn line of Gafsa palms that confronted us on the other side
of the river-bed, we might have been in the veriest wilderness. Although
the wind was lulled, petulant little pillars of sand still arose here and
there among the boulders, and sank down again, as if exhausted; the
descending sun had emerged, a lurid disk, framed in a sulphureous halo
that melted imperceptibly into the gold of the west.
It was growing chillier than ever, and the Count, shivering with cold,
drew his burnous more closely about him; he had bought one for fifteen
francs, probably in imitation of myself, or because I once jokingly called
it "a garment for millionaires who need not use their hands." He liked to
be taken for a millionaire.
I looked at him awhile, wondering what thoughts were ruling the expression
of his perplexed and sorrowful features, and then tried to turn the
conversation into other channels.
"Are there interesting people at your Italian restaurant?"
"Well, there is Hirsch, the young German: you know him?"
"The police commissaire was talking to me about his case yesterday."