Chapter 8 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 contr?le of Gafsa alone-but you may live there a lifetime before seeing a leg of mutton at a country table d'h?te. 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 trespasses, 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 assassins" 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.