Fountains in the Sand: Rambles Among the Oases of Tunisia Part 8

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 cla.s.ses 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 chast.i.ty--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-pa.s.senger, 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 a.s.sure you, to deprive oneself of things, of trifles, if you like to call them so, to which one is nevertheless accustomed and ent.i.tled, 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 a.s.sist 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 amba.s.sadorial 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 d.a.m.nation 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 h.e.l.l: 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; ca 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. n.o.body 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."

"Ha, was he? Let me tell you that I have investigated it thoroughly, and find it most instructive. This young fellow is not yet twenty; he ran away from home for no discoverable reason, then signed on a merchant vessel at Ma.r.s.eilles and, disliking the work, slipped out as soon as she touched port at Sfax, and climbed without a ticket into a night-train, thinking to reach Tunis. Instead of that, he woke up in the morning and found himself at Gafsa! Here, you see, are all the elements of wrong-doing, and the authorities have learnt his history from his papers which they seized. As a German and a Jew, the French instinctively dislike him; as a Jew and a foreigner--the Arabs; he is objectionable to look at, dull of wit, and knows not a word of French or Arabic. But he is poor, and therefore--every one loads him with kindness."

"And why not?" I asked.

"Why not, indeed? Your friend the magistrate has given him some money out of his own pocket; the restaurant proprietress refuses to be paid for his food, while another one, near the station, sends word to say that he can have a plate of soup there whenever he likes; a young Arab boy--these Arabs are really incomprehensible--gives him as many cups of tea or coffee as he can drink; a Jewish lawyer has sent him some clothes; a gentleman in your hotel a quant.i.ty of linen; the Italian barber shaves him gratis; a certain shopkeeper sends him a bottle of liqueur--of liqueur!--every second day; the commissaire has given him, free of charge, a decent unoccupied bedroom in the prison, where he can go in and out as he pleases; best of all, the _Ponts et Chaussees_ are now employing him at three francs a day--a princely income, they tell me--at some agricultural job: pure kindness, inasmuch as he has never handled a spade or pickaxe in his life. He can have a pleasant time in Gafsa; he can marry an heiress if so disposed; then, when the place begins to bore him, the German Consul in Tunis will repatriate him at his Government's expense. 'He's a poor devil,' they say. Why do I tell you all this? Because--well--I am also poor--"

Always harping on the old theme!

"The cases are not quite parallel, are they?"

"No. He is young, and fit for work, whereas I am past the middle term of life. Old age--another horror! Besides, I am a gentleman----"

"Exactly. We should be ashamed to shave you gratis."