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?