The Garden Of Allah

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THE GARDEN OF ALLAH

BY

ROBERT HICHENS


PREPARER'S NOTE

This text was prepared from an edition published by Grosset &
Dunlap, New York. It was originally published in 1904.


CONTENTS

BOOK I. PRELUDE
BOOK II. THE VOICE OF PRAYER
BOOK III. THE GARDEN
BOOK IV. THE JOURNEY
BOOK V. THE REVELATION
BOOK VI. THE JOURNEY BACK




THE GARDEN OF ALLAH




BOOK I. PRELUDE



CHAPTER I

The fatigue caused by a rough sea journey, and, perhaps, the
consciousness that she would have to be dressed before dawn to catch the
train for Beni-Mora, prevented Domini Enfilden from sleeping. There was
deep silence in the Hotel de la Mer at Robertville. The French officers
who took their pension there had long since ascended the hill of Addouna
to the barracks. The cafes had closed their doors to the drinkers and
domino players. The lounging Arab boys had deserted the sandy Place de
la Marine. In their small and dusky bazaars the Israelites had reckoned
up the takings of the day, and curled themselves up in gaudy quilts
on their low divans to rest. Only two or three _gendarmes_ were still
about, and a few French and Spaniards at the Port, where, moored against
the wharf, lay the steamer _Le General Bertrand_, in which Domini had
arrived that evening from Marseilles.

In the hotel the fair and plump Italian waiter, who had drifted to North
Africa from Pisa, had swept up the crumbs from the two long tables
in the _salle-a-manger_, smoked a thin, dark cigar over a copy of the
_Depeche Algerienne_, put the paper down, scratched his blonde head, on
which the hair stood up in bristles, stared for a while at nothing in
the firm manner of weary men who are at the same time thoughtless and
depressed, and thrown himself on his narrow bed in the dusty corner of
the little room on the stairs near the front door. Madame, the landlady,
had laid aside her front and said her prayer to the Virgin. Monsieur,
the landlord, had muttered his last curse against the Jews and drunk
his last glass of rum. They snored like honest people recruiting their
strength for the morrow. In number two Suzanne Charpot, Domini's maid,
was dreaming of the Rue de Rivoli.

But Domini with wide-open eyes, was staring from her big, square pillow
at the red brick floor of her bedroom, on which stood various trunks
marked by the officials of the Douane. There were two windows in the
room looking out towards the Place de la Marine, below which lay the
station. Closed _persiennes_ of brownish-green, blistered wood protected
them. One of these windows was open. Yet the candle at Domini's bedside
burnt steadily. The night was warm and quiet, without wind.

As she lay there, Domini still felt the movement of the sea. The passage
had been a bad one. The ship, crammed with French recruits for the
African regiments, had pitched and rolled almost incessantly for
thirty-one hours, and Domini and most of the recruits had been ill.
Domini had had an inner cabin, with a skylight opening on to the lower
deck, and heard above the sound of the waves and winds their groans and
exclamations, rough laughter, and half-timid, half-defiant conversations
as she shook in her berth. At Marseilles she had seen them come on
board, one by one, dressed in every variety of poor costume, each one
looking anxiously around to see what the others were like, each one
carrying a mean yellow or black bag or a carefully-tied bundle. On the
wharf stood a Zouave, in tremendous red trousers and a fez, among great
heaps of dull brown woollen rugs. And as the recruits came hesitatingly
along he stopped them with a sharp word, examined the tickets they held
out, gave each one a rug, and pointed to the gangway that led from the
wharf to the vessel. Domini, then leaning over the rail of the upper
deck, had noticed the different expressions with which the recruits
looked at the Zouave. To all of them he was a phenomenon, a mystery of
Africa and of the new life for which they were embarking. He stood there
impudently and indifferently among the woollen rugs, his red fez pushed
well back on his short, black hair cut _en brosse_, his bronzed face
twisted into a grimace of fiery contempt, throwing, with his big and
muscular arms, rug after rug to the anxious young peasants who filed
before him. They all gazed at his legs in the billowing red trousers;
some like children regarding a Jack-in-the-box which had just sprung
up into view, others like ignorant, but superstitious, people who
had unexpectedly come upon a shrine by the wayside. One or two seemed
disposed to laugh nervously, as the very stupid laugh at anything
they see for the first time. But fear seized them. They refrained
convulsively and shambled on to the gangway, looking sideways, like
fowls, and holding their rugs awkwardly to their breasts with their
dirty, red hands.

To Domini there was something pitiful in the sight of all these lads,
uprooted from their homes in France, stumbling helplessly on board this
ship that was to convey them to Africa. They crowded together. Their
poor bundles and bags jostled one against the other. With their clumsy
boots they trod on each other's feet. And yet all were lonely strangers.
No two in the mob seemed to be acquaintances. And every lad, each in
his different way, was furtively on the defensive, uneasily wondering
whether some misfortune might not presently come to him from one of
these unknown neighbours.

A few of the recruits, as they came on board, looked up at Domini as she
leant over the rail; and in all the different coloured and shaped eyes
she thought she read a similar dread and nervous hope that things might
turn out pretty well for them in the new existence that had to be faced.
The Zouave, wholly careless or unconscious of the fact that he was
an incarnation of Africa to these raw peasants, who had never before
stirred beyond the provinces where they were born, went on taking
the tickets, and tossing the woollen rugs to the passing figures, and
pointing ferociously to the gangway. He got very tired of his task
towards the end, and showed his fatigue to the latest comers, shoving
their rugs into their arms with brusque violence. And when at length the
wharf was bare he spat on it, rubbed his short-fingered, sunburnt hands
down the sides of his blue jacket, and swaggered on board with the air
of a dutiful but injured man who longed to do harm in the world. By this
time the ship was about to cast off, and the recruits, ranged in line
along the bulwarks of the lower deck, were looking in silence towards
Marseilles, which, with its tangle of tall houses, its forest of masts,
its long, ugly factories and workshops, now represented to them the
whole of France. The bronchial hoot of the siren rose up menacingly.
Suddenly two Arabs, in dirty white burnouses and turbans bound with
cords of camel's hair, came running along the wharf. The siren hooted
again. The Arabs bounded over the gangway with grave faces. All the
recruits turned to examine them with a mixture of superiority and
deference, such as a schoolboy might display when observing the
agilities of a tiger. The ropes fell heavily from the posts of the
quay into the water, and were drawn up dripping by the sailors, and _Le
General Bertrand_ began to move out slowly among the motionless ships.

Domini, looking towards the land with the vague and yet inquiring glance
of those who are going out to sea, noticed the church of Notre dame de
la Garde, perched on its high hill, and dominating the noisy city,
the harbour, the cold, grey squadrons of the rocks and Monte Cristo's
dungeon. At the time she hardly knew it, but now, as she lay in bed in
the silent inn, she remembered that, keeping her eyes upon the church,
she had murmured a confused prayer to the Blessed Virgin for the
recruits. What was the prayer? She could scarcely recall it. A woman's
petition, perhaps, against the temptations that beset men shifting for
themselves in far-off and dangerous countries; a woman's cry to a woman
to watch over all those who wander.

When the land faded, and the white sea rose, less romantic
considerations took possession of her. She wished to sleep, and drank a
dose of a drug. It did not act completely, but only numbed her senses.
Through the long hours she lay in the dark cabin, looking at the faint
radiance that penetrated through the glass shutters of the skylight.
The recruits, humanised and drawn together by misery, were becoming
acquainted. The incessant murmur of their voices dropped down to her,
with the sound of the waves, and of the mysterious cries and creaking
shudders that go through labouring ships. And all these noises seemed to
her hoarse and pathetic, suggestive, too, of danger.

When they reached the African shore, and saw the lights of houses
twinkling upon the hills, the pale recruits were marshalled on the white
road by Zouaves, who met them from the barracks of Robertville. Already
they looked older than they had looked when they embarked. Domini saw
them march away up the hill. They still clung to their bags and bundles.
Some of them, lifting shaky voices, tried to sing in chorus. One of
the Zouaves angrily shouted to them to be quiet. They obeyed, and
disappeared heavily into the shadows, staring about them anxiously at
the feathery palms that clustered in this new and dark country, and at
the shrouded figures of Arabs who met them on the way.

The red brick floor was heaving gently, Domini thought. She found
herself wondering how the cane chair by the small wardrobe kept its
footing, and why the cracked china basin in the iron washstand, painted
bright yellow, did not stir and rattle. Her dressing-bag was open. She
could see the silver backs and tops of the brushes and bottles in it
gleaming. They made her think suddenly of England. She had no idea why.
But it was too warm for England. There, in the autumn time, an open
window would let in a cold air, probably a biting blast. The wooden
shutter would be shaking. There would be, perhaps, a sound of rain. And
Domini found herself vaguely pitying England and the people mewed up in
it for the winter. Yet how many winters she had spent there, dreaming of
liberty and doing dreary things--things without savour, without meaning,
without salvation for brain or soul. Her mind was still dulled to a
certain extent by the narcotic she had taken. She was a strong and
active woman, with long limbs and well-knit muscles, a clever fencer,
a tireless swimmer, a fine horsewoman. But to-night she felt almost
neurotic, like one of the weak or dissipated sisterhood for whom "rest
cures" are invented, and by whom bland doctors live. That heaving red
floor continually emphasised for her her present feebleness. She hated
feebleness. So she blew out the candle and, with misplaced energy,
strove resolutely to sleep. Possibly her resolution defeated its object.
She continued in a condition of dull and heavy wakefulness till the
darkness became intolerable to her. In it she saw perpetually the long
procession of the pale recruits winding up the hill of Addouna with
their bags and bundles, like spectres on a way of dreams. Finally she
resolved to accept a sleepless night. She lit her candle again and saw
that the brick floor was no longer heaving. Two of the books that
she called her "bed-books" lay within easy reach of her hand. One was
Newman's _Dream of Gerontius_, the other a volume of the Badminton
Library. She chose the former and began to read.

Towards two o'clock she heard a long-continued rustling. At first she
supposed that her tired brain was still playing her tricks. But the
rustling continued and grew louder. It sounded like a noise coming from
something very wide, and spread out as a veil over an immense surface.
She got up, walked across the floor to the open window and unfastened
the _persiennes_. Heavy rain was falling. The night was very black,
and smelt rich and damp, as if it held in its arms strange offerings--a
merchandise altogether foreign, tropical and alluring. As she stood
there, face to face with a wonder that she could not see, Domini forgot
Newman. She felt the brave companionship of mystery. In it she divined
the beating pulses, the hot, surging blood of freedom.

She wanted freedom, a wide horizon, the great winds, the great sun, the
terrible spaces, the glowing, shimmering radiance, the hot, entrancing
moons and bloomy, purple nights of Africa. She wanted the nomad's fires
and the acid voices of the Kabyle dogs. She wanted the roar of the
tom-toms, the dash of the cymbals, the rattle of the negroes' castanets,
the fluttering, painted figures of the dancers. She wanted--more than
she could express, more than she knew. It was there, want, aching in
her heart, as she drew into her nostrils this strange and wealthy
atmosphere.

When Domini returned to her bed she found it impossible to read any more
Newman. The rain and the scents coming up out of the hidden earth of
Africa had carried her mind away, as if on a magic carpet. She was
content now to lie awake in the dark.

Domini was thirty-two, unmarried, and in a singularly independent--some
might have thought a singularly lonely--situation. Her father, Lord
Rens, had recently died, leaving Domini, who was his only child, a
large fortune. His life had been a curious and a tragic one. Lady Rens,
Domini's mother, had been a great beauty of the gipsy type, the daughter
of a Hungarian mother and of Sir Henry Arlworth, one of the most
prominent and ardent English Catholics of his day. A son of his became a
priest, and a famous preacher and writer on religious subjects. Another
child, a daughter, took the veil. Lady Rens, who was not clever,
although she was at one time almost universally considered to have the
face of a muse, shared in the family ardour for the Church, but was far
too fond of the world to leave it. While she was very young she met Lord
Rens, a Lifeguardsman of twenty-six, who called himself a Protestant,
but who was really quite happy without any faith. He fell madly in love
with her and, in order to marry her, became a Catholic, and even a very
devout one, aiding his wife's Church by every means in his power, giving
large sums to Catholic charities, and working, with almost fiery zeal,
for the spread of Catholicism in England.

Unfortunately, his new faith was founded only on love for a human being,
and when Lady Rens, who was intensely passionate and impulsive, suddenly
threw all her principles to the winds, and ran away with a Hungarian
musician, who had made a furor one season in London by his magnificent
violin-playing, her husband, stricken in his soul, and also wounded
almost to the death in his pride, abandoned abruptly the religion of the
woman who had converted and betrayed him.

Domini was nineteen, and had recently been presented at Court when the
scandal of her mother's escapade shook the town, and changed her father
in a day from one of the happiest to one of the most cynical, embittered
and despairing of men. She, who had been brought up by both her parents
as a Catholic, who had from her earliest years been earnestly educated
in the beauties of religion, was now exposed to the almost frantic
persuasions of a father who, hating all that he had formerly loved,
abandoning all that, influenced by his faithless wife, he had formerly
clung to, wished to carry his daughter with him into his new and most
miserable way of life. But Domini, who, with much of her mother's dark
beauty, had inherited much of her quick vehemence and passion, was also
gifted with brains, and with a certain largeness of temperament and
clearness of insight which Lady Rens lacked. Even when she was still
quivering under the shock and shame of her mother's guilt and her own
solitude, Domini was unable to share her father's intensely egoistic
view of the religion of the culprit. She could not be persuaded that the
faith in which she had been brought up was proved to be a sham because
one of its professors, whom she had above all others loved and trusted,
had broken away from its teachings and defied her own belief. She would
not secede with her father; but remained in the Church of the mother she
was never to see again, and this in spite of extraordinary and dogged
efforts on the part of Lord Rens to pervert her to his own Atheism. His
mind had been so warped by the agony of his heart that he had come to
feel as if by tearing his only child from the religion he had been led
to by the greatest sinner he had known, he would be, in some degree at
least, purifying his life tarnished by his wife's conduct, raising again
a little way the pride she had trampled in the dust.

Her uncle, Father Arlworth, helped Domini by his support and counsel in
this critical period of her life, and Lord Rens in time ceased from the
endeavour to carry his child with him as companion in his tragic journey
from love and belief to hatred and denial. He turned to the violent
occupations of despair, and the last years of his life were hideous
enough, as the world knew and Domini sometimes suspected. But though
Domini had resisted him she was not unmoved or wholly uninfluenced by
her mother's desertion and its effect upon her father. She remained a
Catholic, but she gradually ceased from being a devout one. Although
she had seemed to stand firm she had in truth been shaken, if not in
her belief, in a more precious thing--her love. She complied with the
ordinances, but felt little of the inner beauty of her faith. The effort
she had made in withstanding her father's assault upon it had exhausted
her. Though she had had the strength to triumph, at the moment, a
partial and secret collapse was the price she had afterwards to pay.
Father Arlworth, who had a subtle understanding of human nature, noticed
that Domini was changed and slightly hardened by the tragedy she had
known, and was not surprised or shocked. Nor did he attempt to force
her character back into its former way of beauty. He knew that to do
so would be dangerous, that Domini's nature required peace in which to
become absolutely normal once again after the shock it had sustained.

When Domini was twenty-one he died, and her safest guide, the one who
understood her best, went from her. The years passed. She lived with her
embittered father; and drifted into the unthinking worldliness of the
life of her order. Her home was far from ideal. Yet she would not marry.
The wreck of her parents' domestic life had rendered her mistrustful of
human relations. She had seen something of the terror of love, and could
not, like other women, regard it as safety and as sweetness. So she put
it from her, and strove to fill her life with all those lesser things
which men and women grasp, as the Chinese grasp the opium pipe, those
things which lull our comprehension of realities to sleep.

When Lord Rens died, still blaspheming, and without any of the
consolations of religion, Domini felt the imperious need of change. She
did not grieve actively for the dead man. In his last years they had
been very far apart, and his death relieved her from the perpetual
contemplation of a tragedy. Lord Rens had grown to regard his daughter
almost with enmity in his enmity against her mother's religion, which
was hers. She had come to think of him rather with pity than with love.
Yet his death was a shock to her. When he could speak no more, but only
lie still, she remembered suddenly just what he had been before her
mother's flight. The succeeding period, long though it had been and
ugly, was blotted out. She wept for the poor, broken life now ended,
and was afraid for his future in the other world. His departure into the
unknown roused her abruptly to a clear conception of how his action and
her mother's had affected her own character. As she stood by his bed
she wondered what she might have been if her mother had been true, her
father happy, to the end. Then she felt afraid of herself, recognising
partially, and for the first time, how all these years had seen her long
indifference. She felt self-conscious too, ignorant of the real meaning
of life, and as if she had always been, and still remained, rather a
complicated piece of mechanism than a woman. A desolate enervation of
spirit descended upon her, a sort of bitter, and yet dull, perplexity.
She began to wonder what she was, capable of what, of how much good or
evil, and to feel sure that she did not know, had never known or tried
to find out. Once, in this state of mind, she went to confession. She
came away feeling that she had just joined with the priest in a farce.
How can a woman who knows nothing about herself make anything but a
worthless confession? she thought. To say what you have done is not
always to say what you are. And only what you are matters eternally.

Presently, still in this perplexity of spirit, she left England with
only her maid as companion. After a short tour in the south of Europe,
with which she was too familiar, she crossed the sea to Africa, which
she had never seen. Her destination was Beni-Mora. She had chosen it
because she liked its name, because she saw on the map that it was an
oasis in the Sahara Desert, because she knew it was small, quiet, yet
face to face with an immensity of which she had often dreamed. Idly she
fancied that perhaps in the sunny solitude of Beni-Mora, far from
all the friends and reminiscences of her old life, she might learn to
understand herself. How? She did not know. She did not seek to know.
Here was a vague pilgrimage, as many pilgrimages are in this world--the
journey of the searcher who knew not what she sought. And so now she lay
in the dark, and heard the rustle of the warm African rain, and smelt
the perfumes rising from the ground, and felt that the unknown was very
near her--the unknown with all its blessed possibilities of change.



CHAPTER II

Long before dawn the Italian waiter rolled off his little bed, put a cap
on his head, and knocked at Domini's and at Suzanne Charpot's doors.

It was still dark, and still raining, when the two women came out to get
into the carriage that was to take them to the station. The place de la
Marine was a sea of mud, brown and sticky as nougat. Wet palms dripped
by the railing near a desolate kiosk painted green and blue. The sky was
grey and low. Curtains of tarpaulin were let down on each side of the
carriage, and the coachman, who looked like a Maltese, and wore a round
cap edged with pale yellow fur, was muffled up to the ears. Suzanne's
round, white face was puffy with fatigue, and her dark eyes, generally
good-natured and hopeful, were dreary, and squinted slightly, as she
tipped the Italian waiter, and handed her mistress's dressing-bag and
rug into the carriage. The waiter stood an the discoloured step, yawning
from ear to ear. Even the tip could not excite him. Before the carriage
started he had gone into the hotel and banged the door. The horses
trotted quickly through the mud, descending the hill. One of the
tarpaulin curtains had been left unbuttoned by the coachman. It flapped
to and fro, and when its movement was outward Domini could catch
short glimpses of mud, of glistening palm-leaves with yellow stems, of
gas-lamps, and of something that was like an extended grey nothingness.
This was the sea. Twice she saw Arabs trudging along, holding their
skirts up in a bunch sideways, and showing legs bare beyond the knees.
Hoods hid their faces. They appeared to be agitated by the weather,
and to be continually trying to plant their naked feet in dry places.
Suzanne, who sat opposite to Domini, had her eyes shut. If she had not
from time to time passed her tongue quickly over her full, pale lips she
would have looked like a dead thing. The coquettish angle at which her
little black hat was set on her head seemed absurdly inappropriate
to the occasion and her mood. It suggested a hat being worn at some
festival. Her black, gloved hands were tightly twisted together in her
lap, and she allowed her plump body to wag quite loosely with the motion
of the carriage, making no attempt at resistance. She had really the
appearance of a corpse sitting up. The tarpaulin flapped monotonously.
The coachman cried out in the dimness to his horses like a bird,
prolonging his call drearily, and then violently cracking his whip.
Domini kept her eyes fixed on the loose tarpaulin, so that she might not
miss one of the wet visions it discovered by its reiterated movement.
She had not slept at all, and felt as if there was a gritty dryness
close behind her eyes. She also felt very alert and enduring, but not
in the least natural. Had some extraordinary event occurred; had the
carriage, for instance, rolled over the edge of the road into the sea,
she was convinced that she could not have managed to be either surprised
or alarmed, If anyone had asked her whether she was tired she would
certainly have answered "No."

Like her mother, Domini was of a gipsy type. She stood five feet ten,
had thick, almost coarse and wavy black hair that was parted in the
middle of her small head, dark, almond-shaped, heavy-lidded eyes, and a
clear, warmly-white skin, unflecked with colour. She never flushed under
the influence of excitement or emotion. Her forehead was broad and low.
Her eyebrows were long and level, thicker than most women's. The shape
of her face was oval, with a straight, short nose, a short, but rather
prominent and round chin, and a very expressive mouth, not very small,
slightly depressed at the corners, with perfect teeth, and red lips
that were unusually flexible. Her figure was remarkably athletic, with
shoulders that were broad in a woman, and a naturally small waist. Her
hands and feet were also small. She walked splendidly, like a Syrian,
but without his defiant insolence. In her face, when it was in repose,
there was usually an expression of still indifference, some thought of
opposition. She looked her age, and had never used a powderpuff in her
life. She could smile easily and easily become animated, and in her
animation there was often fire, as in her calmness there was sometimes
cloud. Timid people were generally disconcerted by her appearance, and
her manner did not always reassure them. Her obvious physical strength
had something surprising in it, and woke wonder as to how it had been,
or might be, used. Even when her eyes were shut she looked singularly
wakeful.