The Garden of Allah Read online

  Produced by Dagny; John Bickers

  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, theconsciousness that she would have to be dressed before dawn to catch thetrain for Beni-Mora, prevented Domini Enfilden from sleeping. There wasdeep silence in the Hotel de la Mer at Robertville. The French officerswho took their pension there had long since ascended the hill of Addounato the barracks. The cafes had closed their doors to the drinkers anddomino players. The lounging Arab boys had deserted the sandy Place dela Marine. In their small and dusky bazaars the Israelites had reckonedup the takings of the day, and curled themselves up in gaudy quiltson their low divans to rest. Only two or three _gendarmes_ were stillabout, and a few French and Spaniards at the Port, where, moored againstthe wharf, lay the steamer _Le General Bertrand_, in which Domini hadarrived that evening from Marseilles.

  In the hotel the fair and plump Italian waiter, who had drifted to NorthAfrica from Pisa, had swept up the crumbs from the two long tablesin the _salle-a-manger_, smoked a thin, dark cigar over a copy of the_Depeche Algerienne_, put the paper down, scratched his blonde head, onwhich the hair stood up in bristles, stared for a while at nothing inthe firm manner of weary men who are at the same time thoughtless anddepressed, and thrown himself on his narrow bed in the dusty corner ofthe 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 drunkhis last glass of rum. They snored like honest people recruiting theirstrength 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 pillowat the red brick floor of her bedroom, on which stood various trunksmarked by the officials of the Douane. There were two windows in theroom looking out towards the Place de la Marine, below which lay thestation. Closed _persiennes_ of brownish-green, blistered wood protectedthem. One of these windows was open. Yet the candle at Domini's bedsideburnt steadily. The night was warm and quiet, without wind.

  As she lay there, Domini still felt the movement of the sea. The passagehad been a bad one. The ship, crammed with French recruits for theAfrican regiments, had pitched and rolled almost incessantly forthirty-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 lowerdeck, and heard above the sound of the waves and winds their groans andexclamations, rough laughter, and half-timid, half-defiant conversationsas she shook in her berth. At Marseilles she had seen them come onboard, one by one, dressed in every variety of poor costume, each onelooking anxiously around to see what the others were like, each onecarrying a mean yellow or black bag or a carefully-tied bundle. On thewharf stood a Zouave, in tremendous red trousers and a fez, among greatheaps of dull brown woollen rugs. And as the recruits came hesitatinglyalong he stopped them with a sharp word, examined the tickets they heldout, gave each one a rug, and pointed to the gangway that led from thewharf to the vessel. Domini, then leaning over the rail of the upperdeck, had noticed the different expressions with which the recruitslooked at the Zouave. To all of them he was a phenomenon, a mystery ofAfrica and of the new life for which they were embarking. He stood thereimpudently and indifferently among the woollen rugs, his red fez pushedwell back on his short, black hair cut _en brosse_, his bronzed facetwisted into a grimace of fiery contempt, throwing, with his big andmuscular arms, rug after rug to the anxious young peasants who filedbefore him. They all gazed at his legs in the billowing red trousers;some like children regarding a Jack-in-the-box which had just sprungup into view, others like ignorant, but superstitious, people whohad unexpectedly come upon a shrine by the wayside. One or two seemeddisposed to laugh nervously, as the very stupid laugh at anythingthey see for the first time. But fear seized them. They refrainedconvulsively and shambled on to the gangway, looking sideways, likefowls, and holding their rugs awkwardly to their breasts with theirdirty, 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 thisship that was to convey them to Africa. They crowded together. Theirpoor bundles and bags jostled one against the other. With their clumsyboots 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 inhis different way, was furtively on the defensive, uneasily wonderingwhether some misfortune might not presently come to him from one ofthese unknown neighbours.

  A few of the recruits, as they came on board, looked up at Domini as sheleant over the rail; and in all the different coloured and shaped eyesshe thought she read a similar dread and nervous hope that things mightturn 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 wasan incarnation of Africa to these raw peasants, who had never beforestirred beyond the provinces where they were born, went on takingthe tickets, and tossing the woollen rugs to the passing figures, andpointing ferociously to the gangway. He got very tired of his tasktowards the end, and showed his fatigue to the latest comers, shovingtheir rugs into their arms with brusque violence. And when at length thewharf was bare he spat on it, rubbed his short-fingered, sunburnt handsdown the sides of his blue jacket, and swaggered on board with the airof a dutiful but injured man who longed to do harm in the world. By thistime the ship was about to cast off, and the recruits, ranged in linealong the bulwarks of the lower deck, were looking in silence towardsMarseilles, which, with its tangle of tall houses, its forest of masts,its long, ugly factories and workshops, now represented to them thewhole of France. The bronchial hoot of the siren rose up menacingly.Suddenly two Arabs, in dirty white burnouses and turbans bound withcords of camel's hair, came running along the wharf. The siren hootedagain. The Arabs bounded over the gangway with grave faces. All therecruits turned to examine them with a mixture of superiority anddeference, such as a schoolboy might display when observing theagilities of a tiger. The ropes fell heavily from the posts of thequay into the water, and were drawn up dripping by the sailors, and _LeGeneral Bertrand_ began to move out slowly among the motionless ships.

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

  When the land faded, and the white sea rose, less romanticconsiderations took possession of her. She wished to sleep, and drank adose 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 faintradiance that penetrated through the glass shutters of the skylight.The recruits, humanised and drawn together by misery, w
ere becomingacquainted. The incessant murmur of their voices dropped down to her,with the sound of the waves, and of the mysterious cries and creakingshudders that go through labouring ships. And all these noises seemed toher hoarse and pathetic, suggestive, too, of danger.

  When they reached the African shore, and saw the lights of housestwinkling upon the hills, the pale recruits were marshalled on the whiteroad by Zouaves, who met them from the barracks of Robertville. Alreadythey looked older than they had looked when they embarked. Domini sawthem 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 ofthe Zouaves angrily shouted to them to be quiet. They obeyed, anddisappeared heavily into the shadows, staring about them anxiously atthe feathery palms that clustered in this new and dark country, and atthe shrouded figures of Arabs who met them on the way.

  The red brick floor was heaving gently, Domini thought. She foundherself wondering how the cane chair by the small wardrobe kept itsfooting, and why the cracked china basin in the iron washstand, paintedbright yellow, did not stir and rattle. Her dressing-bag was open. Shecould see the silver backs and tops of the brushes and bottles in itgleaming. 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 openwindow would let in a cold air, probably a biting blast. The woodenshutter would be shaking. There would be, perhaps, a sound of rain. AndDomini found herself vaguely pitying England and the people mewed up init for the winter. Yet how many winters she had spent there, dreaming ofliberty and doing dreary things--things without savour, without meaning,without salvation for brain or soul. Her mind was still dulled to acertain extent by the narcotic she had taken. She was a strong andactive woman, with long limbs and well-knit muscles, a clever fencer,a tireless swimmer, a fine horsewoman. But to-night she felt almostneurotic, like one of the weak or dissipated sisterhood for whom "restcures" are invented, and by whom bland doctors live. That heaving redfloor continually emphasised for her her present feebleness. She hatedfeebleness. 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 thedarkness became intolerable to her. In it she saw perpetually the longprocession of the pale recruits winding up the hill of Addouna withtheir bags and bundles, like spectres on a way of dreams. Finally sheresolved to accept a sleepless night. She lit her candle again and sawthat the brick floor was no longer heaving. Two of the books thatshe called her "bed-books" lay within easy reach of her hand. One wasNewman's _Dream of Gerontius_, the other a volume of the BadmintonLibrary. She chose the former and began to read.

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

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

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

  Domini was thirty-two, unmarried, and in a singularly independent--somemight have thought a singularly lonely--situation. Her father, LordRens, had recently died, leaving Domini, who was his only child, alarge 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 daughterof a Hungarian mother and of Sir Henry Arlworth, one of the mostprominent and ardent English Catholics of his day. A son of his became apriest, and a famous preacher and writer on religious subjects. Anotherchild, a daughter, took the veil. Lady Rens, who was not clever,although she was at one time almost universally considered to have theface of a muse, shared in the family ardour for the Church, but was fartoo fond of the world to leave it. While she was very young she met LordRens, a Lifeguardsman of twenty-six, who called himself a Protestant,but who was really quite happy without any faith. He fell madly in lovewith her and, in order to marry her, became a Catholic, and even a verydevout one, aiding his wife's Church by every means in his power, givinglarge 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, suddenlythrew all her principles to the winds, and ran away with a Hungarianmusician, who had made a furor one season in London by his magnificentviolin-playing, her husband, stricken in his soul, and also woundedalmost to the death in his pride, abandoned abruptly the religion of thewoman who had converted and betrayed him.

  Domini was nineteen, and had recently been presented at Court when thescandal of her mother's escapade shook the town, and changed her fatherin a day from one of the happiest to one of the most cynical, embitteredand despairing of men. She, who had been brought up by both her parentsas a Catholic, who had from her earliest years been earnestly educatedin the beauties of religion, was now exposed to the almost franticpersuasions of a father who, hating all that he had formerly loved,abandoning all that, influenced by his faithless wife, he had formerlyclung to, wished to carry his daughter with him into his new and mostmiserable way of life. But Domini, who, with much of her mother's darkbeauty, had inherited much of her quick vehemence and passion, was alsogifted with brains, and with a certain largeness of temperament andclearness of insight which Lady Rens lacked. Even when she was stillquivering under the shock and shame of her mother's guilt and her ownsolitude, Domini was unable to share her father's intensely egoisticview of the religion of the culprit. She could not be persuaded that thefaith in which she had been brought up was proved to be a sham becauseone of its professors, whom she had above all others loved and trusted,had broken away from its teachings and defied her own belief. She wouldnot secede with her father; but remained in the Church of the mother shewas never to see again, and this in spite of extraordinary and doggedefforts on the part of Lord Rens to pervert her to his own Atheism. Hismind had been so warped by the agony of his heart that he had come tofeel as if by tearing his only child from the religion he had been ledto by the greatest sinner he had known, he would be, in some degree atleast, purifying his life tarnished by his wife's conduct, raising againa little way the pride she had trampled in the dust.

  Her uncle, Father Arlworth, helped Domini by his support and counsel inthis critical period of her life, and Lord Rens in time ceased from theendeavour to carry his child with him as companion in his tragic journeyfrom love and belief to hatred and denial. He turned to the violentoccupations of despair, and the last years of his life were hideousenough, as the world knew and Domini sometimes suspected. But thoughDomini had resisted him she was not unmoved or wholly uninfluenced byher mother's desertion and its effect upon her father. She remained aCatholic, but she gradually ceased from being a devout one. Althoughshe had seemed to stand firm she had in truth been shaken, if not inher belief, in a more precious thing
--her love. She complied with theordinances, but felt little of the inner beauty of her faith. The effortshe had made in withstanding her father's assault upon it had exhaustedher. Though she had had the strength to triumph, at the moment, apartial and secret collapse was the price she had afterwards to pay.Father Arlworth, who had a subtle understanding of human nature, noticedthat Domini was changed and slightly hardened by the tragedy she hadknown, and was not surprised or shocked. Nor did he attempt to forceher character back into its former way of beauty. He knew that to doso would be dangerous, that Domini's nature required peace in which tobecome absolutely normal once again after the shock it had sustained.

  When Domini was twenty-one he died, and her safest guide, the one whounderstood her best, went from her. The years passed. She lived with herembittered father; and drifted into the unthinking worldliness of thelife 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 ofhuman relations. She had seen something of the terror of love, and couldnot, like other women, regard it as safety and as sweetness. So she putit from her, and strove to fill her life with all those lesser thingswhich men and women grasp, as the Chinese grasp the opium pipe, thosethings which lull our comprehension of realities to sleep.

  When Lord Rens died, still blaspheming, and without any of theconsolations of religion, Domini felt the imperious need of change. Shedid not grieve actively for the dead man. In his last years they hadbeen very far apart, and his death relieved her from the perpetualcontemplation of a tragedy. Lord Rens had grown to regard his daughteralmost with enmity in his enmity against her mother's religion, whichwas 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 onlylie still, she remembered suddenly just what he had been before hermother's flight. The succeeding period, long though it had been andugly, 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 theunknown roused her abruptly to a clear conception of how his action andher mother's had affected her own character. As she stood by his bedshe wondered what she might have been if her mother had been true, herfather happy, to the end. Then she felt afraid of herself, recognisingpartially, and for the first time, how all these years had seen her longindifference. She felt self-conscious too, ignorant of the real meaningof life, and as if she had always been, and still remained, rather acomplicated piece of mechanism than a woman. A desolate enervation ofspirit 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 orevil, and to feel sure that she did not know, had never known or triedto find out. Once, in this state of mind, she went to confession. Shecame 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 aworthless confession? she thought. To say what you have done is notalways to say what you are. And only what you are matters eternally.

  Presently, still in this perplexity of spirit, she left England withonly 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, whichshe had never seen. Her destination was Beni-Mora. She had chosen itbecause she liked its name, because she saw on the map that it was anoasis in the Sahara Desert, because she knew it was small, quiet, yetface to face with an immensity of which she had often dreamed. Idly shefancied that perhaps in the sunny solitude of Beni-Mora, far fromall the friends and reminiscences of her old life, she might learn tounderstand herself. How? She did not know. She did not seek to know.Here was a vague pilgrimage, as many pilgrimages are in this world--thejourney of the searcher who knew not what she sought. And so now she layin the dark, and heard the rustle of the warm African rain, and smeltthe perfumes rising from the ground, and felt that the unknown was verynear her--the unknown with all its blessed possibilities of change.