The Garden of Allah Part 14

The man had finished his fish. He rested his broad, burnt hands on the table on each side of his plate and looked at them steadily. Then he turned his head and glanced sideways at the priest, who was behind him to the right. Then he looked again at his hands. And Domini knew that all the time he was thinking about her, as she was thinking about him. She felt the violence of his thought like the violence of a hand striking her.

The Arab waiter brought her some ragout of mutton and peas, and she looked down again at her plate.

As she left the room after _dejeuner_ the priest again got up and bowed. She stopped for a moment to speak to him. All the French officers surveyed her tall, upright figure and broad, athletic shoulders with intent admiration. Domini knew it and was indifferent. If a hundred French soldiers had been staring at her critically she would not have cared at all. She was not a shy woman and was in nowise uncomfortable when many eyes were fixed upon her. So she stood and talked a little to the priest about Count Anteoni and her pleasure in his garden. And as she did so, feeling her present calm self-possession, she wondered secretly at the wholly unnatural turmoil--she called it that, exaggerating her feeling because it was unusual--in which she had been a few minutes before as she sat at her table.

The priest spoke well of Count Anteoni.

"He is very generous," he said.

Then he paused, twisting his napkin, and added:

"But I never have any real intercourse with him, Madame. I believe he comes here in search of solitude. He spends days and even weeks alone shut up in his garden."

"Thinking," she said.

The priest looked slightly surprised.

"It would be difficult not to think, Madame, would it not?"

"Oh, yes. But Count Anteoni thinks rather as a Bashi-Bazouk fights, I fancy."

She heard a chair creak in the distance and glanced over her shoulder.

The traveller had turned sideways. At once she bade the priest good-bye and walked away and out through the swing door.

All the afternoon she rested. The silence was profound. Beni-Mora was enjoying a siesta in the heat. Domini revelled in the stillness. The fatigue of travel had quite gone from her now and she began to feel strangely at home. Suzanne had arranged photographs, books, flowers in the little salon, had put cushions here and there, and thrown pretty coverings over the sofa and the two low chairs. The room had an air of cosiness, of occupation. It was a room one could sit in without restlessness, and Domini liked its simplicity, its bare wooden floor and white walls. The sun made everything right here. Without the sun--but she could not think of Beni-Mora without the sun.

She read on the verandah and dreamed, and the hours slipped quickly away. No one came to disturb her. She heard no footsteps, no movements of humanity in the house. Now and then the sound of voices floated up to her from the gardens, mingling with the peculiar dry noise of palm leaves stirring in a breeze. Or she heard the distant gallop of horses'

feet. The church bell chimed the hours and made her recall the previous evening. Already it seemed far off in the past. She could scarcely believe that she had not yet spent twenty-four hours in Beni-Mora. A conviction came to her that she would be there for a long while, that she would strike roots into this sunny place of peace. When she heard the church bell now she thought of the interior of the church and of the priest with an odd sort of familiar pleasure, as people in England often think of the village church in which they have always been accustomed to worship, and of the clergyman who ministers in it Sunday after Sunday.

Yet at moments she remembered her inward cry in Count Anteoni's garden, "Oh, what is going to happen to me here?" And then she was dimly conscious that Beni-Mora was the home of many things besides peace. It held warring influences. At one moment it lulled her and she was like an infant rocked in a cradle. At another moment it stirred her, and she was a woman on the edge of mysterious possibilities. There must be many individualities among the desert spirits of whom Count Anteoni had spoken. Now one was with her and whispered to her, now another. She fancied the light touch of their hands on hers, pulling gently at her, as a child pulls you to take you to see a treasure. And their treasure was surely far away, hidden in the distance of the desert sands.

As soon as the sun began to decline towards the west she put on her hat, thrust the card Count Anteoni had given her into her glove and set out towards the big hotel alone. She met Hadj as she walked down the arcade.

He wished to accompany her, and was evidently filled with treacherous ideas of supplanting his friend Batouch, but she gave him a franc and sent him away. The franc soothed him slightly, yet she could see that his childish vanity was injured. There was a malicious gleam in his long, narrow eyes as he looked after her. Yet there was genuine admiration too. The Arab bows down instinctively before any dominating spirit, and such a spirit in a foreign woman flashes in his eyes like a bright flame. Physical strength, too, appeals to him with peculiar force. Hadj tossed his head upwards, tucked in his chin, and muttered some words in his brown throat as he noted the elastic grace with which the rejecting foreign woman moved till she was out of his sight. And she never looked back at him. That was a keen arrow in her quiver. He fell into a deep reverie under the arcade and his face became suddenly like the face of a sphinx.

Meanwhile Domini had forgotten him. She had turned to the left down a small street in which some Indians and superior Arabs had bazaars.

One of the latter came out from the shadow of his hanging rugs and embroideries as she pa.s.sed, and, addressing her in a strange mixture of incorrect French and English, begged her to come in and examine his wares.

She shook her head, but could not help looking at him with interest.

He was the thinnest man she had ever seen, and moved and stood almost as if he were boneless. The line of his delicate and yet arbitrary features was fierce. His face was pitted with small-pox and marked by an old wound, evidently made by a knife, which stretched from his left cheek to his forehead, ending just over the left eyebrow. The expression of his eyes was almost disgustingly intelligent. While they were fixed upon her Domini felt as if her body were a gla.s.s box in which all her thoughts, feelings, and desires were ranged for his inspection. In his demeanour there was much that pleaded, but also something that commanded. His fingers were unnaturally long and held a small bag, and he planted himself right before her in the road.

"Madame, come in, venez avec moi. Venez--venez! I have much--I will show--j'ai des choses extraordinaires! Tenez! Look!"

He untied the mouth of the bag. Domini looked into it, expecting to see something precious--jewels perhaps. She saw only a quant.i.ty of sand, laughed, and moved to go on. She thought the Arab was an impudent fellow trying to make fun of her.

"No, no, Madame! Do not laugh! Ce sable est du desert. Il y a des histoires la-dedans. Il y a l'histoire de Madame. Come bazaar! I will read for Madame--what will be--what will become--I will read--I will tell. Tenez!" He stared down into the bag and his face became suddenly stern and fixed. "Deja je vois des choses dans la vie de Madame. Ah! Mon Dieu! Ah! Mon Dieu!"

"No, no," Domini said.

She had hesitated, but was now determined.

"I have no time to-day."

The man cast a quick and sly glance at her, then stared once more into the bag. "Ah! Mon Dieu! Ah! Mon Dieu!" he repeated. "The life to come--the life of Madame--I see it in the bag!"

His face looked tortured. Domini walked on hurriedly. When she had got to a little distance she glanced back. The man was standing in the middle of the road and glaring into the bag. His voice came down the street to her.

"Ah! Mon Dieu! Ah! Mon Dieu! I see it--I see--je vois la vie de Madame--Ah! Mon Dieu!"

There was an accent of dreadful suffering in his voice. It made Domini shudder.

She pa.s.sed the mouth of the dancers' street. At the corner there was a large Cafe Maure, and here, on rugs laid by the side of the road, numbers of Arabs were stretched, some sipping tea from gla.s.ses, some playing dominoes, some conversing, some staring calmly into vacancy, like animals drowned in a lethargic dream. A black boy ran by holding a hammered bra.s.s tray on which were some small china cups filled with thick coffee. Halfway up the street he met three unveiled women clad in voluminous white dresses, with scarlet, yellow, and purple handkerchiefs bound over their black hair. He stopped and the women took the cups with their henna-tinted fingers. Two young Arabs joined them. There was a scuffle. White lumps of sugar flew up into the air. Then there was a babel of voices, a torrent of cries full of barbaric gaiety.

Before it had died out of Domini's ears she stood by the statue of Cardinal Lavigerie. Rather militant than priestly, raised high on a marble pedestal, it faced the long road which, melting at last into a faint desert track, stretched away to Tombouctou. The mitre upon the head was worn surely as if it were a helmet, the pastoral staff with its double cross was grasped as if it were a sword. Upon the lower cross was stretched a figure of the Christ in agony. And the Cardinal, gazing with the eyes of an eagle out into the pathless wastes of sand that lay beyond the palm trees, seemed, by his mere att.i.tude, to cry to all the myriad hordes of men the deep-bosomed Sahara mothered in her mystery and silence, "Come unto the Church! Come unto me!"

He called men in from the desert. Domini fancied his voice echoing along the sands till the worshippers of Allah and of his Prophet heard it like a clarion in Tombouctou.

When she reached the great hotel the sun was just beginning to set. She drew Count Anteoni's card from her glove and rang the bell. After a long interval a magnificent man, with the features of an Arab but a skin almost as black as a negro, opened the door.

"Can I go up the tower to see the sunset?" she asked, giving him the card.

The man bowed low, escorted her through a long hall full of furniture shrouded in coverings, up a staircase, along a corridor with numbered rooms, up a second staircase and out upon a flat-terraced roof, from which the tower soared high above the houses and palms of Beni-Mora, a landmark visible half-a-day's journey out in the desert. A narrow spiral stair inside the tower gained the summit.

"I'll go up alone," Domini said. "I shall stay some time and I would rather not keep you."

She put some money into the Arab's hand. He looked pleased, yet doubtful too for a moment. Then he seemed to banish his hesitation and, with a deprecating smile, said something which she could not understand. She nodded intelligently to get rid of him. Already, from the roof, she caught sight of a great visionary panorama glowing with colour and magic. She was impatient to climb still higher into the sky, to look down on the world as an eagle does. So she turned away decisively and mounted the dark, winding stair till she reached a door. She pushed it open with some difficulty, and came out into the air at a dizzy height, shutting the door forcibly behind her with an energetic movement of her strong arms.

The top of the tower was small and square, and guarded by a white parapet breast high. In the centre of it rose the outer walls and the ceiling of the top of the staircase, which prevented a person standing on one side of the tower from seeing anybody who was standing at the opposite side. There was just sufficient s.p.a.ce between parapet and staircase wall for two people to pa.s.s with difficulty and manoeuvring.

But Domini was not concerned with such trivial details, as she would have thought them had she thought of them. Directly she had shut the little door and felt herself alone--alone as an eagle in the sky--she took the step forward that brought her to the parapet, leaned her arms on it, looked out and was lost in a pa.s.sion of contemplation.

At first she did not discern any of the mult.i.tudinous minutiae in the great evening vision beneath and around her. She only felt conscious of depth, height, s.p.a.ce, colour, mystery, calm. She did not measure. She did not differentiate. She simply stood there, leaning lightly on the snowy plaster work, and experienced something that she had never experienced before, that she had never imagined. It was scarcely vivid; for in everything that is vivid there seems to be something small, the point to which wonders converge, the intense spark to which many fires have given themselves as food, the drop which contains the murmuring force of innumerable rivers. It was more than vivid. It was reliantly dim, as is that pulse of life which is heard through and above the crash of generations and centuries falling downwards into the abyss; that persistent, enduring heart-beat, indifferent in its mystical regularity, that ignores and triumphs, and never grows louder nor diminishes, inexorably calm, inexorably steady, undefeated--more--utterly unaffected by unnumbered millions of tragedies and deaths.

Many sounds rose from far down beneath the tower, but at first Domini did not hear them. She was only aware of an immense, living silence, a silence flowing beneath, around and above her in dumb, invisible waves.

Circles of rest and peace, cool and serene, widened as circles in a pool towards the unseen limits of the satisfied world, limits lost in the hidden regions beyond the misty, purple magic where sky and desert met.

And she felt as if her brain, ceaselessly at work from its birth, her heart, unresting hitherto in a commotion of desires, her soul, an eternal flutter of anxious, pa.s.sionate wings, folded themselves together gently like the petals of roses when a summer night comes into a garden.

She was not conscious that she breathed while she stood there. She thought her bosom ceased to rise and fall. The very blood dreamed in her veins as the light of evening dreamed in the blue.

She knew the Great Pause that seems to divide some human lives in two, as the Great Gulf divided him who lay in Abraham's bosom from him who was shrouded in the veil of fire.

BOOK II. THE VOICE OF PRAYER

CHAPTER VII