The Garden of Allah Part 5

CHAPTER V

Towards morning Domini slept. It was nearly eight o'clock when she awoke. The room was full of soft light which told of the sun outside, and she got up at once, put on a pair of slippers and opened the French window on to the verandah. Already Beni-Mora was bathed in golden beams and full of gentle activities. A flock of goats pattered by towards the edge of the oasis. The Arab gardeners were lazily sweeping small leaves from the narrow paths under the mimosa and pepper trees. Soldiers in loose white suits, dark blue sashes and the fez, were hastening from the Fort towards the market. A distant bugle rang out and the snarl of camels was audible from the village. Domini stood on the verandah for a moment, drinking in the desert air. It made her feel very pure and clean, as if she had just bathed in clear water. She looked up at the limpid sky, which seemed full of hope and of the power to grant blessings, and she was glad that she had come to Beni-Mora. Her lonely sensation of the previous night had gone. As she stood in the sun she was conscious that she needed re-creation and that here she might find it. The radiant sky, the warm sun and the freedom of the coming day and of many coming desert days, filled her heart with an almost childish sensation. She felt younger than she had felt for years, and even foolishly innocent, like a puppy dog or a kitten. Her thick black hair, unbound, fell in a veil round her strong, active body, and she had the rare consciousness that behind that other more mysterious veil her soul was to-day a less unfit companion for its mate than it had been since her mother's sin.

Cleanliness--what a blessed condition that was, a condition to breed bravery. In this early morning hour Beni-Mora looked magically clean.

Domini thought of the desperate dirt of London mornings, of the sooty air brooding above black trees and greasy pavements. Surely it was difficult to be clean of soul there. Here it would be easy. One would tune one's lyre in accord with Nature and be as a singing palm tree beside a water-spring. She took up a little vellum-bound book which she had laid at night upon her dressing-table. It was _Of the Imitation of Christ_, and she opened it at haphazard and glanced down on a sunlit page. Her eyes fell on these words:

"Love watcheth, and sleeping, slumbereth not. When weary it is not tired; when straitened it is not constrained; when frightened it is not disturbed; but like a vivid flame and a burning torch it mounteth upwards and securely pa.s.seth through all. Whosoever loveth knoweth the cry of this voice."

The sunlight on the page of the little book was like the vivid flame and the burning torch spoken of in it. Heat, light, a fierce vitality.

Domini had been weary so long, weary of soul, that she was almost startled to find herself responding quickly to the sacred pa.s.sion on the page, to the bright beam that kissed it as twin kisses twin. She knelt down to say her morning prayer, but all she could whisper was:

"O, G.o.d, renew me. O, G.o.d, renew me. Give me power to feel, keenly, fiercely, even though I suffer. Let me wake. Let me feel. Let me be a living thing once more. O, G.o.d, renew me, renew me!"

While she prayed she pressed her face so hard against her hands that patches of red came upon her cheeks. And afterwards it seemed to her as if her first real, pa.s.sionate prayer in Beni-Mora had been almost like a command to G.o.d. Was not such a fierce prayer perhaps a blasphemy?

She rose from that prayer to the first of her new days.

After breakfast she looked over the edge of the verandah and saw Batouch and Hadj squatting together in the shadow of the trees below. They were smoking cigarettes and talking eagerly. Their conversation, which was in Arabic, sounded violent. The accented words were like blows. Domini had not looked over the parapet for more than a minute before the two guides saw her and rose smiling to their feet.

"I am waiting to show the village to Madame," said Batouch, coming out softly into the road, while Hadj remained under the trees, exposing his teeth in a sarcastic grin, which plainly enough conveyed to Domini his pity for her sad mistake in not engaging him as her attendant.

Domini nodded, went back into her room and put on a shady hat. Suzanne handed her a large parasol lined with green, and she descended the stairs rather slowly. She was not sure whether she wanted a companion in her first walk about Beni-Mora. There would be more savour of freedom in solitude. Yet she had hardly the heart to dismiss Batouch, with all his dignity and determination. She resolved to take him for a little while and then to get rid of him on some pretext. Perhaps she would make some purchases in the bazaars and send him to the hotel with them.

"Madame has slept well?" asked the poet as she emerged into the sun.

"Pretty well," she answered, nodding again to Hadj, whose grin became more mischievous, and opening her parasol. "Where are we going?"

"Wherever Madame wishes. There is the market, the negro village, the mosque, the casino, the statue of the Cardinal, the bazaars, the garden of the Count Ferdinand Anteoni."

"A garden," said Domini. "Is it a beautiful one?"

Batouch was about to burst into a lyric ecstasy, but he checked himself and said:

"Madame shall see for herself and tell me afterwards if in all Europe there is one such garden."

"Oh, the English gardens are wonderful," she said, smiling at his patriotic conceit.

"No doubt. Madame shall tell me, Madame shall tell me," he repeated with imperturbable confidence.

"But first I wish to go for a moment into the church," she said. "Wait for me here, Batouch."

She crossed the road, pa.s.sed the modest, one-storied house of the priest, and came to the church, which looked out on to the quiet gardens. Before going up the steps and in at the door she paused for a moment. There was something touching to her, as a Catholic, in this symbol of her faith set thus far out in the midst of Islamism. The cross was surely rather lonely, here, raised above the white-robed men to whom it meant nothing. She was conscious that since she had come to this land of another creed, and of another creed held with fanaticism, her sentiment for her own religion, which in England for many years had been but lukewarm, had suddenly gained in strength. She had an odd, almost manly, sensation that it was her duty in Africa to stand up for her faith, not blatantly in words to impress others, but perseveringly in heart to satisfy herself. Sometimes she felt very protective. She felt protective today as she looked at this humble building, which she likened to one of the poor saints of the Thebaid, who dwelt afar in desert places, and whose devotions were broken by the night-cries of jackals and by the roar of ravenous beasts. With this feeling strong upon her she pushed open the door and went in.

The interior was plain, even ugly. The walls were painted a hideous drab. The stone floor was covered with small, hard, straw-bottomed chairs and narrow wooden forms for the patient knees of worshippers.

In the front were two rows of private chairs, with velvet cushions of various brilliant hues and velvet-covered rails. On the left was a high stone pulpit. The altar, beyond its mean black and gold railing, was dingy and forlorn. On it there was a tiny gold cross with a gold statuette of Christ hanging, surmounted by a canopy with four pillars, which looked as if made of some unwholesome sweetmeat. Long candles of blue and gold and bouquets of dusty artificial flowers flanked it.

Behind it, in a round niche, stood a painted figure of Christ holding a book. The two adjacent side chapels had domed roofs representing the firmament. Beneath the pulpit stood a small harmonium. At the opposite end of the church was a high gallery holding more chairs. The mean, featureless windows were filled with gla.s.s half white, half staring red dotted with yellow crosses. Round the walls were reliefs of the fourteen stations of the Cross in white plaster on a gilt ground framed in grey marble. From the roof hung vulgar gla.s.s chandeliers with ropes tied with faded pink ribands. Several frightful plaster statues daubed with scarlet and chocolate brown stood under the windows, which were protected with brown woollen curtains. Close to the entrance were a receptacle for holy water in the form of a sh.e.l.l, and a confessional of stone flanked by boxes, one of which bore the words, "Graces obtenues,"

the other, "Demandes," and a card on which was printed, "Litanies en honneur de Saint Antoine de Padoue."

There was nothing to please the eye, nothing to appeal to the senses.

There was not even the mystery which shrouds and softens, for the sunshine streamed in through the white gla.s.s of the windows, revealing, even emphasising, as if with deliberate cruelty, the cheap finery, the tarnished velvet, the crude colours, the meretricious gestures and poses of the plaster saints. Yet as Domini touched her forehead and breast with holy water, and knelt for a moment on the stone floor, she was conscious that this rather pitiful house of G.o.d moved her to an emotion she had not felt in the great and beautiful churches to which she was accustomed in England and on the Continent. Through the windows she saw the outlines of palm leaves vibrating in the breeze; African fingers, feeling, with a sort of fluttering suspicion, if not enmity, round the heart of this intruding religion, which had wandered hither from some distant place, and, stayed, confronting the burning glance of the desert. Bold, little, humble church! Domini knew that she would love it.

But she did not know then how much.

She wandered round slowly with a grave face. Yet now and then, as she stood by one of the plaster saints, she smiled. They were indeed strange offerings at the shrine of Him who held this Africa in the hollow of His hand, of Him who had ordered the pageant of the sun which she had seen last night among the mountains. And presently she and this little church in which she stood alone became pathetic in her thoughts, and even the religion which the one came to profess in the other pathetic too. For here, in Africa, she began to realise the wideness of the world, and that many things must surely seem to the Creator what these plaster saints seemed just then to her.

"Oh, how little, how little!" she whispered to herself. "Let me be bigger! Oh, let me grow, and here, not only hereafter!"

The church door creaked. She turned her head and saw the priest whom she had met in the tunnel entering. He came up to her at once, saluted her, and said:

"I saw you from my window, Madame, and thought I would offer to show you our little church here. We are very proud of it."

Domini liked his voice and his naive remark. His face, too, though undistinguished, looked honest, kind, and pathetic, but with a pathos that was unaffected and quite unconscious. The lower part of it was hidden by a moustache and beard.

"Thank you," she answered. "I have been looking round already."

"You are a Catholic, Madame?"

"Yes."

The priest looked pleased. There was something childlike in the mobility of his face.

"I am glad," he said simply. "We are not a rich community in Beni-Mora, but we have been fortunate in bygone years. Our great Cardinal, the Father of Africa, loved this place and cherished his children here."

"Cardinal Lavigerie?"

"Yes, Madame. His house is now a native hospital. His statue faces the beginning of the great desert road, But we remember him and his spirit is still among us."

The priest's eyes lit up as he spoke. The almost tragic expression of his face changed to one of enthusiasm.

"He loved Africa, I believe," Domini said.

"His heart was here. And what he did! I was to have been one of his _freres armes_, but my health prevented, and afterwards the a.s.sociation was dissolved."

The sad expression returned to his face.

"There are many temptations in such a land and climate as this," he said. "And men are weak. But there are still the White Fathers whom he founded. Glorious men. They carry the Cross into the wildest places of the world. The most fanatical Arabs respect the White Marabouts."

"You wish you were with them?"

"Yes, Madame. But my health only permits me to be a humble parish priest here. Not all who desire to enter the most severe life can do so. If it were otherwise I should long since have been a monk. The Cardinal himself showed me that my duty lay in other paths."

He pointed out to Domini one or two things in the church which he admired and thought worthy; the carving of the altar rail into grapes, ears of corn, crosses, anchors; the white embroidered muslin that draped the tabernacle; the statue of a bishop in a red and gold mitre holding a staff and Bible, and another statue representing a saint with a languid and consumptive expression stretching out a Bible, on the leaves of which a tiny, smiling child was walking.

As they were about to leave the church he made Domini pause in front of a painting of Saint Bruno dressed in a white monkish robe, beneath which was written in gilt letters:

"Saint Bruno ordonne a ses disciples De renoncer aux biens terrestres Pour acquerir les biens celestes."

The disciples stood around the saint in grotesque att.i.tudes of pious attention.