The Garden of Allah | Page 8

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