The Priests Tale - Père Etienne | Page 2

Someone asked if his reverence had come aboard, but no one knew. Lazily turning the question and answer over in my mind, I became aware that I was sure he had. The persistent intuition grew on me. Without speaking of it, I determined, out of sheer curiosity, to go and see. I detached myself from the group unobtrusively, and strolled off round the deck.
Sure enough on the seaward side I saw him. He was sitting in a deck-chair and looking out across the water. At first I thought he was gazing intently at nothing, but as I too looked, I made out, across the strait, the dim outline of the Sham-balla Mountains on the mainland that are sometimes visible for a little at sunset and dawn. The priest's chair was drawn close to the bulwark, and almost before I knew what I was doing, I was leaning against it in an attitude which allowed me, too, to see those distant peaks and at the same time to converse easily, if it should be permitted.
"Hullo, father," I said; "we were wondering if you had come aboard."
He looked at me, smiling. "I believe I was one of the first," he replied, in his excellent English.
"Saying good-bye to Africa?" I queried, half jocularly.
"Yes, I expect so."
The tone of his voice suggested far more than the words themselves expressed. It aroused my curiosity. "For long?" I asked.
"Well, I don't suppose I shall see those peaks again. I saw them first twenty-seven years ago, a young priest on his first mission, and I have not seen them from the sea since. Now I have been ordered to India to my second mission, and it is not very likely that I shall be moved again. It is still less likely that I shall return. After so long an acquaintance, it is natural that I should want to say good-bye."
I think I was slightly incredulous. "Do you mean you have been over twenty-seven years up there without leave?" I questioned.
"Twenty-seven next month, there and beyond."
I have told you that I was young in those days, and I did not then know of the heroic sacrifices of Catholic missionaries. Moreover, I too was taking a first leave--after two years' service, according to our plan. And I was eagerly looking forward to a visit to my married sister in India, and a journey home after that. Stupidly enough, it took me a few seconds to swallow those twenty-seven years; but for all that my mind worked quickly. Twenty-seven years of tinned food, mosquitoes, heat, natives, and packing-case furniture! That was how I read it. "Well," I said at last, "I should think you were glad to go anywhere after all that time."
"Eh? Oh, I don't know. No, that's wrong; I do know. I'm sorry, that's the truth."
"You like Africa?"
The Frenchman showed himself in the half-humorous shrug of the shoulders, but the missionary spoke. "It has become my home, and its people my people," he said.
I turned the saying over in my mind before I spoke again. Then interest and attraction overcame my hesitation, and I abandoned all pretence of making a chance conversation. "Father," I said, "I expect you have travelled a good deal up there and seen many things. Tell me a little about it all. I've seen enough to be very interested in your experiences. May I pull up a chair and may we talk?"
His brown eyes twinkled, "Certainly," he said, "especially if you will give me a fill of that English tobacco you're smoking. Years ago I learned to smoke English tobacco, but it hasn't too often come my way."
I threw him my pouch with a laugh and went to find a chair. That was the beginning of many conversations, but none of his stories interested me more than the one he told me that night. He had half hinted of strange happenings away back there in remote districts, as well as of more commonplace although sufficiently interesting journeys and adventures, and it was to the less usual that I was drawn that evening. There was that about Père Etienne which made one feel that the commonplace world was of secondary importance, and that he, like the poet at Charing Cross, might find Jacob's ladder reaching heavenward in any place. Thus, while the light died swiftly out of the sky and the stars shone out over that far-off range which runs up to the Para Mountains and giant Kilimanjaro and that far-flung plain which lies embraced beyond, between them and the great lakes, I put my question and he answered it. "Tell me the queerest of all the queer things you have seen, father," I said.
"Queer?"
"Yes," said I. "Unusual, I mean. Not necessarily supernatural, and not horrible. But the thing, perhaps, that more than all else