The Priest's Tale - Père Etienne From "The New Decameron", Volume III.

PÈRE ETIENNE came aboard at Dares-Salaam and did not at once make friends. It was our own fault, however. He neither obtruded nor effaced himself, but rather went quietly on his own way with that recollection which the clerical system of the Catholic Church encourages. We few first-class passengers had already settled down into the usual regularities of shipboard life, from the morning constitutional in pyjamas on the boat deck, to the Bridge four after dinner in the smoke-room, and, besides, it was plain that Père Etienne was not likely to have much in common with any of us. So we were polite at a distance, like Englishmen everywhere. Even I, who, by virtue of my cloth, might have been supposed to make advances, was shy of beginning. I was young in those days, and for one thing spelt Rome always with a big capital.

But from the first there was something which attracted me to the priest, the more so as it was hard to define. In his appearance there was nothing to suggest interest. His age was round about fifty; his hair brown, though in his beard a white hair or two was to be observed. In his short black coat and trousers he looked neither mediaeval nor a traveller, and his luggage was neither romantically minute nor interestingly large. He was booked from Dar-es-Salaam to Bombay, and the purser professed neither to know whence he came nor whither he went beyond those two fixed points.

Yet I was attracted. I have no wish to bore you, so that I shall not dwell upon the point, but in my opinion it was interesting. There are some people who carry an atmosphere with them as they go their own individual way about the world, and there are others who can instantly perceive it. I am not speaking of clairvoyance; I dislike that jargon; but I do know that I was conscious of Père Etienne if he did but pass the smoke-room door when I was about to play a doubled four in No Trumps.

Well, our old British India tramp lay about for a week in Dar-es-Salaam harbour, rolled up to Tanga, and finally crossed over to Zanzibar, without further developments. There we passengers went sweltering about the narrow streets, visited duly the coconut and clove plantations, and conceived ourselves to be exploring by hiring a car, crossing the island to Chuaka, and spending a day up the creek. Père Etienne went at once to the Catholic Mission and remained there. Thus it was not until the evening on which we sailed that we saw him again.

It was half an hour or so before sunset, and a serene beauty lay over land and sea. There was the gentlest breeze, and at our moorings it was almost cool. We were clustering on the landward side of the ship, smoking and watching the town and harbour. Close up under the tall white houses the blue sea broke in tiny creamy ripples on the sand or the low coral rocks, and, with its green woods to right and left, the city seemed to dream in the sun. One could see, however, that it was preparing to wake. A flutter of orange or scarlet on the flat roofs here and there told that the women were already coming up to enjoy the cooler hours; and between the thin cassuarinas in the square that opened to the sea before the Sultan’s Palace, a white-robed crowd was gathering for the faint excitement of the sunset gun. Between ship and shore, the brown-timbered rough-hewn native boats came and went on their long oars, and in smarter skiffs the silk and curio merchants were taking a lingering leave of us. From the south a dozen peaceful lateen-sailed dhows beat up for the native anchorage behind which, from our view-point, the twin spires of the Catholic cathedral stood out against an opal sky. Despite travellers’ tales, there is only one mosque with a minaret in Zanzibar, and that so small and hidden that it is scarcely visible from the sea.

Watching the dhows and sighting the cathedral, suggested, I suppose, Père Etienne. 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 draws your mind back to Africa.”

“You ask a big thing,” he said, smiling friendlily.

“And I believe you can answer it,” said I, impulsively.

He nodded more gravely. “I believe I can,” he said.

“I shall tell you a little story that seems to me singularly arresting and tender. True, I believe that it may arrest me because it occurred in a village--or perhaps I should say a town--which I have visited but once though I have often tried to get back to it again. Now I shall never go. Very likely it is for that reason, then, that it lingers in my memory as a place of great beauty, though in my opinion there are other causes. However, let me begin by describing it to you.

“From the slopes of Kilimanjaro you can look westwards to Mweru, a still active volcano little known and rarely visited, and from Mweru a chain of heights runs west once more till they end abruptly almost in a precipice that descends to the plain. At its foot rises a small river, bubbling up from half a dozen springs in a slight depression, and flowing swiftly off, very clear and cool, towards the great lake which is visible on the horizon from the mountain behind. Just below the pool of the source, on the right bank, shaded with trees, ringed with giant aloes and set in fields of millet and maize, stands a somewhat remarkable native town. There is stone in the hills, and the natives have drawn and worked it for their huts--not a usual thing in tropical Africa. They may, of course, have learned the lore themselves, or some wandering Arab traders may have taught them; but I have another idea, as you shall hear. Be that as it may, there the neat houses stand--grey walls, brown thatch, small swept yards of trodden earth before them within the rings of neat reed fencing. Great willows grow along the bank and trail their hanging tendrils in the water, and the brown kiddies swing from them and go splashing into the stream with shouts of delight. The place is remote, and in a corner out of the path of marauding tribes. Not too easy to find, its folk are peaceable, and I can see it again as I saw it on my first visit when, from the height of the precipice behind, I could make out the thin spires of smoke rising on the evening air and just perceive the brown herds of cattle drifting slowly homewards to the protecting kraals.

“The tribe is a branch of the Bonde, iron workers and a settled folk. How they came to be there, so far north and west of the main stock of their people, I do not know, but of course one comes across that kind of thing fairly commonly and the explanation is nearly always the same. Fear of some kind drove out a family who wandered, like Abram from Charron, until they found a promised land. These folk knew that they came from the south and east a long long time ago; more they neither knew nor cared to know. They were not many in number, and although Arab safaris had passed by, they were not enough to tempt a permanent trader to cross the barren lands north and south, or dare the mountain way from Mweru. The chief’s oldest councillor spoke to me of a slave-raid that had been defeated when he was a young man, but since then they had dwelt in peace. No European had been there within living memory.