“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.