The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. 17Stevenson, Robert Louis
History
The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. 17
Stevenson, Robert Louis
Islands of the Pacific -- Fiction; Samoan Islands -- History; Short stories
"He's a cure, is Buncombe!" laughs Case. "Well, Buncombe took it in his
head that, as there was no other clergyman about, bar Kanaka pastors,
we ought to call in Father Galuchet, and have the old man administered
and take the sacrament. It was all the same to me, you may suppose; but
I said I thought Adams was the fellow to consult. He was jawing away
about watered copra and a sight of foolery. 'Look here,' I said, 'you're
pretty sick. Would you like to see Galoshes?' He sat right up on his
elbow. 'Get the priest,' says he, 'get the priest; don't let me die here
like a dog!' He spoke kind of fierce and eager, but sensible enough.
There was nothing to say against that, so we sent and asked Galuchet if
he would come. You bet he would. He jumped in his dirty linen at the
thought of it. But we had reckoned without Papa. He's a hard-shell
Baptist, is Papa; no Papists need apply. And he took and locked the
door. Buncombe told him he was bigoted, and I thought he would have had
a fit. 'Bigoted!' he says. 'Me bigoted? Have I lived to hear it from a
jackanapes like you?' And he made for Buncombe, and I had to hold them
apart; and there was Adams in the middle, gone luny again, and carrying
on about copra like a born fool. It was good as the play, and I was
about knocked out of time with laughing, when all of a sudden Adams sat
up, clapped his hands to his chest, and went into horrors. He died hard,
did John Adams," says Case, with a kind of a sudden sternness.
"And what became of the priest?" I asked.
"The priest?" says Case. "O! he was hammering on the door outside, and
crying on the natives to come and beat it in, and singing out it was a
soul he wished to save, and that. He was in a rare taking, was the
priest. But what would you have? Johnny had slipped his cable: no more
Johnny in the market; and the administration racket clean played out.
Next thing, word came to Randall the priest was praying upon Johnny's
grave. Papa was pretty full, and got a club, and lit out straight for
the place, and there was Galoshes on his knees, and a lot of natives
looking on. You wouldn't think Papa cared that much about anything,
unless it was liquor; but he and the priest stuck to it two hours,
slanging each other in native, and every time Galoshes tried to kneel
down Papa went for him with the club. There never were such larks in
Falesa. The end of it was that Captain Randall was knocked over with
some kind of a fit or stroke, and the priest got in his goods after all.
But he was the angriest priest you ever heard of, and complained to the
chiefs about the outrage, as he called it. That was no account, for our
chiefs are Protestant here; and, anyway, he had been making trouble
about the drum for morning school, and they were glad to give him a
wipe. Now he swears old Randall gave Adams poison or something, and when
the two meet they grin at each other like baboons."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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