The African Queen Read online

  A classic story of adventure and romance—

  the novel that inspired the legendary movie starring

  Katharine Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart

  “A fast-moving tale and a very good yarn . . . Mr. Forester

  again and again proves himself a master of suspense.”

  — New York Times Book Review

  As World War I reaches the heart of the African jungle, Charlie Allnutt and Rose Sayer, a disheveled trader and an English spinster missionary, find themselves thrown together by circumstance. Fighting time, heat, malaria, and bullets, they make their escape on the rickety steamboat The African Queen . . . and hatch their own outrageous military plan. Originally published in 1935, The African Queen is a tale replete with vintage Forester drama—unrelenting suspense, reckless heroism, impromptu military maneuvers, near-death experiences—and a good old-fashioned love story to boot.

  In praise of C. S. Forester

  and The African Queen

  “I recommend Forester to every literate I know.”

  — Ernest Hemingway

  “The African Queen was certainly no lady in Kipling’s sense . . . The Queen was probably as ugly, incompetent, and dilapidated a thirty-foot launch as one would be likely to find afloat . . . But under the deft hand of C. S. Forester she becomes the instrument of high adventure.”

  — Percy Hutchison, New York Times Book Review

  “The African Queen is an excellent and exciting novel of action ... Here is somebody who has an undeniable gift for telling a rattling yarn but who tells it in a clean, direct, and supple prose—sound prose, without affectation or bravado. Forester can construct a tight and exciting plot ... He can handle history with vivid accuracy and yet never bog down in historical detail ... And in spite of success, Foresters books still stay unpredictable—which is one of the essential virtues of C. S. Forester.”

  — Stephen Vincent and Rosemary Benet,

  New York Herald Tribune

  “Mr. Forester very likely has never seen Central Africa, and knows of the River Uganda merely by hearsay, but he can create an atmosphere that is what the fiction lover demands.”

  — Amy Lovemen, Saturday Review of Literature

  “C. S. Forester is one of the great masters of narrative.”

  — San Francisco Chronicle

  A Note about Cecil Scott Forester

  and The African Queen

  C. S. Forester (1899-1966) was an accomplished biographer, journalist, and sometime screenwriter, as well as the author of many popular novels, including The African Queen, The Barbary Pirates, The General, The Good Shepherd, The Gun, The Last Nine Days of the “Bismarck,” and Rifleman Dodd. But Forester is probably best known as the creator of Horatio Hornblower, a British naval genius of the Napoleonic era, whose exploits and adventures on the high seas Forester chronicled in a series of eleven acclaimed historical novels.

  Born Cecil Louis Troughton Smith in Cairo, Egypt, C. S. Forester grew up in England. After a brief stint as a poet, he was able to devote himself exclusively to his writing thanks to the great success of the stage and screen versions of his novel Payment Deferred (which also helped launch Charles Laughton’s career as an actor).

  Equal parts adventure and romance, Forester’s The African Queen has won the hearts of generations of readers and moviegoers. The novel received both critical and popular acclaim when it first appeared in 1932; the legendary film, based on the novel, was released in 1951. Directed by John Huston, starring Katharine Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart, the film won Bogart his sole Academy Award and went on to become one of the most popular films of all time.

  At the start of World War II Forester traveled on behalf of the British government to America, where he produced propaganda encouraging the United States to remain on Britain’s side. After the war, he remained in America and made Berkeley, California, his home. Forester died in 1966 while writing the last of the Hornblower novels, Hornblower During the Crisis.

  By C. S. Forester

  The Hornblower Saga

  MR. MIDSHIPMAN HORNBLOWER

  LIEUTENANT HORNBLOWER

  HORNBLOWER AND THE HOTSPUR

  HORNBLOWER DURING THE CRISIS

  HORNBLOWER AND THE ATROPOS

  BEAT TO QUARTERS

  SHIP OF THE LINE

  FLYING COLOURS

  COMMODORE HORNBLOWER

  LORD HORNBLOWER

  ADMIRAL HORNBLOWER IN THE WEST INDIES

  Also

  RIFLEMAN DODD

  THE GUN

  THE PEACEMAKER

  THE AFRICAN QUEEN

  THE GENERAL

  BROWN ON RESOLUTION

  TO THE INDIES

  THE CAPTAIN FROM CONNECTICUT

  PAYMENT DEFERRED

  THE SHIP

  THE SKY AND THE FOREST

  RANDALL AND THE RIVER OF TIME

  THE BARBARY PIRATES

  THE NIGHTMARE

  THE GOOD SHEPHERD

  THE AGE OF FIGHTING SAIL

  THE LAST NINE DAYS OF THE BISMARCK

  COPYRIGHT 1935 BY CECIL SCOTT FORESTER; COPYRIGHT 1940

  BY RANDOM HOUSE, INC.; COPYRIGHT © RENEWED 1963 BY

  CECIL SCOTT FORESTER; COPYRIGHT © RENEWED 1968

  BY DOROTHY E. FORESTER

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. NO PART OF THIS BOOK MAY BE REPRODUCED IN ANY FORM OR BY ANY ELECTRONIC OR MECHANICAL MEANS, INCLUDING INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL SYSTEMS, WITHOUT PERMISSION IN WRITING FROM THE PUBLISHER, EXCEPT BY A REVIEWER WHO MAY QUOTE BRIEF PASSAGES IN A REVIEW.

  ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN HARDCOVER IN THE UNITED STATES

  BY LITTLE, BROWN AND COMPANY

  REISSUED IN PAPERBACK BY BACK BAY BOOKS, NOVEMBER 2000

  ISBN 0-316-28910-8

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CONTROL NO. 83-83340

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Q-FF

  TEXT DESIGN BY MERYL SUSSMAN LEVAVI/DIGITEXT

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  CONTENTS

  THE AFRICAN QUEEN

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 1

  ALTHOUGH she herself was ill enough to justify being in bed had she been a person weak-minded enough to give up, Rose Sayer could see that her brother, the Reverend Samuel Sayer, was far more ill. He was very, very weak indeed, and when he knelt to offer up the evening prayer the movement was more like an involuntary collapse than a purposed gesture, and the hands which he raised trembled violently. Rose could see, in the moment before she devoutly closed her eyes, how thin and transparent those hands were, and how the bones of the wrists could be seen with almost the definition of a skeleton’s.

  The damp heat of the African forest seemed to be intensified with the coming of the night, which closed in upon them while they prayed. The hands which Rose clasped together were wet as though dipped in water, and she could feel the streams of sweat running down beneath her clothes as she knelt, and forming two little pools at the backs of her bent knees. It was this sensation which helped most to reconcile Rose’s conscience to the absence, in this her approaching middle age, of her corset—a garment without which, so she had always been taught, no woman of the age of fourteen and upwards ever appeared in public. A corset, in fact, was quite an impossibility in Central Africa, although Rose had resolutely put aside
, as promptings of the evil one, all the thoughts she had occasionally found forming in her mind of wearing no underclothing at all beneath her white drill frock.

  Under the stress of this wet heat that notion even returned at this solemn moment of prayer, but Rose spurned it and bent her mind once more with anguished intensity to the prayer which Samuel was offering in his feeble voice and with his halting utterance. Samuel prayed for heavenly guidance in the ordering of their lives, and for the forgiveness of their sins. Then, as he began to utter his customary petition for the blessing of God upon the mission, his voice faltered more and more. The mission, to which they had given their lives, could hardly be said to exist, now that Von Hanneken and his troops had descended upon the place and had swept off the entire village, converts and heathen alike, to be soldiers or bearers in the Army of German Central Africa, which he was assembling. Livestock and poultry, pots and pans and foodstuffs, all had been taken, even the portable chapel, leaving only the mission bungalow standing on the edge of the deserted clearing. So the weakness vanished from Samuel’s voice as he went on to pray that the awful calamity of war which had descended upon the world would soon pass away, that the slaughter and destruction would cease, and that when they had regained their sanity men would turn from war to universal peace. And with the utterance of the last of his petition Samuel’s voice grew stronger yet, as he prayed that the Almighty would bless the arms of England, and carry her safely through this the severest of all her trials, and would crown her efforts with victory over the godless militarists who had brought about this disaster. There was a ring of fighting spirit in Samuel’s voice as he said this, and an Old Testament flavour in his speech, as another Samuel had once prayed for victory over the Amalekites.

  “Amen! Amen! Amen!” sobbed Rose with her head bowed over her clasped hands.

  They knelt in silence for a few seconds when the prayer was finished, and then they rose to their feet. There was still just light enough for Rose to see Samuel’s white-clad figure and his white face as he stood there swaying. She made no move to light the lamp. Now that German Central Africa was in arms against England no one could tell when next they would be able to obtain oil, or matches. They were cut off from all communication with the world, save through hostile territory.

  “I think, sister,” said Samuel, faintly, “that I shall retire now.”

  Rose did not help him to undress—they were brother and sister and strictly brought up, and it would have been impossible to her unless he had been quite incapable of helping himself—but she crept in, in the dark after he was in bed, to see that his mosquito curtains were properly closed round him.

  “Good night, sister,” said Samuel. Even in that sweltering heat his teeth were chattering.

  She herself went back to her own room and lay on her string bed in a torment of heat, although she wore only her thin nightdress. Outside she could hear the noise of the African night, the howling of the monkeys, the shriek of some beast of prey, and the bellow of crocodiles down by the river, with, as an accompaniment to it all—so familiar that she did not notice it—the continuous high-pitched whine of the cloud of mosquitoes outside her curtains.

  It may have been midnight before she fell asleep, moving uneasily in the heat, but it was almost dawn when she awoke. Samuel must have been calling to her. Barefooted, she hurried out of her bedroom and across the living room into Samuel’s room. But if Samuel had been sufficiently conscious to call to her he was not so now. Most of what he was saying seemed unintelligible. For a moment it appeared as if he was explaining the failure of his life to the tribunal before which he was so soon to appear.

  “The poor mission,” he said, and—“It was the Germans, the Germans.”

  He died very soon after that, while Rose wept at his bedside. When her paroxysm of grief passed away she slowly got to her feet. The morning sun was pouring down upon the forest and lighting the deserted clearing, and she was all alone.

  The fear which followed her grief did not last long. Rose Sayer had not lived to the age of thirty-three, had not spent ten years in the Central African forest, without acquiring a capable self-reliance to add to the simple faith of her religion. It was not long before a wild resentment against Germany and the Germans began to inflame her as she stood in the quiet bungalow with the dead man. She told herself that Samuel would not have died if his heart had not been broken by the catastrophe of Von Hanneken’s requisitions. It was that which had killed Samuel, the sight of the labours of ten years being swept away in an hour.

  Rose told herself that the Germans had worse than Samuel’s death upon their souls. They had injured the work of God; Rose had no illusion how much Christianity would be left to the converts after a campaign in the forest in the ranks of a native army of which ninety-nine men out of a hundred would be rank heathen.

  Rose knew the forest. In a vague way she could picture a war fought over a hundred thousand square miles of it. Even if any of the mission converts were to survive, they would never make their way back to the mission—and even if they should, Samuel was dead.

  Rose tried to persuade herself that this damage done to the holy cause was a worse sin than being instrumental in Samuel’s death, but she could not succeed in doing so. From childhood she had been taught to love and admire her brother. When she was only a girl he had attained the wonderful, almost mystic distinction of the ministry, and was invested in her eyes with all the superiority which that implied. Her very father and mother, hard devout Christians that they were, who had never spared the rod in the upbringing of their children, deferred to him then, and heard his words with respect. It was due solely to him that she had risen in the social scale over the immeasurable gap between being a small tradesman’s daughter and a minister’s sister. She had been his housekeeper and the most devoted of his admirers, his most faithful disciple and his most trusted helper, for a dozen years. There is small wonder at her feeling an un-Christian rancour against the nation which had caused his death.

  And naturally she could not see the other side of the question. Von Hanneken, with no more than five hundred white men in a colony peopled by a million Negroes, of whom not more than a few thousand even knew they were subjects of the German flag, had to face the task of defending German Central Africa against the attacks of the overwhelming forces which would instantly be directed upon him. It was his duty to fight to the bitter end, to keep occupied as many of the enemy as possible for as long as possible, and to die in the last ditch, if necessary, while the real decision was being fought out in France. Thanks to the British command of the sea, he could expect no help whatever from outside; he must depend on his own resources entirely, while there was no limit to the reinforcements which might reach the enemy. It was only natural, then, that with German military thoroughness he should have called up every man and woman and child within reach, as bearers or soldiers, and that he should have swept away every atom of food or material he could lay his hands on.

  Rose saw no excuse for him at all. She remembered she had always disliked the Germans. She remembered how, on her first arrival in the colony with her brother, German officialdom had plagued them with inquisitions and restrictions, had treated them with scorn and contempt, and with the suspicion which German officials would naturally evince at the intrusion of a British missionary into a German colony. She found she hated their manners, their morals, their laws, and their ideals—in fact, Rose was carried away in the wave of international hatred which engulfed the rest of the world in August, 1914.

  Had not her martyred brother prayed for the success of British arms and the defeat of the Germans? She looked down at the dead man, and into her mind there flowed a river of jagged Old Testament texts which he might have employed to suit the occasion. She yearned to strike a blow for England, to smite the Amalekites, the Philistines, the Midianites. Yet even as the hot wave of fervour swept over her she pulled herself up with scorn of herself for daydreaming. Here she was alone in the Central African forest
, alone with a dead man. There was no possible chance of her achieving anything.

  It was at this very moment that Rose looked out across the verandah of the bungalow and saw Opportunity peering cautiously at her from the edge of the clearing. She did not recognise it as Opportunity; she had no idea that the man who had appeared there would be the instrument she would employ to strike her blow for England. All she recognised at the moment was that it was Allnutt, the cockney engineer employed by the Belgian gold mining company two hundred miles up the river—a man her brother had been inclined to set his face sternly against as an un-Christian example.

  But it was an English face, and a friendly one, and the sight of it made her more appreciative of the horrors of solitude in the forest. She hurried onto the verandah and waved a welcome to Allnutt.

  Chapter 2

  ALLNUTT was still apprehensive. He looked round him cautiously as he picked his way through the native gardens towards her.

  “Where’s everybody, Miss?” he asked as he came up to her.

  “They’ve all gone,” said Rose.

  “Where’s the Reverend—your brother?”

  “He’s in there——. He’s dead,” said Rose.

  Her lips began to tremble a little as they stood there in the blazing sunlight, but she would not allow herself to show weakness. She shut her mouth like a trap into its usual hard line.

  “Dead, is ’e? That’s bad, Miss,” said Allnutt—but it was clear that for the moment his sympathy was purely perfunctory. Allnutt’s apprehension was such that he could only think about one subject at a time. He had to go on asking questions.

  “ ’Ave the Germans been ’ere, Miss?” he asked.

  “Yes,” said Rose. “Look.”

  The wave of her hand indicated the bare central circle of the village. Had it not been for Von Hanneken, this would have been thronged with a native market, full of chattering, smiling Negroes with chickens and eggs and a hundred other things for barter, and there would have been naked, pot-bellied children running about, and a few cows in sight, and women working in the gardens, and perhaps a group of men coming up from the direction of the river laden with fish. As it was, there was nothing, only the bare earth and the ring of deserted huts, and the silent forest hemming them in.