The African Queen Read online

  “Coo!” he said, and shifted his position abruptly.

  By some kind of chance, Rose’s position was such that none of these direct streams descended upon her; she was only incommoded by the rain in the wind and the splashes from the floor boards. But that was the only space under the awning as well-protected. Allnutt spent much time moving abruptly here and there, with the pitiless streams searching him out every time. Rose heard his teeth chattering as he came near her, and was for a moment minded to put out her arm and draw him to her like a child; she blushed secretly at discovering such a plan in her mind, for Allnutt was no more a child than she was.

  Instead, she sat up and asked—

  “What can we do?”

  “N-nothing, Miss,” said Allnutt, miserably and definitely.

  “Can’t you shelter anywhere?”

  “No, Miss. But this won’t last long.”

  Allnutt spoke with the spiritless patience bred by a lifetime’s bad luck. He moved out of one stream of water into another. Samuel, in the same conditions, would have displayed a trace of bad temper—Rose had to measure men by Samuel’s standard, because she knew no other man so well.

  “You poor man!” said Rose.

  “You poor chap” or “You poor old thing” might have sounded more comradely or sympathetic, but Rose had never yet spoken of men as “chaps” or “old things.”

  “I’m so sorry,” said Rose, but Allnutt only shifted uncomfortably again.

  Then the storm passed as quickly as it came. In a country where it rains an inch in an hour, an annual rainfall of two hundred inches means only two hundred hours’ rain a year. For a little while the trees above still tossed and roared in the wind, and then the wind died away, and there was a little light in the backwater, and with the stillness of dawn the sound of the river coursing through the tree roots overshadowed every other noise. The day came with a rush, and for once the sun and the heat were beneficent and life-giving, instead of being malignant tyrants. Rose and Allnutt roused themselves; the whole backwater steamed like a laundry.

  “What’s to be done before we move on?” asked Rose. It did not occur to her that there was anything they might do instead of moving on. Allnutt scratched at his sprouting beard.

  “Got no wood,” he said. “ ’Ave to fill up with thet. Plenty of dead stuff ’ere, I should fink. An’ we’ll ’ave to pump out. The ole boat leaks anyways, an’ wiv all this rine—”

  “Show me how to do that.”

  So Rose was introduced to the hand pump, which was as old and as inefficient as everything else on board. In theory one stuck the foot of it down between the skin and the floor boards, and then worked a handle up and down, whereupon the water beneath the boards was sucked up and discharged through a spout overside; by inclining the boat over to the side where the pump was, the boat could be got reasonably dry. But that pump made a hard job of it. It choked and refused duty, and squeaked and jammed, and pinched the hands that worked it, all with an ingenuity which seemed quite diabolical. Rose came in the end to hate that pump more bitterly than anything she had ever hated before. Allnutt showed her how to begin the job.

  “You go and get the wood,” said Rose, settling the pump into the scuppers and preparing to work the handle. “I’ll do this by myself.”

  Allnutt produced an axe which was just as rusty and woebegone as everything else in the boat, hooked the bank with the boat hook, and swung himself ashore with the stern painter in his hand. He vanished into the undergrowth, looking cautiously round at every step for fear of snakes, while Rose toiled away at the pump. There was nothing on earth so ingeniously designed to abolish the feeling of morning freshness. Rose’s face empurpled, and the sweat poured down as she toiled away with the cranky thing. At intervals Allnutt appeared on the bank, dumping down fresh discoveries of dead wood to add to the growing pile at the landing place, and then, pulling in on the stern painter, he began the ticklish job of loading the fuel on board, standing swaying perilously on the slippery uneven foothold.

  Rose quitted her work at the pump to help him—there was by now only a very little water slopping below the floor boards—and when the wood was all on board, the waist piled high with it, they stopped for breath and looked at each other.

  “We had better start now,” said Rose.

  “Breakfast?” said Allnutt, and then, playing his trump card, “Tea?”

  “We’ll have that going along,” said Rose. “Let’s get started now.”

  Perhaps Rose had all her life been a woman of action and decision, but she had spent all her adult life under the influence of her brother. Samuel had been not merely a man, but a minister, and therefore had a twofold—perhaps fourfold—right to order the doings of his womenfolk. Rose had always been content to follow his advice and abide by his judgment.

  But now that she was alone the reaction was violent. She was carrying out a plan of her own devising, and she would allow nothing to stop her, nothing to delay her. She was consumed by a fever for action. That is not to belittle the patriotic fervour which actuated her as well. She was most bitterly determined upon doing something for England; she was so set and rigid in this determination that she never had to think about it, any more than she had to think about breathing, or the beating of her pulse. She was more conscious of the motive of avenging her brother’s death; but perhaps the motive of which she was most conscious was her desire to wipe out the ten years of insults from German officialdom to which the meek Samuel had so mildly submitted. It was the thought of those slights and insults which brought a flush to her cheek and a firmer grip to her hand, and spurred her on to fresh haste.

  Allnutt philosophically shrugged his shoulders, much as he had seen his Belgian employers do up at the mine. The woman was a bit mad, but it would be more trouble to argue with her than to obey her, at present; Allnutt was not sufficiently self-analytical to appreciate that most of the troubles of his life resulted from attempts to avoid trouble. He addressed himself, in his usual attitude of prayer, to the task of getting the engine fire going again, and while the boiler was heating he continued the endless task of lubrication. When the boiler began to sigh and gurgle he looked inquiringly at Rose, and received a nod from her. Rose was interested to see how Allnutt proposed to extricate the launch from the narrow channel in which she was moored.

  It was a process which called for much activity on Allnutt’s part. First he strained at the anchor winch, ineffectively, because the current which was running was too strong to allow him to wind the heavy boat up to the anchor. So he started the screw turning until the African Queen was just making headway against the current, and then, rushing forward, he got the anchor clear and wound in. But he did not proceed up the backwater—there was no means of knowing if the way was clear all the way up to the main stream, and some of these backwaters were half a dozen miles long. Instead, he hurried back to the engine, and throttled down until the launch was just being carried down by the current, although the engine was still going ahead.

  This gave her a queer contrariwise steerageway, in which one thought in terms of the stern instead of the bow. Allnutt left the engine to look after itself, and hastened back to take the tiller from Rose’s hand; he could not trust her with it. He eased the African Queen gently down until they reached the junction with the broad channel of the main backwater. Then he scuttled forward and jerked the engine over into reverse, and then, scuttling back to the tiller, he swept the stern round upstream, keeping a wary eye on the bow meanwhile lest the current should push it into the bank, and then, the moment the bow was clear, while catastrophe threatened astern, he dashed forward again, started the screw in the opposite direction, and came leaping back once more to the tiller to hold the boat steady while she gathered way downstream. It was a neat bit of boatmanship; Rose, even with her limited experience, could appreciate it even though some of the implications were lost upon her—the careful balance of eddy against current at the bend, for instance, and the subtle employment of the
set of the screw to help in the turn. She nodded and smiled her approval, but Allnutt could not stay for applause. Already there were danger signals from the engine, and Allnutt had to hand over the tiller and resume his work over it.

  The African Queen resumed her solemn career down the river, with Rose cheerfully directing her. This was the main backwater of the section, a stream a hundred yards wide, so there was no reason to apprehend serious navigational difficulties. Rose had already learned to recognize the ugly V-shaped ripple on the surface caused by a snag just below, and the choppy appearance which indicated shallows, and she understood now the useful point that the African Queen’s draught was such that if an underwater danger was so deep as to make no alteration in the appearance of the surface, she could be relied upon to go over it without damage. The main possible source of trouble was in the winds; a brisk breeze whipped the surface of the river into choppy wavelets which obscured the warning signs.

  On that day there was no wind blowing. Everything was well. In this backwater, running between marshy uninhabited islands, there was no fear of observation from the shore, the navigation was easy, and the African Queen’s engine was in a specially helpful mood, so that she squattered along without any particular crisis arising. Allnutt was even able to snatch half a dozen separate minutes in which to prepare breakfast. He brought Rose’s share to her, and she did not even notice the filthy oiliness of his hands. She ate and drank as she held the tiller, and was almost happy.

  With a four-knot current to help her the launch slid along between the banks at a flattering speed, and slithered round the bends most fascinatingly. Subconsciously, Rose was learning things about water in motion, about eddies and swirls, which would be very valuable to her later on.

  The heat increased, and as the sun rose higher Rose was no longer able to keep the launch in the shade of the huge trees on the banks. The direct sunlight hit them like a club when they emerged into it, and even back in the sternsheets Rose could feel the devastating heat of the fire and boiler.

  She felt sorry for Allnutt, and could sympathize with him over his unhygienic habit of drinking unfiltered river water. At the mission she had seen to it that every drop of water she and Samuel drank was first filtered and then boiled, for fear of hookworm and typhoid and all the other plagues which water can carry. It did not seem to matter now. Under the warm awning she had at least a little shade. Allnutt was labouring in the blazing sun.

  Allnutt, as a matter of fact, was one of those men who have become inured to work in impossible temperatures. He had worked as a greaser in merchant ships passing down the Red Sea, in engine rooms at a temperature of a hundred and forty degrees; to him the free air of the Ulanga River was far less stifling, even in the direct sun, than atmospheres with which he was acquainted. It did not occur to him to complain about this part of his life; there was even an aesthetic pleasure to be found in inducing that rotten old engine to keep on moving.

  Later the backwater came to an end, merging with the main river again. The banks fell away as they came out on to the broad, stately stream, a full half-mile wide, brilliantly blue in prospect under the cloudless sky, although it still appeared its turbid brown when looked into over the side. Allnutt did not like these open reaches. Von Hanneken, with his army, was somewhere on the banks of the river; perhaps he had outposts watching everywhere. It was only when she was threading her way between islands that the African Queen could escape observation. He stood up on the gunwale anxiously, peering at the banks for a sign of a break in them.

  Rose was aware of his anxiety and its cause, but she did not share his feelings. She was completely reckless. She did not think it even remotely possible that anything could impede her in the mission she had undertaken. As for being taken prisoner by Von Hanneken, she could not believe such a thing could happen—and naturally she had none of the misgivings which worried Allnutt as to what Von Hanneken would do to them if he caught them obviously planning mischief in the African Queen. But she indulged Allnutt in his odd fancy; she swung the African Queen round so that she headed across to the far side of the bend, where at the foot of the forest-clad bluffs the head of a long narrow island was to be seen. Rose already knew enough about the river to know that the backwater behind the island was almost for certain the entrance to a fresh chain of minor channels winding between tangled islands and not rejoining the main river for perhaps as much as ten miles.

  The African Queen clanked solemnly across the river. Her propeller shaft was a trifle out of truth, and numerous contacts with submerged obstructions had bent her propeller blades a little, so that her progress was noisy, and the whole boat shook to the thrust of the screw; but by now Rose was used to the noise and the vibration. It passed unnoticed. Rose stood up and looked forward keenly as they neared the mouth of the backwater. She was quite unconscious of the dramatic picture she presented, sunburned, with set jaw and narrowed eyes, standing at the tiller of the battered old launch in the blinding sunlight. All she was doing was looking out for snags and obstructions.

  They glided out of the sunlight into the blessed shade of the narrow channel. The wash of the launch began to break close behind them in greyish-brown waves against the bank; the water plants close to the side began to bow in solemn succession as the boat approached them, lifting their heads again when they were exactly opposite, and then being immediately buried in the dirty foam of the wash. The channel along which they were passing broke into three, and Rose had to exercise quick decision in selecting the one which appeared the most navigable. Then there were periods of anxiety when the channel narrowed and the current quickened, and it seemed possible that they might not get through after all, and the anxiety would only end when the channel suddenly joined a new channel whose breadth and placidity promised freedom from worry for a space.

  Those island backwaters were silent places. Even the birds and the insects seemed to be silent in that steaming heat. There were only the tall trees, and the tangled undergrowth, and the aspiring creeper, and the naked tree roots along the banks. It seemed as if the African Queen’s clanking progress was the first sound ever to be heard there, and when that sound was stilled, when they anchored to collect more fuel, Rose found herself speaking in whispers until she shook off the crushing influence of the silence.

  That first day was typical of all the days they spent descending the river before they reached the rapids. There were incidents, of course. There were times when the backwater they were navigating proved to be jammed by a tangle of tree trunks, and they had to go back cautiously in reverse until they found another channel. There was one occasion when their channel broadened out into a wide, almost stagnant lake surrounded by marshy islands, and full of lilies and weeds that twined themselves round the propeller and actually brought the boat to a standstill, so that Allnutt had to strip himself half naked and lower himself into the water and hack the screw clear with a knife, and then pole the launch out again. Every push of the pole against the loose mud of the bottom brought forth volleys of bubbles from the rotting vegetation, so that the place stank in the sunlight.

  It might have been that incident which caused the subsequent trouble with the propeller thrust block, which held them up for half a day while Allnutt laboured over it.

  There were times now and then during the day when the heavens opened and cataracts of rain poured down—rain so heavy as to set the floor boards awash, and to cause Rose to toil long and painfully with that malignant bit of apparatus, the hand pump. They had to expect rain now, for it was the time of the autumn rains. Rose was only thankful that it was not springtime, for during the spring rains the storms were much longer and heavier than those they had to endure now. These little daily thunderstorms were a mere nothing.

  Rose was really alive for the first time in her life. She was not aware of it in her mind, although her body told her so when she stopped to listen. She had passed ten years in Central Africa, but she had not lived during those ten years. That mission station had been
a dreary place. Rose had not read books of adventure which might have told her what an adventurous place tropical Africa was. Samuel was not an adventurous person—he had not even taken a missionary’s interest in botany or philology or entomology. He had tried drearily yet persistently to convert the heathen, without enough success to maintain dinner table conversation over so long a time as ten years. It had been his one interest in life (small wonder that Von Hanneken’s sweeping requisitions had broken his heart), and it had therefore been Rose’s one interest—and a woefully small one at that.

  Housekeeping in a Central African village was a far duller business than housekeeping in a busy provincial town, and German Central Africa was the dullest colony of all Africa. There was only a tiny sprinkling of white men, and the Kaiser’s imperial mandate ran only in the fringes of the country—in patches along the coast, along the border of the lake, about the headwaters of the Ulanga where the gold mine was, and along the railway from the Swahili coast. Save for a very few officials, who conducted themselves towards the missionaries as soldiers and officials might be expected to act towards mere civilians of no standing and aliens to boot, Rose had seen no white men besides Allnutt—he, by arrangement with the Belgian company, used to bring down their monthly consignments of stores and mail from Limbasi—and his visits were conditional upon the African Queen being fit to travel, and upon there being no work upon the mining machinery demanding his immediate attention.

  And Samuel had not allowed Rose even to be interested in Allnutt’s visits. The letters that had come had all been for him, always, and Allnutt was a sinner who lived in unhallowed union with a Negress up at the mine. They had to give him food and hospitality when he came, and to bring into the family prayers a mention of their wish for his redemption, but that was all. Those ten years had been a period of heat-ridden monotony.

  It was different enough now. There was the broad scheme of proceeding to the lake and freeing it from the mastery of the Germans; that in itself was enough to keep anyone happy. And for detail to fill in the day there was the river, wide, mutable, always different. There could be no monotony on a river, with its snags and mud bars, its bends and its backwaters, its eddies and its swirls. Perhaps those few days of active happiness were sufficient recompense to Rose for thirty-three years of passive misery.