Читать книгу The African Queen - Cecil Louis Troughton Smith - Страница 4

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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.

‘It’s like ’ell, isn’t it, miss?’ said Allnutt. ‘Up at the mine I found it just the sime when I got back from Limbasi. Clean sweep of everything. What they’ve done with the Belgians God only knows. And God ’elp ’em, too. I wouldn’t like to be a prisoner in the forest of that long chap with the glass eye—’Anneken’s ’is nime, isn’t it, miss? Not a thing stirring at the mine until a nigger who’d esciped showed up. My niggers just bolted for the woods when they ’eard the news. Don’t know if they were afride of me or the Germans. Just skipped in the night and left me with the launch.’

‘The launch?’ said Rose, sharply.

‘Yerss, miss. The African Queen. I’d been up the river to Limbasi with the launch for stores. Up there they’d ’eard about this war, but they didn’t think von ’Anneken would fight. Just ’anded the stuff over to me and let me go agine. I fort all the time it wouldn’t be as easy as they said. Bet they’re sorry now. Bet von ’Anneken done the sime to them as ’e done at the mine. But ’e ’asn’t got the launch, nor yet what’s in ’er, which ’e’d be glad to ’ave, I dare say.’

‘And what’s that?’ demanded Rose.

‘Blasting gelatine, miss. Eight boxes of it. An’ tinned grub. An’ cylinders of oxygen and hydrogen for that weldin’ job on the crusher. ’Eaps of things. Old von ’Anneken’d find a use for it all. Trust ’im for that.’

They were inside the bungalow now, and Allnutt took off his battered sun-hat as he realized he was in the presence of death. He bowed his head and lapsed into unintelligibility. Garrulous as he might be when talking of war or of his own experiences, he was a poor hand at formal condolences. But there was one obvious thing to say.

‘ ’Scuse me, miss, but ’ow long ’as ’e been dead?’

‘He died this morning,’ said Rose. The same thought came into her mind as was already in Allnutt’s. In the tropics a dead man must be buried within six hours, and Allnutt was further obsessed with his desire to get away quickly, to retire again to his sanctuary in the river backwaters far from German observation.

‘I’ll bury ’im, miss,’ said Allnutt. ‘Don’t you worry yourself, miss. I’ll do it all right. I know some of the service. I’ve ’eard it often enough.’

‘I have my prayer book here. I can read the service,’ she said, keeping her voice from trembling.

Allnutt came out on the veranda again. His shifty gaze swept the edge of the forest for Germans, before it was directed upon the clearing to find a site for a grave.

‘Just there’d be the best place,’ he said. ‘The ground’ll be light there and ’e’d like to be in the shide, I expect. Where can I find a spide, miss?’

The pressing importance of outside affairs was of such magnitude in Allnutt’s mind that he could not help but say, in the midst of the grisly business—

‘We’d better be quick, miss, in case the Germans come back agine.’

And when it was all over and Rose stood in sorrow beside the grave with its makeshift cross. Allnutt moved restlessly beside her.

‘Come on darn to the river, miss,’ he urged. ‘Let’s get awye from ’ere.’

Down through the forest towards the river ran a steep path; where it reached the marshy flats it degenerated into something worse than a track. Sometimes they were up to their knees in mud. They slipped and staggered, sweating under the scanty load of Rose’s possessions. Sometimes tree-roots gave them momentary foothold. At every step the rank marigold smell of the river grew stronger in their nostrils. Then they emerged from the dense vegetation into blinding sunlight again. The launch swung at anchor, bow upstream, close to the water’s edge. The rushing brown water made a noisy ripple round anchor chain and bows.

‘Careful now, miss,’ said Allnutt. ‘Put your foot on that stump. That’s right.’

Rose sat in the launch which was to be so terribly important to her and looked about her. The launch hardly seemed worthy of her grandiloquent name of African Queen. She was squat, flat-bottomed, and thirty feet long. Her paint was peeling off her, and she reeked of decay. A tattered awning roofed in six feet of the stern; amidships stood the engine and boiler, with the stumpy funnel reaching up just higher than the awning. Rose could feel the heat from the thing where she sat, as an addition to the heat of the sun.

‘Excuse me, miss,’ said Allnutt. He knelt in the bottom of the boat and addressed himself to the engine. He hauled out a panful of hot ashes and dumped them over-side with a sizzle and a splutter. He filled the furnace with fresh wood from the pile beside him, and soon smoke appeared from the funnel and Rose could hear the roar of the draught. The engine began to sigh and splutter—Rose was later to come to know the sequence of sounds so well—and then began to leak grey pencils of steam. In fact the most noticeable point about the appearance of the engine was the presence of those leaks of steam, which poured out here, there, and everywhere from it. Allnutt peered at his gauges, thrust some more wood into the furnace, and then leaped forward round the engine. With grunts and heaves at the small windlass he proceeded to haul in the anchor, the sweat pouring from him in rivers. As the anchor came clear and the rushing current began to sweep the boat in to the bank he came dashing aft again to the engine. There was a clanking noise, and Rose felt the propeller begin to vibrate beneath her. Allnutt thrust mightily at the muddy bank with a long pole, snatched the latter on board again, and then came rushing aft to the tiller.

‘Excuse me, miss,’ said Allnutt again. He swept her aside unceremoniously as he put the tiller over just in time to save the boat from running into the bank. They headed, grinding and clattering, out into the racing brown water.

‘I fort, miss,’ said Allnutt, ‘ ’ow we might find somewhere quiet be’ind a island where we couldn’t be seen. Then we could talk about what we could do.’

‘I should think that would be best,’ said Rose.

The river Ulanga at this point of its course has a rather indefinite channel. It loops and it winds, and its banks are marshy, and it is studded with islands—so frequent indeed are the islands that in some reaches the river appears to be more like a score of different channels winding their way tortuously through clumps of vegetation. The African Queen churned her slow way against the current, quartering across the broad arm in which they had started. Half a mile up on the other bank half a dozen channels offered themselves, and Allnutt swung the boat’s nose towards the midmost of them.

‘Would you mind ’olding this tiller, miss, just as it is now?’ asked Allnutt.

Rose silently took hold of the iron rod; it was so hot that it seemed to burn her hand. She held it resolutely, with almost a thrill at feeling the African Queen waver obediently in her course as she shifted the tiller ever so little. Allnutt was violently active once more. He had pulled open the furnace door and thrust in a few more sticks of fuel, and then he scrambled up into the bows and stood balanced on the cargo, peering up the channel for snags and shoals.

‘Port a little, miss,’ he called. ‘Pull it over this side, I mean. That’s it! Steady!’

The boat crawled up into a narrow tunnel formed by the meeting of the foliage overhead. Allnutt came leaping back over the cargo, and shut off the engine so that the propeller ceased to vibrate. Then he dashed into the bows once more, and just as the trees at Rose’s side began apparently to move forward again as the current overcame the boat’s way, he let go the anchor with a crash and rattle, and almost without a jerk the African Queen came to a standstill in the green-lighted channel. As the noise of the anchor chain died away a great silence seemed to close in upon them, the silence of a tropical river at noon. There was only to be heard the rush and gurgle of the water, and the sighing and spluttering of the engine. The green coolness might almost have been paradise. And then with a rush came the insects from the island thickets. They came in clouds, stinging mercilessly.

Allnutt came back into the sternsheets. A cigarette hung from his upper lip; Rose had not the faintest idea when he had lighted it, but that dangling cigarette was the finishing touch to Allnutt’s portrait. Without it he looked incomplete. In later years Rose could never picture Allnutt to herself without a cigarette—generally allowed to go out—stuck to his upper lip half-way between the centre and the left corner of his mouth. A thin straggling beard, only a few score black hairs in all, was beginning to sprout on his lean cheeks. He still seemed restless and unnerved, as he battled with the flies, but now that they were away from the dangerous mainland he was better able to master his jumpiness, or at least to attempt to conceal it under an appearance of jocularity.

‘Well, ’ere we are, miss,’ he said. ‘Safe. And sound, as you might say. The question is, wot next?’

Rose was slow of speech and of decision. She remained silent while Allnutt’s nervousness betrayed itself in further volubility.

‘We’ve got ’eaps of grub ’ere, miss, so we’re all right as far as that goes. Two thousand fags. Two cases of gin. We can stay ’ere for months, if we want to. Question is, do we? ’Ow long d’you fink this war’ll last, miss?’

Rose could only look at him in silence. The implication of his speech was obvious—he was suggesting that they should remain here in this marshy backwater until the war should be over and they could emerge in safety. And it was equally obvious that he thought it easily the best thing to do, provided that their stores were sufficient. He had not the remotest idea of striking a blow for England. Rose’s astonishment kept her from replying, and allowed free rein to Allnutt’s garrulity.

‘Trouble is,’ said Allnutt, ‘we don’t know which way ’elp’ll come. I s’pose they’re going to fight. Old von ’Anneken doesn’t seem to be in two minds about it, does ’e? If our lot comes from the sea they’d fight their way up the railway to Limbasi, I s’pose. But that wouldn’t be much ’elp, when all is said an’ done. If they was to, though, we could stay ’ere an’ just go up to Limbasi when the time came. I don’t know that wouldn’t be best, after all. ’Course, they might come down from British East. They’d stand a better chance of catching von ’Anneken that way, although ’unting for ’im in the forest won’t be no child’s play. But if they do that, we’ll ’ave ’im between us an’ them all the time. Same if they come from Rhodesia or Portuguese East. We’re in a bit of a fix whichever way you look at it, miss.’

Allnutt’s native Cockney wit combined with his knowledge of the country enabled him to expatiate with fluency on the strategical situation. At that very moment sweating generals were racking their brains over appreciations very similar—although differently worded—drawn up for them by their staffs. An invasion of German Central Africa in the face of a well-led enemy was an operation not lightly to be contemplated.

‘One thing’s sure, anyway, miss. They won’t come up from the Congo side. Not even if the Belgians want to. There’s only one way to come that way, and that’s across the Lake. And nothing won’t cross the Lake while the Louisa’s there.

‘That’s true enough,’ agreed Rose.

The Königin Luise, whose name Allnutt characteristically anglicized to Louisa, was the police steamer which the German government maintained on the Lake. Rose remembered when she had been brought up from the coast, overland; in sections, eight years before. The country had been swept for bearers and workmen then as now, for there had been roads to hack through the forest, and enormous burdens to be carried. The Königin Luise’s boiler needed to be transported in one piece, and every furlong of its transport had cost the life of a man in the forest. Once she had been assembled and launched, however, she had swept the lake free immediately from the canoe pirates who had infested its waters from time immemorial. With her ten-knot speed she could run down any canoe fleet, and with her six-pounder gun she could shell any pirate village into submission, so that commerce had begun to develop on the Lake, and agriculture had begun to spread along such of its shores as were not marshy, and the Königin Luise, turning for the moment her sword into a ploughshare, had carried on such an efficient mail and passenger service across the Lake that the greater part of German Central Africa was now more accessible from the Atlantic coast across the whole width of the Belgian Congo than from the Indian Ocean.

Yet it was a very significant lesson in sea power that the bare mention of the name of the Königin Luise was sufficient to convince two people with a wide experience of the country, like Rose and Allnutt, of the impregnability of German Central Africa on the side of the Congo. No invasion whatever could be pushed across the Lake in the face of a hundred-ton steamer with a six-pounder popgun. Germany ruled the waters of the Lake as indisputably as England ruled those of the Straits of Dover, and the advantage to Germany which could be derived from this localized sea power was instantly obvious to the two in the launch.

‘If it wasn’t for the Louisa,’ said Allnutt, ‘there wouldn’t be no trouble here. Old von ’Anneken couldn’t last a month if they could get at ’im across the Lake. But as it is—’

Allnutt’s gesture indicated that, screened on the other three sides by the forest, von Hanneken might prolong his resistance indefinitely. Allnutt tapped his cigarette with his finger so that the ash fell down on his dirty white coat. That saved the trouble of detaching the cigarette from his lip.

‘But all this doesn’t get us any nearer ’ome, does it, miss? But b—bless me if I can fink what we can do.’

‘We must do something for England,’ said Rose, instantly. She would have said, ‘We must do our bit,’ if she had been acquainted with the wartime slang which was at that moment beginning to circulate in England. But what she said meant the same thing, and it did not sound too melodramatic in the African forest.

‘Coo!’ said Allnutt.

His notion had been to put the maximum possible distance between himself and the struggle; he had taken it for granted that this war, like other wars, should be fought by the people paid and trained for the purpose. Out of touch with the patriotic fervour of the Press, nothing had been farther from his thoughts than that he should interfere. Even his travels, which had necessarily been extensive, had not increased his patriotism beyond the point to which it had been brought by the waving of a penny Union Jack on Empire Day at his board school; perhaps they had even diminished it—it would be tactless to ask by what road and for what reason an Englishman came to be acting as a mechanic-of-all-work on a Belgian concession in a German colony; it was not the sort of question anyone asked, not even missionaries or their sisters.

‘Coo!’ said Allnutt again. There was something infectious, something inspiring, about the notion of ‘doing something for England’.

But after a moment’s excitement Allnutt put the alluring vision aside. He was a man of machinery, a man of facts, not of fancies. It was the sort of thing a kid might think of, and when you came to look into it there was nothing really there. Yet, having regard to the light which shone in Rose’s face it might be as well to temporize, just to humour her.

‘Yerss, miss,’ he said, ‘if there was anyfink we could do I’d be the first to say we ought ter. What’s your notion, specially?’

He dropped the question carelessly enough, secure in his certainty that there was nothing she could suggest—nothing, anyway, which could stand against argument. And it seemed as if he were right. Rose put her big chin into her hand and pulled at it. Two vertical lines showed between her thick eyebrows as she tried to think. It seemed absurd that there was nothing two people with a boat full of high explosive could do to an enemy in whose midst they found themselves, and yet so it appeared. Rose sought in her mind for what little she knew about war.

Of the Russo-Japanese war all she could remember was that the Japanese were very brave men with a habit of shouting ‘Banzai!’ The Boer war had been different—she was twenty then, just when Samuel had entered the ministry, and she could remember that khaki had been a fashionable colour, and that people wore buttons bearing generals’ portraits, and that the Queen had sent packets of chocolate to the men at the Front. She had read the newspapers occasionally at that time—it was excusable for a girl of twenty to do that in a national crisis.

Then after the Black Week, and after Roberts had gained the inevitable victories, and entered Pretoria, and come home in triumph, there had still been years of fighting. Someone called de Wet had been ‘elusive’—no one had ever mentioned him without using that adjective. He used to charge down on the railways and blow them up.

Rose sat up with a jerk, thinking at first that the inspiration had come. But next moment the hope faded. There was a railway, it was true, but it ran from a sea which was dominated by England to the head of navigation on the Ulanga at Limbasi. It would be of small use to the Germans now, and to reach any bridge along it she and Allnutt would have to go upstream to Limbasi, which might still be in German hands, and then strike out overland carrying their explosives with them, with the probability of capture at any moment. Rose had made enough forest journeys to realize the impossibility of the task, and her economical soul was pained at the thought of running a risk of that sort for a highly problematical advantage. Allnutt saw the struggle on her face.

‘It’s a bit of a teaser, isn’t it, miss?’ he said.

It was then that Rose saw the light.

‘Allnutt,’ she said, ‘this river, the Ulanga, runs into the Lake, doesn’t it?’

The question was a disquieting one.

‘Well, miss, it does. But if you was thinking of going to the Lake in this launch—well, you needn’t think about it any more. We can’t, and that’s certain.’

‘Why not?’

‘Rapids, miss. Rocks an’ cataracts an’ gorges. You ’aven’t been there, miss. I ’ave. There’s a hundred miles of rapids down there. Why, the river’s got a different nime where it comes out in the Lake to what it’s called up ’ere. It’s the Bora down there. That just shows you. No one knew they was the same river until that chap Spengler—’

‘He got down it. I remember.’

‘Yerss, miss. In a dugout canoe. ’E ’ad half a dozen Swahili paddlers. Map making, ’e was. There’s places where this ’ole river isn’t more than twenty yards wide, an’ the water goes shooting down there like—like out of a tap, miss. Canoe might be all right there, but we couldn’t never get this ole launch through.’

‘Then how did the launch get here, in the first place?’

‘By rile, miss, I suppose, like all the other ’eavy stuff. ’Spect they sent ’er up to Limbasi from the coast in sections, and put ’er together on the bank. Why, they carried the Louisa to the Lake, by ’and, miss.’

‘Yes, I remember.’

Samuel had nearly got himself expelled from the colony because of the vehement protests he had made on behalf of the natives on that occasion. Now her brother was dead, and he had been the best man on earth.

Rose had been accustomed all her life to follow the guidance of another—her father, her mother, or her brother. She had stood stoutly by her brother’s side during his endless bickerings with the German authorities. She had been his appreciative if uncomprehending audience when he had seen fit to discuss doctrine with her. For his sake she had slaved—rather ineffectively—to learn Swahili, and German, and the other languages, thereby suffering her share of the punishment which mankind had to bear (so Samuel assured her) for the sin committed at Babel. She would have been horrified if anyone had told her that if her brother had elected to be a Papist or an infidel she would have been the same, but it was perfectly true. Rose came of a stratum of society and of history in which woman adhered to her menfolk’s opinions. She was thinking for herself now for the first time in her life, if exception be made of housekeeping problems.

It was not easy, this forming of her own judgements; especially when it involved making an estimate of a man’s character and veracity. She stared fixedly at Allnutt’s face, through the cloud of flies that hovered round it, and Allnutt, conscious of her scrutiny, fidgeted uncomfortably. Resolve was hardening in Rose’s heart.

Ten years ago she had come out here, sailing with her brother in the cheap and nasty Italian cargo boat in which the Argyll Society had secured passages for them. The first officer of that ship had been an ingratiating Italian, and not even Rose’s frozen spinsterhood had sufficed to keep him away. Her figure at twenty-three had displayed the promise which now at thirty-three it had fulfilled. The first officer had been unable to keep his eyes from its solid curves, and she was the only woman on board—in fact, for long intervals she was the only woman within a hundred miles—and he could no more stop himself from wooing her than he could stop breathing. He was the sort of man who would make love to a brass idol if nothing better presented itself.

It was a queer wooing, and one which had never progressed even as far as a hand-clasp—Rose had not even known that she was being made up to. But one of the manoeuvres which the Italian had adopted with which to ingratiate himself had been ingenious. At Gibraltar, at Malta, at Alexandria, at Port Said, he had spoken eloquently, in his fascinating broken English, about the far-flung British Empire, and he had called her attention to the big ships, grimly beautiful, and the White Ensign fluttering at the stern, and he had spoken of it as the flag upon which the sun never sets. It had been a subtle method of flattery, and one deserving of more success than the unfortunate Italian actually achieved.

It had caught Rose’s imagination for the moment, the sight of the rigid line of the Mediterranean squadron battling its way into Valetta harbour through the high steep seas of a Levanter with the red-crossed Admiral’s flag in the van, and the thought of the wide Empire that squadron guarded, and all the glamour and romance of Imperial dominion.

For ten years those thoughts had been suppressed out of loyalty to her brother, who was a man of peace, and saw no beauty in Empire, nor object in spending money on battleships while there remained poor to be fed and heathen to be converted. Now, with her brother dead, the thoughts surged up once more. The war he had said would never come had come at last, and had killed him with its coming. The Empire was in danger. As Rose sat sweating in the sternsheets of the African Queen she felt within her a boiling flood of patriotism. Her hands clasped and unclasped; there was a flush of pink showing through the sallow sunburn of her cheeks.

Restlessly, she rose from her seat and went forward, sidling past the engine, to where the stores were heaped up gunwale-high in the bows—all the miscellany of stuff comprised in the regular fortnight’s consignment to the half a dozen white men at the Belgian mine. She looked at it for inspiration, just as she had looked at the contents of the larder for inspiration when confronted with a housekeeping problem. Allnutt came and stood beside her.

‘What are those boxes with the red lines on them?’ she demanded.

‘That’s the blasting gelatine I told you about, miss.’

‘Isn’t it dangerous?’

‘Coo, bless you, miss, no.’ Allnutt was glad of the opportunity of displaying his indifference in the presence of this woman who was growing peremptory and uppish. ‘This is safety stuff, this is. It’s quite ’appy in its cases ’ere. You can let it get wet an’ it doesn’t do no ’arm. If you set fire to it it just burns. You can ’it it wiv a ’ammer an’ it won’t go off—at least, I don’t fink it will. What you mustn’t do is to bang off detonators, gunpowder, like, or cartridges, into it. But we won’t be doing that, miss. I’ll put it over the side if it worries you, though.’

‘No!’ said Rose, sharply. ‘We may want it.’

Even if there were no bridges to blow up, there ought to be a satisfactory employment to be found in wartime for a couple of hundredweight of explosive—and lingering in Rose’s mind there were still the beginnings of a plan, even though it was a vague plan, and despite Allnutt’s decisive statement that the descent of the river was impossible.

In the very bottom of the boat, half covered with boxes, lay two large iron tubes, rounded at one end, conical at the other, and in the conical ends were brass fittings—taps and pressure gauges.

‘What are those?’ asked Rose.

‘They’re the cylinders of oxygen and hydrogen. We couldn’t find no use for them, miss, not anyhow. First time we shift cargo I’ll drop ’em over.’

‘No, I shouldn’t do that,’ said Rose. All sorts of incredibly vague memories were stirring in her mind. She looked at the long black cylinders again.

‘They look like—like torpedoes,’ she said at length, musingly, and with the words her plan began to develop apace. She turned upon the Cockney mechanic.

‘Allnutt,’ she demanded. ‘Could you make a torpedo?’

Allnutt smiled pityingly at that.

‘Could I mike a torpedo?’ he said. ‘Could I mike—? Arst me to build you a dreadnought and do the thing in style. You don’t really know what you’re saying, miss. It’s this way, you see, miss. A torpedo—’

Allnutt’s little lecture on the nature of torpedoes was in the main correct, and his estimate of his incapacity to make one was absolutely correct. Torpedoes are representative of the last refinements of human ingenuity. They cost at least a thousand pounds apiece. The inventive power of a large body of men, picked under a rigorous system of selection, has been devoted for thirty years to perfecting this method of destroying what thousands of other inventors have helped to construct. To make a torpedo capable of running true, in a straight line and at a uniform depth, as Allnutt pointed out, would call for a workshop full of skilled mechanics, supplied with accurate tools, and working under the direction of a specialist on the subject. No one could expect Allnutt working by himself in the heart of the African forest with only the African Queen’s repair outfit to achieve even the veriest botch of an attempt at it. Allnutt fairly let himself go on the allied subjects of gyroscopes, and compressed air chambers, and vertical rudders, and horizontal rudders, and compensating weights. He fairly spouted technicalities. Not even the Cockney spirit of enterprise with its willingness to try anything once, which was still alive somewhere deep in Allnutt’s interior, could induce him to make the slightest effort at constructing a locomotive torpedo.

Most of the technicalities fell upon deaf ears. Rose heard them without hearing. Inspiration was in full flood.

‘But all these things,’ she said, when at last Allnutt’s dissertation on torpedoes came to an end. ‘All these gyroscopes and things, they’re only to make the thing go, aren’t they?’

‘M’m. I suppose so.’

‘Well,’ said Rose with decision, at the topmost pinnacle of her inventive phase. ‘We’ve got the African Queen. If we put this—this blasting gelatine in the front of the boat, with a—what did you say—a detonator there, that would be a torpedo, wouldn’t it? Those cylinders. They could stick out over the end, with the gunpowder stuff in them, and the detonators in the tips, where those taps are. Then if we ran the boat against the side of a ship, they’d go off, just like a torpedo.’

There was almost admiration mingled with the tolerant pity with which Allnutt regarded Rose now. He had a respect for original ideas, and as far as Allnutt knew this was an original idea. He did not know that the earliest form of torpedo ever used had embodied this invention fifty years ago, although the early users of it took the precaution of attaching the explosive to a spar rigged out ahead of the launch in fashion minimizing the danger of the crew’s being hoist with its own petard. Allnutt, in fact, made this objection while developing the others which were to come.

‘Yerss,’ he said, ‘and supposing we did that. Supposing we found something we wanted to torpedo—an’ what that would be I dunno, ’cos this is the only boat on this river—and supposing we did torpedo it, what would happen to us? It would blow this ole launch and us and everything else all to Kingdom Come. You think again, miss.’

Rose thought, with an unwonted rapidity and lucidity. She was sizing up Allnutt’s mental attitude to a nicety. She knew perfectly well what it was she wanted to torpedo. As for going to Kingdom Come, as Allnutt put it with some hint of profanity, she had no objection at all. Rose sincerely believed that if she were to go to heaven she would spend eternity wearing a golden crown and singing perpetual hosannas to a harp accompaniment, and—although this appeared a little strange to her—enjoying herself immensely. And when the question was put to her point-blank by circumstances, she had to admit to herself that it appeared on the face of it that she was more likely to go to heaven than elsewhere. She had followed devoutly her brother’s teachings; she had tried to lead a Christian life; and, above all, if that life were to end as a result of an effort to help the Empire, the crown and harp would be hers for sure.

But at the same time she knew that no certainty of a crown and harp would induce Allnutt to risk his life, even if there was the faintest possibility of his end counterbalancing his earlier sins—a matter on which Rose felt uncertainty. To obtain his necessary cooperation she would have to employ guile. She employed it as if she had done nothing else all her life.

‘I wasn’t thinking,’ she said, ‘that we should be in the launch. Couldn’t we get everything ready, and have a—what do you call it?—a good head of steam up, and then just point the launch towards the ship and send her off. Wouldn’t that do?’

Allnutt tried to keep his amusement out of sight. He felt it would be useless to point out to this woman all the flaws in the scheme, the fact that the African Queen’s boiler was long past the days when it could take a ‘good head of steam’, and that her propeller, like all single propellers, had a tendency to drive the boat round in a curve so that taking aim would be a matter of chance, and that the African Queen’s four knots would be quite insufficient to allow her approach to take any ship by surprise. There wasn’t anything to torpedo, anyway, so nothing could come of this woman’s hare-brained suggestions. He might as well try to humour her.

‘That might work,’ he said, gravely.

‘And these cylinders would do all right for torpedoes?’

‘I think so, miss. They’re good an’ thick to stand pressure. I could let the gas out of ’em, an’ fill ’em up with the gelignite. I could fix up a detonator all right. Revolver cartridge would do.’

Allnutt warmed to his subject, his imagination expanding as he let himself go.

‘We could cut ’oles in the bows of the launch, and ’ave the cylinders sticking out through them so as to get the explosion as near the water as possible. Fix ’em down tight wiv battens. It might do the trick, miss.’

‘All right,’ said Rose. ‘We’ll go down to the Lake and torpedo the Louisa.’

‘Don’t talk silly, miss. You can’t do that. Honest you can’t. I told you before. We can’t get down the river.’

‘Spengler did.’

‘In a canoe, miss, wiv—’

‘That just shows we can, too.’

Allnutt sighed ostentatiously. He knew perfectly well that there was no possible chance of inducing the African Queen to make the descent of the rapids of the Ulanga. He appreciated, in a way Rose could not, the difference between a handy canoe with half a dozen skilled paddlers and a clumsy launch like the African Queen. He knew, even if Rose did not, the terrific strength and terrifying appearance of water running at high speed.

Yet on the other hand Rose represented—constituted, in fact—public opinion. Allnutt might be ready to admit to himself that he was a coward, that he would not lift a hand for England, but he was not ready to tell the world so. Also, although Allnutt had played lone hands occasionally in his life, they were not to his liking. Sooner than plan or work for himself he preferred to be guided—or driven. He was not avid for responsibility. He was glad to hand over leadership to those who desired it, even to the ugly sister of a deceased despised missionary. He had arrived in Central Africa as a result of his habit of drifting, when all was said and done.

That was one side of the picture. On the other, Rose’s scheme appeared to him to be a lunatic’s dream. He had not the least belief in their ability to descend the Ulanga, and no greater belief in the possibility of torpedoing the Königin Luise. The one part of the scheme which appeared to him to rest on the slightest foundation of reality was that concerned with the making of the torpedoes. He could rely on himself to make detonators capable of going off, and he was quite sure that a couple of gas cylinders full of high explosive would do all the damage one could desire; but as there did not appear the remotest chance of using them he did not allow his thoughts to dwell long on the subject.

What he expected was that after one or two experiences of minor rapids, the sight of a major one might bring the woman to her senses so that they could settle down in comfortable quiescence and wait—as he wished—for something else to turn up. Failing that, he hoped for an unspectacular and safe shipwreck which would solve the problem for them. Or the extremely unreliable machinery of the African Queen might give way irreparably or even—happy thought—might be induced to do so. And anyway, there were two hundred miles of comfortable river ahead before the rapids began, and Allnutt’s temperament was such that anything a week off was hardly worth worrying about.

‘ ’Ave it yer own wye, then, miss,’ he said resignedly. ‘Only don’t blame me. That’s all.’

He threw his extinct cigarette into the rapid brown water over-side and proceeded to take another out of the tin of fifty in the side pocket of his greyish-white jacket. He sat down leisurely beside the engine, cocked his feet up on a pile of wood, and lit the fresh cigarette. He drew in a deep lungful of smoke and expelled it again with satisfaction. Then he allowed the fire in the end to die down towards extinction. The cigarette drooped from his upper lip. His eyelid drooped in sympathy. His wandering gaze strayed to Rose’s feet, and from her feet up her white drill frock. He became aware that Rose was still standing opposite him, as if expecting something of him. Startled, he raised his eyes to her face.

‘Come on,’ said Rose. ‘Aren’t we going to start?’

‘Wot, now, miss?’

‘Yes, now. Come along.’

Allnutt was up against hard facts again. It was enough in his opinion to have agreed with the lady, to have admitted her to be right as a gentleman should. Allnutt’s impression was that they might start tomorrow if the gods were unkind, next week if they were favourable. To set off like this, at half an hour’s notice, to torpedo the German navy seemed to him unseemly, or at least unnatural.

‘There isn’t two hours of daylight left, miss,’ he said, looking down the backwater to the light on the river.

‘We can go a long way in two hours,’ said Rose, shutting her mouth tight. In much the same way her mother had been accustomed to saying ‘a penny saved is a penny earned’, in the days of the little general shop in the small north country manufacturing town.

‘I’ll ’ave to get the ole kettle to boil agine,’ said Allnutt.

Yet he got down from his seat and took up his habitual attitude beside the engine.

There were embers still glowing in the furnace; it was only a few minutes after filling it with wood and slamming the door that it began its cheerful roar, and soon after that the engine began to sigh and splutter and leak steam. Allnutt commenced the activities which had been forced upon him by the desertion of his two Negro hands—winding in the anchor, shoving off from the bank, and starting the propeller turning, all as nearly simultaneously as might be. In that atmosphere, where the slightest exertion brought out a sweat, these activities caused it to run in streams; his dirty jacket was soaked between his shoulder-blades. And, once under way, constant attention to the furnace and the engine gave him no chance to cool down.

Rose watched his movements. She was anxious to learn all about this boat. She took the tiller and set herself to learn to steer. During the first few minutes of the lesson she thought to herself that it was a typical man-made arrangement that the tiller had to be put to the right to turn the boat to the left, but that feeling vanished very quickly; in fact, under Allnutt’s coaching, it was not very long before she even began to see sense in a convention which spoke of ‘port’ and ‘starboard’—Rose had always previously had a suspicion that that particular convention had its roots in man’s queer taste for ceremonial and fuss.

The voyage began with a bit of navigation which was exciting and interesting, as they threaded their way through backwaters among the islands. There were snags about, and floating vegetation, nearly submerged, which might entangle the screw, and there were shoals and mudbanks to be avoided. It was not until some minutes had elapsed, and they were already a mile or two on their way, that a stretch of easy water gave Rose leisure to think, and she realized with a shock that she had left behind the mission station where she had laboured for ten years, her brother’s grave, her home, everything there was in her world, in fact, and all without a thought.

That was the moment when a little wave of emotion almost overcame her. Her eyes were moist and she sniffed a little. She reproached herself with not having been more sentimental about it. Yet immediately after a new surge of feeling overcame the weakness. She thought of the Königin Luise flaunting her iron-cross flag on the Lake where never a white ensign could come to challenge her, and of the Empire needing help, and of her brother’s death to avenge. And, womanlike, she remembered the rudenesses and insults to which Samuel had patiently submitted from the officialdom of the colony; they had to be avenged, too. And—although Rose never suspected it—there was within her a lust for adventure, patiently suppressed during her brother’s life, and during the monotonous years at the mission. Rose did not realize that she was gratified by the freedom which her brother’s death had brought her. She would have been all contrition if she had realized it, but she never did.

As it was, the moment of weakness passed, and she took a firmer grip of the tiller, and peered forward with narrowed eyelids over the glaring surface of the river. Allnutt was being fantastically active with the engine. All those grey pencils of steam oozing from it were indicative of the age of that piece of machinery and the neglect from which it had suffered. For years the muddy river water had been pumped direct into the boiler, with the result that the water tubes were rotten with rust where they were not plugged with scale.

The water-feed pump, naturally, had a habit of choking, and always at important moments, demanding instant attention lest the whole boiler should go to perdition—Allnutt had to work it frantically by hand occasionally, and there were indications that in the past he or his Negro assistants had neglected this precaution, disregarding the doubtful indication of the water gauge, with the result that every water-tube joint leaked. Practically every one had been mended at some time or other, in the botched and unsatisfactory manner with which the African climate leads man to be content at unimportant moments; some had been brazed in, but more had been patched with nothing more solid than sheet iron, red lead, and wire.

As a result, a careful watch had to be maintained on the pressure-gauge. In the incredibly distant past, when that engine had been new, a boiler pressure of eighty pounds to the square inch could be maintained, giving the launch a speed of twelve knots. Nowadays if the pressure mounted above fifteen the engine showed unmistakable signs of dissolution, and no speed greater than four knots could be reached. So that Allnutt had the delicate task of keeping the pressure just there, and no higher and no lower, which called for a continuous light diet for the furnace and a familiarity with the eccentricities of the pressure gauge which could only be acquired by long and continuous study. Nor was this attention to the furnace made any easier by the tendency of the wood fuel to choke the draught with ash—Allnutt, when stoking, had to plan his campaign like a chess player, looking six moves ahead at least, bearing in mind the effect on the draught of emptying the ash pan, the relative inflammability of any one of the half a dozen different kinds of wood, the quite noticeable influence of direct sunlight on the boiler, the chances of the safety valve sticking (someone had once dropped something heavy on this, and no amount of subsequent work on it could make it quite reliable again) and the likelihood of his attention being shortly called away to deal with some other crisis.

For the lubrication was in no way automatic nowadays; oil had to be stuffed down the oil-cups on the tops of the cylinders, and there were never less than two bearings calling for instant cooling and lubrication, so that Allnutt when the African Queen was under way was as active as a squirrel in a cage. It was quite remarkable that he had been able to bring the launch down single-handed from the mine to the mission station after the desertion of his crew, for then he had to steer the boat as well, and keep the necessary look-out for snags and shoals.

‘Wood’s running short,’ said Allnutt, looking up from his labours, his face grey with grime, and streaked with sweat. ‘We’ll have to anchor soon.’

Rose looked round at where the sun had sunk to the treetops on the distant bank.

‘All right,’ she said, grudgingly. ‘We’ll find somewhere to spend the night.’

They went on, with the engine clanking lugubriously, to where the river broke up again into a fresh batch of distributaries. Allnutt cast a last lingering glance over his engine, and scuttled up into the bows.

‘Round ’ere, miss,’ he called, with a wave of his arm.

Rose put the tiller over and they surged into a narrow channel.

‘Round ’ere again,’ said Allnutt. ‘Steady! There’s a channel ’ere. Bring ’er up into it. Steady! Keep ’er at that!’

They were heading upstream now, in a narrow passage roofed over by trees, whose roots, washed bare by the rushing brown water, and tangled together almost as thick as basket work, constituted the surface of the banks. Against the sweeping current the African Queen made bare headway. Allnutt let go the anchor, and, running back, shut off steam. The launch swung stationary to her mooring with hardly a jerk.

For once in a way Rose had been interested in the manoeuvres, and she filled with pride at the thought that she had understood them—she never usually troubled; when travelling by train she never tried to understand railway signals, and even the Italian first officer had never been able to rouse her interest in ships’ work. But today she had understood the significance of it all, of the necessity to moor bows upstream in that narrow fast channel, in consequence of the anchor being in the bows. Rose could not quite imagine what that fast current would do to a boat if it caught it while jammed broadside on across a narrow waterway, but she could hazard a guess that it would be a damaging business. Allnutt stood watching attentively for a moment to make certain that the anchor was not dragging, and then sat down with a sigh in the sternsheets.

‘Coo,’ he said, ‘it’s ’ot work, ain’t it, miss? I could do with a drink.’

From the locker beside her he produced a dirty enamel mug, and then a second one.

‘Going to ’ave one, miss?’ Allnutt asked.

‘No,’ said Rose, shortly. She knew instinctively that she was about to come into opposition with what Samuel always called Rum. She watched fascinated. From under the bench on which he sat Allnutt dragged out a wooden case, and from out of the case he brought a bottle, full of some clear liquid like water. He proceeded to pour a liberal portion into the tin mug.

‘What is that?’ asked Rose.

‘Gin, miss,’ said Allnutt. ‘An’ there’s only river water to drink it with.’

Rose’s knowledge of strong drink was quite hazy. The first time she had ever sat at a table where it was served had been in the Italian steamer; she remembered the polite amusement of the officers when she and her brother had stiffly refused to drink the purple-red wine which appeared at every meal. During her brother’s ministry in England she had heard drink and its evil effects discussed; there were even bad characters in the congregation who were addicted to it, and with whom she had sometimes tried to reason. At the mission Samuel had striven ineffectively for ten years to persuade his coloured flock to abandon the use of the beer they had been accustomed to brew from time immemorial—Rose knew how very ineffective his arguments had been. And there were festivals when everybody brewed and drank stronger liquors still, and got raging drunk, and made fearful noises, and all had sore heads the next morning, and not even the sore heads had reconciled Samuel to the backsliding of his congregation the night before.

And the few white men all drank, too—although up to this minute Rose, influenced by Samuel’s metaphorical description, had been under the impression that their tipple was a fearsome stuff called Rum, and not this innocent-appearing gin. Rum, and the formation of unhallowed unions with native women, and the brutal conscription of native labour, had been the triple-headed enemy Samuel was always in arms against. Now Rose found herself face to face with the first of these sins. Drink made men madmen. Drink rotted their bodies and corrupted their souls. Drink brought ruin in this world and damnation in the next.

Allnutt had filled the other mug over-side, and was now decanting water into the gin, trying carefully but not very effectively, to prevent too much river alluvium from entering his drink. Rose watched with increasing fascination. She wanted to protest, to appeal to Allnutt’s better feelings, even to snatch the terrible thing from him, and yet she stayed inert, unmoving. Possibly it was that common sense of hers which kept her quiescent. Allnutt drank the frightful stuff and smacked his lips.

‘That’s better,’ he said.

He put the mug down. He did not start being maniacal, nor to sing songs, nor to reel about the boat. Instead, with his sinfulness still wet on his lips he swung open the gates of Paradise for Rose.

‘Now I can think about supper,’ he said. ‘What about a cup o’ tea, miss?’

Tea! Heat and thirst and fatigue and excitement had done their worst for Rose. She was limp and weary and her throat ached. The imminent prospects of a cup of tea roused her to trembling excitement. Twelve cups of tea each Samuel and she had drunk daily for years. Today she had had none—she had eaten no food either, but at the moment that meant nothing to her. Tea! A cup of tea! Two cups of tea! Half a dozen great mugs of tea, strong, delicious, revivifying! Her mind was suffused with rosy pictures of an evening’s tea drinking, a debauch compared with which the spring sowing festivities at the village by the mission station were only a pale shade.

‘I’d like a cup of tea,’ she said.

‘Water’s still boiling in the engine,’ said Allnutt, heaving himself to his feet ‘Won’t take a minute.’

The tinned meat that they ate was, as a result of the heat, reduced to a greasy semi-liquid mass. The native bread was dark and unpalatable. But the tea was marvellous. Rose was forced to use sweetened condensed milk in it, which she hated—at the mission they had cows until von Hanneken commandeered them—but not even that spoilt her enjoyment of the tea. She drank it strong, mug after mug of it, as she had promised herself, with never a thought of what it was doing inside her to the lining of her stomach; probably it was making as pretty a picture of that as ever she had seen at a Band of Hope lantern lecture where they exhibited enlarged photographs of a drunkard’s liver. She gulped down mug after mug. For a moment her body temperature shot up to fever heat, but presently there came a blissful perspiration—not the sticky, prickly sweat in which she moved all day long, but a beneficent and cooling fluid, bringing with it a feeling of ease and well-being.

‘Those Belgians up at the mine wouldn’t never drink tea,’ said Allnutt, tilting the condensed milk tin over his mug of black liquid. ‘They didn’t know what was good.’

‘Yes,’ said Rose. She felt positive friendship for Allnutt welling up within her. She slapped at the mosquitoes without irritation.

When the scanty crockery had been washed and put away Allnutt stood up and looked about him; the light was just failing.

‘Ain’t seen no crocodiles in this arm, miss, ’ave you?’ he asked.

‘No,’ said Rose.

‘No shallows for ’em ’ere,’ said Allnutt. ‘And current’s too fast.’

He coughed a little self-consciously.

‘I want to ’ave a bath before bedtime,’ he said.

‘So do I.’

‘I’ll go up in the bows an’ ’ave mine ’olding on to the anchor chain,’ said Allnutt. ‘You stay down ’ere and do what you like, miss. Then if we don’t look it won’t matter.’

Rose found herself stripping herself naked right out in the open, with only a dozen feet away a man doing the same, and only a slender funnel six inches thick between them. Somehow it did not matter. Rose was conscious that out of the tail of her eye she could see a greyish-white shape lower itself over the launch’s bows, and she could hear prodigious kickings and splashings as Allnutt took his bath. She sat naked on the low gunwale in the stern and lowered her legs into the water. The fast current boiled round them, deliriously cool, tugging at her ankles, insidiously luring her farther. She slipped over completely, holding on to the boat, trailing her length on the surface of the water. It was like Paradise—ever so much better than her evening bath at the mission, in a shallow tin trough of lukewarm water, and obsessed with the continual worry lest the unceasing curiosity of the natives should cause prying eyes to be peering at her through some chink or crevice in the walls.

Then she began to pull herself out. It was not easy, what with the pull of the current and the height of the gunwale, but a final effort of her powerful arms drew her up far enough to wriggle at last over the edge. Only then did she realize that she had been quite calmly contemplating calling to Allnutt for assistance, and she felt that she ought to be disgusted with herself, but she could not manage it. She fished a towel out of her tin box of clothes and dried herself, and dressed again. It was almost dark by now, dark enough, anyway, for a firefly on the bank to be visible, and for the noises of the forest to have stilled so much that the sound of the river boiling along the banks seemed to have grown much louder.

‘Are you ready, miss?’ called Allnutt, starting to come aft.

‘Yes,’ said Rose.

‘You better sleep ’ere in the stern,’ said Allnutt, ‘case it rains. I got a couple of rugs ’ere. There ain’t no fleas in ’em.’

‘Where are you going to sleep?’

‘For’rard, miss. I can make a sort of bed out o’ them cases.’

‘What, on the—the explosives?’

‘Yerss, miss. Won’t do it no ’arm.’

That was not what had called for the question. To Rose there seemed something against nature in the idea of actually sleeping on a couple of hundredweights of explosive, enough to lay a city in ruins—or to blow in the side of a ship. But she thrust the strangeness of the thought out of her mind; everything was strange now.

‘All right,’ she said, briefly.

‘You cover up well,’ said Allnutt, warningly. ‘It gets nearly cold on the river towards morning—look at the mist now.’

A low white haze was already drifting over the surface of the river.

‘All right,’ said Rose again.

Allnutt retraced his steps into the bows, and Rose made her brief preparations for the night. She did not allow herself to think about the skins—black or white, clean or dirty—which had already been in contact with those rugs. She laid herself on the hard floor-boards with the rugs about her and her head on a pillow of her spare clothing. Her mind was like a whirlpool in which circled a mad inconsequence of thoughts. Her brother had died only that morning and it seemed at least a month ago. The memory of his white face was vague although urgent. With her eyes closed her retinas were haunted with persistent, after-images of running water—water foaming round snags and rippling over shallows, and all agleam with sunshine where the wind played upon it. She thought of the Königin Luise queening it on the Lake. She thought of Allnutt, only a yard or two from her virgin bed, and of his naked body vanishing over the side of the launch. She thought again of the dead Samuel. The instant resolution which followed to avenge his death caught her on the point of going to sleep. She turned over restlessly. The flies were biting like fiends. She thought of Allnutt’s drooping cigarette, and of how she had cheated him into accompanying her. She thought of the play of the light and shade on the water when they had first anchored. And with that shifting pattern in her mind’s eye she fell asleep for good, utterly worn out.