The African Queen (21 page)

It was only then that she remembered another sin—a worse one, the worst sin of all in the bleak minds of those who had taught her, a sin whose name she had only used when reading aloud from the Bible. She had lain with a man in unlicensed lust. For a moment she remembered with shocked horror the things she had done with that man, her wanton immodesty. It made matters worse still that she had actually
enjoyed
it, as no woman should ever dream of doing.

She looked down at the vague, white figure of Allnutt asleep in the bottom of the boat, and with that came reaction. She could not, she absolutely could not, feel a conviction of sin with regard to him. He was as much a husband to Rose as any married woman’s husband was to her, whatever the formalities with which she and Charlie had dispensed. She took courage from the notion, although she did not rise (or sink) to the level of actually wording to herself her opinion of the marriage sacrament as a formality. She lapsed insensibly into the heresy of believing that it might be possible that natural forces could be too strong for her, and that if they were she was not to blame.

Much of her remorse and terror departed from her in that moment, and she calmed perceptibly. The last of her prayers were delivered with reason as well as feeling, and she asked favours now as one friend might ask of another. The sincerity of her conviction that what she meditated doing on England’s behalf must be right came to her rescue, so that hope and confidence came flooding back again despite the weakness which the first agony had brought to her sick body. There descended upon her at last a certainty of righteousness as immovable and as unreasoning as her previous conviction of sin.

In the end she lay down again to sleep with her serenity quite restored, completely fanatical again about the justice and the certainty of success of the blow she was going to strike for England. The only perceptible difference the whole harrowing experience made in her conduct was that next morning when she rose she prayed again for a moment, on her knees with her head bowed, while Allnutt fidgeted shyly in the bows. She was her old self again, with level brows and composed features, when she rose from her knees to look round the horizon.

There was something in sight out there, something besides water and reeds and sky and islands. It was not a cloud; it was a smudge of black smoke, and beneath it a white dot. Rose’s heart leaped violently in her breast, but she forced composure on herself.

“Charlie,” she called, quietly enough. “Come up here. What’s
that?”

One glance was sufficient for Allnutt, as it had been for Rose.

“That’s the
Louisa
.”

Partisanship affected Allnutt much as it affects the association football crowds which are constituted of thousands of people just like Allnutt. No words could be bad enough for the other side, just because it happened to be the other side. Although Allnutt had not had a chance to be infected by the propaganda which seethed at that moment in the British press, he became at sight of the
Königin Luise
as validly an anti-German as any plump city clerk over military age.

“Yerss,” he said, standing up on the gunwale. “That’s the
Louisa
all right. The beasts! The swine!”

He shook his fist at the white speck.

“Which way are they going?” asked Rose, cutting through his objurgations. Allnutt peered over the water, but before he could announce his decision Rose announced it for him.

“They’re coming this way!” she said, and then she forced herself again to stay calm.

‘They mustn’t see us here,” she went on, in a natural tone. “Can we get far enough among the reeds for them not to see us?”

Allnutt was already leaping about the boat, picking things up and putting them down again. It was more of an effort for him to speak calmly.

“They’ll see the funnel and the awning,” he said, in a lucid interval. Putting up the funnel and the awning stanchions had been part of the spring cleaning of yesterday.

For answer Rose tore the ragged awning down again from its supports.

“You’ve got plenty of time to get the funnel down,” she said. “They won’t be able to see it yet, and the reeds are between them and us. I’ll see about the stanchions. Give me a screwdriver.”

Rose had the sense and presence of mind to realize that if a ship the size of the
Königin Luise
was only a dot to them, they must be less than a dot to it.

With the top hamper stowed away, the
African Queen
had a freeboard of hardly three feet; they would be quite safe among the reeds unless they were looked for specially—and Rose knew that the Germans would have no idea that the
African Queen
was on the Lake. She looked up and watched the
Königin Luise
carefully. She was nearer, coasting steadily southward along the margin of the Lake. From one dot she had grown into two—her white hull being visible under her high bridge. It would be fully an hour before she opened up the mouth of the river and could see the
African Queen
against the reeds.

“Let’s get the boat in now,” she said.

They swung her round so that her bows pointed into the reeds. Pulling and tugging with the boat hooks against the reed roots they got her half way in, but all her stern still projected out into the channel.

“You’ll have to cut some of those reeds down. How deep is the mud?” said Rose.

Allnutt probed the mud about the
African Queen’s
bows and dubiously contemplated the result.

“Hurry up,” snapped Rose, testily, and Allnutt took his knife and went over the bows among the reeds. He sank in the mud until the surface water was up to his armpits. Floundering about, he cut every reed within reach as low as he could manage it. Then, holding the bow painter, with Rose’s help he was able to pull himself out of the clinging mud, and lay across the foredeck while Rose worked the
African Queen
up into the space he had cleared.

“There’s still a bit sticking out,” said Rose. “Once more will do it.”

Allnutt splashed back among the reeds and went on cutting. When he had finished and climbed on board again, between the two of them they hauled the boat up into the cleared space. The reeds which the bows had thrust aside when they entered began to close again round the stern.

“It would be better if we were a bit farther in still,” said Rose, and without a word Allnutt went in among the reeds once more.

This time the gain was sufficient. The
African Queen
lay in thick reeds; about her stern was a thin but satisfactory screen of the reeds at the edge, which, coming back to the vertical, made her safe against anything but close observation even if—as was obviously unlikely—the
Königin Luise
should see fit to come up the reed-bordered channel to the delta.

Standing on the gunwale, Rose and Allnutt could just see over the reeds. The
Königin Luise
was holding steadily on her course, a full mile from the treacherous shoals of the shore. She was nearly opposite the mouth of the channel now, and she showed no signs of turning. They watched her for five minutes. She looked beautiful in her glittering white paint against the vivid blue of the water. A long pennant streamed from the brief pole mast beside her funnel; at her stern there floated the flag of the Imperial German Navy with its black cross. On her deck in the bows they could just discern the six-pounder gun which gave the Germans the command of Lake Wittelsbach. No Arab dhow, no canoe, could show her nose outside the creeks and inlets of the Lake unless the
Königin Luise
gave permission.

She was past the channel now, still keeping rigidly to the south. There was clearly no danger of discovery; she was on a cruise of inspection round the Lake, just making certain that there was no furtive flouting of authority. Rose watched her go, and then got down heavily into the sternsheets.

“My malaria’s started again,” she said, wearily.

Her face was drawn and apprehensive as a result of the ache she had been enduring in her joints, and her teeth were already chattering. Allnutt wrapped her in the rugs and made what preparations he could for the fever which would follow.

“Mine’s begun too,” he said then. Soon both of them were helpless and shivering, and moaning a little, under the blazing sun.

W
HEN
the attack was over in the late afternoon, Rose got uncertainly to her feet again. Allnutt was only now coming out of the deep, reviving sleep which follows the fever of malaria in fortunate persons. The first thing Rose did was what everyone living in a boat comes to do after an unguarded interval. She stood up and looked about her, craning her neck over the reeds so as to sweep the horizon.

Down in the south she saw it again, that smudge of smoke and that white speck. She formed and then discarded the idea that the
Königin Luise
was still holding her old course. The gunboat was returning; she must have cruised down out of sight to the south and then begun to retrace her course. Allnutt came and stood beside her, and without a word they watched the
Königin Luise
gradually grow larger and more distinct as she came back along the coast. It was Allnutt who broke the silence.

“D’you fink she’s looking for us?” he asked, hoarsely.

“No,” said Rose, with instant decision. “Not at all. She’s only keeping guard on the coast.”

Rose was influenced more by faith than by judgment. Her mission would be too difficult to succeed if the Germans were on the lookout for them, and therefore it could not be so.

“Hope you’re right,” said Allnutt. “Matter of fact, I fink you are myself.”

“She’s going a different way now!” said Rose, suddenly.

The
Königin Luise
had altered her course a trifle, and was standing out from the shore.

“She’s not looking for us, then,” said Allnutt.

They watched her as she steered across the Lake, keeping just above their horizon, heading for the islands which they could see straight opposite them.

“Wonder what she’s goin’ to do?” said Allnutt, but all the same it was he who first noticed that when she came to a stop.

“She’s anchoring there for the night,” said Allnutt. “Look!”

The flag at the stern disappeared, as is laid down as a rule to be followed at sunset in the Imperial Instructions for Captains of Ships of the Imperial German Marine.

“Did you ’ear anything then?” asked Allnutt.

“No.”

“I fort I ’eard a bugle.” Allnutt could not possibly have heard a bugle over four miles of water, not even in the stillness which prevailed, but undoubtedly there were bugles blowing on the
Königin Luise
at approximately that time. Even though the crew of the
Königin Luise
consisted only of six white officers and twenty-five coloured ratings, everything was done on board as befitted the exacting standards of the navy of which the ship was a part.

“Well, there they are,” said Allnutt. “And there they’ll stop. That’s a good anchorage out there among the islands. We’ll see ’em go in the morning.”

He got down from the gunwale while Rose yet lingered. The sun had set in a sudden blaze of colour, and it was almost too dark to see the distant white speck. She could not accept as philosophically as Allnutt the inevitability of their present inaction. They were on the threshold of events. They must make ready, and plan, and strike their blow for England, even though any scheme seemed more fantastic now than when viewed from the misty distance of the upper Ulanga.

“We ought to have been ready for them to-day,” said Rose, turning bitterly to Allnutt, the glow of whose cigarette she could just see in the dark.

Allnutt puffed at his cigarette, and then brought out a surprisingly helpful suggestion.

“Coo,” he said, “don’t you worry. I been thinking. They’ll come ’ere agine, you just see if they don’t. You know what these Germans are. They lays down systems and they sticks to ’em. Mondays they’re at one plice, Tuesdays they’re somewhere else, Wednesdays p’raps, they’re ’ere—I dunno what dye it is to-dye. Saturday nights I expect they goes in to Port Livingstone an’ lays up over Sunday. Then they start agine on Monday, same ole round.
You
know.”

Allnutt was without doubt the psychologist of the two. What he said was so much in agreement with what Rose had seen of official German methods that she could not but think there must be truth in it. He went on to press home his point by example.

“Up at the mine,” he said, “Old Kaufman, the inspector, ’oo ’ad the job of seeing that the mine was being run right—an’ a fat lot o’ good all those rules of theirs was, too—’e used to turn up once a week regular as clockwork. Always knew when ’e was coming, the Belgians did, an’ they’d ’ave everything ready for ’im. ’E’d come in an’ look round, and ’ave a drink, an’ then off ’e’d go agine wiv ’is Askaris an’ ’is bearers. Used to mike me laugh even then.”

“Yes, I remember,” said Rose, absently. She could remember how Samuel had sometimes chafed against the woodenness of German rules and routine. There could be no doubt that if the
Königin Luise
had once moored amongst these islands she would do so again. Then—her plan was already formed.