The African Queen (3 page)

“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. Never could Rose picture little Allnutt to herself without a cigarette—generally allowed to go out—stuck to his upper lip halfway 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 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 anglicised 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 bad 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 him 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 reasons 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 nor 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 eye-brows as she tried to think. It seemed absurd that there was nothing two people with a boat full of high explosive could do to any 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 Russian-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 nundred 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 can be made of housekeeping problems.