The African Queen (23 page)

“Yes,” said Rose, with all the gravity the situation demanded. “They ought to work all right.”

They had all the seriousness of children discussing the construction of a sand castle.

“Can’t put ’em into the cylinders yet,” explained Allnutt. “They’re a bit tricky. We better get the cylinders into position now an’ leave the detonators till last. We can put ’em in when we’re all ready to start. After we get out of these reeds.”

“Yes,” said Rose. “It’ll be dark, then, of course. Will you be able to do it in the dark?”

“It’s a case of ’ave to,” said Allnutt. “Yerss, I can do it all right.”

Rose formed a mental picture of their starting out; it certainly would be risky to try to push the
African Queen
out from the reeds in the darkness with two torpedoes which would explode at a touch protruding from the bow.

Allnutt put the detonators away in the locker with the utmost care, and turned to think about the remainder of the preparations necessary.

“We want to ’ave the explosion right down low,” he said. “Can’t ’ave it too low. Fink it’s best to make those ’oles for the cylinders.”

It was a toilsome, back-breaking job, although it called for no particular skill, to cut two holes, one each side of the stem, in the
African Queen’s
bows, just above the water line. When they were finished, Rose and Allnutt dragged and pushed the cylinders forward until their noses were well through the holes, a good foot in front of any part of the boat. Allnutt stuffed the ragged edges with chips of wood and rags.

“Doesn’t matter if it leaks a little,” he said. “It’s only splashes which’ll be coming in, ’cause the bow rides up when we’re going along. All we got to do now is to fix them cylinders down tight.”

He nailed them solidly into position with battens split from the cases of provisions, adding batten to batten and piling all the available loose gear on top to make quite sure. The more those cylinders were confined the more effective would be their explosions against the side of the
Königin Luise
. When the last thing was added Allnutt sat down.

“Well, old girl,” he said, “we done it all now. Everything. We’re all ready.”

It was a solemn moment. The consummation of all their efforts, their descent of the rapids of the Ulanga, their running the gauntlet at Shona, the mending of the propeller, their toil in the waterlily pool and their agony in the delta, was at hand.

“Coo,” said Allnutt, reminiscently, “ ’aven’t we just ’ad a time! Been a regular bank ’oliday.”

Rose forgave him his irreverence.

As a result of having completed the work so speedily, they now had to endure the strain of waiting. They were idle now for the first time since the dreadful occasion—which they were both so anxious to forget—when Rose had refused to speak to Allnutt. From that time they had been ceaselessly busy; they had an odd empty feeling when they contemplated the blank days ahead of them, even though they were to be their last days on earth.

Those last days were rather terrible. There was one frightening interval when Allnutt felt his resolution waver. He felt like a man in a condemned cell waiting for the last few days before his execution to expire. As a young man in England he had often read about that, in the ghoulish Sunday newspaper which had constituted his only reading. Somehow it was his memory of what he had read which frightened him, not the thought of the imminent explosion—it deprived him of his new-won manhood and took him back into his pulpy youth, so that he clung to Rose with a new urgency, and she, marvelously, understood, and soothed him and comforted him.

The sun glared down upon them pitilessly; they were without even the shelter of the awning, which might betray them if it showed above the reeds. Every hour was pregnant with monotony and weariness; there was always the lurking danger that they might come to hate each other, crouching there among the reeds as in a grave. They felt that danger, and they fought against it.

Even the thunderstorms were a relief; they came with black clouds, and a mighty breath of wind which whipped the lake into fury so that they could hear breakers roar upon the shoals, and the whole lake was covered with tossing white horses, until even in their reedy sanctuary the violence of the water reached them, so that the
African Queen
heaved uneasily and sluggishly under them.

To pass away the time they overhauled the engine thoroughly, so as to make quite certain that it would function properly on its last run. Allnutt wallowed in the mud beneath the boat and ascertained by touch that the propeller and shaft were as sound as they could be hoped to be. Every few minutes throughout every day, one or the other of them climbed on the gunwale and looked out over the reeds across the Lake, scanning the horizon for sight of the
Königin Luise
. They saw a couple of dhows—or it may have been the same one twice—sailing down what was evidently the main passage through the islands, but that was all the sign of life they saw for some days. They even came to doubt whether the
Königin Luise
would ever appear again in her previous anchorage. They had grown unaccustomed to counting the passage of time, and they actually were not sure how many days had lapsed since they saw her last. Even after the most careful counting back they could not come to an agreement on the point, and they began to eye each other regretfully and wonder whether they had not better issue forth from their hiding place and coast along the edge of the lake in search of their victim. In black moments they began to doubt whether they would ever achieve their object.

Until one morning they looked out over the reeds and saw her just as before, a smudge of smoke and a white dot, coming down from the north. Just as before she steamed steadily by to the south and vanished below their low horizon, and the hours crawled by painfully until the afternoon revealed her smoke again returning, and they were sure she would anchor again among the islands. Allnutt had been nearly right in his guess about the methodical habits of the Germans. In their careful patrolling of the Lake they never omitted a periodical cruise into this, the most desolate corner of the Wittelsbach Nyanza, just to see that all was well, even though the forbidding marshes of the Bora delta and the wild forests beyond made it unlikely that any menace to the German command of the Lake could develop here.

Allnutt and Rose watched the
Königin Luise
come back from her excursion to the south, and they saw her head over towards the islands, and, as the day was waning, they saw her come to a stop at the point where she had anchored before. Both their hearts were beating faster. It was then that the question they had debated in academic fashion a week earlier without reaching a satisfactory conclusion solved itself. They had just turned away from looking at the
Königin Luise
, about to make preparations to start, when they found themselves holding each other’s hands and looking into each other’s eyes. Each of them knew what was in the other’s mind.

“Rosie, old girl,” said Allnutt, hoarsely. “We’re going out
together,
aren’t we?”

Rose nodded.

“Yes, dear,” she said. “I should like it that way.”

Confronted with the sternest need for a decision, she had reached it without difficulty. They would share all the dangers, and stand the same chance, side by side, when the
African Queen
drove her torpedoes smashing against the side of the
Königin Luise
. They could not endure the thought of being parted, now. They could even smile at the prospect of going into eternity together.

It was almost dark by now. The young moon was low in the sky; soon there would only be the stars to give them light.

“It’s safe for us to get ready now,” said Rose. “Goodbye, dear.”

“Goodbye darling, sweet’eart,” said Allnutt.

Their preparations took much time, as they had anticipated. They had all night before them, and they knew that as it was a question of surprise the best time they could reach the
Königin Luise
would be in the early hours of the morning. Allnutt had to go down into the mud and water and cut away the reeds about the
African Queen’s
stern before they could slide her out into the channel again—the reeds which had parted before her bows resisted obstinately the passage of her stern and propeller.

When they were in the river, moored lightly to a great bundle of weeds, Allnutt quietly took the detonators from the locker and went into the water again over the bows. He was a long time there, standing in mud and deep water while he screwed the detonators home into the noses of the cylinders. The rough-and-ready screw threads he had scratched in the edges of his discs did not enter kindly into their functions. Allnutt had to use force, and it was a slow process to use force in the dark on a detonator in contact with a hundredweight of high explosive. Rose stood in the bows to help him at need as he worked patiently at the task. If his hand should slip against those nailheads they would be blown into fragments, and the
Königin Luise
would still rule the waves of the Lake.

Nor did the fact that the
African Queen
was pitching a little in a slight swell coming in from the Lake help Allnutt at all in his task, but he finished it in the end. In the almost pitch dark, Rose saw him back away from the torpedoes and come round at a safe distance to the side of the boat. His hands reached up and he swung himself on board, dripping.

“Done it,” he whispered—they could not help whispering in that darkness with the obsession of their future errand upon them.

Allnutt groped about the boat putting up the funnel again. He made a faint noise with his spanner as he tightened up the nuts on the funnel stay bolts. It all took time.

The furnace was already charged with fuel—that much, at any rate, they had been able to make ready days ago—and the tin canister of matches was in its right place, and he could light the dry friable stuff and close down to force the draught. He knew just whereabouts to lay his hands on the various sorts of wood be might need before they reached the
Königin Luise
.

There was a wind blowing now, and the
African Queen
was very definitely pitching to the motion of the water. The noise of the draught seemed loud to their anxious ears, and when Allnutt recharged the furnace a volley of sparks shot from the funnel and was swept away overhead. Rose had never seen sparks issue from that funnel before—she had only been in the
African Queen
under way in daylight—and she realized the danger that the sparks might reveal their approach. She spoke quietly to Allnutt about it.

“Can’t ’elp it, Miss, sometimes,” he whispered back. “I’ll see it don’t ’appen when we’re getting close to ’em.

The engine was sighing and slobbering now; if it had been daylight they would have seen the steam oozing out of the leaky joints.

“S’ss, s’ss,” whistled Allnutt, between his teeth.

“All right,” said Rose.

Allnutt unfastened the side painter and took the boat hook. A good thrust against a clump of reeds sent the boat out into the fairway; he laid the boat hook down, and felt for the throttle valve and opened it. The propeller began its beat and the engine its muffled clanking. Rose stood at the tiller and steered out down the dark river mouth. They were off now, to strike their blow for the land of hope and glory of which Rose had sung as a child at concerts in Sunday school choirs. They were going to set wider those bounds and make the mighty country mightier yet.

The
African Queen
issued forth upon the Lake to gain which they had run such dangers and undergone such toil. Out through her bows pointed the torpedoes, two hundredweight of explosive which a touch could set off. Down by the engine crouched Allnutt, his whole attention concentrated on ascertaining by ear what he had been accustomed to judge by sight—steam pressure and water level and lubrication. Rose stood in the tossing stern, and her straining eyes could just see the tiny light which marked the presence of the
Königin Luise
; there were no stars overhead.

If it had been daylight they would have marked the banking up of the clouds overhead, the tense stickiness of the electricity-charged atmosphere. If they had been experienced in Lake conditions they would have known what that ominous wind foretold; they had no knowledge of the incredible speed with which the wind, whipping down from the mountains of the north, roused the shallow waters of the Lake to maniacal fury.

Rose had had her training in rivers; it did not occur to her to look for danger where there were no rocks, nor weeds, nor rapids. When in the darkness the
African Queen
began to pitch and wallow in rough water she cared nothing for it. She felt no appreciation of the fact that the shallow-draught launch was not constructed to encounter rough water, and that she was out of reach of land now in a boat whose wall sides and flat bottom made her the most unseaworthy vessel it is possible to imagine. She found it difficult to keep her feet as the
African Queen
swayed and staggered about in haphazard fashion. In the darkness there was no way of anticipating her extravagant rolling. Waves were crashing against the flat sides; the tops of them were coming in over the edge, but that sort of thing was, in Rose’s mind, only to be expected in open water. She had no fear at all.

The wind seemed to have dropped for a moment, but the water was still rough. Then suddenly the darkness was torn away for a second by a dazzling flash of lightning which revealed the wild water round them, and the thunder followed with a single loud bang like a thousand cannons fired at once. Then came the rain, pouring down through the blackness in solid rivers, numbing and stupefying, and with the rain came the wind, suddenly, from a fresh quarter, laying its grip on the torn surface of the lake and heaving it up into mountains, while the lightning still flashed and the thunder bellowed in madness. With the shift of the wind the
African Queen
began to pound, heaving her bows out of the water and bringing them down again with a shattering crash. It was as well that Allnutt had selected the type of fuse he had employed; any other might have been touched off by the pounding waves, but the water which could toss about a two-ton boat like a toy could not drive nails.