The African Queen (4 page)

It was not easy, this forming of her own judgments; 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 passage 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; 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-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 to display 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, despite Allnutt’s decisive statement that the descent of the river was impossible, there were still the beginnings of a plan, even though it was a vague plan.

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 had 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 in the subject. No one could expect that Allnutt working by himself in the heart of the African forest with only the
African Queen’s
repair outfit could 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 blood.

“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 this 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 hosannahs 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 were the faintest possibility of his end counterbalancing his earlier sins—a matter on which Rose felt uncertainty. To obtain his necessary coöperation 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
six knots would be quite insufficient to allow her to 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 overside 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 eyelids 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.