The African Queen (7 page)

The
African Queen
resumed her solemn career down the river, with Rose cheerfully directing her. This was the main backwater of the section, a stream a hundred yards wide, so there was no reason to apprehend serious navigational difficulties. Rose had already learned to recognize the ugly V-shaped ripple on the surface caused by a snag just below, and the choppy appearance which indicated shallows, and she understood now the useful point that the
African Queen’s
draught was such that if an underwater danger was so deep as to make no alteration in the appearance of the surface, she could be relied upon to go over it without damage. The main possible source of trouble was in the winds; a brisk breeze whipped the surface of the river into choppy wavelets which obscured the warning signs.

On that day there was no wind blowing. Everything was well. In this backwater, running between marshy uninhabited islands, there was no fear of observation from the shore, the navigation was easy, and the
African Queen’s
engine was in a specially helpful mood, so that she squattered along without any particular crisis arising. Allnutt was even able to snatch half a dozen separate minutes in which to prepare breakfast. He brought Rose’s share to her, and she did not even notice the filthy oiliness of his hands. She ate and drank as she held the tiller, and was almost happy.

With a four-knot current to help her the launch slid along between the banks at a flattering speed, and slithered round the bends most fascinatingly. Subconsciously, Rose was learning things about water in motion, about eddies and swirls, which would be very valuable to her later on.

The heat increased, and as the sun rose higher Rose was no longer able to keep the launch in the shade of the huge trees on the banks. The direct sunlight hit them like a club when they emerged into it, and even back in the sternsheets Rose could feel the devastating heat of the fire and boiler.

She felt sorry for Allnutt, and could sympathize with him over his unhygienic habit of drinking unfiltered river water. At the mission she had seen to it that every drop of water she and Samuel drank was first filtered and then boiled, for fear of hookworm and typhoid and all the other plagues which water can carry. It did not seem to matter now. Under the warm awning she had at least a little shade. Allnutt was labouring in the blazing sun.

Allnutt, as a matter of fact, was one of those men who have become inured to work in impossible temperatures. He had worked as a greaser in merchant ships passing down the Red Sea, in engine rooms at a temperature of a hundred and forty degrees; to him the free air of the Ulanga River was far less stifling, even in the direct sun, than atmospheres with which he was acquainted. It did not occur to him to complain about this part of his life; there was even an aesthetic pleasure to be found in inducing that rotten old engine to keep on moving.

Later the backwater came to an end, merging with the main river again. The banks fell away as they came out on to the broad, stately stream, a full half-mile wide, brilliantly blue in prospect under the cloudless sky, although it still appeared its turbid brown when looked into over the side. Allnutt did not like these open reaches. Von Hanneken, with his army, was somewhere on the banks of the river; perhaps he had outposts watching everywhere. It was only when she was threading her way between islands that the
African Queen
could escape observation. He stood up on the gunwale anxiously, peering at the banks for a sign of a break in them.

Rose was aware of his anxiety and its cause, but she did not share his feelings. She was completely reckless. She did not think it even remotely possible that anything could impede her in the mission she had undertaken. As for being taken prisoner by Von Hanneken, she could not believe such a thing could happen—and naturally she had none of the misgivings which worried Allnutt as to what Von Hanneken would do to them if he caught them obviously planning mischief in the
African Queen
. But she indulged Allnutt in his odd fancy; she swung the
African Queen
round so that she headed across to the far side of the bend, where at the foot of the forest-clad bluffs the head of a long narrow island was to be seen. Rose already knew enough about the river to know that the backwater behind the island was almost for certain the entrance to a fresh chain of minor channels winding between tangled islands and not rejoining the main river for perhaps as much as ten miles.

The
African Queen
clanked solemnly across the river. Her propeller shaft was a trifle out of truth, and numerous contacts with submerged obstructions had bent her propeller blades a little, so that her progress was noisy, and the whole boat shook to the thrust of the screw; but by now Rose was used to the noise and the vibration. It passed unnoticed. Rose stood up and looked forward keenly as they neared the mouth of the backwater. She was quite unconscious of the dramatic picture she presented, sunburned, with set jaw and narrowed eyes, standing at the tiller of the battered old launch in the blinding sunlight. All she was doing was looking out for snags and obstructions.

They glided out of the sunlight into the blessed shade of the narrow channel. The wash of the launch began to break close behind them in greyish-brown waves against the bank; the water plants close to the side began to bow in solemn succession as the boat approached them, lifting their heads again when they were exactly opposite, and then being immediately buried in the dirty foam of the wash. The channel along which they were passing broke into three, and Rose had to exercise quick decision in selecting the one which appeared the most navigable. Then there were periods of anxiety when the channel narrowed and the current quickened, and it seemed possible that they might not get through after all, and the anxiety would only end when the channel suddenly joined a new channel whose breadth and placidity promised freedom from worry for a space.

Those island backwaters were silent places. Even the birds and the insects seemed to be silent in that steaming heat. There were only the tall trees, and the tangled undergrowth, and the aspiring creeper, and the naked tree roots along the banks. It seemed as if the
African Queen’s
clanking progress was the first sound ever to be heard there, and when that sound was stilled, when they anchored to collect more fuel, Rose found herself speaking in whispers until she shook off the crushing influence of the silence.

That first day was typical of all the days they spent descending the river before they reached the rapids. There were incidents, of course. There were times when the backwater they were navigating proved to be jammed by a tangle of tree trunks, and they had to go back cautiously in reverse until they found another channel. There was one occasion when their channel broadened out into a wide, almost stagnant lake surrounded by marshy islands, and full of lilies and weeds that twined themselves round the propeller and actually brought the boat to a standstill, so that Allnutt had to strip himself half naked and lower himself into the water and hack the screw clear with a knife, and then pole the launch out again. Every push of the pole against the loose mud of the bottom brought forth volleys of bubbles from the rotting vegetation, so that the place stank in the sunlight.

It might have been that incident which caused the subsequent trouble with the propeller thrust block, which held them up for half a day while Allnutt laboured over it.

There were times now and then during the day when the heavens opened and cataracts of rain poured down—rain so heavy as to set the floor boards awash, and to cause Rose to toil long and painfully with that malignant bit of apparatus, the hand pump. They had to expect rain now, for it was the time of the autumn rains. Rose was only thankful that it was not springtime, for during the spring rains the storms were much longer and heavier than those they had to endure now. These little daily thunderstorms were a mere nothing.

Rose was really alive for the first time in her life. She was not aware of it in her mind, although her body told her so when she stopped to listen. She had passed ten years in Central Africa, but she had not lived during those ten years. That mission station had been a dreary place. Rose had not read books of adventure which might have told her what an adventurous place tropical Africa was. Samuel was not an adventurous person—he had not even taken a missionary’s interest in botany or philology or entomology. He had tried drearily yet persistently to convert the heathen, without enough success to maintain dinner table conversation over so long a time as ten years. It had been his one interest in life (small wonder that Von Hanneken’s sweeping requisitions had broken his heart), and it had therefore been Rose’s one interest—and a woefully small one at that.

Housekeeping in a Central African village was a far duller business than housekeeping in a busy provincial town, and German Central Africa was the dullest colony of all Africa. There was only a tiny sprinkling of white men, and the Kaiser’s imperial mandate ran only in the fringes of the country—in patches along the coast, along the border of the lake, about the headwaters of the Ulanga where the gold mine was, and along the railway from the Swahili coast. Save for a very few officials, who conducted themselves towards the missionaries as soldiers and officials might be expected to act towards mere civilians of no standing and aliens to boot, Rose had seen no white men besides Allnutt—he, by arrangement with the Belgian company, used to bring down their monthly consignments of stores and mail from Limbasi—and his visits were conditional upon the
African Queen
being fit to travel, and upon there being no work upon the mining machinery demanding his immediate attention.

And Samuel had not allowed Rose even to be interested in Allnutt’s visits. The letters that had come had all been for him, always, and Allnutt was a sinner who lived in unhallowed union with a Negress up at the mine. They had to give him food and hospitality when he came, and to bring into the family prayers a mention of their wish for his redemption, but that was all. Those ten years had been a period of heat-ridden monotony.

It was different enough now. There was the broad scheme of proceeding to the lake and freeing it from the mastery of the Germans; that in itself was enough to keep anyone happy. And for detail to fill in the day there was the river, wide, mutable, always different. There could be no monotony on a river, with its snags and mud bars, its bends and its backwaters, its eddies and its swirls. Perhaps those few days of active happiness were sufficient recompense to Rose for thirty-three years of passive misery.

T
HERE
came an evening when Allnutt was silent and moody, as though labouring under some secret grievance. Rose noticed his mood, and looked sharply at him once or twice. There was no feeling of companionship this evening as they drank their tea. And when the tea was drunk Allnutt actually got out the gin bottle and poured himself a drink, the second that day, and drank, and filled his cup again, still silent and sulky. He drank again, and the drink seemed to increase his moodiness. Rose watched these proceedings, disconcerted. She realized by instinct that she must do something to maintain the morale of her crew. There was trouble in the wind, and this gloomy silent drinking would only increase it.

“What’s the matter, Allnutt?” she asked, gently. She was genuinely concerned about the unhappiness of the little cockney, quite apart from any thought of what bearing it might have upon the success of her enterprise.

Allnutt only drank again, and looked sullenly down at the ragged canvas shoes on his feet. Rose came over near to him.

“Tell me,” she said gently again, and then Allnutt answered.

“We ain’t goin’ no further down the river,” he said. “We gone far enough. All this rot about goin’ to the lake.”

Allnutt did not use the word “rot,” but although the word he used was quite unfamiliar to Rose she guessed that it meant something like that. Rose was shocked—not at the language, but at the sentiment. She had been ready, she thought, for any surprising declarations by Allnutt, but it had not occurred to her that there was anything like this in his mind.

“Not going any farther?” she said. “Allnutt! Of course we must!”

“No bloody ‘of course’ about it,” said Allnutt.

“I can’t think what’s the matter,” said Rose, with perfect truth.

“The river’s the matter, that’s what. And Shona.”

“Shona!” repeated Rose. At last she had an inkling of what was worrying Allnutt.

“If we go on to-morrer,” said Allnutt, “we’ll be in the rapids to-morrer night. An’ before we get to the rapids we’ll ’ave to go past Shona. I’d forgotten about Shona until last night.”

“But nothing’s going to happen to us at Shona.”

“Ain’t it? Ain’t it? ’Ow do you know? If there’s anywheres on this river the Germans are watching it’ll be Shona. That’s where the road from the south crosses the river. There was a nigger ferry there before the Germans ever came ’ere. They’ll ’ave a gang watching there. Strike-me-dead-certain. An’ there ain’t no sneaking past Shona. I been there, in this old
African Queen
. I knows what the river’s like. It’s just one big bend. There ain’t no backwaters there, nor nothing. You can see clear across from one side to the other, an’ Shona’s on a ’ill on the bank.”